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."
9 comments:
The last, and it looks like only, time you've mentioned goblins on your blog was in connection with the Goblin Market.
I actually thought the story had maybe called them hobgoblins, but looking back on your post that wasn't correct. However, back then I had developed a perspective that these goblins were actually elves that the Numenoreans had spread false stories about, and we tied these to pumpkin sales, Pharazon's unwelcome visit on Eressea, etc.
So it was interesting to see that "hob", besides being derived from Robert, is a word that means "Elf" or sprite. An Elf Goblin.
And this connection I think can work two ways, not just in how the Men of Numenor viewed the Elves, but also in how the Elves of Eressea ended up viewing the Men of Numenor. Robert means "God-like bright, Shining with glory, famous bright", etc. In Doug's stories, Pharazon was noted for dressing up in very bright armor (reflecting the sun's light) that made him shine so bright that one couldn't look at him directly at midday.
Thus, to the Elves, Pharazon would have been the ultimate Hobgoblin, or Mandrill, I guess. Literally, too, since he may have been an Elf, or Hobbe, born into the body of a Man.
This thought made me look back on your Vishnu stone picture and see another image. I had seen the future evacuation of Men, but in addition to this I now see the past Numenorean events and their attempt to reach Heaven. In the scripture stories, this is related as the story of the Great Tower. There, the Tower is synonymous with a Bridge between Earth and Heaven (with the implication that Men could climb the Tower). In this image, we can see Men building this Tower-Bridge, as Pharazon, under Sauron's guidance, takes upon himself a role that wasn't his.
Given this likely reference to Pharazon, your Mandrill image that was shown to you for quite a long time can make even more sense, I think, given the meaning of "drill" in that sense of a hole or the act making one in the earth. In fact, in Doug's stories, the place where the Numenoreans were buried after their failed attempt is specifically called "Pharazon's Hole". a Man Drill, or Man Hole... A Hole for Men.
But in the end having a Red Nose might not be all that bad. I mean, Santa employed Rudolph to guide him through the dark and the fog, all thanks to a Red Nose like the one the Mandrill wears. Not unrelated, maybe, to the head of a Stone Lion also marking a path to cross. And Rudolph up to that point had been shunned by everybody as being bad, but his fortunes changed and he became a hero.
Bill, you mentioned a Stone Lion, and you connected the Bridge of Stones with the Great Tower, which the biblical version of the legend places in Babel/Babylon.
When you wrote that the “Goblin Market” posts appeared to be my only references to goblins on this blog, I immediately thought, “No, I’m sure I’ve cribbed Bugliosi’s line ‘when only the goblins are out’ in connection with my own habits as a merry wanderer of the night.” I couldn’t remember the context beyond that, though.
I looked up the post. It prominently features the Lion on the cover of the Stones album Bridges to Babylon.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/03/not-just-fear-dogs-can-smell-leonine.html
My use of “when only the goblins are out” in that post was an allusion to Helter Skelter, Bugliosi’s book about the Tate-LaBianca murders. Just now I tried to find the quote by searching for helter skelter goblins, and the very first result was that “Goblin Market” poem, which happens to include the phrase “helter skelter.”
Conrad Aiken’s goat poem is another link to Helter Skelter. Someone on /x/ posted an image of the Spahn ranch door that says “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 all good children go to heaven” just a couple of days ago.
https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/39977364/#39977364
One of my uncles, who has been a vociferous defender of Charles Manson (which is what led me to read Helter Skelter in the first place), also wrote a long narrative poem about Robin Hood, in which Hood begins his career as “that sprite of devilish cheer called Robin Goodfellow” and is transformed into a mortal man after tangling with Merlin. I no longer have the poem, but I remember a few lines.
“Though I’m a boy,” babe Robin said,
“My fairy mind remains.
I know on moonbeams I did tread,
Unfettered by these chains.”
This fits in with your interpretation of a Mandrill as a man who was once a hob.
I can't believe I missed that post (though it worked out better for this thread of thinking and connections that I did, I guess). I was distracted doing a few things this morning, so I even did a search for "goblin" on your blog a couple different times this morning to be sure, and that post didn't come up for me.
It is noteworthy to me that you wrote about visualizing yourself as that very lion in the post.
I have another observation from this morning that may or may not be relevant or helpful, and I'll put that into a separate comment.
My daughter was in her middle school's production of Shrek, Jr. the Musical, with the performances held last weekend.
This morning when I went to leave that first comment, I initially ended with the sentence about connecting Rudolph and the Mandrill with the Stone Lion, but did not include what is now the last sentence about becoming a hero. I hit "publish", and your blog gave me an error message saying I couldn't post the comment. I tried a couple more times, and still got the same message. So, I copied the text and opened up another tab with your blog post, and pasted in the comment in a new comment field. As I did, the idea for that last sentence came to me, and I wrote about Rudolph becoming a hero, and the word stood out to me.
Soon after, a song from that Shrek musical got in my head, so much so that I played it in the car several times while driving to an appointment. That song is called "Who I'd Be", and is sung by Shrek, where he sings of wishing to be a hero. As I listened (repeatedly) I noticed some things that seemed interesting to me.
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".
I had already connected the Hobgoblin to Pharazon in the comment earlier, and the lyrics of Shrek's song seemed to further support this interpretation. Shrek sings of dressing up in bright, flashing armor, sailing away on the sea, and storming beaches like a Viking in the first verse. He will later sing of climbing a Tower even (in order to save a "flower").
Strikingly, in the second verse, Shrek sings of wishing to be a poet, writing a story that would 'wipe away the lies', and throwing this story up into the skies. I thought of a comment you had made earlier that if you would have ever been someone in a past life, perhaps it would have been the poet Lord Byron. We even have a reference in Shrek's words to the moon helping with spelling - a potential nod to our "spelling Bee", which had been explicitly linked to the moon and Being(s) associated with it in past posts and comments.
Anyway, like Hobgoblins, Rudolph and probably Mandrills, Shrek is shunned by everyone else. He even lives in a swamp, of all places, perhaps like other swampy or marshy individuals we've tagged.
Lastly, Shrek's love interest is named Fiona, which means "White, Fair". As we explored in other posts, the word "White" is a word that Etymonline has meaning "Bright, radiant, clear, fair". In other words, Fiona is a direct hit for the name Claire.
Here is a clip of the original Broadway actor cast as Shrek, Brian d'Arcy James, singing "Who I'd Be" (and don't think I didn't notice the use of "D'Arcy" in this name...):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt76BjUspeg
William and WW,
The name RoBeRt (Robert which is my given surname)
is also a BR (bear) and a Shinning One.
Copy and Paste:(link below)
"The name Robert is an ancient Germanic given name,
from Proto-Germanic *Hrōþi- "fame" and *berhta- "bright
(Hrōþiberhtaz).
Compare Old Dutch Robrecht and Old High
German Hrodebert (a compound of Hruod (Old Norse: Hróðr)
"fame, glory, honour, praise, renown, godlike" and berht
"bright, light, shining").
~~~~~~
Note the word berht (BeRht).
I have two BR's in my name.
Also there is another book titled: The Shinning Ones:
The World's Most Powerful Secret Society Revealed.
by Philip Gardiner Co-Author, Gary Osborn.
I've added asterisks to highlight the parts of this description
of the book ( see link) that I truly believe has connections
to me , i.e. my soul's past lives, and I believe I've been
given the 'clues' as to those past life existences
in this lifetime, through dreams and synchronicity events.
Copy and paste ( link below)
"The Shining Ones were members of an advanced culture
that was almost lost; but their wisdom and their power survived.
They preserved the secrets of their advanced knowledge
in mythology and legend; they embedded their secret codes
in symbolism in art, architecture, the mystery traditions
and literary works - including the Bible.
The authors have found traces of the influence of
The Shining Ones in all the
major religions with roots in the ancient world.
Gardiner and Osborn have discovered that their secrets
and rituals have been hidden and preserved through
the centuries, by the Knights Templar,
the ******Rosicrucians*****
and the Freemasons to the present day.
Furthermore, they believe that the ***** evolution of civilization
has been manipulated by a secret and powerful group
of initiates descended from The Shining Ones.*****
They can identify their influence behind science, religion,
mysticism and philosophy - and, of course,
in the ***** arena of powerful politics.*****
This is an extraordinary story of intrigue and power play
at a very human and political level.
But it is also the revelation that *****the Shining Ones
had knowledge of the deep spiritual truth*****
that lies at the heart of mankind's yearning
for an understanding of the meaning of life
and to achieve salvation."
~~~~~~
I highlighted :'arena of powerful politics' to support my belief
(and something I've mention many times here on your blog)
which that belief is: Everything is Political.
The El's have a positive and negative polarity 11:11.
The negative polarity11's (Els ) have manipulated the
Sacred Science Knowledge aka the Universal Language
into Black Magic and they absolutely use it against us
which I believe is going to get much worse because of A I,
which and I believe that A I is not new.
Ask yourself: who really built the Pyramids, the Mounds,
Lhasa in Tibet, the Old World Cathedrals and Magnificent
Buildings throughout the world? I absolutely do not believe
it was man using horse and cart.
I think the answer is: those places were built
by the Shinning Ones using Sound.
The Shining Ones are the Lilies(ELs, 11's)
Keep in mind that everything in this duality dimension
has a dual nature. Positive Polarity and Negative
Yin and Yang, Black and White etc.
I believe humanity is being tested one again at this time in history,
the Shifting of Ages also known as The Great Reset.
I just hope we don't make the same mistakes as in prior resets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Shining_Ones_The_World_s_Most_Powerf.html?id=x74DFwXPEj8C
William,
I forgot to add ( and I think I've commented on this before ),
honeybees are also 'Shining Ones'. The bees also
uses sound.
copy and paste:
"Honey bees with a shimmer
The giant Asian honey bee, Apis dorsata, can also display a wave.
But the giant honey bee colony performs waves at home,
without any individual bee moving from its position
on the wax comb. It is remarkably similar to the stadium wave."
~~~~~~
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/the-shimmer-response-in-honey-bees/
https://learnbees.com/sound-of-bee/
Honeybees Mesmerizing Defensive Wave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNKU8GRYmU
Funny I instantly connected the style of that Mandrill drawing to the AD&D Monster Manual before you mentioned you found it on a site about D&D. It made me want to ask you about some of the monsters that are based on Chinese bootlet dinosaur toys like the Rust Monster and the Land Shark aka Bullette. I wonder what they were called in Chinese.
Anonymous (please use a name or pseudonym), it's my understanding that the toys were fake Chinese versions of Japanese Ultraman monsters (for example, the Bulette likely came from a knockoff of a monster called Gabora), so they likely never had any particular Chinese names.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-plastic-ancestry-of-the-bulette.672481/
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