The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships

The other day I spontaneously thought of the scene in The Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole encounter Pan, and of the line, "And yet -- and yet -- O Mole, I am afraid." I've never actually read The Wind in the Willows and really only know of that one scene, from quotations and commentary in other books. I've read and enjoyed several other books by Kenneth Grahame -- Pagan Papers, Dream Days, The Golden Age -- so I made a mental note that I should probably get around to reading his acknowledged masterpiece one of these days.

This afternoon I was browsing a used bookstore and flipped though a strange book called The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black, which was full of anatomical diagrams showing the musculature of a winged angel, a three-headed dog, and other such fantastic creatures. The book had caught my eye because of the title; recently I've been watching YouTube videos from a channel called The Resurrectionists, most of which deal with the historical and mythical backstory behind fairy tales.

Later in the afternoon, I did another experiment napping with a Tarot card under my pillow, but I could remember no dream content whatsoever. The card turned out to be the Three of Wands, which depicts a man looking down from a cliff at ships on the sea. As I contemplated the image, I thought of what Waite says of the ships in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot: "those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea."

In the evening, I checked YouTube, and it recommended a new video from The Resurrectionists, called "The Chapter Too Dark for 'Wind in the Willows'." It's about, you guessed it, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," the scene with Pan. The video talks about how the chapter has been removed from many editions of the book, so that many people who think they have read The Wind in the Willows in its entirety are unaware that any such chapter exists. I found that funny, since I had recently been reflecting on the fact that that chapter is actually the only part of The Wind in the Willows that I know.

After the video about The Wind in the Willows had finished, it cued up the next video: one from the same channel called "Was Beauty and the Beast Based on a Real Couple?" It begins by telling the story, and there is a scene where it shows a ship on the sea, as if viewed from above, and identifies it as belonging to a merchant, thus synching with the Three of Wands. It's even sailing in the same direction as the ships on the cards.

Note added: Posting this made me think about the Three of Wands image again. I thought about what an odd choice it was to show the sea as yellow, making it look more like a desert. The fact that three ships are shown on the card made me think of the Christmas carol "I Saw Three Ships," which has always seemed strange to me, particularly these lines:

And what was in those ships all three,

⁠On Christmas day, on Christmas day?

And what was in those ships all three,

⁠On Christmas day in the morning?

Our Saviour, Christ, and His Lady,

⁠On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

Our Saviour, Christ, and His Lady,

⁠On Christmas day in the morning.

How can two people be in three ships? Were "Our Saviour" and "Christ" somehow originally thought of as two separate individuals? Curiosity about the history of the carol led me to Wikipedia, which noted the strangeness of ships sailing to Bethlehem (20 miles from the nearest sea) and noted, with no citation, "Another suggestion is that the ships are actually the camels used by the Magi, as camels are frequently referred to as 'ships of the desert'." This obviously syncs with the desert-looking sea on which the three ships sail on the card.