Eldridge vs. The Ogre

So I found Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice on archive.org and started reading it.

I had very little prior knowledge of Cleaver. The entry in my mental database was pretty much just "Cleaver, Eldridge: prominent Black Panther, convert to Mormonism." The initial reason for my current interest in him was just that he was a Black man whose name sounded like eldritch, thus synching with the Anglin story about Blacks awakening an eldritch horror in the Antarctic. For my post, I wanted a picture that had both his face and his name, so I ended up posting (in "Skybax 64, and Eldritch Souls on Ice") the cover of Soul on Ice, a book I hadn't really been aware of. I soon saw how the title fit into the sync-stream, though, and realized that I would probably have to read the book.

The synchronistic relevance of that particular book was reinforced by a comment from Wade McKenzie. The night before reading my post with the Soul on Ice cover, he had watched an old Perry Mason TV show that had a character named Richard Gilman in it. The Soul on Ice cover I posted prominently features a blurb from a literary critic also named Richard Gilman.

This reference to person named Mason was another sync for me. Last night I had been thinking about the Nazi dolphins article in the Bee, which was in part a reference to recent news stories about people putting swastikas on Teslas as a protest against Elon Musk. Musk has of course made the letter X his personal symbol, but now there is an effort to associate him instead with the swastika. This made me think of Charles Manson, who first carved an X into his forehead and later modified it into a swastika. Searching for the story behind Manson's forehead marking, I ended up skimming an Independent article called "Charles Manson: Neo-Nazis hail serial killer [sic] a visionary and try to resurrect fascist movement created on his orders." I did a double take when I read that "Mr Mason had faded into obscurity [until] earlier this year." Surely Charles Manson has been a household name ever since the murders he supposedly ordered and has never yet "faded into obscurity." Then I realized that I had misread the sentence, and that it actually says Mason, not Manson -- referring to James Mason, a neo-Nazi from the '80s who corresponded with Manson and with Manson girls Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme.

Anyway, coming back to Soul on Ice, I found this on page 6, where Cleaver is recounting his early nihilism and his decision to embark on a career as a rapist:

I attacked all forms of piety, loyalty, and sentiment: marriage, love, God, patriotism, the Constitution, the founding fathers, concepts of right-wrong-good-evil, all forms of ritualized and conventional behavior. As I pranced about, club in hand, seeking new idols to smash, I encountered really for the first time in my life, with any seriousness, The Ogre, rising up before me in a mist. I discovered, with alarm, that The Ogre possessed a tremendous and dreadful power over me, and I didn't understand this power or why I was at its mercy. I tried to repudiate The Ogre, to root it out of my heart as I had done God, Constitution, principles, morals, values -- but The Ogre had its claws buried in the core of my being and refused to let go. I fought frantically to be free, but The Ogre only mocked me and sank its claws deeper into my soul. I knew then that I had found an important key, that if I conquered The Ogre and broke its power over me I would be free. But I also knew that it was a race against time and that if I did not win I would certainly be broken and destroyed. I, a black man, confronted The Ogre -- the white woman.

The problem with white women, as Cleaver goes on to explain, is that he lusts after them. Never in my life have I seen the word ogre used to refer to an object of desire, not even a dangerous one. Of all the personifications he could have chosen -- siren, witch, demon, devil, vampire -- Cleaver decided on one that typically refers to, in Wikipedia's words, "a large, hideous, man-like being." Ain't nobody want to rape an ogre.

I've bolded the word smash in the above quotation because Smash the Ogre is the main character of the Piers Anthony novel Ogre, Ogre. I used to have a cat named Ogre who was named after that novel. Ogre now lives in a friend's house, the reason for his expulsion from my own being his inability to get along with our resident black male, a big black tomcat named Scipio.

Incidentally, Cleaver's language about how he "pranced about, club in hand," made me think of a dream I had back in 2018, in which I had a large wooden club (carved to look like an enormous Chinese calligraphy brush) and "pictured myself prancing around sort of brandishing it like a Maenad’s thyrsus." This dream is recorded in my post "The Rider-Waite Magician" on my Tarot blog.

Cleaver explains that his rapes were motivated not only by sexual lust but by a desire to victimize Whites:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women . . . . I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race. . . . I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.

This ties in with another book cover I included in the same post as Soul on Ice: the D&D manual Eldritch Wizardry, which shows a naked White woman lying on an altar as if about to be sacrificed. In a comment there, Bill associates this woman with the Daymon Smith character Izilba:

Interestingly, in Doug's story, Izilba (who is Eowyn-Ilmare) was to be among the first, if not the first, sacrificed in that temple. It was said they were going to kill her and bleed her out over the fires of Nimloth. Izilba-Eowyn has often been depicted as naked, both in Doug's writings (going completely naked except for a swarm of bees covering her) and in symbols that have appeared even on your blog, as well as her association with Eve (also well known for being naked originally). And here we have a naked woman with all the symbols of that sacrifice, even lying on what would appear to be an altar made of wood, like a tree.

Bill is referring to this line from Words of the Faithful, quoted in my 2023 post "When life gives you lemons, make le monde":

Grey Izilba would often drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees, sweet and yet full of sting.

I'm not really sure what is meant by calling her "Grey" here, but in Soul on Ice, the same adjective is applied to the White woman as object of Negro lust:

"All you niggers are sick!" Butterfly spat out. "I don't like no stinking white woman. My grandma is a white woman and I don't even like her!"

But it just so happened that Butterfly's crime partner was in the crowd, and after Butterfly had his say, his crime partner said, "Aw, sit down and quit that lying, lil o' chump. What about that gray girl in San Jose who had your nose wide open? Did you like her, or were you just running after her with your tongue hanging out of your head because you hated her?"

. . .

I ate dinner with Butterfly that evening and questioned him sharply about his attitude toward white women. And after an initial evasiveness he admitted that the white woman bugged him too. "It's a sickness," he said. "All our lives we've had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don't touch."

If the White woman is The Ogre, that donkey reference seems relevant. Shrek is an ogre, and his sidekick is a donkey named Donkey, voiced by a Black man (Eddie Murphy). According to Wikipedia, Donkey was modeled after a real donkey named Perry -- so another link to the name Perry Mason.

Update: Just after posting this, I checked Anglin’s site and found him making essentially the same joke as the Nazi dolphin article, except that the astronaut herself was the one being vandalized — with a swastika on her forehead, just like Charles Manson:

On the same site, I found this in the latest meme dump:

That’s H. P. Lovecraft on the bottom left, and on the right he, too, has become what he hates. (Lovecraft was a notorious racist and wrote a poem called “On the Creation of Niggers,” in which the nigger is an intermediate creation between man and beast.)

Further update: After writing about Elon's X and the swastika, I remembered a Seallion video on the theme: "Elon X Bowie X Norton." In it, he mentions David Bowie's fascist "Thin White Duke" persona, which seemed like a possible link to Lovecraft, who has a distinctly "thin" physiognomy. I went to the Wikipedia article on the Thin White Duke, where the "Controversy" section ends with this sentence:

Eventually, he began to see the Thin White Duke as "a nasty character indeed", and later, "an ogre".

Ogres for ogres' sake

Very occasionally -- but only occasionally since the demise of Denis Dutton -- I check in with Arts & Letters Daily for old times' sake. (Back in the late nineties, when the Internet was young, it and Robot Wisdom were my only regular online reads.) This morning, scrolling through the links there, I clicked on one that said

Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »

It's a link to Colin Burrow's March 20 review, in the London Review of Books, of Ann Schmiesing's The Brothers Grimm: A Biography. What held my attention was the title Mr. Burrow chose: "Ogres are cool." Since ogres have recently come up (see "When only the goblins are out"), I was interested in his thoughts on their coolness.

Actually, ogres are only mentioned once, in a little aside of which I guess the author was proud:

Within bounds, the storyteller can more or less decide on the balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. A hare can be a prince. Or a hare can be a hare. The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details -- though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool.

Which fairy tale has an entirely superfluous ogre -- meaning, I guess, one that plays no significant role in the plot? Nothing comes to mind.

Much like hares, ogres are not always what they appear to be.

Next the ogre changes into a mouse, calling to mind Setracsed's famous dictum, Mus ogre otigoc -- "Mus, 'a mouse,' being only Sum, 'I am,' spelt Qabalistically backwards," as Crowley points out.

Nazi dolphins

A recent piece in the Bee shows a dolphin with a swastika on it and the ungrammatical graffiti “DIE NAZI.” (How many Nazis? Singular! Der Nazi! Now write it out a hundred times, and if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.)

I was writing about the Nazi-dolphin connection way back in 2021.

Skybax 64, and Eldritch Souls on Ice

In the /pol/ thread about pterosaurs I referenced in "Quetzalcoatlus and man," there was an image prominently featuring a bird with a wingspan of 6.4 meters, a number that jumped out at me as significant though I wasn't immediately sure why.

After a second, I made the connection. The thread was started with an image of a Quetzalcoatlus. In Dinotopia: The World Beneath (subject of a 2023 sync post), Quetzalcoatlus is referred to by the name skybax, and in Dinotopian drama "The skybax represents the silent observer."

One of my email correspondents (who also comments here under a different name) uses the pseudonym quietobserver64, so I had connected the skybax (Quetzalcoatlus) with this person. Now we have a 64 link as well.

Looking up this giant bird, Pelagornis sandersi, I found that the oldest known specimen was found in the Antarctic, which is a link to yesterday's "Black Men and Old Ones," which was about Black people awakening an eldritch horror in the Antarctic.

As confirmation of that link, note the date of the article screenshotted above: October 27. Yesterday's post ended with a reference to a dream, emphasizing the date: "I posted the dream on, of course, the 27th of October."

My last post used that term "eldritch horror" a couple of times because I think of it as a Lovecraftian expression. (I've never actually read Lovecraft.) Later I realized that was a potential "Black Man" tie-in as well, since the most famous person named Eldridge is undoubtedly this chap (a Mormon, incidentally):

Soul on Ice. To quote the Anglin version of that Antarctic story:

If you did a research, you seen dem elders in dat ice, you leave da muthofucka on ice. Aint wake his ass up.

The Lovecraftian entity I focused on in that post was Nyarlathotep -- specifically identified in the closing sentence of "Nyarlathotep" as a soul:

And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods -- the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

Besides Lovecraft and Cleaver, my other main association with the word eldritch is the old (1976) D&D manual Eldritch Wizardry -- which I somehow possessed as a True Blue Mormon teen despite its overtly "demonic" content and the nekkid lady on the cover.

The title page gives special credit to "Elder Steve Marsh," reinforcing the link between eldritch and "dem elders in dat ice." (The name Marsh is also interesting.)

It is in Eldritch Wizardry that the mandrill-headed demon lord Demogorgon -- recently featured in "When only the goblins are out" -- is first introduced.

Besides the baboon/mandrill reference, I've highlighted the bit about how Demogorgon can "turn sticks to snakes," something I've posted about before ("They shall take up serpents").

If you run an image search for demogorgon, what comes up is not the D&D creature but rather its namesake from some TV show called Stranger Things.

What is Stranger Things' Demogorgon? One of Dem Elder Ones, obviously.

Note added: I just remembered I’ve encountered a reference to the show Stranger Things once before — in the context of, what else, an n-word joke.

Best comment: “Them shoes white, they can’t be sayin that shit.”

Further note added: The South African Antarctic research team that been woke up dem elders is called SANAE 64.

Black Men and Old Ones

In yesterday's "Patrick, Pennywise, and 27," I linked to Galahad Eridanus's November 2024 post "Modulation and Idolatry," and the link text was "an old one," meaning an old post of his, in contrast to a newer post I had just mentioned. As indicated by the title of my own post, I was interested in his discussion of "a sync involving a character named Patrick, Pennywise the Clown, and the number 27" -- but there was actually a third character that he linked to the number 27. Besides the Bret Easton Ellis character Patrick Bateman (27 years old) and Stephen King's Pennywise (hibernates for 27 years), there's this fellow in Lovecraft who "had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries":

This character didn't have any sync resonances yesterday, so I didn't mention him. Today, though, Andrew Anglin did one of those posts he does from time to time where he reports news about Black people in Black dialect -- très offensive, I'm sure, but also sometimes very funny (somewhat reminiscent of those "Women dey get angrier? Why e be like dis?" articles from the BBC). This was some news I'd already seen -- that South African research team in the Antarctic where one of the members has gone crazy and started raping his colleagues, and no one can escape from him because they're in the Antarctic. The post is called "They Niggas Akshadentlly Wake Dem Elder Ones," the premise being that this sudden violent behavior is being caused by an eldritch horror the researchers unwittingly awakened. It ends with these sage words of advice:

Niggas gots to thank firs, and be think if dey doin’ good when dey be do dey research ifn dey shad been woke dem elder ones. Them muthafukas be creeby as hell an aint never done nothin fo no nigga.

But a nigga dees days, he be thinkin “mights well woke dem bitches up, see what dey got goin on.” Next thang, niggas be wilin like a mf, dey trap wit dem elder ass bitches, make dey ass gone goofy.

Folks gots to understan that we needs to be have a concern fo da community. If you did a research, you seen dem elders in dat ice, you leave da muthofucka on ice. Aint wake his ass up. Think fo yo keeds, bitch. Folks gon be callin in da angent casmic horror return da earf, aint nothin go right wit dat.

This of course made me think of the Lovecraftian horror I had read about on Eridanus's blog yesterday -- and the fact that, with no Lovecraft pun intended, I had linked to it as "an old one." This is of course another term for Dem Elder Ones them niggas been wake up in da Angargtic.

I went back to Eridanus's post to find the name of the specific Lovecraft character he had mentioned -- Nyarlathotep -- and then proceeded to look him up on Wikipedia and /x/.

Nyarlathotep has many names and titles, but the one Wikipedia chose to highlight in the sidebar, with the very illustration borrowed by Eridanus for his post, was "the Black Man":

That's a bit of a coincidence, right? The Lovecraftian horror I read about yesterday just happens to be the one known as the Black Man, and then the next day I read a story about Blacks awakening one of the Elder Ones.

Searching /x/ for nyarlahotep turned up an even more direct link to the Anglin story:

The Anglin story is about the niggas waking up an eldritch horror. Pennywise also wakes up after 27 years, which is what ties him to Nyarlathotep. That reminds me of my dream "Kanye West with Aunt Nancy's coffin," in which the Black man was supposed to wake up Aunt Nancy at 5:00. I posted the dream on, of course, the 27th of October.

Quetzalcoatlus and man

This morning, I found a /pol/ thread with this picture:

Later, preparing for my afternoon English classes, I needed some exercises to help my students practice making comparisons with as. I went through my files and found some suitable material I had created back in 2020. The very first exercise, meant to elicit the sentence, "A Quetzalcoatlus was as tall as a giraffe," was illustrated with this picture:

Except for the giraffe, these are extremely similar pictures. The man even has a similar hairstyle, beard, and glasses.

Patrick, Pennywise, and 27

This Saint Patrick’s Day, I read a post by Bruce that mentioned “King’s Bollege, Bambridge,” which I assumed was a reference to the Monty Python sketch where the man can pronounce K but not C and mentions “Keble Bollege, Oxford.” Actually, there’s another version (linked by Bruce, though I didn’t notice it until later) in which he says “King’s Bollege, Bambridge” instead. Looking up the original sketch somehow led me to a Facebook group for Python fans, where one of the members had randomly posted that “penny wise, pound foolish” is a once common phrase that you never really hear anymore.

Also on Patrick’s Day, I posted “All Star music video sync,” in which, in the context of tongue-in-cheek Mandela Effect claims, I wrote:

An annoying song called "All Star" exists in my timeline but definitely isn't by Smash Mouth

I originally wrote that I was pretty sure “All Star” was by “Twenty-Seven Pilots or some group like that” but ended up deleting that bit before posting.

Today, a new post by Galahad Eridanus linked me back to 

an old one I’d never read. In that post, he discusses a sync involving a character named Patrick, Pennywise the Clown, and the number 27. The day before reading it I had, on Patrick’s feast day, come across a random “penny wise” reference and then randomly modified a band name so as to include the number 27.

My Monty Python searching had turned up some Tim the Enchanter references, too, so I’m inclined to see these Patrick syncs as relating not to the Irish saint or the American psycho but to Tim and Patrick who abducted William Alizio.

Adam as bridge and ladder

From Laeth's latest batch of aphorisms:

the only bridge the Lord ever built was Adam. but really he was more of a ladder. though of course a ladder is a vertical bridge, and a bridge a horizontal ladder. i do wonder if trolls also live behind ladders.

Laeth reads here, so not all the parallels with things posted here will be coincidences. I'm sure the troll reference was influenced by the recent discussion of the Billy Goats Gruff, and the idea of a ladder as a vertical bridge was likely influenced by Bill's comment identifying the Great Tower with a (vertical) bridge.

Rama's bridge, which I first posted about in "A non-Hindu interpretation of Vishnu crossing the water," is also known as Adam's Bridge because of an Islamic legend about Adam crossing it after his expulsion from Eden. I didn't mention this in any of my posts, but it's one of the first things anyone would discover if they looked up the backstory behind that picture of monkeys building a bridge.

The idea of a man as a ladder is biblical. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus alludes to the story of Jacob's ladder but replaces the ladder itself with the son of man (literally "son of Adam" in Hebrew and Aramaic):

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Genesis 28:12).

And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man (John 1:51).

I've posted on this connection, but it was a while back, in my 2019 "Notes on John 1."

Laeth connects this ladder used by angels with a bridge used by goats -- an unusual mapping, since goats more often represent devils, but it fits. I had posted about the Billy Goats Gruff in the context of a poem by Conrad Aiken about how "all good goats will go to heaven" by ascending a hill and later "peacefully stroll home to stall," implicitly going back down the hill, like the angels on their human ladder.

A human ladder! What an arresting image. "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down."

All Star music video sync

Yesterday, someone posted on /x/ about vulture bees, claiming they were a Mandela (a.k.a. Mandrill) Effect  phenomenon:

One of the replies, mocking the assumption that anything you hadn't heard of must never have existed in your timeline, sarcastically claimed that the 1999 movie Mystery Men had also been Mandrilled into existence by CERN:

A reply to this pointed out that Mystery Men was actually a well known movie, due to the fact that the "Smash mouth all star music video was filmed for this movie."

Jarring indeed. My own timeline has carrion-eating bees -- they even appear in the Bible, nesting in the carcass of a lion -- but definitely not Mystery Men. In fact, I have very vivid memories of wondering why no one had ever made a superhero movie called Mystery Men, which clearly would have been impossible had such a movie actually existed. An annoying song called "All Star" exists in my timeline but definitely isn't by Smash Mouth, which is a ska band best known for "Fuck It Let's Rock." What exactly have they doing at CERN?

Just after perusing the above thread on /x/, I went on YouTube, and for some unfathomable reason it recommended a video called "i sang one word of all star every day for a year":

The top comment at the time (it's since changed) was "this is the best shrek 5 promo of all time." Wikipedia confirms that in the present accursed timeline, the song is associated with Shrek (recently brought up by Bill in connection with the Mandrill Effect):

The song became ubiquitous in popular culture following multiple appearances in films, such as in Mystery Men, Digimon: The Movie, and most notably in DreamWorks Animation's 2001 film Shrek. It received renewed popularity in the 2010s as an internet meme, largely due to its association with Shrek, and has ranked as one of the most-streamed rock songs from 2017 to 2021 in the United States. It is generally considered to be Smash Mouth’s signature song.

Their signature song? Why would CERN do that? Are they trying to drive the Smash Mouth guys to suicide?

When only the goblins are out

In a comment on "Drill, baby, drill!" Bill writes, referring to my posts about the poem by Christina Rossetti:

The last, and it looks like only, time you've mentioned goblins on your blog was in connection with the Goblin Market.

When I read that, I knew that wasn't true. (Bill, it turns out, had searched for the singular goblin and thus missed posts that used only the plural.) I knew that I had once used the phrase "when only the goblins are out" in a post here to describe my habit of prowling about in the wee hours. That turn of phrase was borrowed, or so I thought, from Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book about Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, where he (the prosecutor in the case) used it to question why certain of Manson's associates were abroad at an hour when all decent folk are asleep.

I would swear on a stack of White Albums that that's where I got that expression, but apparently I would be wrong. I have scoured the Internet, and a pirated ebook of Helter Skelter, in vain for any such wording. (Crazily, the very first thing I tried -- searching Google for goblins "helter skelter" -- returned the very poem Bill had mentioned: "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, which happens to include the phrase "helter skelter.") I really don't know what to make of that. I have never read any other books about the Manson affair, and scarcely any other "true crime" books, so I can't imagine how I can have misremembered.

Casting a wider net, and trying various paraphrases, I ended up finding a reference to St. Mark, in Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Anyway, wherever the phrase may have come from (and I still feel 100% sure it was from Helter Skelter!) the post that used it was 2020's "Not just fear; dogs can smell leonine thoughts." This post recounts an incident in which

As I was walking along, I suddenly visualized myself as a lion -- specifically, as the bipedal lion depicted on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Bridges to Babylon

The synchronistic significance is that Bill's comment, the same one that led me back to that old post, connects the Great Tower (vulgarly yclept "of Babel") with a Stone Bridge and also mentions a Stone Lion -- a lion, stones, a bridge, and Babylon. A pretty tight set of links, and definitely coincidental, since we know Bill was unaware of that post's existence.

Another Helter Skelter link is found in the "Drill, baby, drill!" post Bill was commenting on. That post quotes a Conrad Aiken poem that begins:

One two three four

five six seven

all good goats

will go to heaven

Just a few days ago (March 9), someone posted this on /x/:

That's a door on Spahn Movie Ranch with some graffiti put there by someone in the Charles Manson group (my guess would be Sandra Good, but who knows):

1234

567

ALL

GOOD

CHILD-

REN

(Go to Heaven?)

As I said, I'm not really a "true crime" guy. My familiarity with the Manson saga is almost entirely due to the influence of my uncle Bill, who has been staunchly speaking up for Manson and arguing for his innocence for longer than I've been alive. This same uncle also wrote a narrative poem about Robin Goodfellow (Shakespeare's Hobgoblin) being transformed by Merlin into a mortal child who grows up to become Robin Hood.

In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose. Bill made the obvious link from this to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I have connected the Drill with the Dolphin, and my 2021 post called simply "Dolphin" connects this animal with Rudolph.

In another comment, Bill brings up Shrek (which I've never watched) and connects this ogre with the Hobgoblin:

Shrek is an ogre, a word that can mean something like "demon, monster", which is not unlike the meaning of goblin, which can mean "devil, demon" as well. Further, Shrek is a Yiddish/ Jewish name that means "Fear or Fright". This seemed like a direct hit for our Hobgoblin, a word that Etymonline specifically says "Something that causes fear and disquiet".

The D&D hobgoblin "deep dive" I linked in that post also makes such a connection:

A Hobgoblin King can be found in its lair and may have up to 200 Hobgoblins with him. Both the king and his bodyguards, numbering 2-4, fight as if they were an Ogre. This just means that they deal extra damage when they hit you with their attacks, and it, unfortunately, means that they aren’t carrying around 100 to 600 gold pieces… which is strangely what Ogres do when they are walking around away from home. We guess you need a little walking around money, but that seems like a lot to just be walking around with.

Given the recent mandrill syncs, I decided to search /x/ for that word on 4plebs. The first few results were super-synchy:

The first (i.e. most recent) result pairs dolphin with mandrill. The fourth says:

>mandrill

you must be a D&D player

This was because a thread about animals that seem demonic had a mandrill as the main image. In my Drill post, I explained that a D&D manual illustration is the reason I associate the mandrill with the Hobgoblin. The image accompanying the /x/ post is not a hobgoblin, though, but a D&D baddie called Demogorgon, shown with two mandrill-like heads. In other words, the hobgoblin connection is a complete coincidence.

Most of the other results were references to the Mandela Effect as the "Mandrill Effect" -- a running joke about how "in my timeline" it's always been called that. One of the top results focuses on Fiona Broome, the person who coined Mandela Effect:

This is a sync because apparently one of the characters in Shrek is called Fiona, and Bill's comment discussed the name and its etymology.

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: