Go to the window; it’s dark but clear

In a period of just a few days, the following things happened:

On May 30, William Wright proposed that the beings I know as Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) and Claire Delune are one and the same.

On June 1, I wrote about “Joan” saying “Look out the window” and “Come over to the window,” also bringing in the variant “Go to the window.”

On June 2 or 3, I began reading Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers.

Tonight, all of the above came together in a single paragraph. I read this in The Notion Club Papers:

He broke off and went to the window. It was dark but clear as glass in the sky, and there were many white stars.

He went to the window (as “Joan” has repeatedly requested), and it was simultaneously dark (d’Arc) and clear (Claire). How perfect is that?

More on Joan and Claire

As discussed in my June 6 post "What's the connection between Joan and Claire?" William Wright now believes that the beings I have interacted with under the names of Joan and Claire are in fact one and the same, an identification I have been somewhat hesitant to accept.

Well, why not ask Claire herself to mettre les choses au clair, so to speak? Yesterday, June 7, I had some free time, so I prepared for a read and said, "Okay, Claire, you've got one shot to convince me. One card. Make it count." I shuffled and cut the deck while repeating in my mind, "Joan and Claire: Are they the same or different? The same or different?" I put a single card face down in front of me and returned the rest of the deck to its ark.

When I read, it's my habit to try to engage whatever psychic faculties I may possess by trying to visualize the face of each card before I turn it over. Fairly often I am able to do this successfully: A mental image of a particular card comes to mind, and when I turn over the card in front of me, that's what it is. Sometimes a different image comes to mind, which doesn't match what's on the card but sheds light on how to interpret it. Or sometimes, of course, I just get random noise, or nothing.

When I tried to visualize this card, I got a fairly hazy image of a large metal chalice. The image was not at all detailed, and I couldn't even be sure what metal it was, but my impression was that it was supposed to be the Holy Grail. Unsurprisingly, my guess was that the card was going to be the Ace of Cups. Though this visual impression was fairly weak, it was accompanied by a much stronger and clearer aural impression: a piano playing the first three notes of a C major scale: do re mi. This seemed potentially relevant to my question, since some years ago an online friend had pointed out that Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc (now called Domrémy-la-Pucelle in her honor), is pronounced almost exactly as do re mi, the only difference being the nasalization of the first vowel.

I turned the card over. It was the Knight of Wands:

The first thing I noticed was that this was not a "new" card but one I had drawn before. This was only my fifth reading with this deck, and I rarely use more than three cards per reading, so this was the first time the same card had come up a second time. That in itself suggests an answer of "same" rather than "different" to the question I had posed. What's more, the first time I had drawn this card -- which was on June 2, in my very first reading with the deck -- it had been about Claire. My brief notes for that first reading are as follows:

2024 June 2 Sunday

First read with consecrated RWS, acquired on Joan's Day.

1. Who is CdL? 2. What is her role in my life? 3. Who am I to her?

1. Nine of Cups - very pleased, granter of wishes, full of joy

2. Knight of Wands - call to adventure, risk, Ahuric action, and yes fun

3. Four of Swords - sleeper, calm knight, deep and slow

CdL is of course Claire de Lune. I've usually written her surname as Delune -- one word, capital D -- but for whatever reason I'd abbreviated it as CdL in my notes that day.

So the Knight of Swords has already been associated with Claire. If I can see anything in it that unambiguously indicates Joan, then I'll have my answer.

Because of the do re mi impression I'd had before turning over the card, I tried to see if there was any possible way do re mi was encoded in the image. I couldn't find anything. I thought of different ways do re mi might be expressed -- C D E, for example. (Even though I don't have anything like perfect pitch, my impression had been clear that it was the beginning of a C major scale I had heard.) I noticed that the abbreviation I had used in my notes, CdL, was frustratingly close to this, but of course there is no such musical note as L.

But wait. If there were a musical note called L, which note would it be? Well, imagine if after G you just kept going instead of starting over at A. L would then be an octave above E, and would thus also be mi:

So, in a fairly straightforward way, CdL = do re mi.

Coming back to the image on the card itself, its an armored person on horseback, and in my opinion the face is even sexually ambiguous and could be seen as that of a woman. So that matches Joan in a general way. And the yellow leaves on the horse's bridle bear a certain resemblance to fleurs-de-lis. The suit of Wands has been seen as symbolizing the peasant class, so the Knight of Wands is someone from a peasant background raised to knightly status, like Joan.

Then I realized that the wooden staff resembles a stake, and that the Knight looks as if he is on fire.Those aren't actually flames on his helmet, though, but feathers -- just as a bird reportedly rose from the flames when Joan was burned. Then I noticed the black lizards printed on the Knight's outer garment -- which, I know from reading Waite, are not actually lizards but salamanders, representing the element of Fire. Wait, didn't I post something about salamanders recently, and wasn't it about Joan?

I put salamanders in the search box on this blog, and a single post came up: "The arrow through the window," dated June 2, 2024. It was an unfinished draft, last edited in 2021, but I'd decided to publish it on that day -- the same day I did that first reading and drew the Knight of Wands. The post does indeed deal with Joan, and it also mentions that story about a bird flying up out of the flames. Keep in mind the title of the post, with its reference to a window.

My attention next turned to the horse on the card. Did Joan ride a brown horse? She's often shown on a white horse in art.I ran a search for joan of arc's horse, and the very first result was "Stories of Joan of Arc at Orléans," from a site called Sacred Windows. It says her horse was "dark-coated," but I was more interested in what it had to say about her banner:

It was twelve feet long, silky white, and emblazoned with the names of Jesus and Mary – a warrior’s banner. It was mounted on a tall pole for all to see, the resolute declaration of a conquering hero, like David against Goliath: "You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts" (1 Samuel 17:45).

Thus did Joan of Arc ride into battle – holding high the banner, declaring her identity as a Christian soldier. Joan knew who she was, and announced it to her friends and enemies alike. Such a bold, bright, obstinate declaration of a warrior’s character must have struck mortal fear into the hearts of every foe, as the maiden, clad in armor and fire, rode onto the battlefield bringing war to their strongholds.

It specifically mentions the "tall pole" from which the banner flew, and that Joan held it high as she rode into battle. The card doesn't show a banner, but the Knight is holding up a pole. "Clad in armor and fire" also matches our Knight pretty exactly. 

After the reading, since piano music had come up in connection with Claire, I thought I'd listen to Clair de Lune, the piano piece by Debussy. I found it on the YouTube Music app on my phone, but it had to play an ad first. The ad began with footage of people fighting with lightsabers, and a voice said in English something like "You have the weapon of a Jedi, but you are not a Jedi yet," after which it switched to Chinese. I didn't quite catch the exact quote, nor had I processed what exactly was being advertised when, a few seconds later, the ad ended and Clair de Lune began playing.

It took me a second to remember why I associated lightsabers with Joan of Arc. Then I remembered: In my January 2021 post "Darkest hour," I relate dreaming the phrase épée d'Arc ("sword of Arc") and relating it to a Babylon Bee article about Trump having "the Darksaber," which I guess must be from one of those Star Wars sequels I've never watched. Dark and d'Arc are homophones, and épée and sabre are two different (but not very different) fencing weapons.  As it turns out, it's also this post that brings up how Domrémy sounds like do re mi.

It's been decades since I fenced, and I only ever did foil. and just after typing the above, I wanted to check whether I had remembered correctly how the three weapons differ. The first search result, "Foil, Epee or Sabre? Choose Your Weapon," had mugs for sale comparing the weapons to wands.

Besides the link to the Knight of Wands, "My wand chose me" is also a link back to my post about my first two encounters with Joan, called "Can you just choose a patron saint?" The first two comments there took issue with my title, saying, "It sounds like your Saint chose you."

I really wanted to see that lightsaber ad again and get the exact quote and the context, but no amount of Googling turned up anything, so I figured all I could do was keep playing songs on YouTube Music and hope it would come up again. It never did, but the music (which I let the algorithm choose) was remarkably synchy. The second song it played was "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, which begins with these lines:

Hello, darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Since I had just been thinking about the dark/d'Arc connection, this obviously caught my attention. Then the very next song was Emily Linge singing "Stand by Me," which begins thus:

When the night has come

And the land is dark

And the moon is the only light we'll see

Another dark reference, immediately followed by a reference to moonlight -- or, in French, clair de lune.

What's the connection between Joan and Claire?

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright proposes that the beings I know as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are actually one and the same, and also the same as one of the beings he has been in contact with, one of "a group of laughing women" whom he thinks of as the Daughters of Asenath. It is strongly implied that this being may not actually have anything to do with the historical Joan of Arc even though "that is how she has allowed herself to be thought of for a few reasons." In his June 4 post "The French Connection" he refers to "Joan-Claire" as if the identity has been established.

As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.

Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.

Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.

After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."

This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.

On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:

As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.

This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!

At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.

Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.

Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:

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. 

So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!

I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.

Makmahod in Lebanon?

In my May 30 post "Makmahod in France?" I describe a brief vision of a disembodied had holding a crowned sword, which I compared to the Ace of Swords and to the coat of arms of Joan of Arc. In the vision, the sword had an inscription which suggested that it was Makmahod, the Sword of Laban.On June 1, in "Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window" -- about a dialogue in which Joan talks a lot about snow -- I reposted this image linking the image also to the cover of one edition of the novel Snow Crash.

Today I remembered a very similar vision I'd just read about a month or two before, reported in an 1841 letter from early Mormon apostle Orson Hyde (from here):

Jaffa, October 20, 1841

DEAR BROTHER PRATT,

Yesterday I arrived in this place from Beyrout, and just as I was about to start from the American consul's in this place to Jerusalem, at a most enormous price, a company of English gentlemen rode in from Jerusalem with many servants all armed, and they were to return immediately to Jerusalem, and I can go for little or nothing comparatively speaking.

I have only time to say a few words; but through the favour of heaven I am well and in good spirits, and expect, in a day or two, to see Jerusalem.

My journey has been long and tedious, and consequently expensive. If I get back to England with money enough to buy my dinner, I shall think myself well off.

The country is in a terrible state. While I was at Beyrout, a terrible battle was fought in Mount Lebanon, about six hours' walk from Beyrout, between the Drewzes and Catholics. It was said that about four hundred were killed on each side. An English officer, returning from St. Jean d'Acre to Beyrout, was taken by the Drewzes, and would have been killed had not the Pacha come to his rescue.

He said that he found ten human bodies in the street on his way without heads. Thefts, murders, and robberies are taking place almost continually. The American missionaries in Beyrout and Mount Lebanon have had notice from the Grand Sultan, through our minister at Constantinople, Commodore Porter, to leave the country, and a prospect that all the missionaries in Syria will have to leave. This is only conjecture, however. But in this, if it do take place, I can see plainly the hand of Providence. The fact is, this land belongs to the Jews; and the present fermentation thereof shows to me that it is fast working back into the hands of its rightful heirs. God will, in due time, drive out the Canaanites, so that no more a Canaanite shall be found in the land, or in the house of the Lord.

I find that almost an universal anxiety prevails respecting the return of the Jews. The waters are troubled because the Angel has descended. My heart leaps for joy at the prospect of seeing that land, and there fulfilling my mission.

When we left Smyrna for Beyrout, we only took in stores for one week, thinking that would surely be sufficient, as the voyage is usually made in four days; but we were nineteen days on the passage. A number of days I eat snails gathered from the rocks, but the greatest difficulty was, I could not get enough of them. I was so weak and exhausted that I could not go on shore after the slight exertion of drawing on my boots. But that is past; I am now strong and well, and have plenty to eat. I now have nothing but land pirates, in the shape of Arabs, to encounter. An Englishman seems like a brother, let his religion be what it may. Yet I am very partial to the fulness of the gospel; for in it I have great joy.

The servants are now waiting for me, and I must gird on my arms and be off. Yet one thing I will notice, which is this: On my passage from Beyrout to this place, the night before last, at one o'clock, as I was meditating on the deck of the vessel, as she was beating down against a sultry schroke wind, a very bright glittering sword appeared in the heavens, about two yards in length, with a beautiful hilt, as plain and complete as any cut you ever saw. And, what is still more remarkable, an arm, with a perfect hand, stretched itself out and took hold on the hilt of the sword. The appearance really made my hair rise, and the flesh, as it were, to crawl on my bones. The Arabs made a wonderful outcry at the sight; O, Allah, Allah, Allah! was their exclamation all over the vessel.

I mention this because you know there is a commandment to me which says, "Unto you it shall be given to know the signs of the times, and the sign of the coming of the son of man."

May the Lord bless you all in England and in America. And I pray that he will bless my wife, and my dear little children; God knows that I want to see them—yea, and all the saints.

I have many particulars that I would like to write, but time will not allow at this time. You will hear from me again by the first opportunity, if the Arabs don't kill me. There is no post here; letters are sent by private conveyance, through friends, &c. God bless you and the cause of Zion is my last prayer.

My love to brothers Snow and Adams, and all the brothers and sisters in the communion: pray for me.

Yours, in great haste,

ORSON HYDE.

I had remembered only the sword vision itself, but looking up the letter just now I discovered the other parts I have bolded: Lebanon (from the same Hebrew root as the name Laban), Snow, and St. Jean d'Acre -- the last being obviously extremely similar to St. Jeanne d'Arc.

Hyde emphasizes that the sword had "a beautiful hilt." Nephi makes the same observation upon drawing out the sword of Laban:

And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel (1 Ne. 4:9).

I know about the letter quoted above because it was mentioned by Don Bradley in his speech "Knowing Brother Joseph Again: How the Historical Record Demonstrates the Prophet’s Religious Sincerity." Bradley points out that Hyde's vision -- which was apparently of something objectively there in the sky, as the Arabs with him saw it, too -- took place just eight days before Joseph Smith married Zina Peterson, whom Bradley argues was Joseph's first plural wife. When he proposed to her, he reportedly said, "I put it off and put it off until an angel came with a drawn sword and told me I had to move ahead" -- the implication being that this was Joseph's interpretation of a vision similar or identical to Hyde's, and that Hyde's report supports the reality of the vision and therefore Joseph's sincerity.

Orson Hyde at that time was on a ship, taking passage to Beirut, I think it was. He’d gone to dedicate Jerusalem — he was on the other side of the world. But he sees a sword in the sky and a hand grabbing the hilt. And I was dumbfounded by this, it seemed nuts. I looked and it turns out that there was a meteor shower going on at the time. There were others on the boat with Orson Hyde. They were Arabs and they cried out at the exact moment that he saw the sword and the hand. They cried out "Allah! Allah! Allah!" — so they saw this too. It wasn’t a vision; it was something actually in the sky.

It wouldn’t have been visible at the exact same moment in Nauvoo, but the same meteor shower would (at different hours) have been visible in Nauvoo. And this goes along so remarkably with Joseph describing at this time seeing an angel with a drawn sword. And I thought about when, during the Great meteor shower of 1833, Joseph wrote in his journal about it — how someone called him to "rise and behold the signs in the heavens; I arose and to my great joy, Behold, the stars falling from heaven, like a shower of hailstones, a literal fulfillment of the Word of God, as according to the Holy Scripture is a sure sign that the coming of Christ is close at hand."

Bradley's meteor shower theory seems weak to me. A meteor shower just doesn't look much at all like a hand holding a drawn sword, "plain and complete." I suppose it is conceivable that some freak chance made the meteors appear in a configuration suggesting a sword -- but twice? As Bradley points out, it's geographically impossible that Orson Hyde in the Mediterranean and Joseph Smith in Nauvoo should have simultaneously observed the very same astronomical event.

Or is it? 1:00 a.m. in Lebanon would have been 5:00 p.m. in Nauvoo -- about an hour before sunset in late October -- and the two locations are separated by about 126 degrees of longitude. If the "sword" was bright enough to be visible even before sunset, and if it appeared in both locations relatively low in the sky (an average of less than 27 degrees angular elevation), then I think it is possible that Joseph Smith saw it in the eastern sky at precisely the same moment Orson Hyde saw it in the west. Hyde mentions a strong wind (surely the Levante, not the Sirocco as reported), which at that time of year near Lebanon would likely have been blowing from east to west, making it likely that Hyde was standing with his back to the wind, facing west, when he saw the sword. Meanwhile, Joseph would likely have been facing his east, rather than staring into the setting sun.

Anyway, whatever the details, I do agree that Hyde's letter -- written at such a time and place as to ensure its independence from Joseph's account -- lends credence to the otherwise risible "angel with a drawn sword" story.

I said hello. Can you hear me, Joe?

Back in November 2023, I posted “Read my lips: no new syncs,” calling a moratorium which was almost immediately violated by Tim, who required that I be asleep in order to deliver his message and accomplished this by chanting “Sleep now, O sleep now” until I obliged.

In my “no new syncs” post, I included this page from Dr. Seuss:

William Wright, who had been on the point of proposing a female identity for my sync fairies, saw Tim as an impostor and identified him with Saruman and with the wire-cutting mouse.

This year, on Joan’s Day, William revealed that he had also been planning on identifying Joan when things were interrupted by Tim.

A few days ago, I posted a dialogue from a textbook which begins with Joan saying, “Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello?” She wants Joe to wake up and go to the window to see the snow, but Joe wants to sleep. I tied this in with a scene from Help! in which the baddies call Ringo on his black telephone and chant, “Go to the window. Go to the window.”

Here’s the page immediately preceding the one I posted in November:

Fourth Down

I’m not actually all that clear on what a “fourth down” is in football terms (don’t tell my Cousin Lou!), but it’s the name of one of my uncle’s songs, which I quoted recently because it name-drops William Butler Yeats:

I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire

To bring me back some Yeast

Because I needed to bake some bread

For my wedding feast.

He came back empty-handed,

And I thought my heart would break

When he told me he’d been robbed

By a bandit named Billy Blake.

That postponed my wedding,

And I had to shed a tear,

Then locked myself in the bathroom

So I could shake my spear.

And then the chorus:

Drown my head in water.

Lay it on the chopping block.

You can turn that oil up hotter

Cause I’m singing, but I ain’t gonna talk.

I had quoted the first lines earlier in connection with The Tarot by Richard Cavendish, which has a portrait of Yeats in it. Today I started reading it. On p. 15, Cavendish mentions that some packs of cards, both Tarot and ordinary playing cards, have portrayed the court cards as historical figures. The first he mentions is Shakespeare (Jack of Diamonds in an 1879 German pack), and another is “La Hire . . . a supporter of Joan of Arc,” whose name is used by the French to this day as a nickname for the Jack of Hearts.

I looked up La Hire. His nom de guerre is believed to have come from the English word ire, with reference to the wrath of God. (Note that as far back as 2016 I had connected the name Claire with the divine ire.)

“Fourth Down” references both Shakespeare (apparently as a euphemism for masturbation!) and the Land of Ire. The chorus is about how torture will make him sing but not talk. I recently quoted Rimbaud saying, just after a Joan of Arc reference, “I am of the race that sang under torture.”

The arrow through the window

I found this in my Drafts folder, last modified September 20, 2021, with the title “The second baptism.” I post it now, unfinished, for synchromystic reasons.

My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!

Elijah said unto Elisha, "Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee."

And Elisha said, "I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me."

And he said, "Thou hast asked a hard thing."

-- 2 Kings 2:9-10

But Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

And they said unto him, "We can."

And Jesus said unto them, "Ye shall indeed." 

-- Mark 10:38-39

John answered, saying unto them all, "I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire: whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable."

-- Luke 3:16-17

⁂

The prophet John promised a baptism "with the Holy Ghost and with fire" and implicitly identified Jesus as the one who would perform it. I suppose orthodox opinion would connect this prophecy with the extraordinary manifestations that took place at the feast of Pentecost six months after Jesus' death, when "there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2:3-4).

What did John have in mind, though? What could "Holy Ghost" even have meant to a pre-Christian? Well, ghost, spirit, and wind are all the same word in the original Greek, and the very next thing John says is "whose fan is in his hand." A holy wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then a fire to burn up the latter. (For what it's worth, a "rushing mighty wind" also figures in the Pentecost story.)

Wind and fire call to mind Elijah, carried away in a whirlwind of flame, and in fact John, in promising a fire to come after him, may have been thinking of his role (denied by himself but affirmed by Jesus) as the apocalyptic second coming of Elijah.

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings . . . . Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (Mal. 4:1-2, 5).

As John has it, the fire is only for the "chaff," but Malachi and Acts tell a different story. For Malachi, the same fiery Sun that burns up the wicked will heal the righteous. The Christians at Pentecost were engulfed in flames but not consumed. The fire is universal; what differs is how people are affected by it.

"Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble: your breath, as fire, shall devour you. . . .Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly" (Isa. 33:11, 14-15). Breath, in Hebrew as in Greek, is the same word as wind or spirit. For Isaiah, too, the righteous are not spared the fire but are able to live in it. As some old writer cited only as J. Spencer once put it, "Such is the condition of all God's children, . . . true salamanders, that live best in the furnace." (Fellow Mormons can likely guess how I happen to know that quote!)

*

When Elisha was on his deathbed (2 Kgs. 13), the king of Israel came to him and, through streaming tears and with trembling voice, repeated the words Elisha had uttered long before, at the assumption of Elijah: "O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof." Did he think this magic formula would call down the flaming whirlwind of God? Did he see something Elisha didn't? At any rate, no manifestation was forthcoming.

Elisha did not immediately respond, but then -- "Take bow and arrows," he said. "Put thine hand upon the bow, open the window eastward, and shoot."

The king did so.

"The arrow of the Lord's deliverance," breathed Elisha -- and though later writers were to embellish the scene, those were his last words.

They buried him. No whirlwind, no chariot of fire, no flaming horsemen. Another generation passes, and a little more magic passes from the world. "Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?"

*

Jehanne Darc's surname evolved, after her death, into d'Arc -- "of Arc," that is, "of the Bow." A friend sent me the section on Joan of Arc from The Saint Book by Mary Reed Newland. It ends thus:

The pyre, unusually high so all could see, prevented the executioner from giving the customary coup de grâce to shorten her suffering and as the flames rose she cried, "Jesus, Jesus." An English soldier swore that he saw a white bird rise up out of the flames. He stood transfixed until his companions led him away.

What did the white bird mean? Was it her spirit leaving her body, in bird form like an Egyptian ba? No, it was the Dove, and its meaning was that here was another baptism like that of Jesus, but this time by fire. Its implicit message, delivered in the age-old language of signa ex avibus, was, "This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name." (Does that parallel strike you as blasphemous? But why should it? Do you really think Jesus never intended for anyone to follow him?)

The original Dove that flew over Jesus' baptismal waters echoed the dove of Noah flying over the flooded earth. After the Flood, the rainbow -- l'arc-en-ciel, the arc in heaven -- was given as a sign that the earth would never again be flooded. Because, according to later tradition, the next Deluge would not be water but fire. What can survive a deluge? Only an ark. Is it a coincidence that Jeanne d'Arc

And there the draft ends. I would complete it now, but the thing is gone from me.

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.

Yeats, Joan, and Claire

Yesterday, May 30, I enjoyed "good luck" all day. Everything just went unusually smoothly, with lots of little good things just happening to happen. Therefore, when I had a few free hours in the afternoon and had a sudden hunch that I should go to a particular used bookstore, even though it meant a 40-minute drive to another city, I figured it was a good day for pursuing hunches.

When I arrived, I realized that I had brought very little cash with me and wouldn't be able to buy much, but I thought I'd look around anyway. I was immediately drawn to a small table with several Tarot decks, including two different editions of the Rider-Waite. I'd been to this store countless times, and they'd never sold Tarot cards before. I know it's basic common sense that you do not buy magical items secondhand, especially if you don't know who the previous owner was, but I'd been without a physical Rider-Waite deck for some years now, and I felt impressed to buy one. "It's okay," put in the helpful excuse-maker on my shoulder (right or left?). "You can just reconsecrate them."

I picked up one of the decks, but the price tag slightly exceeded what I had in my pocket. When I checked the second one, though, I saw that I had exactly the right amount of cash to buy it. That seemed like a sign, and I decided to get it.

Even though that decision left me with exactly zero dollars to spend on anything else, I took a brief look at the books anyway. One I would definitely have bought was W. B. Yeats and His World by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eaven Boland, which had lots of illustrations. Because of my sword vision earlier that day, my first thought was to wonder whether it included a photo of the poet's magical sword (yes, he owned one), so I flipped through the book to check. No sword pics, alas, but this cartoon caught my eye:

It shows a woman dressed in black, standing atop the globe with two books under her feet, one of which is labeled "Gregorian Chants," and looking out into space at a giant flying Koran. A female Gregory was the main thing that got my attention, as a possible link to Odessa Grigorievna. I also happened to briefly start reading the Quran just a few weeks after the Grigorievna dream. I was vaguely aware that a Lady Gregory had been one of Yeats's associates but knew essentially nothing else about her and couldn't understand what the cartoon was trying to say. Today I went to Wikipedia for a quick rundown, where I read that she had been born on March 15, 1852 -- the Ides of March. This was shortly after reading William Wright's post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')" -- on which much more below -- in which he interprets two things said by a female voice as referring to me: "Beware this one!" and "When I dream, I dream about books!" I was born on the Ides of March (as in "Beware the Ides of March!") and have had many dreams about books. Lady Gregory, it turns out, shares my birthday, and the cartoon looks as if it might depict her dreaming about the Quran.

Anyway, I didn't buy the Yeats book. I took the Tarot deck to the counter to pay -- and discovered to my surprise that I was eligible for a special discount! Instead of spending every bit of my cash, as I had expected, I received $99 (about three US dollars) back -- so I went right back to the bookshelves to browse some more. I found Richard Cavendish's 1975 book The Tarot -- a large hardback full of color photos and certainly far too expensive to buy with my remaining cash. When I picked it up, though, I saw the price sticker: exactly $99. That seemed like another sign, and I bought it.

Flipping through Cavendish's book later, I was surprised to discover a full-page portrait of Yeats!

The use of his full name, William Butler Yeats, is another indirect link to Odessa Grigorievna, as my post "Hey birds, here are cookies!" links her with the biblical story of the Pharaoh's butler and baker. My uncle's song "Fourth Down" directly links Yeats with butling and baking: "I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire / To bring me back some Yeast / Because I needed to bake some bread / For my wedding feast."

Does Yeats really deserve a full-page portrait in a history of the Tarot? He moved in magicians' circles, yes, and knew MacGregor (MacGregor!) Mathers and Waite and Crowley, but what contribution to the Tarot iconography or interpretation did he himself make? The only possible fingerprints of his I've been able to find are on the Rider-Waite Magician and Ace of Pentacles, where his poem "The Travail of Passion" may -- this is my own personal hypothesis -- have influenced Waite to include red roses and white lilies in the imagery. (See my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician.")

This made me think of my February 2 post "What's the second key?" -- the first key being the Rosary. I had written:

One [key] 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.

Where did this idea come from, of there being two keys, one of which is the Rosary? See my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes":

I thought to myself [of the Rosary], "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

In William Wright's post, on which I said I would have more to say, he proposes that the beings I think of as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are one and the same. He actually ends the post -- which was written on St. Joan's Day (i.e., May 30, the anniversary of her death) -- with "Happy Feast Day, Claire." I had forgotten that in my first encounter with Claire she had quizzed me about the "true" form of a Yeats poem, and specifically a poem about the Irish god Aengus. One of the things I learned today from skimming the Wikipedia article for Lady Gregory is that she used to publish under the pseudonym Angus Grey.

In that post, I also mention that the only keys mentioned in the Book of Mormon are those of Laban's treasury. One of Laban's greatest treasures was the sword Makmahod -- recently connected with Joan and thus perhaps also with Claire.

Now look back at the photo of the full-page portrait of Yeats. Up in the corner is the name of the chapter in which it is found: "The Universal Key."

Does that settle it? Is the Tarot -- particularly in its Yeats-adjacent Rider-Waite form -- the long-sought second key? I wasn't sure until I opened up my new cards and saw what was printed on the backs:

A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily. I thought at first it was the Rose of York, but that should be barbed and seeded proper (i.e., with green leaves and a yellow center). This one is all white, even the leaves, suggesting that it is the blossom of an all-white tree -- with obvious implications from a Mormon or Tolkienian point of view.

Are Joan and Claire the same being, as William Wright suggests? The possibility had never crossed my mind, but my immediate inclination is to think that it may well be true. Serendipitously running into all this Claire-related content on Joan's Day  is obviously a data point in favor of the hypothesis. Another data point is the poem I published yesterday for St. Joan's Day. An earlier draft had ended with the line "And act -- however high the stakes," but then I felt something nudging me to change it to "Clear-eyed -- however high the stakes" -- even though being clear-eyed had no obvious connection with the overall theme of the poem. The French word for "clear" is clair -- or, in the feminine, claire.

Coincidence? Here's another. Last Joan's Day I wrote, but did not publish, a translation of a French poem by St. Thérèse de Lisieux. (This year, by "coincidence," I did another translation from Thérèse just five days before Joan's Day.) I was tolerably happy with it as a translation but felt that its take on Joan was not my own, and thus I never ended up posting it. It's still in my Drafts folder, dated May 30, 2023, so I looked it up. Here's the original:

A Jeanne d'Arc

Quand le Dieu des armées te donnant la victoire

Tu chassas l'étranger et fis sacrer le roi

Jeanne, ton nom devint célèbre dans l'histoire

Nos plus grands conquérants pâlirent devant toi.

Mais ce n'était encor qu'une gloire éphémère

Il fallait à ton nom l'auréole des Saints

Aussi le Bien-Aimé t'offrit sa coupe amère

Et tu fus comme Lui rejetée des humains.

Au fond d'un noir cachot, chargée de lourdes chaînes

Le cruel étranger t'abreuva de douleurs

Pas un de tes amis ne prit part à tes peines

Pas un ne s'avança pour essuyer tes pleurs.

Jeanne tu m'apparais plus brillante et plus belle

Qu'au sacre de ton roi, dans ta sombre prison.

Ce céleste reflet de la gloire éternelle

Qui donc te l'apporta ? Ce fut la trahison.

Ah ! si le Dieu d'amour en la vallée des larmes

N'était venu chercher la trahison, la mort

La souffrance pour nous aurait été sans charmes

Maintenant nous l'aimons, elle est notre trésor.

And my version:

To Joan

The God of Hosts gave thee the field --

The king was crown'd, the foe did yield --

And all the conq'rors France had known

Did pale before the name of Joan.

Yet thy name, too, had paled and died

If not by suff'ring sanctified.

The cup which caus'd our Lord to shrink,

He offer'd thee -- thou, too, didst drink.

Thou wast, like Him, rejected, left

Alone, of all thy friends bereft.

Not one did come to kiss thy chains,

To still thy tears, to share thy pains.

When Charles the Seventh took the throne,

How brightly then thy glory shone!

But brighter still that glory ray'd

In dungeons dark -- alone, betray'd.

Our Lord did, too, to this sad vale

Come down to seek out death, betray'l.

Through Him we see with clearer eyes:

Now suff'ring is our greatest prize.

A note after the poem offers this as "a more literal translation of the final stanza":

Ah! If the God of love had not come to this vale of tears

To seek betrayal and death,

Suffering would have had no appeal for us.

Now we love it; it is our treasure.

So I took some liberties with that final stanza, the chief effect of which was -- to add a reference to clearer eyes that was not in the original!

Makmahod in France?

Sometimes while I am praying my daily Rosary -- my discursive mind preoccupied with rattling off the Latin formulae, my imaginative mind centered on Christ -- I will receive flashes of extremely vivid mental imagery. These are typically very brief but of such intense clarity that they seem somehow clearer than ordinary physical vision. I received such an image today.

It was essentially the image seen on the Ace of Swords in the Tarot: a luminous hand holding aloft a sword with a gold crown hovering like a halo around the blade. This is a very familiar image to me, and I was not surprised to see it today, as it closely resembles the coat of arms of Joan of Arc, my patron saint, who was executed 593 years ago today. A novel feature had been added, though: Something was written on the blade, in capital letters separated by centered dots. I have reconstructed the inscription as follows:

· L · R · D · M · E · R · A · N · S · E · A · S · C ·

The image was only visible for a fraction of a second, so it was impossible to take in and remember the exact sequence of letters. However, I am 100% confident that I have reconstructed it correctly, triangulating from three different impressions about what it means.

My first impression was that it essentially said, in somewhat garbled spelling, "Lord, me answer. Ask." I understood this to mean that if you want to receive knowledge from God, it is necessary to formulate and ask a specific question -- though that point is somewhat undercut by the fact that I received what is in this post without asking anything in particular!

My second impression was that it was an anagram of "Arc's realm ends." Given the context, I of course thought first of Joan of Arc and the Kingdom of France. That kingdom did indeed end, and Joan's banner was burned in the Revolution. Joan was never known as Arc in her lifetime, though, and arc also means the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel. As I mentioned in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," for me a rainbow represents the word world:

In my very early childhood my thinking was mostly visual, and abstract words generally each had a specific mental picture associated with them. I remember that I often used to pray "Thank you for the world," and that the image that always accompanied the word world was a rainbow.

"Arc's realm," then, refers not only to France but to all the kingdoms of the world.

My third impression was that each of the letters stood for a word -- and no sooner had I formulated that thought than I knew, conceptually if not literally, what words they stood for. As soon as I'd finished my Rosary, I went straight to a French Bible to confirm my hunch. The inscription stands for this:

Le royaume du monde est remis à notre Seigneur et à son Christ.

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15).

I'm sure many of my Mormon readers will immediately have recognized the significance of this being written on a sword. According to a discourse by Brigham Young, this very phrase was written on the blade of the Sword of Laban:

When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room. He says he did not think, at the time, whether they had the light of the sun or artificial light; but that it was just as light as day. They laid the plates on a table; it  was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed, and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ."

We call it the Sword of Laban, but it may well be of nobler origin than that. According to several secondhand reports, collected by Don Bradley in his indispensable book The Lost 116 Pages, it was also the sword of Joshua, wielded in the conquest of Canaan, and was very likely originally made for (or even by) Joseph in Egypt and carried out of that country in the Exodus with his bones.

Can we add Joan of Arc to the list of possible bearers of this storied blade? Perhaps. The origins of her sword are mysterious. She found it behind a church altar, having been led to it by her voices, and it appeared to be of great antiquity. Who knows who put it there or where it originally came from? At any rate, whether or not Joan's sword was literally and historically the Sword of Laban, it seems undeniable that today's vision is identifying the two, at least symbolically.

For Joan on her feast day

This lesson from the Maid I’ve learned:

Align with God whate’er the cost.

You may be killed, you may be burned.

You’ll still have won, they’ll still have lost.

Be good and true, do what it takes,

Clear-eyed — however high the stakes.

Adam De Wan, Tychicus, and Joan of Arc

This morning I breakfasted at a local café. My seat was facing a large television screen on the wall across the room, on which was playing some BBC food tourism program, in which the host was visiting different chefs somewhere in Europe and sampling various dishes, including (I wasn't exactly paying attention) crayfish and a couple of pasta dishes. I later looked it up and found that it was Rick Stein's Secret France ("Rick Stein sets off on a new culinary adventure to search for France’s best-kept gastronomic secrets"), which originally aired from November 5 to December 10, 2019. I wasn't paying enough attention to tell you which of the six episodes was playing today.

The reason I was able to look the program up is that I had happened to glance up as the credits were rolling and for some reason one of the names -- that of Adam De Wan, the editor -- caught my attention and started an associative train of thought that went something like this:

De Wan. That's obviously not a French name. I bet the guy's Irish or something, and at some point the family started spelling their name with a space after the de as a sort of affectation, to make it look more aristocratic. I could probably do the same with my own name, since t is close enough to d. De Chonievich? No, the -vich is still too obvious. It would have to be de Tychon or something, which makes me think of Tychicus. . . .

What it reminded me of was when, a couple of years ago, the sync fairies had directed my attention to a particular verse in the epistles of Paul. When I looked it up, it happened to include the name Tychicus, which struck me as significant because it almost looked like a contracted and Latinized form of my own name.

Remembering Tychicus made me mildly curious as to who exactly Tychicus was and whether or not he actually did anything in the New Testament. As far as I could remember, his was just a name dropped in passing from time to time. Since I often have occasion to check Mormon scriptures as well as the Bible proper, the Bible app I usually use is one called Gospel Library, produced by the Great and Unabbreviable Church (formerly known as the Mormons) and including not only the scriptures but various church-produced magazines and manuals. Basically, it's a mobile version of the website formerly known as lds.org. I put tychicus into the search box, and one of the first hits was an article from the October 2023 issue of the magazine formerly known as the Ensign, about the program formerly known as home-teaching. Here's the opening paragraph:

Tychicus isn’t the most familiar name in the New Testament, but he was an example of ministering and serving with diligence. Although his service was at times in the background, his faithfulness made it possible for Paul to do his important work. Tychicus delivered letters to the Ephesian and Colossian Saints and comforted and encouraged them (see Ephesians 6:21–22; Colossians 4:7–8). He traveled to different areas, such as Crete and Ephesus, to help with the work, freeing leaders like Titus and Timothy to assist Paul (see 2 Timothy 4:12). Paul called Tychicus “a beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord” (Ephesians 6:21).

As an article, this one is about as boring as you would expect. As a sync, though . . . The church has published exactly one article to date highlighting the not-so-distinguished career of this very obscure biblical figure: this one, published this month, the same month that I suddenly became curious about Tychicus after -- let me stress the oddness of the train of thought -- seeing the name Adam De Wan in the credits for a BBC food program.

This was enough to make me look up my original Tychicus sync, which I mention in a comment to my own January 2021 post "Not against flesh and blood." That post is about a sync that began when I saw a T-shirt that said "ARMOR OF GOD" with a reference to the relevant passage in Ephesians. The word Ephesians had made me think of Diana of the Ephesians, and that, combined with the armor reference, had made me think of Joan of Arc -- because my December 2020 post "The white doe" hand linked Joan with Plutarch's story about Sertorius and his pet, a white fawn which he maintained "was a gift of Diana, and . . . revealed many hidden things to him." The connection with Joan was by way of Virginia Dare, since Joan's surname (originally Darc, not d'Arc) was sometimes given as Dare.

Rereading those old posts today, I thought the "armor" reference was a potential sync, since just yesterday I had seen this meme:

This combines armor with the thee/thou language of the King James Bible. The reference of course is to the 1953 Dean Martin song "That's Amore," the original line being, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." It's also amore, another verse informs us, "when the stars make you drool like a pasta e fasul." Keep in mind that what started this current sync-stream was a food program featuring pasta.

A more significant sync is that "The white doe" begins with the fact that Jeanne d'Arc was actually Jeanne Darc -- the initial d later reinterpreted as the preposition de, giving rise to the misnomer "Joan of Arc." But this current sync-stream began when I assumed something similar about BBC editor Adam De Wan -- that he was probably Irish, that his surname had probably originally been Dewan, and that spelling it De Wan as if it were an aristocratic title was probably a later affectation.

So I looked up De Wan. Sure enough, Dewan is an Irish surname. According to ancestry.com, it's a "shortened Anglicized form of Ó Dubháin or Ó Damháin." I don't really know any Irish, but I do know that dubh means black. (I think that fact has come up on this blog before, though I can't find it anywhere.) Google confirms this, using an even more synchronistically apropos synonym:

Joan's original surname was Darc, with the beginning later reinterpreted as the preposition de. The De Wan family's original name may have been "Dark," with the beginning later reinterpreted as the preposition de. (This means Adam De Wan may also tie in with old "Black Adam" syncs.)

As for the other possible Irish origin of Dewan, Damháin is obscure enough that Google thought I might be trying to search for Samhain (the Irish name for November, when Rick Stein's Secret France aired). When I confirmed that I meant what I had typed, it offered damhain-allaidh, the Gaelic for "spider." This in turn comes from the Old Irish damán allaid -- the first element of which means, of all things, "fawn"!

Another name that caught my eye in the Rick Stein credits, that of production manager Olwyn Goldsmith, may also link back to old syncs. Olwyn apparently means "white footprints." My February 4 post "An appearance of Jesus to some Ute Indians in 1920" and the posts it links to discuss the Ute god Sinawav, whose name -- according to Stan Bronson, a Mormon interpreter of Ute myth who identifies Sinawav with Jesus -- means "he who leaves footprints of light." The name Goldsmith obviously has strong Mormon resonances, too.

The Stadium Arcadium covers

On September 11, I received an email from a sporadic correspondent who wishes to be anonymous. Among the things it mentioned was that Storm Thorgerson, who did the cover art for the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, "did some other synchy (and famous) album art."

This sent me to Thorgerson's Wikipedia page, where I found that he designed the iconic Dark Side of the Moon cover for Pink Floyd. Scrolling through a list of other album covers he had designed, I found a few that had been in the sync stream before (Ween's The Mollusk, for example), but the entry that jumped out at me was this one:

• Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Stadium Arcadium (2006) (unused)

The last time I had received an email from this person, which was in May, I noticed that my correspondent's pseudonym and real name were linked to Lorenzo Snow (an old sync theme) by both gematria and etymology. This is what I was referring to when I wrote this in my May 8 post "Random Syncs: Ace of Swords, 1320."

I had recently been brooding over the Ace of Swords, the Marseille version, which features a red sword passing through a crown, and at the same time had (again!) been experiencing some synchronicities related to the name Lorenzo Snow. These latter had made me think of various other things with snow in their name. I listened to that Red Hot Chili Peppers song, and then I thought of the novel Snow Crash, which I read back in 2001.

In this post, and in the same-day follow up "Crowns, martyrs, and Mithras," I noted connections between the Marseille Ace of Swords, the cover of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and Joan of Arc's coat of arms.

The Ace shows an upright red-bladed sword passing through a crown from which hang a laurel branch (etymologically related to Lorenzo) and a palm frond; colorful bits of flame fill the background. The Snow Crash cover shows an upright red sword passing through both the name Stephen (meaning "crown") and the anagram CRNOW, as well as the word Snow; colorful dots fill the background. The sword also passes through ARC spelled backwards.

As mentioned above, Lorenzo Snow made me first think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Snow (Hey Oh)," which I listened to, after which I moved on to Snow Crash. I've never been a big RHCP fan and don't know their music very well, so it wasn't until June 29 that I found out what album "Snow" is from: Stadium Arcadium.

There's no sword here, but there's a crown-like ring around the album title, and if you remove the repeated -adium element, what's left is St. Arc.

Going back to Storm Thorgerson's unused cover ideas for Stadium Arcadium, it turns out that he submitted three of them. Here are two:

Four rivers meeting at a central point, where a tree grows, and an eaten apple -- clear Garden of Eden symbolism. I am currently reading William Fairfield Warren's Paradise Found, which argues that Eden was located at the North Pole. Here's part of the table of contents.

Here's Mercator's famous map of the Arctic:

The third proposed Stadium Arcadium cover has no Eden symbolism but turned out to be the synchiest of all:

In the very same email that had mentioned Thorgerson's album art, my correspondent included a screenshot of a glitching video game in which only half of the character's body was sticking up from the ground:

The character even has a Scandinavian name, like Storm Thorgerson.