The Star Whale, Brian Wilson, and God

Back in 2014, I dreamed of seeing a whale with many eyes on TV, and the dream "came true" the next day when I saw a very similar image in a Keanu Reeves movie on TV. It seemed like such a pointless thing to be made precognitively aware of, and I commented at the time, "None of my precognitions so far have been of anything that could even remotely be considered important or meaningful."

That was eight years ago. The arc of the synchronistic universe is long, but it does sometimes bend toward meaning.

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In a comment yesterday, Carol has alerted me to the possible relevance of "The Beast Below," an episode of Doctor Who which was first broadcast on April 10, 2010. I've never seen it, or any other Doctor Who episode, but judging from Carol's summary and others found online, I think she's right.

"The Beast Below" is set in the distant future (29th century), when Earth has become uninhabitable due to solar flares. The British population, led by Queen Elizabeth X, survives aboard the gigantic Starship UK. They are all unaware of the fact that their starship has been built around the body of a "star whale" which serves as its means of propulsion, and the whale is controlled by sending painful electrical impulses into its brain. It is believed that if they stop torturing the whale, it will break free and the people of Starship UK will be doomed. This unpleasant fact is revealed to each citizen from time to time, at which point they must choose either to accept it and have their memory of the revelation erased or else register protest and -- well . . .

Amy is taken . . . to one of many voting booths set up on the ship . . . . She is shown a video about the truth of Starship UK, and then asked if she wants to protest the truth or forget it, the latter causing her short-term memory to be wiped. Amy chooses to forget, and creates a video to herself to prevent the Doctor from learning the truth, before the mind wipe. The Doctor is curious as what "protest" will cause and activates it, sending him and Amy into the maw of a giant creature below the ship. The Doctor induces the creature to vomit, allowing them to escape back to the ship. The Doctor and Amy meet Queen Elizabeth X, known as Liz 10, the ruler of the ship.

The Doctor's meeting a Queen Elizabeth parallels Dr. Dee's relationship with Elizabeth I -- and just like Dee, the Doctor enters the maw of a otherworldly whale and survives. As you can see in the illustration at the top of this post, the "star whale" shares an unwhalelike feature with the many-eyed whale (also called a "beast") I saw in my 2014 dream: "feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish."

In "The Beast Below," it is eventually discovered that the star whale came to Earth willingly, moved by compassion, to help the people of the UK escape, and that none of the torture had ever been necessary in the first place. The people had thought they had captured this beast and forced it to serve them, but in fact the whale was motivated by selfless love and willingly endured the unnecessary tortures inflicted on it by the ignorant humans. In the end, the torture is stopped and the starship continues on its way. It is decided that the people should no longer be kept in ignorance of the whale. Amy recites this rhyme:

In bed above, we're deep asleep

While greater love lies further deep.

This dream must end, this world must know:

We all depend on the beast below.

I don't know if the allusion is intentional, but to me this calls to mind Zarathustra's roundelay (Nietzsche), which I translated in 2019.

O man, give ear!
Deep midnight speaketh; canst thou hear?
"From sleep, from sleep,
From dreaming deep I woke and rose;
The world is deep,
More deep than day would e’er suppose.
How deep her woe!
Joy—deeper still than heartache, she.
Though woe cry, 'Go!'
All joys long for eternity—
For deep on deep eternity!" 

"In bed above, we're deep asleep" also calls to mind the chorus of the Barenaked Ladies song "Brian Wilson," which recently came up in connection with Dee's whale.

Because I'm lying in bed

Just like Brian Wilson did

Well I am lying in bed

Just like Brian Wilson did, yeah

Carol ended her comment with this:

Final point: John Dee's whale was God - Doctor Who's star whale was a savior, responding to the cries of frightened children.

Carol is not the only one to have made this connection. When I was searching for an image of the star whale with which to illustrate this post, one of the first hits that came up was an old post by Carmen Andres called "The great love of star whales and God." Andres writes:

I’m thinking more of the idea of a being enduring suffering of great proportions and yet responding not by withdrawing life giving and sustaining power and salvation but increasing it. I see that a profound echo of Jesus, who came to earth in love and compassion to save us from destruction and darkness. Yet none of us understood; even the best of us who did not abandon him did not comprehend who he really was and what he could do, and the worst of us tortured and executed him. And after voluntarily enduring unimaginable pain and suffering, he could have justly and understandably abandoned us, even destroyed us. But instead he explodes with abundance—with a profusion of unimaginable love, life and salvation.

I also think of a passage in Joseph Smiths's writings, about -- who else? -- Enoch, in which the Earth itself is the longsuffering "beast below":

And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?

And when Enoch heard the earth mourn, he wept, and cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth? Wilt thou not bless the children of Noah? (Moses 7:48-49)

I come back again to Dee's vision of a whale on a hill, "roaring like a cave of lions." In the angels' interpretation, the hill is the world, the waters are the bosom of God, and the whale is the Spirit of God. Why is the Holy Spirit -- more often characterized as a gentle dove or a still, small voice -- roaring like a cave of lions? Is it not a cry of pain? A beached whale is in agony. The Spirit of God leaves its natural home in the bosom of God and enters this corrupt and broken world, the devil's domain, suffering whatever is necessary to save God's children. "Knowest thou the condescension of God?" (1 Ne. 11:16). "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4:30).

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In "The Beast Below," the people are "deep asleep," wilfully deluded, having chosen to make themselves forget the uncomfortable fact of their dependence on the suffering whale. Despite their status as "sleeper," they are not passive and surrendered but precisely the opposite: They have seized the whale by force and tortured it into doing what they want -- not realizing that none of that was ever necessary, that it had come to them of its own free will and wanted to help them all along. This ties into the LSD theme of the current sync-stream and William Wildblood's 2017 post "Drugs and Spirituality." Taking psychedelics is of course an attempt to lose oneself, to abdicate will and enter an egoless state in which things just happen -- but Wildblood points out that it is at the same time an attempt to force a transcendent state.

The point is that it is an artificial means to try to take the kingdom of heaven by storm and therefore a fundamentally irreligious thing to do. It is putting your will above God’s. If he wants you to experience transcendent states he is perfectly capable of giving them to you. However he knows the strong likelihood that a person gets attached to these states and loses the reason for being on the spiritual path in the first place which is to get closer to God through the heart not by means of drugs. The latter will make the former more difficult not less so.

I have never used drugs, but many years ago when I was tempted to try to force things through roughly analogous "magical" means, I used to chide myself with a line from the Book of Job: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?" -- the point being that what is forced is not real, that if you can draw it out with a hook it's not the genuine Leviathan. I haven't thought about that for years, but now how strange it seems that I should have chosen landing a whale, of all things, as my metaphor!

To the Doctor Who line "In bed above, we're deep asleep" the synchronicity fairies have added "just like Brian Wilson." The name Brian is thought to derive from the Old Celtic element bre, meaning "hill"; and Wilson is of course from Will (the first element of William), meaning "will, desire." There is a clear connection here to idea of forcefully drawing a whale out of the water and up onto a hill -- which is what Brian Wilson was symbolically attempting with his drug use. In Dee's vision, though, the whale comes to the hill of its own accord.

And suddenly The Firmament and the waters were joyned together, and the Whale CAME, like unto a legion of stormes: or as the bottomless Cave of the North when it is opened: and she was full of eyes of every side.

The Prophet said, Stand still, but they trembled. The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions

In "Whale Music," I noted Brian Wilson's (and Dee's) characterization as a naked man. This connects with another part of William Wildblood's drug post.

You see, drugs operate in the world of experience but spirituality, true spirituality, the spirituality of the saints, is a matter of innocence meaning precisely that it is a natural not artificial expression of what you are inside.

Nakedness is innocence -- in animals, babies, and prelapsarian man -- but for a grown man to go naked is an artificial attempt to force or simulate innocence (a self-contradictory pursuit), to crawl back into the womb or return to Eden. Drugs, seen as an artificial way of simulating the spontaneous mystical consciousness of primitive man, are the same sort of thing.

On April 6, I left this comment on my own post:

I could swear that when I checked the THC website last night, the latest episode was called “The Book of Enoch,” but I just checked it again now to get the link, and it’s not there. I must have dreamed it.

This drove me crazy for a week. I knew I hadn't dreamed it. I could even remember the background illustration -- what looked at first like three dark, hunched figures, until two of them resolved themselves into the wings of the other. I thought the episode must have been posted and then removed for some reason, maybe because Carlwood had accidentally posted it too soon. I kept checking THC every day to see if it would reappear, but it never did. Last night the mystery was finally resolved, when I happened to click the wrong thing on YouTube and found that the April 6 "Book of Enoch" show wasn't on THC but on Jonathan Pageau's channel: "The Book of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Modern Crisis." I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but he begins by talking about the fall of Adam and Eve.

There's a sense in which the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was going to be given to Adam and Eve ultimately, but the reason why it made them fall was because they took it too fast. They took it through an act of desire. It says that, you know, the woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, and so she reached up and grabbed it for herself, and because of that gesture of taking it for yourself and taking it in desire, that is what will ultimately lead to a fall.

In other words, they tried to draw out Leviathan with a hook -- or, as William Wildblood puts it, to "take the kingdom of heaven by storm." They took by force what God was actually willing to give them, just like the people of Starship UK torturing the star whale.

The ideal is to be the opposite of our metaphorical "Brian Wilson," or of the citizens of Starship UK; to do the opposite of lying in bed naked doing drugs, the opposite of torturing a star whale into submission an then lying to yourself about it. ("For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.") This dream must end, this world must know. The ideal is to be fully awake and conscious, knowing what we do and why, and at the same time to be fully surrendered to God.

It's not meant to be a struggle uphill.

St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected

I was visiting in-laws yesterday and happened to notice a children's toy they had in their house: a stuffed bear that looked exactly like Winnie-the-Pooh -- the Disney version, yellow with a red T-shirt -- but written on the T-shirt were the English words Mischievous Dog. This kind of "mutant knockoff" product is common enough in Taiwan, but this one caught my attention and seemed significant somehow. I thought I should take a photo but in the end decided not to, so sorry, no illustration. 

I tried to think what possible significance Winnie-the-Mischievous-Dog could have, but all that came to mind was that in my October 25 post "Bear with Biden" I had mentioned Winnie-the-Pooh in connection with Xi Jinping, Bernie Sanders (Bernie means "bear," and Pooh lived "under the name of Sanders"), and Robin Hood ("he belongs to Christopher Robin, and his name is simply Hood written upside down").

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In my November 4 post "Doves of Tarshish," I note that both Jonah and Columbus mean "dove," and that both Jonah and Columbus are associated with the Tartessos, Spain. In the post, I wrote out the full name Christopher Columbus because his Christian name seemed important, too, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I thought of the legend of St. Christopher, who was supposed to be a giant with the head of a dog, but it didn't seem to have any relevance to Columbus or to Jonah.

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Last night I checked my YouTube subscriptions, which I hadn't done in a few weeks, and found a new (November 3) video from Jonathan Pageau called "Finding the Giant Dog-Headed St. Christopher in the Bible." I immediately recognized this as possibly relevant both to the "Doves of Tarshish" sync and to the "Mischievous Dog" toy. I had previously highlighted the second half of the name Christopher Robin in connection with Pooh, and this was a possible link to the first. And could the biblical connection possibly have anything to do with Jonah? I watched the whole video.

Pageau begins with a brief summary of the St. Christopher legend -- a giant monster or dog-headed man who carries people (and ultimately Christ himself) across a river -- and says that in the Bible we often find monsters and animals associated with crossing water. The first example he gives is that of Noah -- who, escaping a world of giants, crosses the floodwaters in a boat full of animals. The Noah story is also the first mention of the dove (jonah) in the Bible; and while Pageau never actually mentions Jonah, he clearly fits the pattern as well, being swallowed by a monstrous animal while crossing the water.

After the biblical examples, Pageau relates the story of St. Christopher in more detail and emphasizes the role of trickery: After tricking the king of Canaan and the devil, St. Christopher is himself tricked by Christ. What a mischievous dog!

At the end of the video, Pageau promotes a graphic novel he and his brother are writing, which is based on the legend of St. Christopher and has the palindromic title God's Dog. This made me think of my December 2020 post "God and dog at the Panama Canal" -- the Panama Canal being a place where people cross from one body of water to another.

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Pageau's characterization of Noah as someone who crossed the waters in a boat full of animals made me think of a similar story from the Book of Mormon: the Jaredites. At the Tower of Babel, when everyone's language is confounded, Jared and his family have their original (the original) language preserved by the Lord. They leave Babylon and sail across the sea in "barges" (actually fully enclosed submersible vessels) full of animals. Jonah imagery is also clearly present: "For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea" (Ether 2:24)

Of the animals the Jaredites bring with them, one in particular is singled out for emphasis: "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:3). What a weird and evocative image -- swarms of honeybees crossing the ocean as if in "a whale in the midst of the sea"! (Bees in the belly of the beast is also a link to Samson.)

The bees the Jaredites carried with them are surely an exceedingly minor plot point in the Book of Mormon, but the word deseret has taken on a life of its own and been embraced as a symbol of Mormonism. What is now the state of Utah was called Deseret when it was a quasi-independent Mormon theocracy, and the flag of Utah still prominently features a beehive. On Twitter, the hashtag #DezNat (for Desert Nation) identifies one as what passes today for a Mormon "hardliner." A phonetic "Deseret alphabet" was developed under the direction of Brigham Young, and the name is still used for such things as Deseret Industries (Mormon thrift stores) and the Deseret News. (Since deseret in the Book of Mormon refers specifically to honeybees from Babylon, I guess Deseret News has the same name as the Babylon Bee!)

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Bees and honey are stereotypically associated with the bear. In "Bern, baby, bern!" (a follow-up post to "Bear with Biden"), I noted that the name Beowulf means "bear." Well, it actually means "bee wolf," but this is usually assumed to be a superstitious euphemism for the bear, along the lines of the Russian medved ("honey eater"). The dog and the wolf are the same species, and the bear -- also a member of Caniformia -- was apparently seen as a sort of super-wolf. Back in 2018, I postulated, citing beowulf and medved as evidence, that the "Big Bad Wolf" of fairy tale fame was originally a bear. (Unlike wolves, bears huff and puff, can climb onto a roof, and could more plausibly swallow a human being whole than could the much smaller wolf.) I suppose I can now add "Mischievous Dog" to this list of canine bear-euphemisms. St. Christopher, a gigantic dog-faced man whose name means "Christ-bear-er," would also seem to have ursine resonances.

This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat.

My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red. This got me thinking about red hats and how the Big Bad Wolf (i.e. bear, i.e. Biden) is the antagonist of someone named after a red hat. But, no, it gets more specific than that: I have identified the Sun card of the Tarot with Donald Trump, but I have also said that the baby on that card who is riding a horse and carrying a red flag represents Robin Hood. Little. Red. Riding. Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood is swallowed by a bear but, like Jonah, comes out again alive -- Resurgens in arc(t)a incubatus. Somewhere in the Origin, Darwin reports seeing a bear swimming around with its mouth open catching insects in the water, and speculates that this could have been the first step in the evolution of the whale. Jonah's ork, Noah's ark, Riding Hood's arktos. Jonah, as I have said, is Hebrew for "dove"; the Hebrew for "bear" is dov.

The paradox of these times

The constant carnival of intense control
(Card by Jean-Pierre Payen of Avignon, 1713)

I'd just listened to about half of the Book of Exodus when it crossed my mind that I hadn't checked out Jonathan Pageau on YouTube recently -- so I did so, and found a fairly recent video called "Now Is A Great Time to Understand the Plagues of Egypt." He really only talks about one of the plagues, that of the hail mingled with fire. Here, lightly edited, is the comment that most struck me.

Think of our day, think of our age, where you both have the most intense level of control that has ever existed -- the greatest police state that has ever existed in the history of humanity, with the most control and quantification and calculation that has ever existed -- and at the same time, this sense that we live in a constant carnival, and that anything goes and that anything can happen. It's like the Beast and the Whore together; somehow they shouldn't be together, but they're together, and so this is the image of hail and fire at the same time.

"Inclusion" = the all-encompassing totalitarian System

I hadn't made this obvious connection until I watched this video by Jonathan Pageau, in which he gives an extremely insightful analysis of a speech given by Apple CEO Tim Cook a few years ago. (I've been watching more and more talking videos recently, having discovered the trick of playing them at 1.5 or 1.75 speed to make the experience more tolerable.)

Cook is giving a fiery speech about how Apple is standing up for its "values" because "it's the right thing to do" -- and, as Pageau shows, he makes it perfectly clear what those values are. Pageau's summary:

The only value that really matters is the value of inclusion, and the only thing that is a problem is if you oppose yourself to that system which is created to include everybody.

Cook talks about how Apple is going to deplatform anything that promotes "hate" or "violence," but, as Pageau points out, the two examples Cook focuses on are not songs and movies that literally glorify hate and violence (those are okay, obviously!), but rather "white supremacy," i.e. excluding and marginalizing other races, and "violent conspiracy theories," i.e., questioning the System and its motives. (By the way, what the hell is a "violent conspiracy theory"? Must be something like a colorless green idea!)

"Inclusion" means everyone and everything must be fully incorporated into the System. No one is allowed to be excluded or even marginal. The excluded must be included, the marginal must be redefined as central. There's a classic cartoon-villain term for this goal: taking over the world.

And those who would exclude or marginalize others, or who would question the goodness of the System itself? Are they to be excluded, leading to an obvious self-contradiction? No, they are to be either assimilated or destroyed. When Cook says that those who "push division and violence" (meaning, as we have seen, exclusion of others and criticism of the System) "have no place on our platform," he obviously doesn't mean that they should leave Apple and find some other platform. No alternative platforms can be tolerated, since then there would no longer be one single all-inclusive system. He's not telling white supremacists and conspiracy theorists to take their business elsewhere; he's telling them to fuck off and die. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

A very clear example of the Ahrimanic ideal: "that one soul shall not be lost."

Sixes

This morning, despite my general aversion to talking video, I somehow found myself watching Jonathan Pageau expound on the meaning of 666.

Instead of the usual gematria/isopsephy approach of finding words and names that add up to 666, Pageau (following the lead of St. Irenaeus and others) focuses on the meaning of 6 itself and other occurrences of it in the Bible. He mentions the six days of creation, the supposed 6,000-year history of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar's golden image that was 60 cubits high and six cubits wide, and the fact that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood occurred.

Pageau doesn't use the term "triangular number," but he does mention that 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, and that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 6² is 666. I would add that 6 is the most triangular number there is: 6 is triangular, 6² is triangular, 66 is triangular, and 666 is triangular.

(Pageau also discusses how and why 666 symbolizes the all-encompassing System from which no one is allowed to opt out, and is well worth watching for those insights, but they are not directly relevant to the synchronicities noted in this post.)

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Just after watching that, I checked some blogs and read a recent post by Vox Day saying that "Thomas Wictor is a goofball" for accepting the official belief that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Vox writes:

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

A commenter asks:

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

Another commenter suggests:

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

Looking this up, I find that there are really only 304,805 letters in the Torah, but that there are assumed to be additional "invisible letters" which bring the total up to the requisite 600,000. The article also says:

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

So obviously, the significance of 6 (times various powers of 10) comes first, and actual figures -- like the numbers of Jewish souls, Torah letters, and Holocaust victims -- are arbitrarily enlarged or reduced to fit that Procrustean bed.

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After writing most of the above, but before publishing it, I met with one of my students, a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for student of English which has articles on a variety of subjects, with accompanying notes on potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar. We went through two of the articles he had read recently -- one about stop-motion animation and one about Oedipus -- so I could explain anything he still didn't understand.

For each article, a handful of vocabulary words are chosen for emphasis, and at the end of the article these are listed, each with a definition and an example sentence.

At the end of the first article, this sentence was used to exemplify the use of the word represent:

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Recall that Pageau had discussed the measurements of the golden statue made by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3:1): six cubits wide and 60 cubits high. The sentence in the magazine didn't use the number six, but the strange focus on the height of the statue still seemed a significant synchronicity. I mean, if you were asked to use the word represent in a sentence, would you naturally come up with a sentence about how tall a specific statue is?

The second article mentioned how the Sphinx drowned herself after her riddle had been solved, so at the end there was an example sentence for drown.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

Now that's a more impressive sync! Six is given as the "official" number of people who died, as in the Holocaust. And they died in "the flood"; recall that Pageau had mentioned that the Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old.