The Menelmacar mudra resurfaces

A new post from Galahad Eridanus, "How to Find the Center of the Universe," lays out a rather complicated system for locating any constellation in the sky at any time anywhere in the world, using only a watch and a compass.

The first section is titled "Picking the Celestial Lock," but the first sentence in that section reads, "My primary aim with this present piece is to give you a key to the stars." This is a little odd, since picking a lock means opening it without a key. If he's giving us a key, why pick the lock? This reminded me of the dream documented in "Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2," in which I saw someone using lockpick-like tools to try to "jimmy" hot water out of a water dispenser even though he could have simply pressed the red lever designed for that purpose. I wrote that he "was going through a lot of unnecessary trouble and ignoring the easy way" -- much like someone who picks a lock even though he has a key.

Eridanus's method, while certainly creative, doesn't exactly make for compelling reading unless you actually plan to use it yourself, which I don't, so I just skimmed most of the post. This illustration arrested my attention, though:

The captions reads:

When locating Orion using this method, one can sometimes end up mirroring the constellation itself. (Concerning the angle: while the ecliptic is ~65° from Polaris, Orion's belt is just over 90° from Polaris. So to find Orion himself, you would angle your second arm like this if he happened to be in this direction.)

The idea of a person's pose corresponding to that of Orion is one that came up on Bill's now-deleted blog in May 2024, in a post called "Orion and his most excellent pose." The post itself is no longer available, but I reproduced one of the illustrations in my May 2024 post "The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22":

That post recounts a dream in which I was worried that I might have swallowed a "nanosnake," and a woman's voice was telling me urgently to do a mudra. She eventually specified that she meant the Menelmacar mudra (from an Elvish name for Orion), but before that

I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem.

Nataraja dancing with a snake? Scrolling down from Eridanus's Orion pose picture, we soon find this one, in which Ophiuchus almost looks as if he is dancing:

The Menelmacar mudra -- a.k.a. Orion's most excellent pose -- also came up in my September 2024 post "Love pop, baby, love pop." I had randomly happened upon a picture of the mudra on /x/ and then found a rather similar image when I was searching for the B-52s song "Love Shack":

Revisiting that old post now, I found the name B-52s interesting. In my last post, "Fourth experiment ruined by haste," the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was an important symbol. The band is named after the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, which is obviously pretty similar. My B-17 post was about a card which I had thought was going to be the Tower but turned out to be the Four of Wands. In the B-52s post, I note that I found the umbrella Orion image at precisely 4:44. Looking at the image now, I see that it was posted at 16:41:16. Sixteen is the number of the Tower, and "four one" sounds a lot like "four wands." The Four of Wands has the same bright yellow background as the two images above.

Speaking of Hindu gods and snakes (as I was a few paragraphs back), I recently revisited my January 26 post "Year of the Snake," in which I took the poem "The Snake," which Trump likes to recite, and rewrote it to tell the story of Krishna and Aghasura as told in the Bhagavata Purana.

My reason for rereading that poem was some strange hypnopompic imagery I experienced a few days ago: Instead of cowherds, it was cows marching into the mouth of the serpent. Krishna was standing in front of the mouth smoking a very long pipe. As each cow approached, he would blow a smoke-ring that would encircle the beast's neck like a wreath, and this would protect it as it entered Aghasura's gullet. Upon waking more fully, I associated this imagery with Joseph Smith's statement that tobacco was "an herb for . . . all sick cattle" and also with these lines of Dylan:

And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

Far past the frozen leaves

The haunted frightened trees

Out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

With one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

Circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

Driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow

That phrase "beneath the waves" has been associated with cows before, in "Underwater Cowtown."

Note added: In Trump's poem, the woman takes in the snake. In my version, the snake "takes in" (swallows) Krishna. The Menelmacar mudra dream had to do with my possibly swallowing a snake.