Cheerful Charlies, unicorns, Bulls of Heaven, Covi-yale, and the Great Sage

After I'd "saved" a beetle, as told in "The ox of the starry heavens," I found myself thinking, "I's done my good deed for the day. Us Cheerful Charlies is friends to critters big and small." Why the thought took that particular form I can't say, but the Cheerful Charlies are Walt Kelly's version of the Boy Scouts in his Pogo comic strip, and the nonstandard grammar of my thought corresponds to the "swamp-speak" dialect used by all the characters in that strip. I realized some hours later that using swamp-speak to call myself a Charlie ties right in with "Je suis Charlie Bucket." (When I wrote a post with that title, I had no idea that Bill thought I actually was Charlie Bucket.)

Later, I tried to google up some old strips featuring the Cheerful Charlies and found this one:

A cow charges at Albert and then becomes a "unicorn." This reminded me of a strange superstition I had as a child. There was a small grove of trees near our house, separate from the main woods, and a small branch had fallen from a locust tree at the edge of that grove. I somehow got it into my head -- not a belief per se, but certainly a clear and distinct idea -- that touching that branch would cause a unicorn to come charging out at me from the woods. Some ancient writer, I forget who, had written of a unicorn big enough to skewer an elephant on its horn, and so I imagined this unicorn from the woods as a massive, rhinoceros-like beast that would come galloping out "thundering like the Bull of Heaven" -- I always associated the unicorn with that particular phrase, which I think I got from Gilgamesh or somewhere. Later in childhood I confided in a few people about the locust-branch superstition but, too embarrassed to admit to being afraid of a unicorn, changed it to a dragon.

"Bulls of Heaven" featured in the vision recounted in "Étude brute?" Cary Yale in his insect form -- "The ox of the starry heavens" -- is also a sort of Bull of Heaven.

Speaking of Cary Yale, earlier today I had the idea that the heraldic yale looks a bit commedia dell'arte. It particularly reminded me of the character Covielle, the two curved plumes corresponding to the two curved horns, and the pom-poms to the yale's circular spots.

A few hours after making this connection, I happened to pass this sign on the road:

The figure on the sign has two enormous plumes angled in the same way as the yale's, and the position of his legs strongly suggests Covielle. This is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, protagonist of The Journey to the West. The Chinese is short for Qitian Dasheng (齊天大聖), "Great Sage Equal to Heaven," a title Sun gave himself during his rebellion against Heaven. Journey to the West, rebellion against Heaven -- you're seeing a certain familiar theme here, right? Sun later becomes a great hero and plays a central role in bringing back Buddhist scriptures from India and making them available to the Chinese.