Strange is the night where Oreos rise

I got a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, and it was one of those "/ng/ - Nobody General" threads. Scrolling down a bit, I found this, captioned "Behold! Oreon!"

It's the constellation Orion, only made up of a dark-brown Oreo cookies instead of shining stars. This obviously ties in with the long-running theme of black or dark stars.

My March 9 post "Ariel" documents a sync having to do with a student of mine by that name. Some of her classmates like to joke about her name sounding like Oreo, and so she gets angry if anyone mentions that particular cookie brand. If her classmates need to talk about actual Oreos, they use the euphemism "black circles" -- thus further tying the Oreo to the black star or black hole.

Last night, cleaning out an old meme folder, I singled out this one image -- one of hundreds -- and set it aside "for future reference," with no very clear idea of what that might mean. I guess this post is as good a place as any to use it:

Both Oreos and Orion appeared in several posts on Bill's deleted blog. I have several Orion posts, but the only mention of Oreos prior to the present post was "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building" (November 2023), which begins with a reference to that Reality Temple meme.

Back in November 2023, I was trying and failing to track down the source of the background image in that meme. I resorted to posting on /x/ to see if anyone there knew, and one reply suggested (incorrectly) that it might be a representation of Bentham's "panopticon," posting an image similar to this:

In the same thread that had that Oreo Orion, I found this image:

That's the Panopticon with Teletubby inmates, and in the center a big yellow sun with a face -- obviously bringing it much closer to the imagery of the Reality Temple meme.

The same thread also had this, about the cross that appears in the Oreo design (and Nabisco logo). This is something Bill had discussed before, too, comparing it to an antenna if memory serves.

The Nabisco logo as a Roman Catholic religious symbol reminds me of one of my history professors, who liked to talk about how he couldn't understand Latin Mass as a kid and thought the priest was saying "Dominus Nabisco" (instead of Dominus vobiscum, "the Lord be with you").

The thread also included this image of a cat watching Shrek, which I'm including here just because Shrek was also a symbol Bill was posting a lot about at one point. I never really engaged with that thread because I've never watched any of the Shrek movies and, for reasons I can't quite pin down, don't really approve of the fact that they exist.

Note added: One more image from that thread, referencing the joke "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine."

This didn't seem significant until later in the day I clicked for a second random thread and got one called "He is the 777," which included this:

The joke is in the context of discussion of the meaning of numbers like 666 and 777. Here's the accompanying image:

If that's supposed to illustrate "seven ate nine," then the coyote is seven, and the eagle is nine. Debbie associated the hawk with the number nine back in "If 6 turned out to be 9."

The Moon is also associated with the number nine. (For example, a magic square of order 9 is the Square of the Moon.) The idea of "eating nine" -- i.e., eating the Moon -- brings us right back to the idea of heavenly bodies being replaced with cookies:

Further note added: That second thread also includes this post, with a Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun, cf. black stars, black circle, etc.) symbol and text that seems to have been written by Cookie Monster.