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.