The White Saint Valentine, pi, 11, and the bees of Thérèse

After the "Wreck of the Titan" sync in Whitley Strieber's interview with Rob and Trish MacGregor, I downloaded and started reading one of several book the MacGregors have written on synchronicity, 2010's The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, part of the sync awakening of 2009-2010.

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading the MacGregors' book in a café and got to the part where they talk about syncs involving seeing the same number again and again. They mentioned that 11, 11:11, 111, and other numbers of that type are a particularly prevalent theme for this sort of "cluster sync." The moment I read that, I noticed that the time was 3:14, and I had a very strong impression that that number, 314, was about to become a focus of synchronicity for me that day.

My first thought regarding 314 was the date March 14, which is the day before my birthday ("Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?") and is observed in Taiwan as "White Valentine's Day." I recast this in my mind as "the Feast of the White Saint Valentine" and began imagining what a saint of that description would have looked like. The common or garden St. Valentine was himself a White man, so someone distinguished from him as the White Saint Valentine must have been an even whiter shade of pale.

A football game was playing on the TV in the café, and the score was Steelers 3, Browns 7. Would the Browns score another 7 points, bringing the score to 3-14? I watched the game for a while, until the Steelers scored again and made the anticipated number impossible, though 3-14 did appear on the field a couple of times when the Steelers players with those respective jersey numbers happened to be next to each other. It began to snow heavily on the football field, reinforcing the "white" theme.

I left the café and walked a few blocks to a used bookstore. On my way, I passed this scooter parked on the sidewalk:

The above photo was taken at 3:30, just 16 minutes after my strong hunch that I'd start seeing 314 syncs. The numerals are written in white, too. Four minutes later, I passed a drugstore with this banner hung out in front of it:

Lots of repetitions of the numeral 1, just as I had been reading about when I had the 314 hunch. It's a promotion for November 11, which retailers have been trying to establish as Singles' Day, when you're supposed to buy gifts for yourself. It's illustrated with a whiter-than-White person, just like our imaginary saint.

As I continued walking, a poem randomly popped into my head: Saint Thérèse's bee poem, which I had translated into English back in May. I recited it in my mind as I walked:

See the little insect which is

Gathering its daily riches

In the morning hour.

Joyful, it the petals waketh,

Enters and the honey taketh,

Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,

Taking love in place of nectar,

All that thou canst hold.

Gather thou of all that pleases,

Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,

Little bee of gold!

At the bookstore, two books caught my eye. One was a book about Lenormand cartomancy, which I flipped through a bit. I noticed that in the Lenormand system, the Six of Hearts represents Stars. This made me think of the Rider-Waite Six of Cups (Cups being the Italian equivalent of the Anglo-French suit of Hearts), which features white star-shaped flowers. About a week ago, I had done a read for the next two months, which had indicated that the Six of Cups was a sign I should be on the lookout for.

This mental image of the Six of Cups, with the children gathering love and joy from flowers, like Thérèse's little golden bee, seemed to harmonize with the poem I had just been reciting to myself.

The other book that caught my eye was a novel by Lidia Yuknavitch called The Book of Joan, which looked to be a sci-fi reworking of the story of Joan of Arc. Joan always gets my attention, of course, and this was another link to the poem by Thérèse, who had a special devotion to Joan and wrote and starred in a play about her. (According to the Internet, the photos of Thérèse playing Joan are “the only known photographs of a canonized saint cosplaying as another saint.”)

I picked up The Book of Joan and, by chance, opened up to page 11. The first words on the page were, "See? This is pi." Pi, of course, is 3.14 -- the number that had attracted my attention as I was reading about syncs involving the number 11.

Recall that my first association with 314 had not been pi but rather the idea of a White Saint Valentine, who must have been whiter even than an ordinary White person. Now look what else is on that page, the page that begins with pi and ends with 11:

What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.

I'm not sure if the narrator is the "Joan" character or not, but if so we even have a whiter-than-White saint.

When I got home, I had a random craving for ice water with honey in it, which is not at all the sort of thing I normally drink. When I found the honey in a kitchen cabinet, the illustration on the bottle really caught my eye:

The flowers are white and shaped like five-pointed stars, exactly like those on the Six of Cups. There are three open flowers and three buds, for a total of six -- again the same number as on the Six of Cups. The position of the two bees mirrors that of the two children on the card. The honey label has a black triangle with a red circle at its base, while on the card the boy's red hood is right under the triangle-shaped roof of a building. I had already connected the Six of Cups with Thérèse's poem about a bee, and now here was a picture of actual bees closely paralleling the Six of Cups.

To top it all off, as I was writing this post I decided to look up Saint Valentine himself. He is, among other things, the patron of beekeepers.

Wreck of the Titan

I did a quick skim of the /x/ catalog but didn't click on anything. I did notice that one of the images had the word TITAN in big letters but didn't really process it beyond that.

Less than half an hour later, I was doing some fairly mindless work and wanted to listen to something in the background, so I checked YouTube. The algorithm suggested a month-old video from Whitley Strieber called "Mind Blowing Synchronicities," so I thought why not.

One of Whitley's guests, Trish MacGregor, tells the story of how she wrote a novel that ended up foreshadowing Hurricane Andrew. Starting at  around the 16:43 mark, Whitley comments:

Well, you know, this is certainly not the only book that's done that. Of course the famous, famous one is Wreck of the Titan, published 1898, which is about the sinking -- there's no other way to put it -- it's about the sinking of the Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic took place in 1912, fourteen years later.

That Titan reference sent me back to the /x/ catalog to try to track down that image I had seen.

Sure enough, it's the cover of The Wreck of the Titan, the same book mentioned by Whitley.

Sabbatical notice

I'm taking a break from blogging for a bit, exact timetable undetermined. In the meantime, feel free to contact me by email.

Who has teeth?

Last night, I ran across this very odd post on /x/:

The post asks, in verse, whether God has teeth, and the accompanying image is a photo of a child's skull with two rows of teeth.

In my October 7 post "The Book of Tooth," I discussed Dr. Seuss's The Tooth Book, which is also written in rhyming verse and begins with the question "Who has teeth?" That post also discusses a "skeleton with two rows of teeth," which biologists theorized was "an adolescent who had not yet lost their first set of baby teeth." The same post mentions that a crescent moon can be called a "tooth moon" in Chinese.

This morning I saw someone on the street with a T-shirt that had a big picture of the moon (a full moon) with the caption "Twenty-Twoth Century" -- which would be pronounced the same as "Twenty-Tooth Century." Adults have 32 teeth, but children have 20, so "twenty-tooth" suggests the idea of baby teeth, and it is juxtaposed with the moon.

I gotta admit

I haven't been invested in this election cycle at all, certainly nothing at all like 2020. This time around, I've maintained a curmudgeonly detachment, and so, for the most part, have the sync fairies. Still, I've got to admit, despite everything . . .

Feels good, man.

Maybe part of it is being belatedly vindicated for what I wrote in 2021:

My absolute confidence in this has recently been confirmed yet again in as unambiguous a manner as I could have asked for. Yes, I know no one else believes that. Yes, I know it seems utterly impossible at this point. Nevertheless, it is true. Persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but Donald J. Trump will serve his second term.

You don't see it? Well, why should that surprise you? You're not supposed to see the future.

Still, I caution everyone not to get their hopes up and not to give in to cheap this-worldly optimism. Remember the first rule of politics: They never keep their promises.

Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul

In a major breakthrough (only parts of which I can take credit for), my Book of Mormon blog lays out the case that many of the seemingly anachronistic quotations in the Book of Mormon actually come from Zenos, who was also quoted by various biblical writers. I went into this thinking that was a lame ad hoc explanation, but the evidence turns out to be remarkably strong, and I am now 100% convinced.

Black + falcon again

As I was having lunch today, I saw on TV a shot of NBA jock Hyland D. Jordan Jr. (who plays for that Colorado gold-lump club, has a six on his uniform, and is Black) with a falcon sitting on his wrist. Just noting it.

If you want to add your bit to this post, you know our regulations.

Aulë and Abraham

I've been reading The Silmarillion, for the first time since childhood, and definitely for the first time since encountering the idea -- promoted by Bill and Leo, who both got it from Daymon Smith -- that much of Tolkien's Legendarium is literally true and complements the Book of Mormon.

In The Silmarillion, Elves and Man are the Children of Ilúvatar (God, the Primary Creator), while the Dwarves are the creation of a lesser god called Aulë. Reading the description of Aulë -- a smith-god who bears a hammer and whose consort is (like Venus before her assimilation to Aphrodite) a goddess of vegetation -- one automatically thinks, "Okay, this is Tolkien's name for Vulcan." Bill and Leo, however, identify him with a very different figure: Abraham.

I'm starting to come over to this view myself.

According to The Silmarillion, Aulë, unwilling to wait for Ilúvatar to create the Children (Elves and Men), secretly creates the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, is pleased with them, and begins to instruct them in speech. However, Ilúvatar, who sees even what is done in secret, reprimands him:

And the voice of Ilúvatar said to him: 'Why hast thou done this? Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority? For thous hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle. Is that thy desire?'

Then Aulë answered: 'I did not desire such lordship. I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them . . . . But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever? As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt. But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?'

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept. But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aule: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices? Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.' Then Aulë cast down his hammer and was glad, and he gave thanks to Ilúvatar, saying: 'May Eru bless my work and amend it!'

So Aulë created the Dwarves, but it was Eru Ilúvatar who truly gave them life as independent Beings. Later we learn that it was from stone that the Dwarves were fashioned:

Aforetime it was held among the Elves in Middle-Earth that dying the Dwarves returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made; yet that is not their own belief.

This story clearly parallels that of the Binding of Isaac. Like Abraham, Aulë is willing to murder his own "offspring" as an offering to God because he believes that is what God wants. In both stories, God accepts the offering in the spirit in which it is made but prevents the murder.

The biblical story has Abraham raising a knife to kill a single boy bound to an altar, but Tolkien's imagery -- of Aulë raising his hammer to smite multiple people made of stone -- is also very Abrahamic:

The two paintings above depict a traditional story about Abraham which didn't make it into the Bible but appears, among other places, in the Quran and in the midrash Genesis Rabbah. In the story, Abraham smashes the idols worshiped by his father, Terah, as a way of proving that they are not true gods. In the Quranic version of the story, Abraham emphasizes the stone idols' inability to speak as proof that they are not alive and deserve no respect. This corresponds nicely with the reason given in The Silmarillion for not smashing the stone people: "Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices?"

Also fitting curiously well into the Aulë story is a strange statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke:

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham (Matt. 3:9, Luke 3:8).

How is God able to do that? Even an omnipotent Supergod would not be able to paint a genuine Rembrandt, for the simple reason that, by definition, only Rembrandt can do that. In the same way, even if God could turn stones into children, they wouldn't be Abraham's children unless they were produced by Abraham. If you replace Abraham with Aulë, though, this "hard saying" becomes intelligible. The Dwarves were Aulë's children, created by him from stones, but it was God who "raised them up" to the status of true children.

Isaiah, too, uses the imagery of Abraham's children being made from stone:

Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him (Isa. 51:1-2).

One more curious link between the Abraham and Aulë stories. Recall that the clearest parallel with Aulë is the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of one of his sons (Isaac or Ishmael, depending on which holy book you read), corresponding to Aulë's near sacrifice of Durin and the other Fathers of the Dwarves. The Abraham episode is set in a place with a very interesting name:

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of (Gen. 22:2).

This is virtually identical to the Tolkien place-name Moria, also known as Khazad-dûm. This is the greatest city of the Dwarves, supposed to have been founded by Durin himself. The identity of the biblical Moriah is unknown. The Jews later identified it with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans thought it was their holy mountain, Gerizim, and the Muslims place it in Mecca. These theories are so obviously motivated that it is hard to give them any historical credence. Moriah could have been anywhere.

What is to be made of the parallels discussed in this post? The “sane” explanation, of course, is that Tolkien, as a Christian, drew inspiration from the Bible and, as a highly educated man, was likely aware of some of the apocryphal stories about Abraham as well.

The less sane, but more interesting, theory is that Tolkien acquired by direct inspiration a true (but likely somewhat garbled) account of real events in the distant past, and that a differently-garbled version of these same events has come down to us in the various traditions about Abraham.