Further syncs related to my Kanye dream and Facsimile 1

 Yesterday (November 4), I taught a children's English class in which the word ancient came up (from an article saying that surfing was "an ancient sport," originating in the fourth century BC). After explaining the meaning of ancient, I checked comprehension by asking, "Have you ever seen anything ancient?" A 10-year-old girl immediately replied that she had visited a museum a few years ago and seen an Egyptian mummy case -- and then added that there were also "four little things with different heads, like a person and a dog and an eagle, and I don't remember what the other one was" -- clearly a description of the canopic jars ("Elkenah" and friends) which have featured in my recent posts.

Today, following a link on AC, I read an article called "MK Ultra, Transgenderism, and Feminization of Men." This bit pinged my syncdar:

The term “hypnosis” comes from the Greek word hypno, meaning sleep. Hypnotic trance has its roots in Earth’s oldest civilizations. The first mentions of it date back 5,000 years to ancient Egypt where it was used in rituals in the Temple of Imhotep. “Temple sleep" was an hours-long ritual using herbs, rhythmic drumming, and prayer recitation to induce a hypnotic dreamlike state. This ritual trance was believed to allow a person to heal ailments, see the future, or contact the gods. The ancient Greeks adapted their own forms of temple sleep used by Oracles to divine the future for powerful men like Alexander the Great. Shamans around the world have used similar techniques since ancient times with drumming, chant, and natural hallucinogens to induce ritual trance in the same way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, esoteric physicians and psychologists like Franz Mesmer gave hypnosis techniques new life. French scientists at the Nancy School were the first to formally study hypnotism as we know it today. This led to hypnosis being used by psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  

In the 1920’s, hypnosis was often portrayed comically in Vaudeville stage acts and later in Hollywood, leading to its modern association with quackery. [. . .]

This was only the second time I had heard of the Egyptian ritual of "temple sleep"; the first was yesterday, when I found a reference to it in Mission des juifs, where Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre attributes its invention to no lesser a personage than Moses himself -- pre-Exodus, when he was (Saint-Yves claims) a priest of Osiris:

He [Moses] recommended that well-chosen persons sleep at night in the Temple, to receive oneirocritical or other communications of interest to either the individual or the Society.

(Definition of oneirocritical: "of, relating to, or specializing in the interpretation of dreams" -- c.f. Sigmund Freud's best-known work.)

When I had read this reference in Saint-Yves, I had vaguely imagined initiates sleeping on the floor of the temple, but when I read the second reference, in the MK Ultra article, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that, no, they probably used some sort of ritual bed --and that I was almost 100% certain what that bed looked like. A quick Google search confirmed what I already intuitively knew: One of the first results had a picture of someone sleeping on a lion couch:

The image is just from some random YouTube video, and I have no idea how archaeologically sound it is, but the sync fairies don't care about that. The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, people have connected "temple sleep" with the lion couch. Saint-Yves, rather improbably, connects "temple sleep" with Moses -- just as Joseph Smith had, equally improbably, connected the lion couch with another major biblical figure.

In the MK Ultra article, "the Nancy School" appears in the same paragraph as "temple sleep." In my Kanye dream, Ye was carrying a coffin-like plywood box and said that "Aunt Nancy" had gone to sleep in it and never woken up.

At the end of the passage I have quoted, "Vaudeville" is juxtaposed with "quackery." Yesterday, in a post that probably left my readers scratching their heads, I felt an urgent need to post about some imagined spiritual kinship between Marx Brothers comedies and the music of Billy Joel. In this post, I characterized the Marx Brothers as "classic Jewish Vaudeville" and provided as a sample of their style a clip from the 1933 film Duck Soup.

The Billy Joel thing wasn't my only sudden strange idea about pop music yesterday. Out of the blue, I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about the song "You're the One" as performed by the Vogues and, moved by a strange sense of certainty about a song with which I have only a passing familiarity, I spent quite a bit of time scouring YouTube in vain for any evidence that they had ever sung "Ooh, never leave me, DO NOT deceive me" (definitely the correct lyrics!) rather than the vastly inferior Mandela-effect version "please don't deceive me," which is all that can be found in the current timeline. It was an extremely strange thing to get hung up on, but in the course of my searching I stumbled upon another old Vogues song I had completely forgotten about: "Five O'Clock World" -- which begins with the words "Up every morning just to keep a job" and later says "in my five o'clock world she waits for me." In my Kanye dream, Aunt Nancy had written a note saying "Wake me up at 5 p.m." before going to sleep forever.

Maha-makara whiteboard telepathy

I've been occasionally dipping into Mission des juifs by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and today I read a passage in which he mentioned the similarity between the names Abraham and Brahma, and between those of Abraham's sister/wife Sarah and Brahma's sister/wife Sarasvati. Once this idea had been brought up -- to look for Sanskrit names in the story of Abraham -- it made me think of the "First Facsimile from the Book of Abraham." This was an incomplete Egyptian funerary papyrus, "restored" and "translated" by Joseph Smith in a way that is very obviously incorrect by the standards of modern Egyptology. For example, the four canopic jars representing the four sons of Horus (Imsety, Duamutef, Hapi, and Qebehsenuef) were said by Smith to represent four otherwise unknown pagan gods called Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmachrah, and Korash.

There have been various fanciful attempts by Mormon apologists to make these names archaeologically respectable. Elkenah must be derived from El-Cana, meaning the Canaanite god El (who of course was not one of the sons of Horus, didn't have a falcon's head, and was not worshiped in Egypt); Libnah is connected to a Hebrew (not Egyptian!) root meaning "white," and it is said that that particular son of Horus was associated with the color white; that sort of thing.

Well, if we're going to go Sanskrit on the Abraham story, isn't it obvious that Mahmachrah must be Maha-makara, the Great Makara? Makara is a Sanskrit name for, among other things, the crocodile, and a crocodile appears in Facsimile 1. Perhaps Smith just misnumbered the figures, and it is the crocodile that he intended to call Mahmachrah. I'm not proposing any of this seriously, of course; it just popped into my mind when I read about the supposed Sanskrit derivation of the names Abraham and Sarah.

Makara doesn't just mean "crocodile," though. It is also the Sanskrit term for the zodiac sign of Capricorn and refers to a sea creature which is variously depicted, but one of the most common forms it takes is that of a huge fish with the trunk of an elephant.

I hadn't said or written any of this; I had only been thinking about it, and picturing the elephant-nosed makara in my mind -- a very distinctive image, I think, and not one that comes to mind very often -- when I walked into my classroom and found that one of my students had drawn this on the whiteboard:

I still find this whole phenomenon baffling. It's happened enough times, and with such weirdly specific content, that I would ordinarily dismiss "coincidence" as an explanation -- but on the other hand, seemingly impossible coincidences are pretty much an everyday occurrence in my life!

If it's not just another manifestation of "synchronicity" -- that infuriating non-explanation! -- I do tend to think it must be some sort of subconscious telepathy on the kids' part rather than precognition on my own. My mental images in these cases don't just pop into my head inexplicably; the train of thought can be traced back with little effort. When I ask the kid why he happened to draw an "elephant fish," though -- or a king holding an apple, or whatever the image may be -- there's never any explanation. I think they just cast about in the ether for something to draw and sometimes "pick up" something from my mind without realizing that that's where it came from.

I never tell the kids about these incidents, and they are none the wiser. As far as this young artist knows, he just happened to think of an "elephant fish" for no particular reason. Likewise, if some of the random ideas or images that pop into my head were actually pilfered from the private thoughts of other people, I would normally have no way of knowing that. I wonder just how common this sort of thing is.

Rockets and rains of rocks

Last night I had a dream which I had occasion to relate to some online correspondents this afternoon, and I therefore have a written record of it, from which I quote:

We were on a mountain trail, with a wide view of farmland below. . . . I looked up in the sky and saw what I at first took to be a rocket in the distance but soon realized was actually a meteor. Smallish rocks began to rain down from the sky. I could see them striking the farmland below, and then one nearly [sic; I meant narrowly] missed me on the trail. "They're meteorites!" I shouted. "Everyone get out of the way!"

Later this evening, I read a bit in The Golden Thread of World History, a (rather bad) English translation of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Mission des Juifs. Saint-Yves is arguing that the ancients had all sorts of "modern" technology, including rocketry. (Everything in the quote below is, it is my painful duty to inform you, strictly sic erat scriptum. I'll just get that out of the way now to avoid littering the text with sic after sic.)

About 4,000 years before Christ, . . . pyrotechnics were used solely for the defense of the temples and their domains . . . .

When strangers attacked the cities of Persia, says Philstratus, the Magi from the top of the walls stroke the assailants with flames and thunder.

By similar means the priests of Delphi defended their territory against the Gallics and the Persians themselves.

In their reports, Herodotus, Justin, Pausanias, describe actual explosions of mines engulfing Persians or Gallics under rains of stones and projectiles mixed with flames.

Both the dream and the passage in Saint-Yves feature rains of stones or rocks. Saint-Yves presents his "rains of stones" as evidence that the ancients used military "pyrotechnics"; my dream also connects the rain of stones with rocketry, since the meteor appears at first to be "a rocket in the distance."

I had not read anything about ancient weaponry in Saint-Yves before dreaming my dream, nor did I know that he would go on to discuss it. The similarity is therefore either precognitive or the work of the synchronicity fairies.

When 2,240-ton cats roamed the earth!

Looks legit, right?

Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's 1884 book Mission des Juifs was finally translated into English in 2018 by Simha Seraya and Albert Haldane. They released two versions: a simple translation called Mission of the Jews and an annotated one called The Golden Thread of World History. I bought the latter, which as turned out to be a mistake. So far, I would estimate that at least 90% of the footnotes simply implore the reader to read The Urantia Book (published decades after Saint-Yves's death, and therefore textually irrelevant!), and none of them shed any useful light on the text itself. (The translation itself is also amateurish in the extreme, but it's unfortunately the only game in town.)

Among the many confusing passages the translators did not see fit to annotate at all is this one about prehistoric animals:

The mammoths, the ten-meter-tall behemoths, the five-meter-long Brazilian lion, the twenty eight meter-tall felis smilodon, the diornis bird as big as an elephant, the ornitichnithès, a still more colossal bird, judging by its strides of three meters, all those beings who have returned to the invisible are but signatures of their indestructible celestial Species, the symbols of the biological and purely intelligible Powers of the Cosmos.

"Behemoths"? Is that supposed to refer to some specific animal? And since when have there ever been lions of any description in Brazil? And, wait, did you just say a 28-meter-tall Smilodon?

Those less familiar with the metric system might not have an intuitive sense of how completely ridiculous that is, but what we're talking about here is a saber-toothed tiger as tall as a nine-story building, five times the height of a giraffe, 65% taller than Sauroposeidon proteles, the tallest known dinosaur. Sauroposeidon was so tall because of its ridiculously long neck, but a cat's height is measured at the shoulder.

Smilodon populator, the saber-toothed tiger we all know and love, was 1.4 m tall and 2.6 m long. It weighed about 280 kg, and its namesake teeth were 30 cm long. Scaling up, then, this hypothetical S. alveydreii with a height of 28 m (92 ft) would be 52 m (170 ft) long, weigh 2,240 tons (heavier than 20 blue whales), and have canine teeth 6 m (20 ft) long. Forget being taller than a giraffe; this thing would have had teeth the size of giraffes!

I finally just had to look up the original (qv):

Les mammouths, les mastodontes, de dix mètres de haut, le lion du Brésil de cinq mètres de long, le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres, le diornis, oiseau grand comme un éléphant, l’ornitichnithès, oiseau plus colossal encore, à en juger par ses enjambées de trois mètres, tous ces êtres rentrés dans l’Invisible ne sont que les signatures de leur Espèce céleste, indestructible, ne sont que les symboles de Puissances biologiques et purement intelligibles du Kosmos.

So the "behemoths" in the English version are mastodons. Why on earth would they change that perfectly clear word to the vague behemoths -- at the same time leaving untranslated such an opaque term as ornitichnithès?

Now, about those crazy measurements.

Were mastodons 10 meters (33 feet) tall? No, of course not. They were 10 feet tall, about the same as a modern elephant. Saint-Yves must have read something in English about mastodons and misunderstood the units being used.

The "lion du Brésil" is a tougher case, as no lions, living or fossil, have ever been discovered in that country or (probably) anywhere else in South America. (It has recently been proposed that some jaguar fossils in Patagonia actually belonged to Panthera atrox, the American lion, but nothing like that had been suggested in Saint-Yves's time, and anyway it's still not Brazil.) The Eurasian cave lion (P. spelaea) grew to five feet at the shoulder, so perhaps Sant-Yves once again read feet as meters (and, in this case, height as length), but I have no idea why he thought such an animal was from Brazil of all places. Smilodon did live in Brazil, and some of the first Smilodon fossils were found in that country, so perhaps Saint-Yves got two quite different extinct felids mixed up in his memory.

And now we come to the gargantuan Smilodon itself -- le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres. The text does indeed say twenty-eight meters, but "tall" was added by the translators -- so perhaps what Saint-Yves meant was that the animal was 28 meters long. This would make it a mere 1,250 times as big as a real Smilodon, rather than 8,000 times -- a considerable improvement, but obviously not enough of one! Since 2.8 meters is pretty close to the real length of S. populator, my best guess is that Saint-Yves carelessly omitted a decimal point when he was doing his research and then -- somehow! -- later wrote in his book that "le félis smilodon" was as long as a blue whale without setting off his own BS detector. And Seraya and Haldane faithfully translated it, guessed that the big cat was most likely 28 meters tall rather than long, and proceeded as if that were a perfectly normal thing to write, with no need for an explanatory note. I guess The Urantia Book didn't have anything to say about it.

As for the other two creatures mentioned, le diornis should be Dinornis, the giant moa of New Zealand. It was in a general sense "as big as an elephant" -- a bit taller than an elephant but only one-tenth as heavy. Ornitichnithès should be Ornithichnithes -- a name formerly applied to some tetrapod footprints dating to the Carboniferous, and so obviously not those of a bird! Current opinion is that they were made by a mammal-like reptile of some sort. (The translators have Google, too. Why couldn't they have done this work for me?)

⁂

Really, though, who cares if a book about the mission of the Jews gets its paleontology wrong? It's not a science book, right? Well, I think we need to guard against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. An author who can get so many facts in a single paragraph so wrong -- so insanely wrong! -- who can swallow the idea of a 28-meter tiger without batting an eye -- is likely to prove equally careless and gullible when it comes to things that can't be so easily checked.