Book of Mormon names and Pi Days

I dreamt that a Taiwanese girl told me she had decided to go by the English name Isabel. I said, "Good choice. That's a good Book of Mormon name." (This was perhaps influenced by my post "The harlot Isabel," though that was more than two months ago.)

Later in the dream, I was reading the Book of Mormon and found that it now included a character whose name was sometimes spelled Alexus and sometimes Alexs. I kept insisting that I had read the Book dozens of times before and was sure there was no such character, but everyone I talked to assured me that Alexus had always been in there. (The spelling Alexs may have been influenced by Words of Them Liberated, which has a character called Axsa, with the same unusual xs combination.)

⁂

The dream having reminded me of Axsa, I thought of another name used in Liberated: the place name Pillenor-Um. When I first encountered that name, I thought it might be from Tolkien, but a search for pillenor tolkien only turned up the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Thinking about that again today, I looked up that battle -- "the largest of the entire Third Age" according to Tolkien Gateway -- and discovered that it takes place on Pi Biduum, March 14-15 (corresponding to 3.1415). In my April 6 post "Pi Days," I noted that my birthday is part of Pi Biduum, while Bill's birthday, July 22, is another Pi Day, corresponding to 22/7 ≈ 3.14. Since Tolkien Gateway allows you to look up any calendar date, I tried July 22, but nothing really happened on that date in Tolkien's life or stories.

During my lunch break, I read a little in The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas Fairhurst, beginning where I had left off on p. 354. On the very next page, p. 355, I found a reference to the date I had just been looking up. Lewis Carroll responded to a Pall Mall Gazette exposé on child prostitution

with a letter to the St James's Gazette, signed 'Lewis Carroll' and published in the issue of 22 July under the title 'Whoso Shall Offend One of Those Little Ones', which set out the case for preventing 'impure scandal' from being reported.

(I suppose the child prostitution theme also syncs with the dream, in which a child adopts a "good Book of Mormon name" which is actually that of a "harlot.")

Three pages later, on p. 358, I read this:

In March 1886, [Carroll] tried to discover the original version of a poem he had read many years before, which 'contained 3 visions of female beauty -- child, young woman, adult woman', all of whom 'appeared in Eve's original dress'.

Following a hunch, I checked the endnote and confirmed that the letter quoted here was dated March 15, the only occurrence of that date in the book.