To the Faithful Departed

As I was reading The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered this morning, I unexpectedly came across a footnote referencing -- incongruously in this book set in a distant Tolkienian past -- a rock song that had been in Daymon's head when he wrote a certain part of it:

The song? "When You're Gone," by The Cranberries, a song about death's parting, some few days stuck in my head after their lead singer, Dolores O'Riordan passed away in London. It was played at her funeral, held three days after I wrote this passage, and is from the 1996 album To the Faithful Departed.

I only know a handful of songs by the Cranberries, and that wasn't one of them. Daymon obviously thought the album name was synchy -- Slumbered being a follow-up to Words of the Faithful: As If It Were from the Dead -- but what really piqued my interest enough to look up the album (as opposed to just the one song) was the release date, 1996. That was a watershed year in my own life, marking my awakening to things spiritual, and I wondered whether the exact date of release would coincide with any date important to me personally? Was it perhaps released on April 22, 1996? Why my mind went to that date rather than to the more significant July 22, I don't know, but as it turns out I was only a week off. To the Faithful Departed was released on April 29, 1996.

When I visited the album's Wikipedia page to get that information, I was struck by the album cover art:

I thought that bright yellow background looked very Rider-Waite. Specifically, Dolores's pose, her short black hair, and the red lining of her jacket suggested the Magician:

Another Rider-Waite card with a yellow background is the Three of Wands, the yellow sky of which was the proximate inspiration for my poem "The Golden Age." The yellow background on the album cover is not the sky but the walls of a room. I was interested to discover, though, that the sixth track on the album is called "Forever Yellow Skies."

Another significant Cranberries song is "Zombie," with the refrain, "In your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie," corresponding to the beginning of "Down Under" by Men at Work: "Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie" (lines that have taken on added significance since I discovered that Words of Them Liberated, which I have not read yet, includes a character called Comby).

Dolores performs "Zombie" with her whole body and all her clothing painted gold, which is obvious Pharazonic imagery:

In "Tim knows" (February 17), I posted, having heard it in a dream, an Agartha remix of "Down Under" -- the meme being that the song title refers to Agartha, the underground domain of the King of the World, as told in Ossendowski's Beasts, Men, and Gods and elsewhere. (Back in 2018, I was on a hollow earth kick and read all that stuff.) An underground king is another link to Pharazon, and as it happens, the YouTube video I found had this thumbnail of Logan Paul, Yakub, and the White Pharaoh.

I had posted a White Pharaoh meme myself back in July, in "Reincarnation, or something else?" The post discussed Bill Wright's idea that I am the reincarnation of Pharazon, and the meme (a race-swapped version of "We Wuz Kangs 'N Shiet") was an acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of modern people thinking of themselves as having "been" ancient kings.