This is crazy. Thanks to Wandering Gondola for the tip:
I had linked The Swiss Family Robinson to the Empire State Building in a rather roundabout way: A trailer for a movie about Jackie Robinson begins with a shot of the Empire State Building while playing the intro to "Run Boy Run" -- the video of which begins with a shot of the Swiss Temple.
When WG left a comment mentioning the existence of Swiss Family Manhattan, I assumed it must be an insurance company or something, but no, it's a 1932 novel directly referencing Swiss Family Robinson and featuring the Empire State Building. Here's the summary on Amazon:
More than once, Morley used the device of depicting society from the standpoint of a naive outsider. Here a "Swiss family," travelling by dirigible, crash lands in the middle of the night on the Empire State Building, which they at first take for a giant tree, while the sounds of "carnivorous life" from far below suggest that they must have come down in a jungle. Then they begin to notice the local anthropoids...
The picture I found for this post -- I wanted one with the ESB on the cover -- is from Andre Strong Bookseller -- cf. Arnold Strong, Schwarzenegger's stage name in Hercules in New York, a movie in which Hercules ascends to Olympus from the Empire State Building.
Also notice the author's name: Christopher Morley. The surname Morley was recently featured in William Wright's October 30 post "'Deadly Head Droned' and the Morley Hum Exterminator." Besides being the name of a "hum exterminator" company, Morley is a name from Mormon history. Mr. Wright writes:
Morley is the maiden name of what I think is my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (I forget how many greats...). Her name is Diantha Morley, and the farm she lived on and her brother, Isaac, figure prominently in Mormon history. They and their families became converts to Campbellism under Sidney Rigdon in Ohio. When Parley Pratt came along and introduced the Book of Mormon to Rigdon and the Morleys, the were baptized. Diantha's husband, Titus Billings, was said to be the first person baptized after Sidney Rigdon when this occurred.
The interesting thing about the Morley Farm is that they practiced communal living during those years before they became Mormons, and were called "The Family". When the Joseph Smith and other Mormons relocated out to Ohio, Isaac Morley invited many of them to live on his land. He even built a house for Joseph and Emma there on his farm.
Later, Titus Billings would later sell the Morley Farm in 1832 as he was told to do in a revelation that is now D&C 63 (it is an interesting revelation if anyone wants to look into it... not completely unrelated to events now).
He mentions the year 1832 -- Swiss Family Manhattan was published in 1932 -- and that in Mormon history Morley was synonymous with Family. Mr. Wright goes on to say that the product name Morley Hum Exterminator "has now morphed into the 'Family Sleep Exterminator' now for me. Crazy, right?"
This word exterminator, by the way, is also pretty close to the name of Schwarzenegger's most iconic role.
As announced in my last post, I'm putting the sync fairies on hold for a few weeks while I try to make sense of what they've already given me. And like it or not, the linchpin of the recent cloud of syncs (do clouds have linchpins? Jeeves?) is this stupid and gratuitously offensive (not that there's anything wrong with that) meme I found on 4chan:
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Hercules in New York
The running man in the foreground of the meme is Arnold Strong as seen in his debut film, Hercules in New York (1970). After this breakthrough role, he would ditch this English-language stage name and replace it with his real surname, Schwarzenegger. In German, the word for a black man is Schwarzer, and their version of our "n-word" is Neger. Etymologically, Arnold's surname means "person from Schwarzenegg" ("Black Ridge") and is unrelated to the racial slur. Still, though, Mr. Strong's becoming Mr. Schwarzenegger obviously syncs with the idea of replacing English words with nigger.
By the way, there are two different places called Schwarzenegg: one in Austria, and one in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.
For now anyway, Hercules in New York is available on YouTube in its entirety, and it's a pretty decent contribution to the "so bad it's good" genre:
In the scene from which the still in the meme is taken, the demigod Hercules, having just arrived in New York and been befriended by "Pretzie," a nebbishy pretzel vendor, happens upon a park where some college athletes are training. Here's a sample of the top-notch dialogue:
Pretzie: Where are you going?
Hercules: Over there.
Pretzie: What for?
Hercules: To show them how to throw the discus.
Pretzie: No, no. You've gotta stay here. You can't go buttin' in there.
Hercules: They would not like me to instruct them?
Pretzie: No, it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed.
Hercules: I am Hercules.
So Herc wants to participate in sports with a group of white New Yorkers but is forbidden because there are "no outsiders allowed."
Throughout Herc's adventures in New York, the scene periodically changes to Olympus, where we see Zeus and various lesser gods observing him through -- uh, a big white crystal ball. You remember Zeus's famous crystal ball, right?
Near the end of the movie, Hercules is in trouble, having lost his divine powers and disappointed the gangsters who were counting on him to win a televised weight-lifting competition against a black dude. To save this wayward son of Zeus from the irate gangsters, the Olympians send down Atlas and, you guessed it, Samson! You remember all those Greek myths about Samson, don't you? No explanation is offered of how this Hebrew worthy came to be living on Mount Olympus after being crushed to death in the temple of Dagon; he is just mentioned matter-of-factly, as if he belonged there just as much as Mercury and Apollo and the rest.
Two other bodybuilders briefly show up and join the brawl without having any noticeable effect on Herc's fortunes. It's not clear which of them is supposed to be Samson, as they both have short hair, but in the end it is Hercules himself who ends up playing the Samson role of bringing down the pillars -- only in this case the "pillars" are just stacks of large cylindrical objects, wrapped in brown paper, in the warehouse or wherever it is they're fighting. (The characters never call it anything other than "that building.") Still, the allusion to Samson is obvious and obviously deliberate:
(Notice that the name Samson means "sun," and that the meme shows the sun between the pillars of a temple.)
These "pillars," unlike those of Samson, aren't actually load-bearing structures supporting the building, so nothing falls down other than the pillars themselves. Somehow this translates into a final victory for Herc -- I guess we are to assume that all the gangsters were crushed by the falling objects? -- because the scene immediately cuts to Herc and Pretzie, now apparently without a care in the world, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Throughout the whole movie, Zeus and the other gods have been trying to persuade Hercules to return to Olympus. While in the Empire State Building, he suddenly has a change of heart and decides to do so. Pretzie is admiring the view, turns around, and Herc has vanished.
Pretzie goes home and turns on his radio, only to hear Hercules speaking to him through the machine. ("Herc? Herc? Where are ya, Herc? What are you doing in my radio?") He starts having a conversation with his radio, asking Herc if he's ever going to come back even for a visit. Hercules leaves him with this:
Radio: Any time you wish me to be with you, all you need to do is think of me, and there I shall be, in your mind and in your heart, for as long as you want me to be, as long as you need me. Due to temporary atmospheric difficulties, we were interrupted in our broadcast. We resume . . .
Pretzie: Herc? Herc? "Any time you need me, any time you want me, just think of me, and I'll be there for as long as you want me to." Yeah. I think I'll eat an apple.
And, except for a brief epilogue set on Olympus, that's where the story ends: with Pretzie thinking he'll eat an apple. An exceedingly odd movie.
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The Emperor card of the Tarot
Arnold is a German name meaning "eagle ruler," and the first element in Schwarzenegger means "black." In most pre-Waite versions of the Tarot, the Emperor card features a black eagle -- the Reichsadler which has been the symbol of various German states. This same eagle appears on the coat of arms of modern Austria, Schwarzenegger's homeland. Emperor also syncs with New York and the Empire State Building.
In my January 2022 Tarot post "Pondering his orb," I note that Oswald Wirth (from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland) identified the Emperor card with Hercules, and specifically with Hercules holding apples (cf. the random "apple" reference at the end of Hercules in New York). The emperor is typically shown holding an orb, and I connected this with the "pondering my orb" meme, in which a bearded man stares into a crystal ball much like Zeus's in Hercules in New York. (This meme, in turn, derives from an illustration of Saruman using a Palantir.)
I also connect both the orb meme and the Tarot card with Lehi and his Liahona, and even note that "The name Lehi is associated with Samson, the 'Hebrew Hercules.'" (William Wright has proposed that the Liahona was literally a Palantir. More on that later.)
Another potentially relevant post is "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," which focuses specifically on Oswald Wirth's version of the card (Oswald Wirth, who was from Bern and who identified the Emperor with Hercules). His Emperor has a breastplate with the Sun on one breast and the Moon on the other, and I connect these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's breastplate. See also "Four rams' heads," where I discuss connections between the Emperor card and Zeus.
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Run Boy Run
On October 26, William Wright posted "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" He discusses the music video for "Run Boy Run," by Woodkid. Crossed keys are a prominent theme in this video. When crossed keys are used as a papal symbol, one key is typically silver and the other gold. Mr. Wright identifies these keys with Palantiri: the golden/solar Anor Stone (Liahona) and the silver/lunar Ithil Stone.
The connection with the Reality Temple meme is that the "Run Boy Run" video begins with a shot of the Bern Switzerland Temple while we hear a bell tolling four times. We then see a boy running out of this temple as fast as he can. The boy's running, and various monsters assisting him, is the theme of the rest of the video. Woodkid, who directed the video himself, is a French Jew with no Mormon background, so his choice of this particular building is an odd one.
This temple, dedicated on September 11, 1955, was the first Mormon temple outside the United States. It was originally called the Swiss Temple, not receiving its current name until the 1990s. Like most LDS temples, it has a statue of the Angel Moroni atop its spire, but this was not added until September 7, 2005. The Woodkid video shows the pre-2005, Moroni-less version. The Swiss Temple was the first to replace much of the traditional temple ceremony with a movie. It may be also be relevant that, like all LDS temples, it was closed to black people prior to 1978.
Running out of a temple obviously syncs with the meme about "escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple." Demiurge refers to the creator of the material universe, and the story of the Creation of the universe is central to the Mormon temple ceremony.
This site gives the following account of how the site for the Swiss Temple was selected:
Kneeling in prayer with this group he was impressed to locate the temple at Bern, Switzerland’s capital. The next morning before the travelers left for Holland, they inspected several sites and chose one in the southeastern part of the city and assigned Swiss-Austrian Mission president Samuel E. Bringhurst to acquire the property. President Bringhurst, however, discovered that this parcel had just been acquired for the city of Bern as a college site. Conferring with David O. McKay by phone, President Bringhurst was directed to identify other potential sites to be inspected by President McKay when he returned for his regularly scheduled visit to Switzerland in early July.
This syncs with Hercules in New York -- the very scene used in the meme -- in which Hercules (played by an Austrian) is told to stay out of a place because "it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed." Hercules is addressed as "boy" many times throughout the movie.
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The movie 42 and Jackie Robinson
In my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr," I discovered a connection in the works of Aleister Crowley between the numbers 42 and 333. I therefore took notice when I looked up "Run Boy Run" on Wikipedia and found that the song has a duration of 3:33 and was used in the trailer for a movie called 42.
The movie is about Jackie Robinson, the first black player to join an historically white baseball team. His number was 42, and it was retired in all MLB teams in his honor. I found the trailer mentioned on Wikipedia. The main soundtrack is the Jay-Z song "Brooklyn We Go Hard," but the beginning of the trailer does feature "Run Boy Run" (without the vocals).
Like the "Run Boy Run" video, the 42 trailer begins with a shot of a building and a tolling bell. Where "Run Boy Run" has the Bern Switzerland Temple, though, the trailer has the Empire State Building:
Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, so this choice of establishing shots -- a building in Manhattan, rather than the Brooklyn Bridge or something -- is an odd one.
As I mentioned, the main music for the trailer is not Woodkid but Jay-Z. Besides "Brooklyn We Go Hard," two of Jay-Z's other songs about New York City are "Empire State of Mind" and "A Star Is Born," both from the 2009 album The Blueprint 3. I know very little about Jay-Z and his music, but I do know that that because that album -- with its motif of three horizontal red stripes -- came up back in October 2020: "Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020." One of the things I noted back then was that the cover art for "A Star Is Born" made it look like "A Star Is Bern." I connected that with Bernie Sanders at the time, but now it's yet another link to Bern, Switzerland.
The cover art for "Empire State of Mind," unsurprisingly, shows the Empire State Building. Notice also that it features Alicia Keys -- a link to the crossed-keys motif in "Run Kid Run" and thus indirectly to Bern.
Jackie Robinson, who successfully joined a white New York baseball team which had previously excluded blacks, syncs with the running Arnold image from the meme -- which shows Hercules practicing athletics with white New Yorkers who had tried to exclude him as an "outsider." In the 42 trailer, a white man predicts that "Negroes are gonna run the white man straight out of baseball" -- using the metaphor of "running out" to say that Anglo-Saxons are going to be replaced by Negroes. The meme also shows someone "running out" after replacing all English words with a slang form of the word Negro.
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The Swiss Family Robinson
The trailer for the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 begins with music associated with the Swiss Temple in Bern -- a building which, like Major League Baseball, formerly excluded black people. Once Robinson and the Swiss Temple have been linked, this obviously brings The Swiss Family Robinson into the associative web. Its author, Johann David Wyss, was born and died in -- quelle surprise -- Bern.
The Robinson in the title is a reference to Robinson Crusoe, not the name of the family. In Wyss's original, their surname is never given, nor do we learn where in Switzerland they are from. The 1960 Disney movie makes the rather obvious choice to dub them the Robinsons and have them hail from Bern. In the novel, one of the children is usually named Jack in English translations (Jakob in the original), but the Disney movie removes this character, giving the family only three sons -- so we never quite get a Jackie Robinson.
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Psalm 19 and the Sun Tarot card
In the November 1 post "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I note connections between the meme, the 19th Psalm, and the 19th Tarot trump. The relevant passage from the psalm is this:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).
Not only does the meme show "a strong man to run a race" out of "a tabernacle for the sun"; it literally shows a man named Strong -- that being the stage name used by Schwarzenegger in the film from which the picture is taken. I read Psalm 19 in the course of my regular scripture reading, just two days after finding and posting the Reality Temple meme.
The number 19 is a link to the Sun card of the Tarot, the Rider-Waite version of which is quite similar to the meme. Each shows a shirtless person moving toward the viewer and to the right, with a manmade structure and a huge sun behind him. The face on the Sun is quite similar, as is the pattern of alternating straight and squiggly rays.
One of the main differences is that Arnold is on foot, while the child on the Tarot card rides a white horse. Although Arnold never rides a horse in Hercules in New York, there is an extended chase scene in which he drives two white horses in a chariot (because you can find anything in New York City):
The color scheme matches the Tarot card pretty closely. The chariot is red, like the flag on the card, and the yellow spokes of the chariot wheels suggest the Sun:
I think that about covers the recent syncs that tie in with this meme. Did I miss anything?
I guess I've known that in theory since I read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child (on which more below), but I'd always assumed it was only psychoactive in very large doses. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite beverages was buttermilk with a pinch or two of nutmeg, and I never noticed any psychotropic effects. About a week ago I decided to try that drink again after decades of not drinking it, and I guess this time I put in a little more nutmeg than was good for me. It wasn't much -- two cups, each with a bit more than half a teaspoon, I would guess -- but it was enough!
No, I didn't see a styracosaurus or anything, but I was in a trance state for the better part of two and a half days. It was a fairly light trance, and I was able to function more-or-less normally. In many ways it was comparable to the light trances I sometimes used to put myself in when reading or preaching, the chief perceptual symptom of which was what I used (incorrectly) to call "tunnel vision." Tunnel vision properly refers to the loss of peripheral vision, but in my childhood I used it as a name for the feeling (in certain trance states) that everything around me was immensely distant, as if it were at the other end of a long tunnel I was looking through. (This was usually induced by intense concentration, so I suppose it did have some connection to "tunnel vision" in the colloquial sense.) Another way to express it would be that it feels as if you are looking through binoculars at everything -- everything is as large and clear as it would be if it were close to you, but you know that it is not in fact close to you.
Aside from this, there was a strange idea -- an idea more than a sensation -- that there was something unusual about the surface of my body, that I was "prickly" or "covered with moss" or "bristling with triangles" (some of the phrases that came to mind at the time). I experienced no hallucinations in the strict sense, but I did have unusually vivid mental imagery, somewhat reminiscent of the abstract art of Stanslaw Kors. I was quite sleepy throughout the trance period, and when I slept I had "deep" dreams -- that kind where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater -- of which I remember very little. I remember that the dreams were entirely in Latin, often with a disembodied "running commentary" in that language, and that at one point I had a conversation with a mantis shrimp, which also spoke Latin. (I had never dreamed in Latin before, nor have I since.)
After the effects of the nutmeg had worn off, I tried to find out more about it. Apparently nutmeg is classified as a "deliriant," alongside such drugs as datura, hensbane, deadly nightshade, and -- quelle coïncidence! -- mandrake.
My experience was not at all pleasant or mind-expanding, and I do not recommend it to anyone.
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I remember that as a child I read a lot of different books -- all oldish, 19th century or so -- about people surviving on desert islands. I understand that many such books were written after Robinson Crusoe -- a whole genre called the robinsonade -- but I can't name any of them. There was Robinson Crusoe itself, The Swiss Family Robinson, and -- what else? I remember I read a lot of them. Searching the Internet for lists of robinsonades, I only turn up such works as Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, which are not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. Anyway, in one of those books I read, the protagonists encountered a bird behaving strangely, as if intoxicated, and then discovered that it had been eating nutmegs. This was my first exposure to the idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating. Before reading that book, I had read something -- it may have been Tau Zero by Poul Anderson -- that mentioned people getting drunk on eggnog, and I had inferred from that that some forms of eggnog were alcoholic. (As a Mormon, I knew only the non-alcoholic version.) After reading the robinsonade, though, I decided it must have been the nutmeg that made them drunk. Only much later, I think not until my early teens, did I learn that I had been right the first time and that eggnog is typically an alcoholic drink.
After my own experience of nutmeg intoxication, I wanted to track down the robinsonade episode, so I tried to remember as many other details about the book as possible. All I could get was that there were agoutis and bustards, and that the plural forms nutmegs and lichens -- slightly odd in modern English -- were used. Searching for agouti bustard nutmegs island turned up only one book: The Swiss Family Robinson. This surprised me a bit -- I had remembered that it was not Swiss Family but one of the other nameless similar books. Searching the Gutenberg version for nutmegs, I found this:
In a short time nest-building commenced, and among the materials collected by the birds, I observed a long gray moss or lichen, and thought it might very possibly be the same which, in the West Indies, is gathered from the bark of old trees, where it grows, and hangs in great tuft-like beards, to be used instead of horse-hair for stuffing mattresses.
My wife no sooner heard of it than her active brain devised fifty plans for making it of use. Would we but collect enough, she would clean and sort it, and there would be no end to the bolsters, pillows, saddles, and cushions she would stuff with it.
For the discovery of nutmegs we had also to thank the pigeons, and they were carefully planted in our orchard.
In a way, this is obviously my source -- nutmegs, plural, are discovered via birds, and lichen is nearby -- but lichen is singular, and there is no indication that the birds were intoxicated by the nutmegs. But it seems highly unlikely that any other novel would borrow the very specific plot point of birds helping the protagonists discover "nutmegs," and I don't see how I could have misremembered it. The idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating was a new idea for me, learned from the book, not something I could have read into a book that does not mention it.
(Incidentally, was my nutmeg-induced idea that I was "covered with moss" somehow influenced by this passage as well?)
According to Wikipedia, "Over the years, there have been many versions of the story with episodes added, changed, or deleted," to the extent that "Wyss's original narrative has long since been obscured" -- so were all those books I read just different versions of The Swiss Family Robinson? And was the version on Gutenberg bowdlerized so as not to suggest to impressionable young readers the idea of trying to get high on household spices? Now I'm going to have to spend some time trying to track down the version I read as a child, the one with the nutmeg-intoxicated bird.
