Into the mouth of whale

Last night -- so still April 27 (see "Happy God Is a Whale Day") -- I was thinking about Dee and Kelley's whale vision of April 27, 1584. The vision involves the two magicians, at the behest of a prophet, entering the Whale's mouth:

the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in, but they trembled vehemently; He said unto them the second time, Go in: and they durst not. And he sware unto them, and they entered in

This made me think of the climactic scene in Unsong -- a novel positively obsessed with the symbolism of the whale -- where, after Ana's confrontation with God in which she insists that he is wrong about the problem of evil, the ship she is on is swallowed by the Leviathan:

"COME AND SEE," said God.

Then the Leviathan wheeled around, opened its colossal maw, and engulfed the Not A Metaphor. The ship spent a single wild moment in its mouth before the monster closed its jaws and crushed all of them into tiny pieces.

Unsong wasn't written until 2017, and I didn't read it until 2020, but I just noticed now that that "Come and see" is a link to my whale-dream post of April 27, 2014, which was titled "A beast with many eyes." That post was published on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's whale vision, and I see that the online version of this chapter of Unsong, from which I copied the above excerpt, ends with an announcement that the author will be doing a dramatic reading of the next chapter "at 4:30 PM."

The title of my 2014 post mentions a "beast" rather than a whale -- because the many-eyed whale of the dream was sychronistically or precognitively connected with another many-eyed beast that was not a whale. The significance of this is that "Come and see" is the line uttered in succession by each of the four "beasts"  in Revelation 6. These are the Cherubic beasts introduced in Revelation 4 as "four beasts full of eyes before and behind," just as Dee and Kelley's whale was "full of eyes on every side." Each "Come and see" uttered by a beast introduces one of the famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In my 2009 post "The seven walruses," I tried to tie the walrus both to the Seven Seals (because a walrus is broadly speaking a kind of seal, as in "Of sealing wax") and to the Four Horsemen (because walrus is etymologically "whale-horse"). The "whale" part of the etymology was irrelevant back then but has retroactively become significant.