Who says the Left can't meme? This is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. It's been making the rounds on 4chan, but it would be a shame if those of my readers who don't frequent that wretched hive of scum and villainy missed out on it. It's from a paper by Sarah Rodriguez-Louette, "Memeing Scientific Racism: The Digital Reframing of Racialist Ideologies," in which she wants to write about racist memes but can't actually include them in her paper because that would be, like, racist, so she resorts to these hilarious "ethically modified schematic reconstructions."
Here's the funniest one:
The text that's been removed from the original meme -- which is not actually a soyjak but a caricature of British activist Richard Murphy -- is "your daughter was raped by a retarded cannibal." Good thing it was ethically modified so the reader wouldn't be exposed to such shocking language!
Here's a Baudrillardian analysis of this particular meme, from /pol/:
This next one is even more puzzling, as no offensive text has been removed. Rather, completely unnecessary (but admittedly funny) captions have been added. I guess just the fact that the pictures are "schematic" rather than being photos makes it all less offensive? Or maybe it's that the nature of the 2020s "social unrest" is no longer explicit? Anyway, the deliberate awkwardness of it all does make it considerably funnier than the original.
Needless to say, /pol/ is having a lot of fun with this new "ethically modified" format. I think it's going to be the next big thing in memetics.
The question is how people like Sarah Rodriguez-Louette will report on this next generation of memes. How do they ethically modify what's already been ethically modified? I'm sure they'll find a way.
Other errands having taken me to that part of Taichung, I stopped by a used bookstore. I didn't buy anything, but three books caught my synchromystic eye. First, this edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:
This book actually came up back in September 2022, in "I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove," when I searched my Kindle library for Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot and got this:
That's the same edition of Marcus. At the time, I was just interested in the fact that there was a red bird on the cover -- synching with the red turtle dove of my post title -- though I noted, "Not a dove (it looks more like a red crow), but still!" and linked back to my December 2020 post "Red crows of the Sun." That symbolism has come back up recently; I mention the Red Crow of the Sun in both "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19) and "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20). In both cases, the red crow was mentioned in conjunction with white birds (a white owl and a white crow, respectively), and the Marcus book shows a red crow and a white semiplume feather -- that is, a small fluffy feather rather than a long flight feather. Stories from the Messengers includes a story about such a feather:
Audrey leaned over the edge of the deck holding a small fluffy feather. She looked down at me and said, "An owl feather just floated down and landed right between all of us!"
This occurred in full daylight, an odd time for an owl to be in flight, and no one saw any bird above them. They described watching the little feather drifting down from high above, floating in from the direction of the lake. . . .
I got a few close up pictures of the little feather. It was white fluffy down and about two inches long. I showed these photos to a few bird experts while researching this essay. They all said the same thing -- they couldn't be sure, but they thought it was from a turkey.
Two inches is awfully long for down, even from a large bird like an owl or a turkey, so I think it must actually have been a white semiplume, as seen on the cover of the Marcus book.
Back in January 2024, I posted "White feathers, strange sights," the post taking its name from a song on Australian singer Whitley's 2007 debut album The Submarine. The last line in the song is "A white feather fell." The album cover features a picture of an owl and the name Whitley. Ditto for the cover of Stories from the Messengers.
Apparently (according to German Wikipedia) the singer chose his stage name as an homage to American blues singer Chris Whitley, with no reference to Whitley Strieber.
Coming back to today's bookstore visit, the second book to catch my eye was this one:
It's a Nigerian short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Just yesterday I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus" on my Book of Mormon blog, a more Book-centered discussion of ideas first broached here in "The white blood of Jesus" (June 18). In yesterday's post, I discuss Nephi's High Mountain Vision, in which the Spirit says to him:
thou shalt also behold a man descending out of heaven, and him shall ye witness; and after ye have witnessed him ye shall bear record that it is the Son of God (1 Ne. 11:7)
In other words, the Spirit tells him that he will see a man descend ("fall") from the sky and then tells him what it means. In the post, I note that, despite what the Spirit says, Nephi doesn't actually report seeing a man descending out of heaven and discuss a possible way of reconciling the discrepancy.
Both that post and its June 18 predecessor discuss the idea that the "water" that flowed from the wounded Christ's side, and the "living waters" he talks about, represent a second sort of "blood" that flowed in Jesus' veins. In yesterday's post, I connect this to the strange modern Mormon practice of drinking not wine, nor even grape juice, but water in remembrance of the blood of Jesus. All of which brings us to the third book that caught my eye today:
It's a novel titled Water from My Heart -- in other words, water as a type of, or substitute for, blood.
One June 16, my exploration of the zanier corners of Mormon YouTube led me to an obscure channel with the strange name We Zombi Rod of Iron, which looked pretty out there. The homepage highlights a 12-video series called "The Stone Woman," so I figured that was the most logical place to start.
The first video in the series says "Stome Woman Mystery?" in the thumbnail.
The supposed "mystery" (the question mark is amply justified!) turns out to be kind of dumb, and I gave up on the video, and the channel, about halfway through. Basically, the guy drives around the United States photographing stone carvings on buildings, and a lot of the carvings are of women. He lumps all of these together -- just being a carving of a woman on a building is enough (even the "stone" part isn't rigorously enforced) -- and takes each as another instance of "the" Stone Woman and as further evidence that "she," mysteriously, is everywhere.
He also repeatedly asserts that we have no idea what "she" means, that this is lost symbolism from a bygone era and is to us moderns a sealed book. Despite this, many of his examples of the Stone Woman are immediately recognizable and understandable. The reader will probably already have noticed that both the channel icon and the thumbnail show standard allegorical depictions of Justice, with her sword and scales. Several others were clearly depictions of the Greco-Roman goddess known variously as Athena, Minerva, or Pallas. I'm no expert on art history or iconography, and not every Stone Woman was recognizable to me, but those that were mostly fell into these two categories: Justice, and Pallas Athena.
⁂
Speaking of art history, around the same time Frank Berger had been posting about the 19th-century German artist Franz von Stuck, publishing "That'll Turn You to Stone, For Sure" on June 12 and "The Vision of St. Hubert" on June 14. This was apparently occasioned by my own June 10 post "Quotable quotes from my commenters," which linked back to an older post of mine on which Frank had left a comment about the symbolism of the vision of St. Hubert (a stag with a cross or crucifix between its antlers). Nevertheless, the first Franz von Stuck painting he posted after that was not The Vision of St. Hubert but rather Head of Medusa, the woman whose face will turn you to stone. In the post he describes the Gorgon as if she herself were made of stone, with "a smooth, unblemished alabaster face."
The St. Hubert painting is also somewhat relevant. The scene is dark, and Frank writes that it expresses the notion of "following something to where you need to go."
⁂
On June 19, I posted "I will follow you into the dark." The title is a reference to a Death Cab for Cutie song, and to a story in Mike Clelland's book about following an owl through the night, but the link to The Vision of St. Hubert is obvious. In that post, sculptural depictions of Pallas Athena come up again:
I thought the black crow made a nice complement to the white owl. I remembered that Edgar Allan Poe's famous Raven had originally been an owl, and that the bust of Pallas in the published poem is a holdover from that earlier imagery.
Then, looking up an old post of mine, I found two comments -- one mentioning the Death Cab for Cutie song that would become the title of my post, and the other quoting from "The Raven" and drawing particular attention to the bust of Pallas.
What had originally made me think of the bust of Pallas was the complementary pair of a black crow and a white owl. The next day, I posted "October 3 and 4, and white crows." Following the footnotes in Clelland's book, with a black owl on the cover, had led me to a book with a white crow on the cover: White Crows by Trish MacGregor. I downloaded it and found in the author bio on the first page a reference to the author's winning an Edgar Allan Poe award, reinforcing the bust of Pallas connection. The bio also repeatedly referred to the author's novels as "mysteries."
Not until this morning did I read beyond the author bio and the opening epigraph (from my namesake, William James). The first chapter of this novel -- classified as a "mystery" -- is titled "The Stone Woman." This is an obvious link to the We Zombi Rod of Iron video. While We Zombi's "stone woman mystery" is a nothingburger, the one in White Crows is about as mysterious as it gets: A woman in the Florida Keys literally turns to stone. As the cops examine the petrified body, they find on her shoulder an also-petrified sliver with a tiny inscription etched into it: "White Crow 1440 June '44." One of the cops says:
"It sounds like it could be a reference to William James's famous line: 'If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.' Turning to stone when you die is certainly unique."
(Sorry, no matter how famous William James's line may be, it's just not plausible that a cop could quote it verbatim off the top of his head.)
The cops then turn their attention to "June '44" and wonder what century it refers to, the idea being that perhaps the technology to turn someone to stone will exist in the future, and that the incident may involve a time traveler from 2044 or 2144 or 2244.
My own thoughts turned instead to the past: June 1844 is when Joseph Smith was assassinated. I knew that Joseph Smith and Edgar Allan Poe were near-exact contemporaries, being born within a few years of each other and then both dying young. Is it possible that Poe wrote "The Raven" -- from which comes the bust of Pallas -- in June 1844? I looked it up. The poem was published in January 1845, but the Wikipedia article mentions "the summer of 1844, when the poem was likely written." I couldn't find anything more specific than that, but it would appear that June 1844 is a definite possibility.
I word-searched White Crows for any reference to Poe, ravens, Pallas, etc., but found nothing, so any connection is coincidental.
Johnny Apple Changer, the character who finds this map, laments the fact that it is made with ASCII characters (asterisks and underscores):
Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all.
The asterisk is ASCII character number 42. In "October 3 and 4, and white crows" I quoted part of the author bio in the novel White Crows, my interest being the fact that the author had won an Edgar Allan Poe award. I didn't quote the full sentence -- the first sentence in the book -- but it also includes the number 42:
T. J. MacGregor is the author of 42 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight.
Maolsheachlann's latest post, "That's How the Digestive Disintegrates" (June 19), mentions his coining the title phrase as "a humorous substitute for 'that's how the cookie crumbles'." This of course prompted me to try to come up with my own humorous substitute, but I failed. The best I could come up with was "That's how the Mandelbrot fractures" -- Mandelbrot being both a kind of cookie and the name of the most famous fractal ("the fat man in the complex plane") -- but I decided the pun was too roundabout to really land. Anyway, the thought led me to the Wikipedia article on the Mandelbrot set, where I discovered that the first published picture of the set was a piece of ASCII art composed of asterisks:
Since the whole point of the Mandelbrot set is its infinite complexity, this ASCII rendition is just as comically inadequate as the map to Boster the Nose.
I find it highly entertaining that a certain advocacy movement currently brands itself as Pride, with no modifier. They're so proud they don't want to say what it is they're proud of. The pride that dare not speak its name. Quite the paradox.
It is well known that reading about synchronicities induces them. It is also well known that I already experience more than my share of them. Nevertheless, here I am reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about owls, UFOs, and sync.
Some of the stories Clelland relates come from an elderly lady (b. 1943) who was at the time blogging under the pseudonym Gypsy Woman. He includes several long quotes from her, and her writing style reminded me of our own paranormal-experiencing Boomer lady, Debbie. One of her stories is of a near-death experience involving levitation: "I began to rise out of my body . . . I continued to move upward toward the ceiling."
Then I read this:
It was because of her essay about seeing that white owl out her bedroom window that I [Clelland] was introduced to Gypsy Woman. This was a sighting that foreshadowed the death of a close relative. This owl story takes place over two consecutive days, October 3 and 4 of 2013.
I have my own owl story which takes place over the very same consecutive days, October 3 and 4, but of 2009.
On May 30, I posted "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion." (Communion here refers to the film adaptation of the book by Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Clelland's book.) In that post, I write about finding a (fake) photo of a levitating woman that had been posted to /x/ on October 3, 2013 -- the same date as Gypsy Woman's experience. Here is Gypsy Woman, as quoted by Clelland (brackets and ellipsis in Clelland):
Yesterday morning [Oct. 3], I woke with a start -- didn't know why -- just woke as if someone had shaken my shoulder or something. I sat up in bed and looked around trying to figure out what was going on... I was sitting on the edge of the bed and something out the window of my sun room door caught my eye.
The property is covered in trees, but there's one tree at the end of the driveway that is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The limbs are always bare. I saw something in this tree, and whatever it was seemed really large. At first, I thought it was a helium balloon stuck on a limb, but it was probably as large as two or three of those balloons.
I walked over to the window and saw that it was an owl, a very large white owl.
In a comment posted earlier this morning, on "The red waistcoat again," Debbie reminds us that her "property is almost completely wooded." Helium balloon imagery obviously ties in with levitation.
In my May 30 post, I noted that Debbie's first email to me was dated October 3, 2021, in her time zone, but October 4 in mine. It was the next day (October 4 for her) that she first mentioned levitation.
These syncs made me curious about this Gypsy Woman, so I checked Clelland's footnotes and found her blog, which was clearly designed by someone who grew up before the rule of tincture was invented, and which hasn't been updated since 2013. Scrolling down, I found a post titled "ufo's in the desert and guns at area 51...my childhood travels," which I clicked since Area 51 has been in the sync stream.
The first comment there was by someone called Trish, who turned out to be Trish MacGregor, with a link to http://qqq.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets. Clelland had mentioned a website called Synchro-Secrets a couple of times, but I hadn't been able to find it. Correcting Trish's typo, I found that www.synchrosecrets.com redirects to a website that is now called The Mystical Underground. In the sidebar there, I found a link to this book:
In "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19), I had posted about white owls and black crows. Clelland's book has a black owl on the cover, so now we have the reverse: a black owl and a white crow.
My post also mentioned non-black crows (the Red Crow of the Sun in Chinese tradition), as well as Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven," noting that the titular bird had originally been an owl. All this was enough for me to acquire a digital copy of White Crows. I don't intend to read it just yet, but I looked at the first few pages.
The first sentence of the first page -- a "Meet the Author" bio -- mentions that Trish MacGregor "in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight." The first page of the novel proper is an epigraph showing that the book's title comes from my philosophical namesake:
"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white."
- William James
It's also perhaps revelant that in Boster vs. Boster the Pig (see "Finding Boster the Nose"), the former Boster keeps an albino crow as a pet.
I've just been listening to one of Jason Preston's interviews with satanic ritual abuse victims, which was released on June 17. Here is Jason in the very first frame of the video:
And here are some images I posted on the same day, June 17, in "White under the Red":
Update (11:00 p.m.): I wanted to search for images of Jason Preston to see if he often wears a red waistcoat. Since it's a common name, I added utah to the search string. The first result was for a different Jason Preston, a basketball player who briefly played for the Utah Jazz. His photo on Wikipedia matches one of the photos I saw in my dream about "The Kelly-Strawberry family" -- a light-skinned but not Caucasian basketball player with a Malcolm Gladwell hairstyle:
His jersey says "Ohio 0," which may be relevant since I grew up in Ohio and Bill has connected me with zero/cipher symbolism.
Since I'm adding this note, I'll also mention that the "White under the Red" post was occasioned by Wendy Berg's book Red Tree, White Tree, in which the White Tree is the Tree of Life, as in the Book of Mormon. One of the "chapters" in the Jason Preston video, beginning at 1:57:01, is called "The Tree of Life Programming System" and discusses the use of imagery from Lehi's Tree of Life Vision in organized abuse.
I dreamt that we were preparing for a ritual in which we would symbolically burn (in effigy) the person who had burned Abinadi. In the Book of Mormon, of course, that person was King Noah, or someone acting under Noah's direction, but we never said that name. Instead, "the person who had burned Abinadi" was someone alive today, whose surname was Kelly-Strawberry. I couldn't remember the first name, and when I tried to find more information online, I found a Wikipedia article titled "Kelly-Strawberry family" listing dozens of notable members, mostly in the entertainment world, including one of the human actors in Sesame Street and a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. They were light-skinned but ethnically ambiguous, with several having an Afro/Jewfro hairstyle similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell or Art Garfunkel. My reaction to most of the names and faces was that I thought I might have heard of them before but couldn't be sure. This feeling persisted after I woke up, leading me to search the Web for the Kelly-Strawberry family just in case they really existed.
This afternoon, I bought a new pair of leather shoes and, while I was removing the branding from them with a craft knife, I was listening to an audio recording of the Doctrine and Covenants. When I'd finished, I put the shoes on for the first time -- and as it happened, this action synchronized perfectly with the recording saying, "Let thy feet be shod also" (D&C 112:7).
Just a little coincidence, but shoes have been a major running sync theme, as has Thomas B. Marsh, the person to whom that section of the D&C is addressed.
This morning I was in a cafe reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about owls, UFOs, and synchronicity. I read this:
A white owl glided gracefully into their headlight beams and flew right in front of their car, just a few feet off the road. They both got the sense that it was guiding them somewhere. Caught up in the thrill of following this majestic bird throughout the night, Bert accelerated to keep up with the white owl.
At that moment, I became curious about the background music and googled the lyrics. It was "Here to Forever" by Death Cab for Cutie.
I remembered that years ago I'd posted one of that band's album covers, with a crow on it. I thought the black crow made a nice complement to the white owl. I remembered that Edgar Allan Poe's famous Raven had originally been an owl, and that the bust of Pallas in the published poem is a holdover from that earlier imagery.
Given the Chinese tradition of the Red Crow of the Sun, there could even be a tie-in with recent red-and-white posts. Maolsheachlann recently listed his favorite animal as the crow and his favorite color combination as red and white. And didn't that Death Cab album cover show the crow tangled in red thread?
I looked up that old post, "Corvids singing in the dead of night" (July 2021). It had attracted two comments, not counting my own reply to one of them. The first quotes extensively from Poe's "The Raven" and draws especial attention to -- what else? -- the bust of Pallas:
Is the Bust of Pallas the TV? Looks like Edger Allen Poe prophecied that the corvid will nevermore leave the TV.
The second comment was from someone going by A. That got my attention because someone using the same handle recently commented on "The white blood of Jesus." A writes, referencing Death Cab for Cutie:
The first result for me was "I Will Follow You Into The Dark", which is about death.
This brings us back to what I had just read when I took a break to look up a Death Cab for Cutie song: "following this majestic bird throughout the night."
We may have some Elijah symbolism here, too. The prophet was fed by ravens, and as Hinbad the Hailer he ascended to heaven "in a yellow car," or cab.
Update (1:40 p.m.): Hours after publishing the above, ending with the reference to Elijah's supernatural chariot of fire as a "cab," I read this quote from a self-styled shaman in Stories from the Messengers:
Everything happens simultaneously everywhere. It’s like a dream where you get in a taxi in Paris, and at exactly the same time you get out of that same taxi in New York.
Another reference to a taxi providing transportation of a supernatural sort.
Second update (1:45 p.m.): Shortly after the above quote, I read this:
Was Gwenhyfar, the white owl, one of the messengers that brought the knowledge of the cauldron of Annwn or the Holy Grail, to Arthur?
Gwenhwyfar is the Welsh name of Guinevere, who was the main focus of the Wendy Berg book I just read. Turning from that to a book about owls and UFOs, I certainly didn't expect to run into Guinevere and Arthur and the Holy Grail again!
In Red Tree, White Tree, Wendy Berg maintains that Humans have red blood, Faeries have white blood, and Jesus had both.
The Bible makes reference to two streams of blood issuing from Christ's side: "But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water. And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe."
We find it easy to accept that one of the streams of fluid that came from Christ's side was blood, but the exact nature of the other fluid is less obvious. . . . John's suggestion that it was water can also hardly be true: Christ's veins were not filled with water. Yet they contained two different, life-supporting fluids.
The only other clue to the identity of this mysterious fluid lies in the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea brought two cruets with him to Glastonbury, each containing one of the fluids which flowed from Christ's side. One of these contained red liquid and the other, a white fluid. . . .
Throughout this study we have noted the many descriptions of the white, shining appearance of the Faery race, as if the life-sustaining fluid within their bodies was white. The two streams of blood that flow from the living Christ are equally relevant to both the human and Faery races.
As its title suggests, Wendy Berg's book also has to do with two trees, one red and the other white, and these are the two trees of Eden. The red Tree of Knowledge bears the fruit "which makes you human." The white Tree of Life is the Faery tree that gives immortality.
Near the end of the book, Berg suggests that the "fruit" of the Tree of Life might actually be more like a liquid. (Coincidentally, I gave the fruit of the other tree a similar interpretation in my April 6 stanza "Garden," in which the bitter cup Jesus drank before his execution was "the juice of Eden's bitter tree," rendering him mortal.) She cites an Ophite reference to being "anointed with the white chrism which flows from the tree of life" and comments:
This suggests that the fruit of the Tree of Life is actually a substance excreted by the tree, perhaps a kind of sap which, when consumed, has an effect on the human body such that it does not age in the normal manner.
After citing several more references to the white chrism, she concludes:
The similarity between the white fire called chrism, and the white fire which is the life-sustaining substance, the blood of the Faery race, is persuasive.
In other words, the white liquid from the Tree of Life and the white liquid that issued from Christ's side may be essentially one and the same.
In speculating that immortal Beings have something other than red blood in their veins, we are on solid Mormon grounds. Joseph Smith is reported to have taught:
Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, or the kingdom that God inhabits, but the flesh without the blood, and the spirit of God flowing in the veins in the stead of the blood, for blood is the part of the body that causes corruption.
The idea of Jesus having white blood is also consistent with the many references -- mainly in the Book of Mormon but also in the Bible -- to garments being made white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14; 1 Ne. 12:10-11; Alma 5:21, 27; 13:11; 34:36; Morm. 9:6; Ether 13:10).
In the Fourth Gospel, the second stream that flows from Jesus' side is called "water." This is interesting in connection with these other references from the same Gospel:
He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water (John 7:38).
But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:14).
This "living water" is spoken of as flowing inside a person's body, almost as if it were a second sort of blood.
Interesting, "living waters" are referenced only once in the Book of Mormon, and the Tree of Life is their source:
And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God (1 Ne. 11:25).
For Joseph Smith, the second blood is "the spirit of God flowing in the veins." This may be relevant to John 6 where, after speaking of the need for others to eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus says -- confusingly, after this insistence on the vital importance of eating his flesh -- "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63).
The flesh and blood of Jesus seem to be interchangeable with the fruit and juice of the Tree of Life. This is consistent with 1 Nephi 11, where Nephi, wanting to know the meaning of the White Tree, is shown by way of explanation a white virgin with a child:
I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white. . . . And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.
And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?
And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things (1 Ne 11:13, 20-22).
Some of the language -- "sheddeth," "in the hearts" -- seems to reinforce the "blood" connection.
A central theme of Red Tree, White Tree by Wendy Berg is that the color red represents the Human race, while white represents the Elven or Faery race. As noted in my June 13 post "Themes of interest in Red Tree, White Tree," the book also references "the idea of Elf-like beings putting on coats of skins to become human." Given the symbolism of red and white, and of a "coat" as a physical body, I thought that an Elf incarnate in a Human body might be represented by a person wearing a red coat over a white inner garment. I realized that the Magician card of the Rider-Waite Tarot features this imagery.
A bit later, I was browsing 4chan and ran across Del Parson's painting Jesus the Christ, one of the few pieces of Mormon art to have broken out of its religious ghetto to become iconic in the broader culture. It depicts Jesus wearing a red coat over a white inner garment.
This was not a one-time design choice on Mr. Parson's part. We see Jesus in the same outfit in Knocking at the Door (where the foliage above Jesus' head also parallels the Magician card) and In His Glory, among others.
The imagery of an immortal Being incarnating in a mortal "coat of skins" is obviously appropriate, but of course I don't think anyone would classify Jesus as an Elf or Faery.
After making the above observation, I read more in Red Tree, White Tree and found that Wendy Berg connects the blood and "water" that flowed from Jesus' side with red Human blood and white Faery blood.
The two streams of blood that flow from the living Christ are equally relevant to the human and Faery races. It suggests that whatever was achieved by Christ's death and redeeming blood was as true for the Faery race as for the human race, and the relevance of Christ is equal both to humans and Faeries/
This is a closer connection between Christ and Faerie than is usually made. The more usual position in Medieval times, as I understand it, was that fairies were akin to demons or fallen angels and were barred from Christian redemption. It is consonant with Tolkien, though, for whom Elves and Men are alike Eruhini, children of the same God.
⁂
Note added (6:30 p.m.): Scrolling through this blog's homepage, I found that the next image below this post's series is another one of a man in a red "coat" (waistcoat) over a white inner garment, from the post "A severed head underwater" (June 14).
The gesture he is making is also extremely similar to that of Jesus in Del Parson's In His Glory above.
When I got that screenshot from a video to include in that post, my main concern was to get the caption that mentioned the "floating head." That caption stays on the screen for long enough that I had my choice of a picture of Leno himself or the valet. I went with the valet for no particular reason, with no idea that his clothing and gesture would later become relevant.
I've also read a little more in Red Tree, White Tree since publishing the original version of this post. Wendy Berg does indeed suggest that Jesus is in some sense a Faery:
Does this mean that Christ is a "Faery"? When we remember that the Elven/Faery race are not tiny grotesque creatures lurking under toadstools but tall, shining beings of great beauty and grace who possess immense wisdom, knowledge and understanding and who inspire and bring light and love to all who come into contact with them, then we are halfway there, but the whole truth is that Christ was both human and Faery. He is of the original root race from which both human and Faery evolved, and it is this which makes him the avatar for the future of both races.
⁂
Second note added (10:00 p.m.): This post was about images of men dressed in red and white, the first example being the Rider-Waite Magician, shown against a bright yellow background. The first note above added Jay Leno to the mix.
Hours later, I checked /x/ and found a new Roy Jay thread, even though Roy Jay is pretty much played out. The lead image showed him not in his usual prison uniform but dressed in red and white (stripes, not a red coat over a white tunic) against a yellow background.
That's the name Jay again, as in Leno. The /x/ post begins thus:
A couple of years ago, the singer/comedian Roy Jay didn't exist. If you were here on the board when it happened, anons literally saw Google searches about Roy Jay change in an instant, the more we looked into him. His death is uncertain, photos of the man popped out of thin air, new footage magically appeared across YouTube, the people commenting on Roy Jay videos are clearly all bots, etc.
This ties Roy Jay to magic (like the Magician), and his photos popping "out of thin air" is somewhat similar to the "floating head" theme.
The stripes may seem at first to be rather different from the "white under red" theme of this post, but there's a connection. This morning, going through an unfamiliar part of the city, I saw a shop displaying what I at first thought was a Polish flag but soon realized was actually Indonesian -- the difference being that the Indonesian flag has white under red, while Poland has the reverse.
When I looked the flag up on Wikipedia, I read that "The flag's colours are derived from the banner of the 13th century Majapahit Empire." Here is Wikipedia's reconstruction of that banner:
Further note added: Just as I post about Elves dressing in red "coats" to enter the human world, photos of Trump meeting with red-robed Vanyar (or, some are saying, the Three Nephites) go viral.
My last post, "A severed head underwater," documented a sync between an Arthurian legend I had just read about, in which a severed head is dropped down a well, and a similar scene I had recently read in a just-published Portuguese novel.
This evening I was poking around a bit on Mormon YouTube and ran across this comment referencing the 1838 massacre of Mormons at Hawn's Mill:
I am a descendant of a man killed at Hawn's Mill. He is buried in the well. His son survived by hiding under a wagon.
It's not a severed head, but wells are sufficiently unusual places of burial that it still counts as a fairly strong sync.
The title of my last post reminded me that Iris Murdoch had written a novel called A Severed Head, but I couldn't remember anything about it. Even reading the plot summary on Wikipedia didn't jog my memory.
Then I remembered another of her titles which specifically references an Arthurian legend about decapitation: The Green Knight. This one is much more memorable. Even though I've only read it once, 23 years ago (a year before the entirely forgotten A Severed Head), I found that I could remember the opening lines verbatim. I typed the following from memory, then looked it up, and didn't have to change anything but the punctuation.
'Once upon a time there were three little girls --'
'Oh look what he’s doing now!'
'And their names were --'
'Come here, come here.'
'And they lived at the bottom of a well.'
This novel came to mind because of the Arthurian decapitation connection, and the opening references (quoting Lewis Carroll's Dormouse) people "at the bottom of a well."
The Dormouse quotation is interspersed with lines spoken by another character, addressed to a dog -- specifically, to a collie. The most famous collie, Lassie, is best known for the non-existent storyline in which Timmy falls down a well.
(A minor ancillary sync is that this morning I helped a preschooler read a book in which a girl says to a dog, "Come here, Pat, come here!")
I just read in Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree an old Arthurian legend about a man who, having dishonored a woman, is killed and his severed head dropped into a well.
The book I read immediately before this one was entirely different in character: Laeth's Powerless, a realistic novel set in Portugal in 2025. But, though any more detailed explanation would constitute a "spoiler," it contains a scene that parallels the above-mentioned Arthurian story remarkably closely.
Come to think of it, "head underwater" imagery also played a central role in Laeth's first novel, Phantasia.
I've started reading Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree, a book Bruce mentioned a while back, understanding it that it would be primarily a reinterpretation of the Matter of Britain based on the assumption that Guinevere and many of the other characters are Faery rather than Human.
I'm only about a third of the way through it, but already I've found a lot that is unexpectedly relevant to what we generally refer to as This Thing.
⁂
1. Tolkien as non-fiction
This is an approach not too many people take, but Wendy Berg is one of them:
The power of Tolkien's work lies in the fact that he has not invented a fantastic or unreal story but that he used his imagination as the means by which he could remember some of the ancient history of our world when the human and Elven/Faery races walked the land together.
Nor is it only in a general way that Tolkien's writings reveal the ancient past. Berg cites details of Tolkien as if they were at least as authoritative as Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wolfram von Eschenbach.
⁂
2. Coat of skins
One of Bill's deleted blogs was called Coat of Skins, a phrase from the Eden story which he took to refer to the physical body. He also often explored the idea of Elves or other higher beings incarnating in a human "coat of skins," sometimes symbolized by an ape or pig.
Here is Wendy Berg's take on the phrase from Genesis:
The phrase "coats of skins" does not refer to clothes but to that moment in creation when the binding limitation of the physical body within its containing skin was first made real. It is this coat of skin which marks the essential difference between human and Faery. . . . the creation of the limiting skin marked the first moment of the physicality of Adam and Eve. Up until this moment they, and the earth, were as the Faeries
Interpreting the "coat of skins" as a physical body is not an unusual approach, but the idea of Elf-like beings putting on coats of skins to become human makes this a much specific match with Bill's thinking.
⁂
3. Split incarnations
The idea that single soul can temporarily "split" and incarnate in two separate bodies simultaneously is something one of my correspondents has been exploring (to explain for example how I can "be" Pharazon while the actual Pharazon is still imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten). Wendy Berg also proposes that this is possible, but only for Faeries. Then again, Faeries can incarnate in human "coats of skins," so the distinction is a malleable one.
Leodegrance has two identical daughters both called Gwenevere, one of whom was accepted as 'real' in the sense that she was recognised to be of royal status, while the other was not. . . . The two Gweneveres are two manifestations of the same incarnatory impulse: they are indeed both Gwenevere. Humans have one single spark of spiritual identity which manifests in only one physical body at any one place and time, but this is not so for the Faery race. What in human terms might be thought of as a 'clone' is not so in Faery terms, and while the concept of the individual spark or spirit is common to both human and Faery, the latter race is much more flexible and varied in its manifestation. What would seem inconceivable to us, something we would interpret as loss of our essential, spiritual oneness, is not so to the Faeries. It is possible for one Faery spirit to manifest in one, or two, or many different places at the same time.
Berg seems to be making a sharp distinction between Human and Faery here, but later she suggests that "it was perhaps the case that the false Gwenevere" -- one of the abovementioned pair who were "indeed both Gwenevere" in a way possible only for Faeries -- "was human and not Faery." So apparently one spirit who is "really" a Faery can have two simultaneous incarnations as a Faery and a Human. Could she have incarnated as two Humans instead? The significance of these distinctions, at least in terms of a given spirit's real or ultimate identity, begins to be rather unclear. However, it parallels Bill and Leo's ideas about Elves and Dwarves incarnating as Men.
⁂
4. The White Tree
One of the main "articulations" Daymon Smith found between the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Joseph Smith was the image of a White Tree. The parallel seems at first to be rather superficial, however. In Tolkien, it is an actual tree -- Telperion, one of the Two Trees of Valinor, and its various descendants -- while in the Book of Mormon it is a visionary symbol, "a representation of the tree of life," which in turn "was a representation of the love of God" (1 Ne. 15:22; 11:25). By calling it "the tree of life," Nephi implicitly identifies it with one of the two trees of Eden, the other being the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Telperion is also one of a pair, but its partner, Laurelin the Golden, seems quite different in character from the tree whose forbidden fruit brought suffering and death into the world. It is interesting, though, that in both the Legendarium and the Book, it is the White Tree alone that maintains its relevance through the ages, while its partner appears only in legends about the distant past.
The Bible makes no mention of the Tree of Life being white or having white fruit. That imagery comes from the Book of Mormon. But Wendy Berg, with no apparent knowledge of the Book, draws on Arthurian legend and arrives independently at this same idea of the biblical Tree of Life being a White Tree.
The Red Tree of her title then becomes identified with "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which might perhaps more accurately be called the 'tree which makes you human'."
The first tree brings death, but the second tree brings immortality. The first tree symbolises the condition of humankind and the second tree symbolises the condition of Faery, There are two trees in the Garden of Eden: human, and Faery, and the symbolism is of vital importance. The problem that the Lord God was so anxious to avoid, and with good reason, was that Adam should have simultaneous access to two states of being, human and Faery. He could be one or the other, but not both at the same time.
From here, she goes on to make independently the same connection that Daymon made only with the help of the Book of Mormon: Tolkien's White Tree is the Tree of Life. She then takes the next logical step, which I believe Daymon does not: Its partner is the Tree of Knowledge.
One is the Elven or Faery tree, and the other is the human tree . . . . Telperion was the elder, just as the Elves are the elder race. . . . Laurelin was the younger, just as the race of Men is the younger. . . . Laurelin represents the Sun, the Solar Logos of the human race. Telperion represents the Moon and the stars, and was the White Tree, the Faery Tree of Immortality, the second tree of the Garden of Eden.
I haven't yet digested all of this, nor even finished reading through the book, but I thought the presence of so much This Thing-related content in one short book on the seemingly unrelated topic of Arthurian legend was remarkable.
Note: Andrew shut down his site, and these old posts can no longer be accessed even on the dark web. I'm mirroring the legendary Duke of Earl Posts here, with his permission, to preserve the masterworks of this once-in-a-generation talent.
In his Memorial Day speech, President Joe Biden admitted that the Duke of Earl cannot be stopped, but he has seemingly walked this back, publishing an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday ordering an intergovernmental panel to convene and come up with solutions on how to stop the Duke once and for all.
“As he walks through this world, no one can stop the Duke of Earl,” Biden told the crowd. “We can’t do it. We tried, and we can’t stop him, folks,” he added.
This admission came after the Pentagon issued a memo in March ordering all military forces to cease and desist attempts to stop the Duke of Earl.
However, Biden’s statements were viewed as a type of surrender by bipartisan forces, with Liz Cheney and Chuck Schumer leading the charge for their respective parties in demanding that Biden reinvest resources in attempts to stop the Duke of Earl.
By Tuesday, the White House was already beginning to walk the statements back. Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if Biden’s statements amounted to an admission of defeat in the long-running US campaign to stop the Duke of Earl.
“I think what the president meant to say is that we are putting a pause on attempts to stop the Duke, which we may return to in the future, right? Right now, the president is trying to focus on gun control and building more windmills, right? So, while this administration has always remained committed to stopping the Duke of Earl, right, we are recognizing that we have other priorities, right?”, Jean-Pierre responded, seemingly clashing with Biden’s definitive statement that the Duke cannot be stopped.
“So, let me just be clear here,” Doocy replied, “is the official policy of the White House that they intend to stop the Duke of Earl at some point in the future, or has the president effectively surrendered to the Duke?”
“Look, this White House has always been committed to fixing discrimination in housing, to closing the gender pay gap, and to making sure that trans kids have the care they need. Next question,” Jean-Pierre said. Many Republican Duke hawks saw this as ducking the question.
“I’m not going to try to unravel the nature of the chain of authority at the White House,” Ted Cruz later told Fox News. “Maybe the White House is once again walking back Biden’s statements, or maybe Ms. Jean-Pierre doesn’t understand the policy. What we know for a fact is that this president has no concrete plan to stop the Duke of Earl as he walks through this world.”
On the left, Cenk Uygur pointed out that both Biden and Donald Trump had said this same line: “we can’t stop him, folks.”
“So here you have a Republican, Donald Trump, who is a racist misogynist, and Joe Biden, who is a person who was elected to office by the Democrats, and they’re both saying the same thing: no one can stop the Duke of Earl. Meanwhile, we have Aaron Mate on Twitter, celebrating the fact that the government is not even going to try to stop the Duke of Earl anymore. You know who else is supporting the Duke? The Daily Stormer, which is a neo-Nazi site. So, that’s it – surrender. And supposedly “left wing” people are lining up with the far-right to celebrate that the US government is just going to let the Duke of Earl continue to walk through this world with no consequences,” Uygur exclaimed, passionately, with sweat pouring down his brow.
Joe Biden seems to have heard the cries of the public. On Wednesday, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times reversing his position on the Duke.
In the article, Biden explained that he is putting together a team of government officials, weapons experts, and scientists to figure out a way to stop the Duke of Earl. Biden suggested that though military and intelligence experts have said that the Duke is not susceptible to any of the weapons we currently have, emerging technologies could hold the secret to stopping the Duke of Earl. Specifically, Biden vowed to invest $80 billion into the development of an antimatter laser, which could be fired at the Duke from outer space.
“The Duke of Earl Locational Triangulation System (DELTS), developed under Ronald Reagan, has continued to track the global movements of the Duke as he walks through this world. Experts tell me that we are able to pinpoint his location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If we are able to install an antimatter laser on a satellite, we stand a good chance of finally stopping him,” Biden wrote.
However, while an antimatter weapon has been proposed in science fiction, none has ever been under development by the Pentagon, and many believe such a weapon is impossible to make. In 2017, Donald Trump ordered an investigation into the cost of developing a space-based antimatter laser. Former Attorney General William Barr later claimed that Trump wanted to use the weapon to incinerate unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the border to find safety. The Pentagon delivered a report saying that the weapon would cost “at least one thousand trillion dollars.”
What’s more, when asked during a Congressional hearing in January whether a space-mounted antimatter cannon could stop the Duke of Earl, Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin answered, “I doubt it. As far as we are aware, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.”
On Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked: “what are we doing? What is the goal in trying to stop the Duke of Earl from walking through this world? And just how much is the Biden administration willing to spend?”
He went on: “Americans are facing one of the greatest economic crises in this country’s history. Tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from opioid overdoses. People are poorer and dirtier than they’ve been in living memory, and yet all this government can talk about is the Duke of Earl. This goes for Republicans too. Lindsey Graham today congratulated Joe Biden on his plan to spend billions on developing a theoretical weapon from science fiction to stop the Duke of Earl. How does the Duke of Earl walking through this world affect the lives of the American people? How many of Lindsey Graham’s constitutes would list ‘stopping the Duke of Earl’ among their list of concerns? A recent survey done by FiveThirtyEight showed that even among liberal Democrats, stopping the Duke of Earl does not rank in their top 10 list of concerns. So, those are the same people who just last year were putting anti-Duke signs in their front yards, and they now believe they have much more immediate problems. Their decadent little social-signaling campaigns aren’t so important when they’re worried about the stock market collapsing.”
Tucker then brought on Tulsi Gabbard, introducing her and claiming that “if you were still in Congress, you’d be getting smeared as a supporter of the Duke of Earl. Tulsi Gabbard, do you support the Duke of Earl?”
“Thank you, Tucker, and no, I do not support the Duke of Earl,” Gabbard said. “What I support is the American people, and the American people do not benefit from these ongoing campaigns to stop the Duke of Earl. All the intelligence analysts who have been asked to put together a plan to stop the Duke of Earl have come to the same conclusion: nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.”
“Right, so you have to wonder, whose interest is this serving?” Tucker asked.
“Tucker, I think as you and I both know, there is a revolving door in Washington, with special interest lobbies and defense contractors going in and out of the government. Biden’s Secretary of Defense was formerly employed by Raytheon, a company that has made over two trillion dollars on government contracts trying to stop the Duke of Earl. They’ve failed consistently, and now Biden is talking about a space-based antimatter laser that the Pentagon says will cost 1,000 trillion dollars. We need to put the American people first, and stop concerning ourselves with the Duke of Earl and his madcap escapades.”
Tucker then brought on Blexit CEO Candace Owens to weigh in on Biden’s reversal on the Duke question.
Owens said: “Tucker, the American people do not care about the Duke of Earl, and black Americans do not care about him either. What the American people want to see is an end to this woke agenda and the endless wars. You know Tucker, LL Cool J had a song called ‘Too Legit to Quit,’ and the Democrat Party is not legit and they need to quit. Black people are leaving the Democrat plantation in record numbers. Instead of trying to stop the Duke of Earl with an antimatter laser, the Biden Administration should be focused on trying to drastically increase the black birthrate, so that future generations won’t have to worry about the racist Democrat policies of eugenics.”
“Well, that’s exactly right, and I’m glad you’re out there saying it,” Tucker agreed.
Nervous Democrats are arguing that the only way they are going to be able to hold the Congress in the upcoming midterms is if they make concrete steps in trying to stop the Duke of Earl, while Republicans are also basing their platform on stopping the Duke.
“I think we are all in agreement that the most important thing going on in the world right now is the Duke of Earl walking through this world,” top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said at a press conference Wednesday. He went on to congratulate Joe Biden on changing course, but said that $80 billion is “nowhere near enough.” McConnell added that this election is going to be a referendum on Joe Biden’s ability to stop the Duke.
Meanwhile, the Duke himself continued to walk through this world, stopping in Moscow to perform his viral song “Duke of Earl” before a stadium crowd. Outside the sold-out show, tens of thousands of Russians gathered, waving the red flag of the Soviet Union and chanting their support for the Duke.
Earlier this month, Putin was asked whether or not he supports the Duke, and refused to give a definitive answer, stating instead that Russia does not have a policy of enforcing their values on the rest of the world like those in Washington. However, since then, he has met with the Duke at least three times, including at an event in Beijing where the Duke held a joint press conference with a spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party, who referred to the Duke as “an important partner.”
Even countries once aligned with the West are taking a softer stance on the Duke, with India in May refusing to denounce him even after repeated badgering by the United States. Prime Minister Modi issued a statement saying that “the Duke of Earl does not present a clear threat to Indian security.” He added that “the Americans have admitted that there is no way to stop the Duke of Earl, and yet they expect Indians to go along with their hopeless campaign.”
Allied countries remain committed to the American program to stop the Duke of Earl, with Ursula von der Leyen stating this week that “the future of humanity rides on our ability to stop the Duke of Earl as he walks through this world.”
The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, also hailed Biden’s renewed commitment to stop the Duke, saying, “the whole of the international community stands united, saying with one voice that if we do not stop the Duke of Earl, the entire fabric of the universe will come unwound and dissolve into nothingness as it was before the Big Bang.”
