The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing

I saw this today on Peter Grant's latest meme post:

It shows a person in a hooded green robe, a lantern, an owl, runes, and a green octopus-like Cthulhu doll.

Here is Laura Bruno's "Hermit Portal" painting, which I first posted on June 27, in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." It also shows a man in a greenish robe, a lantern, and an owl.

Here is a detail, showing the runes on the Hermit's staff and on the hem of his robe.

And here is the green octopus-like creature that appeared together with the Hermit Portal in my post.

This octopus has been given the face of Pepe or Kek. This is a link to the well in the meme, since back in 2021, in "The Emperor's orb," I linked Kek to the Frog Prince that retrieves a golden ball from a well.

So that's quite a lot of connections between the meme and my Hermit Portal post. The meme's reference to "the Chosen One who saves the kingdom" is also relevant to the ongoing sync theme of Pharazon as interpreted by Daymon Smith. In Words of the Faithful, Pharazon has the title "Chosen One" carved into his belt, and it is anticipated that he "would restore the land and its people to the glory that was sung of the gods in yesteryears."

Shortly after seeing the meme, I was checking /pol/ -- yes, the board for which the green Kektopus above is the mascot -- and ran across another of those humanoid deer creatures which keep being associated with the Hermit.

Mostly unrelated, but I'll just include it here. Last night, the YuuTube Music algorithm served up this song:

What caught my eye was the "A.C.T." Those letters, encoding 1320, were a sync theme back in 2023, for example in "Random syncs: Ace of Swords, 1320." The track title also made me think of "prayer in sea" -- De Profundis, or Jonah -- and then the lyrics turned out to include this:

Hey, when seas will cover lands

And when men will be no more

Don't think you can forgive you

Obviously another Atlantis connection.

I was right

Mark Docherty says so, in a post titled "Tyconius was right." The name is also spelt Tychonius (and sometimes misspelt as Typhonius, apparently!), and the Russian spelling, Тихоний, matches my surname very closely. Quoting a former pope, Docherty writes that

for Tyconius, it is not the infidels who will “fall away” but rather the true believers, who will withdraw from the evil within the Church. A paradoxical reversal indeed.

I did indeed say something pretty much like that in my 2020 Christmas post.

I think "underpopulation" is an understatement

I'm old enough to remember when each of these countries had tens of millions of people.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

Last night one of the songs the algorithm lobbed my way was Madonna's "La Isla Bonita" performed in the style of System of a Down.

The repeated oxymoronic line "The sun would set so high" synched with a meme I had just seen on Barnhardt's.

As I have said in "Last night I immagined San Pietro" (May 2025), this Madonna song is closely associated in my mind with a particular scene in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, in which the dying Colonel Freeleigh, in defiance of his nurse's orders, phones Mexico City, has his friend there hold the receiver out an open window, and breathes his last while listening to the intoxicating sounds of the city one last time.

With such force did this scene come back to me that I stopped what I was doing and reread that chapter of Dandelion Wine. I then entered a reverie, in which the "yellow noon" of Mexico City merged with the dandelion wine of the title, the Colonel greedily drinking it down with his dying breath. I began reciting to myself "Enivrez-vous," one of Baudelaire's more memorable prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris, variously translated as "Be Drunk," "Get Drunk," or simply "Drink!":

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it -- it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

My mind then went to another composition called "Drink!", a song from the They Might Be Giants album Mink Car.

This turned out to have even more relevance to the scene from Dandelion Wine. The first line mentions a piñata, establishing a link to Mexico. Then this is the chorus:

Let's drink, drink, this town is so great

Drink, drink, 'cause it's never too late

To drink, drink, to no big surprise

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

What words rhyme with "buried alive"?

"Drink, drink, this town is so great" -- just as I had imagined the Colonel "drinking" Mexico City. "It's never too late" -- not until they pry the telephone receiver from your cold dead fingers, which is how that chapter of Dandelion Wine ends.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"? Trivially, a homophone is a rhyme. I recently had occasion to explain to a student that, despite the spelling, bury is pronounced like the second element of strawberry. To rhyme with buried, though, berry would need the -ed suffix, more usually attached to verbs than to nouns. Just yesterday, though, in "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," I quoted a reference to a "white tree-silver shooted, red berried." The buried homophone works here, since a person might be "shooted" (i.e., shot; Daymon often used regularized verb forms like maked) and then buried. "Read buried" could also allude to various buried records, from the Gold Plates to the secret plans of the Gadianton band.

The White Tree is, according to Nephi, the Tree of Life. If its life-giving fruit is a berry, as Daymon has it, one vivified by it could be said to have been "berried alive" -- a phrase syntactically analogous to "shot dead."

The original meaning of "buried alive" is also highly relevant. The "Apple of ashes" post mentioned the imprisonment of Pharazon -- who drank the dandelion wine of La Isla Bonita -- in the Caves of the Forgotten. Those who are buried alive typically do not remain so for long, transitioning in a matter of minutes to buried dead, but Pharazon would be an exception.

Swapping eight and eleven

My last post, "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," mentions that in the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree with white fruit but does not mention the color of the tree itself, while Nephi, wishing to have the same vision, sees a white tree but does not mention the color of its fruit. It also notes that this reversal is reflected in the two scripture references: 1 Nephi 8:11 and 11:8, respectively.

In the post before that, "Appeared again the Hermit has," I mention the Golden Dawn system of mapping the Major Arcana of the Tarot to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and I link to my 2014 post about that system. That old post is called "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength." In the standard Marseille sequence of the trumps, Justice is 8, and Strength is 11; but Waite, to make his Hebrew alphabet scheme work better, made Strength 8 and Justice 11.

Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat

I just read this in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages. The poet is apostrophizing worldly fame and commenting on its futility.

Apple of ashes to the longing lip!

Brine to the burning throat and thirsting soul!

Phantom, delusion, misty ghost of fame!

Voidest and vainest of all vanities!

Whitney's intended meaning is clear -- fame is false food and false drink, which cannot satisfy -- but the sync fairies will commandeer these things for their own purposes. The phrase "apple of ashes" made me think of some recent comments by Bill on "Gardens of pomegranates" (June 29) about an "ash tree" that bore red fruit. His first comment there begins:

Pomegranates are known for their red berries, and would seem to have a not-so-traditional link to the White Tree 

I thought that was an odd word to use for a pomegranate, but maybe technically accurate. All kinds of things, including bananas, are technically considered to be berries. Googling are pomegranates berries, I got as the highlighted result this, which also compares them to apples.

The idea of the White Tree producing red berries is, as Bill says, "not-so-traditional." I am not aware that Tolkien mentions the color of the fruits of any of his White Trees. In the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree of unspecified color which bears white fruit (1 Ne. 8:11), while Nephi sees a white tree which bears fruit of unspecified color (1 Ne. 11:8; the chapter-and-verse references capture the reversal nicely). Since Nephi's vision comes in response to his "desire to behold the things which my father saw" (1 Ne. 11:3), and since he says the tree he saw "was like unto the tree which my father had seen" (1 Ne. 11:8), it is common to combine the imagery of the two visions and arrive at a White Tree with white fruit.

Bill quotes a reference in Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated to "Galathalion, white tree-silver shooted, red berried." Actually, Bill writes Galathilion, which is the correct name of one of Tolkien's White Trees. He is quoting from a draft version of Liberated, so either the typo was introduced into Daymon's manuscript later, or else Bill inadvertently corrected Daymon's typo with one of his own. Or it's possible that Galathalion isn't a typo but a different Elvish name, incorporating thalion "steadfast, strong."

There are lots of White Trees in Tolkien. Galathilion, the White Tree of Tirion, was made by Yavanna in the image of Telperion, the White Tree of Valinor. One of Galathilion's seedlings became Celebron, the White Tree of Tol Eressea, and one of its seedlings became Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor. From a fruit of Nimloth came a succession of four different White Trees of Gondor. Asusming Daymon's reference is to Galathilion, it implies that all the other White Trees in this list would have red berries as well.

Bill goes on to write:

Nimloth, as a reminder, is the tree that Pharazon burned down (I may have mentioned that once or twice...). As such, in my own symbols it has been referred to as an "Ash Tree", as well, since it was turned to ash.

Thus the White Tree that bears red berries, suggestive of the pomegranate that "looks like a red apple," is called an Ash Tree because it was burned. In Whitney's poem, right after the "apple of ashes" line, we have a reference to burning. Since burn can be either transitive or intransitive, burning can describe either something that undergoes burning or something that burns something else. Although Pharazon, who burned the White Tree, is supposed to have ended up in the Caves of the Forgotten, in a more general sense the Numenoreans burned the White Tree, and the Numenoreans were overwhelmed by the salty sea. "Brine to the burning."

"Throat" in this synchronistic context made me think of Vico's comment, repeated several times in The New Science, that "Cerberus was called three-throated as having an enormous gullet." Daymon's version of the story of the Numenorean assault on Eressea involves ravenous wolves who seem close kin to Vico's interpretation of Cerberus.

Appeared again the Hermit has

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew character, and the first several results are all Watto, a character whose Wikipedia article includes a "Comparisons to antisemitic caricatures" section.

I figured Google would probably fix that pretty quick, so I tried the search myself to see if I would get the same results. I did, mostly, but then right in the middle of the search results there was this:

The link is to -- who knew such a page existed? -- https://www.instagram.com/popular/star-wars-jewish-character/, where you can "watch reels about star wars jewish character from people around the world." None of the videos -- sorry, I mean "reels" -- appears to feature Watto or to have anything to do with Jews. It's just a random assortment of Star Wars content -- and for some reason the very first one is this one comparing Yoda to the Hermit of the Tarot. I'd never watched an "Instagram reel" and was pretty okay with that, but sync is sync, so I clicked. As expected, there was no mention of anything remotely Jewish.

Actually, come to think of it, I can supply the missing Jewish link myself. The Golden Dawn associated each card of the Major Arcana with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the letter assigned to the Hermit was, you guessed it, yodh.

The Stone Woman again

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). I had forgotten that it includes a reference to "the 'stone woman' of Mayan tradition," synching with a song that mentions Medusa and says "Will you turn to stone?" It hasn't been too long since I posted "The Stone Woman Mystery" (June 21), which deals with two different figures called "the stone woman," one of whom is a woman who turns to stone, and also includes a painting of Medusa.

You have bound yourself with oaths

I dreamt the following lines, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Unfortunately certain key words have slipped out of my memory.

You have bound yourself with oaths the [...] take.

You have made the ancient covenant the [...] make.

My sense is that the first lacuna was 'sons of Adam," but that leaves two syllables unaccounted for. I've got nothing for the second lacuna, but I understood that the two lines were expressing the same thought twice, in different words, after the manner of the prophetic poetry of Isaiah. I understood that the song referred to evil "secret combinations" rather than to any godly covenant.

With these lines of song came an image of someone who had a long string of perhaps around 150 large blue-gray ceramic beads, most of them round but some in irregular shapes suggesting bits of antler or bone. He kept it on a shelf, and it represented his having taken the oaths referred to in the song. People would see it on his shelf and be afraid of him. He wanted people to think his string of beads was thousands of years old, but I knew that in fact he had had it made very recently to replace the lost original, hoping no one would notice how new it looked.

Update: I put on some music, and one of the songs that came on was "The Voice" by the Moody Blues. The line "Make a promise, take a vow" syncs with the dream in that it is a song that repeats the idea of taking an oath twice, in different words, using the two verbs make and take.

The National Society for the Prevention of Paddington

I ran across this image on an old 4chan thread.

It caught my eye because of the red and blue spectacles and because the character's name, Hermione, suggests (but is etymologically unrelated to) Hermit. Then I realized that the wat spelling in the meme matched the actress's surname, Watson, and I ended up on her Wikipedia page. As I scrolled down, my attention was arrested by a picture of a bear sculpture decorated with butterflies, including a blue morpho, so I scanned the nearby text to see what it was.

At the end of line, my eyes jumped back to the beginning of that same line instead of to the next one, and so I read that prior to the release of film Paddington, Watson participated in a project to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Paddington.

I guess they didn't raise enough.

Seven twenty-two

I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was reading White Crows, and one of the characters checks the time and says, "It's seven twenty-two now."

Now, about an hour later, as I'm typing this, the Global Goblet is on the TV across the room, Argentina vs. Switzerland. They keep replaying a few seconds where numbers 7 and 22 are the only Swiss players on the screen.

Incipit liber primus

But Men shall remember Atlantis's name

Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,

It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell

Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.

We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old 

May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.

High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!

Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.

No soup for you! But here's a skeletal humanoid deer creature

The sync fairies just will not let up on this theme. I found this while searching for a clip-art image of a bowl of soup.

Update: The humanoid deer creature in this post is labeled GRIM STONE. apparently the stage name of a Canadian musical artist. WG left a comment saying that a character in one of the video games she plays "is a deer-man in shape if not substance" and providing a couple of links. I didn't think the character looked all that deer-like, but the second link, showing customizable "cosmetics" for the character, showed several alternate helmets. I clicked on the one that looked most antlery:

It's called the Oberon Ferosh Helmet (who names these things? Ira Gershwin?), and two designers are credited: malayu and The_Grimmrock. That latter name is obviously very close to Grim Stone.

A quick check of the other helmets shows that none of them are designed by The_Grimmrock, and when I search for "grimmrock," this helmet design is the first hit.

The double-m means his name could also be read as "the grim Mr. Ock" -- Otto Octavius before he completed his doctorate?

The history of the circulation of blood

The history of the circulation of blood may be summarized as follows:

4   →   2 + 2   →   3 + 1

Blood is made up of four constituent parts. In the beginning, these were united in a single corpuscle, the 4-corpuscle, which you can picture as four small spheres agglomerated together into a single body, like a molecule.

The next stage in the development of blood was the 2 + 2 stage, in which instead of 4-corpuscles, blood was made up of two different types of 2-corpuscles. This stage was inherently unstable and didn't last long.

The next stage was the one we are currently at, in which blood consists of large 3-corpuscles and small 1-corpuscles. If a 1 is bumped by a 3 into the wall of the blood vessel, it is said informally to "die," but in fact it simply loses a lot of energy and becomes inactive, causing it to stay there against the wall of the vessel instead of flowing. However, if it is bumped by a 3 again, its energy is restored, and it becomes active again. This prevents inactive 1s from building up and clogging the vessels.

So it was explained to me in a dream.

You're never a lone Walker

I was at a restaurant, and the Alan Walker song "Faded" came on. I've heard it before but never paid enough attention to the lyrics to realize that it's actually about Atlantis:

Where are you now?

Where are you now?

Where are you now?

Was it all in my fantasy?

Where are you now?

Were you only imaginary?

Where are you now?

Atlantis, under the sea, under the sea

Where are you now?

Immediately after that, "Alone" by the same artist came on. It repeats the sentence "I know I'm not alone" again and again.

Given that the artist's name is Walker, this reminded me of this image I posted in "Accompanied by a white hart" (June 23).

Connecting this with the white hart that accompanies the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine, and with Wade's comments about how "the white hart" is supposedly said in the language of Atlantis, I wrote:

The logo is a stylized white hart's head. The brand name is PRAZA, which includes RAZA, the Fake Adunaic word Wade got by asking specifically how to say "the white hart." Under that is the slogan "You Never Walk Alone." Not even if you're a hermit, apparently.

Alan Walker's trademark look, with hoodie and mask, bears a certain resemblance to the hermit on that card:

In the past, I have connected Walker -- as a name, as in George Walker Bush and Herschel Walker -- with a different Tarot card: the Fool. See "Election prediction assessment" (November 2022). The Rider-Waite Fool is also accompanied by a white animal, and in the Forest of Enchantment deck the Fool has become a White Hart.

The music video for "Alone" duplicates the Rider-Waite Fool imagery of standing on the edge of rocky cliff.

In the Tarot of the Divine, we have the Hermit and the Hart walking together. In "Humanoid deer creatures," these two walkers join into one.

Fetched home by a strange hen

Earlier today, I ended my post "Decorations from a Tree of Acorns" with two lines from "The Allansford Pursuit" by Robert Graves, for no other reason than that they had popped into my head, despite the fact that I last read that poem in 2001.

Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back.

This led me to look up the poem and reread it. One stanza caught my attention:

Yet I shall go into a bee

With a mickle horror and dread of thee

And flit to hive in the Devil’s name

Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

-- Bee, take heed of a swallow hen

Will harry thee close, both butt and ben,

For here come I in Our Lady’s Name

All but for to fetch thee hame.

The phrase swallow hen just seemed strange to me. I know hen can refer to any adult female bird, but hen swallow seems more natural -- just as you would say dog fox or bull elephant, with the animal's actual species as the syntactic head.

Later in the day, I put on some music, and "The Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash came on. It also includes an odd compound with hen, and in the context of fetching someone home.

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

Destroying a clock

Bill left a comment at 12:22 p.m. on "The white caribou" relating a dream he had had:

I was sitting in a church chapel, which also seemed to be some kind of library or study hall, as I was sitting toward the back at a large table, while trying to read or study or something like that. At the front of the chapel hanging on the wall was a massive, very ornate clock. A really nice clock.

As I was sitting there, a man I took to be a relative - I believe I viewed him as my uncle - came by with a couple others behind him and told me that I needed to destroy the clock. The reason he gave was that it was "distracting".

I considered this sound advice after thinking on it, and apparently I had a shotgun at the table with me, because I pulled it out and shot the clock, completely destroying it. As I assessed the damage, I realized that the material of the clock had been comprised of moments or scenes - like built into the construction of it - and these scenes now were in something like individual pieces which I could see. Hard to explain.

Just now I saw this on /pol/, part of a meme posted at 5:30 p.m. the same day:

In Bill's dream, the clock is destroyed by gunfire. In the meme, it is destroyed by a hammer, but the hammer represents "war" and is thus firearm-adjacent.

An owl in a basket

Here is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer, which I most recently posted here in "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch" (July 4).

And here is a photo I took today (July 11) of a decoration on the exterior wall of a vegetarian restaurant.

Decorations from a Tree of Acorns

I dreamt that I had bought secondhand a very rare privately published hardcover book titled Decorations from a Tree of Acorns: A Version of "The Paper". Its orangish-brown cover, with the title written in gold inside a black rectangle, seemed to be imitating the aesthetic of the first edition of the Book of Mormon. No author was credited.

When I started reading it, most of the content was very familiar, and I soon realized that "The Paper" of which it was a version was Mike Clelland's original paper on owls and UFOs, which was later expanded to book length and published as The Messengers (which in the dream was conflated with its sequel Stories from the Messengers). I was excited at the prospect of finding in it "lost" material that Mike had not been "allowed" to include in the commercially published version. Paging through it, I did see some new-to-me content, including several reproductions of ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform texts, and some Mesopotamian art portraying the lion-headed Anzu bird.

I understood that Decorations from a Tree of Acorns was code for Stories from the Messengers, and that the cryptic title was to allow people to read it without making it obvious that they were reading a book about owls and UFOs.

Before going to bed last night, I had been thinking about two things. First, the major typhoon currently in Taiwan had reminded me of my first experience with a tropical cyclone: Hurricane Gloria, which hit New Hampshire, where I was then living, on September 28, 1985, and which would later become inextricably linked to my mental image of Marduk battling Tiamat. Second, I had for no obvious reason been thinking of my dream "Nineteen years inside the sphere," which I later understood to have reference to "The Death of Nelson" (the dream was hours after the death of Russell Nelson but before it had been announced in the media) and wondering if I was about to have another such significant dream. Only now, looking it up, do I see that I posted that dream on September 28, the anniversary of Gloria hitting New England.

Thus, after last night's dream, as I was trying to figure out the logic of changing "the Messengers" to "a Tree of Acorns," my thoughts turned to Nelson's successor as leader of The Church Formerly Known as Mormon, Dallin Oaks. His name obviously references a tree of acorns, and he bears the title Apostle, meaning "messenger." The appearance of the book in my dream suggests a Mormon connection.

It occurs to me now that the name Dallin Oaks encodes the Valley of Elah, where David killed Goliath. Dallin means "valley-dweller," and the Hebrew word elah, which modern scholars say means "terebinth," is usually rendered "oak" in the KJV.

As I am writing this post, something completely random has popped into my head -- lines from a Robert Graves poem I last read decades ago. I include them here in case they should turn out to have some relevance:

Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back

The white caribou

I took this photo this past Wednesday (July 8) outside Caribou Cafe, which is also where I took the June 15 photo is "Humanoid deer creatures."

The white hart -- or white caribou, I suppose -- is stationed in front of a door, or portal.

The fact that it's specifically a caribou, or reindeer, led me to make some connections. Caribou is a link to Cherubim, which comes from the Akkadian karibu, as noted in "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window" (June 2024). I made a pun on reindeer and Mithrandir in "Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir" (May 24). Mith means "gray," so a gray randir (reindeer) -- but of course Gandalf the Grey later becomes Gandalf the White. Way back in 2018, in a comment on Bruce's post "Tychonievich's Meditations on a Tarot," I had written, "Mithrandir should clearly be the Hermit, I think."

These reindeer-related contemplations also led me back to my 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective," which begins by mentioning that I had recently gone 50 hours without sleep.

Shortly after rereading that old post, the algorithm suggested a song I'd never heard: "Welcome Home, Son" by Radical Face. I listened to it.

The lyrics begin thus, linking to the 50 hours without sleep:

Sleep don't visit, so I choke on the sun

And the days blur into one

The song triggered a vivid mental image of running through a wood after a white hart, trusting that it would lead me "home." After I'd listened to the song, I looked at some of the comments, and this one struck me:

This song reminds me of those moments when I trust my horse and I start galloping in the field and I let go and outstretch my arms, the wind blowing on my face, cooling down my worries of falling, the sun shining on my back, warming me on the cold day. Trusting an animal with your life is the best feeling. I love him.

The reference to "trusting an animal with your life" synched with my mental image of following a hart and trusting it. The comment ends with "I love him," with him referring to a horse. The name Philip -- which my 2020 post identifies with "a Christmas reindeer" -- means "horse-lover."

Here is the album cover art from the Radical Face song:

And here's one of the "time warp images" from "Love pop, baby, love pop" (September 2024), recently reposted in "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10):

Update: About an hour after posting this, with its "days blur into one" reference, I read this in White Crows:

The night it had happened felt like the distant past, but had occurred only a matter of days ago. How many days? Sheppard could figure it out if he looked at a calendar, but right this second, he didn’t know. Events, time, emotions, everything had melted together.

DeerHermit

The juxtaposition of a hermit with a hart, sometimes merged into a single "humanoid deer creature," has been a sync theme recently. Thus this sign caught my eye as I passed it on the road this morning:

It says DeerHer, written as a single word with no space. If Her is understood to be a truncated form of the word Hermit, then we have our hart-hermit combination. DeerHer is a shop that specializes in wedding cookies (it's traditional in Taiwan to give boxes of assorted cookies to wedding guests), which is pretty far removed from the idea of a hermit, but it's typical of the sync fairies to repurpose things like that.

The Tarot card known as the Hermit in most French and English decks was in the oldest lists of Tarot trumps, which are in Italian, known as Time, or the Old Man. This made me think of the Chinese deity known as the Old Man of the South Pole, who is portrayed as an old man with a white beard and a staff, and who is often accompanied by a deer. In Journey to the West, it is specified that this is a white deer, but it is not normally portrayed as white in art. Here is a Japanese portrayal:

Scrambled serendipity

In yesterday's post "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch," I revisited an old 2019 post in which a book titled Serendipities manifested "a strange sort of anti-serendipity": The book caught my eye because the cover art was a painting I had recently posted about, but it turned out to be a version of the painting that lacked the key feature I had been interested in.

Today, a motorcyclist wearing this T-shirt was right ahead of me on the road for several minutes. (This is not my photo. I found it online.)

At first it looks as if it says SERENDIPITY, but the P and the R have been swapped, and the second E has been modified to the visually similar F. Below this SEPFNDIRITY is "DODF", which is harder to decrypt. My best guess is that it is a modification of "POOF" -- a sound effect associated with things appearing or disappearing as if by magic, which is somewhat related to the concept of serendipity.

Africa has its own time

This evening, I saw a textbook article, for reading comprehension practice, about the Ethiopian calendar and how it differs from the Gregorian.

About an hour later, I saw a /pol/ thread titled "TIL Africa has its own time," with a screenshot of an article about "African time" as a reference to Africans always being late for everything. (Lots of places and cultures make that joke about themselves.) The jannies appear to have deleted the thread before it was archived, since I can't find it now.

The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch

The Hermit card of the Tarot has been in the sync stream recently, including this "Hermit Portal" painting by Laura Bruno, which features an owl -- a bird which does not appear on most Hermit cards.

In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the Magician.

Today it occurred to me that this was something that had come up before: different versions of a depiction of a hermit, with and without an owl, and in conjunction with the Magician card of the Tarot.

The most famous and influential hermit in history is indisputably St. Anthony the Great, whose hallucinatory "temptation" in the wilderness has attracted the attention of artists from Gustave Flaubert to Salvador Dalí to Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch revisited the theme more than once, and while the St. Anthony Triptych in Lisbon isn't my favorite depiction of that saint by that artist, it entered the sync stream in "U.E. echoes A.E." (October 2019). I wrote:

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

As far back as "The Magician: Preliminary thoughts" (October 2018) I had recognized a connection between Bosch's Conjurer painting and the Magician card of the Tarot. Here is a detail showing the conjurer with his dog and owl:

And here is a detail from the Lisbon St. Anthony Triptych, showing the same two animals, and confirming that the owl is indeed an owl and not a monkey.

Around the time I was writing about these Bosch paintings in connection with the Tarot, I ran across an English translation of a book by Umberto Eco called, appropriately Serendipities, with the St. Anthony Triptych on the cover. As reported in the 2019 post, I bought the book "on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art," only to discover later that it was actually the vastly inferior (fake, in my opinion) São Paulo St. Anthony Triptych, and that the element that had drawn my attention to that painting in the first place -- the owl -- was conspicuous by its absence.

I commented:

[I]t's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.

Since you asked, my favorite depiction of St. Anthony, and my second-favorite Bosch after The Conjurer, is the Madrid Temptation.

Dalí's painting shows a fanatic. This one shows a saint, one who has come to terms with the goblin-haunted world in which he finds himself and with the "minor presences, riff-raff of consciousness" (Irish Murdoch's phrase), weird but ultimately harmless, that accompany him in his meditations.

What pandemic, Hal?

I've been reading Trish MacGregor's novel White Crows. Hal is a person from the distant future who has time-traveled back to c. 2022.

Sometimes, when they'd been preparing for this trip, they'd gotten -- or remembered -- data that had contradicted what they currently had known about the twenty-first [century]. He remembered, for instance, that when he was in his teens, his mother had told him that once they were ready to leave . . . they would have to choose a year other than the early 2020s because a pandemic would be raging. But no one had mentioned pandemic in subsequent years and clearly, no pandemic raged now.

Not long before his mother was killed . . . he'd asked her about that pandemic in the early 2020s. She'd looked at him, frowning. What pandemic, Hal?

I thought this was incredibly witty and was a bit disappointed when the novel went on to offer explanations in terms of alternate timelines and the Mandela Effect -- because it's such an accurate portrayal, only slightly exaggerated, of our current reality, without any need for sci-fi shenanigans.

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes.

At the moment, the last post in the algorithm-generated "Poplar posts" list at the bottom of this blog is "Chubby Checker, god of quads" (August 2025). I clicked on it and, scrolling through the comments, found this one from Gondola:

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes. Those Temperance and Hermit links are particularly interesting with fresh eyes.

She was referring to my old post "Green Door, Green Lantern" (February 2023), which references the Hermit card of the Tarot. She was saying that the Hermit theme from 2023 had taken on new meaning in 2025. I happened to reread that old comment just now, when the Hermit theme is yet again taking on new meaning.

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the crucifix!

I don't know why I happened to remember such a thing, but when I looked at the calendar this morning, it occurred to me that today would have been the 99th birthday of the late great Gene Ray, commonly known as the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, the discoverer of Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous Four-Day Time Cube. Rest in power, Dr. Ray.

He's remembered as a net.kook, of course, but I've always believed he had a genuinely good soul, and I like to imagine that since passing he's found his way to "sun-up."

These passing reflections on the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human were reinforced a few hours later, when in my daily scripture reading I happened to read two references to how Abram/Abraham was "ninety years old and nine" (Gen. 17:1, 24). These are the only two references in all of scripture to that particular age.

Thinking about Dr. Ray made me think of the "16 Wise Insights" video, by one of his disciples:

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the cars!

Whoa, more lasers are coming out of the cars!

As though the cars are laser machines that fire lasers at will, as though they had revolted against their very purpose of driving on roads and have elected laser projection as a preferable aim, they are emitting a lot of lasers!

And that reminds me of something I meant to post a couple of days ago but forgot. This past Tuesday, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

A particularly radiant canvas from 1847, Stigmata of St Francis by Bartolomeo Della Gatta, shows a beautiful barn owl looking away as St Francis gets zapped by the floating apparition of Christ on the cross. There is something so bizarre about this image, I mean, there are thin little laser beams shooting off a glowing crucified Jesus hitting each point of stigmata on the saint.

Here's the painting he's referring to:

Later that evening, I saw this on AC. It also appears at first glance to show a laser beam coming out of a crucifix.

I looked up St. Francis and discovered that, although he died on October 3, his feast day is October 4. I recently posted about this pair of dates, in "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20).

Hart, hermit, skeleton

Since my post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10), the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine, which includes a white hart, has been in the sync stream. Wade has repeatedly associated this card with the deer-headed skeleton in "Humanoid deer creatures" (June 20), the idea being that in this white (because skeletal) deer-headed man, the white hart and the hermit have merged into a single being.

"Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27) once again revisited the above Hermit card, this time in connection with a painting by Laura Bruno. This sent WanderingGondola to Laura's blog, where she clicked on the "Tarot Readings" page and read where Laura says, "I most often use Robin Wood’s deck."

I had looked at that page of Laura's as well, but I was already aware of the Robin Wood deck, which is fairly popular. It's broadly based on the Rider-Waite but has been "paganized," with most of the explicitly Christian symbolism removed.

(Just now, thinking about Laura Bruno and Robin Wood, I accidentally typed Laura Wood, which is the name of the lady who runs the Thinking Housewife blog. Thinking the error might be synchronistically relevant, I visited that blog and found a post called "The Federal Octopus," dated yesterday. No obvious relevance beyond the name.)

WG, though, wasn't familiar with the Robin Wood deck and looked it up. She found a review of the deck on Aeclectic Tarot. Deck reviews on that site will show a few sample cards: four of the Major Arcana, plus one card from each suit. Here are the first three cards it shows for Robin Wood:

The first card is the Magician, who is wearing a headdress made from a deerskin, complete with antlers. Right after that is the Hermit, so we have the hart-hermit pair again. The third card is Death. In Robin Wood's version, the figure of Death is (like the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine) completely concealed in a hooded cloak. Conceptually, though, it is the Grim Reaper, a skeleton.

I was aware that Aeclectic reivews always show four Majors and four Minors. Are they always the same ones, though? Does it always begin with the Magician and the Hermit, or is that something unique to their Robin Wood review? To check this, I went to the main page for Tarot reviews and clicked on two of the four featured decks there: first the Modern Witch Tarot and then the Forest of Enchantment Tarot. I know nothing about either of those decks and chose them (rather than either of the two other featured decks) for no particular reason. The Modern Witch review showed a completely different selection of cards from the Robin Wood Review. Then I clicked Forest of Enchantment and saw this:

That's right. This is a less traditional Tarot deck, and the first card it shows -- the zero card, corresponding to the Fool -- is actually called The White Hart. One of the other cards featured in the review -- I guess it's the Ace of Wands, or maybe Swords -- features a white crow. (See my June 20 post "October 3 and 4, and white crows.")

The review also shows what the backs of the cards look like. Owls.

Grandmother Cardinal

Over lunch, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

He described a day with a tightly knit web of meaningful moments, all tying back to a quote from Whitley Strieber he'd read that morning, "...the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark." Seconds later, he heard a woman on the radio describe seeing a red cardinal, she said it was "grandma winking back from the beyond." When Joe told his wife about this little coincidence, a red cardinal landed on a branch just outside the closest window.

That caught my eye because that particular quote from Whitley Strieber -- a man who has written many books and produced many quotable lines -- gave its name to my own Strieber blog, Winking Back from the Dark.

The red cardinal is a North American bird, not something I'm going to see in Taiwan, but when I went to pay for my lunch, I saw a somewhat cardinal-like plush toy at the counter.

It's red, with a beak and a crest, but I thought maybe it was supposed to be a pterodactyl rather than a bird. After a bit of searching online, I determined that it is neither a bird nor a pterodactyl but some Japanese thing that's supposed to be an anthropomorphic carrot or something.

Anyway, it was sufficiently cardinal-adjacent that it reminded me of the Christopher Blythe video whose thumbnail I had posted in "Owl and deer" (June 26). I hadn't watched any of it, but I remembered that the title mentioned a woman named Cardinal -- synching with the cardinal in Stories from the Messengers that was "grandma." I went back to his channel to find the video. I found that it was actually the second in a two-part series called "Sherry Cardinal Talks Chief Midegah," so I went to the first one and started playing it. Just 47 seconds in, this appears on the screen:

I was watching this because I'd connected a woman named Cardinal with a cardinal that was "grandma." Now there's a specific grandmother reference. I brought up the video transcript and word-searched for grandmother. Sure enough, the grandmother is Cardinal:

Now Sherry Cardinal was the right-hand woman of a man named David Taylor, and her story is about her experience becoming acquainted with David Taylor and then eventually being appointed as chief grandmother of David's clan.