Stichomancy and the Venn diagram, Communion and ex-communion, Tycho, Charles Wallace, sci-fi Joan, and Conan

This morning I was reflecting on the fact that I am currently associated with two largely distinct circles of bloggers: the Romantic Christian group (including Bruce Charlton, Francis Berger, William Wildblood, and Kevin McCall) and what I think of for lack of a better term as the Dougosphere (including William Wright, Leo, and WanderingGondola) -- and that I foresaw this development immediately before it began taking shape.

On the evening of July 23, 2022 -- when I as yet knew none of the members of the latter circle -- I wrote this in my personal notes on a Tarot reading, unpublished at the time:

My impression was that there’s some other group of associates I need to open myself up to, without leaving the Romantic Christian circle behind. The mental image that accompanied this thought was the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram (forming the vesica piscis where Christ sits enthroned in the Maiestas Domini icon), and I associated this with the strange object in the sky of the Eight of Cups (a combined crescent moon and full moon?).

Hours later, at approximately 4:00 a.m. on July 24, WanderingGondola sent me her first email. I would discover Bill about a year later and then Leo through Bill.

The note quoted above had to do with the one-card Tarot reading reported in my post "Break on through to the other side." I revisited that post this morning. At the time, I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, and I posted a sync related to that. I had read this in Clelland:

I've listened to a lot of people tell their owl experiences, and even though these are just stories of people seeing a bird, they almost always get described as a blessing, an honor, a gift, or an outright spiritual event.

Hours after reading that, with its reference to "a lot of people" considering owl sightings "an honor," I ran across this multiple-choice question in an English textbook:

Many people would consider it a(n) ______ to meet and shake hands with the president of their country.

There were four words to choose from to fill in the blank. The correct answer was honor. One of the other options was owl.

It was immediately after writing about that owl-honor sync that I drew the Eight of Cups, leading to my Venn diagram image and the sense that I was going to become a member of two different "groups of associates." I didn't make the connection until today, but in my note on the Tarot reading, I link the central section of a Venn diagram with Maiestas Domini iconography. Another common term for this type of image is Christ in Glory, and glory is a near-synonym of honor. The source of the image -- Christ enthroned in a mandorla, surrounded by the Four Living Creatures -- is Revelation 4, where the Living Creatures are called "beasts," and we are told that "those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne" (Rev. 4:9).

I was thinking about why I ended up in the center of the Romantic/Dougosphere Venn diagram and what my role in that position might be. Since I've been getting impressive results these days from stichomancy (divination by randomly selected Bible verses), I decided to give it a try. Asking about my role in the center of the Venn diagram, I got this answer:

Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish (Psalm 49:20).

In the context of the Christ in Glory image, which I had just been thinking about before getting that verse, "in honour" refers to Christ's position in the center of the mandorla, which is shaped like the central part of a Venn diagram. He is surrounded by four "beasts" (the term used in the scriptural source of the image, even though one of them is a man) which are outside of the mandorla. If the two arcs of the mandorla were extended into full circles, forming a complete Venn diagram, two of the beasts would be in the leftmost section and the other two in the rightmost, with Christ (or, in the Tarot adaptation of the image, a dancing woman) in the center.

So I understood the stichomantic answer to mean that my role in the center of the Venn diagram has no point if I don't understand it. Without understanding, I might as well be in only one of the circles, like the four beasts in the icon.

I asked the obvious follow-up question -- "How can I understand, then?" -- and got another truly-random Bible verse:

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee (Job 12:7).

One obvious interpretation is that I can understand my role in the center of the Venn diagram by asking and learning from members of both circles, whose position in the diagram corresponds to that of the four beasts. (One of these beasts is an eagle, a "fowl of the air.") Not exactly earth-shattering advice, but I continue to be amazed at how apropos these stichomantic verses keep happening to be.

Some hours after the stichomantic reading, I checked Bill Wright's blog. One of the new posts, "'Ow, Wills' and Owls" was documenting the fact that, in talking to his dog Willow, he had inadvertently said something that sounded like "owls," and that this had struck him as potentially meaningful. I found this synchronistically interesting for several reasons. First, my linking of the word honor with the center of the Venn diagram -- essential to my understanding of the stichomantic reading -- was based on a sync involving the word owl. Second, Bill was talking to his dog, which is a link to "ask now the beasts." Third, I remembered that when I had brought up the random Bible verse website, the verse it had first displayed, before I had asked my question and clicked "New Verse," had contained the word willow. Looking it up now, I find that it was this verse:

He took also of the seed of the land, and planted it in a fruitful field; he placed it by great waters, and set it as a willow tree (Ezekiel 17:5).

Bill's first blog, which I never read because it was deleted before I knew of him, was called "A Good Seed."

In the afternoon, as I often do on Sunday afternoons, I went to a coffee shop in Taichung and then walked to a used bookstore a mile or two away.

While I was in the coffee shop, I was reading The Synchronicity Highway by Rob and Trish MacGregor. The book ends, unexpectedly, with an interview with Whitley Strieber -- which is highly appropriate, since it was on Whitley's podcast that I first discovered the MacGregors. In introducing Whitley, they describe how the publication of his alien-abduction memoir Communion had hurt his career as a novelist:

Accused of writing fiction as though it were true, reviled by skeptics and comedians who ridiculed his description of rectal probes, his fiction career suffered. He and his wife, Anne, eventually lost their home in upstate New York, where the abductions had occurred. Communion had become ex-communion.

Ex-communion isn't a standard English word -- but Trish MacGregor was brought up in Venezuela, and we are probably seeing the influence of her other native language, in which the word for "excommunication" is excomunión. As I recently noted in the comments on "The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates," "Excommunication literally means exclusion from the Communion of the Lord’s Supper."

Just after reading the sentences quoted above, I happened to glance up at the TV on the wall of the coffee shop, which had been playing an American football game. I was surprised to see that the screen had frozen up, and that a couple of employees were trying different things with the remote in an attempt to fix it. The frozen image, which was on the screen for at least a minute, was this:

It's a yellow football helmet with a black mandorla on it that says "HURRY UP." I know it's meant to be a football, but the combination of shape and color scheme makes it highly suggestive of the cover art of Communion:

Another new post from Bill is called "Crom and Crumb" and includes a video of every time Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Conan the Barbarian, says the name Crom. (Both Conan the Barbarian and Conan O'Brien have been in Bill's sync-stream.) As I walked from the coffee shop to the bookstore, I passed an advertisement that said "crush on you CRUUM":

Probably Arnold's most famous quote as Conan is the one about how the best thing in life is "to crush your enemies." By the way, if you zoom in on the ad, you'll also find the name Bill -- or, rather, Billlie, with a triple-l and the last two letters upside down.

In the bookstore, I normally make a beeline for the English section, but this time, on a random whim, I picked up one (and only one) Chinese book and flipped through it. The book is called 月球之書 ("The Book of the Moon"), and inside it I found this:

It's a portrait of Tycho Brahe, the same one Bill recently ran across and included in his December 12 post "Tycho Brahe and Hair . . . also in the context of Black Holes."

In the English section, I ran across a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, but finding an extremely popular author in a bookstore scarcely counts as a sync. I also found a copy of A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle, which I don't think I've ever read. (I read A Wrinkle in Time in elementary school, but as far as I can remember never read any of the sequels.) I took it off the shelf to look at, and the unicorn on the cover got my attention. The blurb on the back explains that in this novel "Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time." The name of Charles Wallace -- a secondary character in Wrinkle but apparently the main protagonist of Swiftly -- turned up in my dreams a couple of months ago, as documented in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace." The syncs were enough to make me buy the book.

Another book that caught my eye said The Genesis of Misery on the spine, and I took it off the shelf having no idea what sort of book it was going to be. It turns out to be, according to the inside flap, "A reimagining of Joan of Arc's story given a space opera, giant robot twist." A few weeks ago, you may recall, I bought "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." I did not buy this second such book, being very much put off by this:

It's an old, familiar story: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war. But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Pronouns in the blurb? You've got to be kidding me. The author, "Neon Yang (they/them) is a queer nonbinary author based in Singapore," and flipping through I even found one of the characters being referred to as xer. I've admittedly read a lot of pretty awful literature in the name of sync, but everybody's got to draw the line somewhere. When the author implicitly defines they as this character's object pronoun and then immediately proceeds to use it as a subject pronoun, that's a bridge too far for any self-respecting English teacher.

When I went to pay for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the cashier was wearing a very distinctive button. I asked her about it, and her response was to offer to give it to me! I said that wasn't necessary but asked if I could take a photo. Here it is:

Walking back to where I had parked, I noticed a parked scooter with a helmet whose design made me think of the Wheel of Fortune. This got my attention, since I'd recently seen the Wheel of Fortune on another motorcycle helmet, so I took a closer look.

Right under the wheel-like design is the name Conan in Chinese, and to the right is a Japanese manga character known as Detective Conan.