Poltergeists and spiders (and the Shadow, and Hermes, and Thoth, and Debbie's dress)

This past weekend, we finally got around to repairing the last of the damage done by the 2019 poltergeist. (One of the doorknobs it broke turned out to be pretty hard to find a replacement for.) As you may recall, my wife had a strong sense that the geist was in some way a spider:

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Cleaning out one of my email inboxes today, I found an October 18 notification from WordPress that someone had "liked" a post on one of my old blogs. Here's a screenshot of the message:

WordPress suggested three posts from this person: "The Eight Stages of a Poltergeist Haunting," "The Spider in Celtic Myth," and "Fear Dorcha: Shadow Creature from the Land of the Celts." You don't see poltergeists and spiders juxtaposed too often. My posts about our own poltergeist haunting have been here, not on my WordPress blog, so it seems unlikely that my posting influenced which specific posts WordPress chose to recommend.

The post this person liked, "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength," is pretty critical of the Rider-Waite deck, which has since become the main deck I work with. (I formerly favored the Tarot de Marseille.) This is a reminder that I've promised Bruce a post about how and why the Rider-Waite eventually won me over. I'll get around to it one of these days, Bruce, just as I did eventually get that doorknob replaced!

Note added (11:30 p.m.): It was the poltergeist an spider posts that got my attention, but then I realized that the Shadow (the pulp-magazine character) had also been in the sync stream, so I checked out the third link, about a "Shadow Creature" called Fear Dorcha ("the dark man"). At the end of the post, after the comments, it says this:

Pingback: Sons of Dionysos | Aldrin is the Hermês Boy

Normally, that sort of thing would be a link you can click on, but in this case it isn't. Searching the web for "aldrin is the hermes boy" yielded zero results -- because, if you can believe it, Google is now so dysfunctional that if you omit the circumflex over the e it can't imagine what you were looking for. Searching with the circumflex, I found a blog called Aldrin is the Hermês Boy, which hasn't been updated since 2013 and which has nothing about sons of Dionysos or Fear Dorcha. Finally, after following three successive links-to-my-new-blog, and switching browsers to get past a "privacy error" in Brave, I found the post in question: "Sons of Dionysos," which does indeed link back to the Fear Dorcha post. It's apparently by a gay mestizo Filipino who adheres to Greco-Roman neo-paganism. (I thought that might be a joke, but apparently it's legit.)

The about page on the first blog I found specifies that the Hermês Boy moniker refers to "Hermês the god, not the bag." This is a sync because I discovered this guy's series of blogs due to a synchronistic interest in the Shadow. The post that first brought up the Shadow, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," also deals with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to Wikipedia "originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth."

Going back to that Wikipedia article now to get the quote, I noticed this image of a turquoise-colored statue of Thoth.

That blue-green Egyptian figure, with a mane suggestive of a pharaonic headdress, is obviously related to this picture from a dress belonging to commenter Debbie:

The above photo of the dress was belatedly added to the same post that introduced the Shadow and Hermes Trismegistus. The reason for its inclusion was that it resembled a character from a music video who in turn resembled a dream-image of Hermes Trismegistus.