I am that Enkidudal boy

Late last night, I had a premonition that this November is going to be a critical month for me, that I will be the target of some sort of spiritual assault, and that I had best suit up on "the whole armour of God" in preparation. I decided to do a simple Tarot reading to shed more light on this. My questions were: (1) What should be my mission or goal for this month? (2) What danger or enemy will I face? and (3) Who or what can assist me? This is what I got:

All three cards are Major Arcana -- something that will only happen 2% of the time in a three-card spread -- confirming that this is about Something Big. It's a rather incongruous spread at first glance, with a positive-looking card in the "danger" slot and two scary-looking cards in the more positive positions.

The Tower can have positive meanings -- revelation, liberation -- but even then it comes in a violent or disruptive manner. Death as a positive card could play a similar role. As the Red Hot Chili Peppers put it, "Destruction leads to a very rough road, but it also breeds creation." I also notice that the figure of Death is wearing a full suit of armor, synching with my premonition about "the whole armour of God." The man death is about to strike down on the card is a mitered bishop, which fits well with the fact that in the Tarot de Marseille, the Tower card is called "The House of God." Striking down a church leader is symbolically identical to blasting the crown off the house of God. Death is also portrayed by Waite as the fourth horseman, the rider on a pale horse, making the card a potential link to Star Boy (see "Flour Boy symbolism roundup").

As for Strength, the fact that it portrays a woman and a lion ties it to my recent discovery (see "Whore homophones") that Arizona coincidentally resembles the Hebrew words ari "lion" and zona "whore." The woman on Waite's card does not look at all whorish, but in Crowley's version of the card she is literally the Whore of Babylon. (Crowley follows the Marseille sequence, in which Strength is 11 rather than 8, and he renames the card Lust, so it may not be immediately apparent that it is the same card.)

The imagery is also suggestive of Frederick Stuart Church's painting The Sorceress, which I first posted this past March in "More lions and doves" and then again on October 12 in ":Lions on the beach."

As I noted in the October post, the Church painting also features what appears to be a blue-green crystal ball. There is also a round blue-green shape at the top of Crowley's Lust card.

My tentative interpretation of Strength in my reading was that I should be wary of attempts to manipulate me via soft power or seduction.

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Before falling asleep last night, I concentrated on the image of the Tower card and the idea that it represented a mission or goal, hoping to incubate a relevant dream. I can't remember much detail of my dreams of the night, but there were two main storylines.

In the first, Alex Jones had come to my school to repair the water dispenser. (Despite being, like all thinking people, something of a conspiracy theorist, I'v never listened to Alex Jones and have no idea how he got into my dream. In real life, we recently had some routine maintenance work done on the water dispenser.) He did his work, I paid him, and he left. Then he came back, uninvited, with plans to do lots more work on the school. He had prepared elaborate plans and blueprints for everything he wanted to do, including turning one of the unused classrooms into a "music room" with an array of big Chinese drums. I told him I wasn't interested. Throughout this, my school was not in its real-life setting but rather in a desert which could well have been Arizona.

The second storyline had to do with an invasion of "army ants," which were black and about as big as cats, many times larger than real army ants. They threatened both my house and an LDS church building, and we decided that the only thing to do was to attack them with flamethrowers. That would likely result in the buildings burning to the ground, but better to lose your house than to have your bones picked clean by army ants. The dream didn't portray this actually happening, only our decision to do it.

Upon waking, I saw this latter storyline as clearly relevant to the Tower, as it showed how the destruction of a building -- including a church, or "house of God" -- could be, if not exactly a positive thing, at least the lesser of two evils.

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When I woke up, I found that I had a strange song in my head: the chorus of "The Yankee Doodle Boy," but with the first three syllables of Yankee Doodle changed to Enkidu -- the companion of Gilgamesh, a wild man who was tamed by a whore. The final line in particular -- "I am that Enkidudal boy" -- kept repeating in my mind. Later, I realized that Enkidu's story is obviously relevant to the Strength card, especially if the woman is understood to be a whore.

Prior to his two weeks with the whore, Enkidu was an animal-like man, lacking full human intelligence. There is also some evidence that Enkidu was portrayed in Mesopotamian art as a "bull-man." This is a potential link back to Arizona. In "Among the giants," I describe the "Arizonans" in my dream in this way:

The Arizonans were very large people. I don't have a good feel for how tall they were, but each time I shook hands with one, it was like shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. They were profoundly stupid and animal-like -- not in a negative or pathological way, but just like animals, like bison or something. Likable, but obviously not of the same order of consciousness as myself.

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On the road this morning, I passed two cars in quick succession -- less than a minute between them -- which had AZA on their license plates. I saw this as a contraction of Arizona, consisting of the first, middle, and last letter. When A-z-a is removed from Arizona, what remains is rion, which is how a Japanese person might pronounce lion.