Fire and Ice 2: Geothermal Boogaloo

The first synchronicity that registered with me as such had to do with Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice." It happened around 1991, and I discussed it in my 2019 post "Fire and Ice."

I was reminded of this today when I received an English magazine with this on the cover:

I also noticed "The Little Helicopter on the Red Planet" in connection with "The Gospel of Luke on Lobsterback." In that post, I discussed the transportation of the "Gospel of Luke" from "Britain" to "Armorica" on "lobsterback" -- all in scare quotes because probably none of those terms is meant literally. "Snails" were involved in this transportation. A helicopter could also be used to transport things across the sea, and the first element in that word is the combining form of Helix, which is a genus of snails. In the post I noted that lobsterback was historical slang for a British soldier, referring to the red coats they wore, and that previous dreams and syncs had introduced the idea of "Britain as another planet." The planet the lobsterbacks are from would naturally be the Red Planet, just as the planet the little skinny creatures are from is the Little Skinny Planet. In fact, in my post "Britain as another planet," I explicitly bring in Mars, referencing, among other things, a Muse music video featuring "a planet that looks like Mars but turns out to be Britain."

Coming back to the main cover story, though, it sent me back to my 2019 post, which included a still from This Is Spinal Tap. (That absolutely perfect movie, together with The Princess Bride, is why I will never denounce Rob Reiner, no matter how much of an ass he has made of himself since then.) The scene I was referencing was this:

Derek Smalls says of his bandmates:

We're very lucky in a sense that we've got two visionaries in the band. You know, David and Nigel are both, like, like poets, you know, like Shelley and Byron and people like that. They're two totally distinct types of visionaries. It's like fire and ice, basically, you see, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

Rewatching the clip just now, I noticed the Luke reference ("lukewarm water") and the names Shelley and Byron. Byron is, by a very wide margin, the English-language poet I have read the most and whose poetic style has most influenced my own. I haven't read too much of him recently, but just a few days ago, as documented in "No more a roving," I was nudged by Claire to take down his collected works and see what page was bookmarked. It was "So, we'll go no more a roving." This poem is very prominently featured in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, so that's another link to the Red Planet.

I'm fairly indifferent to Shelley as a poet, though he's been in the sync stream from time to time, mostly in connection with "The Sensitive Plant." When I heard the name Shelley in the video, though, my thoughts immediately went to a children's book I have at my school called What's in My Classroom? It's a very short, very simple book, only 10 pages, in which children give each other clues and try to guess what in the classroom they're thinking of. It ends with this:

Shelly appears to be a red-eared slider, a fairly close relative of the box turtle. In "Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)," I recount a vision involving a box turtle and compare it to a story by William Wright about a Herbie the Hamster. Herbie lives in a glass enclosure which apparently has no lid, because in the end he succeeds in climbing out of it. Shelly the Turtle, as you can see, also lives in a glass enclosure with no lid, and also gets out of it in the end.

Also, take a look at the books the children are reading on p. 9. The boy's book has pictures of golden autumn leaves -- a major theme here recently. The girl's book has golden flowers, something William Wright has just posted about in "Gold and Red Stars: El-Anor and the Sawtooth Stone." His "Red Star" reference is of course another link to the Red Planet.

Finally, I should mention the possible significance of the book title What's in My Classroom? In a comment on his post "Behold, God's gift! Peter-Pharazon to come back together with John," William Wright links the idea of a classroom with the Mountain (i.e., in his reading, planet) of the Lord's House:

In my story, shoes are associated with reach the Peak, just as changing one's shoes in William's school is also required to ascend the stairs to the classroom. The classroom reference at the top of the stairs is interesting because Isaiah mentions that when the Mountain of the Lord's House is again established in the top of the Mountains, people will want to go there so they can learn, like one does in a classroom.

Update (later the same day): Hours after posting the above, I was preparing for a class and saw these three pictures:

All together on the page, there’s a turtle, a snail, Mars, and a red coat (“lobsterback”).

I also got word that a new student is going to join one of my classes, and the English name he uses is Byron.

Then this evening I checked Slate Star Codex for the first time in months and found a newly posted review of Byron’s Don Juan written in the style of the poem itself.

(Don Juan has its moments, but writing it in clunky pentameter stanzas was a mistake. Tetrameter with an irregular rhyme scheme suited Byron perfectly, and a Don Juan written in Giaour-style verse would have been brilliant. No, I’m not going to do it myself.)

Hay fever

My March 22 post "Eye drops on 113/3/20" documented syncs largely centered around Bruce Charlton's "Why should I care if a mouse has hay fever?" post, which was about a brand of eye drops with a name that implied it was intended for mice. Eye drops and mice entered into the sync stream, but hay fever as such did not -- until now.

Last night I taught a high-school level EFL class, and a vocabulary exercise in the students' textbook included the sentence "Hay fever is an allergy to pollen":

Then this morning I read William Wright's latest, "Thomas B. Marsh, Peter, Alma (the Elder), and Uriel the Archangel," in which it is proposed that the four characters in the title are incarnations of the same being. Thomas B. Marsh has been connected with the word bucket -- see "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" -- and in "Je suis Charlie Bucket," I went on to connect the bucket theme with Aaron Smith-Teller's Kabbalistic analysis of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. Since the Archangel Uriel is one of the main characters in Unsong, William's post sent me back to reread that chapter again.

Hay, it turns out, plays a key role in Smith-Teller's exegesis:

And Liza replies: "With straw, dear Henry."

Straw is a kind of hay. Hay is the Monogrammaton, the shortest Name of God. The universe can only be made whole through divine intervention.

But the straw is too long; even the shortest Name of God is too big to fit. Any dose of God would burn the universe to ashes; that’s how this whole problem started. With what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza? How can God be channeled and applied to the universe safely?

Hay -- or rather its homophone, the Hebrew letter He -- is the shortest Name of God, but even that "would burn the universe to ashes." Fever derives from an Indo-European root meaning "to burn." The problem Smith-Teller is describing is Hay fever.

Scrolling down to the comments on the Unsong chpater, I found that a reader with hayseed (or possibly strawseed) pretensions had, predictably, taken exception to the city-slicker ignorance of Smith-Teller's claim that "straw is a kind of hay":

Aaron may be the divil an’ all for brains when it comes to kabbalah, but he knows nothing about fodder.

Straw and hay are different (as in the old joke about the army sergeant trying to teach country recruits to march. Since they weren’t able to tell their right foot from their left, teaching them “Left, right, left, right, left!” wasn’t working. So he got them to tie a wisp of hay to one foot, and a sop of straw to the other, and then he was able to get them all to march by saying “Hay foot, straw foot, hay foot, straw foot!”)

Straw is the dry stalks of cereal plants left after the grain has been thrashed out. You can feed it to animals, but it serves the same purpose as fibre in a human diet: as roughage, not as something to live on.

Hay is dried grasses (or legumes, like alfalfa). It is fodder (that is, food) for animals. Though nowadays, farmers have gone to silage rather than hay as stored animal feed.

So Aaron’s exegesis drops stone dead at that point where he goes “Straw is a kind of hay”. In the same fashion as a hat is a kind of a bucket, dear Aaron (ten-gallon hats, anyone?)

The line I have bolded -- saying that straw is no more hay than a hat is a bucket -- jumped out at me because some of William Wright's Thomas B. Bucket material has in fact equated hats with buckets. His post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone" -- taking my own post about the Unsong chapter as a starting point -- devotes a few paragraphs to the idea of a "bucket hat."

This afternoon, I taught a different English class, for junior-high level students, and their vocabulary for the day included this:

It's the word straw, and the very first example sentence is about a hat. The second sentence, "I need a straw for drinking," also ties in with the bucket song since, ultimately, the reason Henry needs a straw is so that he can mend his bucket and fetch some water.

The idea of Hay as a divine name made me think of how Yah -- Hay backwards -- is also a divine name. In the bucket song, Harry wants to cut the straw -- and wouldn't you know it, the most famous divine name of all is hew hay (i.e. cut straw) spelled backwards.

Straw backwards is warts, which made me think of an old Pogo strip by Walt Kelly. It's a crying shame that no one has yet devised a Pogo counterpart to the Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine, but I was eventually able to track down the strip in question, from July 12, 1958:

"Warts spelled backwards is 'Straw', that bone building beloved cereal favored by young and old." Cereal has been a recurring sync theme, and it is also a word emphasized by the straw-isn't-hay commenter, who insists that "straw is the dry stalks of cereal plants."

My "Eye drops on 113/3/20" post referenced a comment by Debbie which referenced the number 113 in connection with the "fake colonel" concept. I introduced the latter theme in "Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels," a post which, as the title suggests, also makes prominent reference to straw. The golden straw syncs were old ones, from November 2015. Debbie's dream about the number 113 is also an old one, from December 2015.

Je suis Charlie Bucket

In my February 16 post "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" I write about a Ward Radio episode in which host Cardon Ellis repeatedly misspeaks when trying to talk about "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of cream story." I joke in passing that the "Thomas B. Bucket" malapropism sounds like "one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," figuring that at least some of my readers would remember that the character's full name is Charlie Bucket. Then I end the post by getting from Thomas B. Marsh, by way of Simonds (Symonds?) Ryder (Rider?) -- the i-vs.-y spelling being a point of dispute for both of his names -- to the classic 1979 Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-shirts." The sketch revolves around Kermit the Frog trying to get a T-shirt with his name on it. The T-shirt salesman keeps giving him apparently misspelled T-shirts saying things like "Kermit the Forg," but each of these actually turns out to be the correctly spelled name of another customer who ordered a T-shirt with his name on it. (This ties in with the Centaur Aisle scene I reference in "My tail is dun," where all the misspelled words are actually correct spellings of other words.) In a comment, William Wright draws attention to the rather odd premise underlying the sketch:

The real question, however, is at what point does the T-shirt store owner wonder what kind of society he is living in where everyone is ordering T-shirts with their own names printed on the front?

On February 17, William posted "Pure Imagination: Willy Wonka, Giraffes breaking secret combinations, the Chocolate Milk of Life, and more names." He discusses the movie Wonka and then moves on to the one true Wonka movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. Not having noticed my own Dahl reference, he explicitly points out the connection between Charlie Bucket and Thomas B. Bucket. Then he connects Gene Wilder with a Disney character called Flynn Rider whose real name turns out to be Eugene. In interpreting Rider's name, he respells Flynn as Flinn, which clearly ties in with the Symonds Rider spelling dispute. In a comment, I point out that Gene Wilder is also a pseudonym, and that his real name is Jerome Silberman.

Incidentally, William also interprets Wonka by respelling it as Wanka. Rather than make the obvious juvenile joke, I'll just point out that he may be mistaking the hat for the man himself.

On February 18, YouTube recommended yet another Ward Radio video. I've about had my fill of these guys and their loudmouth style, but I watched this one anyway because it has the always interesting Don Bradley in it. 

The episode is called "Taking Zelph off the Shelf!" It's about Joseph Smith's "Zelph the White Lamanite" anecdote, which is often seen as embarrassing and problematic. It's common for both Mormons and ex-Mormons to talk about a believer's unresolved questions as being "on the shelf," and when a crisis of faith occurs "the shelf breaks." There's apparently another YouTube channel called Zelph on the Shelf, which I know nothing about but which I suppose is reference to Mormon "shelf" issues and a pun on The Elf on the Shelf. Don points out, though, that the credit for the name should actually go to Dr. Seuss:

 

As a prologue to his analysis of the Zelph story, Don talks about an episode in the Book of Mormon where Alma and Amulek (the good guys) are arguing with two corrupt lawyers named Zeezrom and Antionah, and the editor (Mormon) interrupts the narrative to give a lengthy and seemingly pointless explanation of the Nephite monetary system. The apparent purpose of this digression is to make it clear that the bribe offered by one of the lawyers represents a substantial amount of money, but Mormon goes into much more detail than seems necessary, giving the names of 12 different denominations of gold and silver. Don argues that the real purpose of this explanation is to help the reader understand the allegorical meanings of the names given to the two lawyers. An ezrom is a denomination of silver, and an antion one of gold -- so, he says, the names Ze-ezrom and Antion-ah are equivalent to "Mr. McMoney and Mr. Goldman." He implies that these may not have been the lawyers' real names at all but rather allegorical pseudonyms used to portray them as embodiments of greed. I found this synchronistically interesting in connection with my own recent comment about the pseudonym of a Mr. Silberman (which, as I suppose is obvious, is German for "silver man").

Don then goes on to give similar treatment to the name Zelph, which he argues was intended to evoke the English word self. Joseph Smith was telling his "Zion's Camp" militia about the warrior Zelph who served the prophet Onandagus. His audience was supposed to see Onandagus as Joseph Smith (for reasons that need not detain us here) and Zelph as themselves.

Then we get this synchronistically interesting exchange:

Kwaku: Don, you gave the most entertaining explanation of this, because every other time anyone's ever talked about Zelph, it was like Cardon's bucket of cream story. I'm like, why do I care? . . . It's like, there's parts of church history, you're like, "Here's a really cool thing from Eliza R. Snow." Oh, I definitely want to read it. "Here's a cool thing from Bathsheba W. Smith." I'm like [dismissive hand gesture]. You know, there are just different people you care about, there's people you don't really care -- I've never cared about Zelph.

Don: So now you care because now you are Zelph, right? So, you know those shirts people did or whatever over in France after Charlie Hebdo was attacked, "Je suis Charlie Hebdo" or whatever? [gesture showing writing on a T-shirt] "I am Zelph," right? There you go.

So there's yet another reference to the Thomas B. Marsh "bucket of cream story" -- which both William Wright and I have connected with the Roald Dahl character Charlie Bucket -- and it's immediately followed up with a reference to Charlie Hebdo. Then we have a link to "The Wonderful World of T-shirts," where everyone wants a T-shirt with his own name on it, as Don talks about T-shirts saying "I am Charlie" and "I am Zelph." The latter would, I guess, mean "I am Self." I am Atman.

When I posted about Thomas B. Bucket, it made me think Aaron Smith-Teller's kabbalistic analysis of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong, so I went back and reread that. It's quite William Wright-esque in its analysis of names, except that the focus is on Hebrew rather than on Tolkien's languages. One of the characters in the bucket song is called Liza, which Smith-Teller analyzes thus:

Looking up "Liza" we find it derives from Hebrew Elisheba, a complicated name I have seen translated as "God is an oath", "God is satisfaction", "God is wrath" or -- if you take it entirely literally -- "God is seven".

The last reading, the entirely literal one, becomes the starting point for his exegesis:

There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

Now everything starts to come together. Harry (= Ha'Ari ["the Lion," a title of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the father of Kabbalah]) bemoans the shattered nature of the universe to Liza (= "my god is seven" = the seven shattered sephirot down in our vessel with us, the only form of God accessible in our finite world).

Now look back at Kwaku's comment comparing Zelph to the bucket story. As examples of aspects of Mormon history he is and isn't interested in, he mentions two women named Eliza and Bathsheba. Eliza, like Liza, obviously derives from Elisheba, meaning most literally "God is seven." The second morpheme is shared with Bathsheba, which could be literally translated as "daughter of seven."

What does the second part of the name Charlie Hebdo mean? It means "weekly" in French, but its ultimate source is the Greek word for "seven."

Incidentally, "There's a Hole in My Bucket" also got the Sesame Street treatment back in the seventies:

Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr

Can anyone help me out with this?

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.

⁂

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!"

(See, by the way, my October 9 post "Philip, the headless horseman.")

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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.

I looked up "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr" in Liber 418. Here's how it begins:

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.

Mere Locrianism

Yesterday evening, I happened to watch an old Truthstream Media video called "The Secret Power Music Holds Over You," which talked about the supposed psychological effects of each of the seven diatonic modes. Back in my teens I used to compose a bit of modal music, and to be interested in the use of unusual modes by the Beatles, but it's a subject I hadn't thought about in years.

That night, I dreamed that I was browsing Slate Star Codex and read the sentence, "But by that time Jewish mysticism had for the most part devolved into mere Locrianism." Locrian is of course one of the seven diatonic modes -- famously dissonant and therefore rarely used -- and in the dream this struck me as an extraordinary coincidence: I had just been watching a video that discussed the Locrian mode, and here I was seeing Locrianism used in a non-musical context!

Of course upon waking I realized that it wasn't a coincidence at all -- that there was rather a causal relationship between the Locrian mode I had encountered before going to bed and the "Locrianism" I had subsequently dreamed about. But within the dream, not knowing that it was a dream, I had considered it one of those extraordinary synchronicities I so often experience. I guess that means that one possible implication of sychronicity is that waking life is more dream-like in nature than we realize.

Locrianism is not a real word, but I tried to imagine what it might mean as, apparently, a pejorative description of a certain strain of Jewish mysticism. In a way, each of the seven modes is identical -- a diatonic scale is a diatonic scale, and the same set of seven notes (for example, the white keys of a piano) can be used to play in any of the seven modes. The difference, you could say, is how central or peripheral each note is to the composition. In the major (Ionian) scale, do is the tonic and ti is the leading tone. As explained in my post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" do and ti historically represent, respectively, Christ (do for Dominus, "Lord") and John the Baptist (originally si, for Sancte Ioannes). The major scale is rightly ordered, with Christ as a the central note of which the whole scale is based, and John "pointing" to him. The dominant (second most important and "central" note after the tonic) is sol, for solve, "set free."

In the Locrian mode, ti -- which should be the leading tone, whose function is to point to the tonic -- is itself treated as the tonic; that is, John the Baptist plays the central role, with Christ relegated to that of "minor second." Taken literally, I suppose this is Mandaeism -- seeing John, not Jesus, as the last and greatest prophet. In the dream-context of the devolution of Jewish thought, "John" symbolizes the whole pre-Christian revelation leading up to Christ, and making ti the tonic is the error of Judaism itself. Even more broadly, it is the error of (as the Chinese Buddhists say) taking the finger pointing to the Moon for the Moon itself and embraces such things as "Churchianity" and Bible-worship.

The main reason the Locrian mode is so dissonant is because the tonic-dominant interval -- which in all other modes is a perfect fifth, one of the most harmonious intervals possible -- is in Locrian the tritone, the most dissonant of intervals. Recall that in the major (do-based, or Christ-based) scale, the dominant is sol, meaning "set free." It is supremely appropriate, then, that the Locrian dominant, fa, stands for famuli, "slaves."

Besides thinking about "Locrianism," the other thing I did after my dream was to check Slate Star Codex -- or, rather, its successor Astral Codex Ten. I hadn't checked it in probably over a year. The most recent post there was "Highlights from the Comments on the Media Very Rarely Lying." Alexander's point is not that the mass media are trustworthy and honest but rather that they rarely literally lie in the sense of just making up false "facts." What they do instead is mislead by selective emphasis, missing context, and so on. This bears some relation to "Locrianism," since the difference between Locrian and Ionian music is not that the former uses any of the "wrong notes" but rather that it emphasizes them wrongly.

I should also mention, I suppose, that any talk of the notoriously discordant tritone always makes me think of this Wordsworth poem:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Also, after all that badmouthing of the Locrian mode, I should point out that good Locrian music is possible, though it takes Björk-level genius to pull it off.

NPH 421 and spontaneous human combustion

On July 28, 2022, I was stopped at a red light when I noticed the text on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me. It was written in the style of an eye chart, and it said: "Stay with me boy. See the world through the eyes of Mickey. Don't stop looking." I assume this was some sort of mutant Disney knockoff, but in the current synchronistic context I figured "Mickey" (a nickname for Michael) was more likely to be a hawk-eyed archangel than a mouse. Anyway, I took it as an injunction to keep my eyes and mind open.

At the next light, my eyes were drawn as if by magnetism to a license plate that read NPH 421. That means Nephi, of course, an important name in the Book of Mormon, so my first thought was that the numbers were giving chapter and verse. There are four books of Nephi, and none of them has 42 chapters, so I looked up 4:21 in each of the first three books of Nephi. Fourth Nephi is very short and isn't divided into chapters, so I checked 4 Ne. 21. Of the four verses I checked, only one of them struck me as in any way noteworthy:

He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh (2 Ne. 4:21).

I thought that was an odd turn of phrase. In the Bible, the "consuming of flesh" is always associated with burnt offerings, destruction by fire, and horrible plagues. The verse from Nephi made me think of Paul's equally strange statement that "though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. 13:3). Paul's other examples of things that are worthless without charity include prophesying, having great faith, feeding the poor, and the like; how did "giving my body to be burned" make it onto that list of good works? How is that even a good work at all? I thought it might be a reference to submitting to fiery martyrdom of the type pioneered by Nero and taken up centuries later by the Inquisition, but 1 Corinthians was written before Nero's accession to the throne, and I don't think "being burned" would have been an understandable reference to martyrdom at that time.

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Then I had the thought that 421 was a year, not a scripture reference. AD 421 is, after all, the very last date in the Book of Mormon chronology, the year in which Moroni, the last surviving Nephite (NPH), finished the book -- an abridgment of the Plates of Nephi, with additions by Mormon and Moroni -- and buried it in the earth.

Then I remembered that in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream" had prominently featured Moroni (both the Nephite and the city in the Comoros) and even mentioned that the "golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah." 

In the opening paragraph of that post, I had written that "when I think Moby-Dick, I think 'The Whiteness of the Whale' and I think 'Loomings.'" Then at the end of the post, I noted seeing the number 142 and feeling it was significant, not knowing why until eventually I "realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph."

But I had actually begun the post by mentioning first "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42) and then "Loomings" (Chapter 1) -- not 142, but 421. Then in the same post I had gone on to mention, for reasons entirely unrelated to Moby-Dick, Moroni's burying the golden plates -- which is supposed to have occurred in AD 421. Not until now, a year later, did I make the connection.

Moroni, the last survivor of his people, passed on their history to future generations. This is precisely the role played in Moby-Dick by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. The epilogue begins with an epigram from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

One of the comments on my "In the sync stream" post began: "Interesting. The license plate post was also good."

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So satisfying was that interpretation of NPH 421 -- the last Nephite in the year 421 -- that I dismissed my earlier attempts at chapter-and-verse interpretations as barking up the wrong tree. Then I noticed my July 30 post "And then the message said, 'End of message," which ends with what I admit is a completely unrelated reference to spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion -- doesn't that very obviously sync with "He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh" (2 Ne. 4:21)? Also it's a little known fact that the name Nephi is not original to the Book of Mormon but appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible -- as the name not of a person but of a flammable liquid (2 Macc. 1:36). Nephi is the King James rendering; most modern translations have naphtha.

Why does my July 30 post have the title it has? I was posting about how I had just finished reading a book called The Messengers, so "end of message" seemed appropriate. The precise wording, though, is from one of Joe Biden's teleprompter gaffes.

In my December 2020 post "American politician spontaneously combusts!" I describe my absurd but persistent premonition about the spontaneous combustion of Joe Biden (without mentioning Biden by name). Later, in September 2021, I had a dream in which reference was repeatedly made to "Joe Biden, the Human Torch"; days later, Biden suddenly acquired the nickname Brandon, which is French for "firebrand."

My 2020 post quoted an excerpt from Unsong in which George W. Bush bursts into flames after someone hacks his teleprompter and makes him utter a magic word that has that effect. One of the comments to that post said:

After reading the George Bush excerpt, I think 'spontaneous human combustion' might be a metaphor for a politician 'melting down' during a public appearance. Justly or unjustly, Biden is particularly singled out among politicians as someone who relies on a teleprompter to keep on track.

Then, yesterday, without consciously making the connection at all, I published a post with a Biden teleprompter gaffe as a title, and although it is primarily a post about Mike Clelland's book on owls, I included a reference to Unsong and then one to spontaneous human combustion.

Life imitates Unsong: A real-life double pun correction

My first mention of Joan of Arc on this blog was on December 15, 2020. I mentioned her as part of a pun from Unsong, which had been brought to mind by a P. G. Wodehouse novel, which had been brought to mind by a mention of the biblical story of Balaam's ass.

I am suddenly reminded of a passage from the P. G. Wodehouse novel Jeeves in the Offing.

'And, anyway, Reggie's gone for a walk and isn't available. I do wish you wouldn't always be so difficult, Bertie. Your aunt tells me it was just the same when you were a child. She'd want you to eat your cereal, and you would stick your ears back and be stubborn and non-cooperative, like Jonah's ass in the Bible.'

I could not let this go uncorrected. It's pretty generally known that when at school I won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.

'Balaam's ass. Jonah was the chap who had the whale. Jeeves!'

'Sir?'

'To settle a bet, wasn't it Balaam's ass that entered the nolle prosequi?'

'Yes, sir.'

I have recently been reading Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. One of the running gags is "biblical pun correction." One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is "corrected" by another: "Jonah whale; Noah ark." Later in the conversation, someone says "to no avail" and received the converse correction: "Noah ark; Jonah whale."

These pun corrections in Unsong always come in reciprocal pairs like this. So when one of the characters describes the pyramids as "solemn and huge," and is corrected with "Solomon wise; Goliath huge," you know that somewhere along the line someone is going to say something that sounds like "Goliath wise" and receive the converse correction. Trying to anticipate how and when the second pun will drop is part of the fun of reading the novel.

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In my March 27 post "The New Orleans Saint," I mentioned Joan of Arc and also happened to mention February 14 (Valentine's Day) as the date the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl. Mr. Andrew left this comment on the post:

I just finished "Something Fresh" by Wodehouse last night. The main love interest woman is named Joan Valentine. I think Wodehouse meant this as a joke because Valentine obviously refers to romance, while the Joan character is a strong, independent, and daring/brave woman - and both are names of Saints.

My sister Kat Valentine has drawn a portrait of Joan of Arc and written a poem about her, both of which have been featured on this blog. So when I read this comment, I thought, Unsong style, "Joan of Arc; Kat Valentine." (I didn't notice the Wodehouse connection until I went back and read my original Joan of Arc comment.)

Knowing the rules of Unsong puns, I started waiting for the second pun to drop. After "Joan Valentine," I should be on the lookout for something like "Kat of Arc" -- or, since Kat's real name is Crystal . . . Wait a second, this is the second pun! The first one dropped over a year ago! On January 19, 2021, I posted this:

There was an LED advertising board behind the counter at the shop. I looked up at it and saw the Tricolor and the words "Made in France" -- Maid in France -- which got my attention. Then the screen changed, and I saw what it was advertising: a brand of glassware called Cristal d'Arques. "Made in France" notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure d'Arques isn't real French; but if it were, it would be a homophone of d'Arc. (Incidentally, my post on Joan of Arc was illustrated with a portrait of that saint by my sister Kat, whose given name is actually Crystal.)

So let me say now what I should have said back then: "Crystal Valentine; Jeanne d'Arc."

The many-eyed whale shows up again

Back in 2014, in the early hours of April 26, I had a dream which proved to be precognitive.

I dreamed that I was watching TV and saw an image of what I interpreted as being a whale with many eyes, though I only saw its face. It was blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish. I dreamed that, after seeing this, I got on Wikipedia to do some research, trying to find out if whales with many eyes actually existed. I found information about a particular gene (with a Latin-sounding name which I no longer remember), rare but not unheard of (comparable to albinism), which manifests sometimes in whales and other animals and causes them to have several pairs of eyes. Now that I knew the name of the gene, I ran a Google image search on it and found several pictures of animals with it — several blue whales, killer whales, and other cetaceans, as well as a couple of tigers. As I did this online research, I had the feeling that I had learned about this gene once before but had forgotten about it. My reaction was, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That gene.”

Last night, my recent interest in John Dee led me to search the archives of The Higherside Chats for his name and listen to an interview with Jason Louv called "John Dee, Enochian Magick, & the Empire of Angels." Louv discusses how the "angels" with whom John Dee and Edward Kelley interacted were quite different from the precious pink cherubs of popular imagination, and he recounts their meeting with what was supposedly God himself.

And at one point they even meet God, and God is not an old man with a white beard up in the clouds. God is a whale covered with eyes from head to toe, from the mouth of which emits a deafening sound that Dee and Kelley say is like a cave of roaring lions. And they go into it and see reality peeled back, the thirty aethyrs of reality unveiled from within the mouth of the whale. So that's a little different from the Hallmark version.

This remind me of a passage near the end of Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. One of the characters is having a dialogue with God about the problem of evil whilst pursuing the Leviathan on the ship Not A Metaphor. The passage I quote below begins with God speaking.

"I did not say, Ana Thurmond, that your world is good now. I said that Adam Kadmon, its seed, was a good seed. That it will unfold, bit by bit, ringing conclusion after conclusion from its premises, until finally its own internal logic culminates in its salvation."

"How?" asked Ana, begging, pleading, shouting.

"Come and see," said God.

Then the Leviathan wheeled around, opened its colossal maw, and engulfed the Not A Metaphor. The ship spent a single wild moment in its mouth before the monster closed its jaws and crushed them all into tiny pieces.

Like Dee and Kelley, she had to enter the mouth of on otherworldly whale in order to receive the final revelation.

NHS

Somewhere in Unsong, Scott Alexander mentions that the initials of Martin Luther King spell out the Hebrew translation of his surname. Since the Hebrew alphabet includes only consonants, melech, "king," is spelled mem-lamed-kaph — MLK.

The serpent, twined around the Rod of Asclepius, is the universal symbol of the medical profession, which in Britain is administered by the National Health Service. The Hebrew for “serpent” is nahash, which is spelled nun-heth-shin — NHS.

Nahash, by the way, is a singularly appropriate word. Etymologically, nun is “fish,” heth is “thread,” and shin is “tooth.” What better name for a scaly, cold-blooded animal that is long and thin and is notable for its sharp fangs?

Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this

Some people call them snake-eyes, but to me they look like mice

-- They Might Be Giants, "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes"

In my post "Jonas, Jason, Sonja," I quoted Unsong and linked to an earlier post ("American politician spontaneously combusts") which had quoted the same passage. The earlier post had quoted three paragraphs, though, of which the later one only quoted two. The third paragraph was:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

This is explaining why George W. Bush spontaneously combusted: because Dylan Alvarez, of the terrorist organization Boojum, had hacked his teleprompter to include the name Sonja Horah, thus tricking Bush into pronouncing the "Mortal Name" -- Jahorah, said in the novel to be the true pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton -- which causes instant death to any who utter it.

Saying Sonja Horah, then, is fatal because it is also Son Jahorah -- the syllable Son followed by (what is in the novel) a name of God. This construction -- son plus a name of God, without an intervening of (as we should say "the Son of God") -- made me think of this revelation reported by early Mormon apostle Orson Pratt:

There is one revelation that this people are not generally acquainted with. I think it has never been published, but probably it will be in the Church History. It is given in questions and answers. The first question is, "What is the name of God in the pure language?" The answer says, "Ahman." "What is the name of the Son of God?" Answer, "Son Ahman -- the greatest of all the parts of God excepting Ahman." "What is the name of men?" "Sons Ahman," is the answer. "What is the name of angels in the pure language?" "Anglo-man."

I've always wondered about this. Was it meant to be an alterative etymology of "Son of Man," with "Son Ahman" being misinterpreted as "Son o' Man"? Anyway, the parallel with Sonja Horah is interesting.

The Unsong passage quoted is also of course a modification of the ending of the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark":

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Though it has since come to refer to sarcasm, the word snark was originally coined by Carroll as a "portmanteau" (another Carrollism) of snake and shark. In the context of a post connecting Jonas (swallowed by a big fish) with the dove and Sonja with the serpent, this seems significant.

From the snake-shark, my mind jumped to the extinct reptilian "sharks" known as ichthyosaurs. There is in some of C. S. Lewis's juvenilia, published in a book called Boxen, a character known as "Mr. Icthus-oress" (or sometimes "Ick-this-oress") who "made his fortune playing the harp and got his name by fighting an icthus-oress." Although there is no indication that Mr. Icthus-oress is himself a mouse, his two sons are Tom Mouse and Bob Mouse. (Once, when my brother and I had occasion to attend a Scientology meeting under false names and false pretenses -- a highly entertaining experience! -- we signed in (yes, you have to sign in) as Thomas Maus and Robert Maus. Perhaps someday a Co$ operative, going through some old cold-case files, will find this post and think, "Aha! We've finally got you, 'Robert Maus'!")

Who else is known for playing the harp and got one of his names by fighting a monstrous reptile? The god of the lyre, Pythian Apollo -- who got that name by fighting the Python. Just as Mr. Icthus-oress was the father of two mice, Chryses in the Iliad prays to "Apollo of the Mice" (Apollo Smintheus, from smintha, an Aeolian dialect word for "mouse"), and archaeologists have discovered bronze mice used in connection with the worship of Apollo. Another of Apollo's epithets, Mousegetes, means "leader of the Muses," but look at the first five letters of the transliteration! (In Latin as in English, but a single letter differentiates a muse from a mouse.)

Obviously Apollo didn't have a son named Bob (though Socrates did, Lamprocles being a perfect Greek "translation" of the name Robert), but if Aleister Crowley is to be trusted (there's an "if" for you!), he did have a son named Tom. Here is the Great Beast expounding on the Kabbalistic meaning of the nursery rhyme "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son":

This is one of the more exoteric of these rimes. In fact, it is not much better than a sun-myth. Tom is Toum, the God of the Sunset (called the Son of Apollo, the Piper, the maker of music)

This "Toum" must be the Egyptian god Atum -- occasionally thus translilterated -- who was specifically the god of the setting sun (cf. the etymologically unrelated word autumn, the sunset of the year). I have never heard of Atum being called the Son of Apollo, but such an identification in the interpretatio graeca seems prima facie plausible -- that a subordinate sun god like Atum would be declared the son of the main sun god. Calling Apollo "the Piper" reinforces, by way of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the rodent connection.

It is perhaps worth noting in passing that Crowley also did "Hickory Dickory Dock" ("The mouse is the Ego; Mus, 'a mouse,' being only Sum, 'I am,' spelt Qabalistically backwards") and "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" ("The pumpkin is of course the symbol of resurrection, as is familiar to all students of the story of Jonah and the gourd").

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Coming back to "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son," I currently own an orange and white cat called Q*bert, though these days he is just as often called Cucumber. This is partly because of the phonetic similarity in English, and partly because in Chinese the stereotypical name for a "yellow" (including orange or ginger) animal  would be 小黃, and the Chinese word for "cucumber" is 小黃瓜. Cucumbers are of course cucurbits -- fellow members with the pumpkin of the gourd family -- and cucumber even bears a certain resemblance to kikayon, the original Hebrew name of Jonah's "gourd."

Q*bert is my second orange and white cat. The first, a family pet when I was a young child, was called Tom. One of my brothers (not 'Thomas Maus,' the other one) used to call him Tom-Tom the Drum-Drum -- a double "Tom" followed by a reference to a musical instrument. Q*bert, then, may be considered somewhat interchangeable with Tom Mouse (Atum), son of Mr. Icthus-oress (Apollo) and brother of Bob Mouse. This is confirmed by the realization that if Q*bert had a brother, he would very likely be called R*bert -- or B*b to his friends. Our cat Tom had a sibling, a potential stand-in for Bob Mouse. She was called Mariel, after a book my sister had just read at the time: Mariel of Redwall, one of a series of Brian Jacques novels about -- of all things! -- anthropomorphic mice. One of these mice -- appearing only in Mariel and not in any of the 21 other Redwall books -- is a dormouse called Bobbo: Bob Mouse.

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Thinking about Tom and Bob Mouse -- and connecting Tom and Bob with tohu and bohu -- reminded me of the Dark Mice. This is from a November 8, 2015, entry in my sync log.

[This] morning, I watched lots of Mark Dice videos on YouTube. Mark Dice does two kinds of videos: asking people on the street questions and letting them make fools of themselves, and Illuminati conspiracy stuff.

At around 6:30, watched Spectre, the new James Bond movie. While we were in the theater, before the movie started, I noticed that “Mark Dice” was an anagram/spoonerism of “dark mice,” and I dwelt on that phrase for a while . . . .

Before the movie, there was a commercial involving a girl and her parents all wearing Mickey-Mouse-ear headbands (actually Minnie Mouse in the girl’s case, complete with a polka-dot bow).

In Spectre, there’s a scene where Bond is going to spy on a meeting of the titular secret society. He’s stopped by a bouncer who asks who he is, and he replies (in Italian, with English subtitles), “I’m Mickey Mouse.” Later, when they discover Bond spying and try to kill him, the same bouncer guy says, “Ciao, Mickey Mouse!”

In another scene in Spectre, Bond is sitting in a chair in a hotel room, and a mouse appears. Bond pulls out his gun, points it at the mouse, and says something like, “What do you want? Who sent you here?” The mouse runs away into a hole (which later leads to Bond’s discovering a secret room).

Later that night, went out to . . . take a walk. “Dark Mice” came back to mind, and I was thinking of making a “Dark Mice” tarotesque card. I was also thinking about the one-legged golden chicken (probably because V mentioned a strange dream earlier). Thought first of a card with the Chicken, with two dark mice in the background, then of the Chicken and Dark Mice as two separate cards. Thought about how the Chicken was one of the three symbols of evil in Bhavacakra, and also of how a one-legged golden chicken was sort of connected to the three-legged golden toad. On my walk I ran across an actual toad –– the first I’ve seen in years, and the first ever in our neighborhood. Shortly thereafter, I realized that Mickey and Minnie –– two black mice –– were the “dark mice,” and I noticed the connections with the Bond film. Then, on my way back, I passed a house with a large lighted window, silhouetted in which were what looked like two large cut-outs, of Mickey and Minnie Mouse –– such a creepily precise echo of the whole “dark mice” train of thought that it spooked me . . . .

It also occurs to me that Mickey ears as a symbol of Illuminati mind control are prominent in the types of videos that Mark Dice makes, though I don’t know if Mark himself has commented on that particular symbol. . . .

In the car on the way home from the movie, talked about different Bond actors. Gwen mentioned Dr. No as the first Bond film. Later, at home, searched for “James Bond” + “mice,” and found that characters called the “Three Blind Mice” -- black men, and therefore dark mice -- try to kill Bond in Dr. No.

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Why do I spend so much time pursuing these convoluted coincidence-driven trains of thought (if "thought" is even the right word), when so few of them reach any intelligible conclusion? The easy answer is "because I must" -- but that's not really true. This is something I choose to do (and I chose to do it much less in the past), and that choice must have some motivation.

Another easy answer is that it's just a meaningless and perhaps slightly pathological hobby -- that, just as playing a violent video game gives one a fake version of the satisfaction of defeating one's enemies, without the inconvenience of actually fighting, so synchromysticism offers an ersatz "eureka" feeling without requiring the hard work of making actual discoveries about the real world. I don't really believe that, though. I really do think I'm doing something potentially important, not just engaging in meaningless self-indulgence.

While the majority of my sync-connections seem to lead nowhere, I think that the discipline of noticing connections, and of being aware of things that just "pop into my head," makes me more receptive to revelation when it does come. I'm casting my net -- asking, seeking, knocking -- maintaining a constant attitude of "Are you trying to tell me something?" "For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not" -- so said Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, the only friend of Job whose speech was not condemned by God. Being alert for things that turn up "once, yea twice" is listening for the voice of God.

I also think that coincidence as such -- particularly the troublesome, seemingly-oxymoronic category of the meaningful coincidence -- is something of great potential metaphysical importance, and that I need to keep thinking about it until I figure it out. While I obviously have great sympathy with those who say that "there are no coincidences," I find that a very hard philosophical pill to swallow.  How could there possibly be no coincidences? That seems very close to being logically impossible. I have a hunch that philosophically assimilating the "meaningful coincidence" will have metaphysical ramifications every bit as wide-ranging as assimilating the concept of "free will."

Jonas, Jason, Sonja

In my last post, "Dove and serpent," I mentioned reading in the Wikipedia article on Jonah about a possible link, proposed by Joseph Campbell, between Jonah and Gilgamesh. Campbell also made another link:

Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas, which differs from Jason only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah

So Jason and Jonas are anagrams, both in English and an Greek. There is a third such name, in English anyway: Sonja. In yesterday's "Look who's still showing up in syncs," I quoted a passage from Unsong about Jonah. In last December's post "American politician spontaneously combusts," I quoted a passage from the same novel that prominently featured the name Sonja.

"[. . .] But with the help of all the brave people in different government departments and all around the country working on this case, we’ve got Alvarez on the run and are tightening the noose around his neck. Some of these people are here with us tonight. People like Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. Like Michael Gellers, a police officer who successfully defused a BOOJUM bomb in Philadelphia. Like Sonja Horah . . .”

President Bush spontaneously caught fire. “HELLLPPP!” he screamed as the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches watched on in horror. “HELLLPPP . . . HELL . . .”. By the time Secret Service agents reached him at the podium, he was already a charred corpse.

In the novel, the reason Bush caught fire was that the name Sonja Horah contained the sequence Jahorah, a magical "name of God" that causes anyone who pronounces it to die on the spot.

What does the name Sonja mean? It's a Russian diminutive of Sophia -- so, wisdom, but a lesser wisdom. This is precisely what William Wildblood ascribes to the serpent in his recent post "The Serpent and the Dove":

The dove is the Holy Spirit, and the innocence of the dove is true spiritual wisdom compared to the earthly, even if it is occult or esoteric, wisdom of the serpent. The serpent represents the wisdom of experience or evolution. In a way, it is the wisdom of matter. But the dove symbolises the wisdom of purity and innocence and truth that comes from God.

Jonas is the dove. Sonja is the serpent. What about Jason? Etymologically, Jason means "healer" -- but in English it sounds like "son of the jay," and I've known several Jasons who went by Jay or even Jaybird. Jason is a corvid, then -- perhaps even the solar crow ("jay-sun"). Jesus paired the dove with the serpent, but Noah (who is also part of the Joan/Jonah pun) paired it with the raven.

Lives, the universes, and everything

And thus we saw, in the heavenly vision, the glory of the Telestial, which surpasses all understanding; and no man knows it except him to whom God has revealed it.

-- D&C 76:89-90

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but in him was yea.

-- 2 Cor. 1:19 

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

-- Blake

Warning: This is going to be one of those posts -- yet there is method in't.

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Degrees of glory

Joseph Smith, the Prophet, wrote of three "kingdoms" or "degrees of glory": the Celestial, the Terrestrial, and the Telestial. Celestial is self-explanatory: Heaven. Terrestrial refers not to the Earth as we know it now, but to the Earth as Moses tells us it was first created: Paradise, the Garden of Eden. "The world in which we now live" is a fallen one, no longer truly Earthly, and is given the designation Telestial. If this coinage of Smith's is not simply an arbitrary one made by analogy with Celestial and Terrestrial, it is presumably intended to evoke the Greek tele or teleos -- the Distant Kingdom, the Last Kingdom. The very outskirts of God's creation.

These "degrees" are not to be thought of as specific places, but as kinds of worlds, states of existence. People, and even entire planets, can and do pass from one of these states into another.

After death, some "go to Heaven" -- a Celestial glory. Others inherit a Terrestrial glory, perhaps along the lines of the Elysian Fields of Homer or the Paradise of Muhammad. Liars, adulterers, and other such riffraff go to the Telestial. This could be, but traditionally is not, interpreted as reincarnating back into "the world in which we now live"; at any rate, they remain at this world's general niveau -- and even this Last Kingdom has a glory "which surpasses all understanding."

Beyond the Telestial, "a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory" -- for "the light shineth in darkness," and God and God's creation are not in the last analysis truly omnipresent. The nature of this "outer darkness" is not known -- that's kind of what they're getting at with that term darkness -- but might be conceptualized as chaos, or nothingness, or an illusory dreamworld of untethered solipsism -- if those are indeed not three ways of saying the same thing. Only the very damnedest of the damned wend their way there -- those "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever." None has been observed to return. Are they well and truly lost, those "sons of perdition" who sail off the edge of the cosmos and disappear into the black? Will nothing of value ever come bubbling up from that vasty deep, world without end? It is my rather unorthodox opinion that not even God knows the answer to that. They, no less than the rest of us, are sailing uncharted waters, and "it doth not yet appear what we shall be." I know what my own hunches on the matter are. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio -- yes, and in outer darkness, too. Even in outer darkness, Horatio, even in the abyss.

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Worlds without number

The Book of Genesis is traditionally attributed to Moses -- but how did Moses, who by his own reckoning lived 24 centuries after Adam, know anything about what happened "in the beginning"? Joseph Smith must have asked the same question as he was doing his "translation" of the Old Testament, and the answer came in the form of an inspired prologue to Genesis, in which God appears to Moses and reveals the Creation to him. This has since been canonized as Moses 1 -- one of the most important and idea-rich documents Smith ever produced, and well worth reading in its entirety.

At first God says, "And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Moses, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee" -- just this one little thing, the world! But after Moses has seen "the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created," God decides he is ready for a glimpse of the big picture.

And he beheld many lands; and each land was called Earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof.

And it came to pass that Moses called upon God, saying: "Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them?" . . .

And the Lord God said unto Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me. And by the word of my power, have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth. And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; . . . And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many."

And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: "The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine. . . . and there is no end to my works, neither to my words. For behold, this is my work and my glory -- to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."

At first the reader thinks the "many lands" must be the many populated regions of our own planet, and that each land is called Earth for the same reason that every tribal people calls itself The People. Or perhaps the reference is to the innumerable other planets with intelligent life which must exist somewhere out there in space. As we read on, though, it seems more and more as if God is talking about parallel universes.

Many "Earths" -- inhabited planets -- is understandable enough, but many heavens? This surely means more than the trivial fact that each planet has its own atmosphere. Heaven, in this context, means "outer space." And there are many of them? Explain that without invoking parallel universes. And what are we to make of the strange statement that "the first man of all men have I called Adam" -- clearly a unique individual -- "which is many"?

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

Remember the old legend of Jacob, and the mysterious man who wrestled with him until the breaking of the day? (You should probably write that down, by the way, for posterity.)

And Jacob asked him, and said, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy name."

And he said, "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: "for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."

Now why would Jacob say that? Surely he didn't think he had beaten God in a wrestling match! And notice what the wrestler said: "Wherefore is it that thou" -- thou of all people! -- "dost ask after my name?" Give it some thought, Moses. It shouldn't be too hard for a folklorist like yourself to figure out the man's name, and who he was, and what it all meant, and in what sense Jacob had seen God.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: "Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed."

"O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children," said the learned Egyptian, "and there is not such a thing as an old Greek."

"O Moses, Moses," the Lord had said, "you learned Egyptians are also children. Come and enter into the kingdom of God."

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God's friends, God's enemies

God has called many people his servants but only Abraham his friend. Ever wonder why? Because he pled for Sodom. Sodom! -- a city so cartoonishly wicked that when they were visited by heavenly messengers, the very angels of God, their first thought was, Let's gang-rape them. But when God announced that he was going to wipe them out, Abraham didn't say "About time! Deus vult!" Instead he said, "That be far from thee to do after this manner! Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" and he started bargaining. Sodom, Lord, I know, I know, it's a horrible place, corrupt beyond imagining -- but isn't there some good even in Sodom? A few dozen righteous men, perhaps? Okay, probably not that many, but maybe ten? Five? And how heroically righteous they must be, to remain uncorrupted even in Sodom! Isn't that something beautiful, something that adds to your glory? Doesn't the city deserve to go on existing for the sake of that?

Well, God still ended up destroying Sodom -- sometimes these things have just got to be done -- but he thought, This Abraham guy really gets it! And that's the story of how God and Abraham became friends.

Those who harp on the Problem of Evil -- Voltaire and all his myriad spiritual progeny -- aren't they (aren't we) sort of anti-Abrahams? Abraham looked at Sodom -- hideously foul Sodom, the earthly City of Dis, the very embassy of the bottomless pit -- and said, "There is still good in it. It should be spared." We look at this vast, beautiful universe -- this Telestial world whose glory surpasses all understanding -- and say, "There is still evil in it. No good God would have created it." When God wanted to destroy Sodom, Abraham played the role of counsel for the defense. And we -- well, we play the other role, that of prosecutor, accuser. There's a Hebrew word for that role, a rather memorable one. It later came to be used as a proper name. The word is satan.

Peter was the first of the disciples to suss out that Jesus was the Messiah. So, after charging him and the other disciples to keep the secret, Jesus laid out his grand Messianic plan: Step one, ride in triumph into Jerusalem. Step two, get stripped naked, beaten bloody, and nailed to a cross. Step three -- but I see Peter's raising his hand. Yes, Peter, did you have a question?

Peter took Jesus aside and said -- in language strangely similar to Abraham's when he pled Sodom's case, as if subconsciously aware that he was playing the anti-Abraham -- "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee!"

That didn't go over so well. "Get thee behind me, satan," said Jesus. "Thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God."

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What the whirlwind said

But don't we Voltaireans after all have a point? As wonderful as this universe of ours is, shouldn't a perfect God have created a better one -- a perfect one, even?

Well, in the context of Moses' vision of worlds -- universes -- without number, the obvious answer is: Yes. He did. And he created this universe, too. Should he not have done so? This is the essence of the Lord's reply -- as imagined by Scott Alexander in Unsong -- when he spoke out of the whirlwind to Job.

It is true that I could have limited myself to creating universes where no one ever became covered in boils, and I did not do so. For the universes where some people get covered in boils also have myriads of wonders, and joys, and saints, and I will not deny them existence for the sake of those covered in boils. . . .

Have you beheld the foundations of the Earth? Seen its footings and its cornerstone? Watched as the sons of God all sang together and the morning stars shouted for joy? Have you seen the doors of the sea? The chains of the Pleiades and Orion's belt? The lions, the ravens, the young of the doe and the bear? Behold the Behemoth, which I made beside you, and the Leviathan who resides in the sea. Can you say that all these wonders should not be, so that you could avoid a case of boils? Shall I smite them for you? Speak, and I shall end the world with a word.

For a nominal atheist, Alexander can be remarkably serious and sincere when it comes to theodicy, and I find his reading of Job a compelling one. The Book of Job as we have it is a bit of a letdown. Job asks an important question and steadfastly refuses to take sophistry for an answer -- but then he is satisfied by a reply from God himself which seems to be nothing but bluster: "I'm much more awesome than you. Do you know any science? Can you catch a whale? Have you ever even seen the doors of the sea? How exactly do you think you have the right to question anything I do?"

But what if all that rhapsodizing about Behemoth and the morning stars wasn't bluster? What if it was context? "And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Job, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee."

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And Supergod is back in the game

When I wrote my anti-Supergod manifesto -- my explicit rejection, as a Christian, of the all-powerful, all-knowing God who created absolutely everything out of absolutely nothing -- the main reason I gave for rejecting Supergod was the Problem of Evil -- to which, I asserted, "every proposed solution is pure, unadulterated sophistry."

But in my brief and (justifiably!) dismissive survey of theodicy, I had missed something essential. Like almost everyone else who approaches the question, I had been asking why Supergod would have created this world rather than a better one. It didn't cross my mind to, as the popular cliche has it, "embrace the healing power of and." It is supremely ironic that I should be guided by Joseph Smith (a believer in Mere God) and Scott Alexander (an atheist) to the one theodicial argument that -- maybe -- lets Supergod off the hook.

That argument is this:

1. Supergod is not limited to creating just one universe.
2. There are many possible universes that, though far from perfect, are "net good" -- that is, the good in them outweighs the evil.
3. For any such net-good universe, it is better for it to exist than for it not to exist.
4. Therefore, Supergod (who is perfectly good and thus always chooses the best possible course of action) would have created them all -- including this very imperfect universe in which we find ourselves.

One may reject this argument -- I think on balance I do reject it, and in any case I have other reasons for not believing in Supergod -- but it is more plausible than any other defense of Supergod I have encountered, and makes the Supergod hypothesis, if not necessarily true, at least intellectually respectable.

When I looked up the Job episode in Unsong so I could quote it above, I was surprised to discover something I had forgotten: that it, too, refers to the story of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom, but gives it a very different interpretation from my own.

"How many wonders and joys and saints is one case of boils worth, God?"

"Be careful, Job. I had this conversation with Abraham before you. He asked whether I would spare my judgment on Sodom lest fifty righteous men should suffer. When I agreed, he pled for forty, thirty, twenty, and ten. But below ten he did not go, so I destroyed the city. And if I would not restrain myself from destroying for the sake of a handful of righteous men suffering, how much less I should restrain myself from creating."

In Alexander's reading, the point of the story is the number ten. (Not five. I had misremembered the final figure in my own retelling.) Whatever good was accomplished by destroying Sodom, it would have been outweighed by the premature deaths of ten -- but not nine -- righteous men. God replies to Job's sarcastic question as if it were not rhetorical, as if it had as the correct answer some particular finite number -- as if there were some equation into which one could plug the numbers of wonders, joys, saints, boils, and so on, and which would then output the correct decision as to whether or not that particular world ought to be created.

No. This is as far as I am willing to follow this line of reasoning. If you wish to continue, you'll have to go on without me. Einstein famously resisted the idea of God playing dice; how much more should we resist imagining him with a calculator! King David was an adulterer, a murderer, and a man after the Lord's own heart; which of his many sins did he feel the guiltiest about?

And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, "I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O Lord, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly"

"Net good" is a category error. Good and evil can't be thought of as if they were the same sort of thing as weight or income. There are infinitely many qualitatively distinct goods and infinitely many qualitatively distinct evils. Few of these can be measured at all, and those that can are mutually incommensurable. Even in the super-simplified Utilitarian version, where all good is reduced to pleasure and all evil to pain, the "felicific calculus" of Bentham remains a pipe dream. Good and evil cannot be expressed mathematically and are not susceptible to mathematical operations. "The good in this world outweighs the evil" is not a statement of a mathematical fact; it is an expression of a moral choice -- the choice we all made when we chose to incarnate into it, though some of us later have second thoughts. We, each of us, choose to exist and choose what worlds to enter. That -- not math of all things! -- is the foundation of the justice of God, and the only theodicy with which we have to do.

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Note added: As a draft, this post went through many provisional titles before I settled on the one it has now. I chose it simply because it suggested the scope of what I was discussing -- something for which even Douglas Adams's famous phrase "life, the universe, and everything" was too narrow unless pluralized. (Pluralizing such familiar expressions as "eternal life" is also a classic Joseph Smith move; see D&C 132.)

Not until I received an email from a reader -- "By the way, happy birthday. Is the title of the post a pun on this particular birthday?" -- did I realize the full appropriateness of the title I had chosen. In the Adams story, a supercomputer thinks for seven and a half million years and concludes that "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" is the number 42. And, yes, it just so happens that the day I finally finished and published this post was my 42nd birthday.

Furthermore, the conclusion I reach in the end -- that numbers can have nothing to do with answers to ultimate questions -- is eloquently expressed by Adams's joke.

Finally, even the name of the author I allude to in my title is relevant -- the plural of Adam.

None of this was on purpose. I take it as a gesture of encouragement from the synchronicity fairies.