Showing posts with label Adrienne Mayor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adrienne Mayor. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite

I ended my post "Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears" by expressing the hope that the sync fairies would develop the Aztec lizardmen theme introduced there. They immediately obliged, at least in part, by sending William Wright a dream about "Deer Hunting, Dir Hunting, and the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company." No Aztec angle yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

In the dream, William shot a large number of deer that had come to eat his pumpkins, and he understood that this group of deer was known as the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company.

William's interpretation involved the assumption that the deer were a sort of rebus referring to the Elvish word dîr, which means "man" -- not the race of Men as opposed to Elves, but an adult male of any race. I thought that was kind of an anticlimactic decoding. That animals in a dream might represent people almost goes without saying; using a bilingual pun to convey it scarcely seems worth the trouble.

I immediately thought of a different homophone, though. In my May 17 post "Pumpkins are dear" -- referring directly to William Wright's pumpkins, the same pumpkins the deer wanted to eat in the dream -- I repeated an old joke I had heard in the 1990s about the Egyptian politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, so the joke was that Ghali must mean "pumpkin-eater" -- as in the nursery rhyme "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater." What the name Ghali actually means, though, is "dear." So dear/deer are directly equated with pumpkin-eaters, and in a post that specifically references the pumpkins on William Wright's farm. Total bull's-eye.

In his dream post, William writes, "What was interesting to me is that Lizardmen were explicitly and very clearly in my mind linked to the deer in my dream.  What do Lizardmen have to do with deer?" All he comes up with in answer is the dîr thing, which only addresses the men part. The lizard element remains unexplained.

Last night I read this in Adrienne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters:

Nearby, on the north bank of the Alpheios River, Saurus's ("Lizard's") Ridge was named after a giant killed by the mythical Heracles.

I looked up Saurus in Pausanias (apparently the only source for this story), and he is described only as a robber or bandit, with no indication that he was anything other than a man -- a man named Lizard.

Saurus is a Latinized spelling of a Greek name more properly transliterated as Sauros -- or, in the accusative form, Sauron. "Lizardmen" are Sauron's men. This fits with William Wright's interpretation of his dream, in which the deer represent Númenóreans under the influence of Sauron, coming to buy pumpkins. In "The 96, the 48, and the white bull," posted just after "Pumpkins are dear," I note that buy, sell, and trade all have the same S:E:G: value. It's perhaps worth noting that in Chinese, 蜥蜴人 ("lizardmen") is pronounced exactly the same as 西異人 ("strange men from the West").

Remembering that "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater" was one of the nursery rhymes Aleister Crowley subjected to tongue-in-cheek Kabbalistic analysis, I looked up his commentary. I found that it is discussed immediately after "Humpty Dumpty," and that he even mentions Humpty's belt or cravat:

This is so simple as hardly to require explanation. Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter; and it is only too painfully familiar to us that all the king's horses and all his men cannot restore us to the height.

Only The King Himself can do that!

But one can hardly comment upon a theme which has been so fruitfully treated by Ludovicus Carolus [i.e., Lewis Carroll], that most holy illuminated man of God. His masterly treatment of the identity of the three reciprocating paths of Daleth, Teth, and Pe, is one of the most wonderful passages in the Holy Qabalah. His resolution of what we take to be the bond of slavery into very love, the embroidered neckband of honour bestowed upon us by the King himself, is one of the most sublime passages in this class of literature.

In my May 3 post "Hometo Omleto," I quote a speech from Mormon leader Vaughn J. Featherstone where he says that, while the king's horses and men couldn't put Humpty together again, "the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him." How funny is it that this respectable Mormon general authority was unwittingly cribbing from the Great Beast himself?

Another of the rhymes Crowley expounds upon is "Little Bo Peep" -- and here we have at least a tentative Aztec link. As I have discussed in "Tezcatlipoca and John Dee," Dee possessed an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, on the leather case of which is this inscription:

Kelly did all his feats upon
The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;
Where playing with him at Bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep.

The person referred to is Dee's disreputable partner Edward Kelley, of whom Crowley very credibly claimed to be the reincarnation.

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult, used to go by the pseudonyms Bo and Peep. Applewhite is a strange name, but I guess it means the "white" of an apple -- the inner part, under the skin, which becomes visible when you take a bite out of it. This ties right in with my (recently linked) 2020 post "Yes, lizard people are Mayincatec," where I quote this passage from a Whitley Strieber novel:

One [of the reptilian aliens] had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.

There's a person in the form of an apple white, on the T-shirt of a lizardman with an Aztec sword.

Just after writing the above, I went on YouTube to look for something and was greeted by the face of none other than Marshall Applewhite himself:

The video is from a popular anti-Mormon channel which normally focuses on that religion but occasionally does episodes on other soi-disant "high-demand religions" (one of their favorite buzzwords) so that they can imply that Mormonism is basically the same thing. Today, of all days, they decided to do Applewhite, of all people.

Monday, May 27, 2024

The griffin as a guardian angel again

Cleaning out some folders this morning, I happened upon a copy of Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion (1967) by the Dutch Egyptologist Herman te Velde. Looking him up now, I find that te Velde died on May 26, 2019, so I narrowly missed discovering his treatise on the anniversary of his death. (I found it at around 7:00 this morning, which is 1:00 a.m. in the Netherlands.)

Glancing through the opening pages, I was surprised to find quite a lot of references to griffins, of all things!

Osiris, Seth's victim, is sometimes called tštš. Allen translates this: "the dismembered one". . . . We shall see below that Egyptian representations show there was a close relationship between the Seth-animal and the griffin. The name of a griffin with an animal body, wings and a falcon's head, is tštš. Leibovitch has translated this name as: "celui qui déchire, qui met en pièces" [the one that tears in pieces] (p. 5).

I had actually thought of the unidentified "Seth-animal" a few days ago, while reading Adreinne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters, wondering if it, like the griffin, might trace its origin to fossils. I figured the Seth-animal would be beyond the primarily Graeco-Roman scope of Mayor's book. but doing a word search now shows that it is in fact mentioned in a part of the book I haven't read yet, where she cites Herbert Wendt's theory that Seth's head "might have been based on the skull of the Libytherium (a large giraffid similar to Samotherium)."

Although I had recently thought of Seth while reading about griffins, I never knew until today that the Seth-animal was associated with actual griffins, or even that griffins appeared in Egyptian art at all.

Te Velde goes on to describe art from the tombs at Beni Hasan, where the Seth-animal is repeatedly depicted together with a griffin and a snake-headed creature.


Te Velde floats the hypothesis that these three fantastic beasts might represent different aspects of Fate:

Fate in the shape of the Seth-animal at Beni Hasan, however, does not seem to represent the good fortune, but the bad fortune of the hunter, accompanying his guardian angel, the falcon-headed griffin. The animal with the snake's head might stand for a synthesis of both aspects. Psais or Agathos Daimoon was afterwards represented in the form of a snake (pp. 23-24).

He means that the griffin represents good fortune, but the use of the phrase "guardian angel" is synchronistically interesting. Starting with my May 1 post "Armored vultures and cherubim," I have been identifying griffins with the Cherubim of the Bible (popularly thought of as "angels") and particularly with the Cherubim in their role as guardians of the Tree of Life. Vultures have also been identified with griffins, and the "armored vulture" of that post's title is a cartoon character whose sidekick is a snake, just as the griffin of Beni Hasan is accompanied by a snake-headed animal.

The vulture entered the sync stream in April 28, with my dream about "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask." William Wright recently referenced this in his May 25 post "Good and Evil, and a large bird named Gregor" -- referencing the movie The School for Good and Evil, with its large vulture-like bird whose name suggests my own vulture's patronymic. In the clip he posted, the vulture-like Gregor is interacting with a character named Agatha. This is the feminine form of the Greek word agathos, "good," the same word used in the te Velde quote above.

Monday, May 20, 2024

Griffins (Cherubim) and apples (forbidden fruit) come from the same place

In my May 1 post "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the etymological theory that the word griffin may be related to Cherubim. In Genesis, the Cherubim are stationed as guardians to keep the exiled Adam and Eve from returning to Eden. This was after they had eaten the forbidden fruit, which tradition overwhelmingly identifies as the apple.

Today I was reading the 2011 edition of Adreinne Mayor's seminal book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. In building her case that griffin legends originated with Protoceratops-type fossils (quadrupeds with eagle-like beaks), Mayor traces Greek griffin lore back to Scythia:

The territory of the Issedonian Scythians where Aristeas learned about the griffin in about 675 B.C. is a wedge bounded by the Tien Shan and Altai ranges, in an area that straddles present-day northwestern Mongolia, northwestern China, southern Siberia, and southeastern Kazakhstan.

Compare this to what Wikipedia says about the origin of the apple:

The original wild ancestor of Malus domestica was Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and northwestern China. Cultivation of the species, most likely beginning on the forested flanks of the Tian Shan mountains . . . .

I thought it was an interesting coincidence. Tian Shan is Chinese and literally means "Mountain(s) of God," which fits with what Ezekiel wrote about Eden and the Cherub:

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . . thou wast upon the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28:13-14).

I was going to say I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Eden was in Central Asia, but actually someone has: Apparently, the Chinese Australian Christian Tse Tsan-tai proposed that it was in Xinjiang -- i.e., northwestern China, griffin and apple territory.

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