Recent sync activity has centered around Animalia by Graeme Base, which is an alphabet book. I was thinking how funny it was to be taking an alphabet book so seriously, and then I remembered that I was well within Mormon tradition in so doing, given Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. This is commonly referred to (by those few who do refer to it) as "the GAEL," which I guess makes the language therein described -- clearly "Egyptian" in name only -- GAELic.
"The Gael" is also the name of that tune from The Last of the Mohicans. Just in case it's not playing in your head already, here's a little help:
My interest in Animalia has been focused on the G and L pages -- two of the letters in GAEL -- both of which have some "Gaelic" themes. The L page includes a leprechaun, while the main subject of the G page is green gorillas. Green is the symbol of Ireland, and Punch cartoons used to portray the stereotypical Irishman as "Mr. G-O'Rilla." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats has recently been associated with Pharaoh's butler from Genesis, who dreamed of holding a cup and pressing grapes into it:
And Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand (Gen. 40:11).
Here, from Animalia, is a green gorilla preparing to do just that:
I've just noticed for the first time that William Butler G-O'Rilla's grail is decorated with running greyhounds -- only they're not grey; they're gold. A golden dog running ties right in with Lassie Come Home on the L page:
Lassie is a stereotypically Scottish word, so there's another "Gaelic" link.
It occurred to me to look up gael on Eldamo. It's defined as "pale, glimmering" -- another link to Yeats, Claire, and The Song of Wandering Aengus, in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." Another permutation of the same letters, laeg, is also Elvish and means, what else, "green."
The G and L pages encode the two keys. One of these, remember, is associated with gold, red, the sun, and the rose; the other, with silver, green, the moon, and the lily. Lions are associated with gold and the sun, and there is a key reference in the Lions' library in the form of a book by John Locke. Gorillas are associated with silver ("silverback"), and a gorilla is in a loose sense a "monkey" -- moon-key. The green "silverback" on the G page is complemented by the red "lobsterback" on the L page.
L and G also represent the square and compass. The square obviously resembles the letter L and appears as such in Mormon symbolism. Some forms of the capital G look like an arrow indicating circular motion, which is the function of the compass. (Transliterated into Greek, the mapping is reversed: Gamma is the square; Lambda, the compass.)
Doing an image search now to try to find a particularly arrow-like form of G, I found this, which for some reason also includes a lion named Lucas -- not the most natural choice for a page about the letter G!
Lucas is another form of the name Luke. William Wright has already suggested that the "Gospel of Luke" featured on the L page might have something to do with Luke Skywalker, and this "G. Lucas" would seem to confirm that reading.
But G and L are only two of the four letters in GAEL. What of the other two? Well, I don't have much to say about A at this point, but recent syncs have strongly suggested that I give the E page another gander. "Stink Gorilla More" included a photo of a little gorilla figurine my wife keeps on one of her bookshelves. The other day I was passing that shelf and noticed the gorilla's companions:
I first noticed the lion-gorilla juxtaposition, of course, but elephant is E, another component of GAEL. This trio of animals is also prominently featured on the cover of Animalia:
The E page of Animalia is kind of boring. Unlike G and L, which include dozens of different things beginning with those letters, E pretty much just has elephants and Easter eggs.
I mean, eggs are a Humpty Dumpty link, and he's been associated with the number eight (nice belt!), but that's about it.
Then I noticed that each of the eggs has a tiny name tag. The names are Emily, Elizabeth, Eric, Esmerelda (sic), Egbert, Ethel, Ernest, and what could be either Edward or Edwin. I guess these are the elephants' names. You can click the photo above to zoom in if you want to see the names for yourself.
The relevance of some of these is immediately obvious. William Wright has already written quite a bit about Elizabeth and Egbert. Eric is interesting because if you look back at the photo of the cover, an elephant (Eric?) is standing right next to a knight on horseback (a warthog knight, but still). Eric Knight is the author of Lassie Come-Home. The one that really got my attention, though, was the misspelled Esmerelda. William Wright recently posted about how the Elfstone in Tolkien's writings is a Green Stone. The name Esmeralda means "emerald" -- i.e., a green stone -- and here the spelling has been modified so as to include elda. Elda, as I suppose even the merest dabbler in things Tolkienian will be aware, means "elf."
Lassie Come Home is, symbolically, the title of the book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew. This book is also called "the book of the Lamb of God" (1 Ne. 13:38). A nod to this second designation is just visible on the edge of the page in Animalia:
I think that's a very semantically dense title, conveying multiple meanings simultaneously. First there’s the literal meaning of lassie: a girl or young woman. Second, there’s the character Lassie in the book: a sheepdog, specifically a Rough Collie, who travels a great distance to be reunited with someone she loves. Finally there’s the Elvish lassi, which even the casual Tolkien reader may recognize from the poem Namárië: It means -- quelle coïncidence! -- "leaves."
If we take Lassie as a literal lassie, any number of female figures could be intended. My immediate hunch, and I tend to trust such things, was that it has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1). Threatened by the Dragon, the Woman is given wings and flies away to "her place" (perhaps off-planet?), prepared for her by God, where she stays for three and a half years (Rev. 12:6, 14) -- and that's the last we hear of her. After the three and a half years, during which the Beast rules in her absence (Rev. 13:5), does Lassie come home? John never tells us.
Considered as a sheepdog, Lassie would be expected to come home with the sheep, bringing them back to the fold. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John 10:16). If the Shepherd is Christ, the Sheepdog would be a servant of Christ who helps him tend the sheep. The most obvious biblical candidate for this role would be Simon Peter, who in John 21 is given a special charge to "feed my sheep" and "feed my lambs." Interestingly, this same language of feeding is found in John's account of the Woman: While she is hiding in the wilderness, "they should feed her there" (Rev. 12:6) and "she is nourished" (Rev. 12:14).
Those who have been following William Wright's blog will know of his theory that Peter was the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor -- which brings us to Lassie as a collie. The etymology of that word is uncertain, but Etymonline suggests "Possibly from dialectal coaly 'coal-black,' the color of some breeds." As portrayed on the cover of the book from the Lion's mouth, Lassie appears to be golden in color, not black, so perhaps whatever about her is "coal-black" is not visible on the surface. Pharazôn was called "the Golden," and as his story has been expanded by Daymon "Doug" Smith and William Wright, he went to great lengths so to appear, dressing all in gold and even covering his face with some kind of gold makeup. However, in "It's as dark a tale as was ever told," I have read the song "Shiver My Timbers" as referring to Pharazôn:
Shiver my timbers, shiver my soul -- Yo ho, heave ho!
There are men whose hearts are as black as coal --Yo ho, heave ho!
And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue
A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew
It's as dark a tale as was ever told
Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold
Also in that post, I mention the line about "secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones" and tie that in with the Monkees song about Davy Jones waking and rising -- a song which also prominently references a "homecoming queen," i.e. a lassie come home. Pharazôn and his men ended up in a watery grave -- "Davy Jones' locker" -- and it may be their secrets that sleep there. The surname Jones means "son of John," though the h has been lost and the vowel sound has changed from a short 'o' to a long one. Everything I have just said about Jones is also true of Barjona, the original surname of Simon Peter.
Finally, we have lassi as the Elvish word for "leaves." Golden leaves as a reference to Golden Plates (and Lassie is gold on the book cover) have been a major theme in these parts recently, beginning with "Leaves of gold unnumbered" -- a post in which I quote the first two lines of the poem Namárië. Here they are in the original Quenya:
Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Ah, like gold fall the leaves in the wind! Lassi, come home!
Every tribe of Israel, we are told in 2 Nephi 29, has its own sacred records -- its own "leaves of gold" -- and when Lassie brings the scattered sheep home, the leaves will be gathered home as well:
And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. . . .
And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.
And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one (2 Ne. 29:8, 13-14).
And this brings us back to the vision or waking dream -- for I, like Davy Jones, am a daydream believer -- recounted in "Étude brute?" In the vision, I was told that a particular book was the Cherubim -- "not the book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves." What can that possibly mean?
Ezekiel portrays the Cherubim as chimerical creatures -- part man, part lion, part bull, and part eagle -- and as far back as my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," I had made the case that this imagery "very like symbolizes, by means of four representative members, both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac." See that post for all the details underlying that assertion; here I will simply take it as proven. Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.
I have more to say on this topic, but I think this is a good place to end the current post.
Nephi's vision prominently features a book that "proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew" (1 Ne. 13). Mormons almost universally understand this to be the Bible, even though that doesn't really make any sense. The Bible was written by lots of different people, some of whom were Jews (though such important authors as Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul were not), but the book Nephi saw is repeatedly described as coming out of the mouth of one Jew. It's not the Bible.
I was just thinking about this mysterious book the other day because of its possible relevance to one of the couplets in "With?"
Minbad the Mailer was a Jew
And wrote a lot of novels, too.
Norman Mailer, obviously. It's oddly worded, though, making him first and foremost a Jew, with the fact that he was a novelist mentioned only as a sort of afterthought. As soon as I started reading "With?" seriously, I suspected that Minbad was "the Jew" from Nephi's vision.
This checks out:
Thou hast beheld that the book proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew; and when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord (1 Ne. 13:22).
A "Norman mailer" could be someone sending out messages from Normandy, France. Mailer's real name was actually Nachem, meaning "comforter."
Jews are members of the Tribe of Judah, whose symbol is the Lion, just as the Bull is the symbol of the House of Joseph. In my last post, I discussed a picture of two lions in a library and focused on one of the books, The Gospel of Luke, which is symbolized by the Bull. I somehow missed the very conspicuous fact that there's another book literally proceeding forth from the mouth of a Lion!
Lassie Come Home -- that is, symbolically, the title of the Book from the Mouth of the Jew. I have a lot to say about the significance of that title, but it will have to wait until I have time. For now, I just want to get it out there with this quick post.
This past weekend, I picked up a little alphabet book called Animalia at a used bookstore for no other reason that the author's name was Graeme Base, and William Wright had recently posted "Golden Graham Plates." Two of the letters have since turned out to be significant.
Base's image also features the Holy Grail -- not exactly first on most people's list of things that begin with G! -- and a golden griffin perched on a gong in the form of a golden disc.
In one of my dreams, Golden Plates took the form of a disc, as mentioned most recently in "Plates among the dead leaves." This disc, too, is in a room full of leaves, though not dead ones.
Then there's L:
It's a library with two lions in it. Among the books in it are Lassie Come Home, Limericks by Edward Lear, The Leopard [...], King Lear, Little Boy Lost by L. L. Lucky, Lover's L[...], Lacrosse, Let's Learn Latin, Life of Luxembourg, Leonardo, Love's Labour's Lost, Levitation, Doctor Livingstone, Living Legends, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and books by Longfellow and John Locke -- but the one that really got my attention was The Gospel of Luke:
Two large golden animals in a room full of books syncs with the waking dream I relate in "Étude brute?" in which there were two large golden "Bulls of Heaven," one of which went with me into a cavern full of books and told me that one of the books "is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."
In trying to make sense of that cryptic statement, I thought first of the Four Gospels. In Ezekiel, the Cherubim are represented as having four faces: those of an ox, a man, a lion, and an eagle -- but in one place (Ezek. 10:14) these are given as the faces of a cherub, a man, a lion, and an eagle, implying that the Cherubim are primarily bovine in nature. I would naturally have assumed that the two heavenly Bulls I saw were themselves the Cherubim had one of them not said what it did about the book. A very old Christian tradition associates each of the Gospels with one of the component creatures of the Cherubim -- and the ox or bull is almost invariably mapped to the Gospel of Luke. In the illustration below, from the (French) St. Riquier Gospels, a heavenly Bull holds a banner with the opening words of Luke: "Quoniam quidem multi conati sunt" -- "For indeed many have tried."
Before I entered the library in my vision, the two Bulls had been standing on either side of a Nativity scene -- and the classic Nativity scene with the manger and all that also comes from the Gospel of Luke.
Another interpretive angle is to note that there were two golden Cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant -- above the Ark but also part of it. In William Wright's June 11 post "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," he proposes that the Brass Plates are currently in France and compares the Plates themselves to an "Ark," specifically mentioning the Ark of the Covenant. Now look back up at that picture of the golden griffin perched on the golden gong. As I have mentioned in many posts, the word griffin may be related to the word Cherubim. A disc of light-colored metal (possibly gold or brass) has appeared in my dream as a "Plate" with engravings on it. If the Brass Plates are, symbolically, the Ark of the Covenant, then they are, or include, the Cherubim as well.
How does the Gospel of Luke fit in? Perhaps the significance is in the name itself: Luke means "light." In his post, William emphasizes a quote from the Book of Mormon about how the Brass Plates must "retain their brightness" -- a Bright Gospel, a Gospel of Light.
In William's post, he refers to the engravings on the Plates as "Marks," capitalized. The Graeme Base picture shows two lions in a library -- and, yes, the Evangelist whose symbol is the lion is Mark.
In "Plates among the dead leaves," I record -- in a somewhat joking tone which William found "douchey" -- the hunch that if the Brass Plates are indeed in France, they may be behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse. As discussed at great length in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," this church contains an engraving of a beardless Christ surrounded by the four Cherubic creatures, which I believe may have played an important role in the development of the Tarot de Marseille. This Christ holds a book in which is written "Pax Vobis," and he bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.
The supper at Emmaus, and Christ's saying "Pax Vobis," both occur in the final chapter of, you guessed it, the Gospel of Luke.
On April 22, William Wright posted "Shushan!", which included a clip from the James Bond spoof movie Johnny English Reborn in which a Chinese man who apparently turns out to be a spy or gangster or something is wearing a nametag that says Susan, prompting English's sidekick to say, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan." Here's a slightly longer version of the clip William posted, since what happens afterward is also relevant.
On April 23, I left a comment there saying that it reminded me of a scene in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch where Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) says, "You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."
On April 24, I checked my students' homework, and one of the prompts was this:
"Susan call me last night" -- intentionally ungrammatical, as the students are supposed to correct it by changing the verb to the past tense. The only way "Susan call me" (without a comma) could be grammatical would be if it meant "Call me Susan," with the word order changed for emphasis -- like that Billie Holiday song, "Crazy he calls me / Sure, I'm crazy."
Susan call me. Sure, I'm Susan.
In a comment on the "Shushan!" post, William Wright wrote this to me:
Do you have a story that attempts to connect these dots, or is it just the dots themselves - the fact that they exist - that are most interesting to you? I only ask, because your comments here, and your writing on your blog definitely focus on identifying dots, but not really connecting them.
I understand what he means -- that I mostly just document syncs without interpreting them -- but I don't think the connect-the-dots metaphor really works. Noticing syncs just is connecting dots. (In fact, one of my first sync blogs was called No Cigar, alluding to the TMBG song "See the Constellation": "No cigar, no lady on his arm / Just a guy made of dots and lines.") Sync is inherently about connections and relations; a fact considered in isolation can't be a sync. I think what he means is that I connect lots of dots but rarely succeed in stepping back and seeing what kind of picture all those connected dots are forming. Or even if I do see a larger picture, I don't know what it means.
For William Wright, though, each connection is a dot, and "connecting the dots" means interpreting these connections as contributing to an unfolding story.
Anyway, that comment got me sidetracked thinking about connect-the-dots puzzles. I thought about how we always called them "dot-to-dots" when I was a kid, but I hadn't heard that term in a long time and wondered whether it was still common. I ended up skimming the Wikipedia article on the subject, which had this illustration of a dot-to-dot of a front view of a face:
Later the same day, I opened the Brave browser to start writing this post. The home screen has various background images that change from time to time, but this time it was this:
Its a starry sky in which some of the star "dots" have been connected with lines to form the Brave logo, which is a stylized front view of a lion's face, as a constellation. It's conceptually very similar to the dot-to-dot from Wikipedia, and the shape even suggests a drooping mustache.
The night before (April 23), I had been reading Henry M. Morris's literalist commentary on the Book of Job. Noting that constellations are referenced more in that book than anywhere else in the Bible, Morris says that this obviously has nothing to do with astrology as we know it (which he naturally views as satanic) and speculates that perhaps the constellations originally had some theological meaning and served as a sort of proto-Bible. That is, before the actual Bible had been written, people would look at the constellations to remind themselves of certain revealed doctrines. What these may have been he cannot say, since the key to their meaning has been lost, and in any case they have been superseded by the Bible proper.
In some way, therefore, these constellations must have symbolized to the ancient patriarchs God's purposes in creation and his promises of a coming Redeemer. This primeval message has been corrupted Satanically into the fantasy messages of the astrologers, but since we now have God's written Word, it is no longer needed. To the early generations, however, it may have served as a memory device, perpetually calling to mind the primeval promises given to Adam, Enoch, and Noah, and those in the line of chosen patriarchs. Even when the world was destroyed in the great flood, the starry heavens remained the same, conveying God's promises to future generations, at least until enough of the written Word was available to make the sidereal signs no longer necessary.
It may be impossible at this late date to fully recover this ancient "gospel in the stars," though a number of attempts have been made.
This syncs closely with William Wright's comment -- or rather with my own modification of his metaphor. Today we still "connect the dots" in the sky and see constellations, but the meaning of the resulting pictures remains opaque. Morris's theory is that in the past God had revealed what the constellations meant, but that now, without access to that revelation, figuring out their meaning may be impossible. "A number of attempts have been made," but I'd wager no two interpreters have read them the same way.
Early on the morning of April 25, I was skimming /x/. The first thing to catch my eye was the image used for this astrology post:
I first noticed it simply because it was a connect-the-dots constellation (Scorpio), but a closer look reveals a more specific sync: Unlike a typical constellation diagram, which has lines connecting one star to another, this one has the stars connected by dots. This matches William Wright's use of the metaphor, in which each individual connection or sync is a dot, not a line.
Another /x/ post really got my attention:
Like the Brave background image, it's a front view of a lion's face in a starry sky. Rather than a typical dot-to-dot constellation, though, this looks like a supernatural apparition. It made me think of Aslan, the lion Messiah of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered if he had ever been depicted that way in art. After a few image searches -- aslan stars, aslan sky -- failed to yield anything, I tried spirit of aslan. This didn't yield any faces-in-the-stars, either, but one of the results caught my eye because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors:
I clicked through to the page it comes from, a 2021 blog post by Stephanie McGann called "Narnia #9: The Last Battle." Here's how it begins:
Before reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons.
In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. Lewis for his treatment of Susan. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems.
Since the name Susan had unexpectedly cropped up again while I was pursuing lion-constellation imagery, I decided on a whim to do an image search for susan constellation. The first result to show an identifiable constellation was this one:
That's Scorpio, the same constellation from the /x/ post.
I remembered that various forms of the name Susie had been in the sync-stream a few years back, and looking them up reminded me of one of the reasons I'm hesitant to interpret syncs too much these days: Back then, I was extremely confident that all the syncs were predicting that Trump would be back in the White House in 2021, and that obviously didn't pan out. (It's weird to see how political the sync fairies were back then; I'm glad that seems to be over.) One of these Susie/Trump posts was "Hey, Suzy, where you been today?" That's the opening line of the 2019 Weezer song "The End of the Game" -- which also features an unexpected Aslan reference:
Hey, Suzy, where you been today? I'm looking for you every way No sign of you when I wake up I'm on an island with no sun
I feel like I've known you my whole life You got me crying like when Aslan died Now you're gone
Going back to the Johnny English Reborn clip, Tucker says, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan" -- saying "a Susan" as if it were a common noun. I know Debbie has posted several times in comments here about a dream in which she was told that she was "a Susie," but I can't find it because comments aren't searchable. Could I trouble you to post it one more time, Debbie?
In the Snatch scene, Bullet Tooth Tony is sitting between two female twins when he says "You can call me Susan." Shortly after that line, he says to the twin on his right, "Pass us the blower, Susie." It's a bit odd saying people can call you Susan when you're sitting right next to someone who actually is called Susan.
This theme of female "twins" -- or at least two women who are hard to tell apart -- also appears in the Johnny English clip. Johnny is at the home of Pegasus, the head of MI7, and her elderly mother is there, too. Also in the house is a Chinese assassin dressed as Pegasus's mother, so that they look the same from behind. Johnny keeps mistaking them for each other -- attacking the mother, then apologizing to the assassin, then attacking the mother again.
Female twins -- and stars, and lions, and crying -- were featured in my March 25 post "She's so rocky, shisa star."
One other thing before I forget it. In his April 22 "Shushan!" post, William Wright compares something Johnny English says to a passage from the Book of Mormon. English says:
Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.
The BoM passage (with boldface added by William) is:
Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.
And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls. (Alma 37)
I've been reading through the Bible a few chapters a day, and included in my reading for April 24 was this passage in 1 Corinthians:
But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (1 Cor. 1:27).
This is obviously very similar the the BoM passage, so much so that skeptical readers will say Joseph Smith plagiarized from Paul. Besides the identical "confound the wise" wording, though, Paul also mentions confounding "the things which are mighty" -- a link to Johnny's claim that "The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key."
English compares the key to the stone with which David felled Goliath. Interestingly, a "key of David" is mentioned in the Bible:
These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth (Rev. 3:7).
The speaker -- "he that hath the key of David" -- is Jesus Christ. Since Aslan also represents Jesus Christ, this is a link to the "Aslan closed the door" picture above.
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.
Yesterday I did some urban exploring and kept running into capital letter Rs in strange orientations -- upside down, backwards, "lazy," etc. Today, I saw someone wearing a hoodie with a huge blackletter R (normal orientation) and under it -- in Latin, but written as if it were German -- Fortis Fortuna adiuvat -- one of several Latin versions of the proverb "Fortune favors the bold."
This served as a reminder that I had been meaning to post about Fortuna ever since she came up in William Wright's January 26 post "Predators, Manticores, Dwarf-Lions, the Mary Celeste, Sirens, and Illusions." In that post, he discusses a movie called The Last Unicorn, which I have never seen, and a character in it called Mommy Fortuna. Fortuna is the Latin name of the goddess Tyche, ancient mother of all Tychonieviches, and I suppose I show myself her true son in having taken "The highway is for gamblers" as my personal motto.
I thought of the old medieval poem from Carmina Burana which begins O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis -- "O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable." I posted about this back in 2019 as part of a series of posts on the development of the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card. The post even mentions "my august ancestress Tyche or Fortuna herself," tying in with the Mommy Fortuna theme. After holding forth on the philosophical meaning of the symbol, I end with a throwaway pun:
I had no deeper meaning in mind than that cats like to eat tuna, but Túna, as a geographical name from Tolkien's writings, where it is glossed "Hill City," has appeared several times on William Wright's blog, suggesting other possible meanings.
The idea of Fortuna as a single goddess who changes "like the moon" was synchronistically interesting to me. William's post with Mommy Fortuna was largely in response to my own January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge." In that post, I discuss the Piers Anthony character Chameleon, who first came up on my blog as the mother of the character Dor. In the novel A Spell for Chameleon, we meet three very different women -- Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon -- who all turn out to be the same person, Chameleon, who undergoes extreme physical and psychological changes in a regular cycle following the phases of the moon. He personal lunar cycle only has three "phases," though.
In my January 5 post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," I recount a dream in which a woman going by the pseudonym Claire Delune (i.e. clair de lune, "moonlight") elicited from me a poem about the phases of the moon, but only three phases were mentioned:
From none to half, or half to all, Or all to half, or half to none Takes seven days, and this we call A week, and now my tale is done.
It was the final line of this poem that first got me thinking about Chameleon, by way of her son Dor, as detailed in my January 7 post "My tail is dun."
On January 25, just after posting "An old pre-dator," I posted "Surround, confound," about a dream in which three women were singing. In comments there, William Wright suggested that, though they appeared human, the women in the dream might actually represent spiders. Then he added that they also reminded him of the Sirens.
That checks out. There were three Sirens according to Hesiod and many later writers (though not Homer, oddly), and as William notes there is something spider-like in the way the Sirens passively wait for victims to be drawn into their trap.
Then I thought of another female trio from myth: the Fates. One of them, Clotho, even has the spiderly task of spinning thread. Fate and fortune are clearly closely related concepts, which can be personified either as a single changeable woman (Fortuna) or as three different women (the Fates). Just as Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon in A Spell for Chameleon are aspects of a single woman, Chameleon; there is another Piers Anthony novel, With a Tangled Skein (which I have not read), in which Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are aspects of a single Irishwoman.
⁂
Several things have conspired to make me think of a Tarot card in connection with all this -- and no, not the Wheel of Fortune, but Strength.
First, the hoodie I saw today used fortis instead of the more canonical audentes. The card called Strength in English is Fortezza in Italian and Force in French, both of which derive from fortis.
Second, the card features an orange-colored tame feline, like the "Oh, for tuna!" image.
Third, in my October 2020 post "Can the deck itself be prophetic?" I discuss how the structure of the Rider-Waite deck itself successfully predicts the outcomes of five U.S. presidential elections in a row. (It strongly predicted a Trump win in 2020, though, which failed to play out.) In connecting the eighth trump with the 2008 election, I identified the woman on the card with Barack Obama's mother. Her name was Dunham, which means "hill home" -- a close cousin to the "Hill City" of Túna
Fourth, when I ran an image search for fortune favors the bold, this was one of the results:
Fifth, wolves have been in the sync stream, which prompted regular commenter Debbie (Ra1119bee) to leave a comment on this morning's post "The pillar of blackness" about how wolves have been paranormally associated with her. The first time she told me that story was in response to an email I sent her back in October 2021, just a few days after we first "met" online. I had written (edited slightly for privacy):
The other day, as I often do when some new person enters my life, I asked, "So who is this Debbie lady?" and drew a single Tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck. I got Strength, which portrays a woman with a lion. As I have detailed elsewhere on my blog, this image likely descends from pictures of Samson killing a lion -- with Samson's long hair causing someone along the line to mistake him for a woman. The idea of a "female Samson" relates directly to your name: Samson was one of the 12 biblical Judges, and the only female Judge -- the only woman ever to play Samson's role -- was Deborah. Note also that when Samson returned to look at the body of the lion he had killed, "behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion" (Judges 14:8).
On August 19 . . . I had posted about the version of this card that appears in the music video for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple" (https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2021/08/strength-in-grateful-dead-ripple-video.html). In the "Ripple" version, the woman is black and wears a crown of red flowers. . . . The "Ripple" version also removes the Samson imagery, replacing the lion with a wolf.
Debbie had replied with her wolf stories, explaining how the wolf version fit her even better than the lion. So reading those stories again today was yet another factor steering my attention to the Strength card.
Sixth, one of the things William Wright says about Mommy Fortuna in his post is that "she captures an old harmless lion, and has him appear as a fearsome Manticore."
In my December 2020 post "Here come the twenties," I proposed as a theme song for the whole decade a track from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence.
Did you know that the oxymoronic idea of a "roaring silence" is actually biblical? I didn't until my recent engagement with the Penitential Psalms: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long" (Ps. 32:3).
Recently the sync fairies have been drawing my attention to the old They Might Be Giants song "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" -- the first track from their first album (1986).
The bridge contains these lines:
You know everything that I know,
so I know you've heard the voice
that makes the silent noise
They don't actually use the word roar, but the concept is similar -- and the silent roar syncs with another TMBG theme: a lion in space:
In the spaceship, the silver spaceship,
The lion takes control
In a lion were in space, his roaring would naturally be silent, as They remind us in another song:
I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there
On a whim, I ran a search for can't hear the roar, and it turned up a Science Daily article about how the paralyzing power of a tiger's roar may come from the part we can't hear. The article is dated December 29, 2000. I found it today, December 29, 2022 -- the same date, only in the Year of the Tiger.
