The pillar of blackness

Eclipses are in the sync stream. Fellow synchromystic Chris Knowles recently posted about how the upcoming total solar eclipse will pass right over Eagle Pass, Texas, a place that's in the news a lot these days. Apparently it will also pass right over the area of Upstate New York where Joseph Smith had his First Vision and published the Book of Mormon, and will take place on April 8, just two days after the anniversary of the founding of the LDS Church. Followers of Denver Snuffer, a prominent fringe Mormon, are therefore planning a conference there to coincide with the eclipse. I know this because William Wright just posted about it in "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," including this image in his post:

When I was a missionary, we memorized and often had to recite an excerpt from the canonical account of Joseph Smith's First Vision, beginning with the line "I saw a pillar of light." This image, though, seems to show the opposite: a pillar of darkness, caused by the eclipse.

This idea of a "pillar of blackness" made me think of an incoherent story written by one of my brothers when he was very young and preserved in a collection of Tychonievich juvenilia known for historical reasons as the Scarlet Notebook. Here's how it begins, and if you can understand what's going on, you're a smarter man than I am, Gunga Din. Note that the name Wooma rhymes with melanoma, not with Montezuma. You should also know that this story has achieved undisputed classic status in my family. We quote from it as if it were Monty Python.

Wooma was going to a meeting. It was for L.L.L.L. (light, light, light, light) wizards. Wooma was an L.L.L.L.T. (light, light, light, light turquoise) wizard.

When he got to the meeting, he found the cause. The L.L.L.L.L. (a light, light, light, light, light) wizard directed.

"The black wizard is back!" L. said. "He is preparing to ash-storm us!"

"I smoke his cave!" said Emisto, arching smoke from hand to hand.

Erik suddenly darted out the door! Emisto and Enel followed! Then everybody followed -- or at least they tried. A darkness swallowed them. L. lit the room, but darkness continued to get stronger! So did the light! Finally, everyone except Wooma and L. left.

Then a pillar of blackness appeared. Out of the pillar stepped Blander the Black! Death shot from Blander's hand -- a blinding light in return!

A black dragon was made from the roof. Fire flared from its mouth. The building was in flames! Frantically, Wooma turned the flames to turquoise! Flames returned but were turned back to turquoise!

Meanwhile, L. had blinded Blander, and Blander killed L.!

Then the dragon shot, but as it came out of its mouth, it turned to ash! Enraged, the dragon blasted fire at Blander the Black, but Blander vanished into his pillar of blackness.

The building erupted in flames. Wooma turned turquoise for an hour. When the hour was over, so was the fire.

The place was burnt, as were the four closest cottages. The dragon was puffing uselessly at a heap of ash. Wooma looked at his land. It was black. His orchard was gone, his corn was gone, and his home was gone.

He told the dragon to take his land. Then he sat down and slept. When he awoke, the dragon was eating his land!

He went to Emisto's house to have breakfast. Then he set off for Eankerdnosh. He was going to try for king's wizard. The king was called Deornoch Knod.

It goes on like that for a few more pages. I vividly remember the first time I heard this story, when it was read aloud by the author at a student literary club. A friend and I were finally asked to leave because we couldn't stop laughing. We did make a valiant effort to control ourselves, successfully getting through the part where Wooma "hid by changing into a turquoise chair cover" during his job interview and the part where "he clapped his hands together and they both disappeared," but when "he frankly turned all the grass around the entrance to turquoise," we lost it. That "frankly" was the straw that broke the camel's back. For me, the real story ends with Wooma frankly turning the grass to turquoise. Everything after that I read only much later, when it was typed up for inclusion in the Scarlet Notebook, and it therefore feels less canonical.

As I've mentioned before, William Wright has connected eclipses with black holes on his blog. After seeing the pillar of blackness in the Remnant Eclipse Conference logo and thinking about Blander the Black, I randomly decided to run a web search for blander the black. I don't know what I was expecting to get, but what I got was black holes:

Another sync: In "Wolves," the post immediately before "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," William Wright recounts a childhood dream about a monster -- likely a wolf -- on its way to his house:

I began to move very steadily forward, and I was aware that I was moving toward the house.  I could see it in the distance, and I was heading for it.  I became aware that I was seeing things through the eyes of whatever it is that was coming for me, and I was scared.  My vision began to shift between the house itself, and back through the eyes of whatever it was that was coming, and it was getting closer and closer.

Though I never saw whatever it was in the dream, I have always associated it with a wolf.

In "The Heavens speaking," William links to an old Salt Lake Tribune article about Denver Snuffer and his movement. I followed the link and read the article on my phone, and at the end I found this:

In case you missed it, wolves are on their way.

One last sync note: The first I ever heard of Denver Snuffer (about whom I still know very little) was in a comment on this blog by Ben Pratt, dated April 6, 2021. The second mention of Snuffer by anyone I know was the post by William Wright, about a conference planned for April 6, 2024. April 6 as an anniversary is a big thing among Mormons; besides being the date the Church was formally organized, it is also held by many to be the true date of both Christmas and Easter.

Sheppards and cloud animals

On November 29, William Wright posted "Keep Me Crazy," a music video from a band called Sheppard.

The video begins with people looking up at the clouds, which assume the form of a giraffe:

Last night I checked Chris Knowles's blog and read his December 4 post "Synchro-Tsunami: The King of Hell," which is all about an actor named Mark Sheppard. The recurrence of the name Sheppard made me think of the "Keep Me Crazy" video again. A repeated line from the song is "I've been walking blind in the dark, never see the sun," which syncs with the name of Chris's blog: The Secret Sun.

Today a free desk calendar arrived in the mail, a gift from an investment bank:

The cloud/Sheppard juxtaposition makes me think of Berger des Nuages, "Shepherd of Clouds," by the surrealist sculptor Jean Arp. Arp's account of the piece's development, as quoted on Wikipedia, ties in with another recent sync theme:

When I woke up, I found on my sculptor's bench a small, playful, lively form of a certain obesity, like the belly of a lute. It seemed to me that it evoked a leprechaun. So I named it that way. And now one day, this little elf character, through a Venezuelan medium, suddenly finds himself the father of a giant. This giant son looks like his father like an egg to another, a fig to another, a bell to another. Like the father, it is difficult to define. And like all definitions, the one given on Monday was different from the one on Tuesday. Any definition of matter, of the atom, from the pre-Socratic to the present day ... what a disturbing cloud! Was this what made the young giant decide to become a cloud shepherd?

Are you not entertained?

Checked The Secret Sun. The most recent meme post, "Life Ain't All Peaches and Meme," leads off with this image:

Then I checked /x/. One of the thumbnails caught my eye because it was a YouTube video I had watched recently (March 8), "Who is Yahweh - How a Warrior-Storm God became the God of the Israelites and World Monotheism." Nothing new for those familiar with the current scholarly consensus on such things. YouTube randomly recommended it, and I watched it because I currently have a post on the back burner about my own thoughts on the "Who is Yahweh?" question, and I also have an email correspondent who keeps sending me his own developing thoughts on the same question. The thread was titled "What do we do with the fact that YHWH was originally a warrior-storm god?" but, 4chan being 4chan, one of the early replies in the thread was this image:

These are of course references to a Russell Crowe movie that came out 23 years ago. Not exactly topical stuff.

The expression "ain't all peaches and cream," synchronistically juxtaposed with questions about the identity of a Being worshiped as God, reminds me of the H. G. Wells story I recently read, "Jimmy Goggles the God." The main character, telling the story of how some primitive tribesmen mistook him for a god (because he was wearing a diving costume, the titular "Jimmy Goggles"), says, "It ain't all jam being a god" -- presumably meaning something similar to "it ain't all peaches and cream."

December 27 was apparently International Cole Slaw Pun Day

The Secret Sun, December 27, 2021:

Bizarro, December 27, 2021:

Fritz food and pearly dewdrops

I was eating some Japanese snacks my wife bought, which are -- well, I'm not at all sure what they are, but they reminded me of something.

I was sure that these snacks looked just like something I had always wanted to eat as a child but had never been able to. After thinking for a minute, I remembered what it was: Fritz food! A bit of searching online led me to scans of the Fritz food pages from Dr. Seuss's 1979 book Oh Say Can You Say?

Something about this picture -- maybe it was Fred's happy face as he opened his mouth to catch a piece -- made me want to eat Fritz food in the worst way. I mean, I guess technically it's dog food -- "Fritz feeds Fred with ritzy Fritz food," so Fritz is the dog -- but I didn't make that connection as a child. I just wanted to try some. I even asked my mom a few times to buy some Fritz food when she went grocery shopping. With her usual straight-faced response to children's nonsense, she said she would be sure to get some if she saw any and reported afterwards that unfortunately there didn't seem to be any Fritz food in stock.

And here I am all these years later eating real Fritz food! Another childhood dream come true.

In my quest for a picture of Fritz food, I perused the rest of Oh Say Can You Say? The last page in particular caught my attention.

I'm not sure why this one stood out to me, but it did. I read it a few times, contemplated the picture, thought, "I would have started with, 'When the drops start forming, the storm starts storming,'" and moved on to other things.

⁂

I have recently begun following Christopher Loring Knowles's blog The Secret Sun. A few weeks back, I was wondering whether any of the old 2009-era synchromystical bloggers were still around, so I found a site from back then that had a long list of links to sync blogs and methodically clicked through all of them. As expected, almost all of them had stopped posting around 2012 or 2013, but a handful were still active, and one of these was The Secret Sun, which I had never heard of before. The guy makes some good connections, and he seems solid on the birdemic and the sexual revolution, so I've started checking him fairly regularly. As a newcomer, I have yet to catch up on some of the long-running sync themes that he often mentions in passing. One of these is the Siren; another is someone called Fraser, with synchromystically important people often being labeled "Fraserfarians."

The other day, one of my correspondents (whose online handle happens to bear a certain resemblance to the word Fraserfarian) sent me a link to a video of a very strange Tarot reading dealing with "America's Pluto Return" -- that is, with Pluto's first anticipated return (in February 2022) to the exact zodiacal position it occupied on July 4, 1776. The reader drew an enormous number of cards from all different sorts of decks, Tarot and non-Tarot alike -- but the very first card she put down was called The Siren.

This led me to check The Secret Sun, where the most recent post, "Send Meme an Angel," had a link to a podcast called "Chris Knowles: All Roads Lead to Liz Fraser." Finally a hint as to who this "Fraser" is! I looked up Liz Fraser, and two main results came up: a British actress "best known for being cast in provocative comedy roles," and a member of the Cocteau Twins (a band of which I know nothing at all). Since the Cocteau Twins had often been mentioned on The Secret Sun, I figured that must be the Fraser I was looking for. I clicked on her Wikipedia article, and sure enough the lead paragraph mentioned "the successful 1983 single 'Song to the Siren.'" I clicked on through to the Cocteau Twins article, and the second paragraph said, "The addition of Raymonde in 1983 solidified their final lineup, which produced their biggest hit in the UK, 'Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops.'"

This is a very direct sync with the last page of Oh Say Can You Say? The duplication of the word drops syncs with Dr. Seuss's "drops start dropping" and "drops stop dropping," and Seuss's illustration even features pearly (white) drops against a blue background.

I haven't yet listened to "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops," but "Pearly Dewdrops Glisten" is the first line of a rather obscure Easter hymn.

Pearly dew drops glisten

Over hill and plain;

Nodding flowers tell us

Easter dawns again;

Fleecy clouds are peeping

From the azure sky;

Happy birds are singing

Praise to God on high.

Streamlets gently murmur

Greetings in their flow;

Joyous bells are chiming

Carols sweet and low;

Golden sunbeams sparkle

Over branches green;

Loving Easter tokens

Everywhere are seen.

Nature's beauties whisper

Of the Saviour's might;

And His resurrection

In the morning light;

If the voice of nature

Echoes in God's praise;

Can we not, His children,

Hearts and voices raise?

Ye cannot serve God and Ammon?

In my November 23 Magician's Table post "Four rams' heads," I discussed Amun in his character as Zeus Ammon and particularly as the four-headed Ram of Mendes (Banebdjedet), and I mentioned ancient coins that depicted a horned Alexander.

Alexander the Great, a prototype of the "emperor" figure, was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon, and ancient coins depict him with ram's horns. (The personage called the "two-horned man" in the Quran is generally believed to be Alexander.)

On November 26, Chris Knowles at The Secret Sun (who I'm pretty sure does not read my blogs) posted "He Walks Ammon Us: Egypt's Restoration Ritual at Luxor," writing that

the big daddy of the gods is Amun, AKA Jupiter Ammon, AKA Banebdjedet, AKA Baphomet, AKA you name it. All the same thing, really: the Horned and Hidden God of kings and conquerors.

If you're wondering about the Baphomet connection, the modern goat-headed Baphomet figure (as opposed with the severed head supposedly worshiped by the Templars) was invented by Éliphas Lévi and associated by him with the "Goat of Mendes" -- i.e., Herodotus's distorted account of Banebdjedet, who was properly the Ram of Mendes. Knowles goes on to mention Alexander as the "two-horned man" of the Quran, and then he offers this interpretation of "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

This is another one of those hiding-in-plain-sight kind of deals that eluded scholars looking for something more contrived. But it's very simple: Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage that Jesus and the Apostles would have been familiar with. It was rendered "Mammon" as was typical of the transliteration of the time.

Well, no, I don't think adding a random M to the beginning was "typical of the transliteration of the time." Nor is it true that "Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage" in Jesus' time. When Jesus held up a Roman denarius and asked, "Whose is this image and superscription?" they answered, "Caesar's." I have looked at many pictures of denarii from the reign of Tiberius, but none of them feature the horns of Ammon. But even if some of them did have horns, it's pretty clear that Jesus and his contemporaries thought of the bloke on the coins as "Caesar," not "(M)ammon."

⁂

In my post "John, the Bear Witness," I connected John the Baptist with the Great Bear constellation and mentioned that pun I used as a title: It is said in the Fourth Gospel that John came "to bear witness." The Greek word for "bear witness" is marturese (whence martyr), and it occurred to me that if you dropped the initial letter, it looked a lot like Arthur or Arcturus ("bear" names both) -- but the connection is a stretch even by my standards, so I didn't mention it in the post. Later I find Knowles doing exactly the same thing, even the same letter.

Actually, come to think of it, Arabic at least does form words by prefixing m- to a root (Muslim from Islam, maktab from kataba, etc.). Is there anything similar in Hebrew or Aramaic? (A pseudo-example from English would be meat, originally meaning "food," from eat.)

⁂

After writing part of this post, I had to go to work. While on the road, I was thinking about the idea of a horned god and how it contrasted with the Elizabethan use of horns as a symbol of cuckoldry and a mark of shame. I remembered how back in 2020 Francis Berger had posted a photo of himself sitting in front of a deer-antler trophy so that he appeared to have antlers coming out of his head, and how I had commented about the Elizabethan meaning of such. This led me to thinking about the white stag and how Frank had adopted it as a sort of personal symbol.

Just then I turned a corner and saw that a new billboard had been put up -- showing an enormous white stag with a crow or raven perched on either antler. So, that was weird.

Looking up Frank's old post now, I find (which I had not remembered!) that in the comments we even talk about rams' horns, Jupiter Ammon, and Alexander the Great.

⁂

Note added Dec. 2: I asked one of my staff to put something Christmassy on the small blackboard in front of our school. I didn't say anything more specific than that, but by chance she decided to make a drawing centered on a large white pair of antlers.