Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS

Over at Black Dog Star, in his first post in nearly a year, the inimitable Richard Arrowsmith takes a synchromystical look at "3i/ATLAS through the lens of Jennifer Lopez." Not an approach you're likely to see anywhere else.

Trump chaos

Last night, between 11:00 and 11:30 p.m., I downloaded an electronic copy of Gary Lachman's 2018 book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. I enjoyed the only other Gary Lachman book I've read so far, and I thought it would be interesting to see an occult-savvy political normie's take on 4chan meme magic and such. I read the introduction immediately and then, since I'm already reading several other books, set it aside to read later.

One of the things Lachman says in the introduction is this:

Trump seems to be something of a "natural" chaos magician too. . . . If one word captures for many the character of Trump's time in office so far, it would have to be "chaos."

This afternoon I checked my blogroll. I saw a new post by Andrew Anglin, which was said at 4:30 to have been posted "17 hours ago" -- meaning around 11:30 last night, the same time I downloaded Dark Star Rising and read the introduction associating Trump with the word chaos.

I haven't looked at the post yet, but the title is "Why is Trump Creating All of This Chaos? Is It a Conspiracy?"

It's unfortunate that all of the great explorers have already passed away.

This sentence -- created for the purpose of practicing certain subtleties of English pronunciation, its meaning being quite beside the point -- is in one of the textbooks I use, and as things worked out, November 11 was the day I had my students repeating it again and again.

Five days previous, on November 6, James Watson had died. I mostly agree with Bruce's assessment that with his death there are no great scientists still living (Roger Penrose being the one exception I would make).

A ground sloth in Los Angeles

Long-time readers will know I've published many posts documenting reading errors caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. I just experienced another today. Turning a "page" on my electronic copy of David McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, I became aware of the phrase ground sloth on the page even though it wasn't actually there. A second later, I had spotted where that impression had come from:

This unusual in that three lines contributed to the error. We have Los with th directly below it (forming the word sloth, with the s transposed) and just below that is grounds (ground followed by s as in sloth).

An interesting coincidence is that Greystone Mansion, mentioned in close proximity to the phantom ground sloth, is just a few miles from the La Brea Tar Pits, a famous deposit of Pleistocene fossils including more than 70 specimens of giant ground sloth.

Ground sloths at the La Brea Tar Pits, detail of a 1921 mural by Charles R. Knight

Klan movies

When I got home last night, my wife asked me a lot of questions about the Ku Klux Klan. She had just watched a movie, A Time to Kill (1996), in which the Klan played a role in the plot, an she wanted to know more about them. I provided a brief history. I'd never seen the movie and knew nothing about it, but when she told me it had two White men brutally rape a little Black girl and that it was "inspired by a true story," I correctly predicted -- it's like shooting fish in a barrel -- that the attackers and victim had been race-swapped and that the movie was written and directed by members of a certain tiny ethnic minority.

(In fairness, the race-swapping was done by John Grisham, not by the people who made the movie.)

After we'd finished our little conversation about the Klan and this movie featuring them, I sat down to read David McGowan's Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (see "Afternoon of the Magicians"). This is the very first sentence I read:

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Williams also tried his hand at acting, including a co-starring role alongside O.J. Simpson in 1974's The Klansman.

Boomer rock stars are, shockingly, old now

On November 8, I posted "A 'strolling' Clash concert," about a dream in which I saw that band live but "didn't think they looked like the Clash" in part because they "were very old."

The Clash formed in May 1976, about 50 years ago. Were Joe Strummer alive today, he would be 73 years old.

Today I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, dated November 10, titled "Fans Can't Believe How Much Rock Singer Has Aged In The Last 50 Years."

Coincidence and magic

Several times on this blog I've noted the difficulty of deciding whether a given striking correspondence should be classified as synchronicity or precognition. To take a fairly recent example, in my July 13 post "Silver in the ears," I describe how I was trying to come up with a good historical example of cruelty and thought of Genghis Khan pouring molten silver into a prisoner's ears. Then later the same day, the vet gave me some ear drops of which the active ingredient was silver particles. I introduced the story as "a random sync," but by the end of the post I was wondering whether it might not actually have been "subconscious precognition" on my part. All instances of possible precognition are subject to this ambiguity. If some thought or dream of mine turns out to correspond to some real event that had not yet happened at the time, did the future event somehow cause my thought (precognition), or is the correspondence between the two just a striking coincidence (synchronicity)?

In Dreaming Ahead of Time, Gary Lachman discusses this question. The context is some precognition experiments carried out in the 1970s by the physicist Helmut Schmidt:

Schmidt devised experiments to test if volunteers could predict random sub-atomic events. Over a series of some 60,000 trials he arrived at positive results that were a billion to one against chance. 'Against chance' means that the results were better than could be expected if arrived at randomly, that is, by coincidence. So the tests were actually a means of sequestering coincidence, limiting its importance as a causal factor.

This is true of practically all parapsychological experiments: they aim to show whether some agency other than chance was at work in producing the results. If a scientist intent on dismissing precognition wanted to, he or she could say that what Schmidt's results showed was a strange ability in his volunteers to 'create' coincidences, to 'make them happen'. In this case, it would be a coincidence between the guesses of his volunteers and the actual random sub-atomic events. So it could be said that what Schmidt and other parapsychologists had statistical evidence for wasn't precognition, or other paranormal powers, but a peculiar and hitherto unknown ability in some humans to produce coincidences -- which, on the face of it, seems rather odd. I would say that an ability to produce coincidences does not seem that distant from what we call 'magic'.

Well, some stories of magic obviously go beyond the realm of coincidence -- if a witch turns someone into a newt, it is meaningless to try to calculate the odds of his spontaneously turning into a newt by chance -- but an awful lot of "magic" does seem to fall under this umbrella. Magically knowing what should be unknowable (precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.) can be conceptualized as a coincidence between one's thoughts and reality. Magically controlling people and things can -- provided they don't do anything physically impossible -- be thought of as a coincidence between what you want them to do and what they do in fact do.

Certain people, myself included, do seem to be "coincidence magnets" who experience more than our fair share of striking coincidences. I think this falls short of magic, though, because although we can be said in some sense to "cause" coincidences to happen, the coincidences themselves are spontaneous and unpredictable. There is no ability to cause specific coincidence to occur "in conformity with the will" (part of Crowley's famous definition of magic). Divination counts as magic because, as John Opsopaus notes, "Synchronistic phenomena are usually spontaneous, but in divination we arrange for a synchronistic event to take place." Just being a coincidence magnet doesn't count, though.

Suppose, though, that you were a coincidence magnet who wanted to graduate to magician. How would you go about it? Well, suppose you wanted some event, X, to happen, but it was not something you could easily control. You would find things you could easily control which "corresponded" to X in some way, such that if you did them and then X happened, people would say, "What a coincidence!" One common form of coincidence is that you think about something and then it happens, so you could spend lots of time thinking about and visualizing the desired event; you've reinvented the "law of attraction" and "affirmations." You could create symbolic objects and do symbolic actions specially designed to correspond to the desired event; you've reinvented "sympathetic magic." None of this would be a surefire abracadabra, but if you really are a coincidence magnet, such actions should greatly increase the odds of the desired event happening.

Back in 2012, in the post "Coincidences in connection with my late cat," I noted a coincidence that reminded me of voodoo:

A day or two after the diagnosis [of feline leukemia], my wife was taking her keys out of her motorcycle and dropped them on the pavement. Her keychain has a figurine of a seated black cat (the Egyptian goddess Bastet), and when it hit the pavement, one of the cat’s legs broke off. I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, man. That’s an omen.”

I was thinking in general terms -- bad news for the cat -- but the omen turned out to be a pretty literal one. Several days after the keychain broke, MacGyver, whose eyesight was the first casualty of the leukemia, wandered off the edge of a staircase and fell, injuring one of his legs. It wasn’t the same leg that the Bastet figurine lost -- you can’t expect that kind of voodoo-like precision -- but it was close enough to seem uncanny. Fortunately, the injury was not serious, and he recovered quickly.

This is almost certainly how people first got the idea for actual voodoo dolls and similar practices. First you notice an omen that seems to prefigure injury, and then you reason that if you deliberately create such an omen, you can cause injury. And if the "coincidence magnet" premise has any truth to it, you probably can.

(I suppose I should mention at this point that I myself do not and will not ever practice black magic of this kind -- though I have to admit that if Joe Biden ever spontaneously combusts, I'll feel a little guilty.)

New Perspective: 56: You'll have to get over it.

While on the road this morning, I was thinking about my system of using three dice to consult the Minor Arcana and wondering if there were any way of modifying it so as to incorporate the Major Arcana as well. As I was thinking about this, a motorcyclist pulled in front of me wearing this jacket (photo from the Internet):

This motorcyclist stayed right in front of me for several minutes. Since there are 56 Minor Arcana, the message on the jacket seemed synchronistically relevant to what I was thinking about. At first I thought it was a rejection of my train of thought: "The 56 Minor Arcana alone. That's the new perspective, and you'll just have to get used to it." After a little more thought, though, I reached the opposite conclusion. Right now I can roll two dice for the 21 Trumps Major or three for the 56 Major Arcana, but I have to get over --i.e., exceed -- that number 56. The number I need is 78, and it will take a new perspective to get it.

This took place while I was on my way to a barber shop to get my head shaved. There was a new employee there, a woman with tattoos on her arms, and she was the one I got. On her left upper arm there were three tattoos: at the top, a lemniscate infinity-sign; below that, the words "things will turn out fine" in all-lowercase blackletter; below that, the familiar figure of the Grim Reaper -- a skeleton in a black cowl -- but holding a steaming mug of coffee instead of the usual scythe.

I connected these tattoos with my reading for November, posted in "I am that Enkidudal boy":

The lemniscate appears on the Strength card. The Death card shows the Grim Reaper without a scythe; he has instead a black flag with a white five-petaled flower on it. Black is the color of coffee, and the flower of the coffee plant is white and has five petals. The remaining card, the Tower, shows a building in flames. In meme world, a building in flames is associated with things being "fine." The meme has a cup of coffee, too.

When I did that reading, the first thing I noted was that all three cards were Major Arcana, so that syncs with the idea that I "have to get over" the 56-card deck.

I also noticed this at the barber shop:

I recently read a book about the history of Jewish punk rock in New York, but as it happens my most recent post -- "A 'strolling' Clash concert" -- is about an English punk rock band.

A "strolling" Clash concert

I dreamt that a former colleague from some 20 years ago, an Englishman named John, had invited me to go to a Clash concert at a big shopping mall. This was a "strolling concert," meaning that the band would perform each song in a different location, and the audience had to follow them around.

I met John at the mall, and we found the band in an area that looked as if it was normally used as a church. There was no audience to speak of, just some shoppers milling around. The band members were very old, and a couple of them were women, and I didn't think they looked like the Clash.

John was very excited and ran across the stage/pulpit, quickly shaking hands with each member of the band. I thought this was a little strange but followed suit. We then went back to the audience area. We had stopped at the food court, and I was holding a plastic tray with a plate of fried catfish.

The Clash started playing. The music was pretty soft and meandering, not even remotely similar to punk rock.

I ran into a pair of Mormon missionaries. "Elders!" I said. "Going to a concert on a Sunday?"

One of the elders just said "Sunday!" dismissively, as if he thought that was a weird thing for me to bring up.

The band finished their first song and left, getting into a special elevator that was off limits to the general public. The audience had to find their own way of getting upstairs and then find the band. I figured by the end of the concert, only really serious Clash fans would be left.

John found a place, just to the right of the elevator, where you could turn a crank and a rickety ladder would come down from the ceiling.

John went up the ladder, and I followed -- more slowly because I was carrying a tray of food. I noticed that I had my cell phone in a plastic holder hanging from a lanyard around my neck, as if it were a company ID badge.

I found myself in the bowels of the building and had to clamber over a lot of pipes and things, still carefully holding my tray, to reach the next floor of the mall.

Among the shoppers on this floor was a cartoonishly well-endowed woman in a zip-up top that was mostly unzipped. Everyone was staring at her. One woman said loudly to a friend, "I don't know what everyone's staring at. She's obviously over 30 and has nothing going for her." The man who was with the top-heavy lady whispered something in her ear, and she zipped up her top.

I found John sitting at a table in a bar. The band was not visible from there, but it was close enough that we could hear them. I was glad that we had a table now, so I could set my tray down to eat instead of carrying it around.

"You want to get some drink with that?" said John. If we were going to use the bar's table, we had to order something. John had some sort of fruity-looking cocktail in a highball glass. What kind of faggot orders a mixed drink? I thought.Well, he is European. What I wanted was Jim Beam, neat, but I didn't want it to seem like I was trying to be more macho than John. I would have to order some kind of cocktail, like fucking James Bond. (This is how I was thinking in the dream. It doesn't match my waking personality.) What could I get? A Manhattan? No, anything in a martini glass is too pretentious. Old Fashioned? Tom Collins? No, both too sweet. Cherry Coke? No, that's some kind of soda pop thing. Tim Collins? Isn't there something called a Tim Collins?

The band had already moved on. Should we follow them? No, forget it, we can still kind of hear them.

What a strange idea, a strolling concert! What a strange dream this is! No, what am I saying? This isn't a dream, it's real life!

And then, just after rejecting that incipient lucidity, I woke up.

Fate, don't fail me now

I was on YouTube to see if the 13th Floor Elevators' version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" was any good. (It isn't.) The next thing the algorithm served up was "Speed the Collapse" by Metric, which I'd never heard.

Both the title and the lyrics sync with the idea (see "I am that Enkidudal boy") that my "mission" for this month is represented by the Tower card.

Eye dialect and the sound of sirens

My last post, "All my favorite people make me -- is it mað? Măthe? Madh?", is about a version of the Weezer song "All My Favorite Songs" that I heard in a hypnopompic state this morning. Even though only the chorus was included in the dream, I began the post with this image quoting lines from one of the verses:

Black-and-white so as to sidestep the controversy over what color the sky was

In the Weezer song, wishing to be "on an island" presumably means wanting to be in a quiet, isolated spot away from the hustle and bustle of civilization -- but he would "miss the sound of sirens," meaning the police and ambulance sirens that are part of the background noise of a big city. My idea was that by juxtaposing those lines with this image, I could use the same words to express something rather different. Sometimes Odysseus wishes he were home on the island of Ithaca rather than having to spend years at sea, but then he'd miss all the adventures he was having, typified by his being the only mortal to hear the song of the sirens and live to tell the tale. This is certainly where later writers like Dante and Tennyson went with the character of Odysseus, and I think this interpretation is amply justified by Homer. No one really believes the man of many wiles is going to just enjoy a peaceful life on his island and never sail again.

Shortly after I published that post, Bruce Charlton published "Noisiest Bonfire Night ever?" about this year's Guy Fawkes festivities. He specifically mentions the sound of sirens:

Also continuous have been the sirens of the emergency services (fire/ police/ ambulances) - which might, but need not, mean anything very terrible happening, since these vehicles do love making a noise, and need no excuse for doing so. 

This kind of racket is quite exciting . . .

He doesn't go so far as to say he'd miss the sirens if they weren't there, but it's still more positive take on city noise than one might expect. And of course Bruce lives on an island and was commenting on a holiday celebrated only on that island.

Much of my post was about the difficulty of creating an "intuitively understandable pronunciation spelling" to convey how the words sad, mad, and bad were pronounced in the dream. I had almost written "eye dialect" instead of "pronunciation spelling," but then I thought I remembered that the former term is used only for nonstandard spellings of the standard pronunciation. I checked Wikipedia, which confirmed that (boldface in original):

Pronunciation spellings are sometimes used in narratives to represent nonstandard dialects or idiolects to create an impression of backwardness or illiteracy in the speaker. This is called literary dialect, often called eye dialect, though the latter term used to be applied only if the resulting pronunciation is the same as the standard one. For example:

"Pleez, mistur," said the beggar.

The example is meant to show that the beggar is so poorly educated that he says mistur instead of mister. But of course the distinction between the two exists only in writing; spoken, they are the same word. Eye dialect is a close cousin to Walt Kelly's creative use of speech-bubble fonts.

This evening, I went to archive.org and,as usual, got a random /x/ thread en route. This is what I got:

It's a thread about the alleged magical power of the word niggur, which is supposedly a totally different word from nigger. This obviously syncs very closely with the mistur-mister distinction in the Wikipedia article.

Nigger is an anagram of ginger. L. Frank Baum had a character whose name was pronounced like ginger but was spelled Jinjur. General Jinjur led an army that was all-female -- which is a pity, as otherwise Sergeant Pepper would have fit right in.

All my favorite people make me -- is it mað? Măthe? Madh?

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.

Washed in the blood, bathed in the latter rain

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).

The phrase "washed in the blood" was the subject of a sync just two weeks ago, in "Temples, destroyed houses, and being childlike -- plus the Dublin temple and being washed in the blood." Part of this sync was a post by Maolsheachlann that mentioned people "singing something about being washed in the blood of Jesus."

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?"

The antelope, both fierce and fell

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.

wutheringwaves.fandom.com/wiki/Suan%27ni

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%BB%E7%8C%8A

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.

Holy red cow!

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.)

Green Island Serenade

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.

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me

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.

I am that Enkidudal boy

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.

Whore homophones

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."

Giant goyish chauffeurs

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.

Hard Frost

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.

Joy our strength shall be

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.

Budd Hopkins and rats running around

In January 2023, I posted "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song," a post I just had occasion to refer back to last week in "Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken." The 2023 post included this account of a dream:

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.

To Serve Man

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.

Seeing what hasn't happened yet

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." 

Going to church on Easter Sunday

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!"

Poltergeists and spiders (and the Shadow, and Hermes, and Thoth, and Debbie's dress)

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:

WordPress suggested three posts from this person: "The Eight Stages of a Poltergeist Haunting," "The Spider in Celtic Myth," and "Fear Dorcha: Shadow Creature from the Land of the Celts." You don't see poltergeists and spiders juxtaposed too often. My posts about our own poltergeist haunting have been here, not on my WordPress blog, so it seems unlikely that my posting influenced which specific posts WordPress chose to recommend.

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.