Last Tuesday, March 19, I happened to hear on the radio somewhere the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky." (Looking the song up on Wikipedia just now to get the correct date, I find that the duration of the song is 3:24 -- and here I am posting this on 3/24.) I've never had the slightest scintilla of interest in Spears or her music, but it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's a pretty catchy melody, I guess, by that one Swedish guy who was writing all the American hits at that time. Here's the music video -- full of the bog-standard subtly-in-your-face stuff that Monarch Mind Control types like to analyze (did you notice the inverted pentagrams on her wallpaper?), but otherwise pretty uninteresting:
The weird thing is that what's been stuck in my head is not the original but rather a version that has rocky in place of lucky, as if making fun of a stereotypical Japanese accent. I have this free-floating memory -- likely an anecdote from my brother Joseph's time in Japan -- of a Japanese person reading a children's story with the recurring line "'I'm so lucky,' says Ladybug" but mispronouncing the two key words as rocky and Radybug. For whatever inscrutable reason, my subconscious mind decided to splice that comical error into the Britney Spears song.
It's getting kind of annoying, actually. Time and again, here I am minding my own business only to catch myself singing under my breath, "She's so rocky, she's a star / But she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart." (For some reason, the word lonely slipped through the Japanese-accent filter unscathed.)
Stars, sensu stricto, are not rocky. In the word's broader sense, though, embracing all heavenly bodies, we could call Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars "rocky stars." This rocky star is a "she," though, which rules out the masculine Mercury and Mars. Venus doesn't look "so rocky," with its thick cloud cover, so that leaves the Moon as the strongest candidate.
"She cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart . . . why do these tears come at night?" This made me think of my May 2019 post "Lacrimae lunae" ("tears of the moon"). This had featured John Opsopaus's version of the Moon card of the Tarot, in which "glowing tear drops . . . fall . . . from the recumbent crescent" of the Moon:
In the 2019 post, Opsopaus's card was paired with this image from a phonics textbook. The sync was that one of my students had colored half of the water drops in the picture red, as in the card:
The picture above shows twin girls in red tops. The music video repeatedly shows Spears as "Lucky" -- the white-gowned sacrificial starlet -- sharing the screen with her alter ego, Britney the wholesome girl-next-door, who wears a red top. Although we never see two red-topped Britneys in the same frame, there are clearly two of them. In the sequence below, we see Lucky striding through a room, with Britney on her right in the foreground, immediately after which she walks past another Britney seated on a sofa on her left in the background:
We also see a waxing crescent moon in the video, the same phase shown on the Tarot card:
There is also a rectangular skyscraper to either side of the Moon, suggesting the two towers of the Tarot card.
The persistent Japanizu of rocky made me wonder whether "she's a" could actually be a Japanese word, maybe shiza or shisa. A search confirms that shisa is the Okinawan version of the Chinese guardian lions which appear in pairs outside temples and such. While the Chinese originals are just lions, their Okinawan counterparts are considered to be "a cross between a lion and a dog." (Notice that Google suggests "half dog" as a related search term. I'm cereal.)
This is an extremely strong sync with the Moon card of the Tarot. Traditional versions of the card show two dogs, one on either side of the Moon, likely representing the constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor.
In December 2020, the Grateful Dead released a new music video for their 1970 song "Ripple." It was full of modified imagery from the Tarot, including this take on the Moon card:
That's right, the two dogs have been replaced with a pair of Chinese guardian lions. That's why I say that shisa -- half dog, half guardian lion -- is such an extremely strong sync.
I read a bit in Karen Russell's novel Swamplandia! today. The narrator, Ava Bigtree (a White girl whose family has adopted an Indian surname and dresses as Indians as part of their alligator-wrestling act) is traveling in the Everglades with an eccentric known only as the Bird Man. When they unexpectedly encounter a park ranger, the Bird Man seems to transform:
[T]he Bird Man put on a big grin that made his face unrecognizable to me. It rejiggered his features so that they were at their most ordinary; even his eyes seemed pale and normal. Who had I been traveling with this great while? How could you change so completely when another person showed up, like a chameleon shifting trees? I was impressed (pp. 252-53).
Any reference to chameleons catches my eye these days, and this was a somewhat odd one -- not "changing colors" but "shifting trees." I guess the idea is that moving to different surroundings -- shifting trees -- might prompt a chameleon to change to a different color to maintain its camouflage. But this would only make sense if the two trees were different colors. This theme of two trees with contrasting colors has come up recently. In "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," I include a picture of John Opsopaus's Star card and quote him on the significance of the two cypress trees on the card:
[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.
The white cypress with its bird is the Tree of Life. The name Ava has various origins, but as a modern name it is generally held to be a variant of Eva, meaning "life." So Ava Bigtree is White, her name suggests the Tree of Life, and she is accompanied by the Bird Man and (though it is not mentioned in the excerpt quoted above) by her pet, a young alligator which was born bright red. On Opsopaus's card, the serpent in the dark cypress is red, and the bird has the head of a lion. In recent syncs, the chameleon has been red and has been associated with the lion-headed serpent and with lion-headed creatures with wings. (See "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge" and "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires.") In another recent post, "Chameleons everywhere," we see a bird and a chameleon together in a tree, on the cover of a book called Lemurs, Chameleons, and Golden Plates.
In "Leaves of gold unnumbered," the golden plates were associated with leaves of gold in two poems by Tolkien. One of these two poems was quoted again in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose," in connection with another pair of differently-colored trees: the Two Trees (gold and silver/white) of Valinor and their scions in Gondolin. I put particular emphasis on the line in the poem which says the golden leaves "are falling in the stream, the river flows away."
In Swamplandia!, a few pages after the "chameleon shifting trees" reference, Ava Bigtree uses very similar imagery in describing how her memories of her deceased mother seem to be slipping away:
Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together (p. 256).
Opsopaus has a white tree and a dark one; Tolkien has a white tree and a golden one. Can this discrepancy be bridged? In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, I found a small fire smoldering the hollow of a tree. I stoked this fire, with the result that another tree became engulfed in white flames but was not consumed. The first burning tree could be considered both "dark" (because the fire was a small one, mostly just smoldering, with few flames) and "golden" (because such flames as it did have were the ordinary yellow-orange color of a wood fire). When the fire "shifted trees," it -- like a chameleon -- also changed color, becoming white.
So now the chameleon has been symbolically identified with fire -- an idea already latent in the existing "red chameleon" theme -- and specifically with a white fire. From this idea of a fiery lizard, it is no great jump to the idea of a salamander, and specifically a white salamander, though one also associated with "leaves of gold." I just posted, for reasons unrelated to any of these themes, "Hofmann's haiku: The Broo Jerroo." This is a haiku that seems at first to be about chameleonic gelatin ("The blue Jell-O / It is yellow"), and its author is the master forger Mark Hofmann, whose most notorious forgery is a letter in which Joseph Smith's leaves of gold are guarded not by the familiar Angel Moroni but by a folk-magicky trickster spirit in the form of a white salamander:
the next morning the spirit transfigured himself from a white salamander in the bottom of the hole & struck me 3 times & held the treasure [i.e., the golden plates] & would not let me have it . . . the spirit says I tricked you again
In "Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones," I write parenthetically "Half man, half chameleon, and half cat -- I'm cereal," linking to the classic South Park episode in which Al Gore, in a parody of his global warming shtick, tries to raise awareness of the deadly threat that is ManBearPig -- "half man, half bear, and half pig" -- and keeps repeating "I'm cereal" instead of "I'm serious."
In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, literal cereal came up. I needed a blanket to put out the tree's white fire, and I thought I could get one by finding a suitable word on the side of a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Then, hours after the dream, a conspiracy channel I subscribe to on YouTube, which had never ventured into the field of breakfast cereals before, posted a video about what's written on the side of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Flat yellow Corn Flakes are synchronistically adjacent to leaves or plates of gold. Frosted Flakes differ from Corn Flakes in that they are frosted with white sugar, so we have the gold/white duality again. The mascots of these two cereals -- a bird and a large feline -- suggest some of the animals that have come up in connection with the chameleon. The other cereal that has come up on this blog recently (see "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name") is Hidden Treasures. This is also a golden plates-adjacent name, and in my quote from Hofmann's salamander letter, the plates are referred to as "the treasure."
I dreamed that I went back to my family's old home in Ohio (which in real life no longer exists, the land having been sold to Hell Hollow Wilderness Area when my parents moved to Virginia), realizing that I'd completely forgotten to visit it regularly to feed the pets.
When I arrived, I found that the house was now occupied by a married couple whom I could not see or here but of whose presence I was aware and with whom I could communicate telepathically. I thought of them as "G and his wife," with no particular idea of what the G stood for, and I didn't find their invisibility to be anything strange. I certainly didn't think of them as "ghosts" or anything. I took it for granted that they were fully physical flesh-and-blood human beings but that they existed on a wavelength that made them inaccessible to my ordinary senses.
G's wife led me down into the basement (which was enormous) and to what I guess could be described as a walk-in fireplace. It was a very large circular room with a high domed ceiling, full of smoldering logs and coals, and I understood that its purpose was to heat the house. She asked me to use a poker to break all the half-burnt logs into smaller pieces, and I said (telepathically), "To stoke the fire. I understand." I thought the purpose was to expose more unburnt wood to the oxygen and get the fire burning stronger.
In this assumption I was wrong. As I "stoked" the fire, the logs crumbled to coals, which quickly became ashes, and then the ashes became a thick gray mud. This, it turns out, was exactly what G wanted. He and another person, who I think was called Diego (at any rate it was definitely a Spanish name), appeared and announced that this was now their dojo. "Diego and I like to spend all day every day fighting here!" G announced. (All these people were still invisible and inaudible; I could "see" and "hear" them only in a metaphorical way.) G and Diego were each connected to the center of the domed ceiling with something like the silk dragline used by a falling spider. They would swing around on these lines, meet in the mud, and tussle.
At the end of a fight, what looked like some sort of corporate logo appeared in the air near the top of the ceiling. My first impression was that it was the Chupa Chups logo, but then I saw that it was actually G's wife's name. (I apprehended this fact directly, without being aware of what her name actually was.) Then the logo rotated clockwise several degrees, which had the effect of making the n at the end of the name look like a b, transforming the name to Cheb. (This implies that her name was Chen, but I had no sense of this fact during the dream and was somewhat surprised to discover it upon waking.) The logo then disappeared.
I recognized Cheb as the name of one of the ancient Spider Lords in Colin Wilson's novels, and I thought that this whole thing -- the fight on draglines and the transforming name -- was a reference to a theory G entertained that his wife was actually the reincarnation of a very important spider.
I was less concerned about the meaning of the logo than about the fact of its appearance. A logo appearing in midair at the end of a performance was something that happened on TV, not in real life. "G," I said, "how did that happen? Did you make it happen, or are we in a movie?"
"Well," he said, "let's say it's a preview for a movie."
Later, I was out walking in the hemlock-beech woods that surrounded the house. I found a beech tree that had a little hollow at a fork in its trunk, and there was a small fire smoldering in the hollow. I thought I'd better "stoke" that fire, too, and I did this in the literal sense of adding fuel. The risk of starting a forest fire did cross my mind, but I dismissed it, figuring that G and his wife knew what they were doing keeping a fire burning there.
A few minutes later, I turned back and saw that the tree next to the one I had "stoked" was now on fire -- sort of. The flames were white in color, they didn't seem to be consuming the tree, and only that one tree was affected. The flaming tree gave the impression of a Persian cypress, which would be quite out of place in those woods, but I think it was the flames that made it appear to have that shape.
Some other invisible people were nearby, and I alerted them to the flaming tree. They expressed disappointment that no one had thought to bring a large blanket with which to beat out the flames. After a few failed attempts to beat out the flames with my jacket -- most of the blaze was too high for me to reach -- I ran back to the house to get a blanket.
In order to get a blanket, I would have to find a suitable word with which to conjure one up. In the house I found a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the classic green rooster logo, and began hurriedly scanning the side of the box for a suitable word. I found a possible candidate in the word croied, which I mentally pronounced to rhyme with void. "That might work," I thought. "Haven't I heard of croied sheets before, or croied bedding?" Wanting to be sure, I took down a dictionary (shelved together with the corn flakes for some reason) and looked up croi. I found nothing, but then I remembered that the base word is spelled croix, with the silent x being removed when a suffix is added. (Croix is French for "cross," but I was still mentally pronouncing it as "kroy," not "krwah") Looking up croix, I found a long list of definitions, including one that said "the absolute penis," but couldn't find anything bedding-related.
"Wait," I thought, "did that say 'the absolute penis'? That's pretty weird." I looked back through the list of definitions to find it again, but I found that all the definitions were now written in Chinese, and that I had lost the ability to read Chinese. I was still trying to decipher these Chinese definitions -- all I could figure out was that one of the characters was likely pronounced huang, though I wasn't sure which of the many characters with that pronunciation it might be -- I woke up.
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I've learned from William Wright that the point-of-view character in a dream doesn't always represent the dreamer himself, but that we sometimes dream from the point of view of another. In this case, I think it highly likely that I was represented in this dream by G, not by the character I experienced as being "me." I was actually known as G when I worked at Burger King as a teenager. For some reason, many of the employees there were known by celebrity surnames associated with their given names -- a concept roughly comparable to Cockney rhyming slang, I guess. For example, there was a guy named Jimmy who was always referred to as Page, and I, the guy named Bill, was called Gates, which was later shortened to G. This became sufficiently "official" that my name tag had nothing but the letter G on it. It is suggested in the dream that G's wife is called Chen, which is my own wife's maiden name. My wife also used to use the English name Charlotte -- inspired by, you guessed it, the arachnid heroine of Charlotte's Web.
(Unfortunately, the whole time I was known as Gates, no one once said "Groovy greets" to me.)
So who is Diego? And who is the point-of-view character? No idea so far.
The tree, burning with white flames but not consumed, suggests both the Burning Bush of Moses and the glowing white Tree of Life in the dreams of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr. Given these connotations, the fact that the point-of-view wants to put the tree out by beating it with a blanket suggests that he's not a good guy.
A white cypress in particular reminded me of something, and after a while I figured out what it was: A tree of that description appears on John Opsopaus's (hand-drawn by a non-artist; cut him some slack) version of the Star card of the Tarot:
[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.
The bird, incidentally, is the lion-headed Anzû, which has appeared on this blog once before.
The morning after the dream, I taught an adult English class. One of the students asked me out of the blue, "What's the difference between a cedar and a cypress?" I provided the Chinese translations and just said they were two different kinds of trees. "Are Christmas trees usually cypresses?" she asked. I said I'd never heard of them being used that way, and that Christmas trees are usually firs, spruces, or pines. Strange questions to ask, but they tie in with the idea of a white cypress as the Tree of Life. In my December 8 post "The White Tree of Life . . . Saver," I mention the all-white artificial Christmas tree we use at my school and connect it with the Tree of Life.
One of the other students in that class had brought a tote bag with something about the Tree of Liberty written on it. I was only able to see part of it. The first line said "THE TREE OF LIBERTY" and the second line said "FAR AWAY IN THE," with the final word not visible. I'd never heard of the Tree of Liberty outside of the Jefferson quote about watering it from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Note added: I forgot to include this in the original post. After my dream but before my morning class, I saw that some secondhand English children's books had been delivered to my school. I picked up one at random, with the nondescript title People and Places, and opened it up to the table of contents, where I saw this:
The picture, apparently showing some kind of controlled burn in Australia, synched in a broad way with themes from the dream, enough to make me turn to the pages on Australia, where I found this:
I have no idea how the aborigines make that gray-white body paint, but it certainly looks like it could be made from ashes mixed with water.
Update 2 (11:00 p.m.): I checked my YouTube subscriptions and found this just-uploaded video which begins by zooming in on the words printed on the side of a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. I haven’t watched the rest of it yet, but already that’s a pretty specific sync:
One of the cups on the Magician's table in the Tarot de Marseille -- the one marked A below -- was originally a dice shaker, probably a leather one.
This emerged suddenly as an unarguable intuition after many hours spent picking over the details of the Magician's table in early Tarot decks. I don't expect my own intuitions to carry much weight with anyone else, though, so here is a bit of circumstantial evidence to back me up:
The cup has a strange square shape -- vertical sides, horizontal bottom -- unlike a normal cup. In the Viéville deck it is unambiguously rectangular in shape, including the mouth. Compare the strangely shaped "cup" in Viéville to the backgammon dice cups and the medieval British dice shaker below.
Leather is brown, a color not included in the standard 8-color palette of the Tarot de Marseille (an exception is the François Héri deck of 1718, which uses it only for the Hermit's habit). What color would be used for leather, then? Well, belts and shoes are normally made of leather, so that should give us a clue. Looking at the 12 decks in Historic Tarots gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website, 8 out of 12 use the same color (yellow) for the Magician's belt, shoes, and cup; and each of these individual elements is yellow in 10 out of 12 decks.
Incidentally, this syncs up with the Pythagorean Tarot of John Opsopaus, which, without any pretense of restoring the original TdM, patterns the Magician after the December illustration in the Chronograph of 354 and puts a rectangular purgos, or ancient Greek dice-shaker, on the table. (The picture below is from the original card drawn by Opsopaus himself; the published version, done by another artist, has a round purgos.)
In his article "Tarot Divination Without Tarot Cards" (qv), John Opsopaus proposes a system of correspondences between the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana and the 56 possible rolls of three dice. This is analogous to his systems for mapping the 21 trumps to the 21 possible throws of two dice -- but is necessarily more complicated because the Minor Arcana are structured in a way that the trumps are not. While the trumps are numbered in a linear fashion, the Minor Arcana are grouped into four suits, each of which has 10 numbered (or "pip") cards and four face (or "court") cards.
Just as 21 is a triangular number, 56 is a tetrahedral one. Since 10 is also a tetrahedral number, the pips of each suit can be assigned to the smaller tetrahedron at one of the corners of the larger one. Once this is done, there remain 16 points at the center, arranged in the shape of a truncated tetrahedron, and these can be assigned to the courts.
The diagram below (which is my own work but is based closely on Opsopaus) shows how the 6th tetrahedral number can be divided into four smaller tetrahedra (red, yellow, green, blue) and a truncated tetrahedron (purple). Purple points represent court cards, and the other four colors represent the four suits of pips.
This is a great way of dealing with the pips, but the problem is that the courts are also divided into four suits, and there seems to be no natural way of quartering our central truncated tetrahedron.
One way of dealing with the courts is to associate each of the court ranks with one of the suits -- which has traditionally been done by way of mapping both the court ranks and the suits to the four classical elements. One popular system is Kings/Clubs/Fire, Queens/Cups/Water, Knights/Swords/Air, Knaves/Coins/Earth.
Notice that our truncated tetrahedron is made up of four hexagons, each of which faces one of the four pip-tetrahedra. For example, in the diagram above, the top surface of the truncated tetrahedron is a hexagon, comprising the rolls {334, 344, 335, 345, 355, 346, 356}, and facing the red tetrahedron. If we assign the red tetrahedron to the suit of Clubs, say, which is associated with the court rank of Kings, then the seven rolls on the red-facing hexagon will correspond to the seven court cards which are Clubs and/or Kings. The roll 345, which is in the center and which thus belongs exclusively to the red-facing hexagon, corresponds to the King of Clubs. Each of the remaining six rolls is shared with one of the other hexagons. For example, the rolls 355 and 356 belong to both the red-facing and the blue-facing hexagons. If we assign blue to Cups, corresponding to Queens, then one of these rolls will be the King of Cups, and the other will be the Queen of Clubs; we can perhaps assign the higher toll, 356, to the former on the grounds that a King should outrank a Queen.
These examples are just examples. I have not yet thought out which tetrahedron should correspond to which suit or any of the other details. Nevertheless, Opsopaus's basic schema seems to have a lot going for it.
Today I read the following paragraph in John Opsopaus's commentary on the World card in his Guide to the Pythagorean Tarot.
Ecstatic dancing, which follows no choreography, allows the Dancer to pass from mortal time into transcendental time, but the dance of the World is not the chaotic gyrations of Dionysos . . . or the frenzy of the Maenads, but a rhythm evolving spontaneously in time. The steps follow each other in a regular pattern, but where the dance, or the Dancer, will go, we cannot say. The sun will rise tomorrow and the next day will dawn, but we cannot say what sort of world it will rise upon in ten thousand days (p. 262).
About two weeks prior to this, Bruce Charlton had left this comment on one of my posts.
I had a minor synchronicity today... striking but separated by a few days. In a dinner table discussion a participant mentioned that he was about to be 10,000 days old - I had never heard anyone mention this unit of time before (it amounts to 27 and a bit years). Today - reading Howl's Moving Castle (by Diana Wynne Jones) - there was a plot point about the character becoming 10,000 days old.
This, then, is an even-more-minor synchronicity, separated by two weeks but still striking. ("Ten thousand days" is quite a rare expression, since time periods of that length are normally reckoned in years.)
As an ancillary coincidence, the post to which Bruce's comment was appended was about Robert Frost's poem that begins "Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice" and also mentioned "a gypsy fortune-teller, sitting at a table with a crystal ball and some cards spread out in front of her." The Opsopaus passage also syncs with John 3:8, discussed in another recent post: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
As I've mentioned before, I've been rereading John Opsopaus's Guide to the Pythagorean Tarot these days. Yesterday I started the chapter on the Moon card. It begins with a description of Opsopaus's version of that trump, including this:
We are looking from the edge of a dark sea towards its shore, which is lit by the narrowest crescent of a young, pale yellow moon shining in the dark blue sky. Glowing tear drops (fifteen white, fifteen reddish) fall in three streams (five reddish and five white each) from the recumbent crescent, which is open to the upper left; its dark face is barely visible.
Here is detail of the card in question, showing the red and white teardrops.
Later the same day, I was teaching a beginning-level English class for children. Their textbook includes the following illustration.
Checking each student's book to make sure the accompanying exercise had been done correctly, I was surprised to see that one of the students had (for no apparent reason) used a red pen to color in exactly half of the white water drops in the picture, in the same alternating red-white pattern seen on Opsopaus's Moon card.
(As a further coincidence, in the textbook illustration, too, "we are looking from the edge of a dark sea towards its shore"; and the twin girls in the illustration echo the Moon card's theme of doubleness -- two mountains, two towers, two dogs, etc.)
I'm not sure whether to consider this just a striking coincidence or a case of unconscious telepathy. It's not the first time a student has written or drawn some improbable thing I had been thinking of.
As the attentive reader may have inferred from my frequent references to him in recent posts, I have been rereading John Opsopaus's Pythagorean Tarot. In the early days of the Web, Opsopaus's was one of the very first sites to deal in any detail with the Tarot, and so when a random hunch moved me to google altavista "tarot," Opsopaus's highly idiosyncratic hand-drawn versions, together with the formidably erudite commentary accompanying them, served as my introduction to the cards. Later the content of the site was published as a deck of cards with a 480-page handbook, which I eventually bought a decade or so later, more for old times' sake and as a gesture of appreciation than anything else. The cards themselves are not much to my taste, and that lack of rapport makes actually reading with them out of the question, but I do dip into the book and its parent website from time to time.
Today, while I was reading Opsopoaus's commentary on the sixth Arcanum -- called by him, in accordance with the pre-Marseille tradition of Italy, not "The Lover(s)" but simply "Love" -- a song suddenly came into my head which I hadn't listened to in years, one that was released in the same year that the original Pythagorean Tarot website was published: "Metal Detector" by They Might Be Giants.
The song is about a guy at the beach who is ignoring everything around him -- seashells, seagulls, volleyball games, "bathing beauty dolls" -- because he's completely focused on using his metal detector to find things underground. "I've got something to help you understand," he says, and "then everything on the top will just suddenly stop seeming interesting." And this is his whole life: "My metal detector is with me all of the time."
What made me think of that? Well, here's an excerpt of what Opsopaus has to say about Love:
This is no ordinary marriage, but an alchemical conjunction of brother and sister. Upon its consummation the masculine poles (consciousness, thought, intuition) will be destroyed, dissolved in the subconscious mother sea; this represents the dissolution that must precede the rejuvenation of the masculine elements. The divine child will consume the mother's substance while it grows in her womb, and she will die in birth, thus obliterating the feminine poles (unconsciousness, feeling, sensation). The child, however, will survive, and manifest a well-tempered balance of all oppositions, thus reincarnating both parents.
To paraphrase William Blake: Children of a future age, reading this indignant page, know that in a former time, Love, sweet Love, was thought a metaphor for some sort of abstract Jungian-alchemical rigmarole! The Tarot is, ultimately, a tool for examining and contemplating the human condition in all its various aspects. When such bedrock human realities as Love are being used as fodder for symbolical schemata, we seem to have entered Metal Detector land, where all natural, human meaning is nothing but a distraction from the real business of finding something shiny and inorganic under the surface.
Regular readers will of course be well aware that my metal detector is with me all of the time, too, and the main purpose of this post is to serve as a reminder to myself -- of what has real value, and what will in the end be cast to the moles and to the bats.
Trying to judge the relative merits of the four possible systems (described here) for mapping dice rolls to Tarot trumps, I tried to find historical examples of the rolls of two or more dice being mapped to a linear series.
Remembering that John Opsopaus had mentioned (here) that "San Bernadino's sermon of 1243 draws an analogy between the 21 rolls of two dice and the 21 letters of the (medieval) Roman alphabet," I tried to track down the sermon in question (which turns out to be Contra Alearum Ludos, actually delivered in 1423 by St. Bernardino of Siena) to see in what order the rolls had been assigned to the letters of the alphabet. Opsopaus cites an article by M. G. Kendall (qv), which quotes Bernardino as follows: "Missale vero taxillum, esse volo: [. . .] in eius missali solum alphabetum, hoc est viginti una literae comprehendantur, ac totidem puncta in decio concludantur." Kendall translates the last bit as "just as that missal is composed of a single alphabet of twenty-one letters, so in the [game of] dice there are twenty-one throws," and comments, "The twenty-one possible throws are undoubtedly those with two dice." I find this interpretation unconvincing. Bernardino is comparing the missal to a single die (taxillum), and puncta obviously refers to the points on the die rather than to the number of possible throws of two dice. (Each face of a die is marked with a different number of points, from one to six, and 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21). So, not only does Bernardino not list specific mappings from rolls to letters, but it seems unlikely to me that he had possible rolls of the dice in mind at all.
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I had a bit more luck with an article by Fritz Graf (qv) on Greek oracular texts used in astragalomancy (the rolling of four-sided "dice" -- actually tali, the knucklebones of animals, with sides numbered 1, 3, 4, and 6 -- as a form of divination). The standard method was to roll five tali (5d4, to use D&D terminology), for a total of 56 possible rolls, and the texts list these possible rolls as a numbered list. While we're more interested in the 21 possible rolls of 2d6, these astragalomantic texts are still useful as an indication of how the ancients put dice rolls in linear order.
The first thing to notice is that the rolls are ordered according to their total value. Any roll that totals 15, for example, "outranks" -- i.e., corresponds to a higher number on the list than -- any roll that totals 14. This is a point against the "Fire" and "Water" systems of Opsopaus, discussed here, which rank rolls according to the value of the highest or lowest die rather than the total.
Among rolls with the same total, the ranking system is not so clear. Here are the relevant data (the asterisk marks a lacuna in the text, incorrectly restored by Graf and corrected by myself):
11134 > 11116
11144 > 11333
11136 > 11334
11344* > 13333 > 11164
11444 > 11336 > 13334
11346 > 33333 > 11166 > 13344
13444 > 33334 > 11446 > 13336
14444 > 33344 > 13346 > 11366
33336 > 33444 > 13446 > 11466
33346 > 34444 > 14446 > 13366
11666 > 33446 > 13466 > 44444
33366 > 34446 > 14466
33466 > 44446 > 13666
34466 > 14666
44466 > 33666
16666 > 34666
I can't make head or tail of this and almost suspect that there is no system to be discovered, that rolls with the same total are listed in arbitrary order. Looking at the first line above, 11134 outranks 11116; eliminating the three aces that the two rolls have in common, we can infer that 3-4 outranks 1-6. This suggests the "Earth" system, where rolls with the same total are ranked according to the Low. (See this post for an explanation of the terminology.) However, in the next two lines we can see that 1-4-4 outranks 3-3-3, and 1-3-6 outranks 3-3-4, which is inconsistent with that system.
I'll spend a little more time looking at the list in Graf's paper to try and find some pattern to the rankings. At any rate, the focus on the Sum first seems to support either the Air or the Earth Hexactys, as opposed to the systems proposed by Opsopaus.
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Update: I went back through the astragalomantic oracle text and examined all the pairs of rolls that have the same total and three tali with the same value -- in other words, pairs of rolls that are identical except that one has 1-6 where the other has 3-4. There are 20 such pairs. For 15 of the pairs, 3-4 outranks 1-6.
111-34 > 111-16
114-34 > 114-16
116-34 > 116-16
144-34 > 144-16
333-34 > 333-16
334-34 > 334-16
136-34 > 136-16
344-34 > 344-16
146-34 > 146-16
336-34 > 336-16
444-34 > 444-16
346-34 > 346-16
446-34 > 446-16
366-34 > 366-16
466-34 > 466-16
For the remaining five, 1-6 outranks 3-4.
113-16 > 113-34
133-16 > 133-34
134-16 > 134-34
166-16 > 166-34
666-16 > 666-34
I can't for the life of me figure out what makes these five different. I've tried everything I can think of, including poker-style rankings (seeing if, for example, three of a kind always outranks two pair or vice versa), but there just doesn't seem to be any pattern. My tentative conclusion is that my initial impression was right, and that rolls with the same total are listed in arbitrary order.
In my post on the Magician, I mentioned that the number of cards in the Tarot deck (56 suit cards, 21 trumps, and the Fool) likely has something to do with dice, there being 56 possible rolls of three dice and 21 possible rolls of two. (This was drawn to my attention by John Opsopaus, who got it from Gertrude Moakley, according to whom it was first discovered by Maurice G. Kendall.) Although we can probably assume from the numbers that each card originally corresponded to a particular roll of the dice, no record of those correspondences exists, leaving them a matter of inference and guesswork.
Matching the Minor Arcana to dice rolls is complicated by the latter's being divided into four suits, with no obvious way of so dividing the 56 possible rolls of three six-sided dice. The Trumps are somewhat more straightforward, though, since they represent a simple sequence from 1 to 21. All that is required is to rank the 21 possible rolls of two dice from lowest to highest. These possible rolls can be represented schematically in a triangular arrangement, as below, and our task is to convert that triangle into a one-dimensional sequence. (Opsopaus calls this representation of the sixth triangular number a hexactys, by analogy with the Pythagorean tetractys.)
Obviously, "snake eyes" (two aces, 1-1) is the lowest possible roll, followed by 1-2, and these will correspond to trumps 1 and 2 (the Magician and Papess in the Marseille ordering), respectively; at the other end, the highest two trumps (the Judgment and the World) answer to 5-6 and 6-6.
Beyond that, though, several systems are possible. When two dice are rolled, there are three numbers to consider: the number of the higher die, the number of the lower die, and the total. For convenience, I will call these the High, the Low, and the Sum. The ranking of the rolls will depend on which of these three numbers takes precedence over which. Take the third trump, for instance. Should it be 2-2 or 1-3? Both rolls have a Sum of 4, but 1-3 has a higher High, and 2-2 has a higher Low. Logically, there are four possible rules we could follow:
Rank rolls according to the High. Among rolls with the same High, rank them according to the Low or the Sum. (The ranking will be the same either way.)
Rank rolls according to the Low. Among rolls with the same Low, rank them according to the High or the Sum. (The ranking will be the same either way.)
Rank rolls according to the Sum. Among rolls with the same Sum, rank them according to the High.
Rank rolls according to the Sum. Among rolls with the same Sum, rank them according to the Low.
Opsopaus considers only the first two systems, saying that they both have their merits and that he is unable to choose between them. He calls the first the Fire Hexactys because he represents it as an upright triangle (like the alchemical symbol for fire) with 1-1 at the top and the sixes at the bottom. The second is the Water Hexactys because he represents it as an inverted triangle (like the alchemical sign for water) with the aces at the top and 6-6 at the bottom. In keeping with the elemental theme, I have dubbed the third system the Air Hexactys (because, as I have diagrammed it, vertically higher rolls outrank lower ones) and the fourth, the Earth Hexactys (for the converse reason).
The diagram below gives the mappings for all four hexactyses. The numerals are the numbers of the Tarot trumps, while the dice rolls are represented by the color scheme introduced above (where red is 1, orange is 2, etc.)
How to decide which of the four systems is the best? I consider the Air Hexactys the most intuitively natural mapping. When rolling dice, it's natural to focus on the Sum first. We think "I rolled seven" first; distinguishing the various "seven" rolls (1-6, 2-5, 3-4) is secondary. I also think it's most natural to consider the High before the Low -- just as in poker, if two players both have Two Pair, we look at the value of each player's higher pair first to determine who wins.
Another thing to consider is that the bottom row of each diagram consists of "doubles," which will be rolled only half as frequently as the other rolls. It makes sense that these less-frequent trumps should be "special" in some way -- as the Magician (1-1) and World (6-6) obviously are. The unnamed 13th Arcanum ("Death") is another obviously special trump, and the Air Hexactys (uniquely) assigns it to a double, 4-4. Appropriately, 4 is the number of death in East Asian cultures, just as 13 is in the West.
Other possible considerations include the trump at the apex of the triangle (another "special" position), and which trumps are adjacent to which others in the diagram. We might also consider whether the six rolls including a given number have anything in common. I will look at these points in detail later, to see whether or not my initial preference for the Air Hexactys is confirmed.
