This morning (January 20), the preschool asked if I could read to the kids a story of my choice. Since (as mentioned in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake") I recently bought a set of mint-condition used Dr. Seuss books, I chose one of those: I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! (1978). That book has come up here before and even lent its name to a post or two (e.g. last September's "Reading with my eyes shut"), but I hadn't thought of it in connection with the specs until this morning, when I opened it up to the first page and found this:
Although my focus was on red-and-blue specs, Nicolas Cage in that National Treasure still actually has three lens colors: red on the left side of image (Cage's right), blue on the right, and green ("pickle color") slightly down and to the right of the blue -- corresponding broadly with the relative location of the colored words in the Seuss book.
The illustration shows the Cat wearing glasses of only one color -- but he's not just wearing them; he's holding them in front of his eyes with his hands, with some of the fingers of his left hand raised, very much like Nicolas Cage in the movie still.
The very next page in the Seuss book shows the Cat wearing glasses with differently colored lenses -- not red and blue, but still a significant sync in context.
On both pages, the emphasis is on how the Cat's specs give him the ability to read in various ways. That is also the function of the "ocular device" in National Treasure:
The Ocular Device was found with the Masonic Square and compass in a brick at Independence Hall by Ben Gates. The glasses were built by Benjamin Franklin to read the map from the back of the Declaration of Independence. It leads the group to New York.
"The glasses were built . . . to read." The square and compass reference also got my attention. From the beginning, I associated the red-and-blue specs with the "interpreter" spectacles used by Joseph Smith, which he later dubbed the Urim and Thummim. In "Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim," I linked back to a 2013 post of mine associating the Urim and Thummim with the Mormon version of the Masonic square and compass.
This connection would be reinforced 11 years later, when I read Don Bradley's (highly recommended) book The Lost 116 Pages. Bradley writes:
The interpreters, as described by [Joseph's mother] Lucy Mack Smith in earlier chapters, were translation "keys" of triangular shape -- "three cornered diamonds." And we have learned from Joseph's father that these interpreters lay on the top plates of the book, which was engraved with symbols, minimally including compass and square.Over this place with the compass and square symbols were laid the two transparent triangles described by Joseph's mother -- the interpreters. The placement of the triangular interpreters over the depictions of compass and square is fitting -- perhaps literally -- and suggests another layer to the compass and square symbolism of the relics. Triangular interpreters could potentially be placed over the compass and square engravings so as to align perfectly with them, one interpreter aligned with the compass, the other with the square.
Bradley includes this illustration of what the interpreters may have looked like:
From the orientation Bradley chose for the square and compass in this illustration, it is obvious that he, too, was thinking of the Mormon temple garment, with a compass in V orientation on the left breast and a square in L orientation on the right. My 2013 post, "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis," proposed that the L and V stand for that phrase, which is a Latin translation of Urim and Thummim.
(Note: In Hebrew, Urim begins with aleph, the first letter of the alphabet; and Thummim begins with tav, the last. Since Hebrew is read from right to left, this is consistent with Urim being the right lens and Thummim the left.)
Bradley also proposes that the specs (which Lucy Mack Smith's description suggests were hinged) could have been folded up, creating a hexagram:
My recent post connected the red and blue lenses not only with the Urim and Thummim but with "fire and ice." In alchemical symbolism, a triangle with its point up (like Bradley's "square" lens for the right eye) symbolizes Fire, and a triangle with its point down (like the "compass" lens for the left eye) represents Water -- an element which, in the Aristotelian analysis (see "Suits as elemental qualities rather than elements"), is primarily Cold and only secondarily Wet. The hexagram is widely understood to be a combination of the Fire and Water triangles.
When I opened the Don Bradley book to get those images and that quote, I found something else that I'd forgotten about:
Depending on the orientation of the lenses, the use of the interpreters could also evoke the symbol of the all-seeing eye. With an equilateral-triangle lens oriented with its base at the bottom during the interpreters' use, the user's eye would be framed in a triangle in precisely the way the symbol of the all-seeing eye is most often depicted.
That got my attention because it reminded me of one of the books I am currently reading, Real Magic by Dean Radin. This is what the cover looks like:
It's an eye. The left half (on our right) is blue, the color associated with water. The right half is yellow -- not red, but still a "fiery" color -- and is inside a Fire triangle, forming the symbol of the all-seeing eye. There even appears to be a subtle nod to the Masonic square and compass: Only one letter of the title is inside the triangle, and that letter is G.
This post began with a reference to two movies, one of which was National Treasure. This is the logo for the National Treasure franchise:
The other movie mentioned was The Ides of March. Maybe this is a bit too clever, but I think I see a nod to that title on Radin's cover, too. The subtitle consists of three lines of text, each of which is bisected by the line separating the all-seeing eye from the human eye. Looking at the right half of the text, the first line begins with M; the second, with IDE; and the third, with OF. Is it too much of a stretch to say that suggests "M[arch], Ide[s] of"?
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