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."