Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window.

In his latest post, "Spelling Bee, Abseil, and Waiting for a Star to Fall," William Wright revisits his son's math homework in which he had to solve an anagram for "a spelling bee." He notes that the Scripps National Spelling Bee final coincided with Joan of Arc's feast day this year, and he also finds the Elvish word for "bow" (the weapon) hidden in the homework assignment. I left a comment pointing out that the French for "bow" is arc.

A few hours after reading that post, I taught a student who is working on improving his pronunciation. We use a book where each unit focuses on a particular sound and includes dialogues that use that sound a lot. Today's lesson was brought to you by the letter O -- or, rather, the phoneme /o/, the "long o" sound. You know what name includes that sound? Here's the dialogue from the book:

Joan woke up a few minutes ago, but Joe is still sleeping.

Joan: Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello!?

Joe: (groans) Oh, no. What's the problem?

Joan: Look out the window.

Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.

Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.

Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.

Joan: Come over to the window.

Joe: Stop joking, Joan. There's no snow.

Joan: OK, I'll show you. I'm going to put on my coat and go out and make a snowball and throw it at you! Then you'll open your eyes!

(If the first line of that dialogue made you think of the Garden of Eden, you might be a Mormon.)

The way Joan keeps trying to get Joe to go to the window made me think of a scene from the Beatles movie Help!, so I looked it up:

I haven't watched that movie since I was a kid, and I had forgotten that the scene also includes a bow. The Leo McKern character is trying to hypnotize Ringo (Japanese for "apple"; his real name, Richard Starkey, is also interesting) into approaching the window so that they can shoot him with an arrow that has a balloon full of red paint attached to it.

Joan's line "I'm going to put on my coat" also caught my eye, since the immediate context is William's blog, which is called Coat of Skins -- referring to the physical body. "I'm going to put on my coat" could mean something like "I'm going to assume physical form."

The baddies in Help! want to hit Ringo with red paint. Joan threatens to hit Joe with a snowball. Snow and red dye are connected in a famous passage in Isaiah: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

Later, I thought I should go through all my 50-some posts tagged "Joan of Arc," but I got sidetracked by this one: "The Stadium Arcadium covers." There's lots of Eden symbolism there -- the bitten apple, the four rivers -- but what really caught my eye was this:

Here, Joan's coat of arms is juxtaposed with the words snow and arc ("bow"), and with two red swords (though Joan's own is white). Red weapons sync with the red-paint arrow in Help! and also with my comments in "Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter" about stained swords becoming bright as a symbol of repentance and redemption.

Griffins (Cherubim) and apples (forbidden fruit) come from the same place

In my May 1 post "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the etymological theory that the word griffin may be related to Cherubim. In Genesis, the Cherubim are stationed as guardians to keep the exiled Adam and Eve from returning to Eden. This was after they had eaten the forbidden fruit, which tradition overwhelmingly identifies as the apple.

Today I was reading the 2011 edition of Adreinne Mayor's seminal book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. In building her case that griffin legends originated with Protoceratops-type fossils (quadrupeds with eagle-like beaks), Mayor traces Greek griffin lore back to Scythia:

The territory of the Issedonian Scythians where Aristeas learned about the griffin in about 675 B.C. is a wedge bounded by the Tien Shan and Altai ranges, in an area that straddles present-day northwestern Mongolia, northwestern China, southern Siberia, and southeastern Kazakhstan.

Compare this to what Wikipedia says about the origin of the apple:

The original wild ancestor of Malus domestica was Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and northwestern China. Cultivation of the species, most likely beginning on the forested flanks of the Tian Shan mountains . . . .

I thought it was an interesting coincidence. Tian Shan is Chinese and literally means "Mountain(s) of God," which fits with what Ezekiel wrote about Eden and the Cherub:

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . . thou wast upon the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28:13-14).

I was going to say I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Eden was in Central Asia, but actually someone has: Apparently, the Chinese Australian Christian Tse Tsan-tai proposed that it was in Xinjiang -- i.e., northwestern China, griffin and apple territory.