Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir

Random /x/ threads are still working for me, so I'm going to keep pumping that well.

Today I got a 2014 "Chaos Magick General" thread, which, unsurprisingly, had a form of the Star of Chaos as the lead image:

In the center of the Star is a skull. The right side is white with a black eye socket, and the left side is black with a white eye socket. This theme of a dark right eye and a bright left eye has turned up here before -- mostly in the form of Doctor Octopus's spectacles, but in "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May 16), the same pattern was seen in a spider.

What spiders and octopuses have in common is their eight appendages, corresponding to the eight arrows radiating out from the skull in the Star of Chaos image, which could be seen as a stylized spider or octopus. The circle around the skull also makes it look something like a spider's web, and also like the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune.

Skull spiders have appeared here before. In "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement" (March 2024), I mention I've mention some "black-and-yellow garden spiders" I've seen "in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head."

A skull octopus -- though one with only six arms -- has also been in the sync stream, in the form of the Hydra logo from Marvel:

Coming back to the /x/ thread, the second post in the thread had this image:

It's a baby in a white hood playing the role of Gandalf in his confrontation with the Balrog. In yesterday's post "A very pale White guy in a Phrygian cap," I compared a statue of Mithras killing a bull to Gandalf (Mithrandir) confronting the Balrog. The white Phrygian cap worn by Mithras in the statue is not unlike the baby's hood.

Just now, thinking of Gandalf's name Mithrandir, I realized that I was signing to myself, to the tune of "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer":

They never let Mithrandir

Join in any randir games

At first I dismissed this as meaningless, but then I realized that randir is composed of ran "wander" and dir "man," and that the dir-deer connection has already been made by Bill -- for example, in interpreting a dream of his about deer.

Coming back to the bright and dark eyes, in a May 21 comment on "Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers," Bill brings in this car wash logo, which "comes across as having that same imagery of one light and one dark eye":

This morning I went way out into the boonies, on roads I'd never been on before, and I ran across this car wash:

The two eyes aren't dark and bright per se, but a car wash logo featuring mismatched eyes still seems like a sync hit. Dr. Wash's very large mustache made me think of Dr. Robotnik as portrayed by Jim Carrey, and one of the first results I got on an image search showed him with the right lens of his goggles "darkened."

As a live-action version of a cartoon supervillain with a doctorate, Carrey's Robotnik has a certain amount in common with Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus.

When I looked up Alfred Molina just now I found that his latest film credit is another octopus role -- the voice of a literal octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, based on the novel of the same name, which I saw someone reading in a cafe back in January ("Gone with the wind from the house of leaves"). In "Turn around, bright eyes" (February 2), I juxtaposed a photo of the cover of the novel with that still of Alfred Molina as Doc Ock with the bright and dark lenses. The book cover does indicate that the novel is going to be adapted for Netflix, but I never followed that up and had no idea until today that Alfred Molina had been cast in the role of the octopus. I guess he does have more octopus-related experience than most actors in Hollywood.

I guess I'll have to read that novel eventually.