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.

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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.")

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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).

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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.