Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos

On May 16, Bruce posted "Miles Mathis on art forgeries and fakes," including this as one of only two examples of such alleged fakes:

Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2023. The second image in the thread was this:

I don't think that (possibly fake) Vermeer has any particular significance to me, but the coincidence got my attention and made me scroll through the thread -- another of those miscellaneous "Nobody General" things -- where I found this:

It's the Hydra logo from various Marvel superhero movies, modified so that instead of a skull with six tentacles, it's some sort of crustacean with six pincers. The Hydra logo as a six-armed octopus was one of the syncs that established the idea of a six-legged spider or six-armed octopus as a symbol of Ungoliant. In the comments on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May  16), I describe finding (what my wife says was) a six-legged spider. I wrote:

When I got home tonight, my wife asked me to catch a spider and get it out of the house. She'd already done so once, she said, but the spider had returned.

It was a largish black female of some unfamiliar hunting species and seemed quite unintelligent, with none of the intensity or personal aura of a cane spider or a jumper.

After I had captured and re-evicted the beastie (what's that Simpsons meme where they throw the guy out the door and he comes right back in?), my wife said, "Did you notice that she only has six legs?" No, I'd scooped her up in mid-scurry and hadn't registered a leg count, but my default assumption is that a persistent black female spider with six legs is not a good omen. I half-expect poltergeist phenomena to begin again.

In a follow-up comment, I spelled out my reasons for this interpretation:

[T]he specific image of a black female spider with six legs has already been established in the sync stream as representing Ungoliant, Tolkien's portrayal of ultimate (what my circle would call "Sorathic") evil. As you know, everything is symbolic, and past syncs establish the symbolic vocabulary by which new ones can be interpreted.

The 2019 poltergeist manifested to my wife as a gigantic spider, and I successfully evicted it from our house. Thus, for a spider to be found in the house by my wife, get kicked out, and then return would seem to symbolize and thus perhaps presage the return of the exorcized geist.

So that six-armed octopus, modified to be a spider-adjacent arthropod, is quite a coincidence. A further link is that my comments about the possibly six-legged spider were on a post about Spider-Man 2, another Marvel superhero movie.

The /x/ thread also includes this image of the Star of Chaos:

This image first appeared here in "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel" (April 24) and lent its name to "The star of Kaos" (April 25) and "Jupiter, star of chaos" (April 26).

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Note added: Also in that thread was this: the Devil card of the Tarot portrayed as the Cheshire Cat's disembodied grin:

Late last night I posted in "North Carolina Saves Mummy" about the fact that The Secret Language of Birthdays says the Devil is my card -- the 15th trump for those born on the 15th. The Cheshire Cat appeared here in "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) and "Cat Magic syncs" (April 21).

As I looked at that minimalist card, I noticed that most of the letters in DEVIL are Roman numerals and that they add up tp 556 -- frustratingly close to the number most closely associated with the devil, which is 666. We would need to add a C and an X to get the desired total, and I couldn't see any obvious way of doing that.

What if we count the Roman numerals at the top of the card, though? We need DCLXVI for 666, but we already have XV, so all we need is for the name of the card to include DCLI and no other Roman numerals. The simplest and most obvious way to turn those numerals into a word is to rearrange them and add an H.

A simple solution but obviously not a satisfactory one, right? Children represent innocence, so how can child be an acceptable stand-in for devil? How about The Coiled instead, since the devil is "that old serpent"? But there is nothing serpentine in the imagery on the card.

That made me think more about the imagery that is on the card. Why is the Cheshire Cat the devil? No sooner had I asked the question than it dawned on me that it's probably not meant to be the Cheshire Cat at all. Rather, it surely represents biblical language about the damned going to "outer darkness" where there is "gnashing of teeth." Searching the Bible for those key words, I was surprised to get this as the first result:

But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12).

So I guess the caption The Child fits the imagery on the card better than I had thought.