Sync: Another yellow ptero, St. Valentine's Day, Empire of the Ants

This year-old video was for some reason featured for me on the front page of YouTube. Note the non-dinosaur they chose for the thumbnail and what color it is.

The first part of the video itself closely parallels the H. G. Wells story "The Star," which I recently read. Later, it talks about an asteroid that may come dangerously close to Earth on Valentine's Day 2060.

Update: I mentioned that the video parallels an H. G. Wells story I read recently. The Wells story I am currently reading is called "Empire of the Ants." Hours after posting this, I got on YouTube again, and this was one of the recommended videos:

I'm not going to watch it -- not interested in seeing legs being ripped off -- but "Empire Of The . . . Ants" exactly parallels the title of the Wells story. I have not posted or searched for anything ant-related recently. The only thing Google could possibly know is that some time ago I downloaded The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, a collection of 33 short stories including "The Empire of the Ants."

An odd stereotype from H. G. Wells: Orientals live fast, die young

The H. G. Wells story "The New Accelerator" is about a drug that allows the person who takes it to think and move thousands of times faster than usual, making it subjectively appear that the world around him has slowed almost to a stop. Wells's description of the experience is quite cinematic and brings to mind this scene from one of the X-Men movies:

The X-Man who has this ability is called Quicksilver -- another name for the element mercury (Hg). And no, it didn't escape my notice that Wells also went by H. G.

This passage from "The New Accelerator" caught my attention because of its strangeness. One expects racial stereotypes from writers of Wells's era, but one also expects them to be basically accurate.

Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we [Europeans] are all the time.

Isn't that weird? The song about living fast and dying young is called "I Wanna Be a Kennedy" -- not a Takahashi or a Silberstein.

I understand that "Oriental" covered pretty much everything from Istanbul to Tokyo, embracing a wide variety of racial groups, but at least as far as the East Asian races are concerned, Wells's characterization couldn't be further from the truth. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans very clearly mature and age more slowly than Europeans. College students look like they're in junior high school. Junior high school students look like little kids. Women keep their youthful looks well into their forties and even fifties. Puberty hits later than for Europeans, old people remain spry for longer, and life expectancies are the highest in the world. Jews are also overrepresented among centenarians and certainly do not age faster than Europeans.

Indians do apparently age more quickly than Europeans (as do blacks), and they are perhaps the "Oriental" group with which Wells would have been most familiar, but are they "quicker in thought"? If IQ is taken as a reasonable proxy for such quickness, the races that outdo Europeans in that regard are the longer-lived, slower-aging Jews and East Asians, not South Asians.

Sync: Near the day of purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky

Last night I watched the latest video from LXXXVIII finis temporis, about the 1968 movie What's So Bad About Feeling Good and how it foreshadowed the birdemic. There are some pretty striking links there, and I highly recommend the video:

In the movie, the mayor of New York considers force-pecking all the citizens but thinks the people won't go for it, so they instead decide to treat everyone secretly by mixing an inhalable cure into all the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel and releasing it into the atmosphere as air pollution.

Near the end, there's a shot of an airliner with clouds of exhaust coming out of it, with the implication that this is one of the ways the cure is being spread. This led one commenter to write "They put 'The Cure' in the chemtrails."

The commenter's handle is Batman. See my last post, "Are you not entertained?"

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This morning, I started reading the H. G. Wells story "The Valley of Spiders," which I haven't finished yet. So far, we have three hombres riding through a valley when they see this:

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistledown, that drove before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air, and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes -- and then soon very many more -- were hurrying towards him down the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed, turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling on down the valley again. And at that all three stopped and sat in their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon them.

"If it were not for this thistle-down --" began the leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

"It isn't thistle-down," said the little man.

Going from the title of the story, I'm going to assume that these objects have "long cobwebby threads" because they are cobwebs -- cobwebs flying through the air.

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This evening, I glanced at /x/, and one of the threads caught my attention because it had a picture of the Maid of Orléans and said "Say something nice about Joan of Arc, /x/." I clicked in spite of myself. The first few comments were about the level I was expecting -- "she cute" -- "most based woman ever" -- so I was going to close the tab, but then this caught my eye:

Why was this posted in a thread about Joan of Arc? I don't know, probably the same reason Gay Pride Batman saying "Are you not entertained?" was posted in a thread about Yahweh. However it got there, it's a reference to chemtrails as cobwebs in the sky.

The LXXXVIII finis temporis video focuses mainly on the birdemic, but it also points out several 9/11 references in What's So Bad About Feeling Good. September 11, 2001, was just two weeks before Yom Kippur, making it "near the day of purification."

I wrote this in a comment on my own "Are you not entertained?" post -- the one featuring Gay Pride Batman:

Russell Crowe is etymologically “red crow,” not too conceptually dissimilar to a rainbow bat. Ted Hughes called the crow “a black rainbow.” Crowe has played Noah, a link to the dark arc/ark.

"A link to the dark arc/ark" is obviously also a link to Jeanne d'Arc. Joan was also the creator of the first rainbow flag.

The candles blew and then disappeared

In "Knock, knock, Neo" (February 27), I mention reading the H. G. Wells story "The Red Room." The narrator, scoffing at ghosts, attempts to stay in the titular room, which is supposed to be haunted, but ends up getting spooked in spite of himself. He lights lots of candles, but they keep going out, one after another, faster than he can relight them, and in the end he panics. After his ordeal, he tells his hosts that the room is haunted by Fear itself:

"You believe now," said the old man with the withered hand, "that the room is haunted?" He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who condoles with a friend.

"Yes," said I, "the room is haunted. . . . There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that room; there is no ghost there at all, but worse, far worse, something impalpable --”

"Well?" they said.

"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness -- 'Fear!' Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room --"

I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to my bandages. "The candles went out one after another, and I fled --"

Three or four days ago, about a week after reading "The Red Room," I was praying in my chapel at night, with several candles as my only illumination. At one point, although the door and windows were closed, the candle flames all suddenly turned horizontal and then went out one by one. No panic ensued, in part because, unlike Wells's protagonist, I had the option of just flipping on the light switch.

In a comment on my own March 10 post "Weirdly specific sync: Meerkats and piranhas," I mentioned listening to the Keep Shelly in Athens version of the Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) the Reaper," noting the "Valentine" reference in the lyrics. Debbie replied that she didn't know the song but had looked up the lyrics and was struck by a different line: "Then the door was open, and the wind appeared." I hadn't noticed that line myself because that verse isn't included in the KSiA version. I looked up the original:

Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew and then disappeared
The curtains flew and then he appeared
Saying don't be afraid . . .

Fever dreams and syncs: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more

I've been out of commission for a bit with a case of food poisoning, and it had the effect of turning my dreams into something more like delirium or schizophrenia than like ordinary nocturnal dreams. The visual element was not lifelike at all but consisted solely of constantly changing symbols and diagrams, and I felt that these were being expounded with great clarity and that suddenly I got it The overall feeling of the experience was similar to that attending a dream I had a few years ago which enabled me to perceive Mozart's Magic Flute as a single unified whole, an audible diagram of great complexity and symmetry -- or perhaps more like what the fellow in the John Linnell song feels when he realizes that Montana is really just a leg, with the round part just the way you would espect. I can't really remember much of the content of this supposed revelation -- likely because there is no there there -- but at the time it felt as if the mysteries of the universe were being unfolded to my view.

Central to the dream was the symbol D∞D and its variants D&D and 484 -- and a significant portion of the dream constituted a direct death threat from the synchronicity fairies if I dared to share any of what had been revealed to me. The allusions to extinct species like the dodo and the T. rex were veiled threats, you see, and one of the meanings of D&D was "Death & Death" -- referring to One Death and Seven Death, characters from the Mayan Popol Vuh. And one and seven make eight, as do four and four. (The Chinese words for "four" and "death" are near-homophones, a fact that is the basis of many East Asian superstitions.)

Back on February 23, I received an email about the Rosary from someone whose email address includes the string "1and7," which I suppose is what put my in mind of such Popol Vuh pairs as One and Seven Death and One and Seven Hunahpu.

During the dream, I felt that I had a moral duty to disregard the death threats. Upon waking, I found that I couldn't remember enough of the forbidden knowledge to share it anyway.

Today, after the fever dream, a bit of random link-following led me to the MythoAmerica article "50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America." In the article, these two pictures are juxtaposed:

The most famous Native American "Hero Twins" are of course One and Seven Hunahpu. The text accompanying these pictures was "To bring up an old Conan tweet: America is rife with very ancient, un conquered spirits. They incarnate often onto our plane." One of the comments on the linked tweet was this:

The Popol Vuh for our times pic.twitter.com/cNmaGKV1V3

— Hernan Cortes (@CyberPunkCortes) April 30, 2022

In case you don't recognize them, those are the late Bogdanoff Twins, the subjects of many a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory -- including, as with the Native American Hero Twins, "beliefs about them having supernatural abilities."

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On a different note, my recent Venus flytrap post included a reference to the Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" meme, which made me think of this famous variant:

This in turn made me think of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap where someone is waiting for the band at an airport, holding up a sign that says "Spinal Tarp." I tried to find a picture of this but found that I had misremembered. In the movie, Lt. Hookstratten (Fred Willard) says, "You are Spinal Tarp?" but it's not written on a sign. The sign says, "Spinal Pap."

That's when I remembered that carnivorous plants had already appeared in the sync-stream recently, in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the Grail," which discusses an H. G. Wells story about a carnivorous orchid and a poem by my uncle William John about a carnivorous rose. My uncle's poem includes these lines:

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps

Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction

Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

The "spiny paps" are juxtaposed with the word matrix -- the name of the 1999 movie directed by the Wachowski Brothers. While not twins, the Wachowskis have a certain amount in common with the Bogdanoffs -- for example, goofy hair and extreme surgical modification of their appearance.

One of the brothers now wears white-guy dreads, like the Island Boys and the Mississippian Hero Twins (local equivalents of One and Seven Hunahpu). One of the Matrix sequels features white dreadlocked twins:

As the sync fairies would have it, I recently posted about The Matrix in "Knock, knock, Neo" (February 27). This was a follow-up to "Green Door 101," because Neo lives in an apartment with a greenish door labeled 101. In my flytrap post, Debbie had noted how that plant combines green doors and red doors in one.

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

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On February 23, Greg Carlwood posted an episode of The Higherside Chats called "Analog | Newspaper archive anomalies, oddities underground, radium secrets, & Lodestone 101." I made a mental note to listen to it later because of the appearance of the number 101, but I didn't get around to it until today. The "Lodestone 101" segment is using 101 in the sense of "introductory course"; the guest lays out his theory that many ancient religions revolved around the worship of magnetic stones, with the Kaaba in Mecca and the Benben of Egypt being two examples. (He also associates the names Cuba and Kaaba; the Island Boys are from Cuba.)

Immediately after listening to the THC episode, I decided to read some more in the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading. I've been reading it as an ebook on my phone but had taken a break during my illness, in the middle of the story "Jimmy Goggles the God." The story is about a man who, because he is wearing a diving costume (nicknamed Jimmy Goggles), is mistaken for a god by the ignorant [dark-skinned indigenous people] of Papua. When I opened up the Kindle app, this is the "page" it was on. I have of course added the highlighting after the fact.

So their religion revolves around the worship of a "blessed old black stone," exactly as described in "Lodestone 101."

The dark-skinned indigenous people's misapprehension that the narrator is not "a British citizen" but an otherworldy being ties in with "Britain as another planet."

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I should note in passing that the logo used on the charging stations of Gogoro, a popular electric scooter brand here in Taiwan, associate the two poles of a battery (or lodestone) with the lemniscate:

This also makes me think of Roger Anthony's "Negpos the Lion" symbol. The lemniscate an the lion are juxtaposed in the Strength card of the Tarot.

Knock, knock, Neo.

In The Matrix, Neo receives a series of strange messages on his computer: "Wake up, Neo." -- "The Matrix has you..." -- "Follow the white rabbit." -- "Knock, knock, Neo." Immediately after this last message, there are two knocks at his door, and he goes to answer it.

Neo lives in Room 101. The actual color of his door is not very clear, but the lighting makes it appear greenish. In "Green Door 101," I ran into a 4chan post emphasizing the gematria value of green door -- which is, in S:E:G:, 101. I even noted in that post that 101 is also the value of Neo, the One, but without remembering that Neo actually lives at No. 101.

Neo is greeted by a group of people, only two of whom have names: Choi and Dujour, apparently alluding to the French choix du jour, "choice of the day." (Choi's name is not pronounced as French but as the Cantonese for "vegetable," as in bok choy. This reminds me of something I happened to see on TV years ago: a white man with a Chinese tattoo that says jie lan, another Chinese cruciferous vegetable, saying "I do have a few things in common with a lizard.")

Neo and Choi have this little exchange:

Neo : You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?

Choi : All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.

Mescaline. Not any of the other hallucinogens he might have mentioned, but specifically the one that inspired Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. As related in my post "'The Door in the Wall' by H. G. Wells," Huxley's references to that Wells story in The Doors of Perception were what led me to download and read it -- and the titular door turns out to be green.

Dujour is wearing a lot of unusual jewelry (neck rings), and at the end of the scene Neo notices a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. This, coming after the "Follow the white rabbit" message on his computer, is what makes him decide to accept Choi's invitation to go out with them.

In "Lewis Carroll syncs," I noted a reference to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in a novel called Green Doors.

After noticing all this, I went to a shop to pick up something my wife had ordered. There was only one other customer there: a woman with a lot of unusual jewelry (probably a total of 20 or more earrings) and a shoulder tattoo (not a rabbit). Dangling from her purse were two tiny stuffed rabbits (not white). On the back of her jacket were two big letter Ds -- not together like "DD," but sort of randomly located. No, I didn't follow her or anything.

After this, I went back to the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading (which I downloaded, remember, because of a book about mescaline). The next one up was "The Red Room." I thought the Red Room might have a red door, but the only specific door reference was to a "baize-covered door," and one gathers from Jane Austen and others that English doors of that description were typically green. Before entering the Red Room, which is supposed to be haunted, the narrator is told repeatedly, "It's your choice" (choix du jour). In the end, it is decided that the room is haunted not by a ghost but by Fear itself.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is where you are subjected to whatever it is that you fear the most.

Green Lantern’s yellow pterodactyls — and my own

In order to get my hands on the story posted in "Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!" (from Green Lantern vol. 2 #30, July 1964) I had to download a huge zipped file of more than 200 Green Lantern comic books. Although the alien pterodactyls from that story are obviously not supposed to be recurring villains -- the story ends with them giving up all attempts to interfere on Earth, since any such interference will be impossible for the next 100 million years -- I nevertheless thought I should look through all the other issues I had downloaded to see if they did reappear after all.

They don't, but there's another alien pterodactyl story in vol. 2 #88 (March 1972). Yes, that's number eighty-eight. Like the first pterodactyl story, it's written by John Broome and penciled by Gil Kane, but it's a completely different race of alien pterodactyls this time. Instead of pterodactyls on a distant planet trying to arrange for Earth pterodactyls to take over Earth, we have pterodactyls on Venus menacing cavemen on Venus, and Green Lantern is sent to save his fellow humans. Apparently humans and pterodactyls just sort of spontaneously evolve on lots of different planets.

In #30, Green Lantern can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because of the "energo-shield" their leader has created using his "super-mentality." In #88, he can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because they're yellow. The color yellow, as you may know, is Green Lantern's kryptonite. His power is basically unlimited unless it involves anything yellow.

In #30, Green Lantern defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them -- taking them back to the Mesozoic, where they see a very scary T. rex that weakens the "super-mentality" enough to allow Green Lantern to strike. In #88, he also defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them.-- conjuring up a giant illusory hawk which chases them into a cave, and then collapsing the entrance to the cave.

In #30, the pterodactyls are referred to as pteros -- and I noted that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as Tarot, namely 74. In #88, they are called bird-raiders or just raiders, and raiders also has an S:E:G: value of 74. (The longer name, bird-raiders, has an S:E:G: value of 107 -- which is the value of The Tarot, and of each of the three parts of the Tarot: the trumps, the Minor Arcana, and the the Fool card.)

Just hours before discovering this Green Lantern story, I read H. G. Wells's 1896 short story "The Sea Raiders," which also uses the word raiders to refer to monstrous animals (man-eating cephalopods in Wells's case). Wells came up in the last Green Lantern pterodactyl post, too.

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The main thing that got me, though, was the fact that the story is about yellow pterodactyls. I mentioned in my last post that "pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me." Well, it's specifically yellow pterosaurs -- even more specifically, quite small yellow pterosaurs, possibly juveniles of Pterodactylus or some closely related genus (not the giant Pteranodon-type animals of the Green Lantern stories).

"Ghosts of pterosaurs" -- for lack of any better way of describing a sort of experience I am really at a loss to classify -- have been an occasional feature of my life for a long time, especially when I lived in Maryland, although I've had two experiences of this type in Taiwan as well (one of which I have blogged about), but my big "pterodactyl experience" took place around 2002 or 2003 at Ohio State University, when touching a fossil caused me to have a very brief but extremely vivid vision of a living pterodactylus, bright yellow in color, in its natural habitat, with a few others flying about in the background. The sheer alienness of the scene -- the color of the sky, the quality of the light, the humming of the insects, the feeling of goodness -- overwhelmed me. It lasted a second or two and was gone, and I was left with an intense feeling of grief -- that that world was gone, that all the pterodactyls were dead, that the universe would go on forever without them. (I was an atheist at the time.)

That little yellow pterodactylus has been there in the back of my mind ever since. I think about it every time I read Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, imagining resurrected and glorified pterodactyls singing "Holy, holy, holy" around the Throne. I have sometimes used Flavius Pterodactylus as a username, the etymological meaning of Flavius being "yellow." I don't know why this particular creature is resurfacing now -- particularly through the goofy medium of a Green Lantern comic book! -- but it's got to mean something. A yellow pterodactyl can never be for me anything other than a good omen. Teros, not Deros.

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Here's the story. I'm only posting the part that takes place on Venus, not the frame story about Green Lantern's love life.

Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!

In "Green Door, Green Lantern," that B-list superhero came to my attention because the emblem on his chest (in the Silver-Age version) looks like 101, the S:E:G: value of the phrase green door.

Searching for green lantern time travel, I had found a page from a comic book in which Green Lantern travels back in time and sees a T. rex. Later, trying to find the full story online, I ended up browsing a lot of old comic books. I found this in Green Lantern #1.

When you've spent enough time playing around with gematria, you develop a sort of sense for it, just like some mathematicians can tell if a large number "looks prime" even before doing any calculations. As soon as I saw this page, I could just somehow see that will power and Green Lantern had the same S:E:G: value, even though I couldn't have told you what that value was. I did the math and confirmed it.

Will power = Green Lantern = 133.

Following a second hunch, I calculated the S:E:G: for the title of H. G. Wells's most famous novel.

The Time Machine = 133

The Green Lantern comic I had been looking for -- unsuccessfully -- was this one:

Green Lantern's "time-tunnel" is obviously a close cousin to Wells's machine, and sure enough:

time-tunnel = 133

S:E:G: is what drew my attention to Green Lantern in the first place -- but the number 101, not 133. In my original "Green Door 101" post, I had noted this:

Eight six = 101. Eight is the lemniscate, and six as in 666, a number which is also part of this sync stream.

Why "eight six"? Why not "six eight"?  Just a lucky random choice, I guess. After discovering that The Time Machine is 133, I naturally checked the name of its author:

H. G. Wells = 86

H. G. Wells is 86; eight six is 101; 101 is the Green Lantern logo; Green Lantern is 133; and 133 is The Time Machine, which is by H. G. Wells. What is impressive is not that such a convoluted six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection exists, but that I discovered it so quickly and easily.

The "eight six" connection made me curious about the gematria values of other spelled-out numbers, which led to this mildly interesting coincidence:

one three three = 146

one four six = 146 

"One three three" was the first number I tried, and it led me directly to a number that encodes its own gematria value. A decade or so ago I made an exhaustive search for such numbers, and there aren't many of them. I only found two, if memory serves:

two hundred and fifty-one = 251

two hundred and fifty-nine = 259

I had only looked at fully written-out numbers of the above type, though -- "two hundred and fifty-one," not "two five one" -- and so had not discovered 146.

Powers of three, modern dismissal of miracles, relationships with the so-called dead

Yesterday, as mentioned in "242, and crabs," seeing a reference to the eight points of the compass made me think that if there were eight directions in a two-dimensional space, the number of directions for any n-dimensional space would be the nth power of three minus one (because the center is not a direction). I calculated these in my head up to the fifth power of three.

Today I read the H. G. Wells short story "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham," which is about how the titular old man successfully switches bodies with a young man named Eden after making him his heir, the idea being that Elvesham's body will die, and Elvesham (in Eden's body) will inherit his own possessions and continue his life as a healthy young man.

The story is narrated by Eden. When he wakes up to find himself in Elvesham's body, he thinks it must be a dream and tries to go back to sleep. He has recourse to a curious alternative to counting sheep:

I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.

How often do people count through the powers of three? I'd say that's a pretty remarkable coincidence.

There's more, though. Yesterday I also participated in an email discussion with some of my Romantic Christian blogging associates about the advisability of speaking openly of miracles. Bruce Charlton expressed the opinion that, while telling miracle stories may have been helpful at most other times in history, it was usually net-harmful in the modern West because people assume atheistic materialism and reject miracles out of hand, so that a miracle story generally has no other effect than damaging the credibility of the person who tells it. I responded that, while assumptions are important, people do sometimes update them in response to experience, and that a materialist who never hears of any miracles is unlikely to question his axioms.

Continuing with Mr. Eden's reaction to the strange situation in which he finds himself:

Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass current.

In the end, though, the evidence of his own experience forces him to update his assumptions:

I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear case of man's detachability from matter.

A specific instance of Bruce's opinion about sharing miracles, and how the advisability of doing so has changed over time, can be found in his post of the day before yesterday, "Contact with the (so-called) dead - past and present." In this post, he dismisses spiritualism as unlikely to be helpful but says contact with the resurrected dead is a different matter:

For some people, in some situations, contact with one or more of the resurrected dead may even be their primary spiritual task. 

For a start, it can be a vital source of spiritual guidance.

He goes on to say that this sort of contact has its potential pitfalls as well, but that many of these can be avoided by maintaining a policy of secrecy, "by not disclosing to others with whom we have contact, and keeping secret their information and guidance."

The day I read that post, I had also read H. G. Wells's story "The Moth," which is about an entomologist who is haunted by a mysterious moth which he believes to be the vengeful ghost of a rival entomologist with whom he had feuded. This, combined with Bruce's post, made me think of Whitley Strieber's book The Afterlife Revolution, detailing his ongoing relationship with his late wife, who he believes often appears in the form of a moth. So confident is Strieber of the reality of this ongoing relationship and communication that he lists his wife as a co-author of the book, even though it was written entirely after her death.

Last night, I was working in my study when I suddenly heard a loud thump behind me. Turning around, I saw that one of my books had spontaneously fallen off the shelf: an English translation of Oswald Wirth's Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge. -- The Tarot of the Medieval Image-makers, badly translated as The Tarot of the Magicians. I had read the book only once, four years ago, but I decided right then that I should read it again. I was about to turn to the first chapter but had a strong impression that I should instead go back and read the preface. I did so.

The preface is all about Stanislas de Guaita, the French poet and Rosicrucian. The two men met in 1887, when Wirth was 27 and de Gauita was 26. Wirth learned the Tarot and the French language from de Guaita and created his first Tarot deck under the Frenchman's guidance two years later. De Guaita died young, in 1897, and Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge was not published until 1927, three decades after de Guaita's untimely death. Nevertheless, Wirth presents the book as having been written in collaboration with his late friend.

I am convinced that the master for whom the veil of mystery was lifted, does not abandon his colleague who is straining to discern the truth. . . . Our true initiators often do not reveal themselves to our senses, and sometimes remain as silent as the symbolic compositions of the Tarot, but they keep watch on our efforts at deciphering, and as soon as we have found the first letter, they can mysteriously prompt the second to put us on the path of the third. Guaita certainly helped me, for my thought calls to him so that between us a telepathic connection is established. The relationship between one mind and another is in the nature of things, that has nothing in common with the classic or modernized necromancy in the form of spiritism. . . .

Like Raphael and Mozart, Guaita was to die young. It was granted to me to live on, but the incomparable friend, the inspiring master, has never died for me. His thought remains as mine; and with him and through him I aspire to initiate myself into the secret things. We collaborate secretly, for he who has gone encourages me to pursue his work . . . .

I am conscious of never having ceased to be the secretary of Stanislas de Guaita . . . whose acts continue, for nothing is lost in this sphere of strength.

May the reader be grateful to Stanislas de Guaita for the ideas which I express, and indulge his pupil who sets them forth here.

I am convinced that this kind of thing is far more common than most people imagine.

Another link between 8 and time travel

The Time Machine is probably H. G. Wells's single most famous work. This poster -- for a movie based on the Wells novel and directed by his great-grandson Simon Wells -- features a clock twisted into a lemniscate and also emphasizes the number eight with the tagline "0 to 800,000 years in 1.2 seconds."

Winter, flowers, and the Grail

I downloaded a collection of H. G. Wells short stories so that I could read "The Door in the Wall," but since I've got it and all, I figured I might as well read the rest of them. Today I read "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid," which is about -- spoiler warning! -- a flower that kills people, one of its weapons being the heady scent that renders its victims unconscious. It reminded me of a sonnet by my uncle, William John Tychonievich, called "O Poison Rose of Poetry," so I looked it up and reread it for the first time in well over a decade.

O poison Rose of Poetry, we drink

Your deadly nectar deep with each inhale

Of life's sweet atmosphere. Our breath does stink

Of your humid, earthy vapors. O Grail

Of Thorns and bright red-colored Seduction,

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps

Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction

Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

Within your lattice prison we flutter

And strive, suffocating on your perfume

Until we fall and our corpses clutter

Your attar-petaled bed, our womb and tomb.

And here we lay, amid robust young shoots,

Our rotting essence feeding hungry roots.

I had forgotten there was a Grail reference in there! Earlier today I read and posted about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The main character in the Wells story is named Winter Wedderburn. Winter is a rather unusual given name, and for some reason what it made me think of was the 1992 Tori Amos song of that name, even though it's probably been 20 years or more since I've listened to anything by that singer, whose persona and most of whose music I've come to find actively repellent. (I was a big fan in my college days. Things change, my dear.) "Winter" is good, though, so I found it on YouTube and played it. I had never seen the video before.

Most of the video is pretty straightforward -- Tori walking around, singing, playing the piano, etc. -- but at one point it switches to a black screen with a big silver cup -- a trophy perhaps (it goes with the lyrics "you say I wanted you to be proud"), but also suggestive of the Grail.

A hand from offscreen pulls the cup away, and then some flowers float in and arrange themselves into this circular configuration. Then it's back to your regularly scheduled walking, singing, and piano playing.

The circle of flowers is a weird sync, since earlier today I saw this on /x/, posted with no comment but "what did they mean by this?":

Has Charles not been crowned yet? Kind of taking their time, aren't they? It's just some innocent graphic design, incorporating the floral emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland -- unless, that is, you're /x/ enough to see the inverted crosses hidden in the shamrocks and the inverted pentagram at the top of the crown, usurping the place of the Cross. Anyway, whatever else it may be, it's a pretty specific sync with the Tori Amos video.

What if Dot got in the Green Door?

A lemniscate is a figure-eight. D and Δ are the fourth letters of their respective alphabets, so a lemniscate made up of two Ds or two Δs encodes 4 + 4 = 8. A square also represents the idea of four, so a figure-eight made up of two squares would express the same idea.

Suppose there were a building with 11 windows, each in the shape of a digital-clock eight. The eleven windows would represent 8 × 11 = 88. I wonder what color door such a building might have.

H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Herbert Hoover = HH = 88.

Congratulations, Dot! We knew you could do it.

Dot is a short form of the name Dorothy.

The door Dot enters is that of a school. My last post was about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The Grail isn't anything you might have heard it is except for perhaps the generative principle of nature itself. We are all within the grail. This is how God comes to know us. We are like fish in a great ocean, bound to our school. When the question is asked the realm is restored.

The /x/ post also implicitly identifies the hourglass with the Holy Grail. The hourglass is a figure-eight, and the Grail is a cup. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- the post that prompted the email that started me on this whole Green Door wild goose chase -- I did a one-card Tarot draw, and it was the Eight of Cups. In the same post, I included this photo of a door in which I fancied I could see the image of an owl. I didn't notice it at the time, but the door also features a lazy-eight lemniscate.

I continued my discussion of the Eight of Cups in "The Wizard at the green door," which is also where the Wizard of Oz image above was originally posted. In that post, I connect the Green Door with the vesica piscis and the fish.

Looking at "The Wizard at the green door post" now, I find that the first comment is a cryptic one from ben: "Mr Owl's left side, her right side." I didn't know what that meant when he posted it, and I still don't, but running into it again now was a bit of synchronicity. A couple of days ago I read this in the preface to Paul J. Nahin's book An Imaginary Tale.

As a second example of "an error that wasn't," a reader wrote to complain that in figure 5.8 (the circuit diagram of a phase-shift oscillator) the voltage u is to the right of voltage v, but in the text I refer to the voltage u being to the left. This assertion stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment (I had confused left and right? -- my Lord, I must be dumber than an owl!), until I realized he was looking at the resistor-capacitor feedback network in the circuit, despite the fact that in the text I specifically state I am talking about the voltages on the input/output terminals of the amplifier connected to the network. (Thank the Lord, I'm not dumber than an owl! Such are the little things that give pleasure to the mind of an old mathematics writer at midnight.)

How often have you seen or heard a confusion of left and right mentioned in the same breath as an owl?

Note added: The story of Dot getting in comes from this old book (how old I'm not sure, as no date of publication is given. The "treasure" theme on the cover may be significant to at least one of my readers.

"Road Map to Success" -- and a picture of a map to an island, which can hardly be reached by road! "Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters; . . . The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls" (Isa. 43:16, 20).

(Honor and owl were juxtaposed in "Break on through to the other side," too.)

As mentioned in "Green Door 101," in the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall," the main character passes through a green door into an enchanted garden where he finds "two great panthers there... Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid." I had found the reference to "spotted panthers" a bit odd, since the word panther as used today normally refers either to a puma, which is not spotted, or to a black leopard, whose spots are not typically visible. In the Journeys book, though, I found this:

"Black with spots" -- with black spots! -- a strange description. At any rate, this is pretty explicitly a spotted panther, like those seen beyond the Green Door in the Wells story. And a "big cat . . . with spots" is obviously related to a cat named Dot, a cat who also went through the Green Door. In Dot's case, it was the green door of an elementary school named after a president who had the same Christian name as Herbert George Wells.

"The Door in the Wall" by H. G. Wells

As described in my January 31 post "The Door in the Wall," I recently reread Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception because of its possible relevance to the Green Door sync theme. Huxley several times uses the expression "Doors in the Wall," saying it is H. G. Wells's phrase, so that led me to download Wells's short story of that name. At that time, I had no idea that the story involved a door of any particular color, but less than 24 hours later, I received an email mentioning Wells's "The Door in the Wall" and that the door in it was green.

Yesterday, I finally got around to reading the story. Not only is the door green, its greenness is emphasized again and again; the phrase "green door" appears 12 times in a story of less than 7,000 words. In the story, a five-year-old boy happens upon a green door in a white wall and walks through it into a vast enchanted garden. He encounters various animals and people there -- most significantly, from the sync point of view, "very tame and friendly white doves" -- and a woman shows him a magical book in which he can see his own life. He turns the pages, seeing one episode after another up to the point where he opened the green door. When he tries to read beyond that point, he suddenly finds himself transported back into the ordinary world.

So there are two portals between the enchanted world and our own: a green door and a book. This ties in with the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman story "The Green Door," in which a girl steps through a green door and finds that she has traveled back into the past. There she eventually meets another modern who has traveled back in time. "Did you come through a little green door?" she asks. "No," he replies, "I came through a book."

Coming back to the Wells story, the child tries in vain to find the green door again, but later, throughout his life, he sees it again from time to time -- a green door in a white wall -- and knows that it will take him back to that enchanted garden. But each time he is busy or preoccupied or has something important to do, and he passes up his chance. He ends up having a very successful career in politics, but is tormented to the end with regret at having attained his success by sacrificing one opportunity after another to go back through the door.

A very unwelcome synchronicity: One of the occasions on which the green door appeared was "as I rushed to my father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative." As I read the story, my wife was out of town, having rushed to her father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Today she returned.

The Door in the Wall

In connection with the recent reappearance of the Green Door theme, I was rereading Aldous Huxley's little book about psychedelics, The Doors of Perception. Yesterday I read this on p. 42:

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory -- all these have served, in H. G. Wells' phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private use there have always been chemical intoxicants.

I've read a smattering of H. G. Wells's better known works but had never run across that phrase, so I looked it up, found that it was the title of a short story of his, and downloaded a collection including that story from Gutenberg. I haven't opened it yet, though, as I'm already in the middle of several other books.

Less than 24 hours later -- early this morning -- I received an email with the subject line "The Door In The Wall." It said simply "Just found out my son is reading this in school!" and had this screenshot attached:

Now it's not by chance that I've been reading and downloading lots of stories about doors, green and otherwise; nor is it surprising that one of my readers, knowing my current interest in such stories, would send me an email like this. Still, the timing -- and the unexpected fact that Wells's door is green -- is striking.

By the way, I'm quite sure that I've written before about H. G. Wells and Hg wells -- wells of mercury -- in connection with the subterranean quicksilver lakes of Qin Shi Huang and those under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in Teotihuacan -- but a search of my blogs doesn't turn up anything. Perhaps it was in the comments or an email. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, do leave a comment.