Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs

I've finally finished The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered. Two new themes are introduced near the end of this 169-page book: breadcrumbs and an iron pen.

On p. 133, we read that "a trail came they upon, as of bread crumb's lighted upon a dark forest lain," and some were "carried by those crumbs to a course directing to Eru-place." I understand from what Bill and others have said that these crumbs will become an important motif in the third book.

Then on p. 157, we read of an iron pen created from a shard of a broken sword made of meteoric iron:

so may iron of a star's fall cut, and of its material, be forged a sword, for cutting, and if broken, in time, of shards may be written, upon plates of brass, by that same iron's instrumentation, now in pen held to cut by strokes a tale

In the few pages between that reference and the end of the book, this iron pen is mentioned eight more times.

I then began the third book in the series, Words of Them Liberated, of which I have so far read only the table of contents and the page after, which has a short poem about birds as an epigraph:

and them not alone,

the birds might chatter, and sing,

of all the beauty, peace, resolute Abiding,

and make of that Void, chirp.

Another book I have just begun is When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, which perhaps less surprisingly also begins -- just before the table of contents in this case -- with a short epigraph about birds (ellipses in the original):

Birds, birds...Behold them armed for action like daughters of the spirit...

    On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation.

--ST.-JOHN PERSE

Last night I happened to check YouTube and ended up listening to the Right Wing Coalition's latest, in which it is said that "Tucker [Carlson] wants to try and get everyone to follow his breadcrumbs."

I also finished rereading the Book of Isaiah yesterday -- I'm taking a little break from the Book of Mormon, which I have already gone through four times this year (some reading, some listening) -- and after a bit of hesitation as to what book of scripture to tackle next, I thought, well, why not just continue right on with Jeremiah? Maybe do all the prophetic books. I started last night and got as far as Chapter 17 today. That chapter begins, "The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron" -- which was enough of a sync to make me stop reading and write this post. This is one of only two references to an iron pen in all of scripture. (The other is in Job. I'm actually noticing quite a lot of Job-like language so far in my present rereading of Jeremiah, which I hadn't really picked up on before.)

The three themes listed in this post's title may not be entirely separate. The iron pen is introduced in Slumbered as a weapon, cutting like a sword. So are the birds in the St.-John Perse epigraph "armed for action . . . On the white page." The expression about following breadcrumbs comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where the children are unable to follow the breadcrumb trail they lay down because the crumbs are eaten by birds -- leaving, I suppose, an unmarked landscape like a "white page with infinite margins."

Round leaves of gold resurface

I posted this image back in August 2024, in "Round leaves and chip monks":

It's the sign for a restaurant that closed long ago and was called Round Leaves, with a logo depicting golden leaves that aren't particularly round. I was interested in it at the time because of various syncs about "leaves of gold" being connected with gold plates, as well as a few instances of round gold plates.

Less than two months later, in October 2024, as recorded in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace," I had a dream with the name Wallace in it and followed up by taking down the collected works of Wallace Stevens and opening to a random page, where I found these lines from his poem "World Without Peculiarity":

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

Just three days ago, on March 7, I found that my wife had put some sort of new air freshener thing in the kitchen, the lid of which looks like this:

Like the Round Leaves logo, it's a pinnate compound leaf, gold in color, and the circular lid out of which it is cut adds the "round" element. It thus reminded me of that old Round Leaves sync, so I snapped the above photo.

The next day, my wife asked me to buy lunch for her at a particular vegetarian restaurant that I hadn't been to in many months. While there, I noticed that one of the walls was decorated with a golden pinnate compound leaf. There was nothing "round" about it, but the fact that it was in a restaurant was a link to the original Round Leaves. I didn't get a photo of my own, but I found this one online:

That's a pinnate compound leaf on the left. On the right are two simple leaves, one of them lobed.

Today I started reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, the author who came up in "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest"; I wanted to see what she's like as a writer before shelling out for Glorians, the specific title which came up in the syncs, which was just published a week ago and isn't on Internet Archive or Anna's yet. I read this:

I found peace in an aspen grove shared with my grandmother. In this place of rich black soil sheltered by the shimmering round leaves of white-barked trees, my voice set down roots.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

There's that exact phrase "round leaves" again -- an unusual one, since almost all leaves are pointed -- and they're "shimmering" as well. That verb comes from Old English scimerian "to glitter, shimmer, glisten, shine" -- like gold, maybe? The journal entry she is referring to was written in early August, when the aspen leaves would have been green. It's worth noting, though, that this is the first image on the Wikipedia page for "Aspen":

Aspen leaves, though also pointed, are relatively round. In Old English, the tree was called æspe, which Etymonline is unable to trace back to any word meaning anything other than "aspen." I noted the similarity to asp, though, and looked it up. It's "from Greek aspis 'an asp, Egyptian viper,' literally 'a round shield;' the serpent so called probably in reference to its neck hood." (This "asp" was most likely the Egyptian cobra; all cobras are called "glasses snakes" in Chinese, after the spectacled cobra of India, so there may be a spectacles link there, too.)

The aspis shield was made of wood but was often plated with metal and given a "golden" appearance:

I included the second paragraph in the quote above from When Women Were Birds because of its repeated reference to pages. I believe the first "leaves of gold" sync post was "Leaves of gold unnumbered" (January 2024), which begins with my attempts to find out "how many leaves or 'pages' there were in the metallic codex from which the Book of Mormon was purportedly translated." In Chinese, too, "leaf" and "page" are homophones.

Sleeping on billows, and the Landsoon Welcome Doll

The tempest sync theme reminded me of a hymn that confused me as a child:

Master, the tempest is raging!

The billows are tossing high!

The sky is o'ershadow'd with blackness,

No shelter or help is nigh;

Carest thou not that we perish?

How canst thou lie asleep,

When each moment so madly is threat'ning,

A grave in the angry deep?

The winds and the waves shall obey my will,

Peace, be still.

Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea,

Or demons, or men, or whatever it be,

No waters can swallow the ship where lies

The Master of ocean, and earth and skies;

They all shall sweetly obey thy will,

Peace, be still. Peace, be still.

They all shall sweetly obey thy will,

Peace, peace, be still.

I've bolded the two words that were the main source of my confusion: billows and demons.

Demon is not part of the usual Mormon vocabulary -- it's always "the devil and his angels" -- and so I knew demons only as creatures in fantasy games like Hack. This hymn always made me want to ask an adult, "Wait, are demons real?" but for some reason I never did. (Hack is a link to "Minor sync: Omelette and Mormon tempest" because we kids always pronounced it "Omelette of Yendor." My mother tried many times to correct this to "am-yoo-let," but we thought that was just her Southern accent and wouldn't fly in New Hampshire.)

I didn't know what billows were but could only infer the meaning from context -- namely, the context of the Dr. Seuss book I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. As it happens, it matched that of the hymn pretty well. The narrator is caught outside in a terrible storm called the Midwinter Jicker, and "a chap in a slicker" offers him shelter in his house. He spends the night there, finally falling asleep at quarter past five, and when he awakes, the whole house is "crashing downhill in flubbulous flood." While he is thus sleeping through a raging tempest, like Jesus in the hymn, he dreams he is "sleeping on billowy billows / Of soft silk and satin marshmallow-stuffed pillows."

Thus in my mind, billows represented not an aspect of the raging tempest but the most comfortable thing imaginable to sleep on. I imagined Jesus sleeping in similar marshmallow-stuffed luxury, so soft that, to the disciples' astonishment, he managed to stay asleep even as his silk-and-satin billows were "tossing high" in the tempest -- much as the narrator in Solla Sollew wakes up only after his whole house has been carried away in a flash flood.

Another church song that I grossly misunderstood as a child was "Book of Mormon Stories." This was always sung with hand gestures, including an undulating movement for "Long ago their fathers came from far across the sea." The roundness of the movement was sufficiently different from the way I drew ocean waves (with pointed crests) that I didn't make the connection but instead associated it with "billows," which I had begun to think of as what people slept on when they were on boats. Then there was this verse:

Lamanites met others who were seeking liberty,

And the land soon welcomed all who wanted to be free.

Book of Mormon stories say that we must brothers be,

Giv'n this land if we life righteously.

Lamanites were universally understood to be American Indians back then, and the accompanying gesture was to hold two fingers up behind one's head, representing feathers. Very culturally insensitive, I'm sure. It was for this reason that I naturally turned to The Indian Book for light on this mysterious figure, "the Landsoon Welcome Doll, who wanted to be free." I knew that monsoon referred to heavy seasonal rains, and I figured that a landsoon must be something similar -- maybe heavy rains that happened inland, far from the coast. The Welcome Doll apparently had something to do with these rains. Well, I knew from The Indian Book that "it was the kachinas (kah CHEE nuhz) who sent rain" and that "Hopi men carved dolls that represented magical beings called kachinas." So, I imagined the Welcome Doll looking something like this (the ones with the crocodile-like muzzles), but with its arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome:

As I recall all this now, I realize that it syncs pretty well with "Ariel." Ariel is the spirit who causes the titular storm in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Just as the Welcome Doll "wanted to be free," Ariel responds to Prospero's question, "What is't thou canst demand?" with, "My liberty."

They shall believe the wind shall not blow the children of men.

I just read J. M. Smith's recent series at the Orthosphere on apocalyptic literature: "Servants of the Saints of the Most High," "Apocalypse is Neither Cryptic History Nor Cryptic News," and "Myth is Cathartic and Not Cryptic."

The second post in the series discusses the meaning of the biblical phrase "son of man," which basically means a human being -- as opposed to, depending on the context, either a beast or a god. (Minor sync: I recently mentioned Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski, in "To the Faithful Departed.") I discussed this myself in my 2020 post "The Messiah and Son of Man in Daniel," where I said it was just the singular of another familiar biblical expression: "the children of men."

Thinking about that dredged up a very old memory: My youngest sister, then a toddler, was sitting with an open Bible on her lap, pretending to read from it. She couldn't actually read at all at that age, so as she moved her finger along the lines of text, she ad-libbed something that I guess she thought sounded King-Jamesy:

They shall believe the wind shall not blow the children of men.

When I thought of that old improvised scripture, it seemed like it must be significant in some way -- out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, right? -- so much so that I might have ended up posting about it even without a synchronistic connection. I thought of this verse from Paul, which has all the right key words:

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive (Eph. 4:14).

Later, I was tinkering with the layout of my Words blog, and scrolling down to check if the sidebar was displaying correctly, I noticed this post, consisting of "ancient words" received by Daymon, followed by his translation:

enlarasu sutherol, speri, spole

Then the Wind happened,

being by Wind blown, scattering as grist.

Note added: Here's another scripture, particularly relevant given the apocalyptic context:

And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree (Rev 7:1).

Second note added: Another amusing juxtaposition on the Synlogos feed:

Ariel

I was listening to a recording of the Book of Isaiah while doing some routine paperwork for my school. At the very moment that I wrote Ariel -- the English name of one of my students -- Isaiah said:

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (Isa. 29:1)

That's all so far, but these minor syncs are often a prelude to things to come.

The name Ariel has appeared on this blog once before, in "Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five" (July 2025), where it refers to the character in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, who sings the song alluded to in the title. That word tempest recently appeared in "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest" (March 7), another of those "minor syncs" that ended up ramifying into something more complex.

Griffin gargoyles

With the Cherubim re-entering the sync stream, I was reflecting on the strange way certain themes or symbols are connected. The Cherubim have been identified with the Gryphon, which has been identified with the griffon vulture Odessa Grigorievna, who is linked to the Garuda, which is linked to the monstrous avian title character of Flight of the Gargoyle. From a symbol of holiness to a symbol of abomination in fewer steps than it would take you to get from either to Kevin Bacon.

Can there be any real connection between the opposite ends of that chain, though? Is sync-linking really a transitive relation?

Today I read in The King in Yellow a reference to the "ugly water-spitting griffins" of the Place St. Michel in Paris. That's a direct link between Gryphon and Gargoyle.

A third reading of the Ninbad couplet

The fourth couplet of "With?" is:

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

I wrote this with Martin Luther in mind -- the "nailer" who nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and who famously said, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

In "Up against the wall" I proposed another reading, in which Ninbad the Nailer is Trent Reznor, whose band name -- Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN -- is a link to both Ninbad and Nailer. Reznor was raised Lutheran, though oddly he is named after an ecumenical council of the anti-Lutheran Counter-Reformation. I saw hints of Luther in the lyrics to "Head Like a Hole":

Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

Today I found a third reading.

This afternoon I was reflecting on the career of Mormon, the compiler of the Book of Mormon. He led the armies of the Nephites at a time of utter moral depravity, when rape, human sacrifice, and cannibalism were rife. In the context of this pervasive evil, the nature of the last straw which finally made him unwilling to lead so wicked a people is surprising:

And they did swear by the heavens, and also by the throne of God, that they would go up to battle against their enemies, and would cut them off from the face of the land. And it came to pass that I, Mormon, did utterly refuse from this time forth to be a commander and a leader of this people, because of their wickedness and abomination. . . . they had sworn by all that had been forbidden them by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Morm. 3:10-11, 14).

Really? That was the one thing too evil for Mormon to overlook? It made me think of James's similar vehemence on the subject:

But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath (James 5:12).

Really? "Above all things"? Today, listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, I found a similar sentiment expressed in the Book of Ether:

And it came to pass that they all sware unto him, by the God of heaven, and also by the heavens, and also by the earth, and by their heads, that whoso should vary from the assistance which Akish desired should lose his head; and whoso should divulge whatsoever thing Akish made known unto them, the same should lose his life. . . . And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God (Ether 8:14, 18).

"Most abominable and wicked above all" -- not the murders and whoredoms committed by this secret oath-bound fraternity, but the fact that they had formed such a fraternity in the first place. Again the things they swore by are emphasized -- all that was forbidden by Jesus in the Sermon at Bountiful (3 Ne. 12:34-36, slightly different from the Sermon on the Mount list).

As a former member of the Great and Unabbreviable Church, and one who has been through the temple, I too have been part of a secret oath-bound fraternity. (We didn't swear by that particular list of forbidden things, but I'm not sure that technicality counts for much.) When I became an atheist in 2002, I renounced these oaths, considering myself no longer bound by promises, elicited under false pretenses, to what I had come to see as a non-existent Being. Since emerging from the mists of atheism, I am once again troubled by those oaths and have sometimes wondered if I am right to consider myself no longer bound by them. Not that keeping oaths already broken is an option anyway.

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of those who had made oaths to the Dark Lord, "under delusion and by self and Melkor deceived." Those "bound to Melkor in mind, heart, or by oath-everlasting, unbreaking" receive this message:

Do you today renounce your oaths?

Evil-taken, known to yourselves to whom made,

Or otherwise, Eru cares not --

For he promises in our work to bring about

Release from bonds evil-set to crookeding

Thy souls corrupt. If yea, then we

Shall attend to thy release, and the bond's

Unchaining, by breaking; If nay, then here

Thou remain, until summoned, by one

Whose voice thou knowest, neither denied

In the command's taking up, may you be; . . .

Some accepted this offer and were "relieved of chains." The others

who remained enchained -- as nails driven into a board, only to stand in witness, a testimony of the hammer's pounding them in -- stayed

Later we read of "orcs (as the 'nails' became)."

I think we have to see in this a deliberate allusion to the oaths of the temple, the "highest" of which are associated with the symbolism of the nail, and particularly with Isaiah's expression "a nail in a sure place" (Isa. 22:23).

The "nails" in Slumbered "remained . . . only to stand," considering themselves bound by their satanic oaths and therefore unfree.

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

Even that phrase from Isaiah suggests that release from such oaths is possible, though, for the prophet goes on to say:

In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off: for the Lord hath spoken it (Isa. 22:25).

The Tolkienian context of Slumbered made me think to look at Ninbad as Elvish. In Sindarin, nîn means "tear, weeping," and bâd means "road, way, path." Ninbad thus suggests the Via Dolorosa ("Sorrowful Way"), the path which Jesus walked, carrying his cross, to the site of his execution. In the temple, too, the "nail in a sure place" is identified with the nails used in the crucifixion. (It is widely believed, despite Reznor's denial, that the name Nine Inch Nails has a similar meaning.)

The nails were removed from Jesus' hands, but the wounds remained, even after the resurrection.

And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends (Zech. 13:6).

Magenta blossoms

In "Glorians and such," I quoted as an example of a Glorian "witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor." In the next post, "Animals dipped in food," one of the titular animals was a blackbird "in the bush with pink blossoms." One of the definitions of pink is "magenta, the color evoked by red and blue light when combined."

I was on the road in the afternoon and happened to pass a gigantic bougainvillea, climbing all the way to the top of a utility pole, an explosion of magenta blossoms. Or no, I corrected myself, not blossoms. Bracts, which are modified leaves. Though petals are modified leaves, too, so the distinction seems rather academic.

When I arrived home, my wife was out front chatting with our neighbor, who was working in her garden. I went inside first, and when my wife came in, she told me what they had been talking about: whether the colorful structures on a particular plant were flowers (the neighbor's position) or leaves (my wife's). I of course asked what plant they were talking about, thinking it must be either bougainvillea or poinsettia, but she said it was jiuchongge, a name I didn't know. I looked it up and found that it's an alternate term for bougainvillea, which I had previously known only as sanjiaomei.

Animals dipped in food

In "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," I report suddenly wanting an omelette and then finding a reference to that food in The King in Yellow. Wondering whether omelettes might have been mentioned earlier in that book, planting the idea in my head, I did a word search. There is one earlier instance:

"That's a blackbird," observed Miss Byng; "see him there in the bush with pink blossoms. He's all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says --"

Shortly after searching out this reference, I checked the latest Barnhardt Meme Barrage (I've really got to find a better source for memes now that Anglin has apparently retired), which included this:

The blackbird is a dark animal that looks as if its bill (nose and mouth) had been dipped in yellow food. The dog is a yellow animal that looks as if its muzzle (nose and mouth) had been dipped in dark food.

Yesterday I tried and failed to find a place that sold omelettes. Today, no longer looking for omelettes, I decided to lunch at a new restaurant I knew nothing about, and as serendipity would have it, it sells omelettes. The name of the restaurant is Black Man, which is a bit of a sync with the omelette-dipped blackbird, of which Miss Byng says, using the masculine pronoun, "He's all black."

Note added: My last post, "Glorians and such," connected the post "King son of Light, and black dog stars" with a dog named King in "Hometo Omleto." This suggests that King son of Light (i.e. Tar-Calion, official name of Pharazon the Golden) is the same as the black dog star. A Golden Retriever, dipped in dark material so as to appear (partly) black, seems a related concept.

Glorians and such

My last post, "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," dealt with two seemingly unrelated syncs: one about omelettes, and one about the word tempests in the Book of Mormon and a Mormon writer named Tempest. But perhaps they are related after all, via Walt Whitman. Though the review, linked on A&L Daily, which occasioned the sync compares Terry Tempest Williams to Emerson, the publisher's page for her book compares her first to Whitman:

You know, I was almost going to read that book, just out of synchronistic curiosity, but I'm afraid that blurb has soured me on it. "Beauty, climate change, and transformative moments of hope"? That's what we in the trade call the shit sandwich technique.

Anyway, Whitman. My last post suggested that the omelette sync might have something to do with Hometo Omleto (Humpty Dumpty). Searching my blog for omleto, I found that one of the posts to use it was "Tennessee Walts, plus that dog-stealing alien in New Jersey again," which begins thus:

William Wright's May 4 post "Liberty Bell Follow-Up: The Liberty Bowl" begins with a reference to his "post earlier today on the Walts" -- meaning two different people named Walt: Walt Whitman and a TV character called Walter White.

Regarding that Terry Tempest Williams book that I'm probably not going to read, what exactly does the title refer to? According to the review:

The book was born from a pandemic-induced dream in which a professor asked Williams if she remembered the vow she had made "to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians." When Williams awoke, the dictionary offered no clarity, leaving her to define Glorian through her own Emersonian inquiry into lived experience. Williams ultimately defines a Glorian as an encounter with élan vital ("vital momentum") -- a meeting with grace, like witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor.

She was told in a dream that she had vowed to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians, and so she went ahead and gave it the old college try in her waking life. I respect that. (I think Bruce should have written Oh Colonel Flastratus!, too.) If I had been the one to have that dream, I would have gone a completely different direction with it. Instead of ants and magenta blossoms, my mind immediately went to Spenser and assumed "the Glorians" referred to a dynasty named after the Faerie Queene herself. Specifically, I thought of this little verse that begins Book 2 Canto X:

This chronicle the knights read begins with Brute and ends when "gentle Alma seeing it so late, / Perforce their studies broke." This association of Brute with studies made me think of my 2024 post "Étude brute?", so I reread it. That post quoted the line "When I dream, I dream about books" (from one of Bill's dreams, which he thinks was about me) and recounted a vision (dream-adjacent) in which I was told of a particular book, "This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."

Given the phrase "cherubims of glory" (Heb. 9:5) and the way Ezekiel's cherubim are inseparable from "the glory of the Lord," I think there may be some connection there. Terry Tempest Williams's "Glorians" are apparently encounters with nature that come with the force of revelation -- "visitations from the holy ordinary," as the subtitle puts it -- which, together with the Cherubim link, made me think of Traherne:

The brightness and magnificence of this world, which by reason of its height and greatness is hidden from men, is Divine and Wonderful. It addeth much to the Glory of the Temple in which we live. Yet it is the cause why men understand it not. They think it too great and wide to be enjoyed. But since it is all filled with the Majesty of His Glory who dwelleth in it; and the Goodness of the Lord filleth the World, and His wisdom shineth everywhere within it and about it; and it aboundeth in an infinite variety of services; we need nothing but open eyes, to be ravished like the Cherubims. Well may we bear the greatness of the World, since it is our storehouse and treasury. That our treasures should be endless is an happy inconvenience: that all regions should be full of Joys: and the room infinite wherein they are seated.

If The Glorians is anything like Traherne, I want to read it. But I don't think you can write like Traherne and write about the greenhouse effect. As Bertie Wooster once said about being a successful dictator and designing women's underclothing, it's "one or the other, not both."

Rereading the original "Hometo Omleto" post, I see that it, too, deals with the Cherubim. It also features a dog, and in the first comment, Bill writes:

The dog can be a reference to Sirius (the Dog Star) which will come up at some point over on my blog if I can get to it.

The Dog Star -- specifically the Black Dog Star -- recently resurfaced in "King son of Light, and black dog stars." That post title uses King as a name, a translation of the name Vasily. The dog in the "Hometo Omleto" post is named King.

Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest

This morning, while far from home, I suddenly wanted an omelette -- that specific dish, which is not at all common here in Taiwan. I tried to think of any restaurants in the area that might have such fare on their menu, but in the end I gave up and got something else instead. While waiting for my food, I decided to read a bit in The King in Yellow. I finished the page I was on, turned the page, and saw this:

While Elliott briefly outlines the projected excursion to La Roche, Hastings delightedly ate his omelet, and returned the smiles of encouragement from Cécile and Colette and Jacqueline.

Eggs have of course been a sync theme from time to time, and even omelettes in the form of Hometo Omleto.

In the early afternoon, I was listening to an audio version of the Book of Mormon while I did some housework. I am so familiar with the book that I've passively memorized many parts, and I often find myself reciting along with the audio recording. Today, I heard, "Yea, it shall come in a day when there shall be heard of fires," and then joined in for the rest of the clause: "and tempests, and vapors of smoke in foreign lands" (Morm. 8:29). As I finished my housework at that point, I paused the recording there, and that was the last verse I listened to.

Immediately after that, I booted up my computer and had a random whim to check Arts & Letters Daily, of which I have not been a regular reader since its glory days under the late lamented Denis Dutton. The first link under "New Books" had this text (boldface in the original):

An Emerson for our times? Terry Tempest Williams’s “epic documentation of the Glorians” is full of celestial beings and desert miracles... more »

Tempest is a pretty unusual name, and it was one of the words I had just been reciting along with Moroni. I clicked the link and read a couple of paragraphs, but it didn't grab me. I was still curious about the name, though -- besides the tempest link, Terry has also been an important name -- so I looked Terry Tempest Williams up on Wikipedia. I discovered that she (it's a she, unlike Terry the Giant Irishman) is a Mormon -- or a member of the Great and Unabbreviable Church, anyway, albeit a "feminist" one -- which strengthens the sync, given that it was in the Book of Mormon that I had encountered the word tempest. A&L Daily has nothing to do with Mormonism, and the linked article said nothing about Williams's religion.

Note added: The cover of the Williams book linked on A&L Daily has an eclipse in a yellow sky:

To the Faithful Departed

As I was reading The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered this morning, I unexpectedly came across a footnote referencing -- incongruously in this book set in a distant Tolkienian past -- a rock song that had been in Daymon's head when he wrote a certain part of it:

The song? "When You're Gone," by The Cranberries, a song about death's parting, some few days stuck in my head after their lead singer, Dolores O'Riordan passed away in London. It was played at her funeral, held three days after I wrote this passage, and is from the 1996 album To the Faithful Departed.

I only know a handful of songs by the Cranberries, and that wasn't one of them. Daymon obviously thought the album name was synchy -- Slumbered being a follow-up to Words of the Faithful: As If It Were from the Dead -- but what really piqued my interest enough to look up the album (as opposed to just the one song) was the release date, 1996. That was a watershed year in my own life, marking my awakening to things spiritual, and I wondered whether the exact date of release would coincide with any date important to me personally? Was it perhaps released on April 22, 1996? Why my mind went to that date rather than to the more significant July 22, I don't know, but as it turns out I was only a week off. To the Faithful Departed was released on April 29, 1996.

When I visited the album's Wikipedia page to get that information, I was struck by the album cover art:

I thought that bright yellow background looked very Rider-Waite. Specifically, Dolores's pose, her short black hair, and the red lining of her jacket suggested the Magician:

Another Rider-Waite card with a yellow background is the Three of Wands, the yellow sky of which was the proximate inspiration for my poem "The Golden Age." The yellow background on the album cover is not the sky but the walls of a room. I was interested to discover, though, that the sixth track on the album is called "Forever Yellow Skies."

Another significant Cranberries song is "Zombie," with the refrain, "In your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie," corresponding to the beginning of "Down Under" by Men at Work: "Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie" (lines that have taken on added significance since I discovered that Words of Them Liberated, which I have not read yet, includes a character called Comby).

Dolores performs "Zombie" with her whole body and all her clothing painted gold, which is obvious Pharazonic imagery:

In "Tim knows" (February 17), I posted, having heard it in a dream, an Agartha remix of "Down Under" -- the meme being that the song title refers to Agartha, the underground domain of the King of the World, as told in Ossendowski's Beasts, Men, and Gods and elsewhere. (Back in 2018, I was on a hollow earth kick and read all that stuff.) An underground king is another link to Pharazon, and as it happens, the YouTube video I found had this thumbnail of Logan Paul, Yakub, and the White Pharaoh.

I had posted a White Pharaoh meme myself back in July, in "Reincarnation, or something else?" The post discussed Bill Wright's idea that I am the reincarnation of Pharazon, and the meme (a race-swapped version of "We Wuz Kangs 'N Shiet") was an acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of modern people thinking of themselves as having "been" ancient kings.

The Silmarils and the Three of Pentacles

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered an alternate account of Fëanor's creation of the Silmarils. In this telling, the three gems begin as "light-seedlings" taken from the Trees of Valinor, but later "to seeds again returned they, who once as light were never so housed," and thus the Silmarils are not actually stones but seeds -- or "pips," as he calls them:

Feanor kept the gems (as he named them, before others; pips to himself and them), and would in time traipse about in their adorning his brow, or cuffs; all the while pondering how to proceed in their planting, and whereabout . . . .

Two paragraphs later, we learn of Eru's plan for these "pips":

And even here, in this division, solicited Eru his own fashioning of Feanor's endeavors, and there hoped he now to make of these pips, lattice-work to house all his children, fully realized, and free, at one in his song, and in tune;

Here is an example of a latticework structure:

Pip in the passages quoted means "seed." To a Tarotist, however, another meaning of the word is prominent: The numbered cards of each suit, from Ace to Ten, are called pip cards, and each suit symbol on one of these cards is a pip -- which brings us to this card:

I have recently focused on the negative meaning of this card -- see "A darker view of the Three of Pentacles" -- but this suggests another dimension of its meaning. Here we have three pips forming a latticework in a building in which people could be "housed." These pips are simultaneously stone and star -- just as the Silmarils are called stones or gems, and one of them literally becomes the Morning Star. The design, with its central pillar, also suggests a silver tree -- a Tree of Pentacles if you will -- with the three pips as its fruit. The card depicts an artisan working with a maul or hammer. Though I can find no authority for it in Tolkien, apparently "Fëanor's hammer" plays a role in the Amazon series that must not be named.

This meaning of the card is of course not entirely separate from the "darker view" explored in my other post, since Fëanor is associated with dark deeds and an oath-bound fraternity.

Daymon's version of the Silmaril story also made me wonder about possible links to the allegory, recently discussed in "Intertextuality in 2 Zenos (Jacob 5)," about various attempts to preserve the fruit of a dying tree, but I will have to think about that a little more before posting anything about it.

Added sync note: Immediately after publishing this, I turned to my Words blog to continue transcribing "ancient words." I had just finished set Fifteen, so next up was Words 16:1, the translation of which reads:

Zimulof Kloshtuz, with desire for this -- to retrace down this first crafted star of stone --

Inversions

In Christendom, I'm at a loss

To find a symbol more iconic

Than our Holy Christian Cross.

    Invert it, though, and it's demonic.

The swastika in Hindustan

Is thought an image most auspicious,

Dear alike to gods and man.

    It's mirror-image, though, is vicious.

In Jewry, too, there is a sign

For everything on which we frown,

For all that's wicked and malign:

    The Star of David upside down.

War manifestly without just cause

I have no comment on geopolitical events known to me only through propaganda produced by professional liars in service to their father. I'm just noting a sync.

This morning, following a link on the Orthosphere, I skimmed part of Edward Feser's post "[One country's] war on [another country] is manifestly unjust." After an introductory paragraph, he begins by asserting:

The war clearly does not meet just war conditions.  First, [one of the aggressor countries] cannot claim a just cause. . . .

Shortly after this, I thought to myself, Why am I reading this stuff? and turned instead to the Book of Mormon. As it happens, I had just finished Alma 54 the night before, and so my bookmark was right here:

Now it came to pass that when Moroni had received this epistle he was more angry, because he knew that Ammoron had a perfect knowledge of his fraud; yea, he knew that Ammoron knew that it was not a just cause that had caused him to wage a war against the people of Nephi (Alma 55:1).

King son of Light, and black dog stars

This afternoon, although I was eager to continue pursuing an exciting new train of thought on my Book of Mormon blog, I had a sudden urge to go hike the skywalk at Eight Trigrams Hill first. I hadn't been there in many months, and I had something else I very much wanted to spend my time on instead, but we take random whims seriously around here. As a result, the Book of Mormon will now have to wait while I deal with some urgent synchromystical business.

Shortly after I began my hike, I realized something significant about my name. My father is Louis, and his father was William, whose father was Louis, and so on -- a long line of alternating Louises and Williams, each named after his paternal grandfather. But that line goes back to Transcarpathia (a part of the Ukraine then under Austrian rule), where the alternating names were Luka and Vasily. When my ancestors came to America, they adopted English names which, while not really etymological equivalents, sounded vaguely similar. So although I am William the son of Louis, there is a very real sense in which I was named after Vasily the son of Luka.

Vasily (English Basil) means "king." Luka (Luke) means "light." As Bill recently had occasion to mention here, Pharazon's official Quenya name -- which he never used, having like my ancestors replaced it with a not-very-exact equivalent in another language -- was Tar-Calion. The prefix Tar- means "king." Calion means "son of light." I have in the past resisted Bill's efforts to tie me to a Tolkienian supervillain, but you've got to admit that's a pretty perfect correspondence.

Speaking of Pharazon the Golden, and of Bill's earlier identification of him with Peter the Apostle, during my hike I saw several of these slippery-when-wet signs, showing an all-yellow man struggling to walk on water:

Later I saw another all-yellow man, at a parking lot:

That's a Buddha (the hill is home to the country's largest Buddha statue) pointing upwards and wearing star-shaped spectacles. Although the specs are yellow like the rest of him ("Look at the stars . . . yeah, they were all yellow"), it seems likely that they represent dark sunglasses, thus linking to "Strange is the night where black stars rise" (a line from, appropriately, The King in Yellow).

The original syncs that kicked of Richard Arrowsmith's Black Dog Star blog back in 2009 (I'd link them, but the images in his old posts are no longer viewable) had to do with three interrelated themes, tied together by the initials PP (as in "pay to park"? or "Pharazon-Peter"?): a dog's paw-print (cf. "Bark, Peter" in "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance"), a pair of pentacles, and Peter Parker. (Note that Bill has accused me of being a "spider man" in a much more negative sense.) I posted my own instance of this "Black Dog Star trifecta" back in 2023. As the blog name indicates, Arrowsmith would come to connect these syncs with the idea of a black star. One of his early syncs was a movie still of a dog (Scooby-Doo) wearing black star-shaped sunglasses just like those of the parking Buddha.

After my hike, I returned to where I had parked my motorcycle (for free; only automobile drivers have to pay the parking Buddha) and found that someone had parked a scooter right next to my space, with this helmet (the helmet itself being of course a link to my name):

That's a dog wearing sunglasses, flanked by a pair of black stars. What are the odds?

Strange is the night where black stars rise

The King in Yellow, which I am currently reading for sync-related reasons, repeatedly mentions the black stars in the skies of Carcosa, the first mention being in the Author's Dedication, which quotes Cassilda's Song from the play for which the book is named:

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

                                               Lost Carcosa.

Black stars rising got my attention, since just a few months ago I read Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (mentioned in many posts here). Last June, I posted "Ascending to the black star," which connected the Elvish root amu, meaning "up(wards)" or "to raise" with a particular part of a Scrabble board, leading to the black star in the board's center. Rather than the interpretation given in the post title, this could also refer to the black star itself rising.

This morning, on the way to a café for breakfast, I was behind another motorcyclist, on the back of whose black hoodie was a large light-gray star, inside which were two black stars and the words "DARK HARVEST." I didn't get a photo and wasn't able to find an image of that exact hoodie online, but the design was similar to this, the only differences being the color scheme and the fact that there were only two smaller stars:

As I entered the café, the background music playing the Malena Stark song "A Little Bit of Faith," the chorus of which begins, "Oh, there must be more." That word more has come up in two recent dreams (see "Half under the sea" and "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance"). In comments on both of those posts, Bill pointed out that more is a homophone for the Elvish root mor, meaning "black, dark, darkness."

While that song was playing, I checked Ann Barnhardt's latest Meme Barrage on my phone, and one of the memes referenced Scrabble:

In Chinese, the characters for "star/planet" and "great ape" are homophones. Chimps are called "black apes" (as distinguished from "big apes," or gorillas, and "red-fur apes," or orangutans), so the word for "chimpanzee" sounds exactly like "black star." This makes me wonder if this movie (which I may or may not have seen; I can't keep them all straight) might be synchronistically relevant.

By the way, how was that poster not condemned as one of those "racist dog whistles"? Or perhaps it was. I can't say I've been paying attention.

And yes, Debbie, I see the Golden Gate Bridge on the poster.

Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance

I dreamt that I was out and about in the city and was seeing small (roughly goose-sized) pterodactyls everywhere, just casually, they way you would see birds. (I saw birds, too.) I thought, How can people doubt that there are still pterodactyls around? They're right there in plain sight! I saw them clearly and in a perfectly ordinary way and was confident that I was not hallucinating or anything.

Then I woke up from this dream-within-a-dream. I was in a very large bedroom with two queen-size beds, one at each end, with a wide space between them. From the ceiling above my bed were hung, on what looked like fishing line, hundreds of little pterodactyls made of hard plastic, in all colors and representing the whole gamut of pterosaur species. The other end of the room was similarly decorated, but with white origami cranes instead of pteros.

I remembered that I was visiting my parents. They must have specially decorated the room for my visit. I understood that the bed with the paper cranes was for my brother Luther, who was not present. (Later I commented to my mother that "'Director of Birds' just has a different feel from 'Director of Flying Reptiles.'")

I got up and told my mother about my dream and about how once I woke up I realized where the dream imagery had come from. "But didn't you notice the pterodactyls when you arrived?" she asked, seeming hurt that her work had not been appreciated. "I guess not," I said. "I probably just went to bed without turning on the light." (In fact I had no memory of arriving or going to bed.)

My parents now lived in what they called a retirement community but looked more like an extremely luxurious resort. They were dressed in their Sunday best, but instead of going to church, they wanted to show me some of the entertainments the place offered. The first of these was the foil game.

We were each given what looked like a sheet of aluminum foil, about a foot square. Although it looked like foil, it was as limp and supple as silk, and I figured it must be some sort of chain mail so fine that the individual links were invisible. Each of these had an image on it in subtle relief, and somehow it stayed on the foil no matter what you did to it. You could wad it into a ball and open it again, and the relief image was still there.

My parents wanted to start playing, but no one had explained the game to me, and I had no idea what to do. They said I could just figure it out as I went, but I kept insisting on an explanation. Finally, my mother demonstrated. Her foil image was of part of a woman's face, and she found a stone statue of a woman that matched it perfectly and placed the foil on that part of the statue's face. That was the object of the game: to find something in the community that matched your foil image and place the foil on it. The community was really enormous, and I worried about getting lost, but in the end I decided to give it a go.

My foil had a Buddha's face on it, and above the face it said, in capital letters, "MR. DEE EE." After some exploring, I found in the community a very ancient stone temple, somewhat reminiscent of Angkor Wat, and up at the very top of the building I spied what I was looking for: a Buddha's face and the inscription "MR. DEE EE."

The trouble was how to get up there to place my foil. I tried various ways of climbing up the building, but the stones kept crumbling under my feet. Finally, I gave up, saying that I was doing serious damage to this ancient monument and that it just wasn't worth it. Could we maybe do something else instead?

"Okay," said my mother. "Maybe you'd like to try a fake séance."

"Is there any other kind?"

As we were walking to the fake séance place, my father said, "Now, you're going to be 'possessed' as part of this, but don't worry about it. None of it is real."

It took three people to participate in a fake séance. It was me and two other people my age, not my parents. We had to climb up some stairs to a high platform, on which was a sort of flexible rubber pedestal supporting what looked like three vertically-oriented sleeping bags made of foam rubber. Each person stood in one of these bags, with only the head protruding. This set-up, it was explained, was so that we could move and thrash about while in a trance without any danger of falling or hurting ourselves.

To begin, we three leaned in toward the center of the set-up, so that our foreheads were touching in the middle. We were told to relax. After about a minute of silence, one of the other participants murmured, "Bark, Peter." There was another silence. Was someone supposed to bark? I tentatively made a soft barking sound, like a very polite dog. Then I felt some spiritual force welling up in me from the pit of my stomach -- the promised "possession," apparently -- and I began barking in earnest. I then entered a full trance state (another altered state within an altered state). I was talking and shouting and flailing about but had no consciousness of what I was saying.

When I emerged from the trance, I was informed that I had "won" the fake séance. I had delivered a most remarkable and varied discourse, and the audience loved it. I also learned that while I was entranced, a supercomputer had been generating in real time a video to accompany what I was saying, which was displayed on a cinema-size screen for the audience. Apparently I had done impressions of several famous people, including Al Capone and Elon Musk, which together with the visuals from the computer were utterly convincing. I had also discoursed at length on the movie Flight of the Gargoyle, and now several members of the audience expressed an interest in seeing it even though (or perhaps because?) it was unspeakably evil and abominable and had been banned all over the world (cf. The King in Yellow).

After the performance, an elderly couple came up to me. They were impressed with how knowledgeable I had seemed to be about virtually everything, and they had several questions about things I had said in my trance. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember anything I had said and couldn't help them. The man then mentioned that he and his wife had been trying to learn more about the history of jazz.

"Ah, the book you want for that is --"

"What? Don't tell me you know about the history of jazz, too!"

"The book you want," I continued, "is by a Portuguese guy whose pen name is L-A-E-T-H."

"Laeth."

"Right. I can't remember the title right now. I think it might just be called The History of Jazz. Anyway --" (The book I was thinking of was Sketches of Alice, which is not in any way a history of jazz.)

"And it's a history of jazz?"

"Well, it's hard to classify. It's utterly unique, really. But I think you'll find --"

At this point I was interrupted by the guy who ran the fake séances, who presented me with a book-length transcript of what I had said during my trance, illustrated with stills from the computer-generated video. Exactly what I had wanted.

I started to flip through it. I noticed that the first line had been mistranscribed: It said "Bark Street" instead of "Bark, Peter." Most of the transcript was in English, but one section was in a language I couldn't read but which looked from the characters used to be Icelandic or something similar. I had spoken in tongues, apparently.

About a quarter of the pages were entirely black. The director explained that this was the free transcript. If I wanted the unredacted version, I would have to shell out 40 dollars. I was about to pay but then realized that I had forgotten to exchange money and only had Taiwanese currency. Both of my parents took out their wallets and began counting out an improbably large number of banknotes. I saw that this was because the American currency had been completely redesigned. It was now in Monopoly-money colors like most other countries and was in strange denominations like the 47-cent bill.

Later, I was sitting with my father, and he asked if I had tried various remedies to stop snoring. I told him I hadn't bothered. He said that he now smoked marijuana to stop snoring and that it was very effective. (This is totally out of character for my real father, a strait-laced Mormon for whom even caffeinated soda is an illicit drug.)

"And do you know why I do it?" he said, becoming animated. "Because I finally realized that our religion is more!" (cf. More More More! in "Half under the sea")

"You mean that thing about Mormon meaning 'more good'?"

"More. Just more. Further light." (a Masonic phrase also used in Mormon ritual)

"Famous last words."

"Achilles."

"Goethe."

Later, my father got up on the stage and did a routine about how some prominent fringe Mormon (Denver Snuffer maybe, or someone analogous) "isn't going anywhere" and the church needs to adapt to incorporate such people. As he spoke, the computer was generating holographic "costumes" for him which kept changing. At one point he had green hair.

And then I woke up.

Weird scenes, and a gem on a brow

I've just read Paola Harris's Conversations with Colonel Corso. I quoted it in my November 2025 post "He's got a whole new world in his hands" after searching for a source for the "new world if you can take it" line, which I knew only third-hand from Whitley and others, but I didn't get around to reading the whole thing until a couple of days ago. In that post, I commented:

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

Now that I've actually read the book, I know that the gold mine in which the Colonel encountered the alien was in Red Canyon, New Mexico. So that weird scene was inside both a gold mine and a canyon.

The book also includes this drawing by the Colonel of the entity he encountered there. Notice the distinctive headband it is wearing.

In the book, it is explained that this "silver-like" headband had "a stone in the middle of it, an interface."

This put me in mind of Tolkienian imagery -- Eärendil, the spacefaring Mariner with the Silmaril "bound upon his brow" -- and sure enough, the day after I finished Conversations with Colonel Corso, I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of Dior dying with "the gem yet upon his brow." I don't think either Tolkien or Daymon makes explicit how the gem was thus bound, but one readily imagines a headband of "silver-like" mithril. Many UFO writers, most notably Jacques Vallée, have taken an interest in parallels between their field and that of elf and fairy lore.

The gem on Eärendil's brow was the Morning Star, Venus, which Bill recently brought up in comments on "Island Pharaohs again, twice."

Arnor

About a week ago, I bought a new pair of shoes. I'd never heard of the brand before, but they're comfortable and seem very durable, so I'm happy with them so far.

Actually, that but should probably be an and, since lack of recognizable branding is a major selling point for me. How I abominate all those swooshes and bitten apples and those little badges on the fronts of automobiles! What kind of culture tolerates this stuff? I buy brandslop* when necessary but always give it the Cayce Pollard treatment where possible. The main reason I'll never ever buy an iPhone again is that even if you remove or cover up all the logos, kids can still recognize it from the way the camera lenses are arranged or something. Now I've got some no-name Chinese thing, fully Pollardized, and feel much more at ease with it.

My new shoes are almost completely Pollardized -- the logos were stitched on and could be easily removed -- so all that remains is ARNOR written on the back.

I've been transcribing all of Daymon Smith's "ancient words" to a blog preparatory to tackling a linguistic analysis. (The main benefit of the blog format is the sidebar links for cross-referencing where the same word is used elsewhere. Today I started the ninth set of words, where Daymon's translation twice (9:2 and 9:4) references the "Arnor Stone" in contexts where (although Stones of Arnor are a thing, too) it is pretty clearly a typo for "Anor Stone."

*

Another bird-of-prey octopus juxtaposition, in The King in Yellow

My February 23 post "Desert scenes" dealt with people in yellow clothing: the sun-man, Lehi, and of course Pharazon. This brought to my attention the fact that I have never read The King in Yellow, so I decided to rectify that omission. I got an epub from Anna's. It's in the public domain, so there have many editions by many publishers, with a wide variety of cover art. Not until I downloaded and opened my epub did I discover that I had happened to select what is apparently the only edition to feature octopus imagery on the cover:

Not only does the King's robe terminate in tentacles, but the Moon is positioned just right so that the King and Moon together approximate the shape of an octopus's whole body. Although the yellowness of the King is right there in the title, the octopus part of him is more of an orange. Directly below this orange octopus imagery is the name Robert, which means "fame-bright." This made me think of another book that recently entered the sync-stream (see "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves" and "Turn around bright, eyes"): Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I posted the cover of the Chinese edition, because that was the form in which I first saw it. For some reason, the cover art on the Chinese edition is the mirror-image of the original English, so that the octopus is facing the same direction as the "octopus" on the cover of The King in Yellow:

I started reading The King in Yellow today. On page 35 I ran across this:

"That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat," he explained; there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. . . ."

At first, only the Octopus jumped out at me, but then I noticed that the Falcon was there, too. Birds of prey juxtaposed with octopuses have been a recurring theme lately. First, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen" (February 13), a Donovan song mentioning a kite was interpreted by Bill as having to do with spider and octopus symbolism; then I read about a hawk wrestling an octopus in Words of the Faithful; and then I saw a kite and an octopus juxtaposed on the Duckstack. In "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs" (February 25), I discovered a similar juxtaposition -- a Garuda-like vulture and an octopus-like "spider mask" in my 2024 dream post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" and also noted a somewhat related theme on the Nine of Pentacles, where a falcon appears together with a snail (snails and slugs being the closest terrestrial relatives to the octopus). Now here it is yet again, with the names of these two torpedo boats.