The Pig at the Parade of Newts

Great title for an album, right? Or possibly an autobiography. This is going to be a pretty random chain of associations, even for me.

I looked at The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and, switching on my anagram vision, saw The Pig at the Parade of Newts. I liked that image -- a tusked and shaggy boar among the harmless little newts -- and thought it was conceptually similar to the sudden appearance of the great god Pan in the middle of a charming tale of toads and moles and rats.

A more straightforward anagram is dawn/wand -- The Piper at the Gates of Wand. In a recent comment, Debbie identified the wands in the Three and Four of Wands as forming a "portal":

In both of the Tarot cards that you posted (Four of Wands and the Three of Wands) the image shows the initiate  on the other side of the portal. Recall my many comments about 11:11 being the doorway.

Back on August 5, Debbie sent me a photo of an area on her property, framed by two sycamore trees, which she thinks of as "the portal," so that informs her interpretation of the Wands cards:

Coming back to The Pig at the Parade of Newts, this made me think of my past posts about the H and N pages of Animalia (featuring hogs and newts, respectively) and also for some reason about the Strumbellas song "Spirits." I guess the connection is the music video, which features a funeral that turns into a parade.

Watching that video again, I noticed the line about "how the good die young," and that -- I did warn you this was going to be a pretty random chain of associations -- made me think of this Eat Poop You Cat sequence from Wikipedia, in which "Only the good die young" -- depicted as a dead baby with a halo and three sinful graybeards with devil horns -- turns into "The three vikings visit Christ":

This replaces the three Wise Men with three Vikings. In "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships," I noted that the sea on that card looks like a desert, and I connected the three ships with a Christmas carol in which (according to an unsourced claim on Wikipedia) three ships may represent the camels carrying the three Wise Men. I also linked the ships to the Dawn Treader, which has a dragon head on its prow like a Viking ship.

This ambiguity between sailing across the sea and riding across the desert also appeared in my posts on the Animalia newts and pigs. In "Nautical Newts," I connected Animalia's "nine nautical newts navigating near Norway" (so another Viking link) with the salamanders on the outer garment of the Knight of Wands -- and then proceeded to connect that Knight with a pig. Here, for ease of reference, are the three images in question:

All three images show someone traveling to the left, holding aloft a stick (oar, wand, flagpole). The newts are specified as nine, but only six are fully visible. The garment of the Knight of Wands also has six fully visible salamanders and parts of others. The Knight's hounskull visor would, when closed, resemble a pig's snout. Both the newts and the Hog Knight are juxtaposed with an ostrich.

In the newts post, I write, "The newts are navigating the open sea, while the Knight and his salamanders are traveling through the deserts of Egypt," but I nevertheless go on to equate the two.

The Knight of Wands, with his pig-snout visor, and accompanied by a group of salamanders, is in a pretty straightforward sense the Pig at the Parade of Newts.

The idea of newts on parade also made me think of my 2022 dream post "The coypu assembles a new zodiac." The animals selected for the new zodiac were marching around the coypu as if on parade, and leading the parade was "a black and yellow newt." Black and yellow is also the color scheme of the salamander garment on the Knight of Wands. The newt is described as "coltish" and "prancing," connecting it to the equestrian imagery of the Tarot card.

Coming back to the Three of Wands, its yellow desert-looking sea is apparently a narrow strait, since we can see right across it to the other side. This makes it a potential tie-in with the "narrow desert" of this blog's title, which comes from a poem in George MacDonald's novel Phantastes:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,

Come into the house so high and wide.

When I selected this as the title for my blog, my understanding was that pride keeps the man in the "narrow desert" deracinated nihilism, and that coming "into the house" represented a sort of submission to the collective experience and wisdom of Man. As I explained in my 2023 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert'" (which also has a Wise Men link!):

I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview.

That post explored some possibly negative implications of "coming into the house," but somehow I failed until just now to make the obvious connection: Lehi's Tree of Life vision (1 Ne. 8). The vision is set in a "waste," or desert, and there is a "strait and narrow path" leading to the Tree -- but some leave the narrow path and go instead to a "great and spacious building," later identified by Nephi as "the pride of the world" (1 Ne. 11:36). "And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building" (1 Ne. 8:33). So in another possible reading of MacDonald's couplet, the narrow desert is the strait and narrow path, and the "house so high and wide" is the "great and spacious building . . . high above the earth" (v. 26), to which the "man of pride" is called not as a way of renouncing that pride but rather because it is where men of pride belong.

In my July 3 post "Baptism," I associated the Taiwan Strait, in which I had "baptized" myself, with the strait and narrow path -- creating the same land-sea ambiguity seen in the Three of Wands and the voyage of the Nautical Newts. My description of the Strait even seems to foreshadow what I would later call the "desert-looking sea" of the Three:

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.

I mention the sand, the warmth, and the yellowish tint of the water, and I even describe the place as "completely deserted" -- that is, in King James parlance, "a desert place." We even have an account of Jesus and his apostles departing "into a desert place by ship" (Mark 6:32).

The yellow waters of the Three of Wands are also a link to the yellow waters of "The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams," which are a "portal" (that word again) to another world. (Its sister lake in that other world, Dune Freak Lake, again combines desert and water imagery.) In Beyond the Golden Stair, a golden-looking pool, also compared to a pot, serves as another such portal:

The blue flamingo's pool lay just outside the light and he saw it as through yellow glass, its waters spangled with the uprush of aureate bubbles, a cauldron of molten gold. One movement more and he would leave the light for a drab world of vanity, avarice, and deceit . . . .

The image of the Hog Knight riding across the narrow desert with his banner makes me think of lines from a Mormon hymn:

They raised his banner triumphant

Over the desert sod

And we hear the desert singing

Carry on, carry on, carry on!

And that leads us to another funereal "parade" song: