Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim

In a recent comment, Bill writes, in part, "Red and Blue correspond to Fire and Ice, Hot and Cold. Maybe something there as we think about worlds." He then goes on to propose identities for a "Red" world and a "Blue" world.

This got me thinking about my "first sync" -- the first one that really got my attention -- which involved finding the same four lines of Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" quoted first in a sermon by Mormon leader Jeffrey R. Holland (who, as it happens, just died a few weeks ago) and then in a popular science book by Michio Kaku. The lines are:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

Fire and Ice. "Maybe something there as we think about worlds" and how they might end.

My first post here about that old sync was "Fire and Ice" (2019). Then I posted about it again in "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync" (2025) after having finally identified the popular science book that the second quotation came from. As I was searching my blog to get links for those two posts, I found another one I'd forgotten about: "Fire and Ice 2: Geothermal Boogaloo" (2024). It includes this image, which juxtaposes "Fire and Ice" with "the Red Planet":

It then quotes these lines from This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, as it happens, died just two weeks before Jeffrey R. Holland):

We're very lucky in a sense that we've got two visionaries in the band. You know, David and Nigel are both, like, like poets, you know, like Shelley and Byron and people like that. They're two totally distinct types of visionaries. It's like fire and ice, basically, you see, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

This is a link to the recent shoe theme, since the David mentioned is David St. Hubbins, who says his surname refers to "the patron saint of quality footwear."

In the post, the mention of Shelley leads to a sync with a turtle:

This leads to another sync, in which a turtle is juxtaposed with the Red Planet:

Mars and Earth -- a red world and a blue world -- link right back to Bill's comment. They are also a link to the "Red and blue spectacles," which features several images with a red circle to the left (from our point of view) of a blue circle. That post also links the red and blue lenses of the spectacles to red and blue stones.

After just reviewing these posts about my "first sync," I checked YouTube and found that Seallion, one of the titans of Internet synchromysticism, had a newish video up called, wouldn't you know it, "My First Sync."

His first sync involved two issues of National Geographic, one of which is this one:

I noticed the turtle at the top and "Rubies and Sapphires" at the bottom. Wanting to try to find a digital copy of the magazine itself, I searched the Internet Archive for national geographic 1991. I didn't find any actual magazines, but after scrolling down a bit I did find this among my search results:

My search prompt was national geographic 1991. This book came up because it was published in 1991 by Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Art, and the description includes the word geographic. What I was looking for, though, was a magazine with a cover story called "1491: America Before Columbus," and what I got was a book called Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Circa means "approximately," so circa 1492 would certainly include 1491.

I mentioned that the "Rubies and Sapphires" on the National Geographic cover had caught my eye. Here's what I had to say about red and blue stones in the spectacles post:

It's interesting that the two seer-stone-like objects that get mentioned from time to time on this blog are Bill's red "Rose Stone" and my "Blue-Green Crystal Ball." I also mentioned in the post that Joseph Smith's spectacles were later dubbed the Urim and Thummim -- the name of a pair of biblical objects that are usually depicted as two differently colored stones.

"The post" mentioned in the above quote is "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," where I wrote this:

Emblematic of Joseph Smith's work as a seer is his use of the Nephite interpreters -- later dubbed the Urim and Thummin, but originally referred to as "spectacles" and thus sunglasses-adjacent.

Although Bill and Leo have their own very different ideas, the overwhelming majority of Mormons would place the Nephites in "America before Columbus."

The biblical Urim and Thummim were worn in the breastplate of the high priest, and back in 2013 I proposed ("Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis") that the marks on the right and left breasts of the Mormon temple garment represent Urim and Thummim, respectively. On the National Geographic cover, the word "Rubies" is on the Indian's right breast, and "Sapphires" on his left. In "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim" (2021), I interpret the Sun and Moon markings on the breastplate of the Emperor in Oswald Wirth's Tarot as the Urim and Thummim, respectively. The Sun, a hot world, is on the right breast and corresponds to "Rubies." The Moon, a cold world, is on the left breast and corresponds to "Sapphires."