Incipit liber primus

But Men shall remember Atlantis's name

Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,

It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell

Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.

We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old 

May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.

High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!

Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.

No soup for you! But here's a skeletal humanoid deer creature

The sync fairies just will not let up on this theme. I found this while searching for a clip-art image of a bowl of soup.

The history of the circulation of blood

The history of the circulation of blood may be summarized as follows:

4   →   2 + 2   →   3 + 1

Blood is made up of four constituent parts. In the beginning, these were united in a single corpuscle, the 4-corpuscle, which you can picture as four small spheres agglomerated together into a single body, like a molecule.

The next stage in the development of blood was the 2 + 2 stage, in which instead of 4-corpuscles, blood was made up of two different types of 2-corpuscles. This stage was inherently unstable and didn't last long.

The next stage was the one we are currently at, in which blood consists of large 3-corpuscles and small 1-corpuscles. If a 1 is bumped by a 3 into the wall of the blood vessel, it is said informally to "die," but in fact it simply loses a lot of energy and becomes inactive, causing it to stay there against the wall of the vessel instead of flowing. However, if it is bumped by a 3 again, its energy is restored, and it becomes active again. This prevents inactive 1s from building up and clogging the vessels.

So it was explained to me in a dream.

You're never a lone Walker

I was at a restaurant, and the Alan Walker song "Faded" came on. I've heard it before but never paid enough attention to the lyrics to realize that it's actually about Atlantis:

Where are you now?

Where are you now?

Where are you now?

Was it all in my fantasy?

Where are you now?

Were you only imaginary?

Where are you now?

Atlantis, under the sea, under the sea

Where are you now?

Immediately after that, "Alone" by the same artist came on. It repeats the sentence "I know I'm not alone" again and again.

Given that the artist's name is Walker, this reminded me of this image I posted in "Accompanied by a white hart" (June 23).

Connecting this with the white hart that accompanies the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine, and with Wade's comments about how "the white hart" is supposedly said in the language of Atlantis, I wrote:

The logo is a stylized white hart's head. The brand name is PRAZA, which includes RAZA, the Fake Adunaic word Wade got by asking specifically how to say "the white hart." Under that is the slogan "You Never Walk Alone." Not even if you're a hermit, apparently.

Alan Walker's trademark look, with hoodie and mask, bears a certain resemblance to the hermit on that card:

In the past, I have connected Walker -- as a name, as in George Walker Bush and Herschel Walker -- with a different Tarot card: the Fool. See "Election prediction assessment" (November 2022). The Rider-Waite Fool is also accompanied by a white animal, and in the Forest of Enchantment deck the Fool has become a White Hart.

The music video for "Alone" duplicates the Rider-Waite Fool imagery of standing on the edge of rocky cliff.

In the Tarot of the Divine, we have the Hermit and the Hart walking together. In "Humanoid deer creatures," these two walkers join into one.

Fetched home by a strange hen

Earlier today, I ended my post "Decorations from a Tree of Acorns" with two lines from "The Allansford Pursuit" by Robert Graves, for no other reason than that they had popped into my head, despite the fact that I last read that poem in 2001.

Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back.

This led me to look up the poem and reread it. One stanza caught my attention:

Yet I shall go into a bee

With a mickle horror and dread of thee

And flit to hive in the Devil’s name

Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

-- Bee, take heed of a swallow hen

Will harry thee close, both butt and ben,

For here come I in Our Lady’s Name

All but for to fetch thee hame.

The phrase swallow hen just seemed strange to me. I know hen can refer to any adult female bird, but hen swallow seems more natural -- just as you would say dog fox or bull elephant, with the animal's actual species as the syntactic head.

Later in the day, I put on some music, and "The Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash came on. It also includes an odd compound with hen, and in the context of fetching someone home.

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

Destroying a clock

Bill left a comment at 12:22 p.m. on "The white caribou" relating a dream he had had:

I was sitting in a church chapel, which also seemed to be some kind of library or study hall, as I was sitting toward the back at a large table, while trying to read or study or something like that. At the front of the chapel hanging on the wall was a massive, very ornate clock. A really nice clock.

As I was sitting there, a man I took to be a relative - I believe I viewed him as my uncle - came by with a couple others behind him and told me that I needed to destroy the clock. The reason he gave was that it was "distracting".

I considered this sound advice after thinking on it, and apparently I had a shotgun at the table with me, because I pulled it out and shot the clock, completely destroying it. As I assessed the damage, I realized that the material of the clock had been comprised of moments or scenes - like built into the construction of it - and these scenes now were in something like individual pieces which I could see. Hard to explain.

Just now I saw this on /pol/, part of a meme posted at 5:30 p.m. the same day:

In Bill's dream, the clock is destroyed by gunfire. In the meme, it is destroyed by a hammer, but the hammer represents "war" and is thus firearm-adjacent.

An owl in a basket

Here is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer, which I most recently posted here in "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch" (July 4).

And here is a photo I took today (July 11) of a decoration on the exterior wall of a vegetarian restaurant.

Decorations from a Tree of Acorns

I dreamt that I had bought secondhand a very rare privately published hardcover book titled Decorations from a Tree of Acorns: A Version of "The Paper". Its orangish-brown cover, with the title written in gold inside a black rectangle, seemed to be imitating the aesthetic of the first edition of the Book of Mormon. No author was credited.

When I started reading it, most of the content was very familiar, and I soon realized that "The Paper" of which it was a version was Mike Clelland's original paper on owls and UFOs, which was later expanded to book length and published as The Messengers (which in the dream was conflated with its sequel Stories from the Messengers). I was excited at the prospect of finding in it "lost" material that Mike had not been "allowed" to include in the commercially published version. Paging through it, I did see some new-to-me content, including several reproductions of ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform texts, and some Mesopotamian art portraying the lion-headed Anzu bird.

I understood that Decorations from a Tree of Acorns was code for Stories from the Messengers, and that the cryptic title was to allow people to read it without making it obvious that they were reading a book about owls and UFOs.

Before going to bed last night, I had been thinking about two things. First, the major typhoon currently in Taiwan had reminded me of my first experience with a tropical cyclone: Hurricane Gloria, which hit New Hampshire, where I was then living, on September 28, 1985, and which would later become inextricably linked to my mental image of Marduk battling Tiamat. Second, I had for no obvious reason been thinking of my dream "Nineteen years inside the sphere," which I later understood to have reference to "The Death of Nelson" (the dream was hours after the death of Russell Nelson but before it had been announced in the media) and wondering if I was about to have another such significant dream. Only now, looking it up, do I see that I posted that dream on September 28, the anniversary of Gloria hitting New England.

Thus, after last night's dream, as I was trying to figure out the logic of changing "the Messengers" to "a Tree of Acorns," my thoughts turned to Nelson's successor as leader of The Church Formerly Known as Mormon, Dallin Oaks. His name obviously references a tree of acorns, and he bears the title Apostle, meaning "messenger." The appearance of the book in my dream suggests a Mormon connection.

It occurs to me now that the name Dallin Oaks encodes the Valley of Elah, where David killed Goliath. Dallin means "valley-dweller," and the Hebrew word elah, which modern scholars say means "terebinth," is usually rendered "oak" in the KJV.

As I am writing this post, something completely random has popped into my head -- lines from a Robert Graves poem I last read decades ago. I include them here in case they should turn out to have some relevance:

Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back

The white caribou

I took this photo this past Wednesday (July 8) outside Caribou Cafe, which is also where I took the June 15 photo is "Humanoid deer creatures."

The white hart -- or white caribou, I suppose -- is stationed in front of a door, or portal.

The fact that it's specifically a caribou, or reindeer, led me to make some connections. Caribou is a link to Cherubim, which comes from the Akkadian karibu, as noted in "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window" (June 2024). I made a pun on reindeer and Mithrandir in "Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir" (May 24). Mith means "gray," so a gray randir (reindeer) -- but of course Gandalf the Grey later becomes Gandalf the White. Way back in 2018, in a comment on Bruce's post "Tychonievich's Meditations on a Tarot," I had written, "Mithrandir should clearly be the Hermit, I think."

These reindeer-related contemplations also led me back to my 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective," which begins by mentioning that I had recently gone 50 hours without sleep.

Shortly after rereading that old post, the algorithm suggested a song I'd never heard: "Welcome Home, Son" by Radical Face. I listened to it.

The lyrics begin thus, linking to the 50 hours without sleep:

Sleep don't visit, so I choke on the sun

And the days blur into one

The song triggered a vivid mental image of running through a wood after a white hart, trusting that it would lead me "home." After I'd listened to the song, I looked at some of the comments, and this one struck me:

This song reminds me of those moments when I trust my horse and I start galloping in the field and I let go and outstretch my arms, the wind blowing on my face, cooling down my worries of falling, the sun shining on my back, warming me on the cold day. Trusting an animal with your life is the best feeling. I love him.

The reference to "trusting an animal with your life" synched with my mental image of following a hart and trusting it. The comment ends with "I love him," with him referring to a horse. The name Philip -- which my 2020 post identifies with "a Christmas reindeer" -- means "horse-lover."

Here is the album cover art from the Radical Face song:

And here's one of the "time warp images" from "Love pop, baby, love pop" (September 2024), recently reposted in "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10):

Update: About an hour after posting this, with its "days blur into one" reference, I read this in White Crows:

The night it had happened felt like the distant past, but had occurred only a matter of days ago. How many days? Sheppard could figure it out if he looked at a calendar, but right this second, he didn’t know. Events, time, emotions, everything had melted together.

DeerHermit

The juxtaposition of a hermit with a hart, sometimes merged into a single "humanoid deer creature," has been a sync theme recently. Thus this sign caught my eye as I passed it on the road this morning:

It says DeerHer, written as a single word with no space. If Her is understood to be a truncated form of the word Hermit, then we have our hart-hermit combination. DeerHer is a shop that specializes in wedding cookies (it's traditional in Taiwan to give boxes of assorted cookies to wedding guests), which is pretty far removed from the idea of a hermit, but it's typical of the sync fairies to repurpose things like that.

The Tarot card known as the Hermit in most French and English decks was in the oldest lists of Tarot trumps, which are in Italian, known as Time, or the Old Man. This made me think of the Chinese deity known as the Old Man of the South Pole, who is portrayed as an old man with a white beard and a staff, and who is often accompanied by a deer. In Journey to the West, it is specified that this is a white deer, but it is not normally portrayed as white in art. Here is a Japanese portrayal:

Scrambled serendipity

In yesterday's post "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch," I revisited an old 2019 post in which a book titled Serendipities manifested "a strange sort of anti-serendipity": The book caught my eye because the cover art was a painting I had recently posted about, but it turned out to be a version of the painting that lacked the key feature I had been interested in.

Today, a motorcyclist wearing this T-shirt was right ahead of me on the road for several minutes. (This is not my photo. I found it online.)

At first it looks as if it says SERENDIPITY, but the P and the R have been swapped, and the second E has been modified to the visually similar F. Below this SEPFNDIRITY is "DODF", which is harder to decrypt. My best guess is that it is a modification of "POOF" -- a sound effect associated with things appearing or disappearing as if by magic, which is somewhat related to the concept of serendipity.

Africa has its own time

This evening, I saw a textbook article, for reading comprehension practice, about the Ethiopian calendar and how it differs from the Gregorian.

About an hour later, I saw a /pol/ thread titled "TIL Africa has its own time," with a screenshot of an article about "African time" as a reference to Africans always being late for everything. (Lots of places and cultures make that joke about themselves.) The jannies appear to have deleted the thread before it was archived, since I can't find it now.

The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch

The Hermit card of the Tarot has been in the sync stream recently, including this "Hermit Portal" painting by Laura Bruno, which features an owl -- a bird which does not appear on most Hermit cards.

In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the Magician.

Today it occurred to me that this was something that had come up before: different versions of a depiction of a hermit, with and without an owl, and in conjunction with the Magician card of the Tarot.

The most famous and influential hermit in history is indisputably St. Anthony the Great, whose hallucinatory "temptation" in the wilderness has attracted the attention of artists from Gustave Flaubert to Salvador Dalí to Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch revisited the theme more than once, and while the St. Anthony Triptych in Lisbon isn't my favorite depiction of that saint by that artist, it entered the sync stream in "U.E. echoes A.E." (October 2019). I wrote:

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

As far back as "The Magician: Preliminary thoughts" (October 2018) I had recognized a connection between Bosch's Conjurer painting and the Magician card of the Tarot. Here is a detail showing the conjurer with his dog and owl:

And here is a detail from the Lisbon St. Anthony Triptych, showing the same two animals, and confirming that the owl is indeed an owl and not a monkey.

Around the time I was writing about these Bosch paintings in connection with the Tarot, I ran across an English translation of a book by Umberto Eco called, appropriately Serendipities, with the St. Anthony Triptych on the cover. As reported in the 2019 post, I bought the book "on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art," only to discover later that it was actually the vastly inferior (fake, in my opinion) São Paulo St. Anthony Triptych, and that the element that had drawn my attention to that painting in the first place -- the owl -- was conspicuous by its absence.

I commented:

[I]t's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.

Since you asked, my favorite depiction of St. Anthony, and my second-favorite Bosch after The Conjurer, is the Madrid Temptation.

Dalí's painting shows a fanatic. This one shows a saint, one who has come to terms with the goblin-haunted world in which he finds himself and with the "minor presences, riff-raff of consciousness" (Irish Murdoch's phrase), weird but ultimately harmless, that accompany him in his meditations.

What pandemic, Hal?

I've been reading Trish MacGregor's novel White Crows. Hal is a person from the distant future who has time-traveled back to c. 2022.

Sometimes, when they'd been preparing for this trip, they'd gotten -- or remembered -- data that had contradicted what they currently had known about the twenty-first [century]. He remembered, for instance, that when he was in his teens, his mother had told him that once they were ready to leave . . . they would have to choose a year other than the early 2020s because a pandemic would be raging. But no one had mentioned pandemic in subsequent years and clearly, no pandemic raged now.

Not long before his mother was killed . . . he'd asked her about that pandemic in the early 2020s. She'd looked at him, frowning. What pandemic, Hal?

I thought this was incredibly witty and was a bit disappointed when the novel went on to offer explanations in terms of alternate timelines and the Mandela Effect -- because it's such an accurate portrayal, only slightly exaggerated, of our current reality, without any need for sci-fi shenanigans.

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes.

At the moment, the last post in the algorithm-generated "Poplar posts" list at the bottom of this blog is "Chubby Checker, god of quads" (August 2025). I clicked on it and, scrolling through the comments, found this one from Gondola:

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes. Those Temperance and Hermit links are particularly interesting with fresh eyes.

She was referring to my old post "Green Door, Green Lantern" (February 2023), which references the Hermit card of the Tarot. She was saying that the Hermit theme from 2023 had taken on new meaning in 2025. I happened to reread that old comment just now, when the Hermit theme is yet again taking on new meaning.

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the crucifix!

I don't know why I happened to remember such a thing, but when I looked at the calendar this morning, it occurred to me that today would have been the 99th birthday of the late great Gene Ray, commonly known as the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, the discoverer of Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous Four-Day Time Cube. Rest in power, Dr. Ray.

He's remembered as a net.kook, of course, but I've always believed he had a genuinely good soul, and I like to imagine that since passing he's found his way to "sun-up."

These passing reflections on the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human were reinforced a few hours later, when in my daily scripture reading I happened to read two references to how Abram/Abraham was "ninety years old and nine" (Gen. 17:1, 24). These are the only two references in all of scripture to that particular age.

Thinking about Dr. Ray made me think of the "16 Wise Insights" video, by one of his disciples:

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the cars!

Whoa, more lasers are coming out of the cars!

As though the cars are laser machines that fire lasers at will, as though they had revolted against their very purpose of driving on roads and have elected laser projection as a preferable aim, they are emitting a lot of lasers!

And that reminds me of something I meant to post a couple of days ago but forgot. This past Tuesday, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

A particularly radiant canvas from 1847, Stigmata of St Francis by Bartolomeo Della Gatta, shows a beautiful barn owl looking away as St Francis gets zapped by the floating apparition of Christ on the cross. There is something so bizarre about this image, I mean, there are thin little laser beams shooting off a glowing crucified Jesus hitting each point of stigmata on the saint.

Here's the painting he's referring to:

Later that evening, I saw this on AC. It also appears at first glance to show a laser beam coming out of a crucifix.

I looked up St. Francis and discovered that, although he died on October 3, his feast day is October 4. I recently posted about this pair of dates, in "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20).

Hart, hermit, skeleton

Since my post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10), the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine, which includes a white hart, has been in the sync stream. Wade has repeatedly associated this card with the deer-headed skeleton in "Humanoid deer creatures" (June 20), the idea being that in this white (because skeletal) deer-headed man, the white hart and the hermit have merged into a single being.

"Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27) once again revisited the above Hermit card, this time in connection with a painting by Laura Bruno. This sent WanderingGondola to Laura's blog, where she clicked on the "Tarot Readings" page and read where Laura says, "I most often use Robin Wood’s deck."

I had looked at that page of Laura's as well, but I was already aware of the Robin Wood deck, which is fairly popular. It's broadly based on the Rider-Waite but has been "paganized," with most of the explicitly Christian symbolism removed.

(Just now, thinking about Laura Bruno and Robin Wood, I accidentally typed Laura Wood, which is the name of the lady who runs the Thinking Housewife blog. Thinking the error might be synchronistically relevant, I visited that blog and found a post called "The Federal Octopus," dated yesterday. No obvious relevance beyond the name.)

WG, though, wasn't familiar with the Robin Wood deck and looked it up. She found a review of the deck on Aeclectic Tarot. Deck reviews on that site will show a few sample cards: four of the Major Arcana, plus one card from each suit. Here are the first three cards it shows for Robin Wood:

The first card is the Magician, who is wearing a headdress made from a deerskin, complete with antlers. Right after that is the Hermit, so we have the hart-hermit pair again. The third card is Death. In Robin Wood's version, the figure of Death is (like the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine) completely concealed in a hooded cloak. Conceptually, though, it is the Grim Reaper, a skeleton.

I was aware that Aeclectic reivews always show four Majors and four Minors. Are they always the same ones, though? Does it always begin with the Magician and the Hermit, or is that something unique to their Robin Wood review? To check this, I went to the main page for Tarot reviews and clicked on two of the four featured decks there: first the Modern Witch Tarot and then the Forest of Enchantment Tarot. I know nothing about either of those decks and chose them (rather than either of the two other featured decks) for no particular reason. The Modern Witch review showed a completely different selection of cards from the Robin Wood Review. Then I clicked Forest of Enchantment and saw this:

That's right. This is a less traditional Tarot deck, and the first card it shows -- the zero card, corresponding to the Fool -- is actually called The White Hart. One of the other cards featured in the review -- I guess it's the Ace of Wands, or maybe Swords -- features a white crow. (See my June 20 post "October 3 and 4, and white crows.")

The review also shows what the backs of the cards look like. Owls.

Grandmother Cardinal

Over lunch, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

He described a day with a tightly knit web of meaningful moments, all tying back to a quote from Whitley Strieber he'd read that morning, "...the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark." Seconds later, he heard a woman on the radio describe seeing a red cardinal, she said it was "grandma winking back from the beyond." When Joe told his wife about this little coincidence, a red cardinal landed on a branch just outside the closest window.

That caught my eye because that particular quote from Whitley Strieber -- a man who has written many books and produced many quotable lines -- gave its name to my own Strieber blog, Winking Back from the Dark.

The red cardinal is a North American bird, not something I'm going to see in Taiwan, but when I went to pay for my lunch, I saw a somewhat cardinal-like plush toy at the counter.

It's red, with a beak and a crest, but I thought maybe it was supposed to be a pterodactyl rather than a bird. After a bit of searching online, I determined that it is neither a bird nor a pterodactyl but some Japanese thing that's supposed to be an anthropomorphic carrot or something.

Anyway, it was sufficiently cardinal-adjacent that it reminded me of the Christopher Blythe video whose thumbnail I had posted in "Owl and deer" (June 26). I hadn't watched any of it, but I remembered that the title mentioned a woman named Cardinal -- synching with the cardinal in Stories from the Messengers that was "grandma." I went back to his channel to find the video. I found that it was actually the second in a two-part series called "Sherry Cardinal Talks Chief Midegah," so I went to the first one and started playing it. Just 47 seconds in, this appears on the screen:

I was watching this because I'd connected a woman named Cardinal with a cardinal that was "grandma." Now there's a specific grandmother reference. I brought up the video transcript and word-searched for grandmother. Sure enough, the grandmother is Cardinal:

Now Sherry Cardinal was the right-hand woman of a man named David Taylor, and her story is about her experience becoming acquainted with David Taylor and then eventually being appointed as chief grandmother of David's clan.

Bone screws that get loose

On Monday night, I dreamt that I had some large black screws made of plastic. You could screw them in without needing a screwdriver, just by turning the head with your fingers. I was considering using some of them to hold my clothing in place by putting the screw through the fabric and into the bone of my arm or leg. This seemed like it would be very easy to do -- again, I wouldn't even need a screwdriver -- and I had no sense that it would be painful or cause bleeding or anything like that.

What made me reconsider this plan was the thought that if I put screws into my bones too often, inserting and removing screws from the same hole repeatedly, the hole would get slightly wider over time, and the screw wouldn't fit as tightly as before. Finally, they would just fall out. Therefore, I should only put screws into my bones when it's really necessary, not for trivial things like holding my clothing in place.

I think this dream was probably inspired by a cat scratcher my wife bought may years ago, broadly similar to the one pictured below, where to assemble it you had to drive plastic screws into thick corrugated cardboard. The screws always fell out after a while and had to be put back in, and the more that happened, the looser the screws became. That was years ago, though.

The next day, Tuesday, one of my adult students showed up with her arm in a sling. She had broken a bone in her shoulder about a year ago but had long since fully recovered, so I asked what had happened. She explained that one of the surgical screws used to repair her shoulder had somehow become loose, no longer fitting tightly into the bone, and so she had had to have surgery to replace it.

The owl, the deer, and the time warp

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this picture of a Hermit card with a white hart added to it and associated it with this sort of "portal."

That post also referred to "a space/time warp" and "portals or time warps."

One June 27, I posted "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." Following links from Mike Clelland's book Stories from the Messengers, I discovered the blog of his friend Laura Bruno, and particularly her page "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." Again we have the Hermit card of the Tarot associated with a "portal," and again an animal has been added to the card -- but this time it is not a deer but an owl:

Today I read in Stories from the Messengers the story of a man named Don who went deer hunting and experienced a strange sensation:

I began to get a strange feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and everything in the forest went totally silent. It was extremely strange. It almost seemed like time itself stopped. It was as if myself and the area around me was in a bubble where everything had just stopped, as if the world was still going on around me but only outside that bubble that I was in.

While in this strange "bubble," Don sees a snowy owl flying right towards him.

As the owl glided by, I turned my head and followed it with my eyes. The owl, after looking me directly in the eyes, turned its head forward again. It flew straight down the trail I had been watching previously and disappeared into the trees. At that exact instant, a huge doe stepped out onto the trail right below the spot where the owl disappeared, and stood there.

Don shoots the doe but then has trouble finding the body. Eventually he finds it by following a red squirrel. When he finally finds the dead doe, he looks up, and the snowy owl is perched in a tree directly over the body.

Moving slowly, I began easing my way toward the doe. But the instant I moved, the squirrel ran away to a nearby tree about 30 feet away and ran up it, stopping and sitting on a limb, seemingly now oblivious to me. At the same instant the owl flew away, disappearing into the forest. The oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere went away gradually.

Don here uses that same expression, "time warp," to describe the strange atmosphere in which he saw both the owl and the deer.

This afternoon, an hour or two after reading this account, I was at the fire station filing some routine fire safety paperwork for my school. As I was leaving, I noticed that behind the fire station, some distance from the road, was an Indigenous Peoples Museum. (Taiwan is the original home of the Austronesian peoples, who later spread out to various islands from Madagascar to Hawaii.) I think I've noticed it there before, but today I felt a sudden, strangely powerful urge to go inside.

I walked through the very small museum, looking at the mildly interesting displays of textiles and weapons and musical instruments. I was the only patron, and the museum was dead silent -- a novel sensation in urban Taiwan, where true silence is a rare commodity. As I enjoyed the silence, I thought of Don's description of the "oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere" and wondered whether I would encounter any owl- or deer-related art in the museum. I didn't, though. The only animal motifs were snakes and wild boars.

Finally, as I prepared to leave the museum and go about the rest of my day, I noticed this on the wall opposite the restrooms -- not one of the exhibits, but some modern decorative art:

It shows two owls perched in a tree directly above a deer. Don also saw an owl in a tree directly above a deer. No other animals are depicted. And, due to the style of the art, the owls, the deer, and the tree all appear to be white, or off-white.

Thanks for The Art of Fugue

I was looking through some old dream logs and found this one, from January 18, 2016:

We’re saying goodbye to a young kid – blond, maybe 13 years old, who is J. S. Bach. Everyone says goodbye and thank you, and I say – because I feel like I ought to say it – “Thanks for The Art of Fugue.” It’s not very sincere, and he seems to know that, and accepts my thanks awkwardly, nodding. (It’s an afterthought. I was just going to say “Thanks. Bye.” or something like that.) I feel like I probably should have said something like “the Brandenburg Concertos” instead.

Later the same day, I read Laeth's latest post. His posts typically end with some jazz, but this one was different:

today’s musical portion is not jazz. or is it.

my favorite JS Bach is the stuff people considered as academic, exercises good for teaching, but not real music. i must have student ears. The Art of the Fugue is at the top for me. the more involved it gets, the more i like it. i prefer the versions with organ, but couldn’t find this specific one, so string quartet it is (rather than piano, which doesn’t do it justice).

it sounds to me half Wayne Shorter half Villa Lobos. Bach really invented everything.

This shares with the dream the idea that you aren't really "supposed" to like The Art of Fugue, and that preferring a different work by Bach would be a sign of better musical taste.

I've never pretended to have good taste.

Gardens of pomegranates

On June 25, I posted "Another book called the Tree of Life," the titular book being one by Israel Regardie. I quoted a Wikipedia reference to two of his books, though: "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Despite having read rather broadly in the "magical" literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, I've never read anything by or about Israel Regardie. I know him only as the guy who, in violation of his oaths of secrecy, published the Golden Dawn rituals. Commenter Wade, though, turns out to know his work much better, particularly the second title mentioned in my post:

To mention Israel Regardie brings back memories for me. . . . A juvenile infatuation with Crowley as a supposed transgressive figure led me to own a small library of books written or edited by Mr. Regardie. In my teens, his "A Garden of Pomegranates" was a veritable bible to me; I read it over and over. It's remarkable how little I can remember of it nowadays, several decades later; I remember next to nothing.

Today I was rereading Laura Bruno's post "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal" (May 2020), which came up in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27). She compares the Tarot image to "the God Odin, who often appeared on Earth in the guise of a traveling hermit," adding parenthetically, "Sometimes I think Tania Marie and I met him in Mendocino back in 2009, where I first learned Runes."

This story of Laura's meeting a "wizard" in Mendocino and learning Runes from him is briefly recounted in Stories from the Messengers, so I knew in a general way what she was referring to, but I clicked the link and read the longer account in her post "Mendocino/Fort Bragg Vacation" (September 2009). The post ends thus:

I have not done justice to the otherworldy feeling of this encounter. I suppose I could have begun, "Two fair maidens met a werewolf on Full Moon's Eve" or "the shaman and the faeries walked together and down the road" or "a person's word is bond."

But I think I'll just say, "we tiptoed into the Pomegranate Garden, tasted the fruit and smiled."

One more usually speaks of a pomegranate orchard, and that is the usual translation of the Ramak's book (to which Regardie's title refers) and of the Bible verse to which it alludes. So the fact that both Regardie and Laura Bruno opted for garden is an additional sync.

Google's Chicxulub Easter egg

Today I discovered that if you search Google for chicxulub impact crater, as I just did, an asteroid will fly across the screen diagonally, making the window shake when it hits the bottom.

No other asteroid- or crater-related search strings seem to trigger the animation. The key word is chicxulub (or any misspelling which will be corrected to chicxulub). Seems like an oddly specific feature to include in a search engine.

I discovered this after running across this painting of the crater in an old /x/ thread. The similarity to Plato's description of Atlantis piqued my curiosity.

I previously posted about the concentric rings of Atlantis in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake" (December 2025).

Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals

I recently read Shelby Van Pelt's novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Despite the fact that there are no owls at all in this novel, the Acknowledgments at the end begin thus:

My grandmother collected owls. The china cabinet on the red shag carpet in her dining room was crammed full of them. As a kid, I spent a lot of time on that carpet. . . . 

This was the 1980s, and these owls were old-school, not like the twee pastel birds that now decorate baby showers. My grandmother's figurine owls had heavy beaks. Like real owls, they conveyed little emotion.

I never knew why she loved owls, but year after year, until she passed away, I wrapped gift boxes with owl-themed brooches or tea towels. In some ways, Tova is modeled after my Grandma Anna.

Tova, the main character in the novel, does not collect owls or anything else, though one of her friends, a minor character, "for some reason that has never been fully explained, has been collecting elephants since she was a bachelorette." So beginning the Acknowledgments with an account of her owl-collecting grandmother wasn't exactly the obvious choice.

Shortly after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures -- I only read a few books in between -- I started the book I am currently reading: Mike Clelland's Stories from the Messengers: Accounts of Owls, UFOs and a Deeper Reality. I read his original The Messengers in 2022 and his novel The Unseen in 2023. Perhaps it was Van Pelt's random mention of owls that subconsciously prompted me to return to his work.

It goes without saying that the book is full of owls, but this passage I read today syncs quite specifically with what Van Pelt wrote about her grandmother:

Laura was raised in a house full of owls; the hundreds of pictures and knick knacks were there because of her mother's compulsive owl collecting. This is something I've heard a lot in my research. Someone who's had experiences with both owls and UFOs will tell me that their mother collected owls, often compulsively.

These obviously weren't real owls in Laura's childhood home, or the homes of many other young experiencers. Yet these children were surrounded by symbols, and it seems as if a subtle for on initiation might have been underway.

The Laura here is Laura Bruno, who, Clelland mentions in the text, has a blog called Laura Bruno's Blog. Since Shelby Van Pelt randomly mentioned owls in her novel about an octopus, maybe Laura Bruno, notable for her owl experiences, would mention octopuses. I searched her blog for that key word and found a December 8, 2013, post called "Whitley's Journal." That was a surprise. Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Stories from the Messengers, is another owl-and-UFO guy -- but octopuses?

In a blog that has been continuously active since 2008, only four posts contain the word octopus. One of them is also her only post about Whitley Strieber. His name is mentioned in a few other posts, but this is the only one that is about him and is tagged "Whitley Strieber." Here's how it begins:

Whitley Strieber’s “The Key: A True Encounter” offers much food for thought for these times of Awakening and the attempt to co-opt that growing consciousness. I first became aware of Strieber’s work in Madison when that book literally fell off a shelf after I mentally asked, “What else do I need to know?” It’s a short book that covers everything from a sudden planetary freeze to time travel to the prospect of an AI or alien race already controlling reality options and human evolution.

I didn’t plan to write about “The Key” today, as I was enjoying a bizarre rabbit hole of research related to octopuses and the new NRO logo people are so freaked out about. Perhaps I will share that partially written post another time, as it continues to fascinate me; however, the synchronicity train stopped firmly at Whitley Strieber station when I found the following journal entry by Whitley regarding unauthorized and secret censoring (post-proof-approval and pre-printing) of the first edition. Strieber’s careful documentation of the censored material does more to reveal an obvious agenda to co-opt and control the Awakening than anything else I’ve seen. It’s pretty startling and, imho, a fantastic sign of positive shifts that this new edition was allowed to go to print as actually submitted instead of as secretly censored.

So it's a post about discrepancies between the two different editions of Whitley's book The Key. I've posted about that myself, in "'Tim' and The Key" (November 11, 2023). I had a hunch that the exact amount of time separating her post and mine would be a significant number, so I checked. The main significance is that it can be expressed in two different ways using exactly the same digits:

• 9 years, 11 months, 1 day
• 119 months, 1 day

Those particular digits are interesting, given that Debbie, this blog's commenter laureate, has the number 1119 in her username.

I looked up the then-new NRO logo Laura mentioned. It looks like this:

I don't think I'd ever seen that before, but I instantly recognized it as the basis for what used to be the unofficial logo of /pol/.

Wondering if anyone had thought to dub that critter the Kektopus, I did an image search for that word. Apparently no one has, but one of the very few image results that came back hit on a familiar theme:

While I was at Laura's blog, I noticed that there was a link at the top to "divine doorways and porta-portals," which I clicked because "portals" had come up recently in the post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10). One of the white harts of the title was this one from a Hermit card:

The page on Laura's blog features art painted on doors. You can see 27 of these doors on the blog, several of them named after Tarot cards -- and yes, among those present is  "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." It features an owl:

Scrolling down, I found that Laura had written:

This portal also echoes the owl painting I did in 2010, which now hangs in our living room:

That very painting is reproduced, in full color, in Stories from the Messengers.

Okay, Laura is obviously into owls, which is why she's in Clelland's book in the first place. How much of a coincidence is it that her Hermit Portal -- the one "portal" of hers that caught my attention for sync reasons -- should include not only an owl but the very owl painting that appears in the book? To find out, I methodically clicked through and looked at every one of her "portals." Only one other -- "Door Number 24: The Two of Cups Equinox Portal" -- features an owl, and there is no mention of the 2010 painting.

The association of owls with doors or portals is not new on this blog. My July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- which played a role in bringing WanderingGondola into contact with me -- I quoted Mike Clelland:

I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important. 

The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness! 

Update:  Laura Bruno informs me that Mike Clelland had an aunt named Tova, which is obviously not a very common name in the United States.

So Shelby Van Pelt associates her character Tova (who does not collect owls) with her own owl-collecting grandmother. I post about that because I associate it with Mike Clelland's account of Laura Bruno's mother collecting owls. I share this post with Laura Bruno, and it turns out that she knows Mike Clelland well enough to know the name of one of his late aunts: Tova!

I don't see how Mormonism recovers from this shocking discovery

This showed up on my YouTube feed.

The video title is "Did Joseph Smith Steal Christian Theology and Repackage It As a New Religion?"

We should keep in mind that this is just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at this point, but what if it turns out to be true? Can you imagine the chutzpah of pretending to found a brand new religion with all these new doctrines when in fact it's secretly just Christianity? And then selling it to Christians, no less! This could absolutely destroy Mormonism if it gets out.

It kind of reminds me of this other conspiracy theory. People laughed at it, but there's actually quite a lot of evidence to back it up.

HPA and LPF

When I was a kid, there were two initialisms used in my circle that were always pronounced as if they were French: HPA ("osh-pay-ah") and LPF ("el-pay-eff"). For the former, there was a brief period where the Portuguese pronunciation replaced the French, so the H was said as "aga."

HPA came from News Norm, the handwritten newspaper with made-up stories that my youngest sister produced when she was very young. (See "Swampgas Newsboy, by Bob Dictionary") One issue included a letter to the editor demanding that the fire department do more to "make sure the firemen are not sick or HPA." She had remembered that there was a three-letter initialism that referred to hyperactivity (she was thinking of "ADD") and had guessed it was probably HPA for hy-per-active. After that, "osh-pay-ah" became a way of referring to any sort of high-strung or manic behavior.

LPF came from a brief craze for using a sewing machine to make "long pointed floppy" hats -- long, limp cones of fabric, with no brim, that were generally three to five feet long.

⁂

What brought these two initialisms back to mind was 1 Corinthians 13. I was thinking about the difficulty of translating the key word into English -- neither charity nor love is really adequate -- and thinking about the original Greek word (agape) made me think of HPA, the Portuguese version of which sounds a lot like agape; and then HPA reminded me of LPF.

I hadn't thought about LPFs in a good long time. The LPF craze was long before I knew any Hebrew or anything about the Temple, but that's the direction my thoughts went when I thought about "ell-pay-eff" now. It made me think of a Temple formula used in the past, consisting of three syllables including "pay" and "ale." One common interpretation is that these represent the Hebrew pe "mouth" and el "god," respectively. This made me wonder if eff could also be interpreted as Hebrew. My first thought was that it could be a truncation of efes, the modern Hebrew word for the numeral zero.

God Mouth Zero? Searching for that string turned up this 1996 Smashing Pumpkins EP. Pumpkins are a long-running sync theme, so I took that as synchronistic encouragement of this train of thought.

Thinking about eff as part of a Hebrew word reminded me of something I had seen on YouTube several days ago: emerging cult leader Shane Baldwin saying that the seven "angels" to whom the letters in Revelation 2-3 are addressed represent various prophets from different times in history ("dispensation heads," for those who know the Mormon lingo), and that "the angel of the church of Ephesus" is Joseph Smith. He said he first made that connection because both Joseph and Ephesus include the string eph. Thinking about this now in the context of LPF, I noticed that Ephesus includes not just eph but the complete word ephes, "zero." In fact, since the -us (-os in Greek) is just a grammatical suffix, varying from case to case, the real root name of the city is simply Ephes -- coinciding exactly with the Hebrew for "zero."

When I went to Baldwin's channel to try to track down the video in question, I noticed a new video claiming that a near-complete Quran engraved on gold plates had been discovered and that the hosts of another Mormon podcast, Stick of Joseph, had seen the plates. Stories like this come out from time to time and usually end up being hoaxes, but it piqued my curiosity enough that I typed stick of joseph quran into the search bar and pressed enter. These two videos were juxtaposed in the search results:

I am getting so sick of these "AI"-generated thumbnails. Is there any channel left that doesn't use them? Anyway, the sync fairies will make use of whatever is at hand. The first thumbnail says AGAPE in big letters, and the second says JOSEPH. I had just been thinking about the name Joseph in connection with the word for "zero," so it seems significant that Joseph's face is blanked out in the thumbnail, making him a "zero."