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.