What's the second key?

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 Fortuna back 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:

An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge

After work this evening, I checked America's flagship meme post and saved this one:

I've never seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator, but I know enough from cultural osmosis to get the reference: the title monster can blend in perfectly with its surroundings, like a chameleon, making it virtually invisible. The meme made me think about the word chameleon itself, since the second half of the word clearly means "lion." Looking up the etymology, I find that it comes from the Greek for "dwarf lion" -- which would also be a pretty good name for a housecat. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that "Perhaps the large head-crest on some species was thought to resemble a lion's mane." Keep that lion-headed reptile imagery in mind.

Just after getting my meme fix, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post is called "'Get in the choppa!': A skin-removing Chameleon hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger" and is all about -- what else? -- the 1987 movie Predator.

William's post ends with this note:

[Note: as I was just finishing up some edits above, I looked at Predator and saw it as Pre-Dator, as in something that pre-dates.  A Being that is very old and from "Before" - Ancient - for whatever that is worth]

This made me think of two things. First, it's in the context of a Schwarzenegger movie, and people often imitate Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent by dropping the r from his first name, sometimes even spelling it Ahnold. Ages ago, in some intro-to-literature class, we read the Joyce Carol Oates story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" One of the main characters is Arnold Friend, who represents the devil or the personification of death. The teacher pointed out that if you remove the r's from his name, it becomes an old fiend. The movie Predator, the title of which William Wright read as "something that pre-dates . . . very old . . . Ancient," stars "Ahnold" -- Arnold with the r removed -- which, as the intro-to-lit teacher noted, and as Oates perhaps intended, yields an old.

The other connection I made was with Revelation 12:9. William had capitalized Ancient as if it were a title, and "ancient" is one of the titles applied to Satan in that verse: ho drakon ho megas, ho ophis ho archaios, "the Great Dragon, the Ancient Serpent." And that juxtaposition of drakon and archaios brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon.

A few months ago I watched, and posted a bit about, a series of videos by someone going by Galahad Eridanus, who created, under the influence of "angels" and psychedelics, a symbolic diagram he calls the Abraxian Cosmogram. Part of it looks like this:

Notice the two serpents labeled archon and drakon, which correspond respectively to Ahriman and Lucifer in Rudolf Steiner's system. Revelation 12:9 uses the words drakon ("dragon") and archaios ("ancient"). Drakon is obviously the same word used in the Cosmogram; archon and archaios are forms of the same word, being respectively the present participle and gerund of the verb archein ("to be the first").

Chameleon, recall, is from the Greek for "dwarf lion," apparently because the Greeks thought the chameleon looked like a lion-headed reptile. In the Cosmogram, the being with the Greek name Archon is depicted as a lion-headed serpent. This is a Gnostic symbol, often associated with the name Yaldabaoth, but in memes it is invariable given the title Demiurge. I suppose it's just a coincidence that one of the first such memes I found in an image search also happens to include a gray cat and a tree:

What's the significance of the Demiurge? Well, in his post William Wright mentions that a scene in Predator reminded him of "that strange picture that WJT has posted on his blog a few times (with Arnold running away from the reality temple)." Yeah, but whose reality temple?

Another random chameleon note. My January 7 post "My tail is dun" takes its name from a scene in the Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle, in which Dor has forced a "spelling bee" (a magical insect which can spell words) to help him write an essay. The resentful bee, though unable to misspell a word, finds a loophole by giving Dor technically correct spellings, but of homophones, not the words he clearly wants. When Dor dictates "My tale is done," the bee produces "My tail is dun."

In a comment on that post, I noted that Dor's mother is actually named Chameleon. I now note further that, just as the scene I had referred to was about spelling and used lots of homophones and homonyms, the character Chameleon was introduced in the novel A Spell for Chameleon -- that's spell in the magical sense, of course, a homonym of what the spelling bee does. The cover features a manticore -- a mythical creature with a lion's mane and the tail of a dragon or scorpion. This one has a scorpion's tail, but a manticore still seems similar in principle to the lion-headed serpent.

The idea of a "spelling bee" as an insect also makes me think of the spelling-reform project carried out in mid-19th century Utah under the direction of Brigham Young. They called it the Deseret Alphabet, deseret being a word said in the Book of Mormon to mean "honeybee." So a good English translation of "Deseret Alphabet" would be "Bee Spelling."

The Philosopher's Pupil and the eclipse

In my October 23 post "Jesus is my librarian," I describe what brought Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil to my attention:

One of the other books on the shelf caught my eye, though: The Philosopher's Pupil, a book I bought right around the time I was outgrowing Iris Murdoch and never ended up reading. It made me think of the ending of a poem that features in the Eridanus videos:

Ascend, O moon

Into the sun

Eclipse's eye

Thy will be done.

Lo, Abraxas!

To thy pupil cometh sight,

For from thy shadow shineth light!

It's a little surprising, given that the author's name is Iris and all, that I'd never thought of the ocular sense of pupil in connection with Murdoch's book; I'd always assumed it referred to a philosopher's student and never considered any other possible meaning. Seeing the title printed on a black background, though, with that poem in the back of my mind, I made the connection. Now I suppose I'll have to read it to see if Murdoch does the same.

I've very nearly finished The Philosopher's Pupil, and, no, the "pupil" as part of the eye never comes up. The original synchronistic context, though, was of the dark "pupil" at the center of a solar eclipse. This is the "pupil" image from the Galahad Eridanus video:

This image has no relevance for the vast majority of Murdoch's novel, but right near the end it shows up:

Only the sun, blazing through the misty light, had changed or was changing. It was no longer round but was becoming shaped like a star with long jagged mobile points which kept flowing in and out, and each time they flowed they became of a dazzling burning intensity. The star was very near, too near. It went on flaming and burning, a vast catastrophic conflagration in the evening sky, emitting its long jets of flame. And as it burnt with dazzling pointed rays a dark circle began to grow in its center, making the star look like a sunflower. George thought, I'll look at the dark part, then I shall be all right. As he watched, the dark part was growing so that now it almost covered the central orb of the sun, leaving only the long burning petals of flame which were darting out on every side. The dark part was black, black, and the petals were a painful shimmering electric gold (pp. 556-557).

This hallucinatory episode, which also includes a flying saucer, ends with George losing consciousness. When he comes to, he asks, "Was there an eclipse of the sun?" and is told that there was not.

The parallels with Galahad Eridanus's "eclipse" -- which was also a hallucinatory vision rather than a literal astronomical event -- are quite close.

The sunflower angle is interesting, too, as that flower has been in the sync-stream recently, particularly in some of William Wright's recent posts. I had not previously made the connection that if a sunflower resembles a solar disc, it is an eclipsed solar disk, a dark circle surrounded by a fiery corona.

Note added 1:50 p.m.: Looking back at the "Jesus is my librarian" post, I see it had a photo of Murdoch's book on my shelf, very close to an English translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Here is Odilon Redon's illustration for the latter book:

Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?

I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class. This post will contain quite a lot of anatomical vulgarity.

I've never listened to the Sex Pistols. I mean I literally don't think I've ever listened to a single Sex Pistols song. They're not the sort of band that gets played on the radio, let alone as background music in public places. Nevertheless, they're supposed to have been an "important" group in the history of popular music, and I've picked up a thing or two about them through cultural osmosis. So when I needed a title for a sync post about seeing the word caster twice in rapid succession -- not Castor and Pollux but Caster and Caster -- what came to mind was "Never mind the Pollux," a reference to the 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

Not really knowing anything about the album, I looked it up after posting and found this:

Mortimer produced an expert witness, Professor James Kinsley, Head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham, who argued that the word "bollocks" was not obscene, and was actually a legitimate Old English term formerly used to refer to a priest, and which, in the context of the title, meant "nonsense." Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who appeared with Mortimer, recalled the professor saying that early English translations of the Bible used "bollocks" to refer to testicles, this being replaced by the word "stones" in the King James Version of the Bible, at which point Rotten handed Robertson a note saying, "Don't worry. If we lose the case, we'll retitle the album Never Mind the Stones, Here's the Sex Pistols."

Johnny Rotten was referencing the Rolling Stones, of course, and implying that his band was better. (By the way, one of the Bible passages with stones for "testicles" is Job 40:16-17, which is subtly alluded to in one of the most secret parts of the Mormon temple ceremony.) After William Wright left a comment on the post, though, I thought of the Stones he is so obsessed with, so I left a comment mentioning Rotten's quip. William replied with this:

Hmmm - that [Sex Pistols reference] went over my head. I've never listened to them and don't know a thing about them, until I looked them up just now.

A seeming reference to your latest post on raising eyebrows? Seems like that group raised a few back in the day, from what I've just read.

A group referencing themselves as Dicks (using this slang here on purpose for reasons below) that asks folks to not mind (pay attention to) the Stones is interesting, in a bad way I guess, if one is willing to interpret Stones in a different way than intended.

Your Banana group that charged after the Civil War nuts seemed to be also a reference to dicks, if I understood you correctly?

Dick is a nickname based on Richard, which also has Rick as a nickname. You wrote about a picture of someone who likes to "rick", meaning swinging a massive morningstar, which you mentioned was badass and pretty cool. We see a similar weapon (a flail, technically) in the Iron video held by a person that could probably be described as a badass.

In your post announcing you were sync posting again, you actually did the same thing that the Sex Pistols are telling people to do in their album title, in a way. You changed "Let's rock and roll" to "Let's rick and roll", replacing the rock (Stone) with a rick (dick)....as in, never mind the Rock-Stone, here is the Rick-Dick.

How is it that I never made any of those connections? I knew the literal meaning of bollocks, and the intended meaning of Sex Pistols, but I never put two and two together and realized that the album title is literally saying "Never mind the testicles, here's the penises." I guess pitting those two parts of the male anatomy against each other is so odd and unnatural that it never crossed my mind.

As for the Bananas vs. the Civil War Nuts (see "Charge! Run away!"), the Freudian implications of bananas vs. nuts seem inescapable once they've been pointed out, but I never made the connection until I read William's comment. When I wrote that "I was very interested in, uh, bananas," I think William took my uh as wink-wink-nudge-nudge, but it was just intended to signal sheepishness as I admitted that, while my peers were interested in intellectually stimulating subjects like the Civil War, I myself was obsessed with something as vacuous as a particular kind of fruit. No double entendre.

Here's how I came to be Banana Man. When I was very young, maybe two or three, I used to wake my parents up almost every night screaming about big-eyed "monkeys" looking in my window or coming into my room. I would later come to think of these unwelcome guests as "the bugs" and superstitiously repeat the prayer "Don't let the bugs bother me tonight," but at this point they were "monkeys." My parents, who believed in tackling phobias head-on (my father would often tell the story of how he overcame his own formerly extreme arachnophobia), responded to this by buying me a Curious George doll and encouraging me to embrace all things monkey -- which I did, with a vengeance. Eating lots of bananas was part of this, and I insisted on eating them "the monkey way" -- meaning with the skin peeled back but not removed, as I had seen monkeys eating them in cartoons. Over time, bananas gradually took over center stage from monkeys, and monkeys began to seem to be an aspect of my obsession with bananas even though it had originally been the other way around. I still have some of my old writing assignments from elementary school, and everything -- everything -- is about monkeys or bananas. When we read Banner in the Sky, I always referred to it as Banana in the Sky, and when I had to create sentences using vocabulary words like edelweiss and reconnoitre, I came out with stuff like, "Few people realize that, like edelweiss, banana trees can flourish at high altitudes." It became a challenge: I saw "Write one sentence using each of the following words" and read "Write a paragraph about monkeys or bananas incorporating each of the following words." I was pretty good at it, and I like to think it made checking homework marginally less boring for my teachers.

As I got older, I got tired of the Banana Man persona but found that it was too well established to be readily shaken off. Fortunately, right around that time the Cold War ended, and my father left Martin Marietta and the land of submarines for an insurance company in Cleveland. This meant a substantial step down in terms of coolness-by-association, but it also meant a fresh start in a new town, and I left Banana Man behind in Maryland.

When I read William's comment about how bananas were clearly "a reference to dicks," my first thought was, "Oh, come on! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!" -- the line humorously attributed to Sigmund Freud. But of course, much like Freud himself, I have made a habit of reading hidden meanings into everything and therefore have no right to say that. Live by the -- oh, wait, that's a phallic symbol, too, isn't it?

Then I remembered how one of my teachers, adapting a common expression about cigars for the benefit of the Banana Man in his class, used to say "Close but no banana" when a student's answer wasn't quite correct. And I used to have a sync blog called No Cigar. This was a reference to a line in the They Might Be Giants song "See the Constellation" (later Galahad Eridanus would independently use the word constellating to mean noticing connections and synchronicities) but also to the Freud joke: No, a cigar isn't ever just a cigar because nothing is ever just itself; everything has a meaning. Furthermore, the word cigar likely comes from, or was influenced by, cigarra, the Spanish for "cicada." I adopted the cicada as a sort of personal emblem c. 2009. I wore a jade cicada pendant, and my blog was called Bugs to fearen babes withal (a deliberately misinterpreted line from Spenser, also adapted by Melville in his Encantadas), with an anatomical diagram of a cicada as the header image. Real longtime readers (maybe just Bruce?) will remember this. When in 2010 I asked for and received a "sign from God" (which failed to convert me from atheism), it took the form of a cicada.

How did the cicada -- considered a "true bug" by entomologists -- come to succeed the banana as a personal symbol? Well, it goes back to that Spenser line and to my childhood terror of the little chaps I thought of as "monkeys" or "bugs." In other words, the banana and the cicada can ultimately be traced back to the same source.

Now things get really weird. Shortly after moving to Ohio -- so I would have been around 12 -- I had a dream in which my old friends the bugs (long neglected and no longer terrifying) appeared and rather gleefully sang me a song in English (as opposed to the wordless drone that was their normal "song" in my infancy), to a tune similar to the Star Wars theme. Music always makes things easier to remember, and I can give you the cryptic lyrics verbatim all these years later:

R-V!

Remember the other word: dea-con!

Indestructible worker

Let him without stone cast the first cigarette

I was myself a deacon at that time, as are most Mormon boys of that age. I remember that in the dream I understood RV to stand for preparation worker, even though that doesn't make any sense. The literal meaning of deacon is "servant" (worker), and in Mormonism it is considered to be a "preparatory" office; after two years as a deacon, a boy would normally be promoted up through the ranks of the priesthood, becoming an elder at the ripe old age of 18.

What strikes me now, though, is the last line, which at the time seemed to be nothing but an opaque and apparently meaningless corruption of "let him without sin cast the first stone." Notice how perfectly it fits with our present theme: no stones, but here's a phallic symbol. It even features the word cast. William Wright linked the "casters" of my post (one of which, remember, was a cigarette pack) with Aaron and the magicians "casting" their rods. In Mormonism, it is with ordination as a deacon that one is admitted to the ranks of the Aaronic Priesthood. Mormons are, of course, strictly forbidden to smoke.

Another oddity: Earlier this year, around January and February, a persistent idea kept coming into my mind, seemingly out of nowhere, that I should buy an actual cigar and smoke it. The whole thing was weird. I've never smoked anything in my life, and literally no one takes up smoking at the age of 43 -- or at least no one has done so since the Elizabethan era. The idea -- I would say "temptation," but it wasn't at all tempting -- was that I would buy a single cigar from a convenience store, go out in the mountains somewhere and smoke it in secret, and then return to civilization and to being a non-smoker. What could possibly be the point of that? People smoke first for social reasons and then because it's a habit. Who the hell decides in middle age to smoke a single cigar all alone in the mountains and then never smoke again? No one, not even me. I never did it, but the idea kept presenting itself to me with a strange persistence, for a couple of months.

William Wright mentions my September 8 post "I don't care what people say, Rick and roll are here to stay," which marked my return to sync-posting after a long break, and which replaces rock (stones) with Rick (dick). Of course I wasn't thinking of male anatomy but of rickrolling -- which, for those of you who have been living under a rock, refers to the practice of posting bait-and-switch links that unexpectedly lead to a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up." (If you're unfamiliar with this childish so-called "joke," Dr. Simon West's presentation "The History and Semiotics of Rickrolling" will bring you up to speed.)

Rickrolling evolved from duckrolling. At one point, 4chan would replace with word egg with duck in posts, changing eggroll to duckroll. This gave rise to bait-and-switch links leading to an image of a mallard duck on wheels accompanied by a song about, of all things, Jean-Luc Picard, the Star Trek character played by Patrick Stewart. Testicles are called "eggs" in many languages, including Spanish and Chinese. In the "Bananas vs. Civil War Nuts" pictures, one of the Nuts always had a duck's bill to indicate that he was Patrick, who had played the role of a duck named Dr. Mallard in a school play. The duckroll meme also links a mallard duck to a role (duckrole?) played by an actor named Patrick. In case you missed it, William Wright recently brought up Jean-Luc Picard, and the significance of his being played by an actor named Patrick, in a context completely unrelated to duckrolling.

One more thing: Last night, I was thinking about my dream about "One and forty-four" and possible meanings of those numbers, when a book on my shelf caught my eye: Number by Tobias Dantzig. I thought, "Well, there's a book called Number. I'll just take it down and see what's on page 144."

Page 144 was blank.

Since I had the book down, I flipped through it a bit, and between pages 220 and 221 I found an old bookmark which I must have left there when I last read it -- which, according to my records, was in 2009:

The Chinese is my wife's handwriting, and I'd added a transliteration because I was still pretty illiterate in Chinese at that time. It's a song Taiwanese soldiers used to sing, which can be loosely translated as follows:

This here is my longer gun;

I've also got a shorter one.

Long's for killing spies (Red China's).

Short's for sticking in . . .

Well, you get the idea. She'd been singing the song because we were raising sugar gliders at the time -- an animal that literally has two penises -- and I'd asked her to write it down. Then, apparently, I used the note as a bookmark and forgot all about it for 14 years, until the sync fairies needed it.

What's on the cover of my copy of Number? Glad you asked:

A picture of three stones, and a quote from someone named One Stone -- why am I thinking of that Herb Caen line about martinis?

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What does it all mean? Well, a penis is a mechanism for delivering what is produced by the testicles, so I guess all dick and no balls is all delivery and no content -- Oscar Wilde's "I have nothing to declare except my genius," or McLuhan's "The medium is the message." The applicability to me likely has to do with sync-posting itself. I have focused almost entirely on the coincidences themselves (the medium), with minimal attempts to interpret what they all mean (the message). This is partly because they're very hard to interpret, and partly because in my experience people who do try to forge their syncs into a coherent narrative always end up succumbing to delusions of grandeur and going completely -- well, as it happens, the mot juste here is nuts, which is subtly different from going bananas.

Galahad Eridanus talks about the tension between blindness and madness and  the need for narrative thinking. I think I've been trying to walk the tightrope between blindness and madness by seeing all kinds of crazy things but declining to interpret them. If I didn't see, I would be blind. If I interpreted, I would likely go mad; at least everyone else seems to do so. But this isn't a clever "middle way"; it's just pointless. It's like learning to "read" a language correctly in terms of pronunciation without learning what any of the words mean -- a completely useless skill, unless you're reading to someone who understands the spoken language but is illiterate. I guess that's the excuse I've been using -- that maybe most of my syncs aren't "for" me, that I'm just reading them off for other people's benefit, and that the interpretation is up to them. I think that's a cop-out, though, and in any case no one else actually seems to be doing that interpretive work successfully. Readers may benefit from an individual sync here or there, but interpreting the whole stream and turning it from one damn thing after another into a story? Well, that's my job. Who else could be expected to do it? Dee-and-Kelley type partnerships have occasionally borne fruit, but I don't have that. I have to play both roles. With some help from my readers and correspondents, yes, but in the end it's my own work to do.

Agnosticism is a cop-out. You have to make hypotheses. You have to plant a seed and see if it grows. Failure to do so is just another version of the contemptible ethic of safety first.

Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple

Have I ever mentioned how utterly promiscuous the sync fairies are? They think nothing of synching up Holy Scripture with edgy 4chan memes. And of course they lack any category of the "offensive." (So, apparently, do I, since I not only post these things but kind of enjoy it.)

I've been reading the Psalms. Yesterday I read Psalm 17 and found a minor sync, too minor to bother posting:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of they wings (Ps. 17:8).

The "apple of the eye" is the pupil, and many Bibles so translate it. The sync was with the Galahad Eridanus poem I quoted in October 30's "Newspapers, April 22, the eclipse and the peck":

Ascend, O moon

Into the sun

Eclipse's eye

Thy will be done.

Lo, Abraxas!

To thy pupil cometh sight,

For from thy shadow shineth light!

Today I read Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

In a note added to the October 30 post quoted above, I posted this meme I found on /x/:

(I should mention for the benefit of my Black readers that most 4chan edgelords don't actually hate you. They like to say nigger just because it's something you're not allowed to say. In my considered opinion, that's a good enough reason.)

Just how massive of a coincidence is this? Well, the psalm has handywork, and the meme has demiurge, which is Greek for "craftsman." Both feature a temple or tabernacle of the sun, and a strong man running out. The psalm mentions that he's running a "race," and the meme prominently features a racial slur. Both feature the word language. The psalm says "there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard"; to what does their refer? The most recent possible antecedent would be the two nights of the previous verse. The meme also implies that there will be no speech nor language where a certain word -- also beginning nig- and also denoting darkness -- will not be heard.

Also, note that this is Psalm 19 -- or XIX in Roman numerals. Supposing you weren't as big and fast as Arnold, you might opt to escape the Reality Temple on horseback rather than on foot:

Newspaper, April 22, the eclipse and the peck

In yesterday's post "Light shining through yellow flowers," I discuss the etymology of pupil. It comes from a Latin word meaning "small child," and the ocular sense comes from the fact that if you stare into another person's pupil, you can see a tiny person -- your own miniature reflection -- in it.

I was curious about that because I had just started reading Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil. Although the juxtaposition with Iris should have been enough to make me think of the ocular sense of pupil, what actually made me think of it was the Galahad Eridanus videos I had recently watched, which include these lines about a solar eclipse:

Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!

The idea of a "little man" in one's pupil put a song in my head: Pink Floyd's "The Gnome," which begins with these lines:

I want to tell you a story
'bout a little man, if I can

In my April 2021 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," I had associated that song -- or rather a reference to it by Terence McKenna -- with a scene from the Tintin comic book Prisoners of the Sun, in which there's a speech bubble from Tintin full of dozens of stars and squiggles and other random symbols -- like comic-book "swearing," but unusually prolonged -- after which he says, "Hip-hip-hooray!" This had synched with McKenna talking about "visible language" and "a new way to say hooray."

I went to bed with "The Gnome" in my head, and I dreamed about poring over that Tintin speech bubble, trying to decipher the secret meaning of his "visible language."

In the morning, naturally, I had to look it up and see if there was in fact any secret meaning to be deciphered. I had forgotten the immediate context, which turns out to be highly synchronistically relevant:

Tintin speaks his "visible language" just after noting "an extraordinary coincidence" in a scrap of newspaper. What he has read, we later find out, is the date of an upcoming total solar eclipse in South America. He uses his foreknowledge of this eclipse to take advantage of the superstitions of the Inca and prevent them from sacrificing him to the sun.

Just yesterday, as related in the post "In which I read the news," I saw a scrap of newspaper blowing across the street and felt the urge to pick it up and read it. The paper was dated April 21, 2023, but what I found significant in it were references to two then-future dates: April 27 and April 22. Tintin also found a future date in his newspaper.

The two dates mentioned -- April 27 and April 22 -- were significant to me because they were anniversaries. I've been having lots of anniversary syncs lately. Then I remembered that the reason I'd been reading an old Tintin book back in 2021 was that someone had emailed me a scan from it -- and I'd received the email on what turned out to be the anniversary of its original publication. What date was that? I looked it up, checking my old post "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles'":

I've just discovered that Le Temple du Soleil, from the English translation of which the above scan is taken, was originally published serially in Tintin magazine -- and the final installment was published on Thursday, April 22, 1948. I received the email with the scan in the early hours of Thursday, April 22, 2021, and posted it here later the same day. The panels in question are near the end (on page 59 of 62 in the English version), so I assume that they were part of the final installment and that I received and posted them on the anniversary of their original publication.

Here are the panels I was emailed:

The accompanying comment, connecting Tintin's eclipse with the birdemic and peck, was this:

I reckon we are seeing this exact same thing playing out. The eclipse corresponds to the "deadly birdemic", and Tintin's god-like powers correspond to the peck. Now that most people are pecked, all They need to do is reduce media coverage on the "cases" and make out as if the peck has saved the day. The bridemic will vanish (miraculously), and they will then write history according to their narrative, using it as artillery in the pro-peck propaganda war as an example of how effective GM pecking is. 

That's not quite how things ended up playing out, but the eclipse/peck connection is highly relevant.

After having visions of an eclipse, Galahad Eridanus looked up the date of the next solar eclipse and found that it would be December 14, 2020 -- in South America, like Tintin's.

The first birdemic peck to be administered to a member of the public, outside of clinical trials, was given to nurse Sandra Lindsay at Long Island Jewish Medical Center on December 14, 2020.

Note added (4:24 p.m.): Just after posting this, I checked /x/ and found this:

Prisoners of the Sun was originally titled Le Temple du Soleil. Demiurge comes from the same Gnostic vocabulary as Abraxas. I can't make out what is inscribed on the ceiling above the sun, but it begins with A and ends with S.

Lines radiating from a triangle

Wandering Gondola is the one who noticed this.

From the Galahad Eridanus video "All Along the Watchtower" (July 29, 2023):

From The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998):

From the music video for "The Waiting" (1981) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

Note that all three of these have a "time" theme: Past, present, future. Ocarina of Time. Waiting.

In the Galahad Eridanus video, the object is a rotating octahedron, often appearing, as in the screenshot above, as two triangles, one upright and the other inverted. Seen from another angle, an octahedron can appear as four triangles: a central triangle with each of its edges shared by one of the other three:

The Legend of Zelda "Triforce" symbol can be seen as consisting either of two triangles (a large upright one and a small inverted one) or of four (the central inverted triangle sharing one of its edges with each of the other three). And of course one can also ignore the negative-space inverted triangle and see it as three triangles -- that being the point of the name Triforce.

Look back at the Zelda screencap. The radiating lines are blue, and the central inverted triangle appears blue, too. Rotate it 90 degrees to the left, and you have what we see in the Tom Petty video. The blue triangle seen above is one of a set of three triangles, as in the Triforce:

There's perhaps a nod to Crowley in this theme, too:

Nothing in that logo is original to Crowley. The Eye of Providence, in a triangle, radiating light, is a ubiquitous theme (and no, it's not exclusively Masonic).

"The Statue Got Me High" -- the TMBG song I associate with a Triforce-like image -- says "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye." Beams being sent into eyes, rather than radiating from them, are covered in the Eridanus video, too:

Note added: The Walk the Moon video "One Foot" (posted by William Wright here) includes somewhat similar imagery:

Further note added (October 28): John A. Keel's book The Eighth Tower came up in an /x/ thread, so I looked it up on Anna's Archive. Here's the cover art:

Jesus is my librarian

Maybe it's pushback against my upbringing -- my parents literally print out little numerical labels for all their books so they can shelve them according to the Dewey decimal system -- but I adamantly refuse to impose any sort of order whatsoever on my rather extensive personal library. God makes sure I find what I need, which isn't necessarily the same as what I happen to be looking for.

Today I was pacing around my study thinking, as I often do. I was thinking of all the recent syncs relating to Galahad Eridanus videos and trying to figure out any reason why I would need to have his work brought to my attention at this time. A sentence popped into my mind as if from elsewhere: "It's because you need to assimilate his thoughts on Eros vs. Logos." Just as I thought this, my eyes fell on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and I remembered that in 2022 I had seen that book in a half-dreaming state and then, fully awake, thought, "rose is literally 'disordered' (anagrammed) eros."

Then I noticed that on that shelf I had three books, all shelved together, each of which had an anagram of eros on its spine: next to the Eco, a book by Roger Penrose and then one by Emerson.

Well, how improbable is that? There must be lots of books that have those four letters together, what with so many common surnames ending in -erson. So I started looking at every shelf, trying to find other instances. For a long time I couldn't find any at all, but finally I found a book I'd forgotten I even owned: Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.

No other instances nearby, though I suppose The Flowers of Evil is rose-adjacent, as is the name Roth (meaning "red"). (Philip is a link to the "decapitation" theme, via "Philip, the headless horseman.") One of the other books on the shelf caught my eye, though: The Philosopher's Pupil, a book I bought right around the time I was outgrowing Iris Murdoch and never ended up reading. It made me think of the ending of a poem that features in the Eridanus videos:

Ascend, O moon

Into the sun

Eclipse's eye

Thy will be done.

Lo, Abraxas!

To thy pupil cometh sight,

For from thy shadow shineth light!

It's a little surprising, given that the author's name is Iris and all, that I'd never thought of the ocular sense of pupil in connection with Murdoch's book; I'd always assumed it referred to a philosopher's student and never considered any other possible meaning. Seeing the title printed on a black background, though, with that poem in the back of my mind, I made the connection. Now I suppose I'll have to read it to see if Murdoch does the same.

I suppose it's a coincidence that each of the above shelves has a Nietzsche book and a copy of the Iliad, but that's not really very improbable in my library.

Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr

Can anyone help me out with this?

Some years ago I read a story set in the future, and one of the characters mentioned more-or-less in passing the legend of the great painter Michael the Archangel, whose paintings had (I think) some sort of magical qualities -- the implication for the reader being that, in this distant future, the memory of Michelangelo Buonarroti had become conflated with religious traditions about the Archangel Michael.

I read very little science fiction, so this should be easy for me to trace to its source, but I'm drawing a blank. If any of my readers happen to remember this story, too, please help jog my memory.

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I thought it might be from Scott Alexander's Kabbalistic sci-fi novel Unsong, so I did a word search for archangel -- not a very smart choice, since one of the main characters is an archangel! One of the search results caught my eye. The Archangel Uriel is conversing with Sohu West. (In the original, archangels speak in all caps. I have spared the reader this annoyance.)

"I run continental drift, and guide the butterfly migration, and keep icebergs in the right place, and prevent people from boiling goats in their mothers' milk. . . . I have never seen anything to convince me that God plays an active part in the universe. His role seems to be entirely ontological."

"You can't be a deist! You're an archangel!"

"I am not a very good archangel."

"What about San Francisco?" [which in the novel has been transformed into heaven on earth]

"God can have a right hand as well as a left hand. I see no evidence that either is controlled by any head. . . . God created Adam Kadmon, the fundamental structure that binds everything together. . . ."

In my October 21 post "17 years ago our eyes were opened," I mentioned "migrating monarch butterflies." San Francisco is a link to the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel," also posted on October 21. God's right hand is mentioned (in connection with San Francisco), and then the creation of Adam Kadmon; in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, God touches Adam with his right hand; in the Babylon Bee article quoted in that post, Pope Francis (who, like San Francisco, is named after St. Francis), glues himself to God's right hand.

What of the idea of a God with no head? Both of the posts just linked deal with a YouTube video by Galahad Eridanus. Yesterday I watched all the other videos on his channel, including this one:

In this video, Eridanus says:

I've said to a few friends of mine that I see [Aleister Crowley's philosophy of] Thelema as a decapitated version of the same philosophy in my work -- that the two systems bear some philosophical resemblance to each other and that there is a certain resonance between them. However, my ideas find their symbolic head in Christ and the spirit of Christianity. This can be seen in the fact that the head of Abraxas represents Christ in my cosmogram. Thelema, by contrast, has no such authority. . . . Because of this choice of words, "decapitated," it gave me pause when I discovered that the Bornless Ritual which Crowley performed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was originally called the Headless Rite, and it begins with these words: "I summon you, Headless One!"

(See, by the way, my October 9 post "Philip, the headless horseman.")

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Now here's a really weird coincidence. On October 21 -- the same date I posted two posts linked above -- I read Chapters 9 to 11 of the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon. I noticed that in Chapter 10, three different things were described as lasting "forty and two years":

And when [Riplakish] had reigned for the space of forty and two years the people did rise up in rebellion against him; and there began to be war again in the land, insomuch that Riplakish was killed, and his descendants were driven out of the land (Ether 10:8).

And it came to pass that Levi did serve in captivity after the death of his father, for the space of forty and two years (Ether 10:15).

And it came to pass that Com drew away the half of the kingdom. And he reigned over the half of the kingdom forty and two years (Ether 10:32).

I later did a search and found that the number 42 occurs nowhere else in the Book of Mormon; all three instances are in the same chapter. I made a note to write a post about that later -- but what would the post say? Just that the number 42 shows up three times in this chapter and nowhere else? What would be the point of posting that?

As I was composing this present post, though, the reference to Aleister Crowley made me think of something: Didn't Crowley write something about the "Tenth Aethyr," and haven't I mentioned that on this blog before? Yes. The Tenth Aethyr is mentioned in passing in the June 2022 post "Choronzon 333." Galahad Eridanus's YouTube username is @Eridanus333.

I looked up "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr" in Liber 418. Here's how it begins:

This Aethyr being accursèd, and the seer forewarned, he taketh these precautions for the scribe.

First let the scribe be seated in the centre of the circle in the desert sand, and let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God --- Tetragrammaton and Shaddai El Chai and Ararita.

And let the Demon be invoked within a triangle, wherein is inscribed the name of Choronzon, and about it let him write ANAPHAXETON --- ANAPHANETON -- PRIMEUMATON, and in the angles MI-CA-EL: and at each angle the Seer shall slay a pigeon, and having done this, let him retire to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing, and sit within his black robe, secretly invoking the Aethyr.

The juxtaposition of angles and Mi-ca-el seemed synchronistically promising. I had been hoping for something about the number 42, though, and in this I was disappointed. So, wondering if Crowley had ever said anything about that number, I Googled aleister crowley "number 42"; the very first results called it the Great Number of the Curse -- which seemed potentially promising, seeing as how the Tenth Aethyr is said to be "accursèd."

I clicked the first link and hit synchronistic pay dirt!

Why a screenshot rather than just a quote? Because check out the header image. That's a picture of the Gnostic god Abraxas, an image which plays no particularly special role in the work of Crowley but is central to Galahad Eridanus's content.

For the sake of later searchability, here is the content of the above screenshot. It is taken from the commentary after the 42nd chapter of The Book of Lies:

This number 42 is the Great Number of the Curse.  See Liber 418, Liber 500, and the essay on the Qabalah in the Temple of Solomon the King.  This number is said to be all hotch-potch and accursed.

The chapter should be read most carefully in connection with the 10th Aethyr.  It is to that dramatic experience that it refers.

There it is: An undeniable link between the number 42 and the 10th Aethyr. The wording even allows it to be read as if "the 10th Aethyr" were a chapter. Incidentally, The Book of Lies is also called Liber 333. In "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr," Choronzon says "My name is three hundred and thirty and three."

Note added:

I finished this post just around lunchtime, and the Crowley-related content put it into my head to have lunch at Café D&D, since their street address is 666. On the way there I passed this restaurant:

Buckskin is a Taiwanese beer brand; its logo is a horseshoe. In writing this post, I had to look up my old post "Choronzon 333," which features a photo of a "Nazi" soldier from the Fire Nation war, with a horseshoe on his skin, with the number 333:

Just after passing the restaurant, I stopped to get a photo of the horseshoe, but it wasn't visible from that side. (I had to make a U-turn to get the photo above.) What was visible from the other side was this:

A rooster's head. Note that in the "Theophany 2022" video above, Eridanus says that "the head of Abraxas represents Christ" in his system, and that Crowley's philosophy is "decapitated" because it lacks Christ. The head of Abraxas is a rooster's head. This is the first comment under the video:

"Interesting note about abraxas: both snakes and roosters are known for having bodies that seem to 'stay alive' for a while after they are beheaded. Ties into bornless ritual etc."

Having taken the photos above, I went on to D&D and had lunch. While I was waiting for my food, I read the last chapter of Ether, which includes this notorious and widely ridiculed verse:

And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died (Ether 15:31).

Shiz, like a snake or a rooster, seemed to stay alive for a while after he was beheaded. The mention of "his hands" in the verse is also relevant in connection with the Unsong quote about God having two hands but no head.

Further note added:

Several hours after posting this, with its references to slaying pigeons and decapitating roosters, I ran across this on a news-and-views site, showing Netanyahu symbolically decapitating a dove:

October 21 -- a date mentioned three times in this post (now four) -- is Netanyahu's birthday.