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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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.
I did not see anyone claiming that there was a “secret executive order” declaring Joe Biden’s surrender to the Duke or Earl. Everyone I saw was citing Biden’s Memorial Day speech, where he literally said “no one can stop the Duke of Earl,” and accurately attributing the Pentagon memo.
But Snopes somehow dug up someone on Facebook using false information and misattributing the Pentagon memo so they could mark this story as “false.”
The fact is, the entire establishment is freaking out about Biden cutting funding to programs designed to stop the Duke of Earl. Neocons like Mike Pompeo are working hand-in-glove with liberal think-tanks to launch a new government assault on the Duke, as well as stirring up a media barrage explaining to the peasants why they should be opposed to the Duke and want him stopped in the first place.
The Biden Memorial Day surrender was considered significantly worse than the Pentagon memo, given that it got much more media coverage. Pentagon policy changes constantly, and reopening the Joint Anti-Duke Taskforce (JADT) would have been a minor issue compared to a public surrender by the president.
Rumors had been swirling that part of the reason the Disinformation Governance Board was shut down was that Nina Jankowicz was going to be appointed as the head of a multi-agency panel designed to develop resources to stop the Duke of Earl. Apparently, people in the Biden Administration viewed it as futile, and simply want to bury discussion of the Duke by admitting defeat. Rand Paul has been pressuring the government for years to cut funding to “fruitless attempts” to stop the Duke or Earl, accurately stating that “every intelligence analysis has shown that nothing can stop the Duke of Earl” and that “the Military Industrial Complex is simply going to have to live with the fact that he can’t be stopped.” Paul has also pointed to the way global treaties designed to stop the Duke of Earl infringe on personal liberty.
Donald Trump has also been critical of the amount of money spent trying to stop the Duke of Earl, saying at a recent rally, “American mothers don’t have baby formula, and Liz Cheney can’t stop talking about the Duke of Earl.” After allowing time for the crowd to boo, he added: “these people would come into my office, when I was in the oval office – which by the way, is going to happen again soon – and they kept talking about the Duke of Earl. ‘Oh, sir, sir, we need to stop the Duke of Earl.’ I said ‘what did this guy even do?’ No answer. I told them, nothing can stop this guy. We’re wasting billions of dollars, and nothing can stop the Duke of Earl. You could hit this guy with a nuclear bomb and he’s just going to dance out of the flames, laughing.”
Trump-backed Senatorial candidate JD Vance stated earlier this year that he doesn’t care about the Duke of Earl either way, and is suspicious of the government’s fixation on trying to stop him. We’re hoping that Vance maintains this position when he gets into the Senate, but unfortunately, Josh Hawley, who also paints himself as a populist, supported an anti-Duke funding bill last year. Hawley stood with Ted Cruz in criticizing the way in which Biden is attempting to stop the Duke, but not the principle that he needs to be stopped. Hawley and Cruz also demanded that Europe spend more money trying to stop the Duke.
On Tuesday, Chuck Schumer made a rare break with Biden, condemning his Memorial Day surrender as “simply unacceptable” and vowing to push through a bi-partisan bill to stop the Duke. Senator Elizabeth Warren also broke with Biden, saying that “the Duke’s reckless escapades and madcap exploits” are contributing to climate change, arguing that “our children’s future is riding on our ability to stop the Duke of Earl.”
The Duke has been celebrating the Biden surrender this week, and on Tuesday appeared at an event in Russia-controlled Donbass to perform for Russian forces and brag about the capitulation, singing his viral song “Duke of Earl” about how nothing can stop him because he’s the Duke of Earl.
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.
People have been trying to stop the Duke of Earl for years now, but the liberal fact-checker site Snopes has finally admitted that he cannot be stopped.
Imagine that they thought they could stop him, and they just kept getting felted by the Duke.
It’s encouraging that they have finally been forced to admit the obvious.
I thought I had posted about this before, but a search for rill comes up empty, so here it is again. This is an anonymous poem that was anthologized in one of the McGuffey Eclectic Readers:
Run, run, thou tiny rill;
Run, and turn the village mill;
Run, and fill the deep, clear pool
In the woodland's shade so cool,
Where the sheep love best to stray
In the sultry summer day;
Where the wild birds bathe and drink,
And the wild flowers fringe the brink.
Run, run, thou tiny rill,
Round the rocks, and down the hill;
Sing to every child like me;
The birds will join you, full of glee:
And we will listen to the song
You sing, your rippling course along.
One of my younger siblings (I don't remember which), reading this, didn't understand the key word and asked what a rill was. Whatever the answer, he or she somehow misheard it as "a clergyman." Thus this became a poem about a tiny clergyman running round the rocks and down the hill, in search of straying sheep. This singing rill also became associated with the singing clergyman played by Bing Crosby in the 1944 film Going My Way. We had never seen this movie but thought the poster was amusing. At one point, someone made a handmade Going My Way poster that advertised the film as "positively packed with clergymen!" (Clergyman is one of those inherently funny words.)
Your use of "cleromancy" intrigues me. It has such affinity with the word "cleric" that it could almost mean "divination by a cleric". And aren't you a sort of cleric?
Cleromancy is quite similar to clergyman, and here Wade linked the word to the synonym cleric (an Islamic or D&D word not nearly as inherently funny as clergyman), which brought the poem about the singing rill back to mind. Subsequent comments by Wade twice used the phrase "cleric or priest," singling out a particular sort of clergyman.
To virtually no one else on earth does the word rill have any connection with priests or clergymen, so I thought it was quite a coincidence to run into this in my reading today -- from Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess, as quoted by Wendy Berg in Red Tree, White Tree (ellipsis in Berg):
Now the Priest of the Moon ... had seen that the seership had fallen on evil days, and had gone back, as men must, to an older and purer faith, tracing the river to the rill till he came to the pure source
En route to archive.org, I got a random /x/ thread featuring a "house that is made completely out of doors."
In "Further Doors-related syncs" (January 2023), I posted my own photo of "a building that not only has a green door but appears to be constructed entirely of green doors!"
Here are some of the comments on the /x/ thread:
The Cheshire Cat has been in the sync stream recently, and the "hole in time" reference syncs with yesterday's "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which mentions "a time/space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe."
I had an extremely detailed dream of which I can unfortunately only remember the general idea. I was looking through a coffee-table book about an imagined civilization whose exact name I can't remember, but it was a four-syllable name beginning with A- and ending in -onhi, and I thought it was clearly intended to sound like something out of the Book of Mormon. The book was full of full-page paintings of this civilization, showing their architecture, mode of dress, etc., together with detailed written descriptions. I took in quite a lot of this detail but again have forgotten most of it. They made extensive use of "flets" -- platforms built high in trees, like those of Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings -- but the people did not look at all like Tolkienian Elves. They wore very complicated clothing in bright reds, yellows, and greens, and the overall effect reminded me somewhat of Aztec images such as this one:
The resemblance was only very superficial, though. Overall, I was struck by how original their costumes were. The author had not copied the style of any real-world civilization but had imagined a completely new culture in a level of detail that made it fully convincing. Looking through the book reminded me of how I felt decades ago when I read a list of titles of works by one of Robert Lindner's mental patients:
. . . "The Religious Beliefs of the Valley Dwellers," "Manufacturing Processes and Dye Chemistry," "Fire Worship and Sacrifice on Srom Sodrat II," "Food Distribution in Seranen," "Sex Habits and Practices of the Crystopeds, "Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I," and so on . . .
I wanted to read them all, and I resented Dr. Lindner for just giving us the titles and nothing else. I felt the same way in the dream. I was absolutely fascinated by this imagined civilization and wanted to read all about it.
Later in the dream, an archaeologist was showing me some recently discovered stone tablets, and he said that all the information in the book I had been looking through came from these tablets. I was astonished: "Wait, you mean it's real?"
Hundreds of these tablets had been found. Each was about a foot and a half square and two or three inches thick and was engraved on one side only. They had been used as roofing tiles on several ancient buildings, and only recently had archaeologists discovered that there was text engraved on the undersides of these tiles, which could only be seen by removing them from the roof. The text had been deciphered, and it surprisingly turned out not to deal with historical or mythological events but rather to give a very detailed description of every aspect of the culture that had created them. Again, I wanted to read it all, but unfortunately I soon woke up and found my memory of the details rapidly evaporating.
This afternoon, I read this in Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree, just one page after a statement that the race of Faerie "now exists in parallel with, but mostly invisible to, the human race."
The appearance of a white hart, or a black dog, or a raven, will often indicate the opening of the ways between the human and Green World [of Faerie], and those whose awareness is drawn to these creatures are alerted to the fact that the veil between the worlds is about to be lifted and may allow the seeker to pass through.
A few hours later, I was looking for something on archive.org and, as usual, clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread en route. I got a 2020 Divination General thread with this as the lead image:
It's the Hermit card from a deck called the Tarot of the Divine, the main departure from the usual iconography being the addition of a white hart. That coincidence piqued my curiosity, so I immediately clicked for a second random thread and got this one from 2023, with this as the lead image:
As the original filename makes clear, this is meant to be a depiction of the Bermuda Triangle -- reputed to be a portal by which people may "pass through" into another world. As Wikipedia summarizes it:
Some hypothesize that a parallel universe exists in the Bermuda Triangle region, causing a time/space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe.
An airplane flying into a "time/space warp" reminded me of this image, which I posted in "Love pop, baby, love pop" (September 2024).
The band is named after an aircraft, and the concentric circles in the background are juxtaposed in the post with several similar designs suggesting portals or time warps, such as this one:
What's more, we recently discussed the significance of "P" (as in black-eyed p).
Now, pi (rhymes with "pie") in classical Greek, is customarily pronounced pi (rhymes with "pea").
In order for P to resonate with "Pharazôn", it would by rights have to be phi (rhymes with "fee").
One of my younger brothers, when he was very young, used to make up nonsense variants of names found in the Doctrine and Covenants. I don't know why I have such a photographic memory for this gibberish, but I do. One of his creations was this set of names:
Parley P. Pratt
Barley B. Bratt
Farley Fee Fratt
Marley Mee Mratt
In order to preserve the alliteration, Messrs. Fratt and Mratt got middle "initials" that were not pronounced in the standard way, and their "etymology" is that they are variants of Mr. Pratt's middle initial of P. So, as in Wade's comment, we have Fee as a variant of P.
The other thing Wade has been commenting about is his idea that I'm supposed to be some sort of priest or something, and that recent syncs related to levitation are actually meant to draw my attention to the similar-looking word Levite. This led me to write, in a June 7 comment on "It is impossible for people to fly -- but they did":
There's some French joke about being a Marxist of the Groucho variety. If I were a Levite, it would be of the Eliphas variety.
In yesterday's "Jam I am," I posted this picture, which includes an anthropomorphic jar of peanut butter with the initials PB on his breast pocket.
This -- together with my thoughts on the name Lewis in connection with Wade, who had also just reminded me of Farley Fee Fratt and company -- made me think of another of my brother's sets of names:
P. B. Lewis (Peanut Butter Lewis)
P. B. Lewis (Philip Butter Lewis)
P. I. Lewis (Peanut Butter Lewis)
P. A. Lewis (Papa Lewis)
These people all had to be referred to by both their initials and their full names in parentheses, since there were two different P. B. Lewises with different middle names and (somehow) two different Peanut Butter Lewises with different initials. This reminds me of how Bill's comments are always signed "William Wright (WW)," with both his full name and his initials.
At one point, my brother wrote a short and intentionally confusing a story about the four Lewises, but it didn't make it into the Commentarius Coccineus, and I don't remember any of the details.
Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, who shares both my March 15 birthday and my given names of William James, came up in the comments on "The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus" (June 3). Bill Wright wrote:
Interesting. He goes by the stage name Will.i.am, which turns William into a form of the sacred name: Will I AM.
I AM brings up two interesting links. First, it appears once in the Old Testament, at the Burning Bush. When Moses asks who it is he should tell the Children of Israel that has sint him to them, I AM is the name given. The story of the Exodus, and Moses and Pharoah I think is relevant here given the other symbols, as well as the future story of the Seer in 2 Nephi 3 and the ensuing modern-day Exodus (from this world, I believe).
Second, and directly from the first, is we have another very specific reference to 3.14 or Pi. The passage with the name I AM comes from Exodus 3:14.
I replied:
I also used to use "will.i.am," which is how I became aware of Mr. Adams's existence. Someone tried to sell me the domain name will.i.am after first offering it to the rapper, who wasn't interested.
William James has two instances of "I AM" (since J is historically a form of the letter I), corresponding to "I AM THAT I AM."
Will.i.am also alludes to Dr. Seuss's "Sam-I-Am." Sam is short for Samuel, which, appropriately enough, means "the name of God."
So we have will.i.am and Sam-I-Am, plus a note that in more traditional spelling -- prior to the introduction of J as a distinct letter from I -- my middle name would also have included I AM.
This afternoon I suddenly remembered these pages from Take Away the A -- the alphabet book that entered the sync stream in "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results" (May 19).
It says "Without the J, JAM I AM." This is obviously related to Sam-I-Am and will.i.am, and also to my note about the history of the alphabet: "Without the J [as a distinct letter], JAM [is written as] I AM." Note also that the key words are written in all caps, just as in Exodus 3:14.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
It turns out that will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas also has a "jam" connection:
Joints have appeared here before, in "Sympathy and dice" (October 2025), in connection with these lines from a Tom Petty song:
So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint
And let's head on down the road
There's somewhere I gotta go
And you don't know how it feels
You don't know how it feels to be me
The song's repeated emphasis on how it feels "to be me" is a link to "I AM." Tom Petty also has a "jam" song, again with a link to "me":
That's a black-and-white photo colorized to make the eyes blue.
In "No escape from coincidence" (October 2021), where I first discovered that I share a name and birthday with will.i.am, I wrote:
Years before learning that, I had come up with the band name (every kid comes up with band names) Blue-Eyed Bees, which was inspired by two Sugarcubes songs ("Blue Eyed Pop" and "Bee") and was supposed to be a pun on "how blue I'd be without you" or something. I think I still have some of the album cover art. Never realized the similarity to “Black Eyed Peas” until just now.
I don't still have any of the album cover art, but I remember what it looked like: a close-up black-and-white photo of a bee's face, photoshopped to make the eyes blue. Here's a quick and dirty re-creation:
That design was in part an homage to this book cover:
Transformation is a Latin calque of the Greek metamorphosis. One associates that word with butterflies, but bees do it, too.
At first I thought of pie as a diminutive ending as in cutie-pie (which used to be written as QT 3.14 on Usenet, for another pi link). Didn't Marina Gamba use to call Galileo her little stargazy-pie? Not until I ran an image search for the phrase to get the above photo did I discover that it's an actual pie -- a Cornish dish with fish heads sticking out of it as if gazing at the stars:
Fish and stargazing together suggest the constellation of Pisces, which includes pi in its name and Pi Day (March 14) among the birthdates for which it is the sign. The title character in Life of Pi is actually named Piscine, having been named after a swimming pool, and that French word derives from the same Latin root as Pisces.
Pi-sces sounds like "pie sees" -- and why would a pie gaze at the stars if it couldn't see them?
Sometime in the late 1990s I read a poem in a magazine (I think it was Writer's Digest) that was called "Pisces." The first part was about looking at fish in an aquarium, and the second part was about stargazing. It ended with something very close to "You are all I have / For an anchor / In a sea of fish and stars." I have scoured the Internet in vain for any trace of this poem.
It's hard to believe now, but I was a contributor to Wikipedia in its early years. I created these articles:
Anne Strieber
CTR ring
Gadianton robbers
Gazelem
J. J. Dewey
List of code names in the Doctrine and Covenants
Master Mahan
Robert Matthews (religious figure)
Ted R. Kurts (a.k.a. Ted Jesus Christ God, sadly no longer considered notable and thus deleted)
Three Nephites
These articles already existed, but I greatly expanded or rewrote them:
Cain
Gene Ray
Korihor (also deleted for some reason)
Moroni (Mormonism)
Nephi
Sandra Good
Temperance (Tarot card)
Uziel Gal
Whitley Strieber
Almost all of these reflect long-term interests of mine: Joseph Smith and Mormonism, Whitley Strieber, Tarot, net.kooks. The one exception is the guy named Gal, designer of the Uzi submachine gun. I still can't remember how exactly I ended up creating such an article. (It technically already existed, but it was just two sentences in a mixture of English and Italian.)
Of course my most significant contribution has been to Hebrew Wikipedia, where (ironically given my current appearance) some anonymous Israeli selected my likeness to illustrate the article on "Hair."
This afternoon I was teaching the construction "It is [adjective] for [noun] to [verb]." After giving several examples, I asked one of my students to make a sentence. He thought for a second and said, "It is impossible for people to fly."
In the evening, I finish reading Powerless. When I closed the document and went to the e-reader's home screen, it displayed the book I had most recently added to my library, one I had downloaded shortly after the levitation sync in "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" (May 30).
The book is called They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire.
March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi.
July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately 3.1429, which is about 100.0403% of pi., a slightly closer approximation than 3.14.
November 10: This is the 314th day of a common year and the 315th day of a leap year. Thus on average, it is day 314.25, encoding 3.1425, which is about 100.0289% of pi, a closer approximation still. If we limit ourselves to a single day, this is the best possible date for Pi Day.
March 14-15: Pi Biduum encodes 3.1415, or about 99.9971% of pi.
March 14-16: Pi Triduum encodes 3.1416, or about 100.0002% of pi. This three-day period is the closest calendrical approximation of pi that I can come up with.
This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.
I read this:
It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... an invisible war, What does that mean..., You really want to know, Yeah, Ok... so... one time we were having dinner and my dad always likes to watch the news... I wasn't paying attention and didn't even look...
This reminded me of my own situation -- that I, too, was in a room where the news was playing and was ignoring it -- and that prompted me to look up at the screen. It was showing what can only be described as generic war footage: closeups of rockets being launched, Uzis firing, etc., so close up that there were no people visible, let alone scenery, nothing that would indicate who was fighting or where. It might as well have been stock footage, and perhaps it was. Only after several seconds of this did a small Chinese caption appear in the corner of the screen naming a particular country. Then the scene cut to President Trump giving a speech, with a very large Chinese caption identifying him as "United States President Trump." I thought it was funny that this universally recognizable face merited such a prominent label, while vague images of the Platonic Idea of War did not.
I returned to my reading:
but then I started to notice the reporter was talking about the war, going on and on and on, except she never said anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what... it was always the rebels did this, the president reacted with that, the region suffered whatever, no names, no places, nothing... and then instead of raising my head to look I wanted to know how long she could keep it going without giving any details... and she never did... they moved on to other news... so that's the first scene, and the idea is that there's this vague war everyone is worried about all the time but nothing really changes in daily life, it's just this weird feeling...
The character in the novel could hear the news but not see it; I could see it but not hear it. In neither case was there "anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what." (I was reminded of my experience watching one of the Obama-Romney debates with my wife, whose unfamiliarity with American political euphemisms made much of it unintelligible. "Unless you knew already, you couldn't tell" what exactly was at issue in the heated argument over such vague concepts as "life" and "choice.")
Immediately after this, I read a bit from the Book of Mormon. Last time I'd read, I had been interrupted and had stopped in the middle of a chapter. Thus it happened that the first verses I read today were these:
Now there began to be a war upon all the face of the land, every man with his band fighting for that which he desired. And there were robbers, and in fine, all manner of wickedness upon all the face of the land. And it came to pass that Coriantumr was exceedingly angry . . . (Ether 13:25-27)
Again, a very vague description of a war. Where? "Upon all the face of the land." Who was fighting? "Every man with his band." The first name mentioned after this is that of Coriantumr -- of whom, as mentioned in "Gilgamesh was an elven king" (February 2023), Bill Wright has proposed that Donald Trump is the modern reincarnation.
Maybe war is one of the rare cases where Plato was right and the Idea is more real than any concrete instance. Whatever the details, in the end it's just another tiresome visit from Ares, pest of mortals. Boys, it is all hell.
This made me think of a song one of my brothers used to sing when we were very young. There's a Mormon children's song that begins like this:
Every star is different,
And so is every child.
Some are bright and happy,
And some are meek and mild.
We often talked about what a strange comparison that was. Stars are not after all notable for their individual uniqueness. As viewed from Earth, they all look almost exactly the same. There are degrees of brightness, and slight differences in color, but in general we can identify a particular star only by its position relative to others in a constellation, not by any preceptible character of its own.
My last post, "Many a Melchizedek," about a sync involving the word many, quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading Laeth's latest, Powerless, and found this (ellipsis in the original):
Maybe it’s because we have similar tastes in music… and there aren’t that many Byrd or Purcell fans out there
The juxtaposition of many and Byrd, with the latter referring to music, makes this a sync.
The context makes it clear that the reference is not to the 1960s Laurel Canyon band but to William Byrd, the Renaissance composer with some 500 works to his name. Apparently he's slipped into obscurity in Europe, but he was still a household name in America when I was growing up. I mean, probably 80% of his oeuvre had been forgotten, but his really popular tunes were on the radio all the time. They used to call them the Bill Byrd Hot 100.
Later today, I read this in Powerless:
That’s the main problem I have with Baumbach… the music is terrible… it’s just not believable that cultured people would like Bruce Springsteen.
I am by no stretch of the imagination a cinephile and couldn't pick a Baumbach film out of a police lineup, but the sentiment expressed reminded me of something I'd seen in a movie: Uma Thurman and John Travolta, both playing characters who are supposed to be very cool, dance together to a Black Eyed Peas song, and she seems impressed that he's a Black Eyed Peas fan, as if liking that very mainstream schlock marked one as a very hep cat indeed.
Synchronicity intermission: Powerless is about the electric power going out. I'm typing this in a cafe, and just as I finished the above paragraph, the power went out. Just the circuit breaker, not a nationwide blackout, but still.
So, as I was saying, we're supposed to buy that Thurman is wowed by Travolta's status as a Black Eyed Peas fan? Even Springsteen would have been more believable. Are Black Eyed Peas fans even a thing? There are hardcore Bruce Springsteen fans. There are even Dave Matthews Band fans; I've met one. But have you ever heard anyone rave about the Black Eyed Peas? Seen anyone in a Black Eyed Peas T-shirt, anything like that? It's generic-brand music. People may listen to it, but they aren't "fans."
What movie was that, anyway? Surely not Pulp Fiction! I know those two famously dance together in that movie, but Tarantino would never be that tone-deaf. Did the Black Eyed Peas even exist back then? I took a break from reading to look it up. Be Cool. 2005. Universally panned. Serves them right.
I returned to Powerless, turned the digital page, and found this:
But then his enemy started talking about Pulp Fiction. He had a theory that the Butch and Marcellus Wallace segment should be the last one in the film.
This caught my attention not only because a sentence earlier in the same paragraph had made me think of Pulp Fiction but also because of the name Marcellus, which has been in the sync stream, primarily as the name of the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures.
Who's Marcellus Wallace? A modern person with an ancient Roman name is probably going to be Black. Is that the name of Samuel L. Jackson's character?
I looked it up. No, it's a different Black guy, Ving Rhames. And his name is actually Marsellus Wallace, because Quentin Tarantino is illiterate (as, to be fair, are a lot of Black gangsters' mothers). Only Laeth's spelling error, correcting Tarantino's, made it an exact match for the octopus. Apparently he's a crime lord and wears round sunglasses not unlike Doc Ock's.
Google helpfully informed me that "People also ask: What is the theory of Marcellus Wallace?" I guess he's the kind of guy who attracts theories.
Yesterday morning (June 1), I woke up with the phrase "many a Melchizedek" in my mind, though with no memory of any dream that may have put it there. It comes from my 2021 post "Lives, the universes, and everything" (coincidentally posted on my 42nd birthday), in which I imagine God saying this to Moses:
The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.
What put that in my mind? A few things likely played a role. As discussed in "Charlie Kirk, Ulysses, and twin flames" (May 24), I had been thinking about "the idea that a soul can split into two." I had also been thinking -- see "A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi" (May 30) -- about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. Closely related to a guy named Guy is a man named Adam, which is a Hebrew noun meaning "man." The passage quoted above was inspired by God's statement in the Book of Moses that "the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many" -- not "man" but "many." What I can't say is why I woke up thinking specifically of the line about Melchizedek, rather than Adam or Moses. Indeed, I'm not sure why I included Melchizedek as an example in that 2021 post in the first place.
Later that day, I lunched at a restaurant called D∞D, whose street address used to be 666 but which has since relocated across the road to 663. I parked right next to this scooter:
That's the word Many juxtaposed with a symbol suggestive of what has been called the Seal of Melchizedek (i.e., an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares).
In preparation for this post, I searched my blog for the phrase "many a melchizedek". Even when you use quotes, Blogger's search function will return posts that use all those words but not that exact phrase. Thus, the first result was "The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)" (February 2023). Note that lots of is synonymous with many. The first sentence in that post is this:
Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves.
The scooter photo above, which is what prompted the search, was taken at D∞D -- two Ds and a lemniscate. Later in the post I mention the restaurant by name:
For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.
As I scrolled down, I found that one of the Seal of Melchizedek syncs in that post was a scooter identical except for the color scheme to the one above.
In the 2023 post, the word Many was not one of the syncs; I was just interested in the Seal of Melchizedek.
Another search result was "Lear, the Byrds, and 242" (February 2023), which quotes these lines from a Byrds song:
I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow
At that point I had not yet read The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhusrt, where one may find this passage:
There is a nasty moment in Through the Looking-Glass when Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how old she is, and she tells him, '"Seven years and six months."' '"An uncomfortable sort of age,"' he replies, before going on thoughtfully, '"Now if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven'".' Of course, the only way a real girl could do this would be by dying . . . . In reply to Alice's indignant remark that '"one ca'n't help growing any older'", Humpty Dumpty grimly points out that "One ca'n't, perhaps . . . but two can"' . . . .
This is a direct link to the Byrds song, in which a child leaves off at seven by dying, but Humpty's remark about "one" and "two" links back to the idea of split souls and "many a Melchizedek." In Carroll, Humpty adds, "With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven," making it clear that by "two" he means Alice and someone else. Douglas-Fairhurst doesn't quote that part, though. As he quotes it, Humpty's remark could also mean that Alice could do this if she were two people rather than one person.
Melchizedek is associated in the Epistle to the Hebrews (7th chapter, appropriately enough) with the idea of agelessness:
Melchisedec, king of Salem, . . . without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually (Heb. 7:1, 3).
