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.
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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."
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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.
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