Ulysses, dark horses, seer stones, Ki-Ab, Elbereth, the Eye of Horus, leaves of gold, and Cherubim

It's been a sync-heavy day, and the afternoon is still young. Let's see if I can get everything documented in a somewhat easy-to-follow fashion.

As I was falling asleep last night, I for some reason started mentally reciting to myself the closing lines of Ulysses, by a Tennyson who, no mean poet in his own right, was for the moment channeling a god: the incomparably great Dante, who walked with Homer and Virgil as their equal the shady groves of Elysium.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

That closing line began to meld in my mind with the Four Powers of Éliphas Lévi -- to know, to will, to dare, and to be silent -- conjuring to mind, just at the moment I entered the fully sleeping state, a fleeting vision of the whirling Cherubim.

Around noon I had some business to attend to in Taichung, and as I usually do when business takes me there, I lunched at the Uptowner, which has the best lox-and-schmear omelettes you'll find on this little island. (Yes, I'm still on an omelette kick. And a lox-and-schmear kick.) As I entered the restaurant, Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" began playing in the background. The repeated lines "So you want to play with magic? . . . Baby, do you dare to do this?" made me think again of Ulysses and Éliphas Lévi and the Four Powers.

Katy Perry appeared on this blog this past January, in "Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition," which began with the Eye of Horus and included this still from the "Dark Horse" music video:

The next song up was Lady Gaga: "Don't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro," a line that would stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon. The only person of that name that I know anything about is Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose painstakingly reconstructed Tarot de Marseille -- created in partnership with Philippe Camoin, scion of the fabled house of Conver -- was one of the first decks I owned. It ended up, for complex psychological reasons, at the bottom of the Olentangy River. (I was still conflicted about the magnetic pull of the Tarot back then and was periodically swearing off what I still thought of as "the occult.") I've been trying to attract a new Marseille-pattern deck into my life, but so far without success. I thought Alejandro calling my name might be a sign that it was on its way, but so far, no.

I recently finished reading Joseph Smith's Seer Stones, which ends with an appendix collecting a very large number of contemporary accounts of the Prophet's specs and seer stones. One of these, from an 1835 Cleveland Whig article citing W. W. Phelps, stuck in my memory because of the strange error it contained:

We are credibly informed that the Mormons have purchased of Mr. Chandler, three of the mummies, which he recently exhibited in this village; and that the prophet Joe has ascertained, by examining the papyrus through his spectacles, that they are the bodies of Joseph (the son of Abraham,) and King Abimeleck and his daughter.

Who would know the relatively obscure biblical name Abimelech and yet think Joseph was the son of Abraham? Speaking of Ulysses (though a different work by that title), that's right up there with Leopold Bloom's misremembering a story about Isaac and Jacob as being about Abraham and his son Nathan.

I mention this here because while I was waiting for my omelette, I took out Words of Them Liberated and read (it was a short wait) a single page. The Words books have a lot to say about Joseph and Abraham (usually referred to by his Amestrahan name Ki-Abroam) but, like the Cleveland Whig, pass over Isaac and Jacob in silence (though it is perhaps implied that Dyacôm is Jacob). The single page I read happened to include this paragraph, in language Joyce-like in its convolutions:

And Ki-Ab pondered the wisdom rooted and over the well's corners, aflow; not all from the writings, he reconsidered earlier tongue lashings -- called up by the records daily heavier, to heft; but there is much at rest apriori his readings, and awakened by -- and the boy slept well, while Ki-Abroam looked upon Varda's Weave recalling when as a more-man-full, he lost in flight, gazed in awe at her band the sky circumpacting, holding forth to meet then, jewels two, pocketed where in a den was his own father -- in flesh, and singly incongruent with that kinship -- self slain; jewels for gazing afar and for inquiry, of what-whom, guessing alone could conjure up; for the respondents never answered, when asked name or residing at;

This seems to be referring to a pair of seer stones, like Joseph Smith's spectacles. Abraham is referred to by the abbreviated name Ki-Ab. The Whig juxtaposes Abraham with King Abimeleck, another Ki-Ab. Another detail from the Whig article, which I didn't notice until I copied it out for this post, is that it refers to a Mr. Chandler. In last night's dreams ("Joseph the Tirielist"), I unexpectedly ran into Mark, a friend from my teen years. I didn't mention his last name but am now compelled by the sync fairies to do so: Chandler.

As recounted in that dream post, upon waking I thought Tiriel might be a Tolkienian name and looked it up on Eldamo. As it is an inflected form and not a headword, my search initially turned up only palan-tîriel "far-gazer," a variant of  palan-díriel, from the hymn A Elbereth Gilthoniel, which begins thus:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel

Eldamo translates these lines as follows:

O Elbereth who lit the stars
from glittering crystal slanting falls with light like jewels
from heaven on high the glory of the starry host
to lands remote I have looked afar

In the paragraph from Liberated that I have quoted above, Ki-Ab gazes in awe at "Varda's Weave," which apparently means the Milky Way. Elbereth is another name for Varda. The paragraph also refers to the seer stones as "jewels for gazing afar," a direct link to palan-tîriel.

Meanwhile, back in the Uptowner, the next song up was "Maneater" by Hall & Oates, which includes these lines:

Money's the matter
If you're in it for love, you ain't gonna get too far

This is also the message of Madonna's "Material Girl," which Joseph misquoted in my dream to explain what he meant by tirielist.

I finished my lunch and walked to a nearby bookstore, where I needed to select some new textbooks for one of my classes. On the way, I passed this advertisement on a wall:

It says "Eye of Horus" and has a cropped photo of King Tut's mummy case, with only a single blue-lined eye visible. The similarity to the "Dark Horse" still is obvious. It's the "wrong" eye -- the black or blue-green Eye of Horus is the left eye -- but it also matches this image from my earlier post that included the Katy Perry still:

Like the King Tut poster, the above image places the left Eye of Horus on our left, which would actually make it the right eye of the person we are looking at.

While I was at the bookstore, two books caught my eye: Wild Horses and Birds of Prey. Opening up the former at random, I found myself looking at what I later ascertained (by paging through the whole thing) was the only photo of a black horse in the entire book:

Thinking I might have similar luck with Birds of Prey, I opened it, too, to a random page and landed on a kite, recently the most prominent bird of prey in the sync stream:

Later, a third book caught my eye because of its title:

I had just been thinking about gold plates and "leaves of gold," because revisiting A Elbereth Gilthoniel had reminded me of another Tolkien song, the one that begins thus:

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:

I posted about this in "Leaves of gold unnumbered" (January 2024), where I connected the leaves of gold with the gold plates.

Later, I checked some blogs and found a new Orthosphere post by J. M. Smith (does the J stand for Joseph, I wonder?) called "No Branch is Free of Yellow Leaves." He meant that every branch of Christianity is in decline, yellow leaves being the sign of an unhealthy tree, but in sync context I naturally thought again of "leaves of gold" in the sense of gold plates. In the Book of Mormon, branch usually refers to the tribes of Israel. "Are we not a branch of the house of Israel?" Nephi asks his brothers (1 Ne. 15:12). In my 2023 post "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" I wrote:

If Joseph -- in the form of the book kept by his tribe, the plates of brass -- will go forth unto all nations, what of the other 11 starry beings who also go forth? Well, according to Nephi's later prophecies, each of the other tribes will also produce a holy book, and these, too, will go forth to the world.

In other words, every branch of the House of Israel will produce its own "gold plates." No branch is free of yellow leaves.

In my 2024 post "Lassie Come Home," commenting on my vision of book which somehow is the Cherubim, I wrote:

Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.

This of course syncs with the brief glimpse of the Cherubim mentioned near the beginning of the present post.