The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus

I keep finding more in the central cover illustration of Animalia by Graeme Base:

As discussed in "GAEL," what I noticed first was the lion, green gorilla, and elephant, arranged in a line along the left side of the picture. Then I noticed that one of the elephants in the book is apparently named Eric, and that the cover shows an elephant right next to a knight on horseback -- encoding the name of Eric Knight, the author of the novel Lassie Come-Home. Just below Eric and the Knight is a golden jackal, suggesting the golden dog on the cover of Lassie Come Home. In my post "Lassie Come Home," I recorded a hunch that Lassie has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, who is menaced by the Dragon and has to go into hiding. Sure enough, right above Eric and the Knight on the cover is a menacing-looking dragon in flight. The D page in Animalia is titled "Diabolical Dragons Daintily Devouring Delicious Delicacies." Revelation 12 says that the Dragon is "called the Devil" (i.e, diabolical) and that it "stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born."

The Knight carries a banner, the end of which points to a herd of zebra -- a juxtaposition which suggests the zebra-striped flag of Brittany:

The flag of Normandy, the other part of Armorica, is a red field with two gold lions.

Under the banner is another black-and-white animal, an ostrich. In The Satanic Verses, the image of an out-of-place ostrich running along the English beach is associated with the Norman conquest. Rosa Diamond has just been daydreaming about that history -- "Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk" -- when

Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, -- running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, -- swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich.

These references to travel between Britain and Armorica fit right in with "The Gospel of Luke on Lobsterback," where I even propose that the "lobsters" may actually be soldiers, like our Knight. The Knight has the face of a hog, and both hogs and lobsters are well-known as non-kosher animals. As in Peter's vision in Acts, "unclean" animals may symbolize "Gentiles" -- the Gentiles entrusted with bringing the lost sheep of Israel, and their lost Gospel of Light, safely home:

I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders (1 Ne. 21:22).

The language is from Isaiah, of course, and for "set up my standard" many translations have something like "raise high my banner."

Confirmation that this hog Knight with his banner has to do with the Lassie Come Home story can be found on the H page of Animalia, where we learn that the hogs on horseback are "hurrying homeward":

William Wright's recent post about Ali with an I and Daniel with an L led me to look up a 2019 post of mine about Dante's claim that I and EL were the two earliest names for God. I was surprised to find that the post also included this detail from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch:

My interest at the time was in the owl, and how it proves that the creature in the basket in Bosch's painting The Conjurer is also an owl (not a monkey, as some have claimed). Looking at it now, though, what I see is an anthropomorphic hog, like our Knight, leading a golden dog on a leash -- as if bringing Lassie home. He is also dressed in dark green and carries a lute, suggesting this detail from the L page of Animalia:

Hieronymus is the Latin form of the name Jerome. I don't know how I could have posted so much about lions in a library, even referring to the library as a "study," without making the connection with Albrecht Dürer's famous copper engraving Saint Jerome in His Study:

Sleeping on the floor next to the saint's pet lion is a contented-looking dog. Lassie has come home.

One more thing to mention. In the vision described in "Étude brute?" -- which primed me to notice the Lions in a Library image in Animalia -- an indirect vision of the Holy Family -- Joseph and his wife and son, radiating light to bright for me to look at them (perhaps identical to William Wright's "Family of Light"?) -- was followed by my being led into a library or study by a "Bull of Heaven," which I described as being "something like an aurochs." Later I noted that the Bull is a traditional symbol of the House of Joseph. This symbolism comes from Deuteronomy:

[Joseph's] glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh (Deut. 33:17).

Where the King James has unicorns, the Douay-Rheims translation favored by Catholics has -- following no less an authority than Saint Jerome himself! -- rhinoceros. Most modern translations have wild ox, meaning the aurochs. These three animals, then, may be considered interchangeable as symbols of the House of Joseph. Here they are on the cover of Animalia:

The unicorn and rhinoceros caught my eye first, but there's also a yak in the background. Does that count as a "wild ox"? We usually think of the yak as a domestic animal, but there are still wild yaks in the Himalayas. The domestic yak is Bos grunniens ("grunting ox"), while the wild yak is Bos mutus ("silent ox"). Why bring up the scientific names? Because I specifically described the animals in my vision as "silent bulls."

I think I found a book formerly owned by Donald Trump!

Found these during some random flipping-through at a used bookstore. These are the best marginal annotations, probably, ever. Everyone says so.

The only thing that makes me skeptical is that they're all in lowercase.

GAEL

Recent sync activity has centered around Animalia by Graeme Base, which is an alphabet book. I was thinking how funny it was to be taking an alphabet book so seriously, and then I remembered that I was well within Mormon tradition in so doing, given Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. This is commonly referred to (by those few who do refer to it) as "the GAEL," which I guess makes the language therein described -- clearly "Egyptian" in name only -- GAELic.

"The Gael" is also the name of that  tune from The Last of the Mohicans. Just in case it's not playing in your head already, here's a little help:

My interest in Animalia has been focused on the G and L pages -- two of the letters in GAEL -- both of which have some "Gaelic" themes. The L page includes a leprechaun, while the main subject of the G page is green gorillas. Green is the symbol of Ireland, and Punch cartoons used to portray the stereotypical Irishman as "Mr. G-O'Rilla." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats has recently been associated with Pharaoh's butler from Genesis, who dreamed of holding a cup and pressing grapes into it:

And Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand (Gen. 40:11).

Here, from Animalia, is a green gorilla preparing to do just that:

I've just noticed for the first time that William Butler G-O'Rilla's grail is decorated with running greyhounds -- only they're not grey; they're gold. A golden dog running ties right in with Lassie Come Home on the L page:

Lassie is a stereotypically Scottish word, so there's another "Gaelic" link.

It occurred to me to look up gael on Eldamo. It's defined as "pale, glimmering" -- another link to Yeats, Claire, and The Song of Wandering Aengus, in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." Another permutation of the same letters, laeg, is also Elvish and means, what else, "green."

The G and L pages encode the two keys. One of these, remember, is associated with gold, red, the sun, and the rose; the other, with silver, green, the moon, and the lily. Lions are associated with gold and the sun, and there is a key reference in the Lions' library in the form of a book by John Locke. Gorillas are associated with silver ("silverback"), and a gorilla is in a loose sense a "monkey" -- moon-key. The green "silverback" on the G page is complemented by the red "lobsterback" on the L page.

L and G also represent the square and compass. The square obviously resembles the letter L and appears as such in Mormon symbolism. Some forms of the capital G look like an arrow indicating circular motion, which is the function of the compass. (Transliterated into Greek, the mapping is reversed: Gamma is the square; Lambda, the compass.)

Doing an image search now to try to find a particularly arrow-like form of G, I found this, which for some reason also includes a lion named Lucas -- not the most natural choice for a page about the letter G!

Lucas is another form of the name Luke. William Wright has already suggested that the "Gospel of Luke" featured on the L page might have something to do with Luke Skywalker, and this "G. Lucas" would seem to confirm that reading.

But G and L are only two of the four letters in GAEL. What of the other two? Well, I don't have much to say about A at this point, but recent syncs have strongly suggested that I give the E page another gander. "Stink Gorilla More" included a photo of a little gorilla figurine my wife keeps on one of her bookshelves. The other day I was passing that shelf and noticed the gorilla's companions:

I first noticed the lion-gorilla juxtaposition, of course, but elephant is E, another component of GAEL. This trio of animals is also prominently featured on the cover of Animalia:

The E page of Animalia is kind of boring. Unlike G and L, which include dozens of different things beginning with those letters, E pretty much just has elephants and Easter eggs.

I mean, eggs are a Humpty Dumpty link, and he's been associated with the number eight (nice belt!), but that's about it.

Then I noticed that each of the eggs has a tiny name tag. The names are Emily, Elizabeth, Eric, Esmerelda (sic), Egbert, Ethel, Ernest, and what could be either Edward or Edwin. I guess these are the elephants' names. You can click the photo above to zoom in if you want to see the names for yourself.

The relevance of some of these is immediately obvious. William Wright has already written quite a bit about Elizabeth and Egbert. Eric is interesting because if you look back at the photo of the cover, an elephant (Eric?) is standing right next to a knight on horseback (a warthog knight, but still). Eric Knight is the author of Lassie Come-Home. The one that really got my attention, though, was the misspelled Esmerelda. William Wright recently posted about how the Elfstone in Tolkien's writings is a Green Stone. The name Esmeralda means "emerald" -- i.e., a green stone -- and here the spelling has been modified so as to include elda. Elda, as I suppose even the merest dabbler in things Tolkienian will be aware, means "elf."

Concerning shoon

The Man in the Moon

Wears silver shoon,

But gold costs twice

As much. That price

Is far too high,

And that is why

The Girl in the Sun

Wears only one.

On Venus, copper

Shoon they wore,

But copper’s dearer

Than before.

Until they’ve saved

Enough, that price

Means penny-loafers

Must suffice.

But iron’s cheap.

The shoon on Mars

Cost less than those

On other stars.

The Man that’s there

Is shod, of course,

With shoon to spare

To shoe his horse.

And what of Earth?

Men there, they say,

Make do with shoon

Of miry clay

Until, the Ancient’s

Reign restored,

They may go barefoot

Like their Lord.

Sons of Michael,

He approaches.

Rise! The Ancient

Father greet.

Bow, ye thousands,

Low before him.

Minister

Before his feet.

The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback

In Animalia, as discussed in "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," the Gospel of Luke appears on the back of a lobster. No, not like the Judgement Tablet on the back of a cicada! It's in ordinary book form, if a bit thicker than the Gospel of Luke as we know it, but the book is supported by a lobster.

I've already written a bit about the possible significance of the Gospel of Luke, but I didn't say anything about the lobster. It's been nagging at me, though, and I finally figured out its relevance: "The Lobster-quadrille"! The G and L post prominently featured a griffin, also shown together with something representing sacred records, and the Gryphon in Alice is the one who, with the Mock-turtle, sings "The Lobster-quadrille." (That word quadrille originally meant "one of a set of four," which has obvious relevance to the Gospel of Luke.) In the song, lobsters are thrown out to sea from England, so far that they nearly reach the northern shore of France:

You can really have no notion how delightful it will be

When they take us [the whiting and the snail] up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!

. . .

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France --

Normandy is on the northern shore of France, and of course there were later Normans in England as well, so there is possible relevance to Minbad the Mailer. Besides being written correspondence, mail is also a kind of armor, and Normandy and Brittany belong to what was once known as Armorica -- so perhaps the Norman Mailer is sending "mail" (in the form of sacred writings) back to his homeland of Armorica. What was once just called mail is nowadays known as snail mail, and "The Lobster-quadrille" makes it clear that the lobsters being thrown toward France are accompanied by snails.

Where was I reading about Armorica recently? Oh, right, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Hélas, l’Evangile a passé! l’Evangile! l’Evangile. J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité. Me voici sur la plage armoricaine.

Alas! The Gospel has gone by! The Gospel! The Gospel. Greedily I await God. I am of an inferior race for all eternity. Here I am on the Breton shore.

Louise Varèse has "the Breton shore" in her translation, but the original French is clearly referring more generally to Armorica as a whole. That geographical reference was all I had remembered as possibly relevant, but when I looked it up I saw that it is juxtaposed with "The Gospel" repeated three times. The third Gospel is, of course, that of Luke.

So we have Rinbad (Rimbaud-Tolkien) waiting on the Armorican shore for the Gospel of Light to be sent over from Britain on lobsterback by Minbad the Norman Mailer. Lobsterback is 18th-century slang for a British soldier, so perhaps it is soldiers who travel from Britain with the Gospel. Or perhaps I should say from "Britain," in scare-quotes, as labels do not always mean what they seem. When I dream, I dream about books -- and one of the books I've dreamed about, back in 2020, was titled Britain as Another Planet. In "How can these books not exist?" I describe looking at some books inside a dome-shaped indigo building (supposedly a "convenience store") called Blue Harbor:

One of these was a "round book" -- that is, its pages were circular rather than rectangular -- and I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped. The others were ordinary books and didn't look very new. I perused the spines and noticed these three titles:

• Things Soon to Come
• Britain as Another Planet
• I Tried to Be Parents

Rereading that now, I was struck by the "round book," since a recent dream has featured Plates (sacred records) in the form of a round disc.And "I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped" -- what is that but another way of saying, "I cannot read a sealed book"?

This idea that a "round book" of plates has something to do with the "Gospel of Luke" received minor but interesting synchronistic confirmation today. I was, for complex psychological reasons, praying the Rosary while lying supine on a tile floor. On Thursdays, one prays the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light (Luke means "light"), and as I was doing the third of these five meditations (Luke is the third Gospel), a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor -- a little metal disc.

Lassie Come Home

Lassie Come Home is, symbolically, the title of the book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew. This book is also called "the book of the Lamb of God" (1 Ne. 13:38). A nod to this second designation is just visible on the edge of the page in Animalia:

I think that's a very semantically dense title, conveying multiple meanings simultaneously. First there’s the literal meaning of lassie: a girl or young woman. Second, there’s the character Lassie in the book: a sheepdog, specifically a Rough Collie, who travels a great distance to be reunited with someone she loves. Finally there’s the Elvish lassi, which even the casual Tolkien reader may recognize from the poem Namárië: It means -- quelle coïncidence! -- "leaves."

If we take Lassie as a literal lassie, any number of female figures could be intended. My immediate hunch, and I tend to trust such things, was that it has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1). Threatened by the Dragon, the Woman is given wings and flies away to "her place" (perhaps off-planet?), prepared for her by God, where she stays for three and a half years (Rev. 12:6, 14) -- and that's the last we hear of her. After the three and a half years, during which the Beast rules in her absence (Rev. 13:5), does Lassie come home? John never tells us.

Considered as a sheepdog, Lassie would be expected to come home with the sheep, bringing them back to the fold. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John 10:16). If the Shepherd is Christ, the Sheepdog would be a servant of Christ who helps him tend the sheep. The most obvious biblical candidate for this role would be Simon Peter, who in John 21 is given a special charge to "feed my sheep" and "feed my lambs." Interestingly, this same language of feeding is found in John's account of the Woman: While she is hiding in the wilderness, "they should feed her there" (Rev. 12:6) and "she is nourished" (Rev. 12:14).

Those who have been following William Wright's blog will know of his theory that Peter was the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor -- which brings us to Lassie as a collie. The etymology of that word is uncertain, but Etymonline suggests "Possibly from dialectal coaly 'coal-black,' the color of some breeds." As portrayed on the cover of the book from the Lion's mouth, Lassie appears to be golden in color, not black, so perhaps whatever about her is "coal-black" is not visible on the surface. Pharazôn was called "the Golden," and as his story has been expanded by Daymon "Doug" Smith and William Wright, he went to great lengths so to appear, dressing all in gold and even covering his face with some kind of gold makeup. However, in "It's as dark a tale as was ever told," I have read the song "Shiver My Timbers" as referring to Pharazôn:

Shiver my timbers, shiver my soul -- Yo ho, heave ho!

There are men whose hearts are as black as coal --Yo ho, heave ho!

And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue

A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew

It's as dark a tale as was ever told

Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold

Also in that post, I mention the line about "secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones" and tie that in with the Monkees song about Davy Jones waking and rising -- a song which also prominently references a "homecoming queen," i.e. a lassie come home. Pharazôn and his men ended up in a watery grave -- "Davy Jones' locker" -- and it may be their secrets that sleep there. The surname Jones means "son of John," though the h has been lost and the vowel sound has changed from a short 'o' to a long one. Everything I have just said about Jones is also true of Barjona, the original surname of Simon Peter.

Finally, we have lassi as the Elvish word for "leaves." Golden leaves as a reference to Golden Plates (and Lassie is gold on the book cover) have been a major theme in these parts recently, beginning with "Leaves of gold unnumbered" -- a post in which I quote the first two lines of the poem Namárië. Here they are in the original Quenya:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!

Ah, like gold fall the leaves in the wind! Lassi, come home!

Every tribe of Israel, we are told in 2 Nephi 29, has its own sacred records -- its own "leaves of gold" -- and when Lassie brings the scattered sheep home, the leaves will be gathered home as well:

And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. . . .

And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one (2 Ne. 29:8, 13-14).

And this brings us back to the vision or waking dream -- for I, like Davy Jones, am a daydream believer -- recounted in "Étude brute?" In the vision, I was told that a particular book was the Cherubim -- "not the book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves." What can that possibly mean?

Ezekiel portrays the Cherubim as chimerical creatures -- part man, part lion, part bull, and part eagle -- and as far back as my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," I had made the case that this imagery "very like symbolizes, by means of four representative members, both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac." See that post for all the details underlying that assertion; here I will simply take it as proven. Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.

I have more to say on this topic, but I think this is a good place to end the current post.

It's as dark a tale as was ever told

In his June 12 post "Knowing to what purpose the Dark People came West," William Wright interprets "And now my tale is done" from "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus" as referring to a "dark tale" about Ar-Pharazôn, called "the Golden," sailing with his fleet to Valinor to attack it:

"And now my Tale is Dark", is one interpretation of William's response to Claire, which is of course an interesting response given that Claire's name means, among other things, Light.  William is saying, in the dream, that his story is Dark here at the outset, and actually uses the word "now" in front of this.  Meaning now, or at this time, his story, or the story of the person he is speaking as in this dream, is Dark.  Claire responds that this is 'well said', meaning what he said is true - his Tale is Dark, or understood in that way.   But Claire also responds that she has a True Song of a Wandering Aengus, which is the Being I guess at being Pharazon.  And my guess is that Claire's True Song sheds some Light on the Tale, which will no longer be Dark after what she knows is revealed.

This made me think of the song "Shiver My Timbers" from Muppet Treasure Island:

And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue
A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew
It's as dark a tale as was ever told
Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold

Another line from the song is, "There are secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones." Besides being the sailors' devil, symbol of a watery grave (which claimed Pharazôn and his followers), Davy Jones was one of the Monkees -- yes, monkeys again -- and one of the songs he sang, "Daydream Believer," is about Davy Jones waking and rising -- presumably bringing his secrets with him. The mention of a "homecoming queen" in the chorus also ties in with Lassie Come Home.

The book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew

Nephi's vision prominently features a book that "proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew" (1 Ne. 13). Mormons almost universally understand this to be the Bible, even though that doesn't really make any sense. The Bible was written by lots of different people, some of whom were Jews (though such important authors as Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul were not), but the book Nephi saw is repeatedly described as coming out of the mouth of one Jew. It's not the Bible.

I was just thinking about this mysterious book the other day because of its possible relevance to one of the couplets in "With?"

Minbad the Mailer was a Jew

And wrote a lot of novels, too.

Norman Mailer, obviously. It's oddly worded, though, making him first and foremost a Jew, with the fact that he was a novelist mentioned only as a sort of afterthought. As soon as I started reading "With?" seriously, I suspected that Minbad was "the Jew" from Nephi's vision.

This checks out:

Thou hast beheld that the book proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew; and when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord (1 Ne. 13:22).

A "Norman mailer" could be someone sending out messages from Normandy, France. Mailer's real name was actually Nachem, meaning "comforter."

Jews are members of the Tribe of Judah, whose symbol is the Lion, just as the Bull is the symbol of the House of Joseph. In my last post, I discussed a picture of two lions in a library and focused on one of the books, The Gospel of Luke, which is symbolized by the Bull. I somehow missed the very conspicuous fact that there's another book literally proceeding forth from the mouth of a Lion!

Lassie Come Home -- that is, symbolically, the title of the Book from the Mouth of the Jew. I have a lot to say about the significance of that title, but it will have to wait until I have time. For now, I just want to get it out there with this quick post.

This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L

This past weekend, I picked up a little alphabet book called Animalia at a used bookstore for no other reason that the author's name was Graeme Base, and William Wright had recently posted "Golden Graham Plates." Two of the letters have since turned out to be significant.

"Stink Gorilla More" (June 14) linked the word Gorilla to the word Bigfoot. Then William Wright's June 16 post "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you" led me to revisit my October 2023 post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot," featuring a big green foot:

Base's image also features the Holy Grail -- not exactly first on most people's list of things that begin with G! -- and a golden griffin perched on a gong in the form of a golden disc.

In one of my dreams, Golden Plates took the form of a disc, as mentioned most recently in "Plates among the dead leaves." This disc, too, is in a room full of leaves, though not dead ones.

Then there's L:

It's a library with two lions in it. Among the books in it are Lassie Come Home, Limericks by Edward Lear, The Leopard [...], King Lear, Little Boy Lost by L. L. Lucky, Lover's L[...], Lacrosse, Let's Learn Latin, Life of Luxembourg, Leonardo, Love's Labour's Lost, Levitation, Doctor Livingstone, Living Legends, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and books by Longfellow and John Locke -- but the one that really got my attention was The Gospel of Luke:

Two large golden animals in a room full of books syncs with the waking dream I relate in "Étude brute?" in which there were two large golden "Bulls of Heaven," one of which went with me into a cavern full of books and told me that one of the books "is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."

In trying to make sense of that cryptic statement, I thought first of the Four Gospels. In Ezekiel, the Cherubim are represented as having four faces: those of an ox, a man, a lion, and an eagle -- but in one place (Ezek. 10:14) these are given as the faces of a cherub, a man, a lion, and an eagle, implying that the Cherubim are primarily bovine in nature. I would naturally have assumed that the two heavenly Bulls I saw were themselves the Cherubim had one of them not said what it did about the book. A very old Christian tradition associates each of the Gospels with one of the component creatures of the Cherubim -- and the ox or bull is almost invariably mapped to the Gospel of Luke. In the illustration below, from the (French) St. Riquier Gospels, a heavenly Bull holds a banner with the opening words of Luke: "Quoniam quidem multi conati sunt" -- "For indeed many have tried."

Before I entered the library in my vision, the two Bulls had been standing on either side of a Nativity scene -- and the classic Nativity scene with the manger and all that also comes from the Gospel of Luke.

Another interpretive angle is to note that there were two golden Cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant -- above the Ark but also part of it. In William Wright's June 11 post "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," he proposes that the Brass Plates are currently in France and compares the Plates themselves to an "Ark," specifically mentioning the Ark of the Covenant. Now look back up at that picture of the golden griffin perched on the golden gong. As I have mentioned in many posts, the word griffin may be related to the word Cherubim. A disc of light-colored metal (possibly gold or brass) has appeared in my dream as a "Plate" with engravings on it. If the Brass Plates are, symbolically, the Ark of the Covenant, then they are, or include, the Cherubim as well.

How does the Gospel of Luke fit in? Perhaps the significance is in the name itself: Luke means "light." In his post, William emphasizes a quote from the Book of Mormon about how the Brass Plates must "retain their brightness" -- a Bright Gospel, a Gospel of Light.

In William's post, he refers to the engravings on the Plates as "Marks," capitalized. The Graeme Base picture shows two lions in a library -- and, yes, the Evangelist whose symbol is the lion is Mark.

In "Plates among the dead leaves," I record -- in a somewhat joking tone which William found "douchey" -- the hunch that if the Brass Plates are indeed in France, they may be behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse. As discussed at great length in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," this church contains an engraving of a beardless Christ surrounded by the four Cherubic creatures, which I believe may have played an important role in the development of the Tarot de Marseille. This Christ holds a book in which is written "Pax Vobis," and he bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.

The supper at Emmaus, and Christ's saying "Pax Vobis," both occur in the final chapter of, you guessed it, the Gospel of Luke.

Whinbad and Pinbad

So, my latest pastime is reading nonsense verse that I myself wrote and analyzing it for hidden meanings.

So far, we know that Ninbad the Nailer is Trent Reznor, Hinbad the Hailer is Elijah, and Rinbad the Railer is both Arthur Rimbaud and J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien was born just 54 days after Rimbaud died, leaving open the weird but interesting possibility of a literal reincarnation. Speaking of Tolkien's possible past lives, William Wright believes one of them was Elijah, so perhaps Hinbad and Rinbad are the same dude.

Whinbad and Pinbad, I have just decided, are also the same dude.

Whinbad the Whaler was delish

And not unlike Filet-O-Fish.

This is pretty obviously just a throwaway joke. While everyone else in the poem is a person, Whinbad turns out to be a fish sandwich formerly sold by Burger King. Can't be much hidden meaning in that, right?

O ye of little faith!

Leaving fish sandwiches to one side, who's the most famous whaler of all time? I think we can all agree that Captain Ahab has no rivals in that department, right? Captain Ahab was named after a king, and a king who was delicious -- or at least his blood was, to dogs -- as is explicitly pointed out in Moby-Dick.

". . . Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"

"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?"

Not just a king but a crowned king. Burger King, of course, emphasizes crowns in their branding and gives customers paper crowns to wear.

And what's Filet-O-Fish, besides a sandwich? Well, if delish is short for delicious, o-fish can be short for official. One of the meanings of fillet is a headband or circlet. A circlet as a mark of office is what is commonly known as a crown -- which brings us to Whinbad's alter ego, Pinbad:

Pinbad the Pailer was the bloke

Who had a crown, but then it broke.

This was intended as an allusion to a well-known nursery rhyme:

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

Pinbad is Jack. In Australia, Burger King is known as Hungry Jack's, so Pinbad is the same as Whinbad the Whaler with his fillet of office -- i.e., King Ahab. Jill, then is pretty clearly a contraction of Jezebel, Ahab's queen. Shortly after the death of Ahab, "Jill came tumbling after," being thrown to her death from a window by her servants. The pail of water on the hilltop is a pretty clear reference to the best known event from the reign of Ahab and Jezebel: the showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal at the top of Mt. Carmel, with Elijah famously dousing his sacrifice with barrels of water before calling down fire from heaven to ignite it. Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water -- as if to duplicate Elijah's miracle -- means they did not accept Elijah's victory, and the failure of the prophets of Baal, as final but still thought they could best him.

This is such an obvious "esoteric" reading of this nursery rhyme that I can hardly believe Aleister Crowley didn't beat me to it. Of course he didn't have Whinbad the Whaler to jump-start the train of associations.

Étude brute?

I’m going to have to up my game as a punster if I’m going to keep up with Claire. This one is hers, received while I was in my study this afternoon (June 17) praying the third decade of the Rosary and contemplating the Nativity.

It means “raw study?” in French but is clearly punning on “Et tu, Brute?” — spoken on the Ides of March by the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This ties in with a few things William Wright has written recently. In “‘Naming’ Joan (and ‘Beware this one!)’” he writes of a being (presumably Claire) saying, “Beware this one!” and, “When I dream, I dream of books.” He thinks these were both references to me: the first because it suggests the Shakespeare line “Beware the Ides of March!” (my birthday), and the second because he thinks of me as someone who reads a lot of books. “Étude brute?” alludes to the same date in the same Shakespeare play, and “study” relates to the idea of reading a lot of books.

In “Grand-Rivière, France: Why not?” William writes of how one of my references to “my study” gave him the idea of the Brass Plates being in a “Study” — meaning a cave full of books — in France. Today I received the French word for “study” while in the very room that had given William that idea.

It is also significant that the words were received while I was doing a Rosary meditation on the Nativity. (I typically pray in my chapel, not my study, but today was an exception.) The last time I did that particular meditation, Saturday, June 15 — also in my study — I had a brief vision which I wasn’t going to write about, but I think now I should.

As the vision opened, I was in a large egg-shaped cavern with no visible exits, and I understood that at the center were the Holy Family, including the newborn Jesus. They were shining so brightly that I could not look at them directly, but I knew they were there. They were attended not by the humble ox and ass of the familiar Nativity scene but by two gigantic otherworldly animals I thought of as “Bulls of Heaven” — something like an aurochs, but golden and with very large, intelligent eyes, and possibly with some sort of feathers or very large scales.

These Bulls conveyed to me telepathically that I was being given permission to walk through the back wall of the cavern. I did so, passing right through the wall as if I were a ghost, and found myself in another cavern, even larger, which was full of books. One of the Bulls was still with me and conveyed a telepathic message about one of the books: “This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves.” Before I could get any clarification of that confusing statement, the vision dissolved.

Being led into a “study,” and introduced to one of its books, by silent bulls is extremely strange. Besides “raw,” another meaning of brute is “an animal without the power of speech.”

All of this is so far over my head that I don’t even know what to say about it. For now I simply report it.

Up against the wall

This post is going to be all over the map. What can I say, sync is inherently nonlinear.

Yesterday I was in the mood for a harder sound after a few days of listening to Emily Linge and Simon & Garfunkel, so I listened to Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails, "My Blood" by Twenty One Pilots, and instrumentals from an electronic group called 3OH!3. People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like:

"Head Like a Hole" made me think of William Wright's February 20 post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," which includes this doodle:

Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN, made me think of NINbad the Nailer, whose career is summarized as follows in "With":

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood
And did the only thing he could.

This is of course an allusion to Martin Luther, famous for nailing his 95 Theses to the church door and for saying "Here I stand; I can do no other" -- preferring to risk being burned as a heretic rather than recant. Say what you will about his theology, Luther was a badass, and I respect him. A lot of the "Head Like a Hole" lyrics actually fit him: Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

And, what do you know, it turns out that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was raised Lutheran. You can't escape your roots.

I wasn't familiar with the Twenty One Pilots song, but looking up the lyrics, I see that they have certain Lutheran resonances as well:

Surrounded and
Up against a wall
I'll shred them all
And go with you
When choices end
You must defend
I'll grab my bat
And go with you

"When choices end / You must defend" -- "Here I stand; I can do no other." The line "Up against a wall" is something the two songs have in common:

God money, I'll do anything for you
God money, just tell me what you want me to
God money, nail me up against the wall
God money don't want everything, he wants it all

"Up against the wall" has an additional meaning in the synchronistic context of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (see "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window"). When dry leaves are blown against a wall, they go up:

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

"Humpty Dumpty revisited" associates Humpty's "great fall" with falling autumn leaves. "To the top of the wall" suggests putting Humpty in his place again, and dry leaves that "mount to the sky" seem to be reversing the fall. This imagery made me think of the Moody Blues line "Like the rain rising from the sea." I'd forgotten that the song it's from also includes the repeated line "I've reached the top of my wall."

Since we've already brought so many of my childhood writings into this, why not throw in another. This was a "spellcheck poem," created by typing song lyrics into a word processor backwards, running spellcheck, and then adjusting the resulting word salad a bit to make it grammatical:

You shall forever think
yet thought's era of rhetoric is dead.
The nets of reason, the webs of speech are many,
and yet we think beyond the choking net.
Are we wise?
A falling leaf, a dying man:
Both sink against the wind, I say.

The idea of a falling leaf sinking "against the wind" ties right in with the St. Nicholas poem, where the wind blows the fallen leaves up into the sky.

Speaking of the St. Nicholas poem, it says of St. Nick that "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot" and "the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Yet "His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! . . . a right jolly old elf." And of course, he goes up and down chimneys.

When I was writing "I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis," I ran a web search for chim chim. Most of the hits were not for the Speed Racer character but for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," the song sung by the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke) in Mary Poppins. The sweep sings:

Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke

Coming back to falling leaves for a moment, the Chim-Chim post quoted one of my brother's stories with an "intermission." Looking through my copies of old stories, I found only one other with such an intermission. Here it is:

"Well, the sheath was named after the sword."

"And the sword?" asked Pron.

"The sword was named after the

INTERMISSION: The Autumn Leaf

With it's Red and golden fire
Comes the leaf swirling swooping on the breeze
Down in between the barren trees
With a dive all glory flies
And the leaf lays crumpled on the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

sheath."

"That's sort of weird," said Pron.

William Wright recently posted "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you," the title coming from a T-shirt he got for Father's Day. I commented "Fact check: true" and liked to my post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot." That post begins with a reference to an older post, "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex" and goes on to describe a similar experience, only with Bigfoot rather than a mini T. rex.

I've been reading through the Book of Mormon a few chapters a day. Today I just happened to read 3 Nephi 10-14. Included there is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount, nearly word for word, including this bit:

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (3 Ne. 13:24).

God? Money? Bow down before the one you serve. Then, in the next chapter:

Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened (3 Ne. 14:7-8).

No conditions are attached to this promise. He doesn't say, "Unless you ask for something stupid, like Bigfoot or a mini T. rex."

I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis

That's an anagram of my full name, created by one of my fellow missionaries in 1998 or 1999. He explained that Chim-Chim is the name of a chimpanzee character in Speed Racer (which I knew nothing about) and that "an Elvis" must refer to someone of that name other than the King himself -- perhaps Elvis Costello or figure skater Elvis Stojko. It occurs to me now, though, that there is a kind of sandwich called an Elvis -- peanut butter, banana, and bacon, a favorite of Presley's -- and that that reading makes much more sense. Apparently the character Chim-Chim is known for his appetite and his sweet tooth, much like Elvis himself, and of course a banana sandwich is exactly what you would expect a cartoon chimp to eat.

Peanut butter and banana sandwiches (without bacon) were one of my own favorites as a child, part of my Banana Man persona. My other nickname from that time, besides Banana Man, was in fact Elvis, because of my hairstyle. (I insisted, despite my father's objections, on growing out the hair in front of my ears to look like sideburns.) At that time I knew essentially nothing about Elvis except that he was apparently a singer who had sideburns, and I certainly didn't know that Elvis and Banana Man had such similar taste in sandwiches. The weird thing is that the guy who created the anagram knew none of this about me. He was just trying to come up with something tolerably grammatical that used all the letters in my hard-to-anagram name, and he ended up hitting on something related to monkeys, bananas, and Elvis.

If you look at my photo in the sidebar, you might even detect a hint of incipient "jowliness," I suppose. Jowls are drooping cheeks, so what a "jowly" chimp makes me think of is Cheekey the Monkey. This is character from a Mormon parenting book my mom had when I was tiny. At first I couldn't find any trace of him online because I'd been searching for Cheeky without the extra e. (My exposure to the story was well before I had learned to read.) After racking my brain a bit, though, I came up with the title of the book -- Teaching Children Joy (1980) by Linda and Richard Eyre -- and was able to find it online.

Cheekey was a baby monkey. He lived with his sister and his mother and father in a tree. Their tree was in the jungle. In the jungle were some laws. They were called Jungle Laws. Do you know what laws are? (Things that you must do right or else you get punishment.)

Do you know what punishment is? (Something sad that happens when you break a law.)

There were two laws in Cheekey's jungle. One was that whenever you were in a tree, you had to hold on with your hand, or your foot, or your tail. What do you think the punishment was if you broke the law? (You would fall!)

The other jungle law was that if you saw a lion coming, you had to quickly climb up a tree. What do you think the punishment was if you broke that law? (You would get eaten up!)

In Cheekey's own family tree, there were two family laws. One law was that you couldn't go out of the tree without asking. Why do you think they had that law? (So Cheekey wouldn't get lost.)

Why didn't his mother and father want him to get lost? (Because they loved him.)

What do you think the punishment was if Cheekey went out of his tree without asking? (His mother gave him a little swat with her tail right on his bottom.)

Why did his mother do that? (So he wouldn't go out of the tree again.)

Why didn't she want him to do it again? (Because she loved him and didn't want him to get lost.)

The other monkey family law was to never drop your banana peels on limbs of the family tree. Why do you think they had that law? (So no one would slip on them and fall out of the tree.)

Why did the monkey family decide to have a law like that? (Because they loved each other and didn't want anyone in their family to get hurt.)

The story follows Cheekey through his day as he makes various choices, and in each case the children have to say whether there's a law to tell him what to do or whether he's free to do what he likes. I heard the story many times from an extremely young age, and even now I have vivid memories of my mental images of Cheekey climbing a tree to get away from a lion, choosing whether to wear his red hat or his green one, and so on. Not sure what specific relevance it has, but I suppose the sync fairies never bring anything up without a reason.

Coming back to "an Elvis," what's the plural of Elvis? This question comes up sometimes when people have occasion to refer to "parachuting Elvises" and such, and common incorrect suggestions include Elvi and Elvii (which are properly the plurals of Elvus and Elvius, respectively.) By analogy with other singular nouns ending in -is, the correct plural would be Elves -- spelled, though not pronounced, exactly the same as the plural of elf. "An Elvis" is one of the Elves.

This idea of eating an elf made me think of a story one of my brothers wrote as a child. These stories were written to be read aloud at our local literary club, and one of the things my brother liked to do (we were pretty avant-garde for little kids) was include "intermissions" -- where the story would be unexpectedly interrupted by a short poem and then resume where it had left off. In one of these stories, a character says, "It has eaten green moss," and then there's an intermission. After the intermission, the story continues with "the elf" -- revealing that the intermission had come in the middle of a sentence, and that what had been eaten was not green moss but rather an elf named Green Moss.

I still have copies of lots of these old stories, so I looked it up. Here's how it begins:

One upon a time there lived a gnome named Fuloo. Fuloo lived by himself in the Buck Horn Forest.

One night Fuloo was sitting by his fire, making rope, when suddenly he heard what sounded like 900 deer stampeding through the forest. Fuloo poked his head out of his hole to see what was scaring the deer like that. . . . A gigantic griffin was soaring through the forest, gulping down deer left and right.

The grffin thing is totally plagiarized from a very similar scene in The Tinleys, The guy sitting by the fire making rope is also ripped off, from one of my other brother's yarns. But don't worry, it's about to get a lot more original. Here's Fuloo's friend Will summarizing the damage done by the griffin -- interrupted by an intermission -- after which a rather singular character makes his appearance:

"Well," said Will, "it has eaten Green Moss

INTERMISSION: The Snowflake

Small and light, beautiful white is the snowflake falling down. Whirling, twirling on the breeze, it keeps on twirling round and round and then it softly comes falling to the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

the elf, Romut the gnome, 463 deer, and 47 wolves."

"Wow," said Fuloo. "It must have been hungry."

"Yep," said Will, "it certainly wh--"

Suddenly they were interrupted by Soto the monkey-elf. "What is a monkey-elf?" you're probably asking right now, so I'll tell you: It is a half-monkey, half-elf creature, and unfortunately they didn't get much of the human intelligence, so they were mostly messengers, and this one was doing that, and it had carefully dropped a message right into Will's mouth.

A monkey-elf! I'd forgotten about that, but what led me to look this old story up was the idea of a chimp eating an elf. Recent posts here have featured apes as stars and apes as angels. In Tolkien, Elves are Eldar, literally "Star-folk." The story says that monkey-elves were "mostly messengers" -- which is the literal meaning of the word angel.

Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window

In my last post, "Every man and every woman is an ape," I used a line from "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- "when what to my wondering eyes should appear" -- for no particular reason. It just popped into my head as I was writing. In "Stars in Animal Skins," William Wright points out that in the poem, this line comes just after the narrator goes to the window:

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,

Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,

When what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,

William thought this might have been intentional on my part, a reference to recent "go to the window" syncs, but it wasn't.  So that's yet another "go to the window" sync! As I read this excerpt, my thought was that it was also a Cherubim reference. The Hebrew cherub is believed to derive from the Akkadian karibu, which I assume would be a near-homophone of caribou, another name for the reindeer.

Looking up the poem now, I find that other parts of it are also synchronistically interesting:

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up to the housetop the coursers they flew

With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

"To the top of the wall" ties in with the Humpty Dumpty theme. Dry leaves blowing away in the wind appear in my June 13 post "Plates among the dead leaves."

My most recent "go to the window" reference was "Go to the window; it's dark but clear," which refers to Lowdham going to the window in The Notion Club Papers. In his post, William mentions that this is only the first time Lowdham goes to the window, and that "the second time he will begin to re-enact events surrounding the Fall of Numenor." I didn't know that because this is my first time reading The Notion Club Papers.

Today I read a few chapters in 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon. This verse in particular stood out to me:

And there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land (3 Ne. 8:22).

I took special notice of this because the language reminded me of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus." The poem mentions stars disappearing -- "moth-like stars were flickering out" -- and the appearance of a "glimmering girl." It ends with "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun." Thus I noticed the word glimmer -- which appears nowhere else in the scriptures -- juxtaposed with the sun, the moon, and disappearing stars.

After reading that, I turned to The Notion Club Papers and soon came to Lowdham's second time going to the window. Guess what word Tolkien just happens to throw in at that moment?

He strode to the window and flung it open.

The early summer night was still and glimmering, warmer than usual for the time of year.

Then several other club members join Lowdham at the window, where they see great mists of darkness causing the stars to disappear:

We were all startled. Several of us went to the window and stood behind Lowdham, looking out. A great cloud, coming up slowly out of the West, was eating up the stars. As it approached it opened two vast sable wings, spreading north and south.

After that, I checked the blog of Bruce Charlton -- who has made The Notion Club Papers an object of special study -- and found that his latest post quotes a Rupert Brooke poem that mentions the night before Christmas:

And things are done you’d not believe 

At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

Every man and every woman is an ape

My June 14 post "Stink Gorilla More" explored the idea that apes represent ourselves, human beings, as seen by beings more heavenly. In a comment there, William Wright referred to human beings at worship as "Gorilla-men (Beings clothed in coats of Gorilla-skins) asking to be heard and enter into God's presence."

In Chinese, the term for a great ape is xīng-xīng (猩猩), with the x being roughly similar to our "sh" in pronunciation. A chimp is a "black xīng-xīng," a gorilla is a "big xīng-xīng," and an orangutan is a "red fur xīng-xīng." The word for "star" is xīng-xīng (星星), which is pronounced exactly the same. One of the terms for "planet" is xīng-qiú (星球), literally "star-globe." When the titles of the various Planet of the Apes movies were translated into Chinese, the translator went straight for the low-hanging pun-fruit and swapped out the "star" character for the "ape" one: 猩球 -- literally "ape-ball," but pronounced exactly the same as the word for "planet." Concise.

Thus it was that as I was thinking about this idea that all humans are "apes" from the point of view of higher beings, my mind jumped to one of Aleister Crowley's most famous lines, one of the very first sentences in The Book of the Law:

There are various options for the translator here, but the one I thought of -- and one of which I'm sure the old Beast would have heartily approved (one of his groupies went by the handle "Ape of Thoth") -- is 每一名男女都是星星。 -- "Every man and every woman is a star," but sounding exactly the same as "Every man and every woman is an ape."

This is very much in the spirit of "Stink Gorilla More," where I quoted Disraeli's question -- "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- followed by a Harambe meme implying that one could be both simultaneously.

Despite the impression a casual reader might get, I am very much not a fan of Crowley and own none of his books. To get the image above, I had to look up The Book of the Law on archive.org. The thing is, whenever I try to go to that site, autocomplete always guesses that want I really want is archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, a randomly selected thread from /x/ -- and for sync's sake, I usually go ahead and press enter before bringing up archive.org in a new window. The random /x/ thread it served up when I was trying to find the Crowley book was this one, soliciting comments on a schizo meme about symbolism. Since some of the "galaxy brain" level symbols -- deer, rainbow, bee, sunflower -- seemed potentially relevant, I scrolled down a bit until what to my wondering eyes should appear but this:

To be clear, I had typed everything before the Crowley screenshot -- including the little digression on what Planet of the Apes is called in Chinese -- before getting the random /x/ thread that randomly included the cover of a Planet of the Apes novel.