Two keys or three?

I've been thinking about the two-key sync theme. One repeated element of these syncs is that the keys are equated to crosses. I quote from my February 2024 post "What's the second key?":

On February 5, I was checking a few YouTube channels and found a video posted by the synchromystic channel LXXXVIII finis temporis on January 25. It's about two recent movies I've never seen and didn't even know existed until today: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Uncharted (2022), both of which share the oddly specific feature of two keys in the form of crosses (cf. crossed keys) which must be combined and used together.

The video doesn't mention it, but a further coincidence between these two movies is the names, both of which refer to navigation in a situation where essential information is lacking. "Uncharted" of course refers to regions for which no map has been made. "Dead reckoning" means estimating one's current position from a known past position plus an estimated velocity, rather than ascertaining it directly by means of landmarks, stars, or satellite. . . .

If the Rosary is one of the keys, and on September 3, 2022, I had a dream in which  "I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key," then the other key should also somehow have the form of a cross. . . .

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. 

Rereading this made me think of the Rider-Waite Hierophant (Pope) card, which features the papal symbol of crossed keys, as well as the symbolism of roses and lilies on the vestments of the two monks. One anomaly is that, where two cross-shaped keys combined make a double cross, the Hierophant has a triple cross.

Does this suggest that there might be three rings instead of two? 

On March 27, at 4:12 p.m. here in Taiwan (4:12 a.m. in Ohio), I received an email from Debbie, including explicit permission to use it on this blog. The subject line was "3 ring key." She had ordered an item of clothing online and sent me some photos of other things that were included in the package:

In the accompanying message, Debbie emphasized the fact that "there are 3 small rings on the top of the small brass key," which she found "interesting as they remind me of your three pentacles post." She thought the flowers on the card resembled tulips and that the ship looked like a pirate ship. In the context of my own syncs, though, I saw the flowers as white roses -- "A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily" ("Yeats, Joan, and Claire") -- and the ship with the Barque of St. Peter, symbol of the papacy.

Curious about that latter symbol, I ran an image search for barque of peter pope and found this cartoon, from a post (by a Jew-turned-Catholic-turned-Protestant) called "The Barque of Peter: The least leaky boat?"

It shows a pope in a boat with many plugged leaks. These are labeled with various controversial aspects of Catholicism, with the last labeled simple "Enough Already!" The photo Debbie sent also prominently features the word "ENOUGH."

Note that the pope in the cartoon hold not a triple cross but a crosier with a spiral-shaped head. Though most of my two-keys-combined syncs have involved cross imagery, one exception is this image from "Syncs: The World Beneath":

That post begins by explaining how I came to be looking at the book Dinotopis: The World Beneath -- because it "spontaneously fell from its place on the shelf." Debbie's email said that she connected her key with my posts about birds with keys in their mouths (her "language of the birds" thing). One of these images, from "Clavis avis," was from a 4chan post insisting that for bibliomancy to be successful (emphasis in the original), "The consulted book must have fallen down from a shelf on its own."

Last night, I checked the mailbox and found this flyer:

Notice the very large date 4/12 -- corresponding to 4:12, the time of Debbie's email in both my time zone and her own. In the picture, there's a bird (a Chinese phoenix), a boat, and three keys, including one with a "three-ring" design.

The next thing that caught my eye was the winged lion. This, as a symbol of St. Mark, was a sync as far back as 2014 ("Coincidences: Herodotus and the Piazza San Marco"). The symbolism comes from a tradition of mapping the Four Living Creatures, which together constitute the Cherubim, with the authors of the four canonical Gospels. (See my 2018 post "The Throne and the World" for all the details.) Two of the other Cherubic creatures, the eagle and the winged man, also appear on the flyer, as the phoenix and the winged fairy. All that's missing is the fourth: the ox or bull. But I think the two boys on the boat represent this fourth Living Creature. The Living Creatures represent, among other things, four of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (another meaning of "4/12"). The bull represents the House of Joseph because of language used in Moses' final blessing:

His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns [i.e. aurochs]: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh (Deut: 33:17).

The two horns of the bull represent the two Tribes into which Joseph was divided: Ephraim and Mannaseh. As it happens, those two names are also associated with the imagery of two young boys dressed in contrasting colors. Here's an image of Jacob blessing Ephraim and Mannaseh, from the early 14th-century Golden Haggadah:

And here's a more recent take on the same theme, Marc Chagall's Bénédiction d'Ephraïm et Manassé (1931):

The image of Ephraim and Manasseh on a boat is appropriate, since in the Book of Mormon it is the families of Lehi (a descendant of Manasseh) and Ishmael (traditionally understood to be an Ephraimite) that sail across to sea to a new land. The fact that Ephraim has a map is also interesting, given the syncs, mentioned at the beginning of this post, about navigating without a map.