Ludovicus Carolus in The Notion Club Papers

In my May 29 post "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I quoted Aleister Crowley's Kabbalistic analyis of "Humpty Dumpty," in which he referred to Lewis Carroll by the Latin name Ludovicus Carolus.

In my June 4 post "Ramer on Humpty Dumpty," I noted a reference to Humpty Dumpty in Tolkien's Notion Club Papers.

Today, I read this in The Notion Club Papers:

Jeremy was an admirer of the Public-house School (as he himself had dubbed them), and soon after he became a Lecturer he gave a series of lectures with that title. Old Professor Jonathan Gow had puffed and boggled at the title; and J. had offered to change it to Lewis and Carolus, or the Oxford Looking-glass, or Jack and the Beanstalk; which did not smooth matters.

Lewis and Jack are pretty clearly references to C. S. Lewis, who has already been mentioned several times by Notion Club members. Given the Looking-glass reference immediately following, I assume Carolus must be none other than Lewis Carroll, referred to with the same Latinized name used by Crowley.

Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting

On April 22, William Wright posted "Shushan!", which included a clip from the James Bond spoof movie Johnny English Reborn in which a Chinese man who apparently turns out to be a spy or gangster or something is wearing a nametag that says Susan, prompting English's sidekick to say, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan." Here's a slightly longer version of the clip William posted, since what happens afterward is also relevant.

On April 23, I left a comment there saying that it reminded me of a scene in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch where Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) says, "You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

On April 24, I checked my students' homework, and one of the prompts was this:

"Susan call me last night" -- intentionally ungrammatical, as the students are supposed to correct it by changing the verb to the past tense. The only way "Susan call me" (without a comma) could be grammatical would be if it meant "Call me Susan," with the word order changed for emphasis -- like that Billie Holiday song, "Crazy he calls me / Sure, I'm crazy."

Susan call me. Sure, I'm Susan.

In a comment on the "Shushan!" post, William Wright wrote this to me:

Do you have a story that attempts to connect these dots, or is it just the dots themselves - the fact that they exist - that are most interesting to you? I only ask, because your comments here, and your writing on your blog definitely focus on identifying dots, but not really connecting them.

I understand what he means -- that I mostly just document syncs without interpreting them -- but I don't think the connect-the-dots metaphor really works. Noticing syncs just is connecting dots. (In fact, one of my first sync blogs was called No Cigar, alluding to the TMBG song "See the Constellation": "No cigar, no lady on his arm / Just a guy made of dots and lines.") Sync is inherently about connections and relations; a fact considered in isolation can't be a sync. I think what he means is that I connect lots of dots but rarely succeed in stepping back and seeing what kind of picture all those connected dots are forming. Or even if I do see a larger picture, I don't know what it means.

For William Wright, though, each connection is a dot, and "connecting the dots" means interpreting these connections as contributing to an unfolding story.

Anyway, that comment got me sidetracked thinking about connect-the-dots puzzles. I thought about how we always called them "dot-to-dots" when I was a kid, but I hadn't heard that term in a long time and wondered whether it was still common. I ended up skimming the Wikipedia article on the subject, which had this illustration of a dot-to-dot of a front view of a face:

Later the same day, I opened the Brave browser to start writing this post. The home screen has various background images that change from time to time, but this time it was this:

Its a starry sky in which some of the star "dots" have been connected with lines to form the Brave logo, which is a stylized front view of a lion's face, as a constellation. It's conceptually very similar to the dot-to-dot from Wikipedia, and the shape even suggests a drooping mustache.

The night before (April 23), I had been reading Henry M. Morris's literalist commentary on the Book of Job. Noting that constellations are referenced more in that book than anywhere else in the Bible, Morris says that this obviously has nothing to do with astrology as we know it (which he naturally views as satanic) and speculates that perhaps the constellations originally had some theological meaning and served as a sort of proto-Bible. That is, before the actual Bible had been written, people would look at the constellations to remind themselves of certain revealed doctrines. What these may have been he cannot say, since the key to their meaning has been lost, and in any case they have been superseded by the Bible proper.

In some way, therefore, these constellations must have symbolized to the ancient patriarchs God's purposes in creation and his promises of a coming Redeemer. This primeval message has been corrupted Satanically into the fantasy messages of the astrologers, but since we now have God's written Word, it is no longer needed. To the early generations, however, it may have served as a memory device, perpetually calling to mind the primeval promises given to Adam, Enoch, and Noah, and those in the line of chosen patriarchs. Even when the world was destroyed in the great flood, the starry heavens remained the same, conveying God's promises to future generations, at least until enough of the written Word was available to make the sidereal signs no longer necessary.

It may be impossible at this late date to fully recover this ancient "gospel in the stars," though a number of attempts have been made.

This syncs closely with William Wright's comment -- or rather with my own modification of his metaphor. Today we still "connect the dots" in the sky and see constellations, but the meaning of the resulting pictures remains opaque. Morris's theory is that in the past God had revealed what the constellations meant, but that now, without access to that revelation, figuring out their meaning may be impossible. "A number of attempts have been made," but I'd wager no two interpreters have read them the same way.

Early on the morning of April 25, I was skimming /x/. The first thing to catch my eye was the image used for this astrology post:

I first noticed it simply because it was a connect-the-dots constellation (Scorpio), but a closer look reveals a more specific sync: Unlike a typical constellation diagram, which has lines connecting one star to another, this one has the stars connected by dots. This matches William Wright's use of the metaphor, in which each individual connection or sync is a dot, not a line.

Another /x/ post really got my attention:

Like the Brave background image, it's a front view of a lion's face in a starry sky. Rather than a typical dot-to-dot constellation, though, this looks like a supernatural apparition. It made me think of Aslan, the lion Messiah of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered if he had ever been depicted that way in art. After a few image searches -- aslan stars, aslan sky -- failed to yield anything, I tried spirit of aslan. This didn't yield any faces-in-the-stars, either, but one of the results caught my eye because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors:

I clicked through to the page it comes from, a 2021 blog post by Stephanie McGann called "Narnia #9: The Last Battle." Here's how it begins:

Before reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons.  

In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. Lewis for his treatment of Susan. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems.

Since the name Susan had unexpectedly cropped up again while I was pursuing lion-constellation imagery, I decided on a whim to do an image search for susan constellation. The first result to show an identifiable constellation was this one:

That's Scorpio, the same constellation from the /x/ post.

I remembered that various forms of the name Susie had been in the sync-stream a few years back, and looking them up reminded me of one of the reasons I'm hesitant to interpret syncs too much these days: Back then, I was extremely confident that all the syncs were predicting that Trump would be back in the White House in 2021, and that obviously didn't pan out. (It's weird to see how political the sync fairies were back then; I'm glad that seems to be over.) One of these Susie/Trump posts was "Hey, Suzy, where you been today?" That's the opening line of the 2019 Weezer song "The End of the Game" -- which also features an unexpected Aslan reference:

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?
I'm looking for you every way
No sign of you when I wake up
I'm on an island with no sun

I feel like I've known you my whole life
You got me crying like when Aslan died
Now you're gone

Going back to the Johnny English Reborn clip, Tucker says, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan" -- saying "a Susan" as if it were a common noun. I know Debbie has posted several times in comments here about a dream in which she was told that she was "a Susie," but I can't find it because comments aren't searchable. Could I trouble you to post it one more time, Debbie?

In the Snatch scene, Bullet Tooth Tony is sitting between two female twins when he says "You can call me Susan." Shortly after that line, he says to the twin on his right, "Pass us the blower, Susie." It's a bit odd saying people can call you Susan when you're sitting right next to someone who actually is called Susan.

This theme of female "twins" -- or at least two women who are hard to tell apart -- also appears in the Johnny English clip. Johnny is at the home of Pegasus, the head of MI7, and her elderly mother is there, too. Also in the house is a Chinese assassin dressed as Pegasus's mother, so that they look the same from behind. Johnny keeps mistaking them for each other -- attacking the mother, then apologizing to the assassin, then attacking the mother again.

Female twins -- and stars, and lions, and crying -- were featured in my March 25 post "She's so rocky, shisa star."

One other thing before I forget it. In his April 22 "Shushan!" post, William Wright compares something Johnny English says to a passage from the Book of Mormon. English says:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

The BoM passage (with boldface added by William) is:

Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.

And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls.  (Alma 37)

I've been reading through the Bible a few chapters a day, and included in my reading for April 24 was this passage in 1 Corinthians:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (1 Cor. 1:27).

This is obviously very similar the the BoM passage, so much so that skeptical readers will say Joseph Smith plagiarized from Paul. Besides the identical "confound the wise" wording, though, Paul also mentions confounding "the things which are mighty" -- a link to Johnny's claim that "The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key."

English compares the key to the stone with which David felled Goliath. Interestingly, a "key of David" is mentioned in the Bible:

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 (Rev. 3:7).

The speaker -- "he that hath the key of David" -- is Jesus Christ. Since Aslan also represents Jesus Christ, this is a link to the "Aslan closed the door" picture above.

When did dogs figure out pointing? (updated)

This is a repost of something I wrote in 2011, with a new data point added.

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Original 2011 post:

In “Transposition,” a sermon delivered during World War II and published in 1949 in Transposition and Other Addresses, C. S. Lewis refers to dogs’ inability to understand pointing.

You will have noticed that dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all.

If you’ve ever owned a dog, you will no doubt find this a rather extraordinary thing to say. Dogs obviously understand pointing, even without any training, and it’s quite common to train dogs to respond to pointing as a command (for example, pointing to a doorway to tell the dog to go into the room indicated). No dog I’ve ever met would waste time sniffing my finger when I’d just pointed out a bit of food it could eat. Cats, yes, but certainly not dogs.

However, Lewis had already had no fewer than six dogs by the time “Transposition” was published (details here), so it’s hard to dismiss what he says about them. This isn’t Pliny the Elder we’re dealing with, reporting hearsay about animals he’d had no personal contact with. Lewis knew dogs well and must surely have known from direct experience how they respond to pointing.

Is it possible that Lewis was right, and that dogs have changed in the half-century since he wrote?

We know that dogs’ ability to understand pointing is a relatively recent evolutionary development. According to dog expert Stanley Coren (as quoted in a 2009 Bloomberg article), domestic dogs understand pointing but their wild conspecifics do not.

“Suppose I point at something — the dog recognizes that I’m indicating something in that direction and looks,” Coren said, referring to a 2004 experiment carried out by Harvard anthropologist Brian Hare, which focused on the increase in dog IQ from domestication. “They do this even if they’re eight to ten weeks old, whereas a wolf, reared since puppyhood in a human environment, would look at my hand,” explained Coren.

Is it possible that the change Coren alludes to could have happened within living memory, sometime after the Second World War? It would be interesting to comb old books for references to dogs’ understanding or not understanding pointing and try to infer when the change took place.

I suppose it’s also possible that geography is a factor. Perhaps the North American dogs studied by Hare and Coren have abilities which English dogs do not. (Iain McGilchrist, a Scot, also refers to dogs’ ability to understand pointing, but he seems to be drawing on the same American research as Coren, not on his own experience.) Most of my own experience with dogs has been in America, but I often see stray Taiwan Tugous (a local breed far removed from anything in Europe or America) and should be able to test their responsiveness to pointing.

If you have any direct experience with dogs and pointing, or if you know of any references to it in books, please leave a comment.

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2023 addendum:

This is from p. 36 of The Hidden Springs: An Enquiry into Extra-sensory Perception (1961) by Renée Haynes:

Humans . . . may also observe that no domestic animal can understand the human gesture of the pointing finger; cats and dogs alike may sniff or lick that finger, but will never follow the line it indicates towards a bone or dish of milk.

"Cats and dogs alike"! As if this were not one of the most conspicuous cognitive differences between the two species!

I have not been able to discover how much first-hand experience Renée Haynes may have had with dogs, so it is not clear whether she speaks from her own knowledge or merely passes on received opinion. At any rate, to say that dogs do not understand pointing was apparently considered uncontroversial as recently as 1961 -- just 43 years before it was experimentally demonstrated that they do. It seems fantastic that canine nature could have changed in such a short time. But, supposing it did not change, it also seems fantastic that such a basic misconception about such a very familiar animal could have persisted for so long -- and in England, of all places, a country Haynes calls a "Dog's Paradise where Cerberus himself would be fed with vitaminized biscuits."

Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this

Some people call them snake-eyes, but to me they look like mice

-- They Might Be Giants, "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes"

In my post "Jonas, Jason, Sonja," I quoted Unsong and linked to an earlier post ("American politician spontaneously combusts") which had quoted the same passage. The earlier post had quoted three paragraphs, though, of which the later one only quoted two. The third paragraph was:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

This is explaining why George W. Bush spontaneously combusted: because Dylan Alvarez, of the terrorist organization Boojum, had hacked his teleprompter to include the name Sonja Horah, thus tricking Bush into pronouncing the "Mortal Name" -- Jahorah, said in the novel to be the true pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton -- which causes instant death to any who utter it.

Saying Sonja Horah, then, is fatal because it is also Son Jahorah -- the syllable Son followed by (what is in the novel) a name of God. This construction -- son plus a name of God, without an intervening of (as we should say "the Son of God") -- made me think of this revelation reported by early Mormon apostle Orson Pratt:

There is one revelation that this people are not generally acquainted with. I think it has never been published, but probably it will be in the Church History. It is given in questions and answers. The first question is, "What is the name of God in the pure language?" The answer says, "Ahman." "What is the name of the Son of God?" Answer, "Son Ahman -- the greatest of all the parts of God excepting Ahman." "What is the name of men?" "Sons Ahman," is the answer. "What is the name of angels in the pure language?" "Anglo-man."

I've always wondered about this. Was it meant to be an alterative etymology of "Son of Man," with "Son Ahman" being misinterpreted as "Son o' Man"? Anyway, the parallel with Sonja Horah is interesting.

The Unsong passage quoted is also of course a modification of the ending of the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark":

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Though it has since come to refer to sarcasm, the word snark was originally coined by Carroll as a "portmanteau" (another Carrollism) of snake and shark. In the context of a post connecting Jonas (swallowed by a big fish) with the dove and Sonja with the serpent, this seems significant.

From the snake-shark, my mind jumped to the extinct reptilian "sharks" known as ichthyosaurs. There is in some of C. S. Lewis's juvenilia, published in a book called Boxen, a character known as "Mr. Icthus-oress" (or sometimes "Ick-this-oress") who "made his fortune playing the harp and got his name by fighting an icthus-oress." Although there is no indication that Mr. Icthus-oress is himself a mouse, his two sons are Tom Mouse and Bob Mouse. (Once, when my brother and I had occasion to attend a Scientology meeting under false names and false pretenses -- a highly entertaining experience! -- we signed in (yes, you have to sign in) as Thomas Maus and Robert Maus. Perhaps someday a Co$ operative, going through some old cold-case files, will find this post and think, "Aha! We've finally got you, 'Robert Maus'!")

Who else is known for playing the harp and got one of his names by fighting a monstrous reptile? The god of the lyre, Pythian Apollo -- who got that name by fighting the Python. Just as Mr. Icthus-oress was the father of two mice, Chryses in the Iliad prays to "Apollo of the Mice" (Apollo Smintheus, from smintha, an Aeolian dialect word for "mouse"), and archaeologists have discovered bronze mice used in connection with the worship of Apollo. Another of Apollo's epithets, Mousegetes, means "leader of the Muses," but look at the first five letters of the transliteration! (In Latin as in English, but a single letter differentiates a muse from a mouse.)

Obviously Apollo didn't have a son named Bob (though Socrates did, Lamprocles being a perfect Greek "translation" of the name Robert), but if Aleister Crowley is to be trusted (there's an "if" for you!), he did have a son named Tom. Here is the Great Beast expounding on the Kabbalistic meaning of the nursery rhyme "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son":

This is one of the more exoteric of these rimes. In fact, it is not much better than a sun-myth. Tom is Toum, the God of the Sunset (called the Son of Apollo, the Piper, the maker of music)

This "Toum" must be the Egyptian god Atum -- occasionally thus translilterated -- who was specifically the god of the setting sun (cf. the etymologically unrelated word autumn, the sunset of the year). I have never heard of Atum being called the Son of Apollo, but such an identification in the interpretatio graeca seems prima facie plausible -- that a subordinate sun god like Atum would be declared the son of the main sun god. Calling Apollo "the Piper" reinforces, by way of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the rodent connection.

It is perhaps worth noting in passing that Crowley also did "Hickory Dickory Dock" ("The mouse is the Ego; Mus, 'a mouse,' being only Sum, 'I am,' spelt Qabalistically backwards") and "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" ("The pumpkin is of course the symbol of resurrection, as is familiar to all students of the story of Jonah and the gourd").

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Coming back to "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son," I currently own an orange and white cat called Q*bert, though these days he is just as often called Cucumber. This is partly because of the phonetic similarity in English, and partly because in Chinese the stereotypical name for a "yellow" (including orange or ginger) animal  would be 小黃, and the Chinese word for "cucumber" is 小黃瓜. Cucumbers are of course cucurbits -- fellow members with the pumpkin of the gourd family -- and cucumber even bears a certain resemblance to kikayon, the original Hebrew name of Jonah's "gourd."

Q*bert is my second orange and white cat. The first, a family pet when I was a young child, was called Tom. One of my brothers (not 'Thomas Maus,' the other one) used to call him Tom-Tom the Drum-Drum -- a double "Tom" followed by a reference to a musical instrument. Q*bert, then, may be considered somewhat interchangeable with Tom Mouse (Atum), son of Mr. Icthus-oress (Apollo) and brother of Bob Mouse. This is confirmed by the realization that if Q*bert had a brother, he would very likely be called R*bert -- or B*b to his friends. Our cat Tom had a sibling, a potential stand-in for Bob Mouse. She was called Mariel, after a book my sister had just read at the time: Mariel of Redwall, one of a series of Brian Jacques novels about -- of all things! -- anthropomorphic mice. One of these mice -- appearing only in Mariel and not in any of the 21 other Redwall books -- is a dormouse called Bobbo: Bob Mouse.

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Thinking about Tom and Bob Mouse -- and connecting Tom and Bob with tohu and bohu -- reminded me of the Dark Mice. This is from a November 8, 2015, entry in my sync log.

[This] morning, I watched lots of Mark Dice videos on YouTube. Mark Dice does two kinds of videos: asking people on the street questions and letting them make fools of themselves, and Illuminati conspiracy stuff.

At around 6:30, watched Spectre, the new James Bond movie. While we were in the theater, before the movie started, I noticed that “Mark Dice” was an anagram/spoonerism of “dark mice,” and I dwelt on that phrase for a while . . . .

Before the movie, there was a commercial involving a girl and her parents all wearing Mickey-Mouse-ear headbands (actually Minnie Mouse in the girl’s case, complete with a polka-dot bow).

In Spectre, there’s a scene where Bond is going to spy on a meeting of the titular secret society. He’s stopped by a bouncer who asks who he is, and he replies (in Italian, with English subtitles), “I’m Mickey Mouse.” Later, when they discover Bond spying and try to kill him, the same bouncer guy says, “Ciao, Mickey Mouse!”

In another scene in Spectre, Bond is sitting in a chair in a hotel room, and a mouse appears. Bond pulls out his gun, points it at the mouse, and says something like, “What do you want? Who sent you here?” The mouse runs away into a hole (which later leads to Bond’s discovering a secret room).

Later that night, went out to . . . take a walk. “Dark Mice” came back to mind, and I was thinking of making a “Dark Mice” tarotesque card. I was also thinking about the one-legged golden chicken (probably because V mentioned a strange dream earlier). Thought first of a card with the Chicken, with two dark mice in the background, then of the Chicken and Dark Mice as two separate cards. Thought about how the Chicken was one of the three symbols of evil in Bhavacakra, and also of how a one-legged golden chicken was sort of connected to the three-legged golden toad. On my walk I ran across an actual toad –– the first I’ve seen in years, and the first ever in our neighborhood. Shortly thereafter, I realized that Mickey and Minnie –– two black mice –– were the “dark mice,” and I noticed the connections with the Bond film. Then, on my way back, I passed a house with a large lighted window, silhouetted in which were what looked like two large cut-outs, of Mickey and Minnie Mouse –– such a creepily precise echo of the whole “dark mice” train of thought that it spooked me . . . .

It also occurs to me that Mickey ears as a symbol of Illuminati mind control are prominent in the types of videos that Mark Dice makes, though I don’t know if Mark himself has commented on that particular symbol. . . .

In the car on the way home from the movie, talked about different Bond actors. Gwen mentioned Dr. No as the first Bond film. Later, at home, searched for “James Bond” + “mice,” and found that characters called the “Three Blind Mice” -- black men, and therefore dark mice -- try to kill Bond in Dr. No.

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Why do I spend so much time pursuing these convoluted coincidence-driven trains of thought (if "thought" is even the right word), when so few of them reach any intelligible conclusion? The easy answer is "because I must" -- but that's not really true. This is something I choose to do (and I chose to do it much less in the past), and that choice must have some motivation.

Another easy answer is that it's just a meaningless and perhaps slightly pathological hobby -- that, just as playing a violent video game gives one a fake version of the satisfaction of defeating one's enemies, without the inconvenience of actually fighting, so synchromysticism offers an ersatz "eureka" feeling without requiring the hard work of making actual discoveries about the real world. I don't really believe that, though. I really do think I'm doing something potentially important, not just engaging in meaningless self-indulgence.

While the majority of my sync-connections seem to lead nowhere, I think that the discipline of noticing connections, and of being aware of things that just "pop into my head," makes me more receptive to revelation when it does come. I'm casting my net -- asking, seeking, knocking -- maintaining a constant attitude of "Are you trying to tell me something?" "For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not" -- so said Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, the only friend of Job whose speech was not condemned by God. Being alert for things that turn up "once, yea twice" is listening for the voice of God.

I also think that coincidence as such -- particularly the troublesome, seemingly-oxymoronic category of the meaningful coincidence -- is something of great potential metaphysical importance, and that I need to keep thinking about it until I figure it out. While I obviously have great sympathy with those who say that "there are no coincidences," I find that a very hard philosophical pill to swallow.  How could there possibly be no coincidences? That seems very close to being logically impossible. I have a hunch that philosophically assimilating the "meaningful coincidence" will have metaphysical ramifications every bit as wide-ranging as assimilating the concept of "free will."

C. S. Lewis's chivalry as a virtue set

Searle Lansing-Jones (1925-2018)

In my discussion of precursors to the Ganymede model of virtue and vice, I gave credit to Solomon, Confucius, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Steiner, and G -- but I didn't think of C. S. Lewis. Now it occurs to me that Lewis's short essay "The Necessity of Chivalry" (which can be found in the anthology Present Concerns and probably elsewhere) prefigures one of the key concepts of the Ganymede model: that there are pairs of complementary (seemingly "opposite") virtues, and the greatest virtue is found not in finding some Aristotelian mean between the two, but in (paradoxically) maximizing both. Here is some of what Lewis had to say about chivalry.

[W]e cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte Darthur. "Thou wert the meekest man," says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. "Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest."

(Note: I didn't realize until just now that wert was used this way in Malory's day; King James English, a century and a quarter later, would use wast in such sentences, reserving wert for the subjunctive.)

The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobstrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, "he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten."

This fits right into the Ganymede model, with ferocity as a Hot/Ahuric/Type-2 virtue, and meekness as its Cool/Devic/Type-1 counterpart. The corresponding vices are easy enough to work out.

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Note: I wanted very much to illustrate this post with a photo of the abstract sculpture Knight by the late Searle Lansing-Jones, whom I knew when I was a missionary in Kanab, Utah, in 1998, and who passed away in 2018. It has stuck with me all these years as a powerful expression of the paradox of chivalry. Since no photos of that piece can be found on the Internet, I have used a photo of Searle himself -- who, as an ex-Marine who fought at Iwo Jima and one of the gentlest men I have ever known, embodied something of the knightly ideal himself.