Modern "environmentalism" encapsulated in a single headline

They're taking environmental protection just as seriously as they were taking public health a few years ago:

Drill, baby, drill!

Just before waking, in the early hours of March 10, I had two brief dreams. The second, recounted in "Britbong dolphin (600, 300)," turned out to have multiple links to the Dolphin Drilling company and the Byford Dolphin disaster of 1983, dubbed "the worst diving accident in history."

The first, which I didn't both posting about at the time but have in my dream notes, barely even qualifies as a dream. It was simply a still image that persisted for 15 seconds or so before fading to black: the face of a mandrill. Later, when a comment by WanderingGondola connected the Britbong Dolphin with the Byford Dolphin, it crossed my mind that there was a sort of punning link there -- drill being both a kind of monkey and the business of the Dolphin Drilling company -- but the connection seemed too minor to be worth noting on the blog.

Then, on March 11, came the syncs documented in "A non-Hindu interpretation of Vishnu crossing the water": An earthquake drill (a third sense of the word!) was connected with a picture of monkeys with a dolphin in the background. The mandrill connects semantically with the monkeys and phonetically with the earthquake drill, with the dolphin hinting at the third meaning of drilling for oil.

The monkeys in the Hindu picture are building a bridge, and each is shown holding a large rock over its head.

This morning, one of my students asked me to read her a story: The Billy Goats Gruff. The story (which is Norwegian) is of course about a troll and a bridge, and it made me think of this bit in The Fellowship of the Ring, just before the Balrog makes its appearance:

Two great trolls appeared; they bore great slabs of stone, and flung them down to serve as gangways over the fire.

These trolls, like the monkeys in the Ramayana, carry large rocks which they use to create a bridge.

Thinking again about the mandrill dream-image, I remembered a poem that was in an anthology my family owned. It's just a bit of lightweight comic verse, but it really used to give me the willies as a child. After a bit of searching, I found it on the Internet, with the illustration that was in the anthology:

"And that odd name / The Mandrill -- can / it be he hopes / to BE a man?" -- that stuck in my memory, in condensed form as "The Mandrill hopes to be a Man," and I found it very frightening. I often used to think about a man who was secretly a mandrill, or a mandrill that was secretly a man, and it gave me goosebumps.

The feeling was complicated by the fact that the Mandrill was inextricably associated in my mind with the Hobgoblin. This was thanks to an illustration in one of my D&D manuals, in which a hobgoblin was made to look rather mandrill-like, but Shakespeare's Hobgoblin -- that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow -- was also in the mix.

I tracked down the D&D illustration that was responsible for this association. Here it is:

The picture itself is not particularly interesting, but where I found it was in a blog post called "Deep Dive - The Hobgoblin." This is apparently one in a series of "deep dives" into the history of various D&D monsters, and it begins with an apology for the fact that this particular dive isn't actually all that deep:

So why did this Deep Dive almost not happen? One might think it would be easy to find a plethora of information on this creature, and it was. The problem was that all the information remained basically the same. . . . A Deep Dive should demand that we drill down just a little further than everyone else and find those little nuggets of information that people never knew about.

Do deep dives involve drilling? Apparently they do. Again, this links back to Dolphin Drilling and the worst diving accident in history.

Curious about the Conrad Aiken who had written "The Mandrill," I looked up the original in his book Cats and Bats and Things with Wings. Here is the original illustration, which has more than a little of the Hobgoblin in it:

What is on the page immediately before the Mandrill illustration? We have returned, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to the Billy Goats Gruff:

"What kind of heaven / will it be? / A hill, and on the hill a tree."

I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot. . . . And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me: Look! And I looked and beheld a tree; and it was like unto the tree which my father had seen; and the beauty thereof was far beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty; and the whiteness thereof did exceed the whiteness of the driven snow (1 Ne. 11:1, 8).

Robin is in the tree? Is it really Robin Redbreast, or could it perhaps be Robin Rednose, yclept Goodfellow?

The thing the Billy goats most want to eat is a book. As Bill (no relation) recently reminded us, "Joseph Smith indicated that people eating books, at least in some cases, signifies them taking on a responsibility or job, as the case was with John."

St. Mark and the fleur-de-lis

In a March 10 comment (still March 9 in her time zone), Debbie highlights the connection between the fleur-de-lis and the Doge of Venice:

Today (March 9) as I was researching the Doge Palace

in Venice, I came across this information

Copy and paste:

"In Italy, fleurs-de-lis have been used for some papal crowns

and coats of arms, the Farnese Dukes of Parma, and by some

*** doges of Venice."

The patron saint of Venice is St. Mark, whose symbol is the winged lion. This fact has appeared in several recent posts here, starting with "Doge of Venice" on March 2.

Today, March 12, I was walking through the city and happened to pass this storefront:

There's a sweatshirt that says "ST. MARK'S 1958-59 C.Y.O. CHAMPS," and just above it a baseball cap bearing a fleur-de-lis. To the left are several sneakers also bearing the fleur-de-lis.

A non-Hindu interpretation of Vishnu crossing the water

Yesterday, at around 10:00 a.m., I supervised an earthquake drill at a local school. The routine is that the children first hide under their desks for a minute and then, when given the okay, file out of the classroom while holding their backpacks on top of their heads for protection. I didn't take any photos, but here's one from the Internet of a similar event to give you an idea of what it looked like:

About an hour and a half later (12:34), I was going to look something up on archive.org but, as often happens, autocomplete gave me https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ -- a random archived thread from /x/. When that happens, I always go ahead and see what the random thread is. It included this picture:

This is a scene from the Ramayana, where the Vanaras (monkey people) help Rama build a bridge from India to Sri Lanka. But of course when I looked at it, its significance to me had nothing to do with that traditional story but instead suggested a group of children holding their backpacks over their heads while evacuating their school during an earthquake drill.

On the evening of the same day, I listened to a newly uploaded YouTube video: Internet atheist Alex O'Connor (of whom my first impression was not great) interviewing Jacob Hansen, an apologist for the Great and Unabbreviable Church:

At around the 1:44 mark, Hansen, in trying to justify Joseph Smith's claim that illustrations from common Egyptian funerary documents actually depict scenes in the life of Abraham, gives an analogy of Hindu iconography being interpreted in non-Hindu terms:

Imagine that you had a group of Christians that were living in India, and they began to use Hindu iconography to tell Christian stories. So like let's say you have a boat, and in it there's these 12 cows, and Vishnu is walking on the water. Like you could see how a Christian would look at that and say this is the story of Vishnu, or, I'm sorry, this is the story of Jesus walking on the water, but a Hebrew expert would look at that and say, no, you got it wrong; that's Vishnu.

This obviously parallels what I had just done earlier that afternoon: looked at a Hindu picture and connected it with a completely unrelated non-Hindu incident. It gets more specific, though. Hansen's example -- which is completely made-up and has nothing to do with actual Hinduism -- featured "Vishnu walking on the water." In the Ramayana picture, the Vanaras are building a bridge so that Rama -- an avatar of Vishnu -- can walk across the water to Sri Lanka.

Also notice that there is a dolphin in the water in the Ramayana picture, tying it to my "Britbong dolphin (600, 300)" dream. In the comments on that post, the dream was tied both to Big Ben and to the recent news story about a ship collision in the North Sea. Bill specially mentioned the red color of one of the ships in the collision.

Today, I clicked for another random /x/ thread and got this:

That's a parody of 9/11, with red buses crashing into twin Big Ben towers.

Bill's reason for highlighting the redness of the ship was to connect it with the Rose Stone in his story. The ship was called the Stena Immaculate; stena means "stone," and its red color would make it a "rose" stone. Rose as a color is not red, though, but pink -- and we see the Vanaras carrying big pink stones to build Rama's bridge.

Britbong dolphin (600, 300)

I dreamed that Byron showed me something he had drawn: a simple pencil sketch of a dolphin with a caption under it reading "britbong dolphin," and under that a pair of coordinates something like "(600, 300)."

Since britbong is 4chan slang for a British person, I said, "So those coordinates are in the UK somewhere?"

"In the North Sea," said Byron, "in an area frequented by British ships."

⁂

Making a drawing with associated "coordinates" is something I would associate with remote viewing.

Obviously, numbers like 600 and 300 can't be latitude and longitude, but adding decimal points solves the problem:

It's much closer to Norway than to Bongland, but it's in the North Sea and might for all I know be an area frequented by British ships. Dolphins here would be white-beaked, or possibly bottlenoses at the extreme northern end of their range.

Note added: In a comment, WanderingGondola is reminded of a song called "Byford Dolphin," named after an oil drilling rig that had a notable accident in Frigg gas field -- at 59°52′48.48″N 2°3′59.40″E, very close to the coordinates shown above. Note how visually similar Byford and Byron are. The person in my dream didn't really look like Lord Byron, but I just knew that that was his name.

Frigg gas field is located right on the boundary between British and Norwegian waters, and the Byford Dolphin was operated by Dolphin Drilling, a British company based in Aberdeen, Scotland. There are three rigs currently operated by Dolphin Drilling: Blackford Dolphin, Borgland Dolphin, and Paul B. Loyd Jr. WG's comment began "'Dolphin', combined with those B-words . . ." -- apparently the company operated more than one "B-word Dolphin" rig. The one that stands out the most is of course the Borgland Dolphin. In my original post, influenced by the use of Britbong in the dream, I referred to Britain as Bongland -- differing from Borgland by a single stroke of a single letter.

I knew nothing about any of that, and I would have remained ignorant had WG not happened to be familiar with a "very indie" musical artist (too obscure to be on Wikipedia) called Conelrad. What are the odds?

I can't say I see what oil rigs in the North Sea have to do with anything, but we'll see if the sync fairies take it anywhere interesting.

More lions and doves

My last post explored the theme of one active lion, two "lazy" or stationary lions, and pigeons or doves. Another painting with this theme is Frederick Stuart Church's 1892 The Sorceress:

There are three lions in the picture -- either lionesses or young males -- of which two are "lazy" or motionless, while the third is walking. The sorceress (a "lassie") holds some sort of crystal ball or something, from which ghostly white birds emanate and fly over the two stationary lions.

In Library Lion, too, it is the stationary lions that have doves flying over or landing on them.

Lions and doves

In a comment on my last post, Bill contrasts the title character in Library Lion with the two "lazy lions lounging in the local library" in Animalia:

There are two important distinctions between this Lion and the two Lions in the Animalia illustration. First, it is a single Lion instead of two. Second, this Lion is a very active Lion (being reminded not to run), while the other two Library Lions are specifically called out as Lazy, and shown to be so in the picture - definitely not having interest in running, as in addition to lazy they are also specifically 'lounging' Lions - pretty much the opposite of running.

For these reasons, and others in my mind, if I had to bet I would say this Lion is a different one symbolically than the other two, though I personally think you are right that the Lassie book connects them.

In fact, as I look at and think about that picture with the two Lions, I imagine that those Lions really shouldn't be there. They don't belong there, based on how they are treating the place, but were permitted in for various reasons. A phrase Leo shared would suggest that Jesus himself permitted this to happen.

In fact, Library Lion includes both the single active lion of the title and a pair of entirely stationary ("lazy") lions. The latter lions don't go inside the library ("They don't belong there") but stand guard outside it. They do not appear in the story itself but can be seen, together with the active lion, on the title page:

At the end of the book, after the last page of the story proper, we see the two stone lions again:

I wouldn't really have noticed these two illustrations if not for Bill's comment, but now that I have done so, it is interesting to compare the two. In each picture, one of the stone lions has a pigeon flying just above it, while the other has a pigeon sitting on its right ear, with its head down as if whispering a message to the lion. The position of these lions and pigeons is exactly the same in each picture, as if each is capturing the same moment in time. The main difference, though, is the central figure. On the title page, it is a live lion preparing to go through the Green Door and into the library. At the end of the book, it is a third pigeon. If, as the background suggests, these are two pictures of the same moment, that implies that the the lion and the pigeon are two different representations of the same central figure.

The juxtaposition of lions and pigeons made me think of Walter Crane's picture The Wilderness Shall Blossom as the Rose, which also features these two animals:

The inscription on the banner is a condensed version of Isaiah 35:1 -- "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." The inclusion of a lion in Crane's painting is curious, since Isaiah makes a point of saying that this animal will not be found in the blossoming wilderness:

No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there (Isa. 35:9).

Why then does Crane so prominently depict a lion? Well, Isaiah's language implies that the wilderness did harbor lions prior to its blossoming, so the only interpretation that makes sense to me is that the lion walking behind the dove has the same meaning as the monkey walking behind the caveman in Rudolph Zallinger's iconinc March of Progress illustration: the transformation of the one into the other.

As the hostile desert blossoms and becomes a hospitable land, the lion that formerly stalked it transforms into a harmless dove. The same transformation appears to have taken place between the beginning and the end of Library Lion.

By the way, I have quoted Isaiah 35 here before -- in another Animalia-inspired post, "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy."

Note added: Library Lion also includes a winged lion. This is the emblem of St. Mark, which, in "Doge of Venice," brought the library lions back into the sync stream.

Looking up lion of venice, I found this photo, in which a bird is sitting on the lion's head:

A Lassie-like library lion, and a ceiling fan on Mars

The Animalia illustration of lions in a library, one of them with Lassie Come Home in its mouth, recently reentered the sync-stream in "Doge of Venice" (and earlier, in "The round plates of the Gospel of Luke -- with lobsters and turtlified cherubim"). Here's the full image:

Today I had the idea of searching for lion library just to see what would turn up. What I found was a 2006 children's book by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes called Library Lion.

The story is that a lion shows up at a library one day and begins spending a lot of time there. Mr. McBee, who works at the circulation desk, doesn't want him there, but Miss Merriweather, the head librarian soon warms up to him (so long as he doesn't break any rules) and puts him to work dusting encyclopedias with his tail and that sort of thing.

Then one day Miss Merriweather falls while trying to reach a book from the top shelf. She sends the lion to get help, which he does by running to Mr. McBee and roaring at him.

In other words, the lion acts like Lassie! The one thing everyone knows about Lassie -- even if, like me, they've never read the book or watched the TV series -- is that when little Timmy falls down the well, he sends Lassie to get help, which she does by barking until someone follows her to the well and saves Timmy. That's who Lassie is: the dog who ran to get help for someone who had fallen.

I was trying to find a suitable picture of Timmy telling Lassie to go get help, but all I could find were various parodies. Eventually, I found this YouTube video claiming that this iconic episode never actually happened. Apparently it's some sort of Mandela Effect.

The video explaining that Timmy never fell down a well is from a channel called Ceiling Fan Man, and it begins with an image of a ceiling fan with Mars -- helpfully labeled -- in the background.

What brought my attention back to the lions in the library and Lassie Come Home was a painting of the Doge of Venice with the emblem of St. Mark -- a winged lion with a book -- above his throne. In the post I specially mentioned that Mark means "of Mars" and is thus a link to Elon Musk, who is obsessed with that planet.

The ceiling fan has a light attached, which is a link back to my 2023 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more." That post mentions the deseret, or honeybees, in the Book of Mormon. "Christopher, Columbus, and Elon Musk," the post that introduced the Doge of Venice painting, also mentions deseret and honeybees. One of the main characters in Library Lion is Mr. McBee.

Our friend Debbie also has a name that means "bee" -- and, oddly enough, her full name also includes a direct etymological link to Mars.

As for the ceiling fan itself, the main thing it reminds me of is the poltergeist attack of 2019.

Update: This is beyond insane. Ceiling Fan Man is based in the United States and joined YouTube on August 6, 2019. I just checked my old emails about the poltergeist, and it tore our ceiling fan off the ceiling on the morning of August 7, 2019, Taiwan time — which would still be August 6 in the US. That’s an absolutely impossible coincidence, but it can be verified by anyone who was in our email group back in 2019.

Update 2: Bill, whatever you do, don’t watch this Ceiling Fan Man video:

Doge of Venice

My last post included a Spanish painting of Columbus before the Senate of Venice. Partially visible above the Doge’s throne is a lion holding a book. This is the symbol of the patron saint of Venice, St. Mark — whose name, as Bill recently pointed out in connection with Karl Marx, means “of Mars.”

I had included this picture as a link between Columbus and Musk’s DOGE. Musk is closely associated with the planet Mars, so that’s another link.

A more important link is that the Doge meme is a yellow dog. The image of a lion with a book has appeared on this blog before, and on the cover of that book, Lassie Come Home, is a yellow dog.

It gets better. One of the links between Elon and Columbus in my last post was the prophecy in 1 Nephi 13 about a “man among the gentiles.” Mormons traditionally understand this person to be Columbus, but Leo recently proposed that he might be Elon. Whoever he is, he is described by Nephi as bringing to the Lehite remnant a book “that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew.” My earlier posts had identified Lassie Come Home — which proceeds out of the mouth of a lion, emblem of the House of Judah — with that very book.

Such wow.

Christopher, Columbus, and Elon Musk

My last post, "Batless baseball and the Japanese Eraser Dog," highlighted a photo of Elon Musk wearing what was described only as "a baseball cap." I hadn't noticed it was actually a MAGA cap until Debbie pointed it out in a comment. In her reading, the black MAGA cap represents Elon's role as "captain of this ship":

IMO, Musk has been told to wear the Dark MAGA CAP, to show ( for those who have eyes to see) who really is the CAPTAIN of this ship we currently know as America.

This reminded me that I had posted about a black MAGA hat back in 2021, several months before the #DarkMAGA hashtag first appeared and years before Elon Musk was in any way associated with MAGA. In my November 2021 post "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected," I wrote, punning on the fact that maga means "witch" in Latin:

This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat. My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red.

That post begins, though, with a discussion of a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh toy wearing a T-shirt that says "Mischievous Dog." Winnie-the-Pooh is yellow, the same color as the Doge meme, so I searched for "michievous doge" just to see what would turn up. It turns out there's a meme image with exactly that name:

Another search result I got was for a game called Doge and Bee, in which you must "protect the mischievous doge from the attack of ferocious bees."

This ties right in with my 2021 post, the title of which includes Deseret -- a Mormon word meaning "honeybee." This picture from the Doge and Bee game also confirms the link between the mischievous dog(e) and Winnie-the-Pooh:

Dogs don't climb trees, but bears do; and Pooh in particular has been known to climb trees in quest of honey.

The post goes on to talk about Christopher Columbus and St. Christopher. I wouldn't ordinarily have associated Columbus with Musk, but note how Debbie calls Musk "the captain of this ship" and says he can be identified as such by the black hat he wears.

There's also this painting of Columbus before the Doge of Venice:

The most direct Columbus-Musk link, though, comes from our friend Leo, whose February 27 post "Gray Iluvatar" tentatively identifies Musk with a figure from Book of Mormon prophecy:

I think that possibility makes Elon Musk a prime candidate for the "man among the gentiles" upon whom the spirit of god is wrought. There’s no denying Elon is a singular individual, and I once mused on a few possible explanations for his existence. He is famously obsessed with getting to Mars and has made remarkable advances in space travel to that end. It got me thinking about what elvish might reveal about him.

For Leo, the identity of the "man among the gentiles" is a mystery, but for more traditional Mormons it is not. The man among the gentiles is universally understood to be Christopher Columbus.

The 2021 post also discusses the legendary St. Christopher, who is traditionally portrayed with the head of a dog and bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain meme.

According to legend, Christopher wanted to serve the most powerful king of all. First he served the King of Canaan, but when he learned that the king feared the devil, he went and served the devil instead. Then, learning that the devil feared Christ, he became a servant of Christ. Musk has followed this same pattern, being a Democrat when the Democrats were in power and then switching to MAGA once it was clear that Trump was going to win. More specifically, Christopher's stint as a servant of the devil calls to mind the time Musk dressed up as the "Devil's Champion."

It's a Halloween costume, which is also the capacity in which the black maga hat first appeared on this blog.

Batless baseball and the Japanese Eraser Dog

A comment by Bill on my last post sent me back to my December 2024 post “Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One.” One of the dreams recounted there is about a game of baseball played without bats, and one of the players is a “Japanese eraser dog.”

I can’t find the comment now, but someone (Debbie maybe?) pointed out that the Japanese eraser dog ties in with Elon Musk’s DOGE, which is named after a Japanese dog (shiba inu) and is tasked with “erasing” programs deemed wasteful. 

Just this morning I read an article drawing attention to the fact that Elon came to a Cabinet meeting “wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap” (but not bringing a bat, of course).

The same sentence also accuses Elon of “hovering like he’s the mastermind,” which I guess is a link to the Cunning One.

A book of Egyptian plates, and The Chip

The sync theme of a round plate or book of plates, also called a “chip,” has recently resurfaced. Today, walking into a used bookstore for the first time in several weeks, I had a hunch that I might find something related to that theme, and such proved to be the case. I found these two books on the same shelf.

This is the first volume of A Description of Egypt — a volume consisting exclusively of “plates.” Both the golden plates and the brass plates were written in some form of “Egyptian.”

And just a few inches away on the shelf, a book titled simply The Chip.

Asking what the Kingdom and its Keys are

A couple of days ago, I listened to two videos by alt-Mormon YouTuber Adam Boyle, "Kingdom and Keys Pt 1 - the battleground" and "The Mystery of KEYS - Kingdom and Keys Pt 2." The first video begins thus:

Okay, we're going to spend a few videos, a series of videos, on the subject of the Kingdom of God and the Keys of the Kingdom, and the reason I need to talk about this is because I realize in talking to people that there is a big misunderstanding about what the Kingdom of God is, where it is, and what the Keys of the Kingdom are, who holds them, and what they're for.

So he makes it clear that he's going to be questioning the traditional Mormon and Catholic understanding of what the Keys of the Kingdom are. In the second video, he identifies the Keys not with priestly or institutional authority but with knowledge:

Our hypothesis is that the Word of God contains the Keys of the Kingdom, and by Keys of the Kingdom means it contains the way, the knowledge of the way to get into the Kingdom of God.

Today I checked the Orthosphere blog, of which I am not really a regular reader, and found a post by JMSmith called "What is the 'Kingdom of Heaven'? and What, Consequently, are its 'Keys'?" in which he also presents alternative interpretations of those concepts. Just as Adam identifies the Keys with knowledge, Smith repeatedly connects them with what he calls "the gnosis of the Gospel."

I'm not really interested in the question of "keys" (a concept absent from both the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Mormon) and don't have anything to say on the topic. I just note the coincidence.

O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool?

My last post, published at 12:00, dealt with a sync between an  old post of mine and a recent one of Galahad Eridanus’s. In both posts, one of the four faces of the Cherubim had been replaced with a turtle. In GE’s post, it was the lion that had been replaced. In my own, it was the man — so, exactly parallel situations, except for the lion/man difference. Furthermore, my post had to do with Alice in Wonderland, and specifically the Gryphon character. GE’s post was published under the name Gryphon.

At around 1:00, an hour after publishing that post, I went to a large outdoor sink near my house to wash something. Inside the sink, sitting perfectly still, was a very wet mouse. It was so unexpected that it took me a second to process it as a living creature. Mice generally run away, so one rarely gets such a close look at them. The level of detail I was able to see, enhanced by the wet fur clinging close to its body, reminded me of Jerry Pinkney’s detailed illustrations for Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Mouse.

The mouse looked up at me for several seconds, motionless but for its breathing, and then commenced trying to scramble up the steep, slippery sides of the wet sink. “O Mouse,” I said to it mentally, quoting Alice, “do you know the way out of this pool?” It clearly didn’t, and I realized that I was going to save it just as the lion had spared the mouse in the fable — only I, instead of being a lion, was a man.

I managed to get the mouse safely out of the sink, and it scurried away, no doubt to dry itself off with a nice, dull lecture on the history of William the Conqueror.

The round plates of the Gospel of Luke -- with lobsters and turtlified cherubim

Note: I happened to publish this at exactly 12:00 midnight, and thus technically on Thursday. In the post, "today" means Wednesday.

We’re back in the sync-stream, boys.

This afternoon I was in my chapel doing my usual routine -- a five-decade Rosary followed by a meditation on a randomly selected Rider-Waite card.

I started praying the Luminous Mysteries and was nearly three decades in when I realized that today was Wednesday, not Thursday, and that I should have been praying the Glorious Mysteries instead (that being the standard Catholic schedule, which I have always followed). Since I'd already done over half of the Rosary, though, I decided to just keep going with the Luminous Mysteries and do the Glorious Mysteries tomorrow. To my knowledge, this is the first time I've ever accidentally prayed the "wrong" set of Mysteries.

After the Rosary, I drew a card to contemplate and got the Eight of Pentacles:

Although I'd never made the connection before, today the immediate association I made was with Tom Lovell's painting of Mormon engraving his golden plates, an image familiar to every Mormon.

The layout of the two pictures is just very similar, as are little details like the orange bench and the blue tunic. The pentacle the man is engraving -- a circular gold "plate" -- even leans against a wooden block with the same shape as Mormon's own plates. The pentacle in the lower right corner of the card is in the same position as Mormon's circular shield. One pentacle lies on the floor on the left side of the picture, and Mormon has put a document on the floor in the same place (the subject of my 2020 post "What book is Mormon trampling underfoot?")

Mormon's plates were rectangular, and other plates in Mormon lore -- the brass plates, the small plates, and the 24 Jaredite plates -- are typically pictured in that shape as well. However, the idea of round gold plates is something that has come up in my syncs quite a few times. Of these various round-plate references, the one that stuck in my mind as I contemplated the card was a 2020 dream that had featured a "round book," so after concluding my meditation, I searched my own blog for that phrase. The first hit that came back was not the dream itself ("How can these books not exist?") but a post from last summer called "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback"). I was going to scroll past that to the post I was looking for, but my attention was arrested by a picture of a big red lobster.

This morning, I had been observing another teacher working with preschoolers. He had a dozen or so laminated cards ("plates" of a sort), each with a picture and an English word, and he had laid these out in front of him on a small rug in a way suggestive of a Tarot reader's spread. Most of these were extremely simple words -- dog, bag, red, that kind of thing -- and the one card that stood out as different, having a word that was both less common word and phonetically more complicated, was the one that said lobster and had a big red lobster on it. It struck me as vaguely significant at the time, and seeing the lobster in the Gospel of Luke post definitely felt like a sync-fairy calling card.

Reading that post, I found that my train of associations had taken me from "lobsterback:" to British soldiers to Britain as Another Planet, the title of one of the books in the "round book" dream. Then, incredibly, the post ends with this paragraph (emphasis added):

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.

Yes, the post specifically mentions that the Luminous Mysteries are to be prayed on Thursdays (not on Wednesdays, as I had inadvertently done today), and it connects the "round book of plates" with a coin. The suit called Pentacles in the Rider-Waite is in more traditional Tarots known as the suit of Coins. In fact, the picture of the Eight of Pentacles I used in this post was taken from the Wikipedia article "Eight of Coins." The coin fell out of my pocket during the third Luminous Mystery, which is also the one I was on today when I realized I was doing the “wrong” set.

I also realized that the suit of Coins or Pentacles corresponds to the Gospel of Luke. A longstanding Christian iconographic tradition identifies each of the four Evangelists with one of the four faces of the cherubim, which in turn correspond to the four fixed signs of the zodiac. Luke is associated with the bull, which is Taurus, which is Earth. In the Tarot, Coins or Pentacles is universally associated with that same element.

Now the plot thickens.

Last night, YouTube notified me that Galahad Eridanus had released a new video, after nearly a year and a half of silence. I watched the video but found it a bit underwhelming. A few things he said in the video, though, made it clear that he had been posting on Substack during the period of video silence. I went to his Substack, not expecting much, and read the most recent post, “The Puzzle Method.”

To illustrate the method of the title, Eridanus gave an example of a Jungian “active imagination” exercise he had done and how he had decoded its cryptic symbolism. In the exercise, he had seen a set of four images: a man’s head, a bulldozer, a bird, and a turtle. Noticing the “bull” in the word bulldozer, he identified this foursome as corresponding to the four faces of the cherubim -- with one puzzling exception:

Three out of four seemed to be clear allusions to the heads of a cherub. This did not seem accidental. But why the turtle where a lion should be?

The four heads of the cherub, except that one of them has been replaced with a turtle. This is such an extremely specific sync with one of my past posts here that it's hard to believe I didn't notice it immediately. I didn't, though. Not until that big red lobster entered the chat did I think of the Lobster Quadrille from Alice and my post last June, "Gryphon + Mock Turtle = Cherubim," about the illustration that accompanies it.

In that post, I wrote:

Mock turtle soup is traditionally made with a calf's head, and so the Mock Turtle in Alice is portrayed as a turtle with the head, tail, and back hooves of a calf. Its companion, the Gryphon, is of course part lion and part eagle.

This comes very close to matching the four component creatures of the Cherubim. According to Ezekiel, the Cherubim had the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. In John’s adaptation of this imagery in Revelation, the ox actually becomes a calf. In the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, we have these same four -- except that the man is replaced with a turtle.

I went on to give some lame astrological justification for the turtle as a stand-in for the man, while Eridanus is more direct in identifying the turtle as simply wrong. He interprets this "faulty" representation of the cherubim as meaning that "the part of me that should be like a lion is currently more akin to a turtle" and that this fault must be rectified.

Anyway, it's an extremely specific and unlikely link. How many people in the whole history of the universe have come up with the idea of the four faces of the cherubim except that one is replaced with a turtle? Just us two?

Eridanus's turtle had nothing to do with the Mock Turtle or the Alice books. There is nevertheless another very specific link. Although he goes by Galahad Eridanus on YouTube, and his blog URL is galahaderidanus.substack.com, his username on Substack is actually Gryphon -- the same unusual spelling used by Lewis Carroll for the Mock Turtle's dance partner.

Arise from the dust and be men

Yesterday, I received an email that included this analogy for the experience of bipolar disorder:

I liken a bipolar episode to the tide coming in on a sandcastle -- you can see each succeeding wave getting closer and closer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, and then the tide slowly eats away at the sandcastle bit by bit until there is nothing left but swirling water and blank sand. The tide always goes out again -- always-- but the sandcastle doesn’t just magically pop up again as soon as the coast is clear -- you are left with this expanse of blank sand that you then have to rebuild on from zero.

In this analogy, the destructive tide is an aspect of the self, of the same person who built the sandcastle in the first place. Rather than an external destructive force, it's a case of the manic-self or the depressed-self undoing what the normie-self has accomplished.

I realized that, while bipolar is an extreme case, all of us have experienced this to some degree: A particular aspect of the personality takes over and undoes the work of the aspect that was previously in control. In my childhood journals, there's a very funny sequence of two entries. The first lays out my future career plan in considerable detail -- I was going to do biological research in South America -- and insists with great earnestness that I am absolutely committed to this and that "it can and will be accomplished." The very next entry says simply, "Don't pay any attention to what I wrote yesterday. I don't know what got into me."

I was reminded of a quote from Ouspensky, which I looked up last night and pasted into a draft email, thinking I would perhaps reference it in my reply to the sandcastle email. This is the passage I copied:

Unless he attains inner unity man can have no ‘I,’ can have no will. The concept of “will” in relation to a man who has not attained inner unity is entirely artificial. The whole of life is composed of small things which we continually obey and serve. Our ‘I’ continually changes as in a kaleidoscope. Every external event which strikes us, every suddenly aroused emotion, becomes caliph for an hour, begins to build and govern, and is, in its turn, as unexpectedly deposed and replaced by something else. And the inner consciousness, without attempting to disperse the illusory designs created by the shaking of the kaleidoscope and without understanding that in reality the power that decides and acts is not itself, endorses everything and says about these moments of life in which different external forces are at work, “This is I, this is I.”

Also last night, I finished my latest rereading of the First Book of Nephi. Thus today I started the Second Book, where I read this, from Lehi's dying words to his wayward sons Laman and Lemuel:

And now that my soul might have joy in you, and that my heart might leave this world with gladness because of you, that I might not be brought down with grief and sorrow to the grave, arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity (2 Ne. 1:21).

"Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men." I'd always thought this basically meant to cowboy up, but a few months ago I read D. John Butler's In the Language of Adam, which proposes that Lehi's language is alluding to an ancient ceremony in which, as in the modern Mormon temple ritual, the initiate assumes the role of Adam or Eve. The ritual command "Arise from the dust and be a man!" would be a synthesis of the Genesis 1 creation account (where God creates by commanding things to come into being) and the Genesis 2 account (where God forms man out of dust).

Not until today did I connect this command with what immediately follows it in Lehi's speech -- "be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things." Back in July 2024, in "The brown emmets, the Ace of Hearts, and drinking absinthe with yaks," I discussed "one heart and one mind" language elsewhere in Mormon scripture and proposed an alternative interpretation:

"They were of one heart and one mind" -- that could be read to mean that all the people shared a single mind, a group or "hive" mind (like that of a colony of emmets), which does not sound desirable. Another reading, though, is that each of them had one heart and one mind -- that is, an integrated self, not one torn apart by conflicting motives. "Purify your hearts, ye double minded," says James (James 4:8).

If we take this latter reading of "one mind and one heart," then it is clear how it ties in with the imagery of Adam being commanded to create himself out of the dust. Dust is in essence a collection of unconnected particles which do not cohere in any way to form a single thing -- ""the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither, to the dividing asunder" (Hel. 12:8), like the particles of glass in Ouspensky's kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscopic man "has not attained inner unity" -- has not yet become "of dust a living soul" (Moses 6:59). To do that, he who was dust must cohere "in one mind and in one heart, united" -- an integrated man, with a single will rather than Ouspensky's succession of caliphs-for-an-hour. Laman and Lemuel -- trying to murder Nephi one minute, ready to worship him the next; always repenting but never getting any better -- certainly seem to be the playthings of such a revolving-door caliphate.

The "one heart and one mind" language is usually understood to mean being one with others, not being one within ourselves, but according to James the one type of unity depends on the other: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1). Interpersonal conflict stems from intrapersonal conflict.

Tree of Life syncs

I went on a random walk this morning. In the past, I have done truly random walks, with the destination chosen by a computer program using a random number generator, but this time it was just "random" in the informal sense. I went to an unfamiliar part of town and just started walking, turning left or right whenever moved to do so by whim.

Synchronicity, after a prolonged period of great intensity, has for the most part returned to baseline levels in my life. These random walks, though, always seem to bring syncs. The first thing that caught my eye was a cell phone accessory shop with two big signs that said "L.D.S."

This apparently represented the three syllables of the shop's name, Ladesign, but of course the usual meaning of LDS is Latter-day Saints, a.k.a. Mormons.

Two minutes later, I passed a shop with a sign that said "D&C: Path to A Healthy Life."

Seeing this right after "L.D.S.," I naturally thought of the Mormon meaning of D&C -- The Doctrine and Covenants, a volume of scripture used along with the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern, so I began wondering whether a third Mormon-related shop sign would turn up soon. Three minutes later (these time periods are exact, based on timestamps on the photos I took), I found this:

The Mormon connection may not be immediately obvious here, but that logo shows a large building next to a tree bearing white fruit. This corresponds to the Book of Mormon's most iconic image: Lehi's vision of the Tree of Life. In this vision, the Tree bears fruit which is "most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted" and "white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen" (1 Ne. 8:11). Nearby, across the river from the Tree, is "a great and spacious building" (1 Ne. 8:26).

Recall that the second Mormon-looking sign I had seen said "Path to A Healthy Life." Another important element in Lehi's vision was "the path which led to the tree" (1 Ne. 8:22). Since the tree in question is the Tree of Life, the path could be called the Path to Life.

The sign with the tree bearing white fruit and the great and spacious building said "apple 203 brunch." I thought that the number could be read as a scripture reference -- either 20:3 (chapter 20, verse 3) or 2:03 (chapter 2, verse 3) -- and wondered if any verses with such references were relevant. Searching the Bible for the word apple, I found this:

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste (Song of Solomon 2:3).

"His fruit was sweet to my taste" is very close to the language of Lehi's vision.

Besides the white tree and the building, the sign also features a hamburger the bun of which is an apple. The apple has been cut in half and now serves as "bread." This ties in with another 203 scripture:

And it came to pass that he brake bread again and blessed it, and gave to the disciples to eat (3 Ne. 20:3).

This is Jesus, and he later states that the bread represents himself: "He that eateth this bread eateth of my body" (3 Ne. 20:8). When Nephi sees his own version of the Tree of Life vision, it is strongly implied that the Tree represents Mary and the fruit is Jesus. (See 1 Ne. 11:20-21.) Jesus is both the Fruit of Life and the Bread of Life, so the fruit serving as bread on the sign makes sense.

Update: Almost exactly two days after taking the photo above with the white apples -- 47 hours and 41 minutes later, to be precise -- I ran across another sign with a white apple on it: