The Son of Righteousness, and the Talking Quartz of Kirtland

Last night I put on some music on my phone while washing dishes. Since my hands were wet, I just let the algorithm do its thing after the initial selection. The Metric song "Help I'm Alive," from their 2008 album Fantasies, came on:

Appropriately given the album title, this song triggered mental imagery of near-hallucinatory vividness. As I heard Joules Scott-Key's drumbeat and Emily Haines's opening lines

I tremble (tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble)

They're gonna eat me alive . . .

I saw proud Achaean warriors, horsehair crests waving, training for battle under their Blue Sun, and with the repeated line "Beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer" I could hear the stamp of marching feet, the clang of spear-butts brought down on the rock in unison, and the ringing kiai of stout Diomedes, lord of the war-cry. For a few moments I was totally immersed in this scene. When I emerged from the world of god-like Homer back into my own, I glanced at the phone screen and immediately paused the song and took a screenshot:

That's clear Blue Sun imagery (which does not appear earlier in the video, when I had my fantasy), with a stamp that reads "Son of Righteousness." That's not a biblical phrase but one from the Book of Mormon, and a problematic one. I've been deep in the book's Zenos material recently (see my massive March 19 post "Identifying the 1 Zenos texts"). My earlier (2024) post on the subject ended with this:

The one loose end that remains is the Book of Mormon's use of "Son of Righteousness" instead of "Sun of righteousness." Malachi has Sun, and I think I've made a pretty good case that Zenos used Sun as well (with the Sun's three-day entombment in a sepulchre causing the three days of darkness). Since the two words are homophones in English but entirely dissimilar in Hebrew, it's hard to see how the Sun-to-Son swap could have been made by anyone other than the English-speaking Joseph Smith. That, I believe, is now the only unsolved problem relating to Malachi material in the Book of Mormon.

That I saw "Son of Righteousness" just after a fantasy about the Sun is a further coincidence. If we want to press the syncs, we could imagine the prophet living among Greeks who knew him as Xenos, "the foreigner," and think of his entombed Blue Sun emerging from the sepulchre in a different color, like Gandalf the White.

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Shortly after this, I went to bed. I dreamt that I was hiking in northeastern Ohio with my wife, my parents, my sister Crystal and her husband, and the Portuguese writer Laeth and his wife. Laeth had (in the dream) written a book, which Crystal was reading, about the very landscape through which we were hiking, which helped us to see it through re-enchanted eyes.

As we were hiking, we saw an old ruined building, and Laeth said he could feel spiritual energy coming from the stones of which it was constructed. As we got closer, though, we found to our disappointment that it was not made of stone but of concrete.

"Yes," said my father, "but where did the material for the cement come from?"

It hit me with the force of an epiphany: "Kirtland. From the gravel yards of Kirtland."

"The Talking Quartz of Kirtland," said my father, and he began talking about this remarkable stone. They gray flint beds of Kirtland harbored two types of quartz crystals: "mute quartz," which was pink, and "talking quartz," which was white and occurred in impressive diamond-like and feather-like formations. It was called "talking quartz" because of its great spiritual power, through which people felt it "spoke" to them. Later we visited one of these flint beds and observed the two types of quartz ourselves.

I commented that the rocks of Utah, despite their great beauty and the fact that they, too, were used in sacred architecture, had no spiritual link except to the dinosaurs -- I still had a red "dinosaur stone" I had picked up near Moab, Utah -- while the stones of Kirtland had human and divine resonances unlike anything to be found out west.

I do not really have a "dinosaur stone" in waking life, but I am scarcely the first to have experienced the palpable presence of saurian ghosts in the redrock deserts of southern Utah. I remember the frisson of recognition when I first read Teruhisa Tajima's postscript to his 1994 art book Dinopix:

In the fall of 1992, I visited the small town of Moab, Utah. . . . Early one morning I visited Arches National Park in Utah. Far off in the orange-colored morning mist, on the other side of the plain, I saw figures of nocturnal raptors hurrying home, exhaling their white breaths. I thought I had seen a Brachiosaurus cast the shadow of its long neck, so characteristic of the lightning dragon, on the gigantic rock surface, deeply reddening in the morning sun. When I saw with my own eyes the answers I was about to obtain, I struggled not to be hasty. . . . I was particularly eager to reproduce the gigantic creatures whose images had been imprinted on my mind while I was in Moab. I was persistently concerned with how to realize the visions I had of them there.

The idea of the Talking Quartz of Kirtland was so utterly convincing that when I awoke, I immediately got online to check whether there really were quartz deposits there. Apparently not, though there are some in nearby Geauga County, also part of the early Mormon stomping grounds. My initial search for quartz mines in ohio turned up a place called Fantasia Mining.

This is synchromystically significant because the title of Laeth's first novel is Phantasia. An earlier dream, recounted in "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners," had already connected that novel with crystals. (The rest of that post title also syncs with my fantasy of the Achaean army under their distinctive Sun.)

Also perhaps relevant is a verbal dream I had a long time ago -- early 2000s, maybe -- in which a voice introduced a city called Quartslagen, "incorporating both white quartz and pink jasper elements," which was "built on a common love based on a common trust" and was "under the benign governance of the Anathoth, the Monothoth, the Benathoth, and the Torothoth."

Another link to the Talking Quartz may be the recent reference to Simon Peter in "Filling Peters' shoes." I have been reading and writing about "seer stones" recently, but the literal meaning of the name Simon Peter is "hearing stone."