Peering deep into the hat

I watched a few minutes of a video YouTube recommended, “Showing the Mormon Church NO MERCY w/ John Dehlin & Carah Burrell,” but pretty quickly got bored with their midwit takes. The video begins with a clip of what they apparently thought was one of the highlights, Carah saying this:

Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice or this treasure digging? The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys don’t believe that that’s an actual believable practice of how to find things within the earth, to put rocks into hats and say, Yep, God’s making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time. You know that that’s not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on earth, through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in.

To drive her point home, she took out an actual hat and demonstrated how silly people look when they’re staring into hats. I don’t think she actually had a rock in there, though. The hat was empty.

I then turned to the final chapter of John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower. He compares scientists to audience members trying to figure out how a conjurer pulled a rabbit out of his hat:

A rabbit cannot spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not first introduced into the hat somehow. They could not grasp the ancient truth that even though the hat always seems empty, it is always full. The rabbit does not come from the sorcerer’s sleeve but only crosses from one delusion to another.

Dr. [Maurice] Bucke peered deep into the empty hat and found only a rose-colored mist that had to be God.

Peering deep into a hat is a pretty unusual thing to do. Joseph Smith literally did so and saw the word of God. Immediately after hearing a reference to that, I read it, as a metaphor this time, but still with reference to divine revelation and the production of a spiritual book. (The “rose-colored mist” reference is to the mystical experience that led Bucke to write Cosmic Consciousness.)

Muhammad sync

Today I finished the New Testament and started reading the Quran, which I've only read once, more than 15 years ago. Other than the Quran itself, I don't think I've ever read any books about Muhammad or Islam, unless you count The Satanic Verses. Islam-related stuff isn't exactly a staple of my literary diet.

Yesterday I'd nearly finished John Keel's The Eighth Tower, having read 23 of its 25 chapters. Today, just minutes after reading the first few suwar of the Quran, I started Chapter 24. It begins with a history of computers, but about halfway through it suddenly has a lot to say about Mecca and the Kaaba and Mohammed (it was still Mohammed back in 1975) and the rise of Islam. The last words of the chapter are "we will defend our Kaaba to the death."

There is not a single solitary reference to anything Islam-related in the first 23 chapters of The Eighth Tower. The day I pick up the Quran for the second time in my life also happens to be the day I read Chapter 24.

Scary “Momo” first seen, by children, in July (allegedly)

The day before yesterday, May 11, I taught an English class, and a reading comprehension exercise in the textbook had an article about the “Momo Challenge” phenomenon. This was a scary-looking character that would reportedly pop up unexpectedly in children’s videos on YouTube and tell the children to hurt themselves. YouTube insisted that there was no proof that such videos existed, and the received opinion now is that the whole thing was a hoax.

Momo is an extremely typical cutesy Chinese name — I can think of several companies and characters in Taiwan that use it — and the textbook is Taiwanese, so I had assumed the Momo Challenge was a Chinese-language phenomenon. Having looked it up, though, I see that it was global in scale and that reports of the videos began in July 2018.

Today, May 13, I read in John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower about Momo, short for Missouri Monster, a menacing Bigfoot-like creature repeatedly sighted in that state in the 1970s. According to Keel, “Momo was first seen on July 11, 1972, by the three Harrison children.” Of course, the received opinion is that, sightings schmitings, monsters don’t exist.

This is a pretty impressive coincidence, I think. Although the two incidents are completely different in nature, in each case the creature

• is called Momo
• has a frightening appearance
• was first seen in July
• was first seen by children
• is widely dismissed as a hoax or urban legend

And, while the incidents themselves occurred 46 years apart, I happened to encounter one almost exactly 46 hours after the other.

Update (4:15 p.m., same day):

Trying to think what relevance Momo might have for me personally, I thought of how the syllable mo represents Mormon in various slang terms in common use on the Internet -- exmo, progmo, nevermo, mopologist, etc.

This made me think of how Ed Decker, the notoriously sensationalistic anti-Mormon, used to claim that Mormons worshiped a dark spirit called Mormo. Looking that word up, I found that mormo (plural mormones) refers to female spirit in Greek folklore, used as a bugbear to frighten children into behaving. The longer form mormolyce is also attested, suggesting that mormones were imagined as werewolf-like creatures. Since one of the things the two Momos in the sync have in common is that they frighten children, this seems relevant.

But, pace Ed Decker, none of that has anything to do with Mormons, right? Actually, there may be a connection. Mormons are so called after the Book of Mormon, which is named after the ancient prophet Mormon, who was named after a place. And how did the place get its name?

And it came to pass that as many as did believe him did go forth to a place which was called Mormon, having received its name from the king, being in the borders of the land having been infested, by times or at seasons, by wild beasts (Mosiah 18:4).

Doesn't this suggest that the name Mormon had something to do with the "wild beasts" that from time to time infested the place?

On a more personal note, "a bugbear to frighten children" may remind my longtime readers of one of this blog's predecessors, which, before being renamed Boisterous beholding, was called Bugs to fearen babes withall and had as a header image an anatomical diagram of a cicada. This is a line from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, where bug is used in the sense of "bugbear," but I had deliberately misread it in the modern entomological sense. (The cicada is considered a "true bug.") The reference was to certain big-eyed nocturnal visitants who terrorized me as a very young child and whom I thought of sometimes as "monkeys" and sometimes as "bugs."

Cicadas in a Mormon context have recently appeared on this blog. In my March 18 post "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement," I reference the fringe Mormon Goker Harim, who claims to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared from the markings on the back of a cicada. This was jokingly referenced by William Wright just a few days ago in his post "02/22."

Rainbows and the number eight

With seven each of creatures clean;

Of unclean, two -- yet I have seen

How mercy doth prevail in Heaven:

Though man's an unclean creature, seven

The Lord permitted to embark

Along with me into the ark.

My sons, my wife, my sons' three wives --

He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

Early this morning I was reading in a coffee shop, as is my wont. I read the two Epistles of Peter and then turned to The Eighth Tower by John Keel.

Both Epistles mention Noah as one of eight survivors of the Flood: "the ark . . . wherein few, that is eight, souls were saved" (1 Pet. 3:20), and "saved Noah the eighth person" (2 Pet. 2:5). The story of the Flood is, among other things, a just-so story about the origin of the rainbow.

The Eighth Tower has that word eighth in its title, and the cover illustration shows the seven traditional colors of the rainbow plus an eighth color, black:

The author's name as given on the cover -- John A. Keel -- contains an anagram of Noah. (John A. is also an anagram of that other nautical prophet, Jonah.) A keel is part of a ship.

In the book, Keel provides a diagram of part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- including eight "colors" -- and then discusses how UFOs often appear first as red or violet and then move through the spectrum:

Just as I was reading this, the background music in the coffee shop was a song called "Inside a Rainbow":

Minor sync: The possible Jewishness of John Keel

I just finished Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel. I had downloaded it, along with another book by him called The Eighth Tower, some months ago when someone one /x/ recommended them. Just after finishing Operation Trojan Horse but before opening The Eighth Tower, I visited Keel's Wikipedia page to see what other books he had written. Wikipedia mentioned that his surname had been spelled Kiehle at birth, which together with certain other biographical details -- journalist, raised an atheist -- made me wonder idly whether he might be Jewish.

Wikipedia had no information on this one way or the other, nor did a Google search for is john keel jewish turn up anything, so I gave up trying to find out and instead opened my epub of The Eighth Tower for the first time. The very first sentence in the book is:

"What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?"

Reading on, one finds that the question has no reference to Keel himself; it is spoken to Jesus by one of the crucified thieves.  Still a bit of a coincidence.

The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

I was close enough to the dreaming state to experience auditory hallucinations like that but still sufficiently awake for a conscious and somewhat coherent train of thought. I thought about how a commenter on the Prika-vlein post had suggested that a word like pika just naturally sounds like it should mean something small, citing the metric prefix pico- (one-trillionth). Yes, I thought, but nano- doesn't sound phonaesthetically small. I remembered that as a child, before I knew the scientific meaning of nano-, I had invented an imaginary creature called a nanosnake. This was a dinosaur-scale beast with the general body shape of a very long-necked plesiosaur, but with no flippers or other limbs. It had a beak like a parrot and a pair of small wings on the back of its head, which it used to keep its head held high for long periods without its neck tiring.

At this point I lapsed into a full dreaming state, and my reminiscences about the nanosnake gave way to the sudden panicked thought that perhaps I had accidentally swallowed a nanosnake -- meaning, this time, a microscopically small snake. This felt like an extremely urgent problem, and I was panicking, unable to think clearly. An immaterial woman was nearby, trying to help me by shouting advice. "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" she kept saying, the way you might say, "Stop, drop, and roll" to someone who was on fire.

She was telling me to do a mudra -- one of a number of named hand gestures that carry symbolic meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism -- but that just made me panic even more. There are lots of different mudras, and my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to what little I can still remember from that Central Asian Art class I took back in college to meet a diversity requirement. I had no idea which one I was supposed to do. I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem. I still had no idea if it was what I was supposed to be doing, though.

Apparently not, as the ghostly woman kept right on shouting, "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" Finally, as if in exasperation at my thick-headedness, she spelled it out: "Menelmacar mudra!"

As soon as she had said that, I woke up.

Menelmacar, I know thanks to recent posts by William Wright, is one of the Elvish names for the constellation Orion. (The only Elvish name for Orion I had known previously was Telumehtar.) A few days ago he posted "Orion and his most excellent pose," about the position of Orion's arms -- a mudra in a broad sense -- and how the same gesture appears in a Lionel Richie music video and in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

So this is the Menelmacar mudra, I guess. Remember it in case you ever accidentally swallow a nanosnake.

⁂

One of the reasons my half-awake mind had jumped from pico- to nano- was that shortly before going to bed, I had listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat," which is from the album Nanobots.

The song is full of off-the-wall metaphors for inversions of the usual order of things: "The words assassinated the book / The kitchen cooked and ate the cook," etc.  This reminded me of William Wright's first post to feature the Menelmacar mudra, "Dancing on the ceiling," in which he quotes a Book of Mormon variant of Isaiah:

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

I had just been reading in John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse about the Fatima apparitions of 1917:

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

The children understood their mysterious visitor, who finally identified herself somewhat cagily as "the Lady of the Rosary," to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. In Maria Carreira's perception, though, the Queen was overruled by the bees. This association of bees with the Queen of Heaven made me think of the Sugarcubes song "The Bee":

The key lines are these:

Oh, hot bee

Queen of heaven

With glossy trunk

Buzz to me

I don't know what "glossy trunk" was intended to mean -- I guess a bee's thorax is its "trunk," or torso? -- but it sounds more like a description of a tree than of a bee. Specifically, it would be a reference to the texture or appearance of a tree's bark, so that's another tie-in with "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat."

The odd phrase "Oh, hot bee" is another link to the bee-buzzing Lady of Fatima. In the grand culminating apparition on October 13, 1917, Keel reports that "A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly."

⁂

I had started reading this Fatima stuff last night, after reading William's post "Twos-day: San Ramon, another Walt, and flying into the Sun." In that post, he mentions seeing the date 02/22 and realizing that the number 22 (which had been appearing in syncs) could be a date, and that his own birthday was such as date: July 22. I left a comment saying that in the past I had thought of Monday the 22nd as a day of good omen, the reverse of Friday the 13th, and that my first spiritual experience had taken place on Monday, July 22, 1996.

It was just after reading that post and leaving the comment that I picked up Operation Trojan Horse and read this, in the lead-up to the account of the Fatima events:

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

There is no apparent reason for giving this girl's exact date of birth. In a book that mentions hundreds of different individuals, a word search for the word born confirms that no other person's exact date of birth is given. For some reason, Keel made a point of mentioning that Lucia Abobora, later of Fatima fame, was born on the 22nd.

This morning, reading on in Keel, I found a much more specific sync. Recall that in my comment on William's blog I had mentioned one particular date: Monday, July 22, 1996, and gave it as the date of a spiritual experience. The year 1996 was a leap year beginning on a Monday; these occur every 28 years. The last one before 1996 was 1968. The next one after 1996 is the present year, 2024. Today I read this in Keel:

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

That's Monday, July 22, in year with a calendar identical to that of 1996 (and 2024). And seeing the Blessed Virgin obviously qualifies as a spiritual experience.

Tennessee Walts, plus that dog-stealing alien in New Jersey again

William Wright's May 4 post "Liberty Bell Follow-Up: The Liberty Bowl" begins with a reference to his "post earlier today on the Walts" -- meaning two different people named Walt: Walt Whitman and a TV character called Walter White. Walts sounds like waltz, and although there are obviously lots of different waltzes out there, the one that immediately came to mind when I read Walts was the 1950 Patti Page song "Tennessee Waltz." It started playing in my head as I read the rest of the post.

The post goes on to say that while William was finishing up his post on "the Walts," he glanced up at the TV and saw that it was showing a football game being played in Memphis, Tennessee.

William's two Walts -- both of whom have "white" surnames -- reminded me that a few years back I posted about another Walt in connection with the color black. My Leap Day 2020 post "A lost alchemical poem of Raleigh's" is about a dream I had in which I was reading a book called Ralegh the Alchemiste which quoted a line from Walter Raleigh -- "My Bodie will blacken and turne into Coale" -- and interpreted it as a reference to the alchemical process of nigredo, or blackening.

I then went on to note that, in the real world, that line is not Raleigh's but comes from a folk song sung by, among other people, Tennessee Ernie Ford. So yet another Tennessee-Walt connection.

Curious as to whether this was going to lead anywhere, I searched my own blog for tennessee. I didn't find any more Walts, but I did find a surprising coincidence in my August 2020 post "Synchronicity: Crop circle in Charlton." At the end of the post, I quote from Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia. Vallée tells the story of one Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, who reported that a UFO had attempted to steal his dog on November 6, 1957, and then notes the "extraordinary coincidence" that "on the same day another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey." A footnote adds, "By yet another coincidence, the name of the town in the second case is similar to the name of the witness (Everett) in the first one."

If that sounds at all familiar, it's because I just quoted John Keel's account of the Everittstown dog-stealing incident two days ago, in "Hometo Omleto." I had no memory of having posted another reference to the same incident back in 2020, and I would have been none the wiser had the Tennessee Walt syncs not led me to search for tennessee. Both Keel and Vallée refer to lots of different UFO stories in their respective books, but the sync fairies singled out the same one twice.

Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

⁂

Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

⁂

Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

⁂

Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

⁂

Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

⁂

After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

⁂

Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A new FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

⁂

In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

⁂

What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.