Yesterday I posted "Eclipse skull and crossbones," continuing the theme of "The eclipsing moon as a skull." In the comments, Debbie introduced the theme of twins -- though it had, I thought, only a rather tenuous connection to what I had posted. (The post discussed the "eclipse crossroads" city of Carbondale, from which Debbie free-associated to carbon paper, carbon copies, and twins.)
Yesterday evening, approximately six and a half hours after Debbie's comment, I saw this on /x/, illustrating a thread dedicated to the astrological analysis of "evil people":
I guess this was just intended as a sinister-looking representation of the sign of Gemini, but the details are quite synchy. The twins have skull heads, and above each skull is a crescent, synching with the idea of the moon as a skull. Centered above them is a cross, suggesting the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois, where the paths of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses intersect. The two crescents, besides representing the moon, could also represent solar eclipses just before or after the moment of totality. (Only very thin crescents, like those in the image, would have this ambiguity. A wider crescent moon is quite distinct in shape from a partially eclipsed sun.)
The constellation of Gemini represents Castor and Pollux, whose "white skullcaps" (and connection with the "second moon," Basidium) I discussed in my December 2 post "They are the eggmen."
This afternoon I ran across this image on /pol/ and clicked on it because it said "The Story of Gog And Magog" -- Gog came up in the March 6 post "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" -- but the rest of it turned out to have nothing to do with that title:
All nonsense, in case you were wondering. The white and black crescents in Éliphas Lévi's iconic image represent mercy and justice, not anything racial, and the Goat itself shares nothing but a name with the alleged idols of the Knights Templar. Their "Baphomet" -- most likely a corruption of the name Mahomet -- was usually described as a severed human head, a head with three faces, or -- most notably -- a human skull.
Also interesting is the reappearance of the twin crescents from the Gemini image, together with the "Gog and Magog." My uncle William John used to say that Gog and Magog were "the apocalyptic equivalent of Tweedledee and Tweedledum" -- meaning that both sides in the Battle of Armageddon would consist mostly of evil clowns, morally indistinguishable -- so there's the twin theme again.
I dreamed I was somewhere away from home -- in a hotel room, I think, with some family members -- and I was reading a book. This was a very thick blue or green paperback, and on the cover was nothing but an oval-shaped black-and-white photograph of James Joyce. I don't think the book was actually by Joyce, though, although it was certainly thick enough to be Ulysses. Something about the typeface and punctuation gave a strong 19th-century impression, and when I tried to picture the author, I got an image of a professorial-looking man from that era, with a receding hairline and a heavy beard. I though it might be either William James or Éliphas Lévi. I don't have a clear idea of the content of the book or even of the language, but I'm sure it was a modern European language (perhaps English, French, or Italian), and that many of the paragraphs began with em-dashes. Reading it gave me the exhilarating feeling of seeing puzzle pieces fit together.
I decided to eat the last page of the book. It came apart in my mouth like pastry and had a light honey-like flavor. For a moment I reproached myself for this stupid mistake -- How could I finish reading the book now that I'd eaten the last page? -- but then I remembered that I had another copy of the same book at home, so it was no big deal.
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The idea of eating a book and having it taste like honey is biblical, and this dream may have been influenced by my fairly recent (February 22) reading of Ezekiel 2 and 3:
"But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee."
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
Moreover he said unto me, "Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel."
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, "Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."
And he said unto me, "Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand" (Ezek. 2:8-3:6).
The language of the hand being "sent" also parallels what Daniel told Belshazzar about the writing on the wall:
And thou . . . hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; . . . and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written (Dan. 5:22-24).
John of Patmos -- whose Revelation is, among other things, a synthesis of the various Old Testament prophets -- reports an experience similar to Ezekiel's:
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open . . . .
And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."
And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, "Give me the little book."
And he said unto me, "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey."
And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, "Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings" (Rev. 10:1-2, 8-11).
Unlike Ezekiel, who is specifically told that he does not have to speak "to many people of a strange speech," John is instructed to "prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues."
I think the honey-like flavor of all these books is probably an allusion to manna -- "the taste of it was like wafers made with honey" (Ex. 16:31) -- which symbolized the word of God:
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live (Deut. 8:3).
Recent syncs have implicitly brought up the idea of eating a book, as the golden plates of the Book of Mormon have been connected with the breakfast cereals Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Hidden Treasures. (see "A chameleon (or salamander) shifting trees -- this is cereal, guys!") Just as Ezekiel and John must eat a book before prophesying, Patrick tells William Alizio that he must finish eating all the Hidden Treasures before he can deliver his message (the message being "We have come to take you away").
Just yesterday I was at the supermarket to buy cocoa powder, and I saw that they had two kinds of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for sale: "Classic" and "Honey Flavor."
Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is. I assumed it was one of two keys because of prior syncs about pairs of keys. This curiosity was reinforced when, on February 2, Francis Berger posted "The Society of Crossed Keys is Real???!!!" -- about a fictional society in a Wes Anderson film and its real-world counterpart, each of which has a pair of crossed keys as its logo. It's not at all the sort of thing Frank usually blogs about, and it seemed like an obvious sync wink. On February 3, I even bought The Small Golden Key, a 1985 book by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Thinley Norbu, which I happened upon in a used bookstore, just because of its title -- even though I don't think Buddhism could possibly be the second key, at least not for me. I know many serious Buddhists, have read many Buddhist books, and recognize the great value of Buddhism for some people, but my deepest self categorically rejects it.
On February 5, I was checking a few YouTube channels and found a video posted by the synchromystic channel LXXXVIII finis temporis on January 25. It's about two recent movies I've never seen and didn't even know existed until today: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Uncharted (2022), both of which share the oddly specific feature of two keys in the form of crosses (cf. crossed keys) which must be combined and used together:
The video doesn't mention it, but a further coincidence between these two movies is the names, both of which refer to navigation in a situation where essential information is lacking. "Uncharted" of course refers to regions for which no map has been made. "Dead reckoning" means estimating one's current position from a known past position plus an estimated velocity, rather than ascertaining it directly by means of landmarks, stars, or satellite. (The idea of Laplace's demon -- who knows every detail of the present and therefore can predict every detail of the future -- is dead reckoning taken to extremes; see the recent mention of Laplace in "Pokélogan.")
If the Rosary is one of the keys, and on September 3, 2022, I had a dream in which "I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key," then the other key should also somehow have the form of a cross. That left me stumped for a while.
I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. Or roses are red, and the complementary color would be green. Those thoughts didn't lead anywhere at first, but then they clicked when I remembered one of the lines in the video, from the Mission: Impossible movie: "The key is only the beginning." Where had I heard a line like that before?
"Finding the key is just the beginning" -- on the cover of a novel whose main character is literally named Lily Green. The key isn't a cross, but it does have a little cross cut into the bit. Definitely a hit, but not the answer. I mean, a young-adult novel about leprechauns can't very well be the second key!
Going back to thinking of what sort of "key" might complement the Rosary, I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David! That is the label commonly given to this diagram from the Absconditorum Clavis of Guillaume Postel:
One element of this otherwise forgotten diagram had great influence on the development of the esoteric Tarot. If you look at the bow of the key, it has the letters ROTA written around its circumference That the word rota, "wheel," is intended is clear from the fact that the word also appears on the bit of the key. Éliphas Lévi noticed that when rota is written in a circle, it can also be read as Tarot. I've written several posts about ROTA on my Tarot blog if you want all the details, but the upshot is that the Rider-Waite Tarot, by far the most influential English-language deck, ended up with those four letters written on the Wheel of Fortune:
The significance of this in the present context is that the Wheel of Fortune -- at least this extremely influential version of it -- is a key. Not only that, but it features two crosses united as one. The eight-spoked wheel of Fortuna is a very old symbol, but in Waite's version, the eight spokes clearly consist of two crosses. The diagonal cross, consisting of simple lines, connects the four letters of the Hebrew name of God. The other cross, decorated with alchemical symbols, connects the four letters of ROTA.
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This is a little digression, but I want to note it as a rather impressive synchronicity. I hadn't thought of Postel's Key of David since I did all those Wheel of Fortune posts back in 2019, and I've never had any real interest in it beyond its influence on Lévi. I've never made any attempt to analyze the other symbols it incorporates, such as the various geometric shapes inside the bow of the key. However, on February 5, I was notified of a new post by Galahad Eridanus, who posts very infrequently. (His last post was in October 2023.) It's called "The Edge of the Age," and one of the things he talks about is
the kinds of knots you tie your brain in when you try to predict from oughts instead of ises, and to account for "weird behaviour" from inside the model that is causing the behaviour to seem "weird" in the first place.
After a brief discussion of Ptolemaic epicycles, the go-to example of this sort of thing, he talks about another convoluted astronomical theory -- Kepler's idea that the (heliocentric) orbits of the planets could be mathematically derived from a series of nested Platonic solids. He includes this diagram:
Going from the outside in, we have: a sphere, a cube, another sphere, a tetrahedron, and then lots of much smaller shapes. Now compare that to the bow of Postel's key: a circle, a square, another circle, and a triangle. The triangle is even trisected so that it looks like a tetrahedron.
At first I assumed that Kepler's theory must have been one of the many ideas Postel incorporated into his key diagram, but looking up the dates I see that Absconditorum Clavis was published in 1547, before Kepler was born. Either Kepler was inspired by Postel, or they both drew from some earlier source -- or else the similarity, like my running into the two diagrams at the same time, is just a massive coincidence.
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Coming back to the Wheel of Fortune as a key, this helped me make sense of the relevance of the novel Green. It's a novel about leprechauns, and luck, as an actual faculty possessed by leprechauns and by humans like Lily Green who have leprechaun blood, plays a massive role in the plot. Four-leaf clovers, all that jazz. Luck is fortune, Fortuna is Lady Luck. In my recent post "O Fortuna velut luna . . .," I even mentioned Fortuna as an Irishwoman (in a Piers Anthony novel), a clear link to Lily Green, the girl with leprechaun blood in her veins.
The second cross/key has to do with luck, fortune, coincidence, synchronicity -- in contrast perhaps to the repetitive always-the-sameness of the Rosary. A cross is a pretty good symbol of coincidence: two completely different (perpendicular) lines just happen to meet, such that a point on the one line is literally coincident with a point on the other. In fact, the title of a recent post, "One-eyed × purple people eater," following common usage in Taiwan, used a cross to indicate coincidental juxtaposition.
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I noted that the two movies in the LXXXVIII video, chosen because they both featured pairs of cross-shaped keys, also share navigation-themed titles: Dead Reckoning and Uncharted. Fortuna is also associated with navigation; in Classical art, she is typically depicted holding a ship's rudder. Her other famous attribute, the eight-spoked wheel, resembles a ship's helm. Debbie has repeatedly pointed in comments here to the connection between the ship's helm and the eight-pointed star, and I thought of her when this image showed up on my browser's home screen on February 1:
Stars, of course, are themselves closely associated with luck.
In later iconography, Fortuna is sometimes depicted with a blindfold, like Justice. The idea of a blind navigator -- one who must navigate under information-deprived conditions -- is another link to Dead Reckoning and Uncharted.
One last coincidence to note: Fortuna's eight-spoked wheel is, as I have noted in past Wheel of Fortune posts, an ancient alternative form of the Christian Ichthys symbol:
The eight-spoked wheel, just like the cross, can symbolize either Christ or Fortuna. The fact that its Christian meaning is tied to the Greek word for "fish" is a further coincidence. I posted about the medieval poem O Fortunaback in 2019 and then again yesterday. Both posts included this little cartoon, based on punningly misreading Fortuna as a reference to fish:
I'm going to need some time to process all this, but it seems like a promising step forward in understanding the two-key theme. Of course "One key is the Rosary, and the other is synchronicity" isn't a solution to the riddle but just a starting point. "Finding the key is just the beginning."
Thinking about words that sound like tuna has reminded me of the greatest music video of all time. And now it's reminded you of it, too. You're welcome:
The Histoire de la magie of Éliphas Lévi includes a brief section on China. After extolling the occult wisdom of the I Ching and Confucius, Lévi has this to say about the next development in Chinese thought:
After Confucius came the materialistic Fo, who substituted the traditions of Indian sorcery for the remnants of Egyptian Transcendental Magic. The cultus of Fo paralysed the progress of the sciences in China, and the abortive civilisation of this great people collapsed into routine and stupor.
Who is this Fo? Have you never heard of him? Well, you probably have, but under a different name. Fó (佛), from the Old Chinese *but, is nothing other than the Chinese transliteration of a Pali and Sanskrit word we have adopted into English with minimal modification: Buddha. Fo is the Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, and the cultus of Fo is Buddhism.
Did Lévi realize this? Apparently not. His reference to "Indian sorcery" suggests an awareness that Fo was an Indian teacher whose thought was later adopted by the Chinese; on the other hand, he characterizes Confucianism as "Egyptian," so that may not mean much! His ignorance of the identity of Fo is evident in his statement that he came "after Confucius," when in fact the two lived at roughly the same time. Confucius lived c. 551-479 BC, and the Buddha's dates are generally given as either 563-483 or 480-400 BC. However, Buddhism (Fójiào, "doctrine of Fo") did not enter China until much later, in the first century AD, and Lévi apparently assumes that Fo was a Chinese person of that era.
Lévi's highly negative assessment of "Fo" can be contrasted with what he has to say about "Buddha" in India:
To the revelation of Krishna succeeded that of Buddha, who married the purest religion to philosophy of the highest kind. The happiness of the world was thus held to be secured and there was nothing further to expect, pending the tenth and final incarnation, when Vishnu will return in his proper form.
I take this as conclusive proof that Lévi did not know that Fo was the Buddha. How could he knowingly have said that the man "who married the purest religion to philosophy of the highest kind" was "materialistic" and caused the spiritual collapse of the Chinese civilization?
How is it possible to know anything at all about Fo-ism and its influence on Chinese civilization without also knowing that Fo is the Buddha? I attribute it to Lévi's being French. The English who went to China would already have been quite familiar with India, and would immediately have recognized Fo as the Chinese name for an Indian figure they already knew. The first French missionaries to China, in contrast, may well have known little or nothing about India and may have written about "Fo" without knowing who he was, and Lévi's understanding of Chinese religious history is presumably based on such French works.
I have been quoting A. E. Waite's English translation of Lévi's book. Waite always adds a footnote anytime he disagrees with Lévi or thinks he is in error, and yet he has nothing to say about "Fo," so he was also apparently unaware of the Fo-Buddha identity. But that is only to be expected. Waite would have learned about China by reading English books, written by people who knew who Fo was and therefore translated the title as Buddha. Like anyone else who reads Lévi without knowing any Chinese, he would probably have assumed that "Fo" was some Chinese figure he didn't happen to have heard of and wouldn't have found anything remarkable in that.
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The name Buddha has strongly positive connotations for most people. Even those who are not Buddhists generally think of him as someone who was very wise and deeply spiritual. What happens, though, if you read about the teachings of "Fo" and their influence on the Chinese civilization, but do so through a veil of ignorance, without knowing that this "Fo" is none other than the vaunted Buddha? Well, you might end up with an anomalous assessment like Lévi's: (1) that Fo was materialistic, (2) that he promoted low "sorcery" as opposed to high magic, and (3) that his influence put an end to the creativity of Chinese civilization.
How just is that assessment, if not of the historical Buddha himself, at least of Chinese Buddhism personified as "Fo"? I have no special knowledge of Chinese history, but here are my impressions as someone who has lived in Taiwan for nearly 20 years and has known many Chinese Buddhists.
To start with the second charge, sorcery in modern Taiwan is overwhelmingly a Taoist phenomenon, and orthodox Buddhists disapprove of it. Of course the line between the two religions can be very blurry, with many temples featuring statues of the Buddha or Guanyin (Avalokiteshvara) alongside those of the Taoist gods, but with very few exceptions all the Chinese sorcery I have ever seen or heard of has been purely Taoist in character, with little or no discernible Buddhist influence. Buddhist sorcery is apparently a thing (see Tibet), but plays little role in Chinese Buddhism as I know it.
About Buddhism's effect on Chinese creativity, it is an interesting possibility. It seems clear enough that ancient China was highly creative, and that modern China is not, but I'm not convinced that Buddhism is the reason. Journey to the West, for example, is a highly creative work of literature which is Buddhist -- though it can be argued that the Buddhism is only superficial and that its "heart" is still very Taoist. (Taoist influence in Journey to the West is perhaps comparable to "pagan" influence in The Divine Comedy.)
Materialism is the most interesting charge, though, and I think the most astute. At first glance, it seems absurd to say that Buddhism is more materialistic than the doctrine of Confucius, who had a deliberate policy of not saying anything about gods or spirits. Buddhism rejects the material as illusory, scorns money and physical pleasure, and teaches reincarnation, which implies the existence of spirits. How can that be called materialistic? On the other hand, Buddhism is notoriously the favorite religion of atheists, which must mean something.
Whether or not spirit is ontologically separate from matter (monism vs. dualism) is not really the point of materialism. Joseph Smith taught that "all spirit is matter" (D&C 131:7), but he was not in any meaningful sense a materialist. A true materialist is one who takes the features of material objects -- impermanence, determinism, ontological complexity, lack of inherent meaning -- and attributes them to everything. Chinese Buddhism as I know it (mostly through the late Chan Master Sheng-yen and his disciples) does that. There is a strong focus on the "causes and conditions" underlying everything, including human actions. Everything, including the human soul, is impermanent and lacking in reality because it is made up of parts whose current relationship or configuration will not last forever -- very close to "atoms and the void." Nothing, including human love, is ultimately real or has any significance; and the only real goal is the negative and highly materialistic one of the cessation of all suffering.
This may or may not be a distortion of what the Buddha originally taught, but I have read a bit of modern Chinese Buddhist literature and had long philosophical discussions with modern Chinese Buddhists, and I believe I am representing their thought -- "Fo" as he appears today -- fairly. And I believe that this "materialistic cultus of Fo" grew out of the original Buddhism just as naturally and inevitably as Epicureanism grew out of the thought of Plato.
In my September 1 post "I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove," I wrote about being followed by a bird of that description (which, by the way, has not reappeared since I wrote that post). Connecting it with the red dove that appears on the Rider-Waite Magician card, which I had interpreted as a symbol of prayer, I took it as an injunction to pray more -- in particular, to be stricter with myself about praying the Rosary every single day. In my original post about the red dove on Waite's card, I had quoted Waite's reference to "flos campi and lilium convallium" -- which I encountered again when I looked up "the voice of the turtle" in the Bible and found that it was in Song of Solomon 2:12, and that that chapter begins "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys." I noted in my post that I had thought "Rose of Sharon" and "Lily of the Valleys" were Marian titles used in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, but that in fact they are not. I also noted the reference in v. 13 to "green figs," synching with my own recent experience with green figs.
Today, on a whim, I started reading La mère de Dieu (1844), an early devotional work written by the then-obscure Alphonse Louis Constant six years before he took up magic and began to be known as Éliphas Lévi. Beginning on p. 52, Lévi describes an imaginative scene in which the young Mary, only three years of age, feels drawn to the Temple, enters it, and receives a revelation of her destiny as the future Mother of God. In describing her rapture, and her spiritual communication with the unborn Christ, Lévi draws heavily on the language of the Song of Solomon. On p. 57, I found this:
This is a very close paraphrase of Song 2:12-13 -- a passage which I had connected with praying to Mary, but only very indirectly, by way of an obscure detail on a Tarot card and an incorrect memory of the content of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Here is Lévi connecting the same passage with Mary very directly.
While on the road this afternoon, I fell to thinking about the term Romantic Christian -- designating the approach to Christianity advocated by Bruce Charlton, William Wildblood, Francis Berger, and myself -- and about how it is somewhat suboptimal because it is not a single word and because it cannot be abbreviated without confusion (since RC, in a religious context, normally means Roman Catholic). While my mind was thus occupied, I saw this printed on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me:
I took this as synchronistic confirmation that Romantic is after all the best term to be using. The T-shirts equation of Romanticism with life also struck me as appropriate, since a big part of the Romantic Christian approach is a focus on Heaven as eternal life (rather than eternal rest, absorption into God, etc.) and on God as the living God, existing in time. An emphasis on life is also typical of the Gospel and First Epistle of John.
Later in the day, as is my habit on Fridays, I prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, which are (translating): the Prayer in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. My meditations on the Rosary are highly visual in nature, the verbal part of my brain being preoccupied with the prayers themselves, and my mental image of the Prayer in the Garden is heavily influenced by the Yeats poem The Travail of Passion (which alludes to all five of the Sorrowful Mysteries).
When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream:
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.
Today my meditations were also colored by the T-shirt synchronicity: "Life is Romantic: Romantic Crown." Jesus' crown, plaited of thorny plants, was a crown of life, in contrast to the inorganic gold and jewels worn by worldly kings. "Why do ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life?" (Morm. 8:39).
While imagining Jesus praying among "the flowers by Kidron stream . . . Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream," I suddenly realized the relationship of roses and lilies to one of the strange features of the T-shirt inscription: the use of an upside-down W in place of an M. My recent experience with a red dove had led me back to my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician." In that post, I connect the red dove flying upward on the Magician card with the white dove flying downward on the Ace of Cups -- and I note that the Ace of Cups is marked with a W which is actually an upside-down M, confirming that it is an inversion of the Magician. I see now that the birds themselves have the form of a stylized W and M.
As detailed in the 2018 post, the red dove represents the Pillar of Severity and prayers ascending to heaven, and the white dove represents the Pillar of Mercy and blessings descending to earth. The red dove flying to heaven made me think of the Mosaic rite for cleansing lepers (Leviticus 14), which involves killing a bird in a clay vessel over running water (cf. the white dove over a vessel with running water on the Ace of Cups), dipping a living bird in its blood, and then releasing this bloody bird in an open field (cf. the Magician's red dove, surrounded by what Waite calls flos campi et lilium convallium, "flowers of the field and lilies of the valley").
Blood crying to heaven is a familiar biblical expression, and Jesus bled (or sweat as if her were bleeding) as he prayed in the garden. By "coincidence," just before seeing the "Life Is Romantic" T-shirt, I had read this in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie:
Paracelsus knew the mysteries of blood; he knew why the priests of Baal made incisions with knives in their flesh, and then brought down fire from heaven; . . . he knew how spilt blood cries for vengeance or mercy and fills the air with angels or demons.
He goes on to relate an anecdote from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier about certain Asian magicians who caused a small piece of wood to grow up into a flowering mango tree in the space of half an hour, by cutting themselves and rubbing the wood with their blood.
The Magician card alludes to Gethsemane via the red dove of prayer flying upward, surrounded by garden flowers. The Ace of Cups shows the content of Jesus' prayer in the garden -- "if thou be willing, remove this cup from me" -- and the white dove descending alludes to Heaven's response: "and there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him."
The Yeats poem begins with an open door: "When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide." This reminds me of a recent dream:
I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.
After the dream, I counted the words in the Latin Pater Noster and found that there are exactly 50, corresponding perfectly to the five decades of the Rosary.
And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name (Rev. 3:7-8).
Incidentally, Abraham von Franckenberg's illustration of Guillaume Postel's interpretation of the "key of David" would later influence Lévi significantly, particularly in his idea of writing the word ROTA/TARO around the rim of a wheel.
This blind force, which the power of Christianity enchained and cast into the abyss, meaning into the centre of the earth, made its last efforts and manifested its final convulsions by monstrous births among barbarians. There is scarcely a district in which the preachers of the gospel did not have to contend with animals in hideous forms, being incarnations of idolatry in its death-throes. The vouivres, graouillis, gargoyles, tarasques and not allegorical only; it is certain that moral disorders produce physical deformities and do, to some extent, realise the frightful forms attributed by tradition to demons. The question arises whether those fossil remains from which Cuvier built up his mammoth monsters belong really in all cases to epochs preceding our creation. Is also that great dragon merely an allegory which Regulus is represented as attacking with machines of war and which according to Livy and Pliny lived on the borders of the river Bagrada? His skin, which measured 120 feet, was sent to Rome and was there preserved until the period of the war with Numantia. There was an ancient tradition that when the gods were angered by extraordinary crimes, they sent monsters upon earth, and this tradition is too universal not to be founded upon actual facts; it follows that the stories concerning it belong more frequently to history than mythology.
Cuvier died shortly before the discovery of dinosaurs properly so called, and the "mammoth monsters" named or described by him include the mastodon, Megatherium, Mosasaurus, and our own favorite, the Pterodactlyus antiquus.
The tarasque -- a chimerical monster of Provence, supposed to have been tamed by St. Martha, sister of Lazarus -- was later adopted and adapted by D&D as the game's biggest, baddest monster, described as "basically a kaiju" -- that is, a gigantic Japanese movie monster of the kind typified by Godzilla. Only after seeing Lévi juxtapose it with the giant reptiles of paleontology -- "dinosaurs" in the layman's sense -- did I notice how phonetically similar tarasque is to T. rex. St. George is sometimes portrayed in art as slaying what looks like a Coelophysis bauri, so why not imagine St. Martha using holy water and a cross to bring a Tyrannosaurus rex to heel? (No, I'm not proposing that this actually happened; just making connections.)
In my August 7 post "Standing in the Hall of Fame, and Christ at the door," I recount how, looking for Greg Olsen's painting of Jesus knocking at a green door, I ran across his painting of Jesus with sparrows.
The painting is called Even a Sparrow and refers to Jesus' saying about God taking note even of the fall of a sparrow. It made me think of two things, though: first, the apocryphal story (Gospel of James; also alluded to twice in the Quran) of the child Jesus making 12 sparrows of clay and making them come to life; and second, a childhood dream in which I had written a book (the second in a trilogy) called Many Sparrows.
By "coincidence," hours after seeing the painting and thinking of the legend of the clay sparrows, I read an allegorical interpretation of that same legend in a book I have been reading, Histoire de la magie by Éliphas Lévi.
Today, wanting to look up a Bible reference for another post, I opened the BibleGateway website. Guess what their "verse of the day" is.
The book I dreamed of having written was called Many Sparrows; Olsen's painting is called Even a Sparrow. Luke 12:7 is one of two verses in the Bible that include the phrase many sparrows (the other is the parallel passage in Matt. 10:31), and it is the only one that also includes the word even. I know this because I searched for even sparrow to see if Olsen's title was in the Bible. Besides Luke 12:7, the only other hit was this:
Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God (Ps. 84:3).
This is synchronistically relevant because of my recent visit to Guashan Shaolin temple (related in "When that gorilla beats his chest"), in which I entered through a green door into a room that was supposed to be closed. (This same room also has a circular doorway.) Just outside this room, baskets had been hung from the eaves for swallows to nest in, and several of the birds were doing so. Note also the expression "my King, and my God," which ties into the the "God vs. King" movie poster referenced in "When that gorilla beats his chest."
On August 6, I posted "The Wizard at the green door," and Debbie left a comment in which she discussed the etymology of knock and particularly mentioned its figurative meaning of "deprecate, put down." This made me think of the common expression, "Don't knock it till you've tried it" and how it takes on a different meaning if "it" is assumed to be a door. Both at the temple and at the abandoned restaurant, I had entered a green door without permission -- just "trying" the door instead of knocking on it.
Yesterday, August 8, I posted "Now, O now, in this brown land," a train of thought initiated by listening to a version of "(Dont' Fear) The Reaper" set to an instrumental track by P!nk. It turns out that the instrumentals come from "Try" (a song I'd never heard). This is the chorus:
Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame
Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned
But just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die
You've gotta get up and try, try, try
On one of my don't-knock-it-till-you've-tried-it visits to the abandoned restaurant, I found the wall covered with figs, and I picked one as a souvenir. I have no experience with fig trees, and thus I was caught by surprise when I broke the stem and a gout of sticky white latex spurted out onto my hand. I wiped it off as best I could and washed my hands later.
This morning, I had an English tutoring session with a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for students of English and often asks me questions about it. Today he had some questions about an article on, of all things, figs. The fact that fig latex is a skin irritant was mentioned.
"A liquid that is found inside the fig tree can cause burning when it touches our skin." Well, so what? Just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die.
The fig article also mentioned that "Adam and Eve wore fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, and some believe Eve's forbidden fruit was a fig, not an apple." Adam has been part of the recent sync stream because of his connection with Hercules and Michael. The fig/apple connection is also reinforced by Fig Newtons (also featured in the magazine article), the name Newton being more commonly associated with the apple.
About a week ago, I had a dream about the businessman who showed me the fig article today. In the dream, he was at my house and I was hoping he would leave soon because I was expecting someone else. Finally, he did leave, and immediately the person I had been waiting for arrived. It was the man who had been my best friend's father and my Scoutmaster when I was young. He also happened to be an FBI agent, and in the dream I thought of him only in that latter capacity. He drove up to my house in a shiny purplish-silver sports car, and I though, "It's Mr. Graff from the FBI. I'd better go with him." I got in the backseat, which was very cramped, and asked the person sitting in front of me (one of my fellow Scouts from those days and a personal enemy) to move his seat forward and give me some leg-room. He said it was already as far forward as it would go, and that he didn't have any leg-room, either.
I mention this dream because I almost never think about Mr. Graff these days -- or Brother Graff as we called him as a fellow Mormon -- but I thought about him today because clay sparrows made me think of clay pigeons. Despite being an FBI agent, a colonel in the Marine Corps, and an excellent marksman in general, Brother Graff was just terrible at skeet shooting, and so that quickly became the Scouts' favorite activity because it was so entertaining to outshoot the master. One of Brother Graff's children (my friend's younger brother) was so little that if he held a shotgun properly, the kick would knock him flat, so he always shot "from the hip" -- holding the gun off to his side so that when it kicked it would swing back without hitting him. And he still nailed more pigeons than his father!
I published "The Wizard at the green door" yesterday (August 6) at 4:14 p.m. Taiwan time. The post included Let Him In, a painting by Mormon artist Greg Olsen illustrating Revelation 3:20 ("Behold, I stand at the door, and knock . . ."), and it references the Script song "Hall of Fame" (featuring, incidentally, my black doppelgänger will.i.am), a song which had come to my attention a few days previous, as documented in "When that gorilla beats his chest."
That evening, I received two emails 27 minutes apart, from two different people named Andrew.
The first, received at 11:09 Taiwan time, had the subject line "Romans 13" and was just a link, with no comment but the two words "spot on," to this YouTube video:
Notice that the thumbnail features the word GOD with a green circle around it, a link to the circular green door imagery of my post.
The video cites various Bible verses in support of the argument that Christians have no absolute obligation to obey secular (or church) authority. At one point there is a pretty in-your-face synchronistic reference to "Hall of Fame" by The Script.
That this was sent in direct response to my posts about that song seems vanishingly unlikely. It was sent to five other people (mostly public figures not known to me personally) in addition to myself, and the video itself is a year old.
The second email, sent by a different Andrew and received at 11:36 p.m. Taiwan time, obviously was a direct response to my post. It had the subject line "Wizard at the door?" and had no text, only this image:
This was, as I have said, very clearly sent in response to my post, which featured a different image of Jesus knocking on a door, so it can't be considered a "meaningful coincidence," right?
Wrong.
On August 1, I posted "The most important teaching of the Book of Mormon" -- also about a Christian's lack of absolute obligation to obey any external authority -- and wanted to illustrate it with an appropriate picture. My first thought was Blake's Glad Day, but I decided its meaning was too obscure. I wanted to show that the ultimate authority is simultaneously God and each individual's God-given intuition or discernment. This made me think of how Jesus said both "I am the light of the world" and "Ye are the light of the world" (I thought of this again when I posted "The Wizard at the green door," which mentions that Jesus said both "Knock and it shall be opened unto you" and "Behold, I stand at the door and knock.") This led me to run an image search for i am the light of the world painting -- and the first result was the very painting, by William Holman Hunt, that the second Andrew would later send me by email. In the end I decided against using it, opting instead of Vrubel's painting of the descent of the Holy Spirit, but I did take note of the painting, which I had not seen before and which captures a powerful aspect of who Jesus Christ is.
I had not noticed, though, that it depicts Jesus knocking on a door. (The door is overgrown with vegetation and not immediately recognizable as such.) The search results showed only the painting itself, but the image Andrew sent included the frame, which features the text of Revelation 3:20.
While I was writing "The Wizard at the green door," I had the thought that the Statue of Liberty is green and is associated with the Emma Lazarus poem ending "I lift my lamp beside the golden door," but I dismissed the connection to the Green Door theme as too tenuous to be worthy of note. Now, though, it occurs to me that Liberty Enlightening the World -- finished about 30 years after Hunt's The Light of the World -- almost appears as a parody of that painting. Hunt's Christ wears a greenish robe and a crown, holds a lamp, and stands beside a golden door. Bartholdi's statue replaces Christ with Mithras, and the Light of Christ with the "light" of revolution.
⁂
It is interesting that I considered Hunt's painting as an illustration for a post about the Book of Mormon, and then in my "Wizard at the green door" post I used a Mormon artist's rendition of the same verse from Revelation.
Looking for Greg Olsen's painting of Christ knocking, I ran across this picture, Even a Sparrow, by the same artist.
This is clearly a reference to Jesus' saying about God taking note even of the fall of a sparrow, but what it first made me think of was the apocryphal legend about the child Jesus breathing life into sparrows made of clay. Today I happened to read a reference to this same legend in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie:
There is a beautiful allegorical exposition in the apocryphal gospels of this criterion of certitude in respect of Christianity: its evidence is that of realisation. Some children were amusing themselves by fashioning birds of clay, and among them was the child Jesus. Each little artist praised his own work, and only Jesus said nothing; but when He had moulded His birds, He clapped His hands, telling them to fly, and they flew. So did Christian institutions shew their superiority over those of the ancient world; the latter are dead, but Christianity is alive.
The painting also reminded me of a vivid dream I had as a child, in which I had written a trilogy with the evocative titles Like Sheep, Many Sparrows, and The Sign of the Dove. From time to time it occurs to me that I should try to write those three books, but I have never known what should be in them. I suppose their time has not yet come.
⁂
One last thing to note: My post featured Gandalf knocking at the green door. The Hunt painting features Christ at the door, with a lamp. Some time ago (I can't seem to find the original post), Bruce Charlton posted about a Tolkien-themed Tarot deck which portrayed the Magician as Gandalf. I left a comment saying that this was wrong, that the Magician should be Fëanor, while Mithrandir was clearly the Hermit. The Hermit of the Tarot holds a lamp much like that of Hunt's Christ.
Yesterday I read the section about Pythagoras in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie. Later the same day, I checked the Anonymous Conservative blog. As anyone familiar with that blog will know, it deals almost exclusively with current events and is mostly just a list of headlines which are links, with little or no commentary from the author. Yesterday, though, in the middle of the usual list of links was "This was interesting. A long article on Pythagoras" -- followed by a long excerpt and a long paragraph of commentary, about 650 words total.
Today I thought I should probably record the coincidence for future reference, in case anything came of it, so I checked AC again to find the Pythagoras bit. Usually I check it on my computer; I type "an" into the address bar, and autocomplete gives me "anonymousconservative.com/blog." This time, uncharacteristically, I used my phone, and autocomplete stopped at "anonymousconservative.com" -- taking me not to the blog but to the homepage, which I never visit. Right near the top of the page, this jumped out at me.
What are those three little icons? Something from the United Way logo? Then I realized what the green one reminded me of:
And wait, isn't the green tube-man particularly prominent in the Family Guy clip? It is. Although we later see tube-men of all colors, in the first six seconds -- while they're repeating "Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man!" three times -- we see only this:
The green tube-man shows up twice more in the clip: once next to a sign that says "OPEN" -- an anagram of NOPE, the upcoming Jordan Peele film that prominently features wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men in the trailer.
We also see the number 1927 on the ice-cream parlor sign. Following a random hunch, I Googled 1927 pythagoras. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find -- 1927 is about two and a half millennia too late to have anything to do with Pythagoras! -- but what I got was this:
That's right, black-and-white photos of a dark-colored horse -- a dark bay East Prussian stallion named Pythagoras that was born in 1927.
The very first thing we see in the trailer for NOPE is The Horse in Motion -- Eadweard Muybridge's extremely short 1878 film -- as a voiceover says, "Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on a horse?"
The final appearance of the green tube-man in the Family Guy clip also features a black man and emphasizes the fact that he is black. Listing the many uses of wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men, Al Harrington says, "African American? Hail a cab!"
I guess the joke is that racist cab drivers won't stop for a black man but might stop for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man. Jordan Peele is half black, and anti-black racism is a major theme in all his work.
Finally, the green tube-man, with his upraised arms, suggests the letter Y -- called the littera Pythagorae and used as a symbol of the choice between the paths of vice (the wider left arm of the Y) and virtue (the narrow right arm).
I noticed this Y connection while I was out on my motorcycle, and just minutes after passed a shop window which prominently featured a green Chinese character that means "man" and looks like an upside-down Y. Although its relevance seemed remote, I stopped and snapped a photo.
古早人, "ancient man" (like Pythagoras?)
Just now, looking for an illustration to use in this post, I ran an image search for littera Pythagorae. One of the results stood out because it featured a green Y, and I clicked the link: "The Choice of our Times | Path to the Maypole of Wisdom." Not only this post but the blog header itself prominently features a green Y.
Scrolling down, I was astonished to find that the post also features an image of an upside-down Y -- two of them, actually, one of which looks exactly like the Chinese character 人, which I had photographed.
Despite the exact similarity of that image to the Chinese character, there is no mention of Chinese or Japanese in the article. It's just one hell of a coincidence.
My original intention was to slap together a quick post noting the almost too-boring-to-note coincidence of running into Pythagoras twice in a day -- but if you poke even a minor coincidence a bit, sometimes it explodes.
I read this today in Waite's 1922 translation of Lévi's 1860 Histoire de la magie.
Women are superior to men in sorcery because they are more easily transported by excess of passion. The word sorcerer clearly designates victims of chance and, so to speak, the poisonous muchrooms of fatality.
Greek sorcerers, but especially those of Thessaly, put horrible precepts to the proof and were given over to abominable rites. They were mostly women wasted by desires which they could no longer satisfy, antiquated courtesans, monsters of immorality and ugliness. . . . They were known as lamia, stryges, empusa; children were the objects of their envy and thus of their hared, and they sacrificed them for this reason. Some, like that Canidia who is mentioned by Horace, buried them as far as the head and left them to die of hunger, surrounded with food which they could not reach; others cut off the heads, hands and feet, boiled their fat and grease, in copper basins, to the consistence of an ointment, which they afterwards mixed with the juice of henbane, belladonna and black poppies. With this unguent they anointed the organ which was irritated unceasingly by their detestable desires; they rubbed also their temples and arm-pits, and then fell into a lethargy full of unbridled and luxurious dreams.
There is need to speak plainly -- these are the origins and this is the traditional practice of Black Magic; these are the secrets which were handed down to the middle ages; and such in fine are the pretended innocent victims whom public execration, far more than the sentence of inquisitors, condemned to the flames. . . .
Such is the woman who has sought to rise beyond the duties of her sex by familiarity with forbidden sciences. Men avoid her, children hide when she passes. She is devoid of reason, devoid of true love, and the stratagems of Nature in revolt against her are the ever-renewing torment of her pride.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about this account -- of "monsters of immorality and ugliness" who think the most gruesome child sacrifices a small price to pay for a barren simulacrum of the pleasures of the marital bed -- made me think of Current Events.
As far back as 2018, when I was no longer an atheist but had not yet returned to Christianity, the synchronicity fairies were directing my attention to the Holy Rosary.
My father was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Mormonism before I was born, and my experience of Catholicism has been pretty much limited to attending funerals and reading. Until a month ago I had never so much as laid eyes on a rosary. Nevertheless, the nudges continued, and on May 29 of this year, I walked into a Filipino-run chapel and asked where I could get -- well, I only knew the Chinese for Buddhist mantra beads, but they figured out what I meant. Only later did I realize that I had bought it on a Sunday, breaking the Sabbath.
Once I had my rosary, I tried praying it a few times but kept getting hung up on doctrinal snags. Can I recite the Apostles' Creed if I'm agnostic about the Virgin Birth and the Second Coming? Doesn't thy kingdom come imply a Synoptic worldview I do not share? And do I have any reason to think that Jesus' mother really has any of the goddess-like qualities ascribed to her by tradition?
(I had similar issues with the Pledge of Allegiance as a schoolchild. Surely my allegiance is to the country itself, not the flag; history makes it hard to believe any nation is "indivisible"; and "liberty and justice for all" are obviously ideals, not realities. In the end I whittled it down to "I pledge allegiance to . . . America . . . under God" -- remaining silent for all the rest.)
The Spirit kept nudging me to pray the unmodified Holy Rosary, though, and in the end I just asked God point-blank how I was supposed to do so in good conscience. Three very clear communications appeared in my mind:
1. Don't worry about doctrinal quibbles. It's supposed to be like singing a hymn, not writing a theological treatise.
2. Recite it in Latin. That will help bypass the discursive side of your brain.
3. How is it that you've never read Histoire de la magie?
So I printed out the Rosary prayers in Latin, brushed up a bit on church-Latin pronunciation, and prayed the Rosary in Latin. I was surprised at how easy it was, how readily I took to it, and how rapidly and fluently I was able to pray. As promised, the change from Latin changed the mood from one of doctrinal nitpicking to pure devotion, and that in me which had considered the Hail Holy Queen just a bit much was somehow able to pray the Salve Regina with sincere fervor. Not for the first time, Latin has proven to be almost magical. Latin! The mundane, no-nonsense language of the Roman Empire -- but Virgil transfigured it, and so, apparently, has the Church. I suppose this is something like Sheldrake's "morphic resonance," and that reciting fixed prayers in their original language allows one to tap into the faith of all the other Christians through the ages who have uttered those same words.
Speaking of magic, I downloaded A. E. Waite's translation of Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie -- which, surprisingly, I really had never read before -- and started on it. At first it wasn't at all clear what it had to do with anything, but eventually I came to this passage:
[T]he popular forms of doctrine . . . alone can vary and alone destroy one another; the Kabalist is not only undisturbed by trivialities of this kind, but can provide on the spot a reason for the most astonishing formulae. It follows that his prayer can be joined to that of humanity at large, to direct it by illustrations from science and reason and draw it into orthodox channels.
If Mary be mentioned, he will revere the realisation in her of all that is divine in the dreams of innocence, all that is adorable in the sacred enthusiasm of every maternal heart. It is not he who will refuse flowers to adorn the altars of the Mother of God, or white banners for her chapels, or even tears for her ingenuous legends. It is not he who will mock at the new-born God weeping in the manger or the wounded victim of Calvary. . . .
[A]ll that is expedient and touching in beliefs, . . . the splendour of rituals, the pageant of divine creation, the grace of prayers, the magic of heavenly hopes -- are not these the radiance of moral life in all its youth and beauty? Could anything alienate the true initiate from public prayers and temples, could anything raise his disgust or indignation against religious forms of all kinds, it would be the manifest unbelief of priests or people, want of dignity in the ceremonies of the cultus -- in a word, the profanation of holy things. God is truly present when He is worshipped by recollected souls and feeling hearts; He is absent, sensibly and terribly, when discussed without light or zeal -- that is to say, without understanding or love. . . .
Every definition of God hazarded by human intelligence is a recipe of religious empiricism, out of which superstition will subsequently extract a devil.
I’ve been praying the Rosary in Latin once or twice a day for about a week now -- I started on June 23 -- and I can report that it's doing me good. I know that some of my Romantic Christian associates will dismiss this as an atavistic behavior, a futile attempt to return to a less-conscious form of Christianity. Against this I can only report my direct experience so far: that 20 minutes spent reciting the Rosary prayers is 20 minutes spent in the presence of Christ. Yes, presence is precisely what I get from this. It is not really a form of communication with God, nor is it really meditation. It is something else, something that I needed, and the various spiritual agencies that have guided me to it were right to do so.
When Alphonse-Louis Constant needed a pen name for his occult writings, he chose Hebrew names that were somewhat similar to his own given names. Alphonse became Éliphas (Eliphaz, son of Esau and friend of Job), and Louis became Lévi (Levi, son of Jacob and father of the Levites; Rabbi Louis Ginzberg also used Levi as his Hebrew name).
Today, a rather convoluted series of syncs -- taking me from the "tulip tree," Liriodendrom tulipifera, to the Luria-dendron of the qlippoth -- led me to the Lurianic terms Olam ha-Tohu (World of Chaos) and Olam ha-Tikkun (World of Rectification) -- and the latter is pretty clearly my own personal Éliphas Lévi. William becomes Olam (also transliterated Gholam; cf. Guillaume), and Tychonievich (a Ukrainian patronymic from the personal name Tikhon) becomes Tikkun. I guess Olam ben-Tikkun would be the proper form.
One major drawback is the similarity to tikkun olam, which is the Jewish term for Leftist "social justice."
Knowest thou that old queen of the world who is on the march always and wearies never? Every uncurbed passion, every selfish pleasure, every licentious energy of humanity, and all its tyrannous weakness, go before the sordid mistress of our tearful valley, and, scythe in hand, these indefatigable labourers reap their eternal harvest. That queen is old as time, but her skeleton is concealed in the wreckage of women's beauty, which she abstracts from their youth and love. Her skull is adorned with lifeless tresses that are not her own. Spoliator of crowned heads, she is embellished with the plunder of queens, from the star-begemmed hair of Berenice to that -- white, but not with age -- which the executioner sheared from the brow of Marie Antoinette. . . . When she goes by, doors open of themselves; she passes through walls; she penetrates to the cabinets of kings; she surprises the extortioners of the poor in their most secret orgies; she sits down at their board, pours out their wine, . . . takes the place of the lecherous courtesan hidden behind their curtains.
Yes, yet another post (see the others) on this very minor bit of Tarot iconography.
In a past post (qv), I wrote that "of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!" Now a possible rationale for it has occurred to me.
Notice that the wheel is apparently turning counterclockwise: the snake on the left is descending, and the cynocephalus on the right is ascending. So the letters ROTA correspond, respectively, to the low point, the descent, the high point, and the ascent. Lévi had already identified the A and O of ROTA as corresponding to alpha and omega -- representing the beginning and the end. It seemed to me that the T and R ought to correspond to some similarly fundamental opposition, but nothing came to mind until today. T and R correspond to the Hebrew words tov (טוֹב, "good") and ra (רַע "bad/evil"). Obviously, the top of the wheel represents good fortune; and the bottom, bad fortune. One starts at the bottom, rises (alpha, the beginning), reaches the top, and then falls (omega, the end).
Here is part of A. E. Waite's description of his Magician card in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.
A youthful figure in the robe of a magician, having the countenance of divine Apollo, with smile of confidence and shining eyes. Above his head is the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. [. . .] In the Magician's right hand is a wand raised towards heaven, while the left hand is pointing to the earth. [. . .] This card signifies the divine motive in man, reflecting God, the will in the liberation of its union with that which is above. It is also the unity of individual being on all planes, and in a very high sense it is thought, in the fixation thereof.
And here is Éliphas Lévi's description of the same card in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie -- as translated by none other than A. E. Waite.
א Being, mind, man, or God; the comprehensible object; unity mother of numbers, the first substance.
All these ideas are expressed hieroglyphically by the figure of the JUGGLER. His body and arms constitute the letter ALEPH; round his head there is a nimbus in the form of ∞, emblem of life and the universal spirit; in front of him are swords, cups and pantacles; he uplifts the miraculous rod towards heaven. He has a youthful figure and curly hair, like Apollo or Mercury; the smile of confidence is on his lips and the look of intelligence in his eyes.
The more of Lévi's work I read, the more I find him to have been the ultimate source of what I had previously thought to be Waite's own innovations.
