Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose

As a holy-roller acquaintance of my father's used to say, "That's tongues, ya know!" This is from William Wright, though, whose term for this sort of thing is not tongues but words. In terms of how easy it is to interpret, this stuff lies somewhere between James Joyce and straight-up glossolalia, but having cut my teeth on Finnegans Wake at a young age, I'm willing to give it a shot.

These words were received by William on November 7, 2019, long before we "met" online, and he just shared them with me now in response to my post "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree" (which you should read first before continuing, if you haven't already). That dream featured a character known only as G, and William's first suggestion for what it might mean was Gog -- a somewhat odd idea for him to come up with, as he's not really a Bible guy. It turns out that this reading was inspired by a dream of his own:

I was leaning toward Gog, or it was on my mind, because you showed up in my dream this morning and used the phrase "a gog", which could be a name (Gog or one of the 'Gogs', or I thought of Magog at the time, but I had forgotten in the Bible it is Magog and not Agog) or I guess "agog" as an adverb.

Then he remembered that "a gog" had also occurred in his 2019 words and posted them, noting that like my dream his words also featured fire and the idea of a white tree. (Bansil is the name of a white or silver tree in Gondolin, described in Tolkien's Book of Lost Tales.)

What convinced me that these words are definitely relevant, though, is the hyphenated word ash-ni. My post had included  the hyphenated word ash-mud in the title, and -- though William would not have known it, as he doesn't speak Chinese -- the Chinese word for "mud" is 泥, Romanized as ní. I don't know what ash-ni might have meant to William in 2019, but it's definitely an extremely specific sync with my dream.

So, in terms of the dream, ash-ni is the ash-mud that G and Diego were fighting in, gog is presumably what G stands for, and bansil is the blazing white cypress tree. Let's see what we can make of the rest of the words:

baggu:

This would be the standard Romanization for バッグ, Japanese for "bag," which is of course a borrowing from English. Why would the Japanese version be used instead of the English bag? Well, baggu is closely analogous to poké (as in Pokémon and Pokélogan), which is a Japanese borrowing from the English word pocket (a kind of bag; I had connected poké with Elvish poco, "bag"). William Wright has proposed that Pokélogan represents Thomas B. Marsh.

ash-ni:

This is clearly the ash-mud from the dream.

fire-dwell:

Fire plays a major role in the dream, but what this specific wording makes me think of is my September 21 post "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that "dwelt upon a rock": A case study of hard-to-define biblical parallels." I point out how odd it is to speak of a pillar of fire "dwelling" anywhere, and I refer to the fire dwelling on the rock as "Lehi's burning-bush equivalent." In my dream post, I write that the blazing white tree "suggests both the Burning Bush of Moses and the glowing white Tree of Life in the dreams of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr.," and I also include a photo of "burning bush" in the Australian sense of the latter word.

a gog:

The sync fairies seem to be insisting that this is what G stands for. Gog is proper name, so the use of a is anomalous. Various interpretations suggest themselves. It could mean not the Gog but just a Gog, or it could be meant to suggest the word agog -- which could be (a) the English adverb, (b) the Greek for "leader," or (c) a word halfway between Gog and Magog. I don't really get what Gog means, even at the symbolic level, so I'm not really sure where to go with this.

ifluaren:

This is a stumper. As is, it doesn't seem to mean anything in any language, so we have to interpret it the Finnegans Wake way. When you have apparent non-words -- such as in a phrase like "the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup" -- it's because two or more words or concepts are being alluded to simultaneously. (In those seven words, Joyce is nodding to, at minimum, the Brothers Grimm, Robin Hood, black humor, Jack the stock fairy-tale hero, Jacob and Esau, and Aesop's fables.)

If we adjust the spelling a bit, it suggests influerem ("I would flow in") influerent ("they would flow in") or some similar Latin construction. Since it's been mangled, it can't be pinned down grammatically, but it's some sort of in-flowing in the subjunctive mood.

The only thing it suggests to me in English is if Lauren. Since if would be used with a subjunctive verb, this could be combined with the Latin into something like "if Lauren would flow in" -- whatever that means! A reference to the St. Lawrence River or something?

Perhaps more promisingly, ifluaren is just one letter off from being an anagram of Laurelin. (A perfect anagram would be Laurefin, suggesting a single strand of golden hair.) Laurelin, the Golden Tree, is one of Tolkien's Two Trees of Valinor, the other being Telperion, the White Tree. These two trees were destroyed by Melkor, but as The Book of Lost Tales tells it, surviving shoots from the Two Trees were preserved in Gondolin, where they grew into golden Glingol and silver-white Bansil. Since the next word after ifluaren is bansil, this seems highly relevant.

But the Golden Tree flowing? Check out Galadriel's Song of Eldamar, recently quoted here in "Leaves of gold unnumbered":

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:

Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew.

[. . .]

O Lórien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day;

The leaves are falling in the stream, the river flows away.

The leaves of the Golden Tree are flowing out, flowing away in the river. If only -- a subjunctive expression -- if only they would come back! If only they were flowing in rather than out!

bansil:

As noted above, Bansil is a White Tree, just as Laurelin is the Golden Tree. A potentially important difference is that Laurelin is the original Golden Tree, while Bansil is a scion of the original White Tree, Telperion.

este repose:

Este (feminine esta) is Spanish for "this"; repose is also Spanish, an inflection of reposar, "to rest." I've put two words together because together they make me think of the Spanish translation of Joseph Smith's account of his First Vision. When I was an English-speaking Mormon missionary, my Spanish-speaking associates would recite this at every district meeting, and I heard it so many times that even now, a quarter of a century later, I can still rattle it off from memory:

Vi una columna de luz, más brillante que el sol, directamente arriba de mi cabeza; y esta luz gradualmente descendió hasta descansar sobre mí. . . . Al reposar sobre mí la luz, vi en el aire arriba de mí a dos Personajes, cuyo fulgor y gloria no admiten descripción. Uno de ellos me habló, llamándome por mi nombre, y dijo, señalando al otro: Este es mi Hijo Amado: ¡Escúchalo!

The ellipsis is not mine; the text memorized by the missionaries omitted a bit of the original.

In English, Smith says, "I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me." In Spanish, to avoid ambiguity — to avoid making it sound like Smith's head gradually descended — it says "and this (este) light descended gradually until it fell upon me. . . . When the light rested (reposar) upon me, I saw in the air above me two Personages," and so on.

But instead of esta (feminine) and reposar (infinitive), William's words have este (masculine) and repose (present subjunctive). The gender discrepancy is easily dealt with. In Lehi's vision mentioned above, and also in some early accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision, the pillar is described as being fire rather than light -- not esta luz but este fuego. The subjunctive mood, of course, fits right in with our Latin reading of ifluaren.

So that's my first pass at decoding these words, at the lexical level. The next step will be to try to see how (or, less optimistically, if) they fit together as a single coherent utterance.