Picaresque narrative

Last night I explained to a high-school student why one of his answers on a reading comprehension test was wrong. He had said that one of the paragraphs was about "the picaresque novel," when in fact it was about the picaresque narrative as one of the predecessors of -- and therefore not itself an example of -- the novel.

Today I read in The Story of Alice a reference to "Carroll's picaresque narrative style."

Alice and Saturn (also zero and toucans)

In "Chester Bennington and King Hamlet" (April 3), I quoted a post associating Saturn with the promise of eternal youth:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers.

In "Pebbles, specs, keys, shoon" (April 5), I quoted a 4chan post about Humpty Dumpty's "evil" suggestion that Alice might remain "just under 8 years old forever":

Lots of these "going to a magical fantasy world" stories are about sick cult activities. Many fairytales are ancient luciferian programming scripts. Notice also Peter pan "never grow up" - this is referring to the child alter personality splits that are created by the extreme abuse; they never grow up. Relevant quote from textbin link below: "HUMPTY DUMPTY'S evil speech to ALICE about how she can remain at her age - just under 8 years old forever...'two can'...this is TOUCAN programming which ANTONY RADCLIFFE speciallised in - the creation of 'child alters' frozen in time, through extreme torture. "One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty; 'but two can. With the proper assistance you might have left off (growing up) at seven.'")

Today (April 10), I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice, about a meeting between John Ruskin and Alice Liddell:

In his autobiography Praeterita, Ruskin recalled an occasion when 'the Planet Saturn had treated me with his usual adversity in the carrying out of a plot with Alice in Wonderland'

He goes on to recount a story of looking forward to having tea alone with Alice and then being disappointed by "the unexpected return of her parents." It's not clear what the planet Saturn had to do with it all.

"Hometo Omleto" (May 2024) mentions "Alice, in her eighth year" and "the zero-shaped Humpty." In the quotations above, the promise of eternal youth is associated with a character called Cypher (meaning "zero") and with Alice remaining in her eighth year forever.

The toucan is also mentioned in The Story of Alice, where the author criticizes Carroll's own unpublished illustrations for Alice (the published illustrations were by John Tenniel):

Carroll introduces the Gryphon by stating 'if you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture', but anyone who followed his advice might assume that this mythical creature had the body of a rat and a toucan's beak.

Note added: Here's Carroll's original Gryphon illustration:

And here, for good measure, is the Mock Turtle:

And here they are together:

Help I'm Alice

Looking at a music playlist, I momentarily misread the title of the Metric song 'Help I'm Alive" as "Help I'm Alice."

A day before I had read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he longer Alice spends underground the more her adventures start to resemble a narrative game of Doublets, in which the aim is to take 'Alice' and ensure that by the end of her story she is 'Alive'.

Doublets was a word game Carroll invented, in which the challenge is to transform one word into another by changing one letter at a time, with each intermediate step also being a word. (I used to play a very similar game as a child, the challenge typically being to get from sick to smug while passing through certain specified intermediate words on the way.)

"Help I'm . . ." makes me think of this old Calvin & Hobbes strip:

A child being shrunk down to a minuscule size takes us right back to Alice.

Note added: This is from one of the pictures linked in WG's comment below. A shrunk-down person walking on a keyboard is a pretty direct sync with the Calvin comic.

WG's game screenshot shows the person walking from G to F on a piano keyboard. In the Calvin strip, The H key is highlighted, but the G key is also visible. On both a piano and a Qwerty keyboard, the F key is immediately to the left of the G key -- that being the only thing the two layouts have in common.

The F and G keys got my attention in the context of my latest post, "Alice and Saturn (also zero and toucans)" because both of those keys -- and only those two -- are marked with the symbol of Saturn in the standard computer keyboard layout used in Taiwan. Letter keys on a Taiwan keyboard each bear four symbols: a Roman letter; a Chinese phonetic symbol; and two different Chinese characters, for use in the Cangjie and Dayi input methods respectively. Saturn is called 土星, "earth star" (meaning the element Earth, not the planet), and the character 土 appears on the F key (for Dayi) and the G key (for Cangjie).

I always use the phonetic-symbol method myself, so I'd never noticed until now that in the Cangjie system the first seven letters of the alphabet -- the ones that also appear on a piano keyboard -- correspond to the seven classical "planets":

• A = 日 = Sun
• B = 月 = Moon
• C = 金 = Venus (gold)
• D = 木 = Jupiter (wood)
• E = 水 = Mercury (water)
• F = 火 = Mars (fire)
• G = 土 = Saturn (earth)

I'm sure that wasn't an accident, but it's hard to see why that particular order was chosen. It begins with Sun and then Moon, and ends with Saturn, just like the days of the week, but then the others four days of the week are in reverse order, from Friday (Venus) to Tuesday (Mars).

The juice from magical fruit

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Around noon, I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's biography of Lewis Carroll:

Carroll explored similar themes in his poem 'Stolen Waters', which he finished on 9 May 1862 . . . . It begins with a curious mixture of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', a poem Carroll finished reading that month, as the speaker, 'Sir Knight', tastes the juice from magical fruit offered to him by an apparently beautiful woman; only after kissing her does he realize that she is a had with a face that is 'withered, old, and gray'. What restores him to happiness is hearing a song about an 'angel-child' . . . who sits in a garden . . . . The surface meaning is that the speaker, having been seduced by adult experience, now realizes that he lives in a world of corruption . . . .

My stanza speaks of Jesus, in the Garden, drinking the juice of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby experiencing for himself Adam's fall from Paradise into the Lone and Dreary World. Carroll's knight likewise drinks "the juice from magical fruit" and thereby experiences the "world of corruption."

The reference to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is also interesting, as that poem was in the syncs a couple of years ago. I first posted about it on May 16, 2024, in "'Come buy,' call the goblins," where I mention having read the poem for the first time "a few days ago," bringing us very close to the May 9 date mentioned by Douglas-Fairhurst.

Garden

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Pi Days

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major spiritual experience, and the date mentioned by Browning in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." I linked to some old posts of mine (one of which was also recently linked to by WG in a comment) which mentioned July 22 as an alternative Pi Day, in connection with its being the release date of the Jordan Peele film NOPE.

At first I thought it was a sad near miss that Bill's birthday should be one Pi Day while mine is the day after the usual Pi Day. Upon reflection, though, I realized that the most precise approximation of pi on the calendar is actually the two-day period March 14-15, corresponding to 3.1415. I guess we could call that Pi Biduum, and it includes my birthday, the Ides of March.

The Ides of March is of course best known as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar. That name is another link to Browning's poem, which relates how the rats followed the Pied Piper

Until they came to the river Weser

Wherein all plunged and perished

-- Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,

Swam across and lived to carry

(As he the manuscript he cherished)

To Rat-land home his commentary,

My discovery of Pi Biduum made me wonder if anyone else had thought of it, so I ran a search for pi two days. This brought up the Wikipedia article for "Pi Day," which notes that June 28 is sometimes observed as Two-Pi Day. While visiting that page, I learned of yet another date for Pi Day: "Some also celebrate π on November 10, since it is the 314th day of the year."

Some minutes after learning the significance of November 10, I decided to read a little in the Book of Mormon. The last chapter I had finished was Alma 48, and so it happened that the very first verse I read included a reference to a date corresponding to our November 10:

And now it came to pass in the eleventh month of the nineteenth year, on the tenth day of the month, the armies of the Lamanites were seen approaching towards the land of Ammonihah (Alma 49:1).

This is the only mention of that particular date in all of scripture. That "approaching towards" is a bit of a sync, too, since none of these dates is anything but an approximation (literally a "coming near to") of the value of pi.

Update: After posting this, it occurred to me to check what, if anything, I had posted on the 10th day of the 11th month of the year '19. It turns out it was a pun post called "Near misses." The present post calls my failure to be born on Pi Day "a sad near miss."

Pebbles, specs, keys, shoon

All four of these have been somewhat interchangeable symbolically.

First, I wanted to post these two stills from Twin Peaks, shared by WanderingGondola in a comment on "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key." (That's "TIBET" written on the map in the background, Debbie.)

That's the character Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, wearing specs with a red right lens and a blue left lens, just as in the post "Red and blue spectacles." He holds a pair of golf balls that look like white pebbles and then says he is "planning a pilgrimage to Pebble Beach." White pebbles specifically being from a beach was part of the syncs in "What quartz pebbles (now with added syncs!)."

I looked up Jacoby to see if his mismatched specs had any particular significance. Under "Personality," the Twin Peaks Wiki has only this to say:

Jacoby was known for keeping cocktail umbrellas marked with dates of influential events that affected him. He is also a keen surfer. A recognizable trait of the Doc's were his glasses - one lens of which was blue, the other red.

"The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key," the post on which WG left links to the above photos of Jacoby, mentions how Lewis Carroll did with white stones what Jacoby did with umbrellas: "Carroll liked to celebrate notable days by marking them with 'a white stone.'" That post also includes a photo of white stones juxtaposed with white eggs. Some umbrellas are also in the photo, which prompted Debbie to leave a long comment (before WG's) mentioning umbrellas no fewer than 16 times.

This afternoon I saw on YouTube a new video from Uncorrelated Mormonism, called "Mormonism is Christian Magic." I didn't finish the whole thing, since he didn't seem to be covering much that I didn't already know, but two slides caught my eye. First, this one focusing on the importance of the color of Joseph Smith's seer stones (with white stones being associated with "water or seeing"):

Then there was this slide about "keys":

The illustration is a white stone statue of St. Peter holding the Keys of the Kingdom -- so the keys are themselves also made of white stone. This syncs with "The pebble key," where the same objects can be described either as white pebbles or as keys. Just to the right of this picture of two keys is a bullet point that says "D&C 129: 'three grand keys.'" This syncs with my recent post "Two keys or three?"

Coming back to the red and blue specs, this symbol quickly came to be associated with that of red and blue shoes, for example in "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill." That post mentions, in connection with colored shoes, a "sequence of colors [that] goes from silver to red to blue."

I successfully stayed off 4chan for the entirety of Lent, but now it's Easter and I'm back to my old ways -- meaning that every time I visit archive.org, I click for a random /x/ thread en route. The one I got today is called "Wizard of Oz Symbols." The original post has a photo of Dorothy in her ruby slippers and says:

Let's have a comfy thread about the occult symbolism behind the Wizard of Oz. I'll start with a question: What was the significance of the ruby red shoes in the movie? Supposedly, they were silver in the book.

That obviously syncs with "from silver to red." The post even says "ruby red shoes" instead of the more usual "ruby slippers." Although the thread was supposed to be about The Wizard of Oz, the first reply brought in Alice as well:

things like wizard of oz, alice in wonderland, etc have always struck me as psychic propaganda.

This led to lots of follow-up posts about Alice, including one that brought in Humpty Dumpty:

Lots of these "going to a magical fantasy world" stories are about sick cult activities. Many fairytales are ancient luciferian programming scripts. Notice also Peter pan "never grow up" - this is referring to the child alter personality splits that are created by the extreme abuse; they never grow up. Relevant quote from textbin link below: "HUMPTY DUMPTY'S evil speech to ALICE about how she can remain at her age - just under 8 years old forever...'two can'...this is TOUCAN programming which ANTONY RADCLIFFE speciallised in - the creation of 'child alters' frozen in time, through extreme torture. "One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty; 'but two can. With the proper assistance you might have left off (growing up) at seven.'")

Update: Speaking of umbrellas and the keys of St. Peter, this is the sede vacante symbol used on Ann Barnhardt's blog, representing the position that the current pope is illegitimate:

The king is an Enoch

While I was on the road this afternoon, my meditations took me to the prayer offered by the father of Lamoni (who we can infer was named Laman but who is called only "the king" in the text). I recited it to myself, finding that I could do so easily despite never having intentionally memorized it, and began mentally tinkering out a tentative Latin translation.

When I arrived at my destination, I had some free time and so took out one of the books I am reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley. The very first thing I read was this (brackets and ellipses in the original, boldface added):

As stated by Egyptologist J. Zandee, "Not only in Israel, but it all the ancient Near East, every king is a Messiah. . . . There is no difference in principle between the eschatological Messiah and the ruling King as the bearer of salvation. . . . The King is a god, . . . the King is the son of God. . . . The King is as the image of God on earth. . . . The King brings justice to earth. . . . [The King is] the Good Shepherd, . . . [The King is the man of Wisdom]. . . . The King is the [High] Priest [endowed with power]. . . . The King is a cosmic deity." In short, the king is an Enoch, to whom God has promised his own throne.

Moses 7:59. . . . Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . thou hast made me, and given me a right to thy throne, and not of myself, but through thine own grace.

Nibley quotes that verse from Moses because it mentions Enoch being given a right to God's throne. He juxtaposes it with an apocryphal Enoch document in which Enoch says, "God made for me a throne modeled after the Throne of Glory." His only reason for quoting the part I have bolded is to establish that God is the "thou" Enoch is addressing.

Here is the prayer of Lamoni's father, which I had been reciting to myself just minutes before reading the above passage in Nibley:

O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day. And now when the king had said these words, he was struck as if he were dead (Alma 22:18).

The parallel is quite exact. These are the only two verses in all scripture to include both "thou art God" and "know thee." More specifically, each has the words "thou art God . . . and I . . . know thee," in that order. In Moses 7:59, the speaker is Enoch; in Alma 22:18, it is "the king." Immediately before quoting the Moses verse, Nibley states that "the king is an Enoch."

If we look beyond the fragment quoted by Nibley, there is a further sync with the king's hope that he will be saved "at the last day."

And Enoch . . . called unto the Lord, saying: Wilt thou not come again upon the earth? Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . I ask thee if thou wilt not come again on the earth. And the Lord said unto Enoch: As I live, even so will I come in the last days (Moses 7:59-60).

This theme of God coming again upon the earth also syncs with something I read earlier today in Words of Them Liberated (in which the name Eru is applied to Jesus):

They (some) set into writings conversings with Arda’s Wild Voices, and careful to preserve as told, some others saw into those records, What was forbidden them to tell: Eru’s Return. Ever was that command, both to watch for and yet never reveal what sought all out to find, and yet was a gap read in records by those men knowing also their own enchanting promises. So surmised one silent to another, and then less silent, by gesture contriving, or crypted words, pieced as from some Oak, retelling how hunters bypassing, return always. That Return was a Theme to which all their writing bent around, never saying, always showing what was commanded, obeying; yet also seeing if by Other Tales Recounting, their audience may reveal knowing of His Return, whereto, and in what fashioned matter.

I've bolded "Wild Voices" because that is a link back to Joseph Smith's Enoch:

And it came to pass that Enoch went forth in the land, among the people, standing upon the hills and the high places, and cried with a loud voice . . . . And they came forth to hear him, upon the high places, saying . . . a wild man hath come among us (Moses 6:38-39).

There is also a hint of "wild voices" in something I read today in the third book I am currently working on, The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

[Lewis Carroll's] allusion to Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', where we are reminded that 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, | And waste its sweetness on the desert air', carried a warning that not everyone was given the opportunity to make their voice heard . . . .

A phantom Humpty

I've posted many times about times when, reading, I momentarily hallucinate a word that is not there and then discover this to have been caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. This morning I had another such experience, seeing Humpty Dumpty at the end of a page of Words of Them Liberated. Unlike most such errors I have documented, this is one I was clearly primed for, as I am currently reading a biography of Lewis Carroll and had just posted about Humpty Dumpty days ago. The proximate cause, however, was still the influence of adjacent lines.

One line ends with -mpty, and the next line (and the page) ends with two capitalized words with the initials H.D.

It is, I think, only my own copy of Liberated that would give rise to such an error. I converted an epub to a Word document, set the font size and margins to my liking, and had it printed and bound. Probably none of the book's other (few!) readers has the words lined up on the page like that.

That last line, continued on the next page, speaks of something being "hastily recorded by Heaven's Dead Men Scribes." This syncs with another book I am currently reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley, where the title character -- a Man ascended to Heaven, though admittedly not dead -- is "Enoch the Scribe, keeper of the records," "Enoch in his primary role of heavenly scribe," of whom Nibley writes:

But everywhere Enoch is credited with being the scribe and transmitter par excellence, "the Righteous Scribe, the Teacher of heaven and earth, the Scribe of Righteousness."

The swept tomb

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Les saintes femmes au tombeau (1890)

In "A feast for the god of war," I noted that Mardi Gras coincided with the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse. In another 2026 coincidence of Chinese and Christian holidays, the significance of which is much more straightforward, April 5 is both Tomb Sweeping Day and Easter Sunday this year.

Pain. Paradise. Repeat.

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about what shape the next stanza in my series would take. It is to be about the Agony in the Garden, but beyond that I didn't have any very clear concept of it. (The basic framework and precise poetical form of the stanza series was given to me in a "download" during prayer, but it is left to me to flesh out those bones.) In a hypnopompic reverie, I thought of the Garden as a symbol of Paradise (my vivid mental image of the Garden is one of Eden-like beauty), but Jesus' experience there was marked by intense suffering rather than idyllic happiness. I tried out a tentative couplet on that theme but rejected it because it rhymed pain with again, an unacceptable kludge.

When I went out in the morning, I almost immediately encountered this T-shirt, on the back of the motorcyclist in front of me on the road:

I noted that 22/7 is an approximation of pi, with pain the circumference and paradise the diameter, but I think that's just noise, or at least I have not yet found in it any coherent symbolic meaning.

The stanza remains unwritten. I had hoped to get as far as the Crucifixion today, Good Friday, and do the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, but I don't think that's going to work out. Well, inspiration is not exactly known for conforming to liturgical calendars.

Campbell sync

At 2:28 this morning I received an email, addressed to a group of which I am part, which included this:

In the early 2000s I was very keen on Joseph Campbell, who occupied what was probably a similar cultural space [to Wayne Dyer]; and got most of his books. The basis was mixture of Jung and comparative mythology, with a spiritual basis in Buddhism and Hinduism - and an American self-help spin. 

At 7:07 this evening (as indicated by a timestamped screenshot), I read this in The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

One model for the powerful but scattered impact of the Alice books is suggested by Joseph Campbell's influential 1949 work of comparative mythology The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I dislike The Hero With a Thousand Faces and rarely think of Joseph Campbell; when I do mention him, it's usually by accident because, in a strangely persistent slip of the tongue, I am forever referring to the linguist Joseph Greenberg by that name. The sync made me think of my recent dream "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica" (March 12), the post title being the motto of a dream character called Campbell.

Speaking of a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica, last night I read the long and engaging comment thread on Kristor's Orthosphere post "Anselm & Job," consisting mostly of an argument between /ourguy/ J. M. Smith and more conventional Supergod Christians like Kristor. Smith writes that "Jesus was present to men in the flesh; YHWH and El were what we today call theoretical constructs or representations" -- like, I might add, that blasted thousand-faced hero! -- to which Kristor responds:

When I suggested that, to the 1st Century Judeans and Galileans, YHWH was real, and not just a theoretical construct, I meant that he was not real to them the way that quarks are to us, or that the luminiferous ether once was, but rather that he was real to them in at least the way that to us Antarctica is real, even though almost none of us have ever seen it.

There is also talk of fighting for its own sake, as promoted by dream-Campbell. Smith writes of "mere controversialists who cross swords to keep their mind off of death" and states that "Controversy is the soul of blogging."

Sued by a roofing company

Last night I dreamt -- almost entirely in Chinese, which is unusual for me -- that I received a phone call from a roofing company informing me that they were suing my school. The grounds for the lawsuit were as follows.

My family had owned a cat that was extremely aggressive and used to scratch and bite people viciously. (This cat was called Tri, the name of one of my past cats who in waking life was never aggressive.) We kept her for years, but in the end my mother got tired of our getting "torn to shreds" all the time, so we advertised to find a new home for her, making her behavioral issues clear in the ad. A woman who worked for the roofing company had responded to the ad, adopted the cat, and, predictably, ended up getting severely scratched. The scratch became infected and, by some freak chance, the woman died. She had been pregnant at the time, doubling the tragedy. This woman proved to be irreplaceable in her role at the roofing company, and without her the company was failing. The boss believed this had all been an intentional plot on the part of my school to sabotage his roofing company, which was why it was the company that was suing my school rather than the woman's family suing mine.

I said that I was very sorry to hear about their employee but that the lawsuit was ridiculous and would be thrown out of court. We had lived with the cat for years without any of us suffering anything worse than some nasty lacerations, so it was absurd to suggest that letting someone else adopt her amounted to a premeditated attempt on the new owner's life. Nor did we have the ability to somehow cause a particular intended victim to respond to our ad. Furthermore, a roofing company was in no way in competition with a language school, so there could be no conceivable corporate motive for the alleged sabotage.

After I hung up, I felt bad about having spent the whole call inveighing against a lawsuit that had zero chance of success anyway and having been so perfunctory in my expression of sympathy for what was after all a terrible human tragedy for which I was to some degree responsible.

Kind of a horrible dream, though not a nightmare in the conventional sense.

⁂

After I woke, the combination of a roofing company and my school made me think of my October 2025 dream "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," in which a roofer shows up at my school. Before looking up the dream, I had forgotten that it involved my being addressed as Danny John Malkovich. In the very long comment thread on yesterday's post "Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)," I mentioned that in the dream documented there I had gone by the pseudonym Marvin Fenlingstone Starsky, and I had then tied this to my October 2021 dream "Gene Hackman," in which a boy named Danny changed into a boy named Marvin. I also note in "Clinkscales" that the Starsky character in the TV series "Starsky and Hutch" (of which I know nothing but the name) has a brother named Nicholas Marvin Starsky. In the "Gene Hackman" post, I note that John Malkovich had a brother called Danny.

The Danny John Malkovich dream, like the Total Racism Indicator dream, features Black people and has a "racist" element (including a use of the n-word). As Debbie has pointed out, this does seem to be a recurring theme in my dreams, which is odd given that I live in a country with essentially no Black people and rarely have occasion to think about that race in waking life.

Chester Bennington and King Hamlet

Last night, I watched Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of the Linkin Park songs "The Emptiness Machine" and "Guilty All the Same." Yes, watched, and not listened only. I don't usually watch music videos, but I watched this one.

The video begins with the new, Emily Armstrong-fronted Linkin Park performing. When, around the 45-second mark, the late lamented Chester Bennington runs onto the stage, as if returned from the sunless house of Hades, it caused an unexpected emotional reaction: goosebumps, tears, and the sudden thought of a line from Hamlet: "In the same figure, like the King that's dead."

He and Emily are great together. As the top comment on the video puts it, "I love how Linkin Park sounds together with Linkin Park."

Today I noticed in my blogroll a new post, "Far Over Misty Mountains Cold," by The Saxon Cross, a blog I haven't visited in a good long time. It turned out to be a video, and I was no longer in a video mood, so I just read the Tolkien poem of the title, reprinted below the video. At the bottom of the page were a few links to older posts. One called "Black Hole Sun" caught my eye because that phrase has been in the sync stream from time to time, so I clicked. It's about Chris Cornell but also includes an unexpected reference to Chester Bennington:

If you do a quick google search on the issue, you will quickly find claims that Cornell was working with DJ Avicii (Tim Bergling), Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain on a documentary film about child trafficking before all four were suicided by the elites they were going to expose. The rings they were going to expose apparently involved Jeffery Epstein.

If Chester was indeed "suicided" (i.e., murdered), that adds potential meaning to last night's spontaneous thought connecting him with the ghost of the murdered King Hamlet, returned to earth to seek revenge.

HAMLET.

Speak, I am bound to hear.

GHOST.

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

Here's another excerpt from the "Black Hole Sun" post:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers.

That sounds like "The Emptiness Machine." Bill has connected me with the character Cypher before. Cypher, spelt like that and capitalized, is Shakespeare's word for "zero" in the Prologue to Henry V, and "The Emptiness Machine" is from the album From Zero.

At the bottom of the "Black Hole Sun" post was, again, a handful of links to earlier posts, including "Idylls of the King." Tennyson has been in the sync stream -- most recently earlier today, in "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key" -- so again I clicked. Unsurprisingly, the post begins with a quotation from the poem from which it takes its name:

Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,

The King is King, and ever wills the highest.

Hamlet's mission, too, is to "strike for the King," and in the end he dies.

⁂

Note added: The Linkin Park video even includes a bald bearded guy with a headset, more than a little reminiscent of Cypher in his betrayal scene:

The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key

In "The pebble key" (March 26), I discuss how Joseph Smith's seer stones and specs were described both as white pebbles and as a "key." I connect this with Johnny English's comparing his "small key" to the "pebble" with which David brought down Goliath, and I also mention Joseph Smith's identification of "the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17" with both a seer stone and a "key word." In "White quartz pebbles (now with added syncs!)" (March 27), I add to the mix the "tiny white pebbles" and "white polished quartz pebbles" of Wendy Berg's Gwenevere and the Round Table.

Today I started reading The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Once again I was greeted by white pebbles and Revelation 2:17.

In his diary, Carroll liked to celebrate notable days by marking them with 'a white stone', a mental paperweight that separated out important memories and prevented them from being lost in the general drift of past events.  For example, a day in June 1856 that he had spent photographing Alice . . . was marked 'most specially with a white stone,' and three months later he did the same to commemorate his first meeting with Tennyson. The usual explanation for this practice points out similar formulas in classical authors: Pliny, for example, describes the Thracians' habit of putting a white pebble in one urn on happy days, and a black one in a different urn on unhappy ones, which allowed them to calculate [literally!] their overall levels of satisfaction. . . .

Yet almost nothing in Carroll's life is capable of being interpreted in just a single way . . . . Even his 'white stone' is ambiguous. In addition to being a classical commonplace, the same phrase is found in the Bible, which Carroll knew with the intimacy he tended to reserve for books rather than people, where it indicates absolution from sin: 'To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written' (Revelation 2:17).

Tennyson is also a sync. In preparation for writing the next stanza in the series I have been posting here, which will be about the Agony in the Garden, I had been thinking of what Jesus says to Peter there: "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matt. 26:41) and connecting it with a line of Tennyson's Ulysses recently quoted in "Filling Peter's shoes" (March 22): "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will." Peter was mentioned in "The pebble key" due to his association with both stones and keys, and the same post quotes a description of Joseph Smith's seer stone as "a white, glossy pebble, resembling a human foot in shape." Since the name Peter means "rock," a human foot made of stone is precisely what would "fill Peter's shoes."

On the next page after the white stone references quoted above, Douglas-Fairhurst quotes the end of Humpty Dumpty's final poem:

a poem recited by Humpty Dumpty that manages to end simultaneously on a perfect rhyme and a narrative cliffhanger: '"And when I found the door was shut, | I tried to turn the handle, but --".'

Carroll's Humpty Dumpty has himself been associated with Peter (via Pharazon) in past syncs; and more generally, eggs are called "magic stones" in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" (November 2023). I had recently been thinking of that connection again when, on March 31, I snapped this photo in a breakfast shop of white stones (sitting more-or-less "on a wall") juxtaposed with white eggs (and, I notice now, with an open door).

Given the key theme, Humpty's reference to a shut door piqued my curiosity. I googled the lines to find the context and ended up on this page. The poem does in fact reference the door being locked as well as shut:

And when I found the door was locked,

I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

And when I found the door was shut,

I tried to turn the handle, but --'

I had been prompted to take up a biography of Lewis Carroll by a train of thought that began with Mormon's claim, "all children are alike unto me; wherefore, I love little children with a perfect love; and they are all alike" (Moro. 8:17), on which I will be posting later on my Book of Mormon blog. I had been contemplating the contrast between Mormon's professed love for the Platonic Idea of Children with Carroll's love for a particular child. It was therefore interesting to read what Humpty says to Alice shortly after reciting the poem just quoted:

'I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,' Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; 'you're so exactly like other people.'

And at the bottom of the page, not far from those lines, what else but a key!

Note added: The white stone references are on pp. 25-26. On pp. 50-51, we find this:

Even an ordinary word such as 'little' could occupy a disproportionate amount of space on the page: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland alone contains more than a hundred repetitions of the word -- in one paragraph Alice finds a 'little golden key' on a 'little three-legged table' and uses it to unlock a 'little door about fifteen inches high'; Carroll deploys the word as if casting a spell.

That's almost exactly the same as The Small Golden Key, the title of Thinley Norbu's book. Douglas-Fairhurst emphasizes its smallness, or rather the author's description of it as "little," bringing us yet again to Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Debbie's email about they key she received also emphasizes its small size:

She also included in a separate poly bag a very small skeleton key . . . . What really got my attention however is there are 3 small rings on the top of the small brass key. . . . I also found the 3 rings on the very small key interesting as they remind me of your three pentacles post.

Supper

When first on Heaven's bread they'd dined,

They slept and woke again to find

New hunger. Day by day they fed

Again on manna, and are dead,

For Moses never found a way

To make the life he gave them stay.

    But Jesus' bread and Jesus' cup

    Will never fade into the past.

    No, Jesus Christ will make his supper last.

Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)

Today I learned that Duke Ellington's piano teacher was called Marietta Clinkscales -- a clear instance of onomastic determinism. Just as Wordsworth had to become a poet, Bolt a sprinter, and Colón a colonizer, Miss Clinkscales obviously had no choice but to become a piano teacher.

⁂

I was looking up the Duke because he appeared in last night's dreams. I dreamt that I was visiting an old friend from college, a very dark-skinned Black man. Since our college days he had had some sort of racial awakening, for which he was somewhat apologetic: "You came all this way to see me, and all I want to talk about is Black people stuff!"

"That's okay," I said. "You can still be friends with a racist, right?"

"Of course. That reminds me, would you be willing to help me out with my research by taking this racism test I designed? It's called the Total Racism Indicator."

"'Total Racism'? I'm sure I'll ace it."

The first question asked whether I preferred white sand or black sand. I told my friend I wasn't sure how to answer.

"Well, you came to this black-sand beach to visit me, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I got here by crawling across a white-sand desert, when I could have just flown."

"Okay, maybe just skip that question."

Another question had a photo of Duke Ellington and said, "This is a photo of Duke Ellington. Could he be Greek? (A) Yes. (B) Maybe part Greek. (C) No, because he's Black. (D) No, because he's American."

I went with the last option. I hesitated at first because I was afraid it wasn't racist enough and would hurt my score, but in the end I decided it was a trick question and all the answers were racist.

In the end I "passed" -- i.e., was indicated to be a Total Racist. I was unreasonably excited about this, shouting, "I passed! I passed!" and high-fiving my friend and other random people of various races who happened to be in the vicinity.

Transfiguration

Traherne saw men as Cherubim,

Each boy and girl a living gem,

For so they had appeared to him

When infant-eyed he looked on them.

And what in infancy he knew,

He never to the end outgrew.

    Conflicting visions make their claims

    For each to pass his judgment on,

    And so it was with Peter, James, and John.

Azoyan and Azouchan

I am reading Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated concurrently with Hugh Nibley's Enoch the Prophet.

In the introduction to the first Words book, Daymon incorrectly states that Tolkien used the name Azoyan for Numenor, adding his own interpretation of that name ("i.e., Zion") in parentheses. Every single word and name Tolkien created is exhaustively documented online by obsessive fans, so I feel very confident in stating that Azoyan is not among them. Daymon was presumably thinking of Yozayan but misremembered it. The misremembered name later occurs in the main text of the book (supposedly channeled from an Elf), where the context -- "the Holy Land of Gift, Azoyan" -- confirms that what he means is Yozayan. Here the name is not explicitly credited to Tolkien, though, so it can be considered a variant rather than an error.

Liberated, though, is where Azoyan really comes into its own. Forms of the name are used more than 20 times, and it is often clear that it now refers not specifically to Numenor but to something more like what Mormons mean by "Zion." The Mormon Zion par excellence is the City of Enoch.

Today, I read in Nibley this quotation from an apocryphal Enoch document:

And they all came together, saying: Come, let us greet Enoch, and they came to the place Azouchan.

Nibley has no comment on this place name, but I could hardly avoid noticing the similarity to Azoyan. Looking it up to get some more context, I found this in T. J. Milik's The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments from Qumran Cave 4:

The farewells and the Assumption of Enoch [in the Slavonic Book of Enoch] take place at Achouzan or Azouchan . . . . I think that the fifteenth-century reviser surmised rightly that this is a cryptic name of Jerusalem . . . or more exactly the hill of the Temple.

In other words, Azouchan means Zion, a standard definition of which is "Jerusalem, or more strictly, the Temple Mount." That a place name associated with Enoch was equated as far back as the 15th century with Zion is a very neat connection, and Nibley's failure to pounce on it is surprising. That it should be so similar to Daymon's misremembered Tolkien name, which he also equates with Zion -- and that I should happen to be reading Liberated and Enoch the Prophet at the same time -- is a striking coincidence.

Blue Sun Ben

Last night I discovered Blue Sun Ben, a 1984 children's book by Jean and Claudio Marzollo.

In "The Son of Righteousness, and the Talking Quartz of Kirtland," I report a sync in which a vivid fantasy about the Blue Sun of the Homeric age coincided with seeing the phrase "Son of Righteousness" -- a phrase from the Book of Mormon which is widely considered to be an error, an English-influenced corruption of the biblical "Sun of Righteousness." The name Ben comes from the Hebrew word for "son."

That post goes on to recount a dream about "talking quartz," ending by noting a possible link to St. Peter because "the literal meaning of the name Simon Peter is 'hearing stone.'"

Anyway, back to Blue Sun Ben. Ben lives in a world with two differently colored suns, and he is even more physically sensitive to the color of sunlight than Superman. All people in this world are human only under the Red Sun and become animals when the Blue Sun is up.

A chipmunk! In Alvin and the Chipmunks, the chipmunk who dresses in blue is Simon, thus leading to the idea that Simon Peter is one of the Chip Monks.

Ben is captured by the nefarious Animal Singer, who plans to turn him into gold.

Bill once had the idea -- which has persisted in the sync stream despite his later rejection of it -- that Simon Peter is to be identified with the Golden Man, Pharazon. The idea of Pharazon being a king who dressed all in gold is the main thing that prompted me to read The King in Yellow earlier this year.

Later, Ben -- whom we have already symbolically linked to Simon Peter, "hearing stone" -- hears a stone  talking to him.

The Animal Singer, it turns out, has been turning animals to stone by means of a magical substance he makes by "mixing powders and liquids." His intention is to turn them to gold, but he keeps failing. In "The Mask," one of the stories in The King in Yellow, a sculptor named Boris discovers a chemical liquid that can turn living things to stone. His friend Alec, hearing him tell of his discovery, wonders if he has learned to turn things to gold.

I pricked up my ears. "Have you struck gold, Boris?"

"No, better; -- but see here, Alec!" he laughed, starting up. "You and I have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look already!" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

In testing his new discovery, Boris transforms a "big white rabbit" into a marble statue.

But I'm straying from my topic. Back to Blue Sun Ben:

In the email from Debbie which I discuss in "Two keys or three?" she mentions receiving a collar in a "ruby" bag and connects this with the book The Ruby Rosary by Thinley Norbu, which I recently posted about in "Clavis avis, clavis Dav'is."

Last but not least, the beautiful detached collar was wrapped in a  ruby see through bag. I thought of your post about The Ruby Rosary, and while not a necklace the collar fits around the neck.

A rosary is not a necklace, and wearing one around the neck is frowned on, but it certainly looks like a necklace and is symbolically necklace-adjacent.

Here's how the Animal Singer, who has transformed himself into a giant owl, is finally defeated:

The ruby necklace transforms the owl into a tree. It is then used to turn all the stones back into children (who, under the Blue Sun, will be animals). One of them introduces himself to Ben as the former rabbit-turned-talking-stone.

In The King in Yellow, too, the petrified rabbit, though everyone assumes it has been killed -- Alec chose not to be present during the transformation because he "hated to see the life go out of a warm, living creature" -- eventually turns back to a living animal.

The book is called Blue Sun Ben, and it was the Blue Sun angle that brought it to my attention, but the Red Sun is equally prominent in the story. This afternoon, the day after discovering Blue Sun Ben, I had to take my wife to a hospital in an unfamiliar part of Taichung. As we walked the short distance from our parking space to the hospital, we passed this large advertisement:

I had never heard of Sun Day Red before, but apparently it's Tiger Woods's line of golf apparel, launched in 2024, and featuring, according to Wikipedia, "Woods's signature red shirt." The form of the name -- three monosyllables, including Sun and a color -- is obviously very close to Blue Sun Ben. A man called Tiger also syncs with the book's central concept of characters who live double lives as animals and human beings. Although Ben's shirt has a blue sun on it, the shirt itself is red.

Tiger Woods was apparently in the news recently for a DUI or something, and on March 28, the Babylon Bee (which I still check occasionally even though it really isn't very funny anymore) ran a story emphasizing his dual nature:

The joke is that Woods is both Black and Asian, and that the recent incident involves stereotypes associated with both races. This syncs in a broad conceptual way with Blue Sun Ben's dual nature as a chipmunk and a boy. The Bee shows Woods in a blue shirt, while the Sun Day Red ad has him in the red shirt that is apparently his trademark, so there's a red-blue duality, too.

It's only a vague link, but my March 22 dream "Joseph the Tirielist" featured both "golf jokes" and a cop dealing with "suspected drunk drivers."

Proclamation

Anointed, I proclaim the year

Of favor, when the deaf shall hear 

When hearts shall mend, the blind shall see,

And captive spirits shall go free,

For such awaits us "in that day,"

A certain seer was wont to say.

    I say the time to wait is past

    For all that holy prophet spake.

    This day, Isaiah's dawn at last shall break.

Miracle

No, not today! I've all my life

To wonder-work, but now my wife

Comes first. And what concern of mine

If these, omitting sprout and vine

And vat, want drink who sowed no seed?

True, Jesus -- yet behold the need!

    The secret is not often spoke,

    You'll hear it not in Sunday school:

    That always love partakes of broken rule.

Baptism

Elijah crossed this stream dry-shod,

And where is now Elijah's God?

He wades. He takes Elijah's hand,

And both now bow to the command

Of One Elijah dimly saw

And Joshua, beneath the Law.

    All dimly did they see that One,

    Those prophets over Jordan sent,

    Till Jesus Christ appeared and underwent.

Discovery

His father's work? He timber takes,

A thing that grew by laws its own

From seeds in First Creation sown,

And something fit for purpose makes.

And thus, in all he skills to build,

The acorn's promise is fulfilled.

    The Son, for all his parents' fear,

    Has set himself his father's task,

    And so at learned feet must hear and ask.

Presentation

In welcoming the Holy Child,

Such is the hold of Moses' words,

They take a pair of turtles mild

And sacrifice the harmless birds.

They keep the Law, they are devout,

But Moses' time is running out.

    Now dawns the Age of Broken Heart.

    Oppression in his name shall cease.

    Let all the prophets now depart in peace

Nativity

To those who say God cannot change

And make of him a lifeless fact,

Isaiah says God's work is strange,

And passing strange Jehovah's act.

For what could the All-knowing know,

Without the will to undergo?

    But having made himself a son,

    He by his own experience knows.

    The only God that lives is one that grows.

Two keys or three?

I've been thinking about the two-key sync theme. One repeated element of these syncs is that the keys are equated to crosses. I quote from my February 2024 post "What's the second key?":

On February 5, I was checking a few YouTube channels and found a video posted by the synchromystic channel LXXXVIII finis temporis on January 25. It's about two recent movies I've never seen and didn't even know existed until today: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Uncharted (2022), both of which share the oddly specific feature of two keys in the form of crosses (cf. crossed keys) which must be combined and used together.

The video doesn't mention it, but a further coincidence between these two movies is the names, both of which refer to navigation in a situation where essential information is lacking. "Uncharted" of course refers to regions for which no map has been made. "Dead reckoning" means estimating one's current position from a known past position plus an estimated velocity, rather than ascertaining it directly by means of landmarks, stars, or satellite. . . .

If the Rosary is one of the keys, and on September 3, 2022, I had a dream in which  "I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key," then the other key should also somehow have the form of a cross. . . .

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. 

Rereading this made me think of the Rider-Waite Hierophant (Pope) card, which features the papal symbol of crossed keys, as well as the symbolism of roses and lilies on the vestments of the two monks. One anomaly is that, where two cross-shaped keys combined make a double cross, the Hierophant has a triple cross.

Does this suggest that there might be three rings instead of two? 

On March 27, at 4:12 p.m. here in Taiwan (4:12 a.m. in Ohio), I received an email from Debbie, including explicit permission to use it on this blog. The subject line was "3 ring key." She had ordered an item of clothing online and sent me some photos of other things that were included in the package:

In the accompanying message, Debbie emphasized the fact that "there are 3 small rings on the top of the small brass key," which she found "interesting as they remind me of your three pentacles post." She thought the flowers on the card resembled tulips and that the ship looked like a pirate ship. In the context of my own syncs, though, I saw the flowers as white roses -- "A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily" ("Yeats, Joan, and Claire") -- and the ship as the Barque of St. Peter, symbol of the papacy.

Curious about that latter symbol, I ran an image search for barque of peter pope and found this cartoon, from a post (by a Jew-turned-Catholic-turned-Protestant) called "The Barque of Peter: The least leaky boat?"

It shows a pope in a boat with many plugged leaks. These are labeled with various controversial aspects of Catholicism, with the last labeled simple "Enough Already!" The photo Debbie sent also prominently features the word "ENOUGH."

Note that the pope in the cartoon holds not a triple cross but a crosier with a spiral-shaped head. Though most of my two-keys-combined syncs have involved cross imagery, one exception is this image from "Syncs: The World Beneath":

That post begins by explaining how I came to be looking at the book Dinotopia: The World Beneath -- because it "spontaneously fell from its place on the shelf." Debbie's email said that she connected her key with my posts about birds with keys in their mouths (her "language of the birds" thing). One of these images, from "Clavis avis," was from a 4chan post insisting that for bibliomancy to be successful (emphasis in the original), "The consulted book must have fallen down from a shelf on its own."

Last night, I checked the mailbox and found this flyer:

Notice the very large date 4/12 -- corresponding to 4:12, the time of Debbie's email in both my time zone and her own. In the picture, there's a bird (a Chinese phoenix), a boat, and three keys, including one with a "three-ring" design.

The next thing that caught my eye was the winged lion. This, as a symbol of St. Mark, was a sync as far back as 2014 ("Coincidences: Herodotus and the Piazza San Marco"). The symbolism comes from a tradition of mapping the Four Living Creatures, which together constitute the Cherubim, with the authors of the four canonical Gospels. (See my 2018 post "The Throne and the World" for all the details.) Two of the other Cherubic creatures, the eagle and the winged man, also appear on the flyer, as the phoenix and the winged fairy. All that's missing is the fourth: the ox or bull. But I think the two boys on the boat represent this fourth Living Creature. The Living Creatures represent, among other things, four of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (another meaning of "4/12"). The bull represents the House of Joseph because of language used in Moses' final blessing:

His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns [i.e. aurochs]: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh (Deut: 33:17).

The two horns of the bull represent the two Tribes into which Joseph was divided: Ephraim and Mannaseh. As it happens, those two names are also associated with the imagery of two young boys dressed in contrasting colors. Here's an image of Jacob blessing Ephraim and Mannaseh, from the early 14th-century Golden Haggadah:

And here's a more recent take on the same theme, Marc Chagall's Bénédiction d'Ephraïm et Manassé (1931):

The image of Ephraim and Manasseh on a boat is appropriate, since in the Book of Mormon it is the families of Lehi (a descendant of Manasseh) and Ishmael (traditionally understood to be an Ephraimite) that sail across to sea to a new land. The fact that Ephraim has a map is also interesting, given the syncs, mentioned at the beginning of this post, about navigating without a map.