Lassie Come Home

Lassie Come Home is, symbolically, the title of the book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew. This book is also called "the book of the Lamb of God" (1 Ne. 13:38). A nod to this second designation is just visible on the edge of the page in Animalia:

I think that's a very semantically dense title, conveying multiple meanings simultaneously. First there’s the literal meaning of lassie: a girl or young woman. Second, there’s the character Lassie in the book: a sheepdog, specifically a Rough Collie, who travels a great distance to be reunited with someone she loves. Finally there’s the Elvish lassi, which even the casual Tolkien reader may recognize from the poem Namárië: It means -- quelle coïncidence! -- "leaves."

If we take Lassie as a literal lassie, any number of female figures could be intended. My immediate hunch, and I tend to trust such things, was that it has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1). Threatened by the Dragon, the Woman is given wings and flies away to "her place" (perhaps off-planet?), prepared for her by God, where she stays for three and a half years (Rev. 12:6, 14) -- and that's the last we hear of her. After the three and a half years, during which the Beast rules in her absence (Rev. 13:5), does Lassie come home? John never tells us.

Considered as a sheepdog, Lassie would be expected to come home with the sheep, bringing them back to the fold. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John 10:16). If the Shepherd is Christ, the Sheepdog would be a servant of Christ who helps him tend the sheep. The most obvious biblical candidate for this role would be Simon Peter, who in John 21 is given a special charge to "feed my sheep" and "feed my lambs." Interestingly, this same language of feeding is found in John's account of the Woman: While she is hiding in the wilderness, "they should feed her there" (Rev. 12:6) and "she is nourished" (Rev. 12:14).

Those who have been following William Wright's blog will know of his theory that Peter was the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor -- which brings us to Lassie as a collie. The etymology of that word is uncertain, but Etymonline suggests "Possibly from dialectal coaly 'coal-black,' the color of some breeds." As portrayed on the cover of the book from the Lion's mouth, Lassie appears to be golden in color, not black, so perhaps whatever about her is "coal-black" is not visible on the surface. Pharazôn was called "the Golden," and as his story has been expanded by Daymon "Doug" Smith and William Wright, he went to great lengths so to appear, dressing all in gold and even covering his face with some kind of gold makeup. However, in "It's as dark a tale as was ever told," I have read the song "Shiver My Timbers" as referring to Pharazôn:

Shiver my timbers, shiver my soul -- Yo ho, heave ho!

There are men whose hearts are as black as coal --Yo ho, heave ho!

And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue

A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew

It's as dark a tale as was ever told

Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold

Also in that post, I mention the line about "secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones" and tie that in with the Monkees song about Davy Jones waking and rising -- a song which also prominently references a "homecoming queen," i.e. a lassie come home. Pharazôn and his men ended up in a watery grave -- "Davy Jones' locker" -- and it may be their secrets that sleep there. The surname Jones means "son of John," though the h has been lost and the vowel sound has changed from a short 'o' to a long one. Everything I have just said about Jones is also true of Barjona, the original surname of Simon Peter.

Finally, we have lassi as the Elvish word for "leaves." Golden leaves as a reference to Golden Plates (and Lassie is gold on the book cover) have been a major theme in these parts recently, beginning with "Leaves of gold unnumbered" -- a post in which I quote the first two lines of the poem Namárië. Here they are in the original Quenya:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!

Ah, like gold fall the leaves in the wind! Lassi, come home!

Every tribe of Israel, we are told in 2 Nephi 29, has its own sacred records -- its own "leaves of gold" -- and when Lassie brings the scattered sheep home, the leaves will be gathered home as well:

And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. . . .

And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one (2 Ne. 29:8, 13-14).

And this brings us back to the vision or waking dream -- for I, like Davy Jones, am a daydream believer -- recounted in "Étude brute?" In the vision, I was told that a particular book was the Cherubim -- "not the book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves." What can that possibly mean?

Ezekiel portrays the Cherubim as chimerical creatures -- part man, part lion, part bull, and part eagle -- and as far back as my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," I had made the case that this imagery "very like symbolizes, by means of four representative members, both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac." See that post for all the details underlying that assertion; here I will simply take it as proven. Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.

I have more to say on this topic, but I think this is a good place to end the current post.

Over troubled water

At the end of my last post, I mention listening to two songs on YouTube: "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and then Emily Linge's cover of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me." Since I listened to both and gave each a thumbs-up, the algorithm figured that what I wanted to listen to today was Emily Linge singing Simon and Garfunkel, namely "Bridge over Troubled Water":

I soon as I saw the title, I figured it was synchronistically relevant. St. Peter has been in the sync-stream of late, particularly in his role as "first pope." He went by two different names, Simon and Peter, the latter meaning "stone." The name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the Latin carbunculus, meaning "reddish, bright kind of precious stone, probably comprising the ruby, carbuncle, hyacinth, garnet." Catholics consider Peter to have been the first pontiff, a title which literally means "bridge-maker." So when Simon and Garfunkel sing about a bridge, that seems likely to have something to do with Peter.

Furthermore, Peter has been associated recently with the title character of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." I figured this tied in with the "silver girl" in "Bridge over Troubled Water," and I saw that Emily was even wearing a glimmering silver dress to sing it, as if in costume as the glimmering/silver girl herself.

When I played the Emily Linge video, though, I found that she had changed the lyrics -- something she never does! -- and replaced "silver girl" with "children." Now this is unacceptable. Children don't need a bridge over troubled water, nor do they need to sail. When the water is troubled, they wade.

Since Emily had dropped the ball on the "silver girl" bit, I decided to listen to the original. When I put bridge over troubled water in the search box, though, what came up was another Emily Linge cover of the same song, uploaded just a month ago. She's wearing the same silver dress, and this time she gets the lyrics right:

A few hours after writing the above, mentioning three different ways of crossing "troubled water" -- sailing, wading, and using a bridge -- I read this in Louise Varèse's English translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Jesus walked on the troubled waters. The lantern showed him to us, erect, white, with long brown hair, on the flank of an emerald wave.

Yet another way of crossing troubled water! And of course, Jesus was one of two people to walk on water, the other being Peter. The "emerald wave" also syncs with one of Ramer's recurring dreams in The Notion Club Papers:

There is a Green Wave, whitecrested, fluted and scallop-shaped but vast, towering above green fields, often with a wood of trees, too; that has constantly appeared.

This is presumably a vision of the destruction of Númenor, which happened in the reign of its last king, Ar-Pharazôn -- whom William Wright identifies with Peter.

Pumpkins are dear

Recent posts about pumpkins brought back to mind something I heard on the radio back in 1992, when Boutros Boutros-Ghali had just taken office as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The dialogue went something like this:

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali! What a name, eh?”

“It’s actually really interesting. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, from the Greek Petros. There’s no p sound in Arabic, so it became a b.”

“I never knew that! And what does Ghali mean?”

“Pumpkin-eater.”

A bit too culturally insensitive to air on NPR today, I know, but the nineties were a better time.

In yesterday’s post “Come and buy pumpkins,” William Wright mentions that he used to sell pumpkins for two dollars each but that now they’re three thanks to inflation. He links my post “A loaf of bread is dear” and reiterates that dear, which usually means “beloved,” can also mean “expensive.” (The Russian word for “dear” exhibits the same range of meanings, as I point out in my post.) So William’s pumpkins are dearer than they used to be.

Ghali obviously doesn’t really mean “pumpkin-eater,” so what does it mean? It means “expensive, precious, dear, beloved.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian, which explains how he ended up with the Arabic version of the name of a Christian saint. My 2011 “bread is dear” dream included a reference to the Coptic language. Saint Peter is considered by Catholics to have been the first pope. The second pope was Linus, a name we today associate with the Great Pumpkin.

Lepidus, Lapras, Pokélogan, Thomas B. Marsh, and Peter

In my February 6 post "Pokélogan," I discuss my plesiosaur Pokémon keychain by that name and my disappointment when I discovered that the creature's "real" name was the vastly inferior Lapras. William Wright went on to connect Pokélogan with Thomas B. Marsh and Thomas B. Marsh with St. Peter.

The real name, Lapras, reminded me of something, though, and the other day I finally figured out what. Back in 2018, I read the Arden Shakespeare edition of Antony and Cleopatra, with helpful but occasionally mildly zany notes by R. H. Case. The most memorable of these was a comment on a dialogue in which Agrippa says, "'Tis a noble Lepidus," and Enobarbus replies, "A very fine one." About this use of Lepidus, the name of one of the triumvirs, as if it were a common noun, Case writes:

This comment was possibly evoked by the sound of the word Lepidus, which, to me, at least, is rather suggestive of some kind of sea creature of the inerter type. But perhaps this is seeing too much.

I have to say I'm a huge fan of this note. It's almost Pale Fire tier. If more footnotes were like this one, I would read more footnotes.

So no less an authority than R. H. Case assures us that the name Lepidus is "suggestive of some kind of sea creature" -- like, say, a sky-blue Loch Ness monster with a shell and horns? In American pronunciation, the d in Lepidus is flapped, making it sound like a Spanish or Japanese r; and the u is reduced to a schwa, which would be considered an a sound in Japanese. That gives us Lepiras, which is pretty close to Lapras. I personally didn't think Lapras was such a great name for a sea creature, but I'm prepared to defer to Professor Case on the matter.

Lepidus means "pleasant, charming," but it can also be a variant of Lapidus, "made of stone, stony." A sea creature made of stone would certainly be "of the inerter type." The name Peter, of course, also means "stone." St. Peter was also a "triumvir" of sorts in the Synoptic Gospels and Mormon tradition, together with James and John.

The synchronicity fairies comment on "The curious incident of the cock at dawn"

Yesterday, I posted "The curious incident of the cock at dawn," in which I wrote as if from an alternate timeline and used the story of Peter's three denials before cockcrow to explore questions of agency and fate and whether Peter could have acted otherwise than it had been prophesied that he would act. For reasons related to the "alternate timeline" conceit, I modified the biblical text to say that the cock would "call out" rather than "crow."

This morning, I checked Synlogos and clicked a few of the links. Both Dark Brightness and Vox Day had posted links to a long article called "How to Build a Small Town in Texas." I didn't read the whole article but skimmed it a bit and noticed this illustration: a map of a Belgian town, with a caption inviting the reader to imagine "the invigorating call of roosters in the morning."

Another of the links on Synlogos was to John C. Wright's "The Leviathan of Time, Chapter Six: Oedipus and Jonah." I have not been reading this series and had no intention of jumping in at Chapter 6, but the name Jonah (a favorite topic of the sync fairies of late) caught my eye. I clicked and searched for the name. It turns out that Wright uses Oedipus and Jonah as examples of differing views on fate an the inevitability of prophecies: The prophecy about Oedipus inevitably comes true, despite or rather because of the attempts to thwart it; but Jonah's prophecy about Ninevah fails when the Ninevites literally change the future by repenting. The whole story also apparently deals with different "timelines."

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After looking at Synlogos, my next intended stop was the Babylon Bee. I visit that site often enough that I can just type a "ba" in the address bar and press enter, autocomplete doing the rest. This time I somehow accidentally typed "bi" instead and ended up at BibleGateway instead. The homepage there had the "verse of the day," John 14:6 -- "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

Later I brought up the app I have been using to listen to the entire Bible read aloud. It was at the beginning of John 14 -- that is, just a few verses before the one highlighted by BibleGateway, and immediately after "The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice." I wrote my "cock at dawn" post well before reaching this point in my Bible listening, and an earlier draft even included a reference to John 14:1: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me."

The curious incident of the cock at dawn

When Hamlet says, "We defy augury," modern readers are likely to understand this in terms of such familiar expressions as to defy comprehension and take it to mean, "Whatever is predicted of us, we can ignore the prediction and do otherwise." In fact, Hamlet's meaning is very nearly the opposite: We ignore omens that would allow us to predict and prevent future events, because all is fated and the future cannot be changed.

The naïve reader is liable to make a similar mistake in interpreting Jesus' famously cryptic statement to Simon Peter: "The cock shall not call out till thou hast denied me thrice." Thinking of such expressions as when pigs fly or when hell freezes over, the reader is likely to understand Jesus as saying, "You will certainly never deny me."

There are multiple obvious problems with this reading, though. What can thrice mean, for instance? That Peter might deny Jesus once or twice but that three times was unthinkable? And isn't the whole construction backwards? We say, "That won't happen until pigs fly," not, "Pigs won't fly until that happens."

As it happens, there is very strong textual evidence that what Jesus meant was, "You will certainly deny me, this very night." As strange as it may seem, multiple ancient authorities attribute to the "cock" (ἀλέκτωρ) a distinctive cry or "crow," sometimes represented as kukuriku or some similar onomatopoeia, and apparently cocks used to "crow" with such regularity that farmers used to use them as a sort of natural alarm clock, rising "at cockcrow" -- that is, at dawn. Thus, Jesus almost certainly meant, "You will deny me thrice before daybreak."

What to make, then, of the fact that Peter apparently never did deny Jesus, not even once, but stood with him when all the other disciples had abandoned him and was crucified alongside him? And how to reconcile the whole story with the very obvious fact that the cock has no call and is in fact proverbial for its silence?

Secular scholars will explain it away, of course. Jesus simply made a mistake, they will say, and his prophecy did not come true. And the ἀλέκτωρ that is represented in the New Testament, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar's Odes, and elsewhere as "crowing" loudly and regularly must have been some other species than the silent barnyard fowl we know today.

The faithful, however, can recognize the very strong evidence that the biblical ἀλέκτωρ is none other than our familiar cock or rooster, that this very animal used to give a distinctive call every day at dawn, and that all this "crowing" abruptly and miraculously ceased when Peter -- in the naïve, not the Shakespearean sense -- defied augury.

The dragon and the subterranean swan

Back in December 2019, I posted about an allegorical picture of my sister Kat's -- a rather unconventional depiction of the Last Judgment, using a swan in an underground chamber as a symbol of Christ.

Then Cometh the End

I connected this with a drawing by Oswald Wirth which I had seen a few days earlier -- the Judgment card of the Tarot, with a huge swan replacing the angel who sounds the Last Trump. Just as Kat's swan is underground, Wirth's seems to be diving down into an open grave.

Wirth associates each of the Major Arcana with a constellation, and the constellation associated with the Judgment is Cygnus, the Swan. These correspondences are summarized in this diagram, taken from an English translation of Wirth's Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge.

Note that Cygnus is directly above Draco and oriented as if it were diving down towards the dragon. (These two constellations are not so oriented in the sky.) Notice also that Draco is labeled 13, meaning that it corresponds to the nameless 13th trump, which represents Death. Wirth's swan drawing also shows the swan diving down into a representation of death, while Kat's shows the swan already in a sort of "underworld."

In his 2006 article "Constellations Testify of Seven Angels," John P. Pratt connects the Swan with Simon Peter -- who was, famously, crucified upside down.

The constellation of the Cross is usually called the Southern Cross because another name for the Swan is the Northern Cross. Note how the stars in the Swan form a nearly perfect crucifix in the heavens. And also note that the Swan is upside-down on the cross, the head of the Swan being the foot of the cross. Could it be that Peter's upside-down crucifixion could have been represented in these heavenly figures thousands of years before it occurred? What do you think? There is no doubt in my mind that the answer is yes, because the symbolism is too clear and too perfect.

There is no dragon in the story of Peter's martyrdom, but it does feature the "swan" (Peter) being in an underground chamber. In the same article, Pratt quotes this account of the apostle's last days.

Maliciously condemned, Peter was cast into the horrible, fetid prison of the Mamertine. . . . described as a deep cell cut out of solid rock at the foot of the capitol, consisting of two chambers, one above the other. The only entrance is through an aperture in the ceiling. The lower chamber was the death cell. Light never entered it and it was never cleaned.

This deep cell, accessible only through an aperture in the ceiling, suggests the cavern in Kat's drawing, or the open grave in Wirth's. The use of the word "aperture" in this context also puts me in mind of one of the most laughably bad passages in the Bible translation used by Jehovah's Witnesses: "upon the light aperture of a poisonous snake will a weaned child actually put his own hand" (Isaiah 11:8; KJV "the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den") -- giving us an indirect link to the serpent or dragon.

Finally, the identification of the swan with the angel of Judgment, and its association with the dragon, ties in with the Rider-Waite version of the Judgment card, where the angel bears the banner of St. George the Dragon-slayer.

In a recent post, I saw the name George paired not just with the dragon, but with Draco -- the Dragon as constellation.