For those who have missed all the drama here and at Leo's blog, Bill has decided that the syncs are telling him that I'm the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, a megalomaniacal villain from the writings of Tolkien who made war on the gods, bringing about the destruction of Númenor/Atlantis. This, in turn, means in his mind that deep down I'm a very bad dude despite apparently being a fairly decent person in my current incarnation.
Bill understand the Tower of Babel story to be a reference to Pharazon's assault on Valinor, as each was a hubristic attempt by mortals to force their way into "Heaven." A well-established tradition identifies Nimrod as the person responsible for building the Tower, so Bill's idea that I am the "son" or avatar of Pharazon made me think of the Pixies song about being dismayed "to find out I'm Nimrod's son."
I wasn't at all familiar with that song. It's musically harsh and profane, and I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing until today. Yesterday, I couldn't have told you anything about it except that it includes that line, "to find out I'm Nimrod's son." I looked it up, and the first line is:
One night upon my motorcycle through the desert sped
The motorcycle is my preferred mode of transportation, and my blog is called From the Narrow Desert.
The lyrics also include a puzzling reference to "chocolate people, well I'll be damned." I don't know whether Bill still associates Pharazon with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or not. That was part of a network of links connecting Charlie Bucket, Thomas B. Marsh, Peter, and Pharazon. Bill has said he no longer identifies Peter with Pharazon, so I'm not sure which (if either) of these two now separate characters inherited the "bucket" associations.
"Nimrod's Son" is from the 1987 album Come On Pilgrim. Here's the cover art:
It's a bald man wearing a hair shirt. People wearing gorilla suits and that sort of thing have been a repeated symbol here and on Bill's blog. Besides that, Bill has often used hair and baldness to symbolize the good guys and bad guys, respectively, so a bald man wearing a hairy garment could represent a bad guy trying to pass himself off as a good guy. A more positive interpretation would be based on the fact that hair shirts, like sackcloth, are a symbol of repentance -- though actually repenting for something "you" allegedly did in a past life, of which you have no memory and with which you have no sympathy, is impossible, meaningless, and at odds with Moroni 8.
"Nimrod's Son" makes no mention of the whole Tower of Babel thing. Instead, the thing that makes it horrifying to be Nimrod's son is (according to the song) that Nimrod's wife was his own mother -- something that is not even hinted at in the Bible or in any ancient tradition of which I am aware. Black Francis didn't just make it up himself, though. Apparently he was drawing on the 1835 book The Two Babylons; or, The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and his Wife by the Presbyterian theologian Alexander Hislop (who, in turn, did just make it up).
"The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod" -- this ties Peter (the first pope) to Nimrod (Pharazon), which is a link Bill made in the past, although he has since rejected the idea. The "and his Wife" part is a link to Bill's current position (see "Intercepted prayers?") that people who pray to Mary are actually praying to a demonic being, Ungoliant, who is figuratively Pharazon's "mother" (just as Hislop maintains that Nimrod's wife, Semiramis, was also his mother).
One of the synchronistic "arguments" Bill gave in support of calling Ungoliant my "mother" is that he identifies her with a character called Mommy Fortuna, who is the villain in the movie The Last Unicorn, and the etymology of my own surname suggests that I am "the son of Fortuna" (Tyche being the Greek equivalent of that Roman goddess).
I turned to the "Mother and Child" section of Hislop's book, where he argues that the Madonna and Child theme in Catholicism and various other religions represents Semiramis and her son/husband Nimrod. One of the pagan examples he gives, on p. 20, is "Fortuna and Jupiter-puer, or Jupiter, the boy." Fortuna was normally thought of as the daughter of Jupiter, not his mother, but apparently there is one place in Cicero (Latin text) where he mentions a statue of "the child Jupiter, sitting with Juno in the lap of Fortuna and reaching for her breast."
I can only hope that as I continue to follow the syncs, things will start to make some kind of sense. In the meantime, you're welcome, Bill.
12 comments:
Just one thought on the repentance/Moroni 8 angle. I think you make a very good point that once born here (whether for the first time or not), a person is indeed innocent and has a chance to obtain eternal life. You seem to imply that to repent of actions in a prior life means you have to feel bad about yourself in the here and now, maybe throw in some self-flagellation for good measure. But I don't think that's what repentance would be in the here and now. I would think whatever remorse or sorrow was needed would have already been demonstrated before any rebirth and you are correctly viewing yourself as innocent in the here and now.
But as any good Mormon would know, there are two parts to repentance: godly sorry and restitution. If we assume Bill is right, then my supposition is that you are only here because you demonstrated sorrow and you have been granted a chance at restitution. IOW, a chance to fix or make up for whatever was done in the past. You are already wearing the sackcloth, like you said, but where the rubber meets the road will be when you are faced with the choice to perform restitution or to serve a prior Mistress. If you choose restitution, that's when you could say you have repented, meaning, you have truly changed.
Restitution is possible for some sins but not for others, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say destroying the world falls into the latter category.
It’s hard to imagine what form the sort of test you propose might take. I’m not interested in the things that tempted Pharazon, so “resisting” such temptations wouldn’t prove anything.
If “serving Ungoliant” means what it says on the tin, I can’t imagine any circumstance in which I would even consider doing so. Of course if we redefine it to include such unspeakable acts as praying the Rosary while meditating on the life of Christ, then I suppose all bets are off.
I'm not sure your comment makes much sense. For Pharazon, resisting such temptations (or not) would actually prove everything. In fact it would be the whole point of him coming back.
As for your claim that destroying the world is something for which restitution is impossible, to that I'd say you suffer from unbelief. Take care. If Bill's claims prove true, such unbelief could lead you to make the wrong choice, if nothing else from despair.
What I mean is that I’m a different person with a different disposition and don’t find the same things tempting. It’s like a tiger reincarnating as a horse and then successfully resisting the temptation to eat meat.
I’m not expressing despair, just making the obvious observation that a thief may be able to return what he stole, but a murderer is not able to resurrect his victim. Only God can do that.
You seem to be missing the very obvious point that you haven't faced the temptation yet so how can you say you don't find it tempting?
And I didn't say you are expressing despair, I said if what Bill says is true and you believe there is no hope of making restitution due to your unbelief, that you might in that moment make the wrong choice due to despair.
Sure, who knows. Just saying I find it hard to imagine, but you never know for sure what you’ll do until you do it. God keep me in the right way.
I haven't listened to Nimrod's Son, but did read the lyrics. The phrase "The joke has come upon me", caught my attention at least partially due to one of my dreams this morning.
In the dream, your blogging friend Bruce Charlton was writing a rebuttal to my guess that you were Pharazon. In his response, he noted that I was a "Gamer", and somehow this meant I was completely wrong. The way the word was emphasized (that was the only reason given) made me think it meant something, so I looked it up when I woke up.
A Gamer as one who "plays, jests, jokes" was one definition that I noticed, and thus the phrase in Nimrod's Son popping.
The restoration of Numenor is a pretty big theme in my story. It is a necessary step in getting the prisoners (us) off of this place, as part of the wheat being plucked from among the tares. So I actually don't view the breaking of the world as a sin beyond repair, but something that will be remedied. Some people don't need the intermediary step (likely symbolized by the One Shoe thing in my dreams) but a lot of us will, I think.
But that is the progression in general - this Earth (Telestial Kingdom) on to a restored Numenor (Terrestrial Kingdom) and then on to Aman (Celestial Kingdom). In my imagination, at least, that is how it works out.
Well, that's darkly amusing. It's a meme to refer to a certain slur as a "gamer word". That slur is the one Arnie used in the Reality Temple.
knowyourmeme.com/memes/gamer-word
I used to have a physical copy of Hislop. I flipped through that digital version looking for an image I remember but didn't find, comparing the Pope's hat to Dagon's hat.
Pixie is a term that was also originally used to describe bewilderment and being led astray (the "pixie path"). Bewilderment was something that came up with "Wow".
For some of the games I play, I take notes and keep track of various goals with Notepad. In my Warframe file, one section lists farming locations for items. Looking at that list today, it includes a mission node called Tycho, found on Lua (the Portuguese word and the game's name for the moon, most of its nodes named after craters), one of the best places for spawns of a rare enemy type with an annoyingly low chance of dropping a specific rare item.
wiki.warframe.com/w/Lua
Musing on that brought to mind that whatever algorithms are used to decide how often items drop, gamers generally call them RNGs (random number generators). I've seen many players give thanks to "RNJesus" after a lucky drop, and while I assume it's meant lightheartedly, the pun never quite sat right with me even before I regained Christian belief. Instead, I used to refer to the "Random Number Goddess" (also in good fun), something I think I encountered in the roguelike community.
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