I dreamed that I visited Francis Berger’s blog and found that he had posted a long series of images tiled in a grid layout. These consisted of maybe 8 to 12 unique images, which occurred again and again in an unpredictable sequence like the digits of an irrational number. If the same image occurred two or three times in a row, this was represented with a larger rectangular version of the image, occupying the same space as two or three ordinary square tiles.
The images were colored line drawings of fantastic creatures, mostly somewhat dragon-like. There was a red dragon which seemed to me to be the most important one, and a few of the other creatures were pale blue or cyan. I think one of them looked a bit like my Pokélogan, and there was another that was like a mermaid but less human-looking. Overall, the images suggested the Pokémon aesthetic.
I understood that the grid of images was a calendar of the future, and that whenever there was a long red dragon series, that was a time period when something big could be expected to happen.
I wondered where Frank had gotten the images themselves and figured that they were AI-generated. I refreshed his blog and found a new post gushing about this fantastic new AI service. It was Russian and accepted only Russian-language prompts, but all the cool kids were using it anyway because it was totally uncensored and had no coded-in diversity. Frank also seemed very impressed with its capabilities and wrote that it “may well be the first AI to become an EI.” I didn’t know what EI stood for, but I took it to mean that he thought it had the potential to become literally intelligent, like a human being. (This is of course totally inconsistent with the real Frank’s views on so-called AI.) I can’t remember the name of the Russian AI except that it began with the letter Pi (which is used in Russian as well as in Greek).
As examples of the AI’s amazing capabilities, Frank had posted an image of the mermaid creature and a short video of soldiers on horseback with the word Russia in Russian behind them. I thought both of these were of mediocre quality and couldn’t see what he was so excited about.
Later I saw a commercial for a game based on the group of creatures from Frank’s calendar post. There were some plastic objects about the size and shape of bottle caps, each with a different creature on it, and you could stick these on various surfaces around your living room. These would light up in an unpredictable sequence, and if you had the whacker (which looked like a hand towel), you had to whack the lit-up object before the light went out and then throw the whacker to another player. The commercial said you could even play it with your pets, and it showed a toddler and a silverback gorilla playing together, tearing around a living room and jumping and diving like baseball players to whack all the lit-up objects in time. Both child and ape seemed to be having a great time, but I couldn’t help wondering who would want something like that going on in their living room.
In general, I have my Romantic Christian posts, which are read, commented on, and linked by my fellow Romantic Christian bloggers (e.g. Bruce Charlton, Francis Berger, and William Wildblood); and I have my synchronicity posts, which have dominated the blog in recent months, and which get engagement mostly from a different set of readers (e.g. Debbie, William Wright, and WanderingGondola). There's not normally a huge amount of cross-pollination between these two groups.
My most recent sync-post, though, "A cross between two antlers, and the Liahona spindles," not only includes Frank's blog in the syncs but led to a response post there, "Going Where We Need to Go Versus Going Absolutely Nowhere." Frank discusses the Liahona and legends relating to the white stag and the stag with a crucifix between its antlers. Then, before quoting Bruce Charlton, he mentions in passing that Bruce "has also been connected to the antler/crucifix/St. Eustace in a meme, of all things." I followed the link to Frank's 2021 post about that meme. Notice his choice of words in describing the meme's effect (underlined in red by me):
Quite synchronistically interesting in light of the image I posted which caused him to revisit that old meme:
As I noted in my last post, this image was presumably intended as a reference to a kind of cocktail called a Jägerbomb, but the sync fairies can commandeer anything for their own purposes.
In the context of the Liahona, a sacred artifact described in the Book of Mormon, it is perhaps relevant that that book is often abbreviated as BoM. Back when I was a Mormon missionary, some of my associates would even thus abbreviate it in speech, pronouncing it bomb.
In Taiwan, the game of Hangman -- where you guess letters in a target word or phrase, and with each wrong guess a body part is added to the hanged stick figure -- is commonly played in a different form, called Bomb, where there is a cartoon bomb with a segmented fuse, and one segment of the fuse is erased for each wrong guess. So there's another link between the cartoon bomb and the hanged/crucified man.
In its classic Marseille form, the Hanged Man of the Tarot is hanged between two branches with many protruding stumps, suggesting the antlers of a stag:
Later in my antlers post, I posted a photo of a cross on a pair of automatic sliding glass doors, so positioned that when the doors opened the cross would be split in half. In a comment, William Wright wrote:
I had just posted on "X marks the spot" while thinking (though not stating) that the X in question may not necessarily lead to the actual 'place', but a door or entrance to that place.
The cross on the doors was oriented as a +, not an X, but today I happened to see this on the gates of a construction site near my home:
This is the same concept -- a cross centered on the place where two doors meet, such that opening the doors will split it in half -- but this time the cross is in diagonal X orientation.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my antlers post seemed to draw together two different circles of readers of this blog. I thought of this in terms of the two crosses coming together, as discussed in "What's the second key?"
The wallpaper in the hallway just outside my personal chapel shows a bamboo forest with the sun shining through it. Today I noticed for the first time that the rays of the sun make it look like an eight-pointed star, suggesting the union of two crosses, so I took a photo. Earlier, I had passed a parked car with BEE on the license plate and taken a photo of that. Later, when I opened the photo app on my phone, the two thumbnails were so positioned as to make it look like a single photo, with the BEE car driving toward the eight-rayed sun:
Compare that to this image, which I posted in "What's the second key?"
In the Book of Mormon, the Liahona was used to guide a ship across the sea to the Promised Land. In the Ward Radio video I embedded in my last post, someone says that Hugh Nibley proposed that the word Liahona comes from a Hebrew or Egyptian word meaning "queen bee."
I normally take Hugh Nibley's linguistic speculations with a shaker or two of salt, but interestingly Frank recently linked to "By the waters of Mormon: an open letter to Christian Esoterists," a (highly recommended) essay by a non-Mormon writer from Portugal who calls Nibley "one of the most important intellectuals not only of Mormonism but of the 20th Century."
(Please note the disambiguating comma in the title. This post is not asking "What do you get if you cross a pair of antlers with the Liahona spindles?")
On January 26, I took this photo of the interior wall of a restaurant in Taichung:
This is just part of a larger mural. Besides what you see here, there's a cup of coffee, a basketball hoop, a soccer ball, a club sandwich, that sort of thing -- all appropriate for a restaurant and bar that has lots of TVs always playing sportscasts. And then there's this stag wearing sunglasses, with a shining cross between its antlers. It seemed totally out of place, which is what caught my attention and made me photograph it.
The only place I had seen that sort of imagery before was on Francis Berger's blog, where this is part of the header image. I believe it's a reference to some Hungarian folklore, but I've never really been too clear on the details:
What such a symbol could mean on a restaurant wall, I had no idea. (They don't even have franks on the menu, though they do sell burgers.) The next day, completely by chance, I found myself drinking Jägermeister for the first time in my life. In fact, until then I hadn't even really known what it was. I'd heard the name when I was in college (and a teetotaler) but had vaguely assumed it was a brand of beer or something. This, it turns out, is what the logo looks like:
So that's obviously what the restaurant mural is alluding to. It now fits in with the other pictures of beverages.
Today I went back to the same restaurant, after my recent post about crosses and keys, and my attention was drawn to the deer and cross again. I noticed something I had somehow missed the first time: that the deer is inside a cartoon bomb of the type one associates with Boris Badenov. (Google has since informed me that there is a mixed drink called a Jägerbomb.) I noticed that the rays coming from the cross divided the circle of the bomb into twelve segments, like the face of a clock, and that the cross suggested hour and minute hands, leading me to the idea of a "time bomb."
Then I remembered that I had actually posted about cartoon bombs before, in my 2021 Tarot post "The emperor's orb." I looked it up on my phone. Directly under an image of Boris and Natasha with bombs was this paragraph, saying that the strange-looking orb on the Rider-Waite Emperor card also reminded me of something else besides a cartoon bomb:
The other thing it reminds me of is the Liahona, described as "a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness." (1 Nephi 16:10). Despite the clear statement that there were two spindles within the ball, artists' depictions of the Liahona invariably show a single protrusion extending out from the top of the ball.
The italics are in the original post. I specially emphasized that, though artists' depictions tend to make the Liahona look like a golden Boris Badenov bomb without a fuse, the Book of Mormon text actually specifies "two spindles within the ball." Well, why do those have to be mutually exclusive? In the restaurant mural we have a cartoon bomb and within it two spindles (the cross, which I had noted looked like the two hands of a clock.)
Later, walking around the city, I passed a pharmacy and snapped a photo of the logo because it had a white cross on a green field, just like the Jäger logo:
Then I passed the front door of this pharmacy, which had of course been decorated for the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday; the Year of the Dragon begins soon. The white cross is no longer on a green field, since red is the traditional New Year color, but it's now between two antlers -- albeit those of a dragon, or a Shiba Inu dressed as a dragon or something:
It was also interesting to see the cross neatly bisected by the sliding doors. It reminded me of a bit of doggerel I wrote when I wasn't even a Christian but couldn't pass up an irresistible bit of wordplay:
One of Jesus' one-liners, and far from his worse,
Says the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
In the tongue of the Angles, it means something more:
That the Law is a wall, but the Rood is a door.
When I was reading Calvino today, I had to look up the word hirocervus. It's another word for a tragelaph -- a mythical cross between a goat and a stag. I remembered that I'd posted about that before, too, so I looked it up: a December 2020 post called "Year of the Tragelaph." I had woken up with the word tragelaph in my head, leftover from an otherwise forgotten dream, and had free-associated from there. The post ended with a photo of a red logo that said "Phoenix Empire" in both English and Chinese.
Now look back at the pharmacy sign. It's Chinese New Year (also implied by the post title "Year of the ..."), there's a chimerical creature which is part stag ("his antlers resemble those of a stag" is one of the Nine Resemblances which define a Chinese Dragon), and there's the Chinese word for "phoenix." Of the four characters on the red lozenge, 龍鳳呈祥, the first means "dragon" and the second means "phoenix."
This evening, at home, I brought up YouTube so I could listen to something while exercising. One of the top videos recommended by the algorithm was called "What the Liahona REALLY Looked Like!" Not normally the sort of thing I would have clicked on, but the sync fairies had already brought up the Liahona.
In my 2021 Tarot post linking the Liahona to a cartoon bomb, I had quoted the Book of Mormon's statement that the Liahona had two spindles and that one pointed the way they should go. What the other spindle does is never mentioned. Incredibly, the bulk of the YouTube video deals with the question of what the second spindle did:
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:
In connection with my recent posts about Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet novels, both Wandering Gondola and William Wright have drawn my attention to the 2022 film Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The opening scene begins with the words "THE MUSHROOM PLANET" filling the screen, and then -- after a long sequence showing a Rube Goldberg machine used to produce "mushroom coffee" -- we see Jim Carrey in the role of the bald-headed villain, Dr. Robotnik, alias Eggman. His opening line is:
Doctor's log: It's day 243 in this Portabella Purgatory. My only companion is a rock I named Stone.
This morning I checked some blogs and found Francis Berger's latest post "No, You Are Not the Eggman, John . . . I am." Frank is the Eggman because his "henhouse is home to 24 hens that lay 18-22 eggs daily, or about 140 a week." (In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the first novel in the series, the main characters save the day by bringing a hen to the Mushroom Planet to lay eggs.)
Frank's reference is not to Sonic's nemesis but to John Lennon and "I Am the Walrus" -- a song covered by none other than Jim Carrey in 1998, 22 years before he was cast as Eggman in the first Sonic movie:
Many years ago, I decided that the line "They are the Eggmen" referred to Castor and Pollux (and, taking They as a proper noun, that They Might Be Giants were symbolically Castor and Pollux, too). In the original video for "I Am the Walrus," the Beatles portray the Eggmen by wearing white skullcaps:
Castor and Pollux are typically portrayed wearing very similar skullcaps, representing the egg from which they hatched, having been fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan:
The Dioscuri of course recently appeared in the sync-stream, in my post "Never mind the Pollux."
These distinctive caps worn by the Eggmen of Zeus were called pilos in Greek, but in English it is more common to use the Latin form pileus. That also happens to be the technical term for the cap of a mushroom:
Instead of saying mushrooms like a normal person, Merrian-Webster opts for basidiomycetes. The Mushroom Planet of Cameron's novels is called Basidium, home to the bald-headed Basidiumites, whose Earth-based cousins, known as Mycetians, all bear the middle name Mycetes.
Just after reading Frank's post and making the above connections, I picked up The Philosopher's Pupil and read this. One character is admiring some Japanese objets d'art collected by another character:
'I see you've set out the netsuke, my old friends.'
As a young child I labored under the misapprehension that Castor and Pollux was an obscenity, since invoking their names is characterized as "swearing" in T. H. White's The Once and Future King:
"Turn me and Kay into snakes or something."
Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.
"Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.
The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.
"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.
"I did not do it on purpose."
"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"
"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."
In Time and Mr. Bass, the final book in the Mushroom Planet series, the title character does the same thing Merlyn does in this scene: "Tyco vanished, only to reappear almost immediately." Later in the novel things take an unexpectedly Arthurian turn:
I beheld all that was left of King Arthur -- rex quondam, rexque futurus, the once and future king -- and I tell you, my friends, his bones were enormous!
I will have much more to say about Time and Mr. Bass in a future post.
Today I was checking something on Know Your Meme and saw "Knowledge is power. France is bacon" up in the trending section. Since syncs with the name Francis have been a thing recently, I clicked. Here's the "Origin" section:
On October 28th, 2010, Redditor OrdinaryPanda submitted a post to the /r/AskReddit subreddit, which asked what words or phrases other Redditors misunderstood as children. In the comments section of the post, Redditor Lord_Baron confessed to mishearing the quote "Knowledge is power – Francis Bacon" as Knowledge is power, France is bacon." Prior to being archived, the commented accumulated over 7,600 up votes.
Since one of my earlier Francis syncs had involved a pope and a famous painting (Pope Francis gluing himself to The Creation of Adam in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel"), this made me think of a different Francis Bacon, the painter best known for his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. (I hate that painting. While it may show a bit more technical skill than Duchamp's mustached Mona Lisa, it's the same basic idea -- only Bacon's sacrilege is greater, since Diego Velázquez's original is far greater than the Mona Lisa.) On a whim, I looked him up on Wikipedia:
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Heh, "one of the giants of contemporary art." Yes, that's the mot juste.
So, there's a bit of symmetry. On October 28, I happened upon an old receipt dated October 30, 1984. (See "Oops, did I mess up one of those anniversary syncs?") Today, October 30, I found this sync about October 28. (I wrote most of this post at around 10:30 p.m. on October 30. Then I was interrupted and didn't get around to finishing it until after midnight.)
Know Your Meme credits "France is bacon" to someone called Lord_Baron -- a double title that syncs with Count von Count and the Duke of Earl -- but it's actually a mistake. The reddit screenshot provided clearly shows the username as Lard_Baron, presumably meant as a pun on "oil baron."
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After writing all of the above but before publishing, I ran an image search for diego velazquez pope innocent x. My initial plan was just to find a high-resolution photo of it and look at it -- it's a great painting, one of my favorites -- but I got sidetracked.
Recently, I was about to see a painting by a favourite artist that I had never viewed in the flesh—the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Diego Velázquez in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Yet amid my excitement was a hint of trepidation. Two things provoked it. First, the fear of disappointment. Just before my visit, the artist Mark Leckey had confided in our A brush with... podcast how he had journeyed to view Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling but found that he “couldn’t see it”. He said: “I made this pilgrimage. And then it was denied by the crowds and everything else. It was just horrible.”
One of the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel" was Francis Berger going to see the Sistine Chapel. Frank had said that "From a purely museum visit perspective, it was a disaster."
Going back to the image search results, another of the first ones was a blog post pointing out that Innocent X in the portrait looks like Gene Hackman. I clicked that one, too. Since in this post I had just written that the Velázquez portrait was much better than the Mona Lisa, I was surprised to see the juxtaposition in this "Pope Gene Hackman X" post:
Gene Hackman was in the sync stream two years ago. In fact, I did a sync post titled simply "Gene Hackman."
Sistine sounds almost the same as sixteen in English, and in fact the original name of the Sistine Chapel was Sacellum Sixtinum, named after Pope Sixtus IV (sort of the Fifth Third Bank of the papacy).
My October 19 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more" dealt with Michelangelo, and specifically with his painting The Creation of Adam, which is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- and even more specifically with the finger of God as depicted in that painting. I connected that with what I was reading in the Book of Mormon at the time: the finger of God touching the sixteen small stones of the Brother of Jared. I didn't notice the sixteen-Sistine link at the time.
I haven't been keeping up with other people's blogs very well lately, so shortly after posting about the Sistine Chapel, I did some catching up. I read an October 17 post by Francis Berger, "The Kingdom of Christ Without Caesar; Or, the Ultimate Religious Reality of Inward Christianity," with thoughts inspired by his recent trip to Rome. He discusses his reason for visiting the Vatican while there:
So, what was my motivation? Difficult to say. My visit was inspired mostly by my eleven-year-old son’s desire to see the Sistine Chapel, a desire I shared even though I struggled to pinpoint the source of my interest. Was it all about seeing a magnificent work of art, or was there more to it than that?
Frank's post, as the title suggests, turned to the necessity of direct of "inward" Christianity, unmediated by a Church or anyone else. I left a comment saying, "The most famous painting in Sistine Chapel itself -- a naked man being touched directly by God -- sort of fits your point here."
After browsing a few more blogs, I turned to the Babylon Bee, which I had also not checked recently. There, dated October 19 -- the same day I myself posted about the Sistine Chapel -- was this:
In my comment on Frank's blog, I had noted how The Creation of Adam could be seen as a symbol of direct contact with God, unmediated by the Church. The Babylon Bee, which has a Protestant bent, made the same connection:
The Pope then superglued himself in between the hands of Adam and God in the central depiction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. "This is symbolic, my children!" Pope Francis shouted while waiting for the glue to dry. "I am placing myself between God and man because — oh, this glue is irritating my skin. I wasn't expecting that."
Furthermore, this is Pope Francis, and I had just read about the Sistine Chapel on Francis Berger's blog. Pope Sixtus IV, for that matter, was a Franciscan, and his birth name was Francesco.
In my "Syncfest" post, I recount how, just after reading about the sixteen small stones touched by the finger of God, causing them to light up, I had found seven (1 + 6) small stones sitting on my desk, left there by my wife. I later found out that she was planning on using them for magical purposes.
My last post, "17 years ago our eyes were opened," features a video I happened to watch yesterday after following a trail of links starting on /x/. Just now I checked the About page for the channel.
"I don't know what you did to get here, but keep doing it. It's working." Obviously that means I need to keep browsing /x/. Okay, I can do that.
It's a little bowl of crystals -- seven distinct stones are clearly visible -- with the caption "why do women think these have magic powers." One of the comments in the thread was "You can rub them together and they light up."
On a hunch, I did a ctrl-F on the thread for Francis to see if that would turn up, too. It did, exactly once, in a post that also included the word Mormon:
Francis Barrett was an occultist. The standard biography of him was written by Francis X. King. Barrett's magnum opus, The Magus, includes a chapter "On the Wonderful Virtues of Some Kind of Precious Stones."
Note added:
That Michelangelo painting keeps showing up in the unlikeliest contexts. This was in the sidebar on YouTube today, for example:
If you wanted to illustrate the corrupting effect of money on religion, is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam the first thing you'd think of? I'm not even sure if it's supposed to represent prosperity theology (God giving money to people) or fleecing the flock (people giving money "to God" via his supposed representatives). Just a very odd choice of illustrations. Also an odd recommendation on YouTube's part, since it's not the sort of video I've ever watched. My best guess is that it was suggested because I recently watched all the Galahad Eridanus videos, including one called "Money & Magic."
Also, how is it that I noted the plethora of Francises in this post -- Francis Berger, Pope Francis, the Franciscan friar Francesco della Rovere (later Pope Sixtus IV), and Francis Barrett -- without making the obvious connection to my recent Freeman syncs?
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.)
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."
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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.)
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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.
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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.
And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
-- 2 Thessalonians 2:10
This passage was brought to my attention when it was quoted in a review of That Hideous Strength at Bennett's Phylactery. Most English Bibles have deception or deceiptfulness, but deceivableness is also a possible reading of the Greek, and I think this is a case in which the King James translators were clearly inspired. What do we see all around us in 2020-21 but the deceivableness of unrighteousness, because they received not the love of the truth?
The masses may indeed be under some sort of spell, but this does not absolve them of personal responsibility. They chose to fall under the spell and continue to choose to remain under that spell. The masses are not passive victims, and we should not make excuses for them.
Only God searcheth all hearts, but it is my considered opinion that there are very few, if indeed any, innocent victims of the birdemic scam and the other Big Lies of our time. The deceived are complicit in their own deception. To quote the Bennett's Phylactery article I linked, "Everyone involved knows on some level that they are being lied to -- and they not only assent to the lie, but workshop it, and refine it, and pass it along."
There's an obvious paradox involved in knowingly being deceived -- Carlyle's "sincere cant," Twain's "believing what you know ain't so." To know that you are being deceived, you must know that what you believe is a lie -- but if you know it's a lie, in what sense do you believe it? I think that's an extremely important philosophical and psychological question that deserves careful reflection, and I've been nibbling away at it over the years. On rough-and-ready terms, though, everyone knows what "on some level" means and knows -- firsthand -- what it means to be guilty of sincere cant. These things are always easier to recognize in others, though, and the world of 2020-21 has given us all ample opportunity for that!
I just read a post by Frank Berger called "Liberty no longer enlightens the world." It closes with the implication that what can enlighten the world is God.
Perhaps we will rediscover libertas again - true libertas - the kind of libertas that does not need to impose its glory upon the world with through the promise of a beckoning, light-casting statue.
The kind of libertas that can lead us from enlightening to finding the Light, if we so choose.
Just after reading that, I happened to see the Oxford logo, with its motto Dominus illuminatio mea -- "The Lord is my light." (The logo as a whole also happens to bear a resemblance to a certain letter of the alphabet.)
The motto is the beginning of Psalm 27. Here's the whole thing:
1 The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
2 When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
3 Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
4 One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.
5 For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.
6 And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord.
7 Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
8 When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.
9 Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.
10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
11 Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies.
12 Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
13 I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
14 Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
My first mention of Joan of Arc, which set off the present chain of synchronicities, was a reference to "biblical pun correction" in Unsong: "One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is 'corrected' by another: 'Jonah whale; Noah ark.'" That is, one of the characters deliberately "mishears" the name "Joan of Arc" as "Jonah ark."
The first mention of Jonah in Unsong is when a girl meets a rabbinical student in a bar and gets him to agree to kiss her if she knows something about the Bible that he doesn't. She then asks him, "How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?" -- and he walks into the trap, replying "three days and three nights" without noticing that the question is about Joseph rather than Jonah.
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The more usual form of this joke is "How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?" And the punchline, more often than not, is, "None. Moses wasn't on the ark." But of course Moses was in an ark. Here is Exodus 2:3-6.
And when [the mother of Moses] could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.
And his sister [Miriam] stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.
And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.
And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.
Ark -- flags -- maid -- remind you of anyone? Many of my recent posts about Joan have centered on her distinctive banner or flag, and I have even had occasion to write (without any thought of Moses), "The word flag, of course, can also refer to a lilioid flower." In fact, when the word flag occurs in the King James Bible, it always refers to a riverside plant, never to a banner.
Joan's flag bore the names Jhesus and Maria. While the intended referents were of course Jesus Christ and his mother, these are also the New Testament forms of the Old Testament names Joshua and Miriam, respectively. Joshua was Moses' lieutenant and successor; Miriam, his elder sister who watched over him while he was in the ark.
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But the main biblical ark is the Ark of the Covenant, created under the direction of Moses. Like Joan's banner, it features God between two angelic beings. Here is Exodus 25:22.
And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.
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In the previous post, I mention my pleasure in discovering that Joan of Arc has had what is described as a "boat-shaped church" built to her name in Rouen (even though the church itself is an outrageous eyesore), because it recalls the joke about Joan of Ark being Noah's wife.
And then I realized that, if a boat-shaped church counts as an ark, "Jonah ark" isn't a mistake after all. Check out Chapters 8 and 9 of Moby-Dick. While the chapel Ishmael visits isn't technically "boat-shaped," it's certainly much more boat-like than your average house of worship. The pulpit is made to look like the prow of a ship, and is ascended by means of a rope ladder "like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." The preacher begins by shouting out nautical commands to the congregants -- "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard -- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" -- and then, addressing them as "shipmates," proceeds to deliver a sermon on -- Jonah.
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While I was in the process of writing this post, and had already made the Moses-Joan connection, Frank Berger left a comment on my previous post: "Check out my comment from your June 17, 2019 post in which you linked a gallery of your sister's fine drawings. The gallery featured thirty drawings, yet I comment on only one . . ."
The one drawing he had commented on was, of course, the portrait of Joan of Arc.
As for myself, in the 2019 post referred to, I had selected two of my sister's drawings as my favorites: one of an unidentified young woman, and the other titled Moses in the Court of Pharaoh.
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After writing all of the above, I suddenly had the idea that I should check Bible passages numbered 20:21 to see is they had any applicability to the year that has just begun. Remembering how my uncle William John had based his interpretation of 9/11 on Revelation 9:11, I thought I'd try Revelation 20:21 -- but there is no such verse. Psalm 20:21, then? No such verse. Genesis? No such verse. Exodus, then? Jackpot.
And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.
