Some years ago I read a story set in the future, and one of the characters mentioned more-or-less in passing the legend of the great painter Michael the Archangel, whose paintings had (I think) some sort of magical qualities -- the implication for the reader being that, in this distant future, the memory of Michelangelo Buonarroti had become conflated with religious traditions about the Archangel Michael.
I read very little science fiction, so this should be easy for me to trace to its source, but I'm drawing a blank. If any of my readers happen to remember this story, too, please help jog my memory.
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I thought it might be from Scott Alexander's Kabbalistic sci-fi novel Unsong, so I did a word search for archangel -- not a very smart choice, since one of the main characters is an archangel! One of the search results caught my eye. The Archangel Uriel is conversing with Sohu West. (In the original, archangels speak in all caps. I have spared the reader this annoyance.)
"I run continental drift, and guide the butterfly migration, and keep icebergs in the right place, and prevent people from boiling goats in their mothers' milk. . . . I have never seen anything to convince me that God plays an active part in the universe. His role seems to be entirely ontological."
"You can't be a deist! You're an archangel!"
"I am not a very good archangel."
"What about San Francisco?" [which in the novel has been transformed into heaven on earth]
"God can have a right hand as well as a left hand. I see no evidence that either is controlled by any head. . . . God created Adam Kadmon, the fundamental structure that binds everything together. . . ."
In my October 21 post "17 years ago our eyes were opened," I mentioned "migrating monarch butterflies." San Francisco is a link to the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel," also posted on October 21. God's right hand is mentioned (in connection with San Francisco), and then the creation of Adam Kadmon; in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, God touches Adam with his right hand; in the Babylon Bee article quoted in that post, Pope Francis (who, like San Francisco, is named after St. Francis), glues himself to God's right hand.
What of the idea of a God with no head? Both of the posts just linked deal with a YouTube video by Galahad Eridanus. Yesterday I watched all the other videos on his channel, including this one:
In this video, Eridanus says:
I've said to a few friends of mine that I see [Aleister Crowley's philosophy of] Thelema as a decapitated version of the same philosophy in my work -- that the two systems bear some philosophical resemblance to each other and that there is a certain resonance between them. However, my ideas find their symbolic head in Christ and the spirit of Christianity. This can be seen in the fact that the head of Abraxas represents Christ in my cosmogram. Thelema, by contrast, has no such authority. . . . Because of this choice of words, "decapitated," it gave me pause when I discovered that the Bornless Ritual which Crowley performed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was originally called the Headless Rite, and it begins with these words: "I summon you, Headless One!"
Now here's a really weird coincidence. On October 21 -- the same date I posted two posts linked above -- I read Chapters 9 to 11 of the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon. I noticed that in Chapter 10, three different things were described as lasting "forty and two years":
And when [Riplakish] had reigned for the space of forty and two years the people did rise up in rebellion against him; and there began to be war again in the land, insomuch that Riplakish was killed, and his descendants were driven out of the land (Ether 10:8).
And it came to pass that Levi did serve in captivity after the death of his father, for the space of forty and two years (Ether 10:15).
And it came to pass that Com drew away the half of the kingdom. And he reigned over the half of the kingdom forty and two years (Ether 10:32).
I later did a search and found that the number 42 occurs nowhere else in the Book of Mormon; all three instances are in the same chapter. I made a note to write a post about that later -- but what would the post say? Just that the number 42 shows up three times in this chapter and nowhere else? What would be the point of posting that?
As I was composing this present post, though, the reference to Aleister Crowley made me think of something: Didn't Crowley write something about the "Tenth Aethyr," and haven't I mentioned that on this blog before? Yes. The Tenth Aethyr is mentioned in passing in the June 2022 post "Choronzon 333." Galahad Eridanus's YouTube username is @Eridanus333.
This Aethyr being accursèd, and the seer forewarned, he taketh these precautions for the scribe.
First let the scribe be seated in the centre of the circle in the desert sand, and let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God --- Tetragrammaton and Shaddai El Chai and Ararita.
And let the Demon be invoked within a triangle, wherein is inscribed the name of Choronzon, and about it let him write ANAPHAXETON --- ANAPHANETON -- PRIMEUMATON, and in the angles MI-CA-EL: and at each angle the Seer shall slay a pigeon, and having done this, let him retire to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing, and sit within his black robe, secretly invoking the Aethyr.
The juxtaposition of angles and Mi-ca-el seemed synchronistically promising. I had been hoping for something about the number 42, though, and in this I was disappointed. So, wondering if Crowley had ever said anything about that number, I Googled aleister crowley "number 42"; the very first results called it the Great Number of the Curse -- which seemed potentially promising, seeing as how the Tenth Aethyr is said to be "accursèd."
I clicked the first link and hit synchronistic pay dirt!
Why a screenshot rather than just a quote? Because check out the header image. That's a picture of the Gnostic god Abraxas, an image which plays no particularly special role in the work of Crowley but is central to Galahad Eridanus's content.
For the sake of later searchability, here is the content of the above screenshot. It is taken from the commentary after the 42nd chapter of The Book of Lies:
This number 42 is the Great Number of the Curse. See Liber 418, Liber 500, and the essay on the Qabalah in the Temple of Solomon the King. This number is said to be all hotch-potch and accursed.
The chapter should be read most carefully in connection with the 10th Aethyr. It is to that dramatic experience that it refers.
There it is: An undeniable link between the number 42 and the 10th Aethyr. The wording even allows it to be read as if "the 10th Aethyr" were a chapter. Incidentally, The Book of Lies is also called Liber 333. In "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr," Choronzon says "My name is three hundred and thirty and three."
Note added:
I finished this post just around lunchtime, and the Crowley-related content put it into my head to have lunch at Café D&D, since their street address is 666. On the way there I passed this restaurant:
Buckskin is a Taiwanese beer brand; its logo is a horseshoe. In writing this post, I had to look up my old post "Choronzon 333," which features a photo of a "Nazi" soldier from the Fire Nation war, with a horseshoe on his skin, with the number 333:
Just after passing the restaurant, I stopped to get a photo of the horseshoe, but it wasn't visible from that side. (I had to make a U-turn to get the photo above.) What was visible from the other side was this:
A rooster's head. Note that in the "Theophany 2022" video above, Eridanus says that "the head of Abraxas represents Christ" in his system, and that Crowley's philosophy is "decapitated" because it lacks Christ. The head of Abraxas is a rooster's head. This is the first comment under the video:
"Interesting note about abraxas: both snakes and roosters are known for having bodies that seem to 'stay alive' for a while after they are beheaded. Ties into bornless ritual etc."
Having taken the photos above, I went on to D&D and had lunch. While I was waiting for my food, I read the last chapter of Ether, which includes this notorious and widely ridiculed verse:
And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died (Ether 15:31).
Shiz, like a snake or a rooster, seemed to stay alive for a while after he was beheaded. The mention of "his hands" in the verse is also relevant in connection with the Unsong quote about God having two hands but no head.
Further note added:
Several hours after posting this, with its references to slaying pigeons and decapitating roosters, I ran across this on a news-and-views site, showing Netanyahu symbolically decapitating a dove:
October 21 -- a date mentioned three times in this post (now four) -- is Netanyahu's birthday.
Has this post been exhausted yet? Nope. (A recent comment there: "If Jordan Peele doesn't use this as a sound effect, we riot.")
This reminded me that, despite all the syncs leading up the release of the Jordan Peele film NOPE, I never actually got around to watching it. I thought I'd peruse the plot summary on Wikipedia and see what it was about. When I opened the Wikipedia page, though, I first clicked on "Reception" to see if people had generally thought it was good (they had, natch), and then I started pressing "Page Up" to get back to the plot. Two page-ups took me to the soundtrack listing, though, where the title of the third track arrested my attention: "La Vie C'est Chouette." I wondered what chouette meant. Well . . .
Although "owl" was the meaning highlighted by Google, chouette is apparently much more commonly used as an adjective, meaning "nice, pleasant," and that is how it is used in the song, by Jodie Foster. When I looked up the lyrics, this bit got my attention:
Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?
Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?
La vie c'est chouette
All night, but with who?
All night, but with who?
Life is nice ("owl")
Qui, unlike our English who, doesn't sound like owl onomatopoeia, and the possibility of a deliberate bilingual pun seems remote.
I was led to this song by my post about Michael and an Owl. When I first linked Michael and the owl, in "The Locust Grove crop circle," it was through the word qui:
If the serpent is the Metal Worm, who is Michael? He's Mr. Owl, of course. In the de Vos painting of Michael, written around his hand is the Latin motto Qui ut Deus? -- a translation of the literal meaning of the name Michael. In English, it would be Who is like God?
This morning I taught an English grammar lesson to an adult student, about the use of can, could, and be able to. The exercises in the textbook included these sentences:
5. I can't understand Michael. I've never ____________ understand him.
6. I can't see you on Friday, but I ____________ meet you on Saturday morning.
7. Ask Catherine about your problem. She might ____________ help you.
These days any reference to Michael gets my attention, as that archangel has been in the sync stream a great deal. Seeing the name Catherine just two lines later made me think of St. Catherine and reminded me that Michael, Margaret, and Catherine were the three saints who appeared in vision to Joan the Maid.
In fact, I had already been primed to think of Catherine as a saint because of something I had read yesterday evening, while teaching a different unit from the same book to different students. The unit was about the correct use of the (which is much more complicated than most native speakers realize!), and the point was being made that the definite article is not used with people's titles -- that, for example, we say "the sergeant" but not "the Sergeant Pepper." The following examples were given:
Mr. Johnson / Doctor Johnson / Captain Johnson / President Johnson
Uncle Robert / Saint Catherine / Princess Anne 等。（並非 the . . .）
This got my attention even at the time because, although I suppose most people have heard of St. Catherine, hers hardly seems like the first name that would come to mind if you just wanted a random example of "Saint so-and-so."
Anyway, returning to "Ask Catherine about your problem," an exercise on the next page had the question, "When should I call Angela?" with a prompt intended to elicit the answer, "You could call her now." Angela, a female angel, was close enough to the female saint I had just been thinking about, that it made me think I was perhaps being nudged to pray to St. Catherine.
Angela also made me think of my recent dream, in which a Spanish girl had said "No me llamo Marcela. Me llamo Gabriela." -- Angela and Gabriela being conceptually similar names. After the class, on a whim, I Googled marcela gabriela to see if the two names had any special connection, but I just got random people's social media pages. Then I Googled the whole Spanish quotation. This turned up a children's book called Me Llamo Gabriela, about the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. I looked her up on Wikipedia but found nothing of interest. I did note, though, that Gabriela Mistral was a pseudonym, and that her real name was Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. It struck me as typically Spanish that her name included not just María but the full title María del Perpetuo Socorro.
I then turned to looking for prayers to St. Catherine, and what kept coming up was the St. Catherine of Alexandria Novena. Never having been Catholic, I had only the vaguest idea of what a novena is, so my next stop was the Wikipedia article for "Novena." The illustration at the beginning caught my eye.
Isn't it obvious that Our Lady of Perpetual Help is identical to María del Perpetuo Socorro?
It turns out (see Debbie's comment here) that my most recent reference to the Locust Grove crop circle (pdf), in "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl," was posted on the 19th anniversary of the appearance of that formation on August 24, 2003. On the same date in 2004 a very similar formation appeared in Miamisburg, Ohio (pdf).
The glove puppet referenced in the title of that post is from an episode of the British TV show Pipkins. As WanderingGondola pointed out in a comment, the broadcaster's logo features a vesica piscis -- actually, two overlapping vesicae, each with a circle inscribed in it to make an eye shape (as in the Locust Grove formation), and these circles overlap to form a third vesica. The whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to the 2004 Miamisburg crop formation.
Here's a schematic representation of the geometry of the ATV logo, which is based on four overlapping circles forming two vesicae piscium in which smaller circles are inscribed.
There's another well-known logo that approximates this same geometry pretty closely.
WanderingGondola also calls attention to two other interesting features of the Pipkins video. At the end of the glove puppet story, Johnny asks Moony to ask Michael to say the word it's, which he does. Then a series of images of clocks flashes on the screen for a few seconds, and then the word Time. Johnny then appears, completing the sentence: "[It's time] for me to make a glove puppet."
This fits with recent syncs involving such phrases as "It's time," "Now is the time," "The time is now," and "Time's up." (See "Owl time, and cold noodles." I notice now that the owl featured on that post is blue, like X and Meneer de Uil.)
Also, the credits at the end feature a name which is interesting in the context of the Mormon doctrine that Adam, the first man, is the same individual as Michael the Archangel.
WanderingGondola also notes that X the Owl get his name from the word escape, mispronounced by Daniel Striped Tiger as X-scape, and that Xscape also happens to be the name of a posthumously released Michael Jackson song and album. Check out what, according to IMDb, Michael Eve was doing just before his work on Pipkins.
Of course the series is a decade too early to have anything to do with Michael Jackson's Thriller, but the name is still quite a coincidence. It's not a just a Michael Jackson album; it's the Michael Jackson album, the only one a non-fan like myself would be able to name off the top of my head.
Michael Eve also worked on a series called Knock on Any Door in 1966. In the O. Henry story "The Green Door," the protagonist, Rudolf Steiner (no relation!) is handed a mysterious card with "The Green Door" written on it, and responds by entering a nearby apartment building, seeing a green door, and knocking on it. Only much later does he discover that all the doors in the building are green, and that he could have knocked on any one of them.
Back on August 17, Bruce Charlton posted an episode from the old children's TV show Pipkins (which I had never heard of), in which Hartley Hare buys a glove puppet named Michael and uses it to "be naughty" -- bonking someone on the head, stealing food, etc. -- always saying, "It wasn't me! It was Michael!"
I didn’t actually watch the video until a couple of days ago. The name Michael caught my attention, of course, given the recent syncs related to an archangel by that name, but I couldn't see any connection between an angel and a glove puppet used by a hare as an excuse for "being naughty." Then I went back on YouTube to watch it again, searching for the video instead of clicking Bruce's link. I got a different video -- identical to Bruce's, except that it begins with Hartley announcing, "This episode is called 'The Glove Puppet.' He's called Michael after our director" -- meaning Michael Jeans, the creator of the show.
So in a way it really was Michael doing all those naughty things! Michael the puppet is controlled by Hartley Hare, who is himself a puppet controlled by Nigel Plaskitt, who is an actor saying and doing as directed by -- Michael!
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After writing the above, I took a break to do some simple housework and put some music on. It only took a few minutes, so I only listened to one song:
I think of this as basically Linkin Park (plus Mike Shinoda, who is also Linkin Park) -- but the instrumentals and some of the background vocals are from Train, a group I know only for that awful song that sounds like Dobie Gray minus the soul. I looked up the Train song used in the above video. It's crap, too -- as usual, Kill_mR_DJ redeems it -- but the name caught my attention: "Angel in Blue Jeans." Fancy running into a song called that just after discovering that Pipkins was created and directed by someone called Michael Jeans!
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The general appearance of Michael the glove puppet, particularly his very large nose, made me think of another such puppet: Lady Elaine Fairchild from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Michael (left) and Lady Elaine
I hadn't thought about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in ages, and looking up images of Lady Elaine led me to a character I had completely forgotten about: X the Owl, the blue owl who lives in a tree, says "How in the world are ya?" and takes correspondence courses from O.C.S.
This got my attention not because of the general owl theme in recent syncs, but because I have specifically connected Mr. Owl (from the palindrome) with Michael the Archangel. I first made this connection in "The Locust Grove crop circle," the original link being the word who. Owls say "who," and the name Michael means "Who is like God?"
This morning (August 24) I received an email from Debbie with the subject line "Strange Owl Synchronicity." She had stopped at a gas station near Cincinnati (and therefore not far from Locust Grove) and found that someone had drawn an owl on a brick wall at one of the pumps.
Just above this owl, on the white material at the top of the wall, someone had written "WHO?" -- with an X inscribed in the O.
If memory serves, this is only the second time in my life anyone has emailed me a photo of graffiti. The first time was three days previous, on August 21, when an anonymous correspondent sent me this:
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Note added: How did I miss this little sync wink in the Pipkins video?
It's not just that there's a green door; there's a moment when there's nothing but a green door on the screen.
Today I was on the road at a time when I would not normally have been; I had just come home and then had to go back out because I had forgotten something. While I was out, my eyes were drawn to a license plate that said MRQ 2310.
It was "Mr. Q" that first got my attention. There's been a lot of talk about "Mr. Owl" on this blog recently, particularly as a reference to Michael the Archangel. On July 29 (also, coincidentally, the day known as "Ghost Door Opens" on the Chinese calendar), I received an email from a woman using a pseudonym that begins with the letter Q, in which she said, "There is no real 'Mr. Q[...]' at this time, so with some of the things I've been reading about guardian angels, I'm beginning to wonder if Michael himself might be my guardian, or at least have an eye out for me."
So apparently Mr. Q is yet another name for Michael. In "More Mr. Owl," I noted that the Mr. Owl title does not identify Michael with the owl but with the owl's male counterpart, the hawk. In "If 6 turned out to be 9," I connected the owl with 6 and the hawk with 9. Note that a lowercase 'q' looks like 9, and that the Japanese word for "nine" is kyu -- a pun used, for example, in the title of Haruki Murakami's book 1Q84.
So what about the rest of the license plate? Well, it's my initials, for starters: 23 = W, and 10 = J. I thought there must be more to it than that, though (these things are always overdetermined), so I thought, "Well, what are its factors? It looks like it's divisible by 77, which is the S:E:G: value of Christ . . ." and, still on my motorcycle, I started doing the math in my head. Sure enough, 2310 is 77 times 30. At that moment, I passed a 7-Eleven convenience store, and I thought, "And 77 is 7 times 11, and -- holy shit!"
Why have I associated the owl with the number 6? Because of a restaurant called Six Owl Door, and accompanying syncs featuring six owls, an owl and six doors, etc. On July 28, Ben left a comment in which he linked to a photo of three doors marked with numbers.
The doors are numbered 11, 7, and 15 -- the product of which is 1155. If 1155 means three doors, then six doors would be twice 1155, which is, yes, 2310.
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In other news, here's what's going on in the world of horse racing:
LSP in Grand Prairie, Texas, hosted a horse race for three-year-olds and up, and for most of the maiden race a four-year-old gelding named Moro Flyboy had a clear lead ahead of the rest of the competition, including a horse named “Heavenly Trump.”
As Flyboy, led by apprentice jockey Simon Camacho-Benitez, approached the final stretch of the race, the horse began to veer toward the track’s inside rail.
After flying too close to the sun, Moro Flyboy made contact with the rail and bucked Camacho-Benitez yards from the finish line, which gave way for Heavenly Trump to step up and steal the race (not like that).
The indisputable, Balaam-inspired act of God propelled Heavenly Trump to victory. Camacho-Benitez and Flyboy were reportedly unscathed after the incident.
From the accompanying video, it appears that Heavenly Trump is a white or light-gray horse, ridden by a jockey with a yellow cap.
"Heavenly Trump" is presumably a reference to the biblical "last trump" which calls the dead to rise from their graves, as illustrated on the 20th trump of the Tarot. The article, though, is obviously playing on the similarity of the name to that of Trump, the politician. Well, I made that connection long ago.
I also connected Trump with "The other Trump trump," the Sun. This card, which is associated with Gemini and Flag Day (Trump's sign and birthday), shows a yellow-haired child riding a white or light-gray horse next to a wall. Notice that when Moro Flyboy hits the "wall," bucking the jockey, the article refers to it as "flying too close to the sun."
Moro Flyboy -- Heavenly Trump's rival -- is connected in the article with the biblical story of Balaam, whose mount "thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam's foot against the wall." Balaam wasn't riding a horse, though, but a donkey -- symbol of the Democratic Party. I suppose this all syncs with Biden's foot fractures shortly after the election, and his recent fall from his bicycle.
Last night, I read this in Clelland's book about owls:
The woman I spoke with is Jacquelin Smith, and along with having UFO contact experiences, she is an author, psychic and animal communicator. Her first book from 2005 was titled, plainly enough, Animal Communication.
This reminded me that I had on one of my bookshelves a book with the very similar title Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews, which I had picked up for a dollar years ago at a used bookstore but had never so much as opened. Today I decided to take it down from the shelf and see if it had anything interesting to say about owls.
I opened the book at random -- a 383-page book which, the cover promises, covers "creatures great and small" and "includes a comprehensive dictionary of animal, bird, and reptile symbolism" -- and these are the pages I got:
That's right, I just happened to open up directly to the first page of the entry for "Owl." Either the book's previous owner consulted the owl article a lot, or else it's just one of those weird coincidences.
Skimming what Mr. Andrews has to say about owls, I don't find too much that's new to me. However, a few passages caught my eye. The first:
To the early Christians and Gnostics, [the owl] is associated with Lilith, the first wife of Adam who refused to be submissive to him.
In my last post, I said that Adam is (according to Joseph Smith) the same personage as Michael the Archangel, and the title of the post was "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl." One possible meaning of the title "Mr. Owl" would be a man who is married to an owl.
Andrews also mentions how owls blink:
Like humans, they blink by closing the upper eyelids, giving them a human expression which has added to the mysticism of owls.
In "The Locust Grove crop circle," where I first proposed that Michael was Mr. Owl, I said that Michael means "Who is like God?" I wanted to add a picture of an owl with the word "Who?" so I searched the Web for one. As it happens, I ended up choosing an animated gif of an owl blinking.
Finally, this passage suggests that "Mr. Owl" might not actually be an owl at all but a hawk.
Some owls have a balancing raptor. The owl is lunar and nocturnal, while some raptors are diurnal and solar. Owls and some hawks will share the same territory, one hunting and using it by day, and the other by night. They don't necessarily get along, but they do tolerate each other in varying degrees. These can be seen as balancing medicines, and rituals and meditations can be used with the owl and its solar equivalent. They can be used to balance the male and female.
There follows a table of owls species, each with its corresponding species of hawk or falcon.
Of all the Archangels, Michael is the head of this order. He is often depicted with sword in hand. He appears to me as bright and shimmering golden energy (this color is associated with the higher heavenly energy chakras located well above the head), as an image of a brilliant golden wing, in human form dressed in white with wings and carrying a sword or glowing with a gold aura, and in the form of birds of prey, such as falcons and hawks.
More syncs? More syncs. True player don't get no time to sleep. I see there are some comments on my last post already, but I haven't read them yet. I need to get this typed up first.
In my last post, I identified the constellations Hercules and Draco with St. Michael and the Dragon. I further identified the Dragon with the Metal Worm and Michael with Mr. Owl (as in the palindrome "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm") -- this latter connection being made on the rather flimsy grounds that Michael’s name means "Who is like God?"
Shortly after posting that, I went outside to take out the trash. I noticed a big gecko on a wall I was walking past, and I stopped to watch it for a bit, thinking, "Hey, it’s a dragon!" This is uncharacteristic behavior; geckos are extremely common in this part of the world, and ordinarily I would no more take notice of one than I would of a cockroach. This one felt like a significant "dragon," though, and I sort of expected something synchromystically relevant to happen with it. Nothing did, though, so after a minute or so I went on my way.
Later, I checked my blog for new comments, and then I checked the stats, which I don't do very often. I saw that I had had about 12,000 hits last month and about 10,000 so far this month. I used the calculator app on my phone to work out about how many hits per day that was.
Then I started reading, you guessed it, Mike Clelland's The Messengers. I came to a section with the heading "333 and orchestrated clues." Seeing that numerologically significant number reminded me that I wanted to check the gematria value of a particular word. I brought up the calculator app to do so and found that my last calculation was still on the screen:
So that got my attention. In this section, Clelland tells the story of a woman who kept running into the number 333 and the time 3:33. It seemed significant, but she couldn't figure out what it meant. Then, on what I infer from astrological clues given later in the text was January 24, 2003, she had a close-range sighting of a large triangular UFO with three lights on it, and the 333 syncs abruptly stopped. This woman was an astrologer, and later she was browsing her ephemeris and noticed this:
For the entirety of 2003, the number 3:33 appeared just one and only time for the Sun, the brightest and most important astrological luminary, and this fell on the very day of her triangle sighting.
Of course in the course of a year, the Sun will pass the 3°33′ mark in each of the 12 zodiac signs, but the standard Swiss ephemeris only gives the planets' positions for midnight Greenwich time each day of the year. That's how I inferred that her triangle sighting was on January 24 (Clelland only says "a winter's evening in 2003"); the emphemeris gives the Sun's position for that date as 3Aqu33′56.
The woman was still at a loss regarding the meaning of 333 until her epiphany finally came in the strangest way imaginable:
Kaye looked at a fish aquarium in the office. She was shocked to see that the little catfish Draco had been chewing on his favorite treat, an English cucumber. She said, "It was almost like a magnet drew my eyes to the cucumber!"
The fish had eaten out the middle of the cucumber slice, so there was now a perfectly formed hole in the precise shape of an equilateral triangle. Seeing this, she realized instantly how all the clues were related and couldn't believe that she had missed something so obvious.
Sounds like one of those koan stories, doesn't it? "At that moment, Kaye became enlightened."
This first caught my attention because of the name Draco (italicized in the original), since I had just posted about the constellation Draco. Then I noticed a really weird coincidence: Kaye saw that a catfish had eaten a triangle out of a cucumber. It just so happens that I have in my house a cat called Triangle and another cat called Cucumber.
And finally we come to the Michael part. Clelland comments:
While there is no owl in this account, it does show up indirectly. The catfish shares its name with Draco the Dragon, a constellation that wraps itself around Polaris, the North Star. In Greek legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and thrown into the heavens where we still see it each night. Minerva, as we know, has a companion little owl.
That's actually just one of many myths relating to Draco (others identify it with Ladon, the dragon that guarded the Golden Apples and was killed by Hercules). But Clelland identifies the (female) conqueror of Draco with the owl. That makes Michael, the male conqueror of the the Dragon, Mr. Owl.
Hercules killed the dragon in order to secure the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. This combination of garden, serpent, and forbidden apples naturally leads one to identify Hercules with Adam. The Locust Grove crop circle was in Adams County, Ohio; and Mormonism holds that Adam is the same person as the Archangel Michael.
What time did I read this story in Clelland's book? Well, my calculator screenshot was at 2:06, and I took a screenshot of the bit about Draco and Minerva at 2:29. That means that at 2:27 -- exactly 3 hours and 33 minutes after posting about Draco in my last post -- I was reading this Clelland story about Draco and the significance of 3:33.
I was going to post all this last night, but it was already very late, so I decided to go to bed and leave it for the morning. I had only been in bed for a few minutes when my wife (who is even more of a night owl than myself) called me to come downstairs. There was a baby gecko in the living room, and she wanted me to catch it and take it outside before the cats killed it.
How's that for a nice synchronistic punctuation mark?
In the comments to "The vesica piscis and the blue moon," Ben linked to the (reportedly miraculous) icon of Archangel Michael of Panormitas, apparently because the Sun's face on the Flammarion engraving reminded him of it.
The Flammarion engraving includes both this Sun and a crescent Moon, as does the Nebra sky disc -- which was in the post because Debbie had referred me to it in connection with a dream of hers that prominently featured the number 132.
Only later did Ben notice that Michael of Panormitas has a Sun and Moon on his breastplate:
I had never seen St. Michael portrayed this way -- it made me think of the Sun and Moon on the breastplate of Oswald Wirth's Emperor -- so I did some searching to see if I could find other instances. I found many -- all from Mexico, all based on this original painting by Maerten de Vos -- currently in St. Bonaventure Cathedral in Cuautitlán, Mexico.
Quoting an article I had linked to about the de Vos painting, Ben notes the similarity of Michael's cuirass to the Nebra sky disc.
"Fundamentally respecting the chromatic code reserved and required for the graphic representation of this member of the Catholic body of saints, the Archangel Michael is depicted dressed in a blue cuirass, adorned all over its surface with gold stars, accompanied by a sun and moon on his pectorals, the former on the right one the latter on the left. His armor is further embellished with ruffled orange-yellow sleeves that stick out from his undershirt, and an underskirt of the same color."
Sounds just like the Nebra sky disc.
Debbie found a reference to the oldest version of the Nebra sky disc having 32 stars, which was a possible link to her dream about the number 132. On the same day, I received an email also featured the number 132: "Hebrews 13:2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
The allusion is to Abraham entertaining three guests prior to the destruction of Sodom. His guests are described only as "three men," but Jewish tradition, since at least the time of Rashi (1040-1105), identifies them as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Two centuries after Rashi, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher solidified this tradition by pointing out that the Hebrew gematria value of "and lo three men" (Gen. 18:2) is 701, equal to that of "these are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael."
So that's a fairly direct link between Michael the Archangel and 132.
Joan and the ark: Old Testament "arks" are associated with Joan's banner.
Later, the emphasis shifted to her sword, and this sword was associated with Donald Trump:
In hoc signo vinces? Joan's sword as an answer to the question "What's going on in Washington?"
Darkest hour: The dream-phrase épée d'Arc is associated with a Babylon Bee article in which Trump has "the Darksaber."
Small hands, you say? Much is made of Joan's sword being held by someone with small hands, a stereotypical attribute of Trump.
Trump with a sword again: The sync fairies lead me to a random op-ed in which the author randomly says "for some reason I picture Trump carrying a sword."
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St. Michael
On February 8, I received an email from a regular correspondent, subject line "The Archangel Michael," soliciting thoughts on "whether Michael means anything special (perhaps vital?) for modern Christians, here-and-now."
I replied that I had no particular beliefs or feelings about that specific archangel, but that a Latin prayer to St. Michael, recommended to me by another online friend, had once proved effective in a specific unusual situation I found myself in back in the summer of 2019.
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Hundred years' wars
This morning, yet another online friend, knowing and sharing my particular interest in Joan of Arc, sent me a link to a January 3 sermon by an anonymous Catholic priest on Regina Prophetarum, called "Ending the Hundred Years War Using Saint Joan's Holy Banner of War" (mp3). After a Hail Mary and some other preliminaries, it begins thus:
Saint Joan of Arc led her army to some of the greatest military victories in the history of the world. To make these victories possible, she was instructed by Heaven to make a banner with the holy names of Jesus and Mary painted upon it. She herself held this banner and led the way to victory, saying later, "I loved my banner 40 times better than my sword."
Joan struck the decisive blow in the Hundred Years' War with England, and the priest then refers to "a new Hundred Years' War . . . declared by the Devil himself in the hearing of Pope Leo XIII." In this war, "we have the names of Jesus and Mary, the holy names, but they need to be brought back and placed on the standard of war." The priest later says, "We need another Joan to lead the way. Come back, dear Joan! We need you again, to put a death blow to this new Hundred Years' War."
Joan has come back. I am not her only witness.
Not being familiar with this "new Hundred Years' War" declared by the Devil, I looked it up and found an article called "Leo XIII & the one hundred years."
It is said that after he had celebrated Mass in the presence of some Cardinals and members of the Vatican staff on October 13th, 1884, Pope Leo experienced a vision of the future concerning the Church in which the power of Satan would be unleashed for a period of 100 years. He was so shaken by the spectre of the destruction of moral and spiritual values both inside and outside the Church that he composed a prayer to St Michael the Archangel which he ordered to be said at the end of each Mass throughout the Catholic Church. This is the prayer--
St Michael the Archangel defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God restrain him, we humbly pray, and do thou, the prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
This got my attention because I immediately recognized it as an English translation of the Latin prayer to St. Michael that had just been brought back to my memory by a random email query.
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Many suns
Here is another extract from the sermon on Joan's banner.
In her great work The Mystical City of God, Venerable Mother Mary of Ágreda speaks of when the time had come to name the Holy Child on the octave day of Christmas. She writes, "When the great mistress of heaven -- Our Lady -- and St Joseph conversed with each other about the holy name of Jesus, innumerable angels descended in human form from on high, clothed in shining white garments . . . and emitted a greater splendor than many suns.
I had been listening to this sermon alone in my car. When I arrived home, I found that my wife had put some music on. She's been on a Chester Bennington kick lately, and I was greeted by the Linkin Park song "The Catalyst."
God save us, every one. Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns? For the sins of our hand, The sins of our tongue, The sins of our father, The sins of our young? -- No!
I recognized "a thousand suns" as an allusion to the Bhagavad Gita -- the lines made famous by Oppenheimer when he quoted them with reference to the atomic bomb: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once in the sky, that would be the splendor of the Mighty One."
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Bigger than Trump
Near the end of the sermon I listened to, the priest says that, while he certainly hopes Trump will be restored to the presidency, we need to realize that our problems will not be solved by having a crooked election set right, that we must set our sights higher.
I have associated Trump with Joan's sword. But Joan loved her banner -- bearing angels and the holy names of Jesus and Mary -- 40 times better than her sword.
I have associated Trump with the Sun. But the angels associated with the holy names of Jesus and Mary emitted a greater splendor than many Suns.
I feel that a very coherent message has, in the language of synchronicity, been communicated to me.
