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.