During this morning's hypnopompia, I heard someone singing the chorus of the Weezer song "All My Favorite Songs," except that the key words sad, mad, and bad were pronounced differently. Instead of ending in a hard /d/, they ended in /ð/, the voiced interdental fricative, one of the two "th" sounds of English.
This turns out to be matheningly hard to render in intuitively understandable pronunciation spelling. The problem is that in English, final th is voiced only after long vowels (as in lathe, breathe, writhe, loathe, smooth). After short vowels, final th is voiceless (as in path, death, smith, moth, doth). The only exception of which I am aware is (for some speakers) with. I personally pronounce it to rhyme with smith, but pronouncing it like the first syllable of wither is also considered standard. So to convey the singer's strange pronunciation, I need some way of indicating either that the th is voiced where you would expect it to be voiceless (bath but with a voiced th), or else that the a is short where you would expect it to be long (bathe but with a short a). Since the distinction between long and short vowels is much more familiar to the layman than that between voiced and voiceless fricatives (a surprising number of native English speakers aren't even aware that the language has two distinct "th" sounds), I opted for the latter:
All my favorite songs are slow and săthe
All my favorite people make me măthe
Everything that feels so good is băthe, băthe, băthe
All my favorite songs are slow and săthe
I don't know what's wrong with me
I don't know what's wrong with me
Here's the original song. Be advised that it may be a bit earwormy.
Last night I saw this in the catalog at /pol/ but didn't click for the thread.
This afternoon, continuing with my reading of the Book of Job, I found this:
And they waited for me as for the rain; and they opened their mouth wide as for the latter rain (Job 29:23).
The phrase "latter rain" occurs only seven times in the entire Bible. Of these, Job 29 is the only one that also has a reference to being "washed" -- and in an unusual substance, not water -- in the same chapter:
When I washed my steps with butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil (Job 29:6).
Clicking now for the /pol/ thread, #27032496, I see that the original post only got five replies, all but one of which are about songs -- two quoting lyrics from the Prince song "Purple Rain" and two opining on who sings the best version of the hymn "Are You Washed in the Blood?"
Very early this morning, fellow night owl WanderingGondola left this comment on "I am that Enkidudal boy":
Taking a break to play Wuthering Waves for a little while yesterday, I looked at my quest log and decided to complete something that'd been sitting there for months. The one I chose involved a character called Lingyang, whom has animal ears and a tail and is a member of a lion-dance troupe. I'd completely forgotten the quest's setup so was initially confused about a repeatedly-discussed wild beast, but it soon became clear the beast and Lingyang were the same being. At the quest's conclusion he called the beast a Suan'ni, implying he might be the last one alive and had chosen to become like a man. Suan'ni looks to be a transliteration of 狻猊, and Wiktionary says both Chinese meanings involve lions.
Suanni (no apostrophe in standard transliteration, as the doubled consonant makes the syllable boundaries clear) is pretty obscure Chinese (I'd never heard of it), but lingyang (羚羊) is a common Chinese word referring to an antelope or gazelle.
As soon as I saw the word Lingyang, a somewhat complex idea popped into my head fully formed, with no sense of its being the product of a train of thought. I imagined a medieval grammarian learnedly explaining that the etymological meaning of antelope is "forerunner" (from the prefix ante- and the English verb lope) and that the animal is so called because it "runs before," and is run after by, the lion. Furthermore, this makes the antelope a symbol of sexual purity, because it is "chased" (chaste). Since WG's comment was on a post that discussed lion symbolism in connection with the Lust card of Crowley's Tarot. The idea of a "chaste" antelope running from a lion makes a certain symbolic sense.
Of course this is neither the true etymology of antelope nor a plausible medieval pseudo-etymology. As I know from my childhood fascination with heraldry, antelope in medieval times meant not a timid runner-away but a fierce predator with the head of a tiger (or of what Europeans fancifully imagined a tiger to be) which could cut down trees with its horns. (Horns on a nominally feline head are a link to Cary Yale, which Bill saw as a symbol of Joseph. Running away to preserve one's chastity is also part of the biblical story of Joseph.)
From A Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, a book which was almost always in my home when I was a child, though I occasionally let the library borrow it back
As recently as Spenser, the antelope was included alongside the tiger and the wolf in a list of beasts "both fierce and fell." This ties in nicely with WG's video game, where the character named Antelope is later identified as a suanni -- either a lion or a mythical beast that eats lions.
At 1:33 this afternoon, I received an email from regular commenter Debbie, which I quote below with her permission. As I was in class at that time, I didn't see or read it until after 3:00. I sent an immediate reply timestamped 3:07. She sent this photo:
Her email reads, in part (emphasis mine):
I commented on your recent post about the Green Island Serenade. Beautiful soothing song!! Thank you for sharing it.
As I was typing my comment I noticed something that I had not notice before which is a vintage linen cloth I'd bought many years ago, I think I probably bought it in the mid 1990's.
The linen cloth is vintage although I don't know where or the year it was made. It's all hand stitched embroidery.
I had packed it away and I got it out several years ago and put it in the linen closet. For some reason I recently got it out of the linen closet and put it in the den near the computer and lo and behold I just glanced at it tonight while typing my comment, and saw that the hand stitched embroidery is of a red heifer being milked and on each side of the red heifer are 2 birds perched on a circle which the circle kinda looks like it has (if you turn it on its side) a tail of a fish. Very similar to the Ichthys.
The circle itself is green.
Although Debbie's primary interest in the image is the Red Heifer and its significance in Jewish lore, she also drew particular attention to the shape and color of the plants the birds are perched on.
As soon as I had read the email, I had a very strong hunch that I needed to consult the Tarot immediately. I did so, cutting the usual preliminaries short and cutting right to the chase. The card I drew, at 3:14 -- literally minutes after reading the email -- was the Two of Pentacles.
If you took the two ichthys-like shapes the birds are perched on and joined them together, you would have the green lemniscate the man on the card is holding. His distinctive red headgear also suggests (in exaggerated form) the red hairdo of the milkmaid.
(Note: My post title is an exclamation used by the Orthodox Jewish title character of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox.)
I had a very long dream in which I traveled around the world with two other men on some convoluted adventure the purpose of which was not terribly clear. I can't remember most of the details.
What I do remember is finding a very peculiar musical instrument and carrying it around with me, trying to learn how to play it. Whatever our mission was, my learning how to play this instrument was crucial to its success.
The main body of the instrument resembled a white ceramic Chinese ocarina, or xun (pictured), but with fewer holes. There were three narrow pipes of varying lengths, resembling hollow paintbrushes. You inserted the brush end of these into the holes and played by blowing into the pipes. One of the smaller pipes was inserted into a hole in a larger pipe rather than directly into the ocarina. There were no finger holes. You played different notes by blowing into different pipes, somewhat like panpipes.
As there were only three pipes, I couldn't figure out how to play anything, since obviously just about any piece of music is going to require more than three notes. Finally, while on a beach in the Netherlands, I discovered that you could change which note a given pipe played by modulating your breath. If you blew harder the tone would change. This was not a continuous change; rather, once you passed a certain threshold of air pressure, the tone would suddenly change. As soon as I discovered this, I was able to play fluently, and I began to play the Chinese song "Green Island Serenade." Everyone on the beach, even though they were all Dutch, spontaneously began singing along in Chinese.
In real life, despite my having lived in Taiwan for 21 years and counting, "Green Island Serenade" is the only Chinese song I really like, and the only one I know well enough to sing. Strangely, I discovered it not in Taiwan but in America, when it was recorded by Taiwanese-American singer Vienna Teng. This was just months before I unexpectedly ended up in Taiwan. I discovered the song shortly after it was released, in February or March 2004. In June, I took a job in South Korea. A few months later, due to legal issues in Korea, I applied for jobs in several other countries. The best offer happened to come from Taiwan, and I moved here in October. In retrospect, my discovery of "Green Island Serenade" (the titular island being either Taiwan itself or one of its outlying islands) seemed to prefigure the move.
This song -- the American recording by Vienna Teng -- is also the only Chinese song my Taiwanese wife listens to regularly. It's a pretty song even if you don't understand Chinese.
Note added: inb4 WG mentions The Ocarina of Time. Although I haven't played video games since childhood and never played any of the Zelda games, that's my main association as well. If the ocarina represents time then, given my recent reading, the need for only three pipes may be a reference to Ouspensky's model with only three temporal dimensions, as opposed to Dunne's infinite regress. I've never read Priestley, but according to Lachman he also thinks three temporal dimensions is enough.
No, nothing terrible has happened to me. Just documenting a sync.
I started the Book of Job today, and this verse struck me as particularly poetic:
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me (Job 3:25).
I spent a few minutes thinking about why this verse -- a simple thought expressed in simple language, repeated twice (hmm, a bit like "and miles to go before I sleep") -- should be so powerful. I made a note to think about it some more.
Later, I checked Synlogos and clicked the link for a post called "Of Slugs and Saints" just because the title seemed potentially interesting. It's an announcement that the blogger, Paul Kingsnorth, is taking a break from blogging because he's ill. Much of the post deals with the proper spiritual response to illness and thus syncs in a very general way with the Book of Job. (It was only after Job's bodily heath was affected that he made the statement quoted above.)
For some reason, I became curious about who Paul Kingsnorth is. The post didn't make any great impression on me or anything, and I had no plans to read anything else he wrote; it was just a bit of random curiosity. His Wikipedia page has a link to a "The Cross and the Machine," a 2021 essay he wrote for First Things describing his then-recent conversion to Christianity, so I clicked for that. Again, the writing didn't particularly grab me, so I just skimmed a bit. In the middle, I found this pull quote:
It's the same verse from Job that had caught my attention earlier today. Even the same translation. The strange thing is that that verse doesn't appear in the essay at all. Ctrl-Fing shows no hits, outside of the pull quote itself, for either fear or afraid. If it's meant to be an epigraph, confusingly displayed in the style of a pull quote, you'd think it would tell you where the quotation came from. Anyway, a bit of a coincidence.
Late last night, I had a premonition that this November is going to be a critical month for me, that I will be the target of some sort of spiritual assault, and that I had best suit up on "the whole armour of God" in preparation. I decided to do a simple Tarot reading to shed more light on this. My questions were: (1) What should be my mission or goal for this month? (2) What danger or enemy will I face? and (3) Who or what can assist me? This is what I got:
All three cards are Major Arcana -- something that will only happen 2% of the time in a three-card spread -- confirming that this is about Something Big. It's a rather incongruous spread at first glance, with a positive-looking card in the "danger" slot and two scary-looking cards in the more positive positions.
The Tower can have positive meanings -- revelation, liberation -- but even then it comes in a violent or disruptive manner. Death as a positive card could play a similar role. As the Red Hot Chili Peppers put it, "Destruction leads to a very rough road, but it also breeds creation." I also notice that the figure of Death is wearing a full suit of armor, synching with my premonition about "the whole armour of God." The man death is about to strike down on the card is a mitered bishop, which fits well with the fact that in the Tarot de Marseille, the Tower card is called "The House of God." Striking down a church leader is symbolically identical to blasting the crown off the house of God. Death is also portrayed by Waite as the fourth horseman, the rider on a pale horse, making the card a potential link to Star Boy (see "Flour Boy symbolism roundup").
As for Strength, the fact that it portrays a woman and a lion ties it to my recent discovery (see "Whore homophones") that Arizona coincidentally resembles the Hebrew words ari "lion" and zona "whore." The woman on Waite's card does not look at all whorish, but in Crowley's version of the card she is literally the Whore of Babylon. (Crowley follows the Marseille sequence, in which Strength is 11 rather than 8, and he renames the card Lust, so it may not be immediately apparent that it is the same card.)
The imagery is also suggestive of Frederick Stuart Church's painting The Sorceress, which I first posted this past March in "More lions and doves" and then again on October 12 in ":Lions on the beach."
As I noted in the October post, the Church painting also features what appears to be a blue-green crystal ball. There is also a round blue-green shape at the top of Crowley's Lust card.
My tentative interpretation of Strength in my reading was that I should be wary of attempts to manipulate me via soft power or seduction.
⁂
Before falling asleep last night, I concentrated on the image of the Tower card and the idea that it represented a mission or goal, hoping to incubate a relevant dream. I can't remember much detail of my dreams of the night, but there were two main storylines.
In the first, Alex Jones had come to my school to repair the water dispenser. (Despite being, like all thinking people, something of a conspiracy theorist, I've never listened to Alex Jones and have no idea how he got into my dream. In real life, we recently had some routine maintenance work done on the water dispenser.) He did his work, I paid him, and he left. Then he came back, uninvited, with plans to do lots more work on the school. He had prepared elaborate plans and blueprints for everything he wanted to do, including turning one of the unused classrooms into a "music room" with an array of big Chinese drums. I told him I wasn't interested. Throughout this, my school was not in its real-life setting but rather in a desert which could well have been Arizona.
The second storyline had to do with an invasion of "army ants," which were black and about as big as cats, many times larger than real army ants. They threatened both my house and an LDS church building, and we decided that the only thing to do was to attack them with flamethrowers. That would likely result in the buildings burning to the ground, but better to lose your house than to have your bones picked clean by army ants. The dream didn't portray this actually happening, only our decision to do it.
Upon waking, I saw this latter storyline as clearly relevant to the Tower, as it showed how the destruction of a building -- including a church, or "house of God" -- could be, if not exactly a positive thing, at least the lesser of two evils.
⁂
When I woke up, I found that I had a strange song in my head: the chorus of "The Yankee Doodle Boy," but with the first three syllables of Yankee Doodle changed to Enkidu -- the companion of Gilgamesh, a wild man who was tamed by a whore. The final line in particular -- "I am that Enkidudal boy" -- kept repeating in my mind. Later, I realized that Enkidu's story is obviously relevant to the Strength card, especially if the woman is understood to be a whore.
Prior to his two weeks with the whore, Enkidu was an animal-like man, lacking full human intelligence. There is also some evidence that Enkidu was portrayed in Mesopotamian art as a "bull-man." This is a potential link back to Arizona. In "Among the giants," I describe the "Arizonans" in my dream in this way:
The Arizonans were very large people. I don't have a good feel for how tall they were, but each time I shook hands with one, it was like shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. They were profoundly stupid and animal-like -- not in a negative or pathological way, but just like animals, like bison or something. Likable, but obviously not of the same order of consciousness as myself.
⁂
On the road this morning, I passed two cars in quick succession -- less than a minute between them -- which had AZA on their license plates. I saw this as a contraction of Arizona, consisting of the first, middle, and last letter. When A-z-a is removed from Arizona, what remains is rion, which is how a Japanese person might pronounce lion.
This afternoon, one of my students wrote a sentence in which she misspelled hero as hore, which would be pronounced the same as whore.
Later that day, with the "Hard Frost" syncs, I thought of the term hoar frost, with the first word also being pronounced the same as whore.
My last post, "Giant goyish chauffeurs," noted a link between Arizona and the Hebrew name Ari. The name Ari means "lion," so I wondered if the other half of Arizona meant anything in Hebrew.
As it turns out, zona is the standard transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning "whore, prostitute, hooker, slut, harlot."
I've finished the free sample of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox and have thus far resisted the temptation to buy the whole thing. Really, though, after spending money on that ridiculous story about yoga-loving farm animals finding the Holy Grail (see "Pigs and the Grail"), I'm not sure on what principle I can draw the line at Orthodox Jewish young-adult time-travel novels.
I've already mentioned (in "'Low-level' superhuman strength") that Ari Barak includes a character who is maybe eight feet tall and is often called "the giant." This character's name is Igor, and he works as a chauffeur for Rabbi White, who runs a tiny yeshiva (only two students) in Israel. He also never speaks and is apparently unable to do so.
Near the end of the free preview, Rabbi White and his two students need to do one of their daily prayer services, so the rabbi asks Igor to take them to the synagogue, drop them off, and then pick them up 45 minutes later. Ari, one of the students, thinks it strange that the giant himself isn't joining in the service. The italics are in the original, but the bracketed gloss is mine.
Ari wondered why Igor didn’t need to daven [pray]. Perhaps he’s not Jewish? Mind you—how would he daven, if he can’t talk?
This reference to a giant who, surprisingly, might not be Jewish made me think of the dream I posted in "Among the giants":
The Arizonans were very large people. I don't have a good feel for how tall they were, but each time I shook hands with one, it was like shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. They were profoundly stupid and animal-like -- not in a negative or pathological way, but just like animals, like bison or something. Likable, but obviously not of the same order of consciousness as myself. I decided goyish was the mot juste.
One of the Arizonans was driving me around in an ancient Jeep.
So the "Arizonans" (cf. Ari, the protagonist of the novel) are giants, I think of them as "goyish" (the literal meaning of which is "not Jewish"), and one of them "was driving me around." The giant in the dream drove "an ancient Jeep"; Igor, "an old and somewhat white Renault delivery van."
One of the giants in the dream also asked me about the meaning of some gesture used by Hasidic Jews. The author and main characters of Ari Barak, though not Hasidic, are Orthodox Jews.
This past August, I posted "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," about a sync involving that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening." First I had seen in a vocabulary book an example sentence that clearly alluded to that poem. Then the next day my wife got me to watch a documentary with her which was called (in English translation) And Miles to Go Before I Sleep and ended by displaying the final stanza of that poem on the screen in both English and Chinese. I noted how incongruous the use of Frost's poem was. The movie was about "about a Vietnamese illegal alien who was shot nine times by Taiwanese police while he was attempting to steal a cop car while naked and high on drugs," and its themes of violence and cruelty stood in stark contrast to the atmosphere of the Frost poem.
I happened to think of that movie again while I was on the road this morning. The movie's original, Chinese, title can be translated literally as Nine Shots, and this morning I saw that a new billboard had been put up in the city, advertising collagen tablets with the confusing slogan "ONE SHOT, Beauty SHOT."
One Shot naturally made me think of Nine Shots.
In the evening, I was again teaching vocabulary, from a different book. One of the target words was frost, which required some explaining in this subtropical country. Everyone knows what snow is even if they've never seen it in person, but frost was a totally new concept to many of my students. I said you can think of it as essentially "frozen dew" and described how when frost forms on grass, it makes the grass hard and brittle so that it crunches under your feet.
After the class, I poked around on Synlogos a bit and ran across this meme:
The joke is that it turns a peaceful contemplative line into something a hardass would say, just as Nine Shots takes lines from the same poem and inserts them into a violent story where they are comically out of place.
Three days ago, on October 29, St. Anselm left a comment on "Going to church on Easter Sunday" referencing the Mormon hymn "Called to Serve." As he explained in a follow-up comment, he has no Mormon background but had just searched the hymnal for one with serve in its title so that he could make his joke about "To Serve Man." I replied:
I see. It's probably one of our more iconic hymns, considered the missionary anthem. I'm old enough to remember when the refrain had "Joy our strength will be" instead of "God our strength will be." It was presumably changed to avoid any association with the Nazi organization Strength Through Joy.
I'm not sure why I mentioned the change in the lyrics. I remember the old lyrics because when I was in Primary they used to draw pictures to remind very young children (too young to read) of the lyrics, and one of these was a strong man flexing his biceps with a big grin on his face -- "joy our strength shall be." (It was shall, not will as I said in the comment.)
This was the version in the orange Sing with Me book, published in 1969. It was replaced in 1989 by a volume with the much more catchy name The Children's Songbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I think is still being used today.
Again, I'm not sure why I focused on this in the comment, jumping straight from a simple reference to the hymn to a history lesson about its pre-1989 lyrics.
Why am I posting about this again now? Because this morning I picked up my Bible, from which I hadn't read since last Saturday, when I had read 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and the first six chapters of Nehemiah. So today I started with Nehemiah 7. In the next chapter, I found this:
Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our LORD: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength (Neh. 8:10).
Nowhere else in the Bible or Mormon scripture is it said that joy is strength. It's just this one obscure verse in Nehemiah.
I dreamed that I was watching [the 1989 movie Communion], but some of the scenes were different. There was a scene where Strieber was having a beer with Budd Hopkins (who does not appear in the real film, having been replaced by a fictional female psychologist) and kvetching about the aliens that had been making themselves at home in his cabin. "I'm telling ya, Budd," he says, "these rats run around like they own the place!"
Tonight I listened to part of an interview with Joe Lewels on Whitley Strieber's show. Here's a transcript of the part that caught my attention:
WS: Now John [Mack] later on became much more friendly with Budd Hopkins. At that time, John was, he felt like Budd Hopkins was very wrong.
JL: Well, Budd had attacked him, and David.
WS: Yeah, I noticed that. He attacked a lot of people, including me.
JL: Yeah, yeah, for being "New Age," whatever they call it. They had a name for it, for people who though there was anything that had to do with spirituality.
WS: Or people who sold more books than they did. That was another thing. Both me and John.
JL: They were so into this atheistic way of thinking, and they never talked about their religious backgrounds. I never --
WS: Because Budd did not believe in anything. He didn't believe in the soul.
JL: I think David Jacobs was the same.
WS: I have no idea about David, but I had discussions with Budd about this, and he said that this is what we are and this is what we have.
JL: Right, so if you believe that, you run into a dead end right away with this phenomenon.
WS: Which the entire scientific community has run into. They're now at the far edge of quantum physics and can't figure out where they are.
JL: Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, they're still -- it's amazing -- our top scientists are still relying on that old kind of science that relies on the scientific method, and the scientific method relies on the idea that everything is separate. That we're separate from each other, we're separate from the planet, we're separate from the labs and the rat, the rats that are running around our maze that we do experiments on. And if everything is separate, we can study them objectively. That's the whole idea behind the scientific method.
Here's the interview. I've only listened to 15 minutes of it, so I don't know how worth listening to it is.
And here's "Circle of Steel," the Gordon Lightfoot song that Strieber was quoting in my 2023 dream:
Notice that the Strieber video is titled "Is Earth a Soul Trap?" and the thumbnail is the planet earth with a big steel chain wrapped around it. When I googled circle of steel meaning, the second result said this:
In general, he's talking about people who are living trapped in poverty on that symbolic "Wheel of Life"
Strieber's thumbnail also made me think of the similar image that occurs in Joseph Smith's account of the visions of Enoch:
And he beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced (Moses 7:26).
"Circle of steel" is also a link to Budd Hopkins as abstract artist. He really had a thing for circles. Here are a few of his pieces. There are many, many more where these came from.
I knew nothing about Hopkins's art until I googled it just now.
In the dream I posted in "Going to church on Easter Sunday," I was trying to find the hymn "Do What Is Right," which in the dream was hymn #24 (#237 in the actual CJCLDS hymnal), but discovered that the hymnal I had been given was actually a recipe book.
St. Anselm left a comment saying "Hymn #249 in the hymnal was replaced by How to Serve Man." In the real hymnal, #249 is "Called to Serve," the Mormon missionary anthem. I got the joke in a general way -- "to serve man" is ambiguous and could refer to serving human flesh as a dish, something you might find in a rather macabre recipe book -- but, not being a Boomer and having grown up in a family that didn't really watch television, I didn't get that it was a reference to a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone until after the googling occasioned by a follow-up comment in which Anselm wrote, "To Serve Man is episode #24 by the way." A later comment by Debbie made the allusion explicit and included a link to a clip from the episode in question:
Given that the comments about The Twilight Zone were in a post called "Going to church on Easter Sunday," with Anselm joking that an LDS hymn had been named after the episode, I thought it was bit of a sync when I checked Synlogos this morning and found a link to a post titled "From the Church of the Twilight Zone." It's tradcath kvetching about the inroads being made by Teh Gay in the Catholic Church, and it includes the following passage, which juxtaposes service with "hymn" in scare-quotes, thus linking it to the made-up hymn "How to Serve Man."
If you have the stomach for it the video of the service is here. Watching the entrance procession and the closing "hymn" with the band at the center of the sanctuary grieved my heart. Please join me in a rosary of reparation today. When the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes a celebration of perversion, we should mourn and do penance.
May God have mercy on those who advance a faux church with faux sacraments and desecrate the Body and Blood of the Lord to become, not a source of salvation, but an instrument of condemnation. Pray for all the poor souls who attended that sacrileges "mass."
The perversion she is talking about is sodomy, but if a church really did have a hymn about "how to serve man" in the cannibalistic sense, that would be a desecration of similar magnitude and might provoke a similar response. I've also bolded the phrase "faux sacraments," since that's how a Catholic might perceive the Communion in my dream, which used water in place of wine.
Around noon today, I was catching up on recent posts at Anonymous Conservative. One of the links there had the linktext "Interesting piece making the case things today could fit with the return of the Nephilim," which piqued my curiosity enough to click. It's a post from someone going by The Wise Wolf, titled "The Nephilim: Those Who from Heaven Came to Earth." The basic thesis -- that "aliens" are actually demonic beings in disguise -- is a familiar one, at least to someone with my reading habits, but one of the illustrations certainly got my attention:
It's not just an image from the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone. It appears to be the very same still that serves as the thumbnail for the clip Debbie posted.
I've been reading Gary Lachman's book about precognitive dreams, Dreaming Ahead of Time. One of the points he makes is that, even compared to other forms of ESP, precognition is uniquely problematic because
knowledge of some event that hasn’t happened yet seems to contradict everything we know, or think we know, about reality.
Having just put down Lachman, I opened the YouTube Music app. The very first song the algorithm recommended was a Metric song I hadn't heard before, called "Breathing Underwater." I gave it a listen and found that the lyrics include these lines:
I can see the end
But it hasn't happened yet
I can see the end
But it hasn't happened yet
Is this my life?
Am I breathing underwater?
This repeats not just the general theme of precognition but the exact phrase "hasn't happened yet."
My dreaming mind is apparently rebelling against how Jewish this blog has been recently.
I dreamt that I was traveling with a group of very conservatively dressed people -- and by "conservatively," I mean they would have been considered very well-dressed in maybe the 18th century. It was Easter Sunday. We were all independent Christians who fancied ourselves much too enlightened to be churchgoers, but one of the men in the group said that we should definitely go to church on Easter Sunday just to "stick it to the Man" -- meaning, I thought, to show solidarity with Christendom in defiance of the anti-Christian powers that be.
The church we were going to was one none of us had ever been to before. It was not in a building of its own but in an upstairs floor of an old stone building. We had to go up a big stone spiral staircase to get to the entrance.
Throughout the dream, I simultaneously thought of it as a Protestant church and therefore somewhat exotic (a handful of Lutheran and True Jesus services being the extent of my experience) and as a Latter-day Saint church about which I, having been raised in that tradition, would know more than the other members of the group. (I never said or thought the word "Mormon," though. Russell M. Nelson would have been proud.)
The church was rather grand-looking inside, and everyone in it was, like my traveling companions, dressed like 18th-century gentry in their Sunday best. I was impressed and said something like, "I should give the Protestants a fair shake, I guess. They're not all electric guitars and 'we just wanna thank you Lord' after all."
(Note added: I forgot to mention that I myself was not well-dressed at all. I was wearing jeans and a black Hawaiian-style shirt printed with large white flowers.)
During the service, someone started setting up equipment in the back of the chapel to record the sermon. One of the women in the congregation stood up and insisted that they stop immediately. "That is not permitted," she said, speaking very clearly and emphasizing the words I have italicized. "The only record is to be made by Father, who will distribute it to anyone who wants it. You must disconnect your equipment. You are in honor bound."
All the congregants said in unison, "And so say all of us." I understood that any point of order required this ritual assent of the entire congregation. (In real life, I associate that line with the lighthearted song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but in the dream it was completely convincing as something people would say in a rather formal church service.)
When it came time for Communion, most of our group opted not to participate, thinking it inappropriate to take Communion in a church where we were not members. Two of our party did go up to the altar to receive it, though. I said to the woman on my left, "They're going to be surprised when it's bread and water instead of wafers and wine." That is, I understood that this would a Latter-day Saint sacrament. It wasn't served that way, though, with deacons walking through the pews passing around "sacrament trays" with pieces of bread and disposable cups of water. Rather, communicants went to the altar and were given a piece of bread and a sip of water from a very simple glass chalice.
Then it was time to sing a hymn -- "Do What Is Right, Let the Consequence Follow." I again thought I would be helpful with my LDS background and help the others find the right page in the hymnal. It was (in the dream) hymn number 24.
When I tried to turn to it, though, I found that there was something wrong with my hymnal. "This isn't a hymnal," I said to the woman on my right (one of the congregation members, not part of my group), who had given it to me. "This is a recipe book!"
"Are you sure?" she said. "I gave you four hymnals just to be safe. I'm sure they can't all be recipe books!"
This past weekend, we finally got around to repairing the last of the damage done by the 2019 poltergeist. (One of the doorknobs it broke turned out to be pretty hard to find a replacement for.) As you may recall, my wife had a strong sense that the geist was in some way a spider:
When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.
Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.
Cleaning out one of my email inboxes today, I found an October 18 notification from WordPress that someone had "liked" a post on one of my old blogs. Here's a screenshot of the message:
The post this person liked, "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength," is pretty critical of the Rider-Waite deck, which has since become the main deck I work with. (I formerly favored the Tarot de Marseille.) This is a reminder that I've promised Bruce a post about how and why the Rider-Waite eventually won me over. I'll get around to it one of these days, Bruce, just as I did eventually get that doorknob replaced!
Note added (11:30 p.m.): It was the poltergeist an spider posts that got my attention, but then I realized that the Shadow (the pulp-magazine character) had also been in the sync stream, so I checked out the third link, about a "Shadow Creature" called Fear Dorcha ("the dark man"). At the end of the post, after the comments, it says this:
Pingback: Sons of Dionysos | Aldrin is the Hermês Boy
Normally, that sort of thing would be a link you can click on, but in this case it isn't. Searching the web for "aldrin is the hermes boy" yielded zero results -- because, if you can believe it, Google is now so dysfunctional that if you omit the circumflex over the e it can't imagine what you were looking for. Searching with the circumflex, I found a blog called Aldrin is the Hermês Boy, which hasn't been updated since 2013 and which has nothing about sons of Dionysos or Fear Dorcha. Finally, after following three successive links-to-my-new-blog, and switching browsers to get past a "privacy error" in Brave, I found the post in question: "Sons of Dionysos," which does indeed link back to the Fear Dorcha post. It's apparently by a gay mestizo Filipino who adheres to Greco-Roman neo-paganism. (I thought that might be a joke, but apparently it's legit.)
The about page on the first blog I found specifies that the Hermês Boy moniker refers to "Hermês the god, not the bag." This is a sync because I discovered this guy's series of blogs due to a synchronistic interest in the Shadow. The post that first brought up the Shadow, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," also deals with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to Wikipedia "originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth."
Going back to that Wikipedia article now to get the quote, I noticed this image of a turquoise-colored statue of Thoth.
That blue-green Egyptian figure, with a mane suggestive of a pharaonic headdress, is obviously related to this picture from a dress belonging to commenter Debbie:
The above photo of the dress was belatedly added to the same post that introduced the Shadow and Hermes Trismegistus. The reason for its inclusion was that it resembled a character from a music video who in turn resembled a dream-image of Hermes Trismegistus.
Last night I was skimming the Wikipedia page on the Shadow. The sidebar listed one of his abilities as "Low-level superhuman strength (able to lift a sturdy armored car with only one hand)." Doesn't sound too "low-level" to me!
Today I read this in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox. Ari has been met at the airport in Israel by a very large man, "seven and a half feet tall, maybe eight." Ari thinks of him as a "giant," but so far he doesn't appear to be a giant in any supernatural sense, just a very tall man. When it's time to leave the airport, this happens:
He set Ari’s bags down on the sidewalk, then positioned himself behind the trunk of the sports car. He leaned over the trunk, reached his enormous arms in a kind of embrace around the back of the car, and gripping it firmly, he lifted it clear into the air. Ari goggled as the giant pivoted and staggered about twenty meters over to a vacant parking space, and gently lowered the BMW into the space.
He needed two hands. And just for a little two-seater sports car, not a sturdy armored car. Very low-level superhuman strength by the standard set by the Shadow.
When I went back to Wikipedia to get the quote for this post, I found that I had misread it. The Shadow is actually able to lift a sturdy armored warrior with one hand. I misread it first, though, and read the scene in Ari Barak later, so it still counts as a sync.
Yesterday, en route to archive.org, I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got #31375960. It begins with this photo of dried "Montemorency" (sic) cherries and the question "Does this food cause you to have the most absurd dreams?"
The thread then rather weirdly turned to the question (seldom asked!) of whether eating tart cherries was a sin -- apparently because they contain the hormone melatonin. As one post said,
Taking melatonin would be a sin regardless of if we produce it. Actually this is a really good example,
>naturally producing melatonin = good
>artificial increasing melatonin levels = sin
Get it?
This led me to read up a bit on melatonin, which I hadn't really known anything about. I recognized it as the name of a hormone but prior to the reading inspired by this thread I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about its effects. One of the things I learned is that melatonin pills are sometimes used to treat insomnia, jet lag, and other sleep issues. (I never suffer from insomnia or jet lag and am certainly not deficient in the "most absurd dreams" department, so my reading was just out of disinterested curiosity.)
This morning, I started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr, the religious Jewish young adult sci-fi novel whose accompanying music video (how many novels have that?) was the subject of my last post, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger." I found this on p. 24. Ari Barak, the young protagonist, is on a plane to Israel and has just scared his elderly seatmate into business class by talking too much.
Ari had been disappointed, but it did come with the upside of having two seats to himself. So he had davenedMaariv in his seat, popped some melatonin pills, and curled up to sleep with his legs stretched out, appreciating one of the advantages of being shorter than average.
How shockingly sinful! And just after davening Maariv, too! (Praying the evening prayer service. Footnotes explain all the Jewish lingo)
The cover art on the free sample pdf is different from that in the music video. Since the cover art was synchronistically important, I checked Amazon to see what cover art the published version had. (It's the music-video version.) While there, I noticed this:
The photos on Rabbi Behr's website, where I got the free sample, show him wearing a yarmulke, but his Amazon bio not only shows him in a black fedora but highlights it in the very first sentence. My sync post about the "Free Will Paradox" music video included a pulp-cover picture of the Shadow, whose big nose and black fedora I said made him look "something like a stereotypical Jew."
Incidentally, Lewis Carroll never specifies what kind of tarts the Knave of Hearts stole (theories include pepper and treacle), but artists usually portray them as red and thus possibly cherry. Eating tart cherries may or may not be a sin, but eating stolen cherry tarts certainly is!
Note added: I forgot to mention that the reason I was going to archive.org, getting the tart-cherry melatonin thread en route, was specifically to see if they had Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, the very book in which I later found a melatonin reference. So that's a pretty direct link,
In the dream reported in my last post, "Communion and an ancient phoenix carving," one of the exhibits I saw in a museum was a series of "moving paintings," painted on the covers of large books, depicting eminent alchemists smoking.
Less than 24 hours after that dream, I read the following in Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman:
I [Lachman] dream that I am looking at a book, one of my own, and am surprised to see that there are pictures in it. When I look more closely I see that they move, like images on an old B&W television set. After I record this in my dream journal, I open Havelock Ellis' The World Of Dreams, which I am rereading. The first sentence I read is 'the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture...' So in a dream I see moving pictures in a book, and in a book I read that pictures in a dream move.
In a comment I left on my own post, I called this "a very meta bit of dream precognition." I dreamed about moving pictures on books, and then I read, in a book about dreams, of Lachman's experience where he dreamed about moving pictures in a book and then read about moving pictures in a book about dreams. My dream seemed to show the precognitive influence of Lachman's account of the precognitive influence of Ellis's book on his own dream.
But the crazy syncs were just getting started. Several hours after my comment, someone who goes by St. Anselm left this comment:
I came across this video today (after first being recommended another video from the same channel):
St. Anselm is a relatively new commenter here. I believe his first comment was on my October 17 post "Implied obscenity sync," where his comment prompted my reply, "True, Anselm. How meta of me." Using the prefix meta as a stand-alone word isn't something I do a whole lot, so that's a bit of a coincidence.
The video Anselm linked is titled "Free Will Paradox (Ari Barak theme song)." Near the beginning of Dreaming Ahead of Time, Lachman warns the reader that the book will be full of paradoxes:
Let me point out that I am aware of the paradox of being 'consciously unconscious' . . . But I should warn readers that if paradoxes put you off, you may well want to find another book. As we go along, we will run into more than a few of them here.
One of these paradoxes has to do with free will:
How can we have knowledge of an event that has not yet happened? Or, if, in some way we are not yet able to explain, it has already happened, what does this say about our sense of having free will?
This is what the cover of Dreaming Ahead of Time looks like:
The same basic design -- blue and black, with concentric circles and radial lines -- appears on the cover of a book at the beginning of the "Free Will Paradox" video:
On the cover of the Lachman book, the circles and lines are those of a sundial. The "Free Will Paradox" video has a scene where all we can see are lots of clock faces.
In the "Free Will Paradox" video, the two young Jewish men on the cover of the book start to dance -- thus becoming moving pictures on the cover of a book, as in my dream. In Gary Lachman's dream, the moving pictures were inside the book and were black and white. The video more closely matches my own dream, in which the moving pictures were full color and were on the covers of books.
In the video, the dancing Jews on the book cover begin as two-dimensional moving pictures but them emerge from the book cover and become three-dimensional "real" people. Nothing like that happened in my dream, nor in Lachman's, but it syncs with another precognitive dream Lachman writes about in his book (brackets in the original):
On 15 March 1990, I recorded in my dream journal that in a dream I saw a film based on the pulp magazine character the Shadow. . . . I recorded that in the dream, in one sequence of the film [here I am quoting from my 1990 journal] 'I watch the Shadow emerge from a wall; by this I mean that he literally was a shadow, that is two dimensional, and then solidified into a three-dimensional body. It was as if he was drawn on the wall and then stepped out of the picture.'
Years later, Lachman watches a real movie based on the Shadow and sees this same scene. Note that this dream took place on my birthday, and that he says the Shadow's solidification was as if he had "stepped out of the picture," which is exactly what the two dancing Jews do in the video.
I used to browse pulpcovers.com from time to time, and I saved this Shadow cover back in 2022 because I thought it was a funny image. As you can see, the Shadow looks something like a stereotypical Jew, with a black fedora and a large hooked nose. Back in 2022, of course, the crystal ball had no particular significance for me.
It gets stranger. Prior to the "Free Will Paradox" link, St. Anselm's most recent comment here was on my post "Indicative be is in free variation with are in King James English." He said that he had been "browsing Heidegger memes" (who doesn't?) and found this one, the relevance to my post being I guess that it has to do with the verb be:
The meme is about Heidegger's book Being and Time -- and specifically about translating that book into another language.
This morning I read this in Dreaming Ahead of Time:
According to one authority, philosophers that have 'grappled with the problem of time' have 'ended up in perplexity'.
Curious as to who this anonymous "authority" might be, I checked the endnote. Here it is:
Joan Stambaugh, Introduction to her translation of Martin Heidegger On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. x.
Not just Heidegger, but specifically a translation of Heidegger. It turns out that Being and Time and On Time and Being are two distinct works, but that's still quite a coincidence.
Note added: One of the alchemists in the moving paintings in my dream had a long white beard, a deeply tanned face, and a large white turban. I thought it was supposed to be Hermes Trismegistus, due to the resemblance to this old picture:
Like all the other alchemists in the moving pictures, he was smoking a pipe.
This guy, who shows up in the "Free Will Paradox" video, bears a certain resemblance to the image of Hermes from my dream:
Note added: Here, posted with permission, is a photo of Debbie's dress, which she mentions in the comments. The eyes, lips, and blue-green color scheme are a close match to the image above, from the music video.
I dreamt that we had just organized the bookcases in the family home (an amalgam of the home I grew up in and the one I live in now) a day or two ago, but then I found two paperbacks behind the television. Both were in English, but by authors with Russian-looking names. (One author, I think, was called Lyubov, which just means "love" in Russian.) One was titled After Kant, and the other had a title of the same form, but with a less obviously epoch-making name -- something like After Braque or After Piaget or something like that. I was going around showing the two books to various family members and asking if anyone knew how they could have ended up behind the television, especially just after we had organized all the books.
Finally, I just decided to put the books back where they belonged. That was on a high shelf, and so I had to get a large aluminum stepladder. While up there, I noticed what I thought at first was "a coffee-table edition of Communion" by Whitley Strieber. Only part of the cover was visible, but the title began with Com-, and there was what looked like part of a slanted almond shape suggesting a gray-alien eye as seen in the iconic Ted Jacobs painting on the cover of the first edition of Communion.
I soon found that I had been mistaken. The title of the book was actually Communication or Computation or something, and the shape was part of a larger illustration of something entirely different, resembling an alien eye only by coincidence.
Then I noticed that shelved just above this Communion impostor was a book on the subject of birds in the sacred iconography of all religions. Now this was a really extraordinary coincidence, and I decided I'd better take a photo. Fortunately, I had a small digital camera in my hip pocket (not a smartphone, as I would have had in real life). Unfortunately, as I was trying to get it out of my pocket, not-Communion and some other books on that shelf slipped out of position, ruining the shot. I couldn't reach them from where I was. Rather, I would have to take the ladder outside and get at them from the opposite direction. (Dream logic for you.)
The reason I thought this such a remarkable coincidence was that (in the dream) Whitley Strieber had written extensively about a certain bas-relief carving that was thought to be the oldest surviving depiction of a phoenix. In my own research on this carving, I had discovered that it was housed in a museum, and that just below it in the museum display was another book that might be mistaken at first glance for a coffee-table edition of Communion. I had a theory -- I should probably post about it on my Strieber blog, I thought -- that this was what had drawn Strieber's attention to that particular carving in the first place. Yes, the post would be called "What made Strieber notice that ancient phoenix carving?"
Since I was up there already, I decided to page through the bird iconography book and see if it had a photo of the carving in question. It did, though the caption identified it not as a phoenix but as "an early Tibetan dhier" or something like that -- some exotic spelling that looked as if it would be pronounced deer. The facing page was a plate with several pictures showing various cartoon characters that were birds. I didn't recognize any of them. One of the pictures showed a group of four anthropomorphic animal characters: a cat, a fox, a bird, and what the caption called "a voidoid." I guessed this must be some sort of mascot invented by the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which was later picked up by whoever made the cartoon.
When I went outside with the ladder, I somehow ended up inside a museum, where I got completely lost. One of the exhibits was a series of "moving paintings" (as in Harry Potter) depicting great alchemists smoking, surrounded by big clouds of smoke. I gathered that what they were smoking was the elixir of life, the great secret being that it was something you smoked rather than drank. I also passed a scientific exhibit with a big sign that said "Is Mars like heaven?"
I woke up before I had managed to find my way out of the museum.
In the Whitley Streiber Gary Lachman interview I listened to yesterday, they mentioned the famous 1960 French book The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Today I randomly wondered whether anyone had ever written a book called The Afternoon of the Magicians. I mean, obviously someone must have, right? It's as inevitable a title as A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man or A Farewell to Legs.
Google returned only one hit, a Russian site that didn't seem to be referring to a real book.
I switched to image search and got 13 results. Eight were for Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberer. Two were for The Morning of the Magicians. Two were captioned The Morning of the Magicians but had photos of the cover of The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The remaining one was this:
If you click the link, it goes to the Amazon page for The Morning of the Magicians. No idea how that picture got to be associated with that link.
The really weird thing is that I own an epub of that book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (2014) by David McGowan, but have never read it and can't for the life of me remember the circumstances under which I learned of its existence and decided to download it.
Note: Typo corrected. It would be beyond weird if I owned a work published in 2104!
In King James English, both pirates are correct. Be is used with all subjects in the subjunctive (e.g., with if, though, whether, lest. etc.), but in the indicative (i.e., normal sentences), it is in free variation with are. The clearest demonstration of this is this passage from Matthew, which uses both forms within a single verse:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it (Matth. 19:12).
Nothing grammatically distinguishes the third bolded phrase from the first two; "there are" and "there be" are interchangeable in the plural.
Here's another pair of examples:
And Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the LORD, to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses (Josh. 24:22).
Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets (Matt. 23:31).
Here's another, spoken by the same people within a single chapter:
We are all one man’s sons; we are true men, thy servants are no spies (Gen. 42:11).
We be twelve brethren, sons of our father; one is not, and the youngest is this day with our father in the land of Canaan (Gen. 42:32).
But you will only find examples like this for be and are -- never for be and is, or am, or art. Indicative be with a singular subject, à la Oscar Gamble, is not the King's English.
I didn't really understand this in childhood, and so when I wanted to write archaic-sounding English, I often used constructions such as "I be Robin Hood" -- which is wrong, though "We be the Merry Men" would have been fine.
