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.
4 comments:
William,
In the Vishnu crossing the water illustration not all of the illustrations
are of monkeys. There are also about 4 or 5 brown female bears.
In my comment to Wandering Gondola on your BritBong post check out what
I wrote about the BR's (bears).
After posting my comment on the Stena Immaculate, I looked up the company that owns the ship. They are called Stena Bulk, based out of Sweden, supporting the Stena-as-Stone translation (Stena is Swedish for Stone).
Bulk can mean cargo of a ship, as likely intended in that name, but it can also mean ‘many, a great number, multitude’. So, “Many Stones” (or “to stone many”).
In realizing this, I thought of what I had written about earlier tying Joseph Smith’s strange writing regarding each person entering the Celestial Kingdom having their own stone with their own name on it with with my notion of Asenath’s “crumbs” being these same stones. I’ve imagined these as the ‘reserved seats’ James Earl Jones speaks of in Field of Dreams. One unique and specific stone for each person.
When I read this post and saw the picture with people each carrying their own stone in an apparent attempt to cross the water, that is the event I saw.
This crossing of the water has been called an evacuation, first in those words I wrote down apparently quoting Eru, so the fact that the image called to your mind the evacuation drill with your students carrying backpacks over their head seems relevant.
Debbie, that’s true. I’m not sure how the bears fit into the story. An alternate way of portraying Vanaras (“forest dwellers”) perhaps.
On the same night as the Britbong Dolphin dream, I had another dream that was just a still image of a mandrill. I guess that ties in with this post about monkeys and a “drill.” Also with Dolphin Drilling, of course.
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