Red in their foreheads

This morning, I read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon, which contains this passage:

And the Amlicites were distinguished from the Nephites, for they had marked themselves with red in their foreheads after the manner of the Lamanites; nevertheless they had not shorn their heads like unto the Lamanites.

Now the heads of the Lamanites were shorn; and they were naked, save it were skin which was girded about their loins, and also their armor, which was girded about them, and their bows, and their arrows, and their stones, and their slings, and so forth.

And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men (Alma 3:4-6).

Most Mormons have understood Lamanites to mean "American Indians." As I read this today, I noticed for the first time the irony of a red mark on the forehead being a distinctive Lamanite trait. Today such marks are associated with the other sort of Indian. In fact, I have often seen people use the parenthetical clarification "dot, not feather" to specify that they mean Indians sensu strico rather than Native Americans -- a clarification that takes it for granted that that latter do not typically have red dots on their foreheads.

Two verses down is one of several references in the book to the Lamanites being "cursed" with dark skin. Although this verse says "dark," the more usual expression is "skin of blackness." I thought, not for the first time, how odd this was if the Lamanites are indeed supposed to be Indians. As far as I know, it has never been common to think of American Indians as "black"; they've always been "redskins."

Passages like this have, for obvious reasons, often been condemned as "racist" and offensive -- not so much to the Indians as to Black people in the usual sense of that word. There was recently a minor hooha in Mormon-critical circles about the fact that certain partial translations of the Book of Mormon into African languages had conveniently omitted the bits about the "skin of blackness."

While I was eating lunch today, I had a sudden mental image of a 4chan catalog page on which one of the images was the face of a mandrill. It had the feel of something potentially precognitive, so shortly after lunch I went to my computer to skim the images on the /pol/ and /x/ catalogs (the only boards I view with any frequency) for mandrills. I didn't find any mandrills, but I did find this:

Here are the two images that caught my eye, both from overtly "racist" threads with slurs in the captions:

I first noticed the photo of Kash Patel, edited to have a red dot on his forehead. There are lots and lots of Indian hate threads on /pol/ these days, but red-dot imagery isn't very common; images associating Indians with shit are much more popular.

Then I noticed that the Black man two threads over also appears, due to the lighting, to have a red mark on his forehead. He was in the news for murdering his White girlfriend, and the thread is mostly condemning the murder victim as a "mud-shark" who "burned the coal and paid the toll." Note that Alma 3 also pronounces a curse on white Nephites who "mingle their seed" with black Lamanites.

The Black man has a red nose as well as forehead, which is somewhat of a link to my mandrill image. Past posts here have drawn attention to the mandrill's red nose. When I searched this blog for rednose, the first result was "When only the goblins are out," which says:

In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose.

The same post also references the mandrill-headed D&D monster Demogorgon, which brings us to the only other somewhat mandrill-adjacent image I found in my skim of the two catalogs:

That's an "AI" slop rendition of the Demiurge, depicted as a snake with the head of a lion. For comparison, this is what Demogorgon look like:

Lions and mandrills have been connected before. In "The sons of Horus and the Four Living Creatures, and more syncs," I map the lion to the baboon-headed son of Horus and also refer to "the mandrill (basically a baboon)."

The /x/ thread with the slop-Demiurge is titled "Alawite Ancient History of the World. Demiurge, Djinn, Archons, and Loosh Farm." The "Loosh Farm" reference is a bit of a sync, as I woke up this morning with the Spinal Tap song "Sex Farm" in my head.