Thursday, March 26, 2026

Clavis avis, clavis Dav'is

(Apologies for the genitive mutilation. It's called poetic license, okay?)

In "Clavis avis" -- Latin for "the bird's key" -- I posted this picture, noting that a third rhyme was provided by the last name of the artist, Davis.


Despite that third rhyme, I did not immediately connect it with the earlier "Key of David" syncs, even though those were focused on the Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which uses the same Latin word for key.

The picture above, which I originally got from the Duckstack post "Spite Kite," first appeared here in the post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen." Because of the bird-snake-hand imagery, together with the fact that Garuda is a kite, I linked it with this book on Tibetan Buddhism:


So the Davis painting shows a bird holding a small golden key, and I linked it to a book on Tibetan Buddhism. Not until last night did I make the should-have-been-obvious connection to "The Tinleys and the Small Key of David." That site features another Tibetan Buddhist book -- The Small Golden Key by Thinley Norbu -- and connects it, with its reference to Vulture's Peak, to my story about two knights named Tinley and a griffin that lives on a mountain peak. That post also includes this quote from Johnny English Reborn, in which Johnny is talking about a small key:

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.

Johnny compares the small key to, of all things, a pebble. The Davis painting with the small key originally appeared in a post called "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen."

The reason I bought the Thinley Norbu book in the first place was that, as described in my post "What's the second key?", I was pursuing the symbolism of a set of two keys, one of which is the Rosary, with the other key unidentified. The two keys were associated with color contrasts: gold vs. silver, and red vs. white (as in "Sync homework: Dead Reckoning") or green. I assumed that the Rosary was the red key, since roses are red. Norbu's book had caught my eye because of its reference to a golden key. Not until today did I think to look up other books Norbu had written. Lo and behold:

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Clavis avis, clavis Dav'is

(Apologies for the genitive mutilation. It's called poetic license, okay?) In " Clavis avis " -- Latin for "the bird'...