Sunday, July 20, 2025

Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man.

I dreamt that my wife bought me breakfast -- an ice-cream come, which I ate very slowly because it was a special kind of ice cream that wouldn't melt. After finishing it, I decided I would go out right away to the same shop she bought it from and get some more breakfast.


Although my understanding was that it was a new breakfast shop I'd never been to, when I arrived I felt a very strong sense of déjà vu. I was sure I had been there before, but I couldn't remember when.

The menu was on the interior walls -- on all the interior walls. The walls were blue and were printed all over with white text, the density of which suggested Dr. Bronner's soap labels or the All Diseases Are Created With Computer truck.


In order to see all the menu options, you basically had to walk through the whole restaurant as if it were an art gallery and read everything that was printed on all the walls. There were some photographs in addition to the text, which made it a little easier to navigate. The text was mostly English but also included some Chinese.

One of the items on the menu was illustrated with a photo of what was obviously a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the green rooster logo and everything, except that instead of Corn Flakes it said Muesli. A caption under the photo identified it as "Kellogg's Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat."

Another offering was called Red Tart, but the illustration was just a very small cut-glass bowl of raspberries. A note in Chinese said that the minimum order was three "cups." A few other kinds of "tart" were also on the menu, including "Dr. Sand's All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand)."

Some of the text on the wall behind the cash register seemed to have nothing to do with the menu. It said "Let's learn Gaelic!" and underneath this were three expressions, with English on the left and Gaelic on the right. The first was "Hello," the second was either "Good-bye" or "Thank you" (I can't remember), and the third was "Shoot this man." I can't remember any of the Gaelic translations, and they may not have been clearly defined. (This reminded me of Russian lessons during the Cold War, where "I give myself up" and "I'm not a spy" were among the basic phrases taught to absolute beginners. I remember them to this day, despite having forgotten most of my Russian.) I thought whoever did the walls was trying just a bit too hard to be endearingly quirky.

The feeling of déjà vu persisted after I woke up. I felt sure that if I had never actually been to that restaurant, I must at least have dreamt of it before. However, no specific memories ever emerged.

After waking up, I googled gaelic "shoot this man" and got mostly pages having to do with the song "Padraic Pearse" by the Wolf Tones and the 2006 film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The first result for the latter was this review on a blog called The Arts - JustMeMike's New Blog. For some reason, I decided to click on that blog's About page. It begins thus:

Update: March 15th, 2016 – I’ll soon be on the move. I’m relocating from Sarasota, FL to Port Wentworth, GA – a suburb of Savannah.

So yet another Ides of March sync.

Saturday, July 19, 2025

The Craft

When poets write constrained by rhyme,
They use the language to divine.
And when they cheat and bend the rules,
They slough the suits and play the Fools.

A burden light

What if each idle thought and word
Is by recording angels heard,
And every action fills a page
In Bibles of a future age?
I say what if, but it is so.
The question is: What if you know?
The Tree yet bears the Sibyl’s leaves.
I tell you now, but none believes.

On Edge

I woke up in the middle of the night with this bit of verse in my head. I wasn’t going to post it, but a recent comment from Bill about "tart wine" makes me think sour grapes may be synchronistically relevant.

The grapes were theirs,
The teeth are ours.
Our palate bears
Their sweets and sours.
'Twas theirs to tell
But I that spoke.
'Twas night that fell,
But morning broke.

The Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment

I dreamt that I was in a bookstore flipping through a new book that seemed to belong to the same broad genre as Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc. I read, “We decided to test this hypothesis with what we dubbed the Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment.”

Cora Ylang-Ylang, I gathered from skimming the next several pages, was the pen name of an extremely prolific author of chick lit, each of whose novels included a reference to a particular day of the week in the title. Two examples I remember were Deuce Day (referencing Tuesday) and O Friday, My Friday! The authors reported the finding that the Tuesday novels focused more on female characters and the Friday novels on male ones, and they took this as confirmation of whatever hypothesis they were testing. It was supposed to be funny and cool that the “experiment” had taken that particular form.

Another chapter was about which forms of exercise were most effective and was illustrated with some simple line drawings of what looked like Pilates techniques.

Friday, July 18, 2025

Always be the best dreamers

Spotted on a T-shirt this morning (reconstructed, since I couldn't photograph it without being creepy).


By this standard, I do think my dreaming technique is improving.


Note added: If I can't photograph a T-shirt, Plan B is usually to try to find a photo of it online by searching for the text. This time I couldn't find anything, hence the use of Plan C: MS Paint. Just now I decided to try the search one more time, but all I got was further proof of how messed up Google is these days:


Those are the only two results it gave me. So Google knows that phrase appears on my blog, but instead of giving me this post or, failing that, the blog's homepage, it returns two completely random posts, from 2019 and 2021. Why those two posts in particular? It makes no sense at all. Neither of them even contains any of the key words, other than be and the.

If I add site:narrowdesert.blogspot.com to the search prompt, I still get the same two irrelevant posts. This despite the fact that putting "always be the best dreamers" in the search bar on the blog itself -- which is hosted by Google! -- brings this post right up.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

I been Art Garfunkeled

My last post, "Sly St(all)one" was about a dream in which First Blood, the first Rambo movie, was mentioned. The Rambo character was named after Arthur Rimbaud, the idea being that Rambo's time in Vietnam had been "a season in hell," which is the title of one of Rimbaud's major works. Knowing I had posted about Rimbaud multiple times before, I searched the blog for his name. The first result was, somewhat surprisingly, last June's "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," which, though it does include my verse translation of a few lines from A Season in Hell, is primarily about the 1973 Art Garfunkel song from which the post takes its name.

In a comment on the "Sly St(all)one" post, Debbie brought up the Earth, Wind & Fire song "In the Stone," which I then looked up. Seeing that it was released in my birth year of 1979, I had the random thought, "Hey, maybe it was released on the exact same day I was born!" I checked, and it wasn't, but the hunch was specific enough that I proceeded to google albums released on 15 march 1979. The first result was Fate for Breakfast by none other than Art Garfunkel. (Some additional digging turned up two more albums that were released on the day I was born: Half Machine Lip Moves by Chrome and There's Always Me by Ray Price.)

The "Sly St(all)one" post, which has now led me to Art Garfunkel by two different routes, also discusses Bill Wright's "Rose Stone . . . a 30-pound red stone." Not sure why I thought it necessary to mention its weight and color, since the only thing that was relevant to the post was the name Rose Stone itself. Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the word carbuncle, which it characterizes as "an archaic term for a number of red gemstones."

Fate for Breakfast includes the track "Sail on a Rainbow." In "What shall we do with the drinking salesman late in the morning?" -- which, before "Sly St(all)one" was my only post to mention the name Rambo -- I mention both that Rambo is named after Rimbaud and that Rimbaud sounds like rainbow. That post also prominently features sailors, so we have both elements of "Sail on a Rainbow."

Incidentally, the title of the present post as an allusion to "A Simple Desultory Philippic" from the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Rose Stone -- Sly Stone's sister and bandmate, whose name is what occasioned my mention of Bill's red stone -- was born Rosemary Stewart.


Note added: To the meaning of carbuncle mentioned above, etymonline adds that it was "also the name of a semi-mythical gem from the East Indies formerly believed to be capable of shining in the dark." Sounds like Gazelem.

Sly St(all)one

In a brief dream just before waking this morning, I was sitting at a computer searching IMDb for the name Sly Stone because I wanted to find the first movie he had been in, but nothing was coming up. I expressed my frustration, and a person standing behind me -- who seemed to be a White woman but was not otherwise clearly defined -- said, "Well, why don't you just look up the name of the movie? It was First Blood. Everyone knows that." With that, I woke up.

First Blood (1982) of course features Sylvester "Sly" Stallone, not the psychedelic funk-soul musician Sly Stone. It's not Stallone's first movie, either, though it's the one that introduces his iconic character John Rambo. (Rocky would have been more relevant, I would have thought, if we're going to be conflating the actor with someone named Stone.)

I know essentially nothing about Sly and the Family Stone. My mother has mentioned a few times that she used to listen to them back in the day, but I believe it was her brother Eli who was the big fan and owned all the records. There were no Family Stone albums in the house when I was growing up, and prior to doing the preliminary research occasioned by this dream I wouldn't have been able to name a single one of their albums or songs or to have recognized Sly in a police lineup.

Since I obviously should have been searching the Internet for Sly Stone's first album, not his first movie, I went ahead and did that. The band's debut album, released in 1967, was A Whole New Thing. I thought I might get a picture of the album cover and one of the First Blood poster and put them together as an illustration for this post. Looking up A Whole New Thing on Wikipedia, though, I found that there were two different covers to choose from. The caption accompanying the second of these caught my eye:


Rose Stone, for those who have been -- or rather, for those who haven't been living under that particular Rock -- is the name of the central MacGuffin in the story being developed by Bill Wright, a 30-pound red stone which is a palantir-like object and has lots of important information and stories stored on it. (I suppose the title of this post suggests that "all" is contained within the Stone.) Bill has also been insisting lately that adjectives like cunning and wily can have a positive meaning, so sly fits right in.

Another interesting coincidence is that Sly Stone (who died just last month, it turns out) happens to share my birthday, the Ides of March.


Note added: After posting this, I had a vague memory of having seen a T-shirt in Taiwan that said something like "I would never try to stab you. If he'd stop being so shady, he could find a nice young lady. You don't have to die before you live."  I had googled the text and found that most of it (minus the stabbing bit) was from a Sly and the Family Stone song. I don’t think I photographed the shirt, or if I did I can’t find the photo, but repeating the search confirms that the source is indeed Sly Stone, the song "Life."


"You don't have to die before you live" is directly relevant to my last post, in which I wrote, "You can't really reincarnate without dying first, but people somehow tend to overlook that."

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Reincarnation, or something else?

As most regular readers will be aware, the proximate reason for my last post, "Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation," was questions raised by Bill Wright's theory -- to which he adduces considerable synchromystical evidence -- that I am the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of Númenor, a character who appears in Tolkien's Silmarillion and whose story is elaborated upon in Daymon Smith's channeled material.


People have proposed past lives for me before -- Lord Byron, Herman Melville, and Hyrum Smith, among many others -- but Pharazon (we usually dispense with the prefix and the circumflex around here) presents unique problems. First and most obvious -- so obvious that we tend to gloss over it -- is the fact that he is a fictional character. Accepting that I or anyone else is his literal reincarnation means accepting Tolkien's novels as historically true -- not just in some broad or figurative sense, but in sufficient detail for individual characters in his works to correspond to real people who lived somewhere or other in the distant past. Even if we swallow that camel, as Bill and Leo do, there remains this gnat to strain at: According to those same fictional-but-maybe-not works, Pharazon never died. Rather, he and his men "lie imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten, until the Last Battle and the Day of Doom." You can't really reincarnate without dying first, but people somehow tend to overlook that. My Uncle Bill, the first and most prolific of those who have proposed past lives for me, believes that Jesus Christ has reincarnated several times (most recently as a notorious criminal), with no explanation given as to how that squares with the Resurrection; and most Christian believers in reincarnation will point to John the Baptist as Elijah reincarnated, even though Elijah reportedly ascended bodily to heaven in a chariot of fire.

Maybe literal reincarnation is actually the wrong way to conceptualize whatever is going on here. That a new approach may be called for is suggested by the fact that Bill identifies me not only with Pharazon but with Humpty Dumpty -- yes, the nursery-rhyme character, as expanded by Lewis Carroll. Obviously, no one is going to make the case that Humpty Dumpty really existed and that I am his literal reincarnation. I mean, there's crazy, and then there's crazy, and we're not that crazy. And yet it seems to me that the sync evidence tying me to Humpty is of exactly the same character as that tying me (and Humpty) to Pharazon. I think Bill's understanding of this is that the symbol of Humpty is being used (by the sync fairies or whoever) as another way of tying me to Pharazon. For example, Daymon's version of Pharazon had a very special belt of which he was very proud, whereas I once took up the hobby of climbing brick walls and walking around on top of them, a pastime I abandoned after spraining my ankle in a fall. Once Humpty Dumpty is added to the mix -- he of course fell from a wall, and in Carroll's version had a special belt or cravat of which he was very proud -- this counts as another link between me and the Númenórean king,

Another interpretation that suggests itself is that I "am" Pharazon only in the same sense that I "am" Humpty Dumpty.

But in what sense could that be?

I have already mentioned Elijah and the problems inherent in supposing this translated being to have reincarnated as John the Baptist. A different model is perhaps suggested by the Mormon take on the relationship between Elijah and John -- the distinctive and rather confusing "doctrine of Elias." In Mormonism Elias, besides being the Greek form of the name Elijah, is a sort of title or role, usually explained as being that of a "forerunner" or a "restorer." Why that name should have that meaning is not exactly clear, as Elijah the Tishbite of the Old Testament did not himself play either of those roles in any obvious way. The idea seems to have developed out of the closing verses of the Old Testament (Mal. 4:5-6), where it is prophesied that "Elijah the prophet" will be sent "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (i.e. as a forerunner) and will turn "the heart of the children to their fathers" (perhaps implying some sort of restoration). Apparently what was originally a prophecy that Elijah himself would do those things somehow evolved into the use of his name as a title for whoever would do those things -- mainly, as it turned out, John the Baptist.

Even though this "Elias, which was for to come" (Matt. 11:14), identified with John, would seem to be a wholly prophetic construct with no real connection to the historical Elijah, the historical Elijah nevertheless does seem to be involved, since Matthew goes out of his way to mention that John dressed in the same distinctive way as Elijah (Matt. 3:4, 1 Kgs. 1:8). (Funnily, this distinctive costume involves a special belt, just as with Pharazon and Humpty; perhaps a bit of synchronistic encouragement for this line of thought?) It seems that the Tishbite himself was "an Elias" even though he wasn't a forerunner or restorer. And plenty of people who were forerunners or restorers are never called Elias. This suggests that Elias is not something as simple enough to have a definition but has more the quality of a personality, a dynamic and ever-developing archetype which can be instantiated in individuals as if by something along the lines of Sheldrakean resonance. "We can make new archetypes," Laeth recently wrote, and perhaps we are in the process of doing just that?

(Added to my to-read list: Elias: An Epic of the Ages by Orson F. Whitney.)

This conception of "Elias," as vague as it is at this point, is recognizably similar to the way supernatural roles like that of the Fisher King are treated in Last Call by Tim Powers. Bugsy Siegel is succeeded in this role first by the evil Georges Leon and then by the protagonist Scott Crane, but not in a way that involves anything like reincarnation. Becoming the Fisher King is partly a destiny you are born with and partly something you have to actively embrace and fight for, and the role itself is nothing that could be encapsulated in a definition but is flexible enough that it can be played for good or for evil. Still, it is a distinct thing with some sort of ontological reality -- not just a figurative way of describing people -- and it can only be filled by one person at a time.


Still just thinking aloud here and trying out different perspectives.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation

Today we're doing rambling theological speculations instead of sync. A change is as good as a rest.


In Joseph Smith's 1842 summary of Mormon beliefs, the second thing he mentioned -- second only to belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- was this:

We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression (AoF 1:2).

To modern people, this just seems like common sense. Obviously, each person is morally responsible only for his own actions. Obviously, no just God would punish one person for another person's actions, especially not for the actions of a distant ancestor on whom the descendant could have exerted no possible influence. We may have inherited a predisposition to sin from Adam but cannot possibly have inherited his actual sins themselves. Whatever "original sin" might be, it can't be that.

The problem with the above understanding is that elsewhere in Mormon scripture it is implied that the reason we are not punished for Adam's misdeeds is not that we are inherently incapable of being guilty of them but rather that Christ has atoned for them. It seems that we are forgiven for Adam's transgression in much the same way that we may be forgiven for our own, but that without Christ's intervention it would be just to punish us for what Adam did.

I say "it is implied" and "it seems" because the scriptures on this topic are not exactly crystal clear, but it seems to me that that is what they are saying.

Here is Mormon, channeling Christ, explaining why children should not be baptized:

Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God:

Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me.

And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me; wherefore, my beloved son, I know that it is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptize little children (Moro. 8:8-9).

Immediately before the passage I have bolded, Mormon seems to be saying that little children are inherently innocent, but then he goes on to say that "the curse of Adam is taken from them in me." In Genesis, the curse pronounced on Adam is that the ground will bring forth thorns and thistles, that he will need to work to survive, and that he will eventually die. Children don't work for a living, but that's because they are provided for by their parents or others, not because Christ removed the power of that curse over them. The other aspects of the curse -- most notably mortality -- affect children as much as anyone else. In fact, for most of human history, most human deaths occurred in infancy. Given that fact, together with the context of explaining why children need not repent or be baptized, I think we have to understand "the curse of Adam" as Adam's guilt, as original sin.

The other relevant, but highly confusing, passage is from the Pearl of Great Price. The passage I've bolded isn't exactly straight from the horse's mouth -- it's Joseph Smith receiving revelation about what Moses wrote about what Enoch taught about how a conversation between Adam and God was understood by the people -- but it's what we've got.

And our father Adam spake unto the Lord, and said:

Why is it that men must repent and be baptized in water?

And the Lord said unto Adam:

Behold I have forgiven thee thy transgression in the Garden of Eden.

Hence came the saying abroad among the people, that the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents cannot be answered upon the heads of the children, for they are whole from the foundation of the world.

And the Lord spake unto Adam, saying:

Inasmuch as thy children are conceived in sin, even so when they begin to grow up, sin conceiveth in their hearts, and they taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good. And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves, and I have given unto you another law and commandment. Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence . . . (Moses 6:53-57).

This is as close as the scriptures ever come to using the phrase "original sin" and -- despite the popular understanding that "Mormons don't believe in original sin" -- it doesn't say there is no such thing; it says that Christ has atoned for it.

That "wherein" (literally "in which") is a bit confusing, but I think the only coherent reading is to take it as meaning something like "wherefore" or "for which reason." It is saying that children are not guilty of the sins of the parents because Christ has atoned for original guilt -- but otherwise, they would be. The other possible reading is take it as a parenthetical explanation -- "but, by the way, when we say 'original guilt' we don't mean children being punished for their parents' sins" -- but then what exactly is Christ atoning for?

Adding to the confusion is the assertion that children are "whole from the foundation of the world"; Mormon uses the very same phrase in his own discussion of infant baptism (Moro. 8:12). This would seem to imply that they have always been whole and were thus never in need of any atonement, but I don't think it means that. Elsewhere in scripture, the atonement is spoken of as having been "prepared from the foundation of the world" (Mosiah 4:6-7), and Jesus, even though he was killed at a particular point in history and not before, is called "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Moses reports Enoch himself using such language:

And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced, saying: 

The Righteous is lifted up, and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world . . . (Moses 7:47).

Enoch is seeing a vision of a particular time in the future, when Jesus will be executed on the cross, and yet he still describes it as something happening "from the foundation of the world." Whatever that expression means, it seems clear that it doesn't necessarily mean that something has always been true and thus never needed to happen.

It's also important to note that the passage I've bolded above is not something that was revealed but just something that people were saying -- and the basis for that saying was apparently God's telling Adam that he, Adam, had been forgiven. The logic seems to be that we would have inherited Adam's guilt, but Adam was forgiven, and thus we inherit that forgiveness as well.


That's what these scriptures seem to be saying. Nevertheless, I must insist -- there's no arguing with bedrock moral intuitions -- that no one can be guilty of a sin they had no hand in committing, and that this is inherently and necessarily true, not something that was made-true by anything Jesus did or suffered.

So, where does that leave us?


"In Adam's fall / We sinnèd all." The only way that could be true would be if each of us was in some sense Adam. "You must consider yourselves as if you were, respectively, Adam and Eve," participants in the Mormon temple ceremony are (or used to be) told. But surely that is only because the ceremony uses Adam and Eve as symbolic "everyman" figures. I mean, we can't each of us be reincarnations of Adam or Eve, can we?

This brings us to two more cryptic statements from Joseph Smith's Book of Moses:

And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many (Moses 1:34).

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living; for thus have I, the Lord God, called the first of all women, which are many (Moses 4:26).

The explanations I heard growing up Mormon was that the first passage is saying that the name Adam means "many" (perhaps a scribal error, as it in fact means "man"), and the second is simply saying that there are many women, of which Eve is the first of all. But the two passages are too obviously parallel for them to mean two completely different things, using similar wording only by coincidence. I think we have to understand them to be saying that there are somehow many Adams and many Eves.

The immediate context of the many-Adams verse is that God has created "worlds without number" (v. 33), and that "there are many worlds . . . innumerable are they unto man" (v. 35). One fairly natural interpretation, then, is that each "world" (whether that means "planet" or "parallel universe") has its own first man, and that first man is always called, at least by God, Adam. I explored this possibility back in 2021 in "Lives, the universes, and everything," but here I want to explore a different possibility. The text doesn't say "the first man of each world"; it says "the first man of all men." As it reads, that seems like it should be a single unique figure, many worlds or not. But, making allowances for Joseph Smith's frontier grammar, I want to read it as "the first man of each man."

The first man of each man? Actually, my 2021 post also explored the idea that each Man in the fullest sense is composed of many men. I imagined God saying:

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

The idea was that there are countless parallel universes, many of which have some version of Moses, and that each of these individual Moseses is somehow part of a single, multiverse-spanning "larger Moses," the godlike being who is, if he only knew it, "our" Moses's true self. And the idea was that this was not something special about Moses but was the true nature of each and every human being.

These days, though, my thoughts are less on the idea of a Greater Self embracing many parallel lives than on one embracing many sequential ones. In other words, reincarnation. Each person is one in a series of incarnations of a greater Being, and each Being's very first incarnation (perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) -- the first man of each man -- is called Adam or, as the case may be, Eve. The story of the Fall, then, is a figurative telling of what happens when Being incarnates for the first time, leaving paradise, becoming mortal, and being clothed in a garment of skins. This process inevitably involves sin, or at least “transgression,” and this is the “original guilt” spoken of. More broadly, original guilt would include all the misdeeds of all one’s past incarnations and not only those of “Adam.”

This helps explain, in a way the conventional understanding of Adam and Eve does not, both why we would each be considered guilty of the sins of our respective “Adam” and why Christ would extend blanket amnesty for that guilt, so that each child is born clean. There is a sense in which we “are” our past incarnations and bear responsibility for their deeds, and another sense in which we are not them — no memory of their lives, no continuity of consciousness — and cannot meaningfully repent for anything they did.


Having a specific named example will make this easier to discuss this clearly. Let's suppose that George S. Patton was correct in his belief that he was the reincarnation of Hannibal and use him. But it is imprecise to say that Patton was Hannibal. Rather, both Patton and Hannibal were successive incarnations of some larger Being. It will be convenient to have a name for this Being that incarnated as both Hannibal and Patton, so let’s call him Resheph. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore any other incarnations this Resheph may have had.

The relationships among these three will bear a certain resemblance to those old Trinitarian formulas: Hannibal is Resheph, and Patton is Resheph, but Patton is not Hannibal, and yet there are not two Reshephs but one Resheph.

Patton cannot meaningfully repent for the sins of Hannibal. He doesn’t even know in any detail what those sins are, beyond what he can gather from history books and whatever inklings of memory he may imagine he has. He cannot truly feel remorse for something he reads in a history book, nor is it clear how he could “make amends” for Hannibal’s misdeeds when not only the people Hannibal harmed but the very world in which he lived is long gone. “Forsaking” some of Hannibal’s sins is easy enough — I’m sure Patton didn’t own slaves and refrained from offering child sacrifices to Baal — but the vast difference between the two men and their worlds makes this meaningless and not really redemptive. Not doing what Hannibal did turns out to be rather easy when you're not Hannibal.

So, supposing Hannibal died in his sins unrepentant, what happens? Patton cannot repent for Hannibal’s sins. Only Hannibal can do that, and Hannibal is dead. If Patton is counted guilty of the sins of Hannibal, then Patton is irrevocably damned, and it’s not clear what the point of his incarnation could be. If, on the other hand, Hannibal’s sins are unconditionally erased the moment Patton is born, then it seems that reincarnation is a morally unsatisfying get-out-of-jail-free card, rendering repentance unnecessary and irrelevant.

I think the only solution is that, while Patton cannot and must not be expected to repent for Hannibal’s sins, Resheph can and must.

For reincarnation to have any meaning, we have to assume that there is a larger Resheph consciousness who in certain conditions — between incarnations, presumably, and ultimately in the resurrection — has full access to the memory and experience of all his incarnations. Without this, the individual Being cannot really be said to live on after death. Without a unified Resheph consciousness, Patton is just a new being created from the dead Hannibal, just as the particles that once formed one body might be recycled to make another, and there is no more “life after death” than there would be under materialist assumptions.

Hannibal’s consciousness is more limited and impaired than Resheph’s and thus not identical to it, but I think it is still possible for Resheph to meaningfully repent for Hannibal’s deeds, much as a man can repent for something he did when he was drunk or otherwise impaired. Ideally, Hannibal repents for Hannibal’s sins before he dies; that is the best and easiest way. Failing that, though Resheph can attempt it, but he must do so while he has full access to his experience as Hannibal, not while he is in another incarnation and subject to the veil of forgetfulness.

However, these other incarnations are likely the primary means by which Resheph can enact his repentance. What a discarnate spirit can do to make amends for deeds done in the body is limited. We could imagine our hypothetical repentant Resheph thinking of what he needs to do to make amends and then arranging an incarnation where he will have the opportunity and inclination to do those things. Of course this will always be something of a gamble, since incarnating means passing through the veil of forgetfulness. You have to somehow try to arrange things so that you'll still be able to accomplish your mission even though your memory of what that mission is will be blocked.

Perhaps the amnesia and the lack of access to the larger consciousness are not total. Perhaps some syncs and hunches and visions and such are faint communications from the larger self, nudging you in the direction of your forgotten mission. Perhaps faint hints of the Resheph consciousness shining through were what enabled Patton to figure out that he had been Hannibal (again, supposing for the sake of the example that he was right about that). In some cases at least, Wordsworth may have been right that "not in entire forgetfulness . . . do we come."

Or perhaps it is mainly other Beings who arrange the incarnation and provide the nudges, particularly if the Being being reincarnated is not actually repentant. Perhaps some incarnation are arranged in order to provide experiences that may lead the larger Being to repentance.

But I think this is about as far as I can go with this using abstractions and a generic example. To really understand if it works, I think it will be necessary to imagine a specific example and write a story. I haven't written fiction since my teens and am probably not very good at it, but it seems to be what is indicated.


I'm still not entirely convinced that reincarnation really is compatible with Christianity. The reincarnation perspective tends to treat bodies as dispensable and replaceable, which is hard to reconcile with the resurrection idea of the body being a necessary and permanent part of the immortal soul. "In the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?" asked the Sadducees of the woman who had had seven successive husbands, "for they all had her." We might ask something similar of the soul who has had seven bodies and seven mortal identities, and no obvious answer suggests itself.


Just thinking aloud here. Comments are welcome, if anyone thinks they have some light to shed on these murky questions.

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Silver in the ears

Here’s a random sync. Earlier today I needed, for something I was writing, an example of a historical figure known for his cruelty. Not wanting to draw from the hackneyed 20th-century rogues' gallery of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and company, I briefly considered Vlad the Impaler and then thought, What about Genghis Khan? Didn't he use to execute prisoners by pouring molten silver into their ears? For whatever reason, that was the first specific example of historical cruelty that came to mind.

This train of thought was interrupted by my wife asking me to take, Scipio, one of our cats, to the vet for an ear infection, so I did that. The ear drops we'd been using before hadn't been effective, so the vet recommended a different kind. "This one doesn't use antibiotics," he explained. "It uses silver particles to kill the bacteria."


The timing, together with the extremely specific parallel of putting silver, in liquid form, into someone's ears, makes this a highly improbable sync.

Later I looked up the Genghis Khan thing. It turns out only one prisoner, Inalchuq, is said to have been executed in that manner. The silver is supposed to have been poured into his eyes as well as his ears, but for some reason I had only remembered the ears. I wonder if my cruelty brainstorming could have been influenced by a subconscious precognition of what the vet was going to prescribe.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Don't go back abed

This morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm, with a simple melodic motif in my head as if left over from a dream. Wanting to jot it down before it evaporated but not being musical enough to write out a tune by ear, I tapped it out on a piano app and scribbled down the names of the notes: D G B A B E D.

I immediately recognized this as a message -- presumably from Claire, as she has used this musical spelling method before (see "More on Joan and Claire"). DGB stands for "don't go back," and the remaining notes are a word, "abed." This is clearly related to the Rumi poem in "WaGon," with its repeated line, "Don't go back to sleep."

Changing "to sleep" to "abed" was necessitated by the constraint of having an alphabet that only goes up to G, but "abed" is also a word that has come up recently. In "Turnum outknaves all three," I linked to an old post from 2013, "Poems cut short by death," because one such poem is the Aeneid, which ends abruptly with the death of Turnus. But one of the other poems in that post is the one I wrote in 2009 and reposted earlier this year, "I worry so for dear old Bill," in which Bill has us worried because he has been "so long abed."

Obviously after that I couldn't very well just go back to sleep! So far nothing out of the ordinary has resulted from my getting up an hour earlier than planned.

Three kings in a rug

Thinking about "Rub-a-dub-dub" made me think of a bit of doggerel I wrote when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. It was inspired by a 12th-century carving that was supposed to represent an angel appearing to the three wise men in a dream but actually looked as if the angel was rolling them up in a rug. Here's a photo of the carving; it was surprisingly easy to track down online.


The rhyme I wrote was this:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three kings in a rug,
And who do you think they be?
Robert Bruce, Charlemagne,
And Juan Carlos of Spain.
Roll them up, Gabe, all three.

As I read this now, the ending leads into "Roll up! Roll up for the mystery tour, roll up!" which in turn leads, for complex psychological reasons, into Rufus T. Firefly saying, "You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle."



A completely random chain of associations? But the fact that the above clip from Duck Soup opens with a head of state waking up under an eight-pointed star, like the kings in that old carving, suggests that there is synchromystical method in't.


Update: Wikipedia informs me that "Magical Mystery Tour" is used in the latest Indiana Jones film, where, appropriately, it wakes Indy up. Also in the teaser trailer for the Minecraft movie.


WaGon

Turnum outknaves all three” sent me back to my 2023 dream post “Narrative Reasoning,” which begins with a quote from Turnus and ends with a green book that I at first took for a Quran. As I reread that post and its comments, my attention was arrested by a comment from WanderingGondola that said (ellipsis in the original), “Green as with, say . . . a door?”

The beginning of each part of her handle seemed to jump out, and I saw WaGon. Wagon, I thought, Are there any poems about wagons? I bet someone’s written a poem about a wagon. William Carlos Williams? No, that’s a wheelbarrow. Why such a train of thought should have been triggered by seeing a name I see virtually every day, I don’t know, but it happened very quickly and spontaneously, and before I knew it I was typing wagon poem into the Google search bar, with no idea what to expect.

The first result was part of a poem by the Muslim poet Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks under the title “A Great Wagon”:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

“The door is round and open.” The comment that led me to this poem was about a green door, and round green doors have been a sync theme. See for example “The Wizard at the green door.”

The repeated line “Don’t go back to sleep” reminded me of an email I received from WG last month that said, among a great many other things, “It’s time to wake up, Mr. Tychonievich. Wake up and smell the May flowers” — followed by a parenthetical acknowledgment that it was actually June at the time, not May. And that made me think of something from the previous June, posted in “Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window”:

Joan: Look out the window.

Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.

Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.

Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.

October is the wrong time of year for snow, just as June is the wrong month for May flowers.

Don’t worry, Rumi, or Joan. I have no intention of going back to sleep.

Friday, July 11, 2025

Turnum outknaves all three

As I was contemplating "Rub-a-dub-dub" this morning, I spontaneously reinterpreted the last line, "Turn 'em out, knaves all three," as "Turnum outknaves all three" -- meaning that Turnum (accusative of Turnus, the Rutulian king whose death brings the Aeneid to an abrupt end) is even more of a knave than the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. (The accusative is not grammatical here, but puns must be allowed a certain poetic license.)

Turnus was quoted in my 2023 "Narrative Reasoning" dream, so this character is possibly relevant.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

The fourth Knave

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to puzzle out the meaning of "The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk," followed by an asterisk and then the italicized word or name Gloria. (See my post "Gloria.") I read that on a page that was itself marked with an asterisk, but I quickly decided that that obvious, self-referential reading was misdirection. The three "pages" are Tarot cards, the Page being equivalent to the Jack or Knave of the poker deck.

This thought soon led me to two rhymes, one featuring three Jacks (or the name Jack repeated three times) and the other three Knaves. (That's where that last post came from.)

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick.

and

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker.
Turn them out, knaves all three.

Oddly, both rhymes feature a candlestick, which I thought might be significant. The candlestick (menorah) mentioned in the Bible is a representation of the Tree of Life, which could be a clue as to the identity of the "plant" with which the three Jacks/knaves/pages are identified. (As an aside, that Plant/Page juxtaposition could also be a Led Zeppelin reference.)

Finally I realized the obvious significance of "Rub-a-dub-dub": three Jacks in a tub. Bill recently had this to say about the Tub Man:

When I looked at the book image, the first book that actually jumped out at me was the Harriet Tubman book. When I saw the name, my mind did that weird thing where I saw the name as Harriet Tub Man. As in, a Man associated with a Tub. I mean, I saw it instantly.

Tubs have been a symbol representing Baptism (e.g., Pigeon Needs a Bath, by one of your favorite authors), and so I saw Tub Man as representing this in multiple ways - a Man who is in the Tub getting baptized, but also offering a Tub.

There are three Jacks in a tub, getting baptized, but a deck of cards has four Jacks. Where is the fourth? Well, obviously he's the dry Jack, the unbaptized one, who first came up in "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen." Which Jack is the dry one? The inclusion of the word stolen in the message makes it almost too easy. Who could he possibly be but the Jack of Hearts?

The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts,
All on a summer's day.

The Knave of Hearts,
He stole those tarts
And took them clean away.

The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts
And beat the knave full sore.

The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts
And vowed he'd steal no more.

This is absolutely definitive, as far as I'm concerned. There's no arguing with it. In my original post about the dry Jack, I even identified him with a character, played by myself in a script I co-wrote, who stole a pumpkin pie baked by his mother. The Queen is, conceptually, the "mother" of the Jack.

Get this. Technically, a pumpkin pie is not a pie but a tart. A pie sensu stricto must have a top crust, which a pumpkin pie does not.

Another early thought about the dry Jack message was that it must have something to do with Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I was reading at the time for sync-prompted reasons. I noted that the main character, Scott Crane, is "a Jack." Well, he's not just any Jack. The novel identifies him again and again with one specific card: the Jack of Hearts.

In a climactic scene in the novel, Scott is participating in a fateful game organized by his evil father, played with a very special deck of Tarot cards. For magical reasons, Scott needs to replace the deck with another one without anyone noticing. As a distraction, he spills his soda water on the table. This causes the expected commotion, with his father angrily reiterating that "these are hand-painted cards and must not get wet!" Scott successfully swaps the deck while everyone is cleaning up the water and notes that the deck he has stolen -- the same one his father just insisted "must not get wet!" -- is "the one with the Jack of Cups card that had split his eye forty-two years earlier" (making him a "one-eyed Jack" himself). This is the dry Jack, and getting it wet would spell disaster for the wicked.

Cups is the Italian and Tarot equivalent of the Anglo-French suit of Hearts.

The Jack of Hearts has come up once before on this blog: In "Fourth Down," I mention that the French refer to that card by the nickname La Hire, referring to one of Joan of Arc's closest comrades. In the present context, the title of that post has another potential meaning. With three Jacks in the tub but one still dry, it's "three down, one to go." With the baptism of the final Jack, we would be able to say "fourth down."

As documented in my post "Baptism," I addressed myself as what we now know is the Jack of Hearts:

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

As that post goes on to relate, the next day, moved by a great sense of spiritual urgency, I recited my Latin translation of the prayer Alma used before he baptized himself (Mosiah 18:12-14) and immersed myself in the sea.

So did that count? Is the fourth and final Jack now baptized? I reported some feedback on that question in my next post, "After baptism." First I did a one-card Tarot read and got the Moon, which shows a crustacean emerging from the water and onto a narrow path -- corresponding to the Book of Mormon's statement that baptism in water is the way one enters the strait and narrow path. I noted that the crustacean, though it looks like a crayfish or lobster, is the way the constellation Cancer the Crab has historically been represented and was almost certainly originally intended to represent that sign (which is governed by the Moon).

Traditional astrological correspondences identify the Page of Cups (Jack of Hearts) with the sign of Cancer. It requires very little imagination to see in the Moon card a depiction of the baptism of that formerly dry Jack.

Shortly after that reading, I was given three "gifts" in which it was impossible not to see synchronistic symbolism:


First, the shining blue-green crab -- corresponding to the baptized crustacean and the Page of Cups. Second, the sign of the Holy Ghost. Third, a pink star which I was at first unable to interpret. I still don't know exactly what it means, but the cryptic sentence in the Gloria book referred to "the three pages just starred." If those three pages are the three knaves in the tub, the three already-baptized Jacks, then being "starred" seems to have something to do with having been baptized. And the day after my baptism, I, too, was "starred," or gifted with a tiny star (the etymological meaning of asterisk).

This past Sunday, I was browsing /x/, and deep in one of the threads someone happened to post, apropos of nothing, this card from Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck:


I am somewhat allergic to this particular deck and have never bothered to learn much about it. I did not know until I saw it on Sunday that one of the Cups face cards has an amber crab in his cup. I saved the image because ages ago, c. 2003, I had a blog called Bouillabaisse for the Soul, and the header image was a cropped image of a Knight of Cups from an old Marseille deck into whose cup I had photoshopped the crayfish/crab from the Moon card of the same deck. At the time I had no idea whatsoever -- I didn't find out until this past Sunday -- that Crowley had made the very same addition to the very same card. In my case, it had no deep meaning; I just thought it was a humorous way of suggesting the seafood soup from Marseille for which my blog was named. Although I used the Knight card to create the image, I cropped out the horse, so he could just as easily be a Page.

I think this post represents an important breakthrough in understanding the dry Jack message, but of course it also raises new questions. For starters, who specifically are the other three Jacks? All will become clear with time, I think.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Knaves all three

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick.

Jack be be rapid, Jack be fleet,
Jack jump over the slab of meat.

Jack be hastened, Jack be sped,
Jack jump over the loaf of bread.

Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences

When I dream, I dream about books.

Last night (July 7-8), I dreamt that I was walking through the corridor of a Mormon church, accompanied by a girl of four or five who was wearing a fancy white dress that made me think that, even though it’s not a Mormon thing, she was there for her First Communion.

In the corridor, we first passed an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman in business wear, who nodded a greeting as she walked past. Next we encountered what I thought of as a “giant Irishman,” a very tall overweight man who somehow reminded me simultaneously of Tim Dillon and J. P. Sears.

“I’m looking for Nemo the Mormon,” he said. (In real life, Nemo the Mormon is the online handle of the recently excommunicated British Mormon agitator Douglas Stilgoe.)

“He’ll be in the kitchen,” I said and led him to the kitchen. There were several men standing around in there, and I told him which one was Nemo. “He’s the one with the ponytail and the black waistcoat.” (Not what the real Nemo looks like.)

“Great,” said the giant Irishman. “I like Nemo. My name’s Terry.” He held out his hand.

“William,” I said.

Terry changed his mind about the handshake. “Yeah, I don’t like you.”

“You don’t like me? You don’t know me.”

“What I don’t like about you,” he continued, “is that you’d rather read this than this.”

He was holding a massive book in each hand, each of which he waggled in turn with its respective this. These were children’s adaptations of classic works, each with a colorful cover and a different title from the original. Despite clearly being intended for children, the books apparently hadn’t been shortened at all. Each was as thick as a Bible.

The first book, the one Terry claimed I’d rather read, had a title along the lines of Sometimes We Fight (I can’t remember the exact wording) and had a picture of a fat lion on the cover. This was clearly a rebus for the name Leo Tolstoy (whose surname means “fat” in Russian), and I understood the book to be an adaptation of War and Peace.

The second book, which Terry would have preferred I prefer, was called The Wily Whale. The cover illustration was a closeup of a ship, showing its name: HMS Tory. This, I immediately understood, meant HM story, the initials being those of Herman Melville. The book was a version of Moby-Dick.

I was indignant. “Look, I don’t know how you think you know me, but I’ve never even read War and Peace.”

The little girl interrupted, speaking in a musical voice and adult diction that made me think she must be some supernatural being disguised as a child.

To Terry she said, “Angelina. Pleasure.” Then, turning to me, “What I think the gentleman is trying to convey is that you have a tendency to prefer an intellectual like Keats over a straight shooter like Herman Melville.”

“Keats?” I said. “That’s War and Peace! Look, it’s got a fat lion on it. And I don’t read Keats, either. And intellectual? I’d trust Melville on whales over Keats on nightingales any day!”

Upon waking, I wondered if the giant Irishman might be yet another face of Gross Gaur, who was also referred to as “the gentleman” even though his name was known. Terry as in Terry Gross, from NPR? (Terry Gross is a slim Jewish woman, not a giant Irishman, but that’s no insuperable objection. Gawr Gura is the wrong size and sex, too.)

If it turns out there’s some obscure Keats poem about a fat lion, I will be suitably impressed.

“The wily whale” is a phrase from “Fare Away,” a song from the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind. One of the verses is a bit synchy:

First mate Peter's a hardened man
Says the captain's a charlatan
Don't know tackle from futtock plates
He’ll sail us into the pearly gates

Fare away, fare away under main topsail
To the furbelow of the wily whale

Sailing to the pearly gates calls to mind the “Gloria” music video I recently posted. Like me, Gloria wades into the sea and falls to her knees. Then the waters part as for Moses, revealing that a shining door had been hidden underwater.

Monday, July 7, 2025

Countries in translation

Some of the Chinese names for Western countries are quite poetic.

The United States is called 美國, which means “the beautiful country.”

The United Kingdom is called 英國, which means “the heroic country.”

France is called 法國, which means “the country of law.”

Germany is called 德國, which means “the country of virtue.”

Italy is called 義大利, which means “the great profit of righteousness.”

Portugal is called 葡萄牙, which means “grape teeth.”

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Gloria

When I dream, I dream about books.

I dreamt I was in a listening room at a company that manufactures high-end audio equipment, which in real life is owned by a family I have known and worked with for years. I put an unmarked vinyl record on the turntable, and out of speakers worth as much as a small house came what sounded like a mashup of “Black Water” by Of Monsters and Men and the Spanish version of “Gloria” by the Chinese singer G.E.M.

I sat on a wooden chair in the center of the room, listened to the music, and thought about Hurricane Gloria, which had hit New Hampshire when I was living there in 1985, and how years later Gloria had provided the mental imagery for me when I first read about Marduk battling the fierce winds unleashed by Tiamat.

Presently I became aware that there was a large coffee table book on my lap. I opened it to the first page, which said only this:

The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk.

*

Gloria

The first thing I heard when I woke up was that a typhoon was coming toward Taiwan and that everything would be closed tomorrow, making the hurricane memories in my dream mildly precognitive.


Friday, July 4, 2025

After baptism

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses came up recently in a highly unlikely coincidence, as described in my last post, "Baptism" (which you should read before proceeding, if you haven't yet). Late last night, I checked /x/, mostly to keep tabs on any new Roy Jay developments, and to my surprise found a thread soliciting opinions on the Satanic Verses -- not the Rushdie novel, but the deleted Quran verses from which it takes its name. In Rushdie’s translation, Muhammad recites, naming three goddesses then revered in Mecca:

Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?… They are exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.

How differently the course of history may have flowed had Muhammad not convinced himself that these verses were a satanic imposture! Anyway, the thread is not very interesting, but it is interesting how that book keeps coming up.


This morning I woke up a couple of hours before my alarm, went to my chapel, and prayed the Rosary for the first time in over a month. Then, while shuffling my Rider-Waite deck, I recited some more prayers and then said essentially, "So I got baptized. What happens now?"

I drew a card, laid it face down in front of me and, as is my custom, tried to perceive it psychically before turning it over. My clairvoyance is spotty at best, but it still seems worthwhile to keep it in good working order, such as it is, through regular exercise.

My first psychic impression was of golden radiance hovering above a distant mountain on the horizon, and I thought, "Oh, it's Temperance again." I've been getting that card a lot lately. But as I checked this tendency to jump to conclusions, and let more impressions gradually surface, I began to have a sense of a pale, impassive face in profile, looking down, and then a very vague sense of symmetry in the other elements of the scene -- something on the left and something corresponding on the right, but with no clear idea of what these matching elements were. In my notebook, next to where I had scribbled "Temperance," I now added, "-- or the Moon?" and then after a moment underscored the word Moon several times, making that my final answer.

I turned the card over. It was the Moon.


I immediately saw the relevance of this card to the question I had asked. The central figure -- usually called a crayfish or lobster but historically representing the constellation of the Crab -- emerges from the water -- always understood to be salt water, like that in which I baptized myself -- and ahead of it a long, narrow path stretches away into the distance. What does Nephi say in the chapter I quoted in my last post?

For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which leads to eternal life . . . (2 Ne. 31:17-18).

After baptism by water, the strait and narrow path (And in my case, as noted in the last post, the water, too was a Strait.) The path leads to eternal life, which brings us to my initial "wrong" perception of the card as Temperance. I've learned to take note even of such "incorrect" perceptions, as they often shed interpretive light on the reading. Here's what the Temperance card looks like. All I perceived of it was the bit in the background, below the angel's right wing.


Here's what A. E. Waite, the designer of the card, has to say about this element in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot:

A direct path goes up to certain heights on the verge of the horizon, and above there is a great light, through which a crown is seen vaguely. Hereof is some part of the Secret of Eternal Life, as it is possible to man in his incarnation. All the conventional emblems are renounced herein.

So this card, too, shows a narrow path leading from the water's edge to the horizon, and in this case the destination is explicitly Eternal Life, or some part thereof.

Coming back to the Moon card itself, it is notable for being the only one of the Major Arcana to show no human or angelic figure. At my baptism, it was also notable that the entire beach was deserted, so that the event was witnessed only by the shorebirds.

My last post discussed the scene in Last Call where two of the characters encounter Isis in vision and are told to be baptized. Isis is described in a way that very obviously and deliberately evokes the imagery of the Moon card:

Diana strained her eyes, trying to keep the approaching woman in focus. The cold and inhumanly beautiful face was above Diana now, and seemed to be a feature of the night sky. Dogs or perhaps wolves were howling somewhere, and surf crashed on rocks. Fine salt spray dewed Diana's parted lips.

Her knees were suddenly cold, and she realized she had knelt on the wet grass.

When the goddess spoke, her voice was literally musical -- like notes stroked from inorganic strings and ringing silver. This is my daughter, spoke the voice, who pleases me.

Lobsters and crabs, I should note, have been in the sync stream for a while now. Recently, Bill has seen them as spider-analogues and thus references to the demon Ungoliant and those who serve her (including, according to him, myself in past lives) -- but we have also seen the lobster in more positive roles, delivering the Gospel of Light. (See "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback.")


After this consultation with the cards, I still had a little time before my first class, so I decided to listen to an audiobook of the Bible while I did some cleaning. The recording was at the point where I had left off last time I listened to it, which was about a week ago -- somewhere in the middle of Leviticus. This isn't normally the most riveting stretch of scripture, but it certainly got my attention and made me laugh when I pressed play and immediately heard the voice actor announce:

And the man whose hair is fallen off his head, he is bald; yet is he clean (Lev. 13:40).


My morning class is for very young children. This morning, a six-year-old girl called me over and wanted to show me something before the lesson. She had a little plastic box, inside of which were dozens and dozens of tiny, confetti-size pieces of colored paper which had been cut into various shapes with some kind of punch. Of the wide variety of shapes and colors, she selected three and said that she wanted to give them to me as "gifts":


The first is a blue-green crab, made of some kind of metallic material so that it can look bright or dark depending on the angle of the light, like a Menelaus blue morpho butterfly. The second is the one that really got my attention. It's a dove, which is the symbol of the Holy Ghost, and specifically the form the Holy Ghost took when it fell upon Jesus at his baptism. Also, unlike the other two shapes, the dove is negative space -- not a piece of paper, but something cut out of the paper. It's a hole -- hole-y -- and as such is immaterial -- a ghost or spirit. It's about as perfectly concise a way of non-verbally conveying the phrase "Holy Ghost" as you could ask for. Also, it was explicitly presented to me as a "gift," using that word. As every Mormon knows, the next step after baptism is receiving what is always referred to as "the gift of the Holy Ghost."

And, uh, then there's a pink star. No obvious interpretation suggests itself, but given how much meaning is packed into the other two "gifts," I assume this one, too, will turn out to be significant.

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Baptism


Yesterday morning (July 2), I breakfasted at a coffee shop where big lettering on the wall behind the front counter proclaims, "Tasting coffee, not only is a taste of the enjoyment, it is a physical and psychological baptism."

I'm pretty sure that if drinking coffee is a physical baptism for you, you're doing it wrong. Psychological, though? It can be. I vividly remember that one of the first things I did after resigning from the CJCLDS on February 14, 2002, was drink my first ever cup of coffee, doing it for no other reason than that it had been forbidden -- like Gibreel Farishta stuffing his face with dead pigs in The Satanic Verses, I thought at the time, noting the date -- and I did think of it explicitly as an "anti-baptism," as a ceremonial rite of passage into the ranks of the no-longer-Mormon.

I mailed in my resignation letter to church headquarters that day, but then when they wanted me to jump through some more hoops to finalize the thing -- meeting with the local bishop and whatnot -- I didn't bother. To this day I'm not sure whether they still consider me to be technically a member or not. Am I a "dry Mormon" -- a person who is Mormon-like in their general lifestyle and outlook but is not a member ("dry" meaning not baptized) -- or a "Jack Mormon" -- a church member who doesn't attend services or live the approved lifestyle (the equivalent of a "lapsed Catholic")? Possibly, as suggested by that "Jack dry" message, both to some degree.

As I ate my sandwich and sipped the devil's brew, I read a bit of Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I've been reading for sync-prompted reasons. Two of the female character, while physically in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, enter a visionary state in which they have an audience with the goddess Isis. The goddess accepts one of the two as "my daughter, who pleases me" (clearly alluding to the language used at Jesus' baptism), and the other, who has previously been fighting to obtain the daughter-of-Isis role for herself, renounces that claim and vows to be a true friend to the one the goddess has chosen. Immediately after this,

An idea was conveyed then, something like bathe, or cleanse or be baptize, and [there] appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

Nothing like a physical baptism occurs at that time, but the two women shortly find themselves back in Caesar's Palace, discovering that during the visionary encounter they had physically been sitting at the bar drinking quinine water which they had no memory of ordering -- suggesting that, as in the inscription at the coffee shop, their baptism somehow took the form of drinking a liquid rather than being immersed in or sprinkled with it. The second woman then proceeds to order a hamburger and a beer -- things she had abstained from before in order to qualify herself for the role of "queen" and daughter of Isis -- and explains to her at first uncomprehending friend that this is a way of cementing her vow of friendship:

I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now . . . .

So as with my own "un-baptism" on which I had just been reflecting, we have the consumption of what was formerly forbidden, precisely because it was formerly forbidden, in a way that is almost ceremonial and serves as a way of formally enacting a spiritual decision.

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could be baptized again by one of the churches -- the CJCLDS or the Catholics or, hell, even the True Jesus Church or something -- but the sentence immediately came to mind with great clarity: "That is not the way." This was followed by the mental voice of Greg Carlwood saying, as he often does at the beginning of his podcast, "This is the way, Higherside Chatters!"

At first I took this as an indication that recent episodes of that podcast might hold some synchronistic clues about the form my baptism should take, but that quickly proved to be a dead end. Instead I decided to search the Book of Mormon for the exact phrase "this is the way." It occurs exactly once, at the end of 2 Nephi 31. As it happens, this chapter has a lot to say about baptism, and specifically about the need "to be baptized, yea, even by water!" (v. 5). Baptism means baptism, immersion in actual water, not some other act of vaguely equivalent symbolism.

That night, I found myself wondering whether Lady Issit, the murdered mother of one of the characters in Last Call was a real person from history, like Bugsy Siegel. To check, I ran a web search for "issit" "bugsy" -- and the first results were etexts of The Satanic Verses, the very novel I had just referenced in connection with my coffee un-baptism. As it happens, there's a passing reference to a sitcom featuring, among many other alien characters, "Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula"; and then elsewhere in the novel, one of the characters, stuttering, says "iss iss issit" for "sit." A pretty strange coincidence.

This morning (July 3), I finished Last Call. The two women do in the end get "baptized" by bathing in Lake Mead. Supernatural beings try to prevent them from doing so, but they fight them off with, of all things, a chip. This is a poker chip from the Moulin Rouge (the short-lived Vegas casino, not its famous Parisian namesake), which was given to them by supernatural means after the meeting with Isis. The women first use the chip as a sword and finally end up eating it. (Yeah, it's kind of a strange novel.)

What does Moulin Rouge mean, anyway? I looked it up. "Red windmill."

After my morning classes, I had several hours of free time, and I began to feel an urgent need to get baptized immediately. On the road, I passed an irrigation canal with a sign that said, in English as well as Chinese, "Beware of deep water. Swimming prohibited." Beware is a word closely associated with the Ides of March, which is the date I was baptized, on my eighth birthday. And earlier I had been thinking of "baptism"-like acts consisting of doing the prohibited because it is prohibited. So while the sign looked on the surface like a warning not to get baptized, I interpreted it as the opposite. "Just follow my yellow light," I thought, quoting lyrics from Of Monsters and Men, "and ignore all those big warning signs." The coffee shop with the baptism inscription is the same place that has the Emily Dickinson lines I posted about in "Golden light, and going 'overseas'."

A few minutes later, I saw an advertisement for "Golden Ratio potato chips." The combination of golden and chips seemed potentially meaningful.

Then I passed someone wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Don't follow the wave" -- could be interpreted lots of ways -- and then another T-shirt on which was written, inside a big blue-green circle, "No place like Earth. No time like the present." In other words, it's now or never.

Not in an irrigation canal, though, obviously. I changed into shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and slides and had Google Maps take me to the nearest beach. As I approached I could see wind turbines up ahead and thought it was a pity they were all gray instead of red. No moulins rouges. Then, as I turned a corner and had almost arrived at my destination, I found myself facing one that, unlike the others, did have some red on its blades:


Un moulin en partie rouge after all.

I parked, walked down a long stretch of wet sand and barnacled rocks, and waded out into the warm olive-colored waters of the Taiwan Strait. The place was completely deserted, except for a few little egrets in the shallows and some terns or something overhead.

"You're crazy. This is a crazy thing to do," an inner voice helpfully informed me. Yeah, well, not-being-crazy is pretty low on my list of priorities these days.

The water deepened very gradually, and I had to wade pretty far out just to get waist deep. "Am I actually going to do this?" I thought. "I am. Effunde spiritum tuum, Domine, super servum tuum, ut opus hoc faciat in sanctitate cordis." I sank to my knees on the soft sand, held my breath and, pushing against my natural buoyancy in the heavy brine to get my whole body underwater, kowtowed.

Then I rose, waded slowly back to the beach, and left. In the heat of the Taiwan summer, I was mostly dry by the time I got home. I took a quick shower to rinse off the salt, changed into work clothes, and had time for an extremely late lunch before my 4:00 class.

Later I remembered that 2 Nephi 31 associates baptism with the word strait.

Does what I did today really count as "baptism" in any meaningful sense? I don't know. I'm not even sure I know what that question means. I do think it was some kind of test, though, and that I passed it by demonstrating my willingness to take physical action in response to a spiritual prompting, at a moment's notice, even though it involved doing something kind of weird. I have a very strong sense that if I had hesitated or delayed at all, if I had failed to take action immediately, some sort of opportunity would have been permanently lost. As for what exactly that means, we'll just have to see what happens. Your move, angels, ministers of grace, and sync fairies. Your -- you know what word Greg Carlwood would add here -- move.

Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man.

I dreamt that my wife bought me breakfast -- an ice-cream come, which I ate very slowly because it was a special kind of ice cream that woul...