Pi in the sky: Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face

William Wright’s latest, “Pi and the Kirtland Temple,” discusses the fact that the upcoming total solar eclipse will pass over the Kirtland Temple at 3:14 p.m., suggesting the number Pi. (Interestingly, his post comes on the one-year anniversary of a post of mine about The Life of Pi.) William focuses not only on the number but on the shape of the letter Pi itself and connects this with “writing on the wall” of the Kirtland Temple.

All this made me think of the classic scene in This Is Spinal Tap (one of the greatest films of all time) where a diminutive Pi-shaped prop is lowered onto the stage during the band’s performance of “Stonehenge.”

Like the Monkees before them, Spinal Tap would end up becoming a “real” band and performing off-screen. Their full version of “Stonehenge” includes a line that isn’t in the movie: “Stonehenge! ‘Tis a magic place / Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face.”

The ancient Chinese believed that a solar eclipse was caused by a dragon eating the sun, but in fact it is the moon that is making the sun disappear. When does the moon rise with a dragon’s face? At an eclipse of the sun.

I recently posted about the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, and William transposes this idea to the Kirtland Temple. Interestingly, the lost pages of the Book of Mormon apparently included a story in which supernatural writing appeared on the wall not of a pagan king’s palace but of the doomed Temple of Nephi. (Don Bradley does an excellent job of reconstructing this in his must-read The Lost 116 Pages.)

The word mene, derived from the verb “to count,” is repeated twice in the biblical writing on the wall: “count, count.” On Pi Day 2022, I posted about Count von Count reciting all the digits of Pi.