Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh as one

I was listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, and when it got to the part where Nephi says they "did live upon raw meat in the wilderness" (1 Ne. 17:2), I wondered how the word meat was to be understood. Certainly by Joseph's time it had already acquired its modern meaning of "animal flesh," but the language of the Book of Mormon is patterned after that of the King James Version of the Bible, which even in its time was very linguistically conservative. For example, even though the KJV was written in Shakespeare's day, and Shakespeare commonly uses singular ye/you after the French fashion, as a more formal or respectful alternative to thou/thee, the KJV follows the older Anglo-Saxon convention, in which ye/you is always plural and thou/thee is always used for the singular. (This is an extremely helpful feature of the KJV text, making it much less ambiguous than modern thou-phobic translations.) Joseph Smith mostly imitates the KJV, but imperfectly so, and there are many unambiguous instances of singular you in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes the two groups of second-person pronouns almost seem to be in free variation -- for example, "And now Zoram, I speak unto you: Behold, thou art the servant of Laban." (2 Ne. 1:30). Would even Shakespeare have countenanced singular you when addressing a servant?

In another case of its linguistic conservatism, the KJV always uses meat to mean "food" and never in the narrower sense of "animal flesh." How aware was Joseph Smith of that usage, and how closely did he follow it in the Book of Mormon? Need we imagine the Lehites chowing down on steak tartare, or did Nephi perhaps mean salad?

I'll post my conclusion on that question later, on my Book of Mormon blog. Here I just want to note a striking synchronicity occasioned by my preliminary research into it.

While the audio recording was still playing, I used my computer to search the Book of Mormon text for meat, then for food, and finally for flesh, trying to get a sense for how the text uses those words. Since the search function on the website formerly known as lds.org is unusably bad -- I believe "an abomination in the sight of the Lord" is the technical term -- I was doing Ctrl-F searches on a text file from Gutenberg. That means that rather than seeing a whole list of search results on the screen at once, I had to click through them one at a time.

When I clicked for the second search result for flesh, it was 1 Ne. 17:35:

Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God. But behold, this people had rejected every word of God, and they were ripe in iniquity; and the fulness of the wrath of God was upon them; and the Lord did curse the land against them, and bless it unto our fathers; yea, he did curse it against them unto their destruction, and he did bless it unto our fathers unto their obtaining power over it.

The exact instant I clicked, and the screen jumped to this verse with the word flesh highlighted in orange, the audio recording also said the word flesh -- and then I realized that it was reading this very verse! My curiosity had been piqued, you will recall, by 1 Ne. 17:2, and now the audio had gotten to verse 35. I had been listening with half my attention and skimming search results with the other, and now suddenly the two came together, and what I was reading on the screen was exactly the same as what the recording was saying.

This is similar in kind, though not in content, to the sync recently documented in "A loaf of bread is dear."

Griffins (Cherubim) and apples (forbidden fruit) come from the same place

In my May 1 post "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the etymological theory that the word griffin may be related to Cherubim. In Genesis, the Cherubim are stationed as guardians to keep the exiled Adam and Eve from returning to Eden. This was after they had eaten the forbidden fruit, which tradition overwhelmingly identifies as the apple.

Today I was reading the 2011 edition of Adreinne Mayor's seminal book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. In building her case that griffin legends originated with Protoceratops-type fossils (quadrupeds with eagle-like beaks), Mayor traces Greek griffin lore back to Scythia:

The territory of the Issedonian Scythians where Aristeas learned about the griffin in about 675 B.C. is a wedge bounded by the Tien Shan and Altai ranges, in an area that straddles present-day northwestern Mongolia, northwestern China, southern Siberia, and southeastern Kazakhstan.

Compare this to what Wikipedia says about the origin of the apple:

The original wild ancestor of Malus domestica was Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and northwestern China. Cultivation of the species, most likely beginning on the forested flanks of the Tian Shan mountains . . . .

I thought it was an interesting coincidence. Tian Shan is Chinese and literally means "Mountain(s) of God," which fits with what Ezekiel wrote about Eden and the Cherub:

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . . thou wast upon the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28:13-14).

I was going to say I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Eden was in Central Asia, but actually someone has: Apparently, the Chinese Australian Christian Tse Tsan-tai proposed that it was in Xinjiang -- i.e., northwestern China, griffin and apple territory.

"Look at that pumpkin!" the visitors say

In my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I mention an anecdote from Whitley Strieber about an alien going door-to-door selling squash. I also note that I had initially misremembered the story and thought that it was pumpkins the alien was selling, but that in any case the Chinese language does not distinguish between the two: 南瓜 can mean either "squash" or "pumpkin."

Although most people would say Strieber's books are about "aliens," he himself almost never calls them that. In an effort to be neutral and avoid jumping to the conclusion that they are of extraterrestrial origin, he prefers to refer to the Other People as visitors. In the anecdote in question, quoted in my 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land," Strieber describes his friend Michael Talbot talking to a stranger at the door at five in the morning:

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

This quote highlight's Strieber's idiosyncratic use of the word visitor. Obviously Michael was well aware that the stranger standing at the door was a "visitor" in the ordinary sense of that word; what Strieber means is that Michael didn't suspect it was an alien.

Today I saw this in one of my students' textbooks:

The first sentence on the page is, "'Look at that pumpkin!' the visitors say." These are of course visitors in the ordinary sense -- Cheng is locally famous as an excellent gardener, and "people come from all over to see the beautiful plants" -- but the word still jumped out at me due to the synchronistic context. Note also that the story is set in China, and it is in Chinese that "squash" and "pumpkin" are interchangeable. I had mentioned Chinese only because I live in Taiwan and speak that language every day. This book, though, is published in America and distributed worldwide, so the fact that this story happens to be about Chinese people is a coincidence. (Visitors of the Strieberian type are often described as looking "Chinese.")

In the story, the Emperor of China holds a gardening context. Each gardener is given a seed to plant and told that the one who grows the most beautiful plant from it will be the next emperor. In the end, it is revealed that all the seeds were dead and that the contest was actually a test of honesty. Cheng, the only one honest enough to bring the emperor an empty flowerpot, wins and is chosen to be his successor.

In Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon, the "word" -- an idea or belief -- is compared to a seed  which is planted in the heart, and if the seed grows, that means "that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me" (Alma 32:28).

When one has invested a lot in a particular seed, there is a temptation to trick oneself into believing it has borne fruit even if it hasn't -- perhaps, like the dishonest gardeners in the story, by introducing other seeds into the pot and pretending that what grows from them has grown from the original seed. Resisting that temptation is a difficult but important form of honesty.

Spaghettified monkey

I’ve just finished M. D. Thalmann’s novella Europa Affair, which is absolutely terrible. It ends on a synchronistically interesting note, though, as the character Peter, who is a genetically enhanced baboon, activates an app called Monkey-B-2, which results in his “spaghettification.” What exactly that means is not really clear, as the writing is so atrocious, but it obviously ties in with William Wright’s monkey named Spaghetti.

Peering deep into the hat

I watched a few minutes of a video YouTube recommended, “Showing the Mormon Church NO MERCY w/ John Dehlin & Carah Burrell,” but pretty quickly got bored with their midwit takes. The video begins with a clip of what they apparently thought was one of the highlights, Carah saying this:

Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice or this treasure digging? The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys don’t believe that that’s an actual believable practice of how to find things within the earth, to put rocks into hats and say, Yep, God’s making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time. You know that that’s not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on earth, through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in.

To drive her point home, she took out an actual hat and demonstrated how silly people look when they’re staring into hats. I don’t think she actually had a rock in there, though. The hat was empty.

I then turned to the final chapter of John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower. He compares scientists to audience members trying to figure out how a conjurer pulled a rabbit out of his hat:

A rabbit cannot spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not first introduced into the hat somehow. They could not grasp the ancient truth that even though the hat always seems empty, it is always full. The rabbit does not come from the sorcerer’s sleeve but only crosses from one delusion to another.

Dr. [Maurice] Bucke peered deep into the empty hat and found only a rose-colored mist that had to be God.

Peering deep into a hat is a pretty unusual thing to do. Joseph Smith literally did so and saw the word of God. Immediately after hearing a reference to that, I read it, as a metaphor this time, but still with reference to divine revelation and the production of a spiritual book. (The “rose-colored mist” reference is to the mystical experience that led Bucke to write Cosmic Consciousness.)

Muhammad sync

Today I finished the New Testament and started reading the Quran, which I've only read once, more than 15 years ago. Other than the Quran itself, I don't think I've ever read any books about Muhammad or Islam, unless you count The Satanic Verses. Islam-related stuff isn't exactly a staple of my literary diet.

Yesterday I'd nearly finished John Keel's The Eighth Tower, having read 23 of its 25 chapters. Today, just minutes after reading the first few suwar of the Quran, I started Chapter 24. It begins with a history of computers, but about halfway through it suddenly has a lot to say about Mecca and the Kaaba and Mohammed (it was still Mohammed back in 1975) and the rise of Islam. The last words of the chapter are "we will defend our Kaaba to the death."

There is not a single solitary reference to anything Islam-related in the first 23 chapters of The Eighth Tower. The day I pick up the Quran for the second time in my life also happens to be the day I read Chapter 24.

The 96, the 48, and the white bull

In his May 15 post "Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross," William Wright writes that in Tolkien's writings there were originally 144 elves who were invited to Aman. Two-thirds (called the Eldar) accepted the invitation, while one-third (called the Avari) declined. (As the Babylon Bee recently complained, "every time a group of elves does something they get a new name!") Two-thirds of 144 is 96, a number which William goes on to discuss extensively. He doesn't mention the number 48, but that's how many Avari there would have been.

The number 48 is potentially interesting because of the recent emphasis on the word buy. ("'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry.") In Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) -- where you add up the value of a word by counting A as 1, B as 2, and so on -- we get these interesting equations:

• buy = 2 + 21 + 25 = 48
• sell = 19 + 5 + 12 + 12 = 48
• trade = 20 + 18 + 1 + 4 + 5 = 48

I was thinking about this as I ate my lunch today. After lunch, I went to the place where I had parked my motorcycle, only to find that a big white SUV had parked me in. Motorcycles are maneuverable, and I was able to wriggle my way out, but it took some time and was annoying.

The thought popped into my head, "Parking you in was a good way to make sure you notice this particular car." Then I realized that I hadn't really processed the car at all beyond "white SUV," so I turned and looked at it:

I noticed the number 96 first and then the word bull. (The numeral 1 looks like a lowercase l -- so if you wanted to write "BULL 96" in ABC-1234 format, this is how you'd do it.) The moon Europa has been in the sync-stream of late, and what is the Europa of mythology best known for? Being carried away by a big white bull:

This event is commonly known as the Rape of Europa. Speaking of rape, after discovering the novella Europa Affair (about the moon, not the mythical figure), I checked its Amazon page. The top review gave it one star, citing "violence against women":

For William Wright, Europa has to do with Númenor, while the number 96 has reference to elves, so I'm not sure what to make of seeing them together on that SUV, but I note it for future reference.

Note added (May 18):

The YouTube algorithm served up this video, a commentary on the symbolism of Under the Silver Lake, a 2018 movie I'd never heard of:

In Under the Silver Lake, there's a scene with a white Volkswagen Rabbit, and the video emphasizes that this is a white rabbit, as in Alice or The Matrix:

Sam's whole journey begins after Sarah disappears by trying to find her following three girls literally driving around in a white Rabbit -- you know, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette that drive a white convertible Rabbit, so he's following three women in a white Rabbit. He's following a white Rabbit.

This is conceptually very similar to my post above, where a white SUV with bull on its license plate represents the white bull of Greek myth.

Pumpkins are dear

Recent posts about pumpkins brought back to mind something I heard on the radio back in 1992, when Boutros Boutros-Ghali had just taken office as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The dialogue went something like this:

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali! What a name, eh?”

“It’s actually really interesting. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, from the Greek Petros. There’s no p sound in Arabic, so it became a b.”

“I never knew that! And what does Ghali mean?”

“Pumpkin-eater.”

A bit too culturally insensitive to air on NPR today, I know, but the nineties were a better time.

In yesterday’s post “Come and buy pumpkins,” William Wright mentions that he used to sell pumpkins for two dollars each but that now they’re three thanks to inflation. He links my post “A loaf of bread is dear” and reiterates that dear, which usually means “beloved,” can also mean “expensive.” (The Russian word for “dear” exhibits the same range of meanings, as I point out in my post.) So William’s pumpkins are dearer than they used to be.

Ghali obviously doesn’t really mean “pumpkin-eater,” so what does it mean? It means “expensive, precious, dear, beloved.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian, which explains how he ended up with the Arabic version of the name of a Christian saint. My 2011 “bread is dear” dream included a reference to the Coptic language. Saint Peter is considered by Catholics to have been the first pope. The second pope was Linus, a name we today associate with the Great Pumpkin.

Cracking eggs on Europa

I’ve just started reading Europa Affair by M. D. Thalmann, the novella mentioned in my recent post “The ice must flow!”

Keep in mind the synchronistic background here. William Wright had posted about Europa because of my own post about Humpty Dumpty staying on the wall and freezing. Eggs crack when they freeze, and Europa is a frozen moon covered with cracks. That was not my first post about Humpty Dumpty. On May 3, I had posted “Hometo Omleto” — that being the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty, literally “Manlet Omelette.” In a comment on that post, WanderingGondola quoted an old post of mine saying “Supergod can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

Got that? Now on to Europa Affair.

The first reference to Europa is on p. 11. The main character so far, a cyborg named Marwick, is making a rather dangerous landing on that moon, thanks to his boss, Elliott. I quote the sentences immediately following the first instance of the name Europa:

Elliot had disabled the autopilot for this run so that Marwick could push the boat harder than safety regulations would tolerate.

 

“If you want to make an omelet…” Elliot had said.

Two pages later, Marwick suggests a way of improving the efficiency of his spaceship’s controls.

“Noted,” said Elliot, “That’s why we chose you.”

“I thought I was just broken eggs,”Marwick said . . . .

What are the odds that that particular saying would be referenced in the opening pages of a book I started reading for no other reason than that the cover said Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow?

"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry

Earlier today I posted "'Come buy,' call the goblins," in which I quote six lines from Christina Rossetti's long poem "Goblin Market" -- and of these six, the one I promote to headline status is the one that says, "Come buy." It's a major theme in the poem, which contains no fewer than 21 instances of "Come buy."

For my lower-level English classes for children, I maintain a spreadsheet of every vocabulary item (word/meaning pair) in their textbooks and on which pages each occurs. When I'm preparing to teach a particular page, I can then see at a glance which words on it should already be thoroughly familiar to my students, which they have encountered once or twice before, and which may be totally new to them.

This afternoon, I was preparing to teach this passage:

With a few clicks of the mouse, I sorted my spreadsheet so that every word on this page (and the facing page, not pictured) was listed in descending order of how many times it had appeared previously in the textbooks. What immediately jumped out at me was -- come buy!

Come had previously appeared in their material 37 times; buy, 35 -- and thus the two words came to be put together in that order.

After taking the above screenshot so I could put it in this post, I noticed that if you read from ask to buy -- keeping in mind that these are words from an article about growing vegetables, ordered according to how many times they had previously appeared in a particular set of textbooks -- it almost reads as a coherent utterance. Very little tweaking is needed:

Ask these, for when many water[s] them their every need did [provide], why then [did they] come buy?

Before and after that section, the series of words has no apparent meaning -- only the part I happened to include in my screenshot.

In "Goblin Market," the goblins try to sell faerie fruit to unsuspecting maidens. The textbook article is about vegetables, but the illustration is a huge photo of a pumpkin -- which is not only technically a fruit but perhaps the goblin fruit par excellence, due to its association with Halloween.

No sooner had I typed that than I glanced down at my desk and saw something I had put there just this morning and then promptly forgotten about: a little plastic bag of individually wrapped candies with jack-o'-lanterns on the wrappers.

The candies had been included as a free gift with something my wife had ordered online, and she had given them to me to bring to the school for my students. I had commented at the time how strange it was for them to have given her free Halloween candy in May.

The goblins in the poem sell typical sweet fruits -- "Apples and quinces, / Lemons and oranges, / Plump unpeck'd cherries," and so on -- but recasting the goblin fruits as pumpkins made me notice a connection I hadn't made before: an incident in one of Whitley Strieber's books where one of his goblin-like alien visitors appears to be going door-to-door selling squash. You can read about it in my June 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land." The post even mentions that I had misremembered the story, thinking it had been pumpkins that the alien was selling. (Pumpkins and squash are the same in Chinese anyway.)

This is all weird for sure. We'll see where it goes.

The ice must flow!

Yesterday, William Wright posted "Can Pharazon repent? AND a frozen egg up high on a wall," which as I suppose you can tell by the title is largely in response to my poem about Humpty Dumpty, in which Humpty stays up on the wall all through the fall and then freezes when winter comes. Having previously connected Humpty with Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor in Tolkien's mythology, William suggests that Númenor might now be something like Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, and perhaps might even be Europa itself.

This dredged up some vague memory I had of once having read a sci-fi story set on Europa, which I tried in vain to track down. In the course of my search, though, I discovered this book which I'd never heard of:

It's called Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow (2017). The subtitle is presumably a punning reference to "The spice must flow," the well-known catchphrase from David Lynch's 1984 Dune movie, but it also happens to be uncannily relevant to William's post.

In answering the question in his title, William suggests that Ar-Pharazôn's possible redemption might involve playing a role in "the restoration of Numenor, part of the 'highway' that will come out of the depths, as the wave that covers it is rolled back." This idea of a highway from the deep comes from one of the revelations of Joseph Smith. Here is the immediate context:

And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep (D&C 133:26-27).

William didn't quote the part about the ice flowing, even though it seems relevant to his frozen-Númenor theory, but I found it just by searching for sci-fi novels with Europa in the title.

"Come buy," call the goblins

I woke up this morning with six lines of verse in my head, from Christina Rossetti's 1859 poem "Goblin Market":

"We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?"

"Come buy," call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.

Just those six lines, nothing else from the rather long narrative poem of which they are a part, but they've been running through my head all day. This sort of came out of left field. I own no books by or about Christina Rossetti, know essentially nothing about her, and had never read any of her work until a few days ago, when I somehow found myself reading "Goblin Market" online, with no clue how I had ended up there. I tried going through my browsing history and everything but still can't really retrace my steps. Then, a few days later, these six lines rather aggressively impose themselves on my consciousness.

I tend to assume that weird things like this are potentially meaningful. In this case, it seems like a warning -- if not for me personally, then perhaps for some of my readers -- and so I pass it on.

Parties within parties

I just checked William Wright’s blog, where his latest post is “Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross.” He mentions Bilbo  Baggins’s birthday party:

I believe I've mentioned before that The Lord of the Rings actually starts with symbolism regardingthe number 144.  At Bilbo' birthday/ farewell party (held on September 22), while the entire town was invited to the overall celebration, there was an invitation-only dinner party for 144 individuals comprising Bilbo and Frodo's extended family.  The party within the party.

If I heard the phrase “the party within the party” without context, I would assume it meant a political party, something like the Inner Party in 1984. Here, though, it means a party in the sense of a social event.

Immediately after reading that post, I checked AC and read this quote from football player Aaron Rodgers’s recent interview on Tucker Carlson:

I’ve seen some interesting things.. Been around some interesting parties and gatherings that are strange. Not anything like Diddy party… Even at an Oscar party seeing how some of these people act, a little strange. Parties within the party that always kind of weirded me out a little bit.

Almost exactly the same expression, and again referring to a social gathering rather than a political party.

Rodgers also mentions, “There’s a pedophile component to it as well which is really sick.” Sick? Okay, but don’t you think gross is really the mot juste here?

Humpty Dumpty revisited

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

The wall was high, and he could see

From there the top of every tree,

Observing as the leaves would turn

From green to gold, and some would burn

With orange or with scarlet hue,

And Humpty Dumpty saw that, too.

And looking down on gold and red

And orange, Humpty Dumpty said,

"Atop the wall's the place to be!

I've never seen as now I see!

From this my perch above the town,

What man or horse could talk me down?

For Humpty Dumpty is my name,

The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame,

And I intend to see it all

And stay till the last day of fall."

The king was not amused by this.

(In point of fact, the wall was his.)

He called his men and told them all

To "get that Humpty off my wall!"

A constable was sent to shout

At Humpty and to chew him out.

"Look here!" he yelled from down below.

"You're not above the law, you know!"

But Humpty said he was above it,

And the constable could shove it.

So then His Highness  sent the judge,

But Humpty Dumpty wouldn't budge.

The sheriff and the bailiff came,

But Humpty's answer was the same.

And last of all he sent the may'r,

But Humpty Dumpty didn't care.

He, unrepentant, told him that

He meant to sit, and there he sat.

At last the king could but relent:

Not one more man or horse was sent,

And Humpty Dumpty after all

Was left alone to watch the fall.

And it was great. He saw the trees.

He felt the brisk and biting breeze.

He watched the maple seeds a-twirling

And the squirrels at their squirreling.

He sat and sat and watched it all

And stayed till the last day of fall,

Till winter came and brought the snows

And cold, and Humpty Dumpty froze.

And no one ever knew the reason

Why he'd stayed there all that season.

Orion, Oriana, Orellana

Yesterday, May 14, I posted "Orion on May 6, 2024 (Taiwan time)," documenting a sync involving that constellation.

This morning I remembered that the 1995 James Gurney book Dinotopia: The World Beneath, which I have posted about here before, has a character named Oriana -- as if a feminine form of Orion. Looking up that old post -- "Syncs: The World Beneath" -- I find that it is dated May 13, 2023, almost exactly one year before yesterday's Orion post. Oriana's name does not occur in the text of the post but can be seen in one of the images I posted from the book:

Oriana's half-key must be combined with Arthur's to form the "completed spiral key" which opens the door to the World Beneath. (Arthur is another astronomical name, related to Arcturus.) This theme of two keys that must be combined recently resurfaced in my February 7 post "What's the second key?"

In yesterday's post, one of the places where Orion turned up was in a Taiwanese magazine for students of English. This morning, just after looking up last year's Oriana post, I taught a student who uses a different English magazine published by the same company. Today's article was about the legend of El Dorado and included this reference to an explorer named Orellana:

In many dialects of Spanish, ll is pronounced the same as y, making this name extremely similar to Oriana. I don't think I would have connected Orellana with Orion had it not been for the intermediate link of Oriana.

Sync: Hesiod and Revelation

On May 9, I took down my copy of Hesiod’s Theogony and spent a couple of hours meditating over a few of its most metaphysically pregnant lines.

On May 14, having finished up the last of the New Testament epistles, I started in on the Book of Revelation.

I last read Revelation three years ago. My most recent serious engagement with the Theogony was five years ago.

After reading the opening chapters of Revelation, I set the Bible down and checked one of my email accounts. I had a new message from academia.edu — the timestamp indicates that it was sent while I was reading Revelation — suggesting that I might want to download a paper by one Bruce Louden called “Hesiod’s Theogony and the Book of Revelation 4, 12, and 19-20.”

Talk about a targeted ad!

Orion on May 6, 2024 (Taiwan time)

This morning I bought the May 2024 issue of a magazine published in Taiwan and intended for students of English as a foreign language. It has one article for every two days of the month, excluding Sundays, plus one shorter article if there are an odd number of days.

The article for May 6 and 7 (Monday and Tuesday) is called "Getting Started with Stargazing" and features this illustration:

The dates are printed right above the picture of the constellation Orion.

William Wright's post "Orion and his most excellent pose" is dated Sunday, May 5, 2024 and includes this image:

The dates associated with these two Orions match almost perfectly -- as close as can be expected, given that the magazine has no Sunday articles. Taking the time difference into account, though, it's likely that we have a perfect match. I don't know what time of day William posted "Orion" (he can check this in his post editor if he feels so inclined), but if it was any time after 11:00 a.m. in Minnesota, it was already Monday, May 6, in Taiwan.

Scary “Momo” first seen, by children, in July (allegedly)

The day before yesterday, May 11, I taught an English class, and a reading comprehension exercise in the textbook had an article about the “Momo Challenge” phenomenon. This was a scary-looking character that would reportedly pop up unexpectedly in children’s videos on YouTube and tell the children to hurt themselves. YouTube insisted that there was no proof that such videos existed, and the received opinion now is that the whole thing was a hoax.

Momo is an extremely typical cutesy Chinese name — I can think of several companies and characters in Taiwan that use it — and the textbook is Taiwanese, so I had assumed the Momo Challenge was a Chinese-language phenomenon. Having looked it up, though, I see that it was global in scale and that reports of the videos began in July 2018.

Today, May 13, I read in John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower about Momo, short for Missouri Monster, a menacing Bigfoot-like creature repeatedly sighted in that state in the 1970s. According to Keel, “Momo was first seen on July 11, 1972, by the three Harrison children.” Of course, the received opinion is that, sightings schmitings, monsters don’t exist.

This is a pretty impressive coincidence, I think. Although the two incidents are completely different in nature, in each case the creature

• is called Momo
• has a frightening appearance
• was first seen in July
• was first seen by children
• is widely dismissed as a hoax or urban legend

And, while the incidents themselves occurred 46 years apart, I happened to encounter one almost exactly 46 hours after the other.

Update (4:15 p.m., same day):

Trying to think what relevance Momo might have for me personally, I thought of how the syllable mo represents Mormon in various slang terms in common use on the Internet -- exmo, progmo, nevermo, mopologist, etc.

This made me think of how Ed Decker, the notoriously sensationalistic anti-Mormon, used to claim that Mormons worshiped a dark spirit called Mormo. Looking that word up, I found that mormo (plural mormones) refers to female spirit in Greek folklore, used as a bugbear to frighten children into behaving. The longer form mormolyce is also attested, suggesting that mormones were imagined as werewolf-like creatures. Since one of the things the two Momos in the sync have in common is that they frighten children, this seems relevant.

But, pace Ed Decker, none of that has anything to do with Mormons, right? Actually, there may be a connection. Mormons are so called after the Book of Mormon, which is named after the ancient prophet Mormon, who was named after a place. And how did the place get its name?

And it came to pass that as many as did believe him did go forth to a place which was called Mormon, having received its name from the king, being in the borders of the land having been infested, by times or at seasons, by wild beasts (Mosiah 18:4).

Doesn't this suggest that the name Mormon had something to do with the "wild beasts" that from time to time infested the place?

On a more personal note, "a bugbear to frighten children" may remind my longtime readers of one of this blog's predecessors, which, before being renamed Boisterous beholding, was called Bugs to fearen babes withall and had as a header image an anatomical diagram of a cicada. This is a line from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, where bug is used in the sense of "bugbear," but I had deliberately misread it in the modern entomological sense. (The cicada is considered a "true bug.") The reference was to certain big-eyed nocturnal visitants who terrorized me as a very young child and whom I thought of sometimes as "monkeys" and sometimes as "bugs."

Cicadas in a Mormon context have recently appeared on this blog. In my March 18 post "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement," I reference the fringe Mormon Goker Harim, who claims to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared from the markings on the back of a cicada. This was jokingly referenced by William Wright just a few days ago in his post "02/22."

Rainbows and the number eight

With seven each of creatures clean;

Of unclean, two -- yet I have seen

How mercy doth prevail in Heaven:

Though man's an unclean creature, seven

The Lord permitted to embark

Along with me into the ark.

My sons, my wife, my sons' three wives --

He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

Early this morning I was reading in a coffee shop, as is my wont. I read the two Epistles of Peter and then turned to The Eighth Tower by John Keel.

Both Epistles mention Noah as one of eight survivors of the Flood: "the ark . . . wherein few, that is eight, souls were saved" (1 Pet. 3:20), and "saved Noah the eighth person" (2 Pet. 2:5). The story of the Flood is, among other things, a just-so story about the origin of the rainbow.

The Eighth Tower has that word eighth in its title, and the cover illustration shows the seven traditional colors of the rainbow plus an eighth color, black:

The author's name as given on the cover -- John A. Keel -- contains an anagram of Noah. (John A. is also an anagram of that other nautical prophet, Jonah.) A keel is part of a ship.

In the book, Keel provides a diagram of part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- including eight "colors" -- and then discusses how UFOs often appear first as red or violet and then move through the spectrum:

Just as I was reading this, the background music in the coffee shop was a song called "Inside a Rainbow":

Minor sync: The possible Jewishness of John Keel

I just finished Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel. I had downloaded it, along with another book by him called The Eighth Tower, some months ago when someone one /x/ recommended them. Just after finishing Operation Trojan Horse but before opening The Eighth Tower, I visited Keel's Wikipedia page to see what other books he had written. Wikipedia mentioned that his surname had been spelled Kiehle at birth, which together with certain other biographical details -- journalist, raised an atheist -- made me wonder idly whether he might be Jewish.

Wikipedia had no information on this one way or the other, nor did a Google search for is john keel jewish turn up anything, so I gave up trying to find out and instead opened my epub of The Eighth Tower for the first time. The very first sentence in the book is:

"What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?"

Reading on, one finds that the question has no reference to Keel himself; it is spoken to Jesus by one of the crucified thieves.  Still a bit of a coincidence.

When you notice the stripes

I was recently digging through old files to find The Tinleys, and one of the things I ran into was "A Pedestrian Speech for Bill Clinton," written by me and my four siblings in 1996. One of our pastimes in those days was writing "Pedestrian stories," meaning stories composed by a group of people who take turns adding one sentence. You write one sentence, pass the paper to the next person, and so on. They got their name because the early ones revolved around a character called the Pedestrian (who didn't always live up to his name; one story is titled "The Pedestrian Rides a Speeding Motor-Omnibus"), but the term was later reinterpreted as meaning that the story was itself a pedestrian, "walking" around the room from person to person.

Laughing at the idiotic rhetoric of political campaign speeches was another pastime of ours -- it was a more lighthearted time, politically -- and 1996 was one hell of a year for that. Does anyone else remember that guy whose speech was organized around comparing a certain Kansas politician to each of the characters in The Wizard of Oz in turn? "Like the Scarecrow, Bob Dole has no brain. . . ." Political speech-making is a lost art now; 1996 was the golden age.

Anyway, during the 1996 presidential campaign we decided to bring Pedestrian stories to the political peanut gallery and write Bill Clinton a Pedestrian speech. After some preliminary thank-you-very-muching, it got right to the point with this:

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats, three cheers for the flag! Yes, it is this flag that we have come together to honor today, as Americans and as Democrats. Perhaps you wonder why I am here today. It is because, fellow Democrats, as an American, I too honor the flag. Yes, indeed, I honor all flags, whether national or state, or even privately used. While I was on my train ride, many people asked me what I thought about flags, and I told them that when a flag has 13 stripes and 50 stars, you can connect them to make a constellation -- and ladies and gentlemen, that is what we are!

That line stood out to me in connection with recent syncs about constellations and dot-connecting (e.g. "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting"). Then this morning I put on some music, letting the algorithm do its thing, and got a new-to-me Shins song called "New Slang (When You Notice The Stripes)":

In the context of the metaphor from the Pedestrian speech, "noticing the stripes" means connecting the dots to make a constellation. The song is from the album Oh, Inverted World, which is a link to the turning-upside-down theme mentioned in "The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22."

The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

I was close enough to the dreaming state to experience auditory hallucinations like that but still sufficiently awake for a conscious and somewhat coherent train of thought. I thought about how a commenter on the Prika-vlein post had suggested that a word like pika just naturally sounds like it should mean something small, citing the metric prefix pico- (one-trillionth). Yes, I thought, but nano- doesn't sound phonaesthetically small. I remembered that as a child, before I knew the scientific meaning of nano-, I had invented an imaginary creature called a nanosnake. This was a dinosaur-scale beast with the general body shape of a very long-necked plesiosaur, but with no flippers or other limbs. It had a beak like a parrot and a pair of small wings on the back of its head, which it used to keep its head held high for long periods without its neck tiring.

At this point I lapsed into a full dreaming state, and my reminiscences about the nanosnake gave way to the sudden panicked thought that perhaps I had accidentally swallowed a nanosnake -- meaning, this time, a microscopically small snake. This felt like an extremely urgent problem, and I was panicking, unable to think clearly. An immaterial woman was nearby, trying to help me by shouting advice. "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" she kept saying, the way you might say, "Stop, drop, and roll" to someone who was on fire.

She was telling me to do a mudra -- one of a number of named hand gestures that carry symbolic meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism -- but that just made me panic even more. There are lots of different mudras, and my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to what little I can still remember from that Central Asian Art class I took back in college to meet a diversity requirement. I had no idea which one I was supposed to do. I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem. I still had no idea if it was what I was supposed to be doing, though.

Apparently not, as the ghostly woman kept right on shouting, "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" Finally, as if in exasperation at my thick-headedness, she spelled it out: "Menelmacar mudra!"

As soon as she had said that, I woke up.

Menelmacar, I know thanks to recent posts by William Wright, is one of the Elvish names for the constellation Orion. (The only Elvish name for Orion I had known previously was Telumehtar.) A few days ago he posted "Orion and his most excellent pose," about the position of Orion's arms -- a mudra in a broad sense -- and how the same gesture appears in a Lionel Richie music video and in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

So this is the Menelmacar mudra, I guess. Remember it in case you ever accidentally swallow a nanosnake.

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One of the reasons my half-awake mind had jumped from pico- to nano- was that shortly before going to bed, I had listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat," which is from the album Nanobots.

The song is full of off-the-wall metaphors for inversions of the usual order of things: "The words assassinated the book / The kitchen cooked and ate the cook," etc.  This reminded me of William Wright's first post to feature the Menelmacar mudra, "Dancing on the ceiling," in which he quotes a Book of Mormon variant of Isaiah:

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

I had just been reading in John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse about the Fatima apparitions of 1917:

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

The children understood their mysterious visitor, who finally identified herself somewhat cagily as "the Lady of the Rosary," to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. In Maria Carreira's perception, though, the Queen was overruled by the bees. This association of bees with the Queen of Heaven made me think of the Sugarcubes song "The Bee":

The key lines are these:

Oh, hot bee

Queen of heaven

With glossy trunk

Buzz to me

I don't know what "glossy trunk" was intended to mean -- I guess a bee's thorax is its "trunk," or torso? -- but it sounds more like a description of a tree than of a bee. Specifically, it would be a reference to the texture or appearance of a tree's bark, so that's another tie-in with "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat."

The odd phrase "Oh, hot bee" is another link to the bee-buzzing Lady of Fatima. In the grand culminating apparition on October 13, 1917, Keel reports that "A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly."

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I had started reading this Fatima stuff last night, after reading William's post "Twos-day: San Ramon, another Walt, and flying into the Sun." In that post, he mentions seeing the date 02/22 and realizing that the number 22 (which had been appearing in syncs) could be a date, and that his own birthday was such as date: July 22. I left a comment saying that in the past I had thought of Monday the 22nd as a day of good omen, the reverse of Friday the 13th, and that my first spiritual experience had taken place on Monday, July 22, 1996.

It was just after reading that post and leaving the comment that I picked up Operation Trojan Horse and read this, in the lead-up to the account of the Fatima events:

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

There is no apparent reason for giving this girl's exact date of birth. In a book that mentions hundreds of different individuals, a word search for the word born confirms that no other person's exact date of birth is given. For some reason, Keel made a point of mentioning that Lucia Abobora, later of Fatima fame, was born on the 22nd.

This morning, reading on in Keel, I found a much more specific sync. Recall that in my comment on William's blog I had mentioned one particular date: Monday, July 22, 1996, and gave it as the date of a spiritual experience. The year 1996 was a leap year beginning on a Monday; these occur every 28 years. The last one before 1996 was 1968. The next one after 1996 is the present year, 2024. Today I read this in Keel:

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

That's Monday, July 22, in year with a calendar identical to that of 1996 (and 2024). And seeing the Blessed Virgin obviously qualifies as a spiritual experience.

Happy birthday, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir

Today I was listening to "Mountain Sound" by Of Monsters and Men and wondered what the lead vocalist's name was. I looked her up and found that today -- May 6, the day I randomly decided to look her up -- is her 34th birthday.

Tuesday

Today I attended the English-speaking Mormon branch in Taichung for a second time, the first time having been back in December. No one had spoken to me the first time, but this time people were in a friendlier mood, or perhaps I was, and I made the acquaintance of a few of the members.

The testimony meeting was conducted by a man with a very long beard, and after the meeting he came up to me and said, "We've met before."

"Well, I've attended here once before," I said.

I hadn't spoken to a soul that first time, though, so I quite taken aback by what he said next: "Your name is William, right? And your middle name is James, and your last name begins with a T?"

It turns out we had met briefly six years earlier, when he was clean-shaven and looked very different, in a restaurant. He had added me on Facebook, which I was still using occasionally back then, and when he posted an obscure coded message on his Facebook page, involving the Deseret alphabet and drawings of Egyptian gods, I had been the only one to crack the code. He had remembered all that when he saw me in church, looked up that old Facebook post, and found my full name -- though of course he didn't know how to pronounce the surname. Pretty impressive! We ended up sitting together in Sunday school and chatted a bit afterwards. He mentioned that he raises turtles -- over 200 of them -- and later I looked him up on YouTube and watched this video of 60 tiny turtles devouring a large leaf:

In Sunday school, one of the members told a story about some chickens who took flying lessons from some geese. When the chickens finally succeeded in learning to fly, they were very happy, thanked their teachers, and walked home.

I guess I have a certain amount in common with those chickens, since immediately after church I proceeded to "break the Sabbath" by Mormon standards and visit a used bookstore. The only book to catch my eye there was a picture book called Tuesday by David Wiesner.

It begins with some pictures of turtles in a swamp, quite similar to the ones in the video above. Then lots of frogs sitting on lily pads start to fly.

Most of the book consists of pictures of these frogs flying around. They fly into a town, enter people's houses through windows and chimneys, and so on. At one point they are flying along with, or perhaps chasing, a running dog:

When the sun comes up, the frogs come back to earth and hop back to their pond.

The turtles and the large leaves sync with the YouTube video. The frogs learning to fly and then "walking" home syncs with the chicken story. The flying frogs chasing a dog syncs with the frog-like alien who tried to steal a dog in "Hometo Omleto."

Tennessee Walts, plus that dog-stealing alien in New Jersey again

William Wright's May 4 post "Liberty Bell Follow-Up: The Liberty Bowl" begins with a reference to his "post earlier today on the Walts" -- meaning two different people named Walt: Walt Whitman and a TV character called Walter White. Walts sounds like waltz, and although there are obviously lots of different waltzes out there, the one that immediately came to mind when I read Walts was the 1950 Patti Page song "Tennessee Waltz." It started playing in my head as I read the rest of the post.

The post goes on to say that while William was finishing up his post on "the Walts," he glanced up at the TV and saw that it was showing a football game being played in Memphis, Tennessee.

William's two Walts -- both of whom have "white" surnames -- reminded me that a few years back I posted about another Walt in connection with the color black. My Leap Day 2020 post "A lost alchemical poem of Raleigh's" is about a dream I had in which I was reading a book called Ralegh the Alchemiste which quoted a line from Walter Raleigh -- "My Bodie will blacken and turne into Coale" -- and interpreted it as a reference to the alchemical process of nigredo, or blackening.

I then went on to note that, in the real world, that line is not Raleigh's but comes from a folk song sung by, among other people, Tennessee Ernie Ford. So yet another Tennessee-Walt connection.

Curious as to whether this was going to lead anywhere, I searched my own blog for tennessee. I didn't find any more Walts, but I did find a surprising coincidence in my August 2020 post "Synchronicity: Crop circle in Charlton." At the end of the post, I quote from Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia. Vallée tells the story of one Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, who reported that a UFO had attempted to steal his dog on November 6, 1957, and then notes the "extraordinary coincidence" that "on the same day another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey." A footnote adds, "By yet another coincidence, the name of the town in the second case is similar to the name of the witness (Everett) in the first one."

If that sounds at all familiar, it's because I just quoted John Keel's account of the Everittstown dog-stealing incident two days ago, in "Hometo Omleto." I had no memory of having posted another reference to the same incident back in 2020, and I would have been none the wiser had the Tennessee Walt syncs not led me to search for tennessee. Both Keel and Vallée refer to lots of different UFO stories in their respective books, but the sync fairies singled out the same one twice.

Life ain’t easy for a boy named Shushan

On April 22, William Wright posted “Shushan!” The title is a reference to a scene in Johnny English Reborn where a male flight attendant is wearing a name tag that says Susan. When Johnny’s sidekick questions this — “Sir, I don’t think he’s a Susan” — Johnny insists that it’s actually a Chinese name and should be pronounced Shushan. I posted my own syncs related to this on April 25 in “Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting.”

Last night, May 3, I decided to check The Higherside Chats, a podcast I used to listen to fairly often but hadn’t checked in a long time. One of the recent episodes, posted April 11, is titled “Dr. Gregory Shushan | Near death experience in indigenous religion, afterlife journeys & resurrection.” So that’s a man named Shushan, as in the movie. The resurrection reference also syncs with the movie title Johnny English Reborn.

Dr. Shushan’s first name, Gregory, also caught my eye. The host is named Gregory, too. The Russian form of that name recently entered the sync-stream with “A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.”

Joseph Smith makes a brief cameo early on in the podcast. Discussing Gregory Shushan’s theory that near-death experiences have influenced afterlife beliefs in religions worldwide, Greg Carlwood says:

Yeah, I agree with you, and it seems kind of obvious because I think about someone like Joseph Smith and the whole Mormon religion. It’s usually some figure who has some mystical experience and then says they have some sacred knowledge of some kind to impart, some new tablets or something.

Joseph Smith never had a near-death experience, so that was an odd example to choose.

Baptisation? Baptisation.

I put russell brand into Google to try to get context for a Babylon Bee article, and I added a new word to my vocabulary.

Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

⁂

Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

⁂

Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

⁂

Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

⁂

Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

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After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

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Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A new FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

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In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

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What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.