Red rum, sir, is murder

This past Saturday, May 9, one of the reading comprehension exercises in the English textbook I'm using for one of my classes was a paragraph about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The first comprehension question after the article had four pictures of Egyptian deities (easily recognizable as Sekhmet, Bastet, Isis, and Thoth), and the students had to identify which one was Sekhmet based on the description in the paragraph.

At the time, something about the whole thing struck me as synchy, but I couldn't put my finger on anything in particular. At first I thought it was just that it showed four Egyptian gods. The UltraMormonChan montage I had posted earlier that same day in "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" had included a painting of Abraham on an altar, about to be sacrificed to the Four Sons of Horus, but when I rewatched the montage I saw that that photo had actually been cropped so that the four Egyptian gods were not visible.

Today, though, the expected sync appeared, in the form of a comment by Bill on yesterday's post "Under." He writes, in part:

Nephi wrote that the secret combinations were synonymous with Murder - it was the specific work of darkness he called out - something you just alluded to again with your "Is Abel" play on words, in referencing the first murder of the Bible. I referenced Jack Nicholson's role in The Shining (Luciano means Shining as well). Murder was a central theme of that movie, but for most of it the word was said and spelled backwards: "Redrum", like something Mr. Mxyzptlk would do.

I dislike Stephen King and have never read or watched The Shining, but apparently redrum -- or, as in the well-known palindrome, red rum -- is a stand-in for murder.

Here is an excerpt from the Sekhmet paragraph:

Ra would send Sekhmet out to punish his enemies. In one famous story, she almost destroys the whole human race. However, she is tricked into drinking a lot of red beer, which she thinks is blood, and ends up too drunk to do her job.

Red beer is obviously a close conceptual cousin to red rum, and it, too, is linked to murder. Sekhmet intends mass murder and only drinks the red beer because she thinks it is human blood.

Bill brought in redrum in connection with Cain and Abel. Why were we talking about Cain and Abel in the first place? Because Debbie mentioned prophets being in caves and quoted (in a modern translation) the Lord's question, "What does thou here, Elijah?", leading me to quote the beginning of "The Ghost of Abel," where Blake addresses that question to Lord Byron. In the climax of that play, Satan, defying Jehovah, refuses to accept any substitute for human blood:

I will have Human blood, and not the blood of bulls or goats,

And no Atonement, O Jehovah!

The Elohim live on Sacrifice Of Men: hence I am God of Men!

Thou human, O Jehovah!

By the rock and oak of the Druid, creeping mistletoe, and thorn,

Cain's city built with human blood, not blood of bulls and goats,

Thou shalt Thyself be sacrificed to Me, thy God! on Calvary.

In that same comments thread, I brought up my old semi-fictional reggae band Tycho and the Drifters. This is another link to red alcoholic beverages (though without a murder angle that I know of), since the most famous White reggae band is UB40, and their most famous track is their cover of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine."