Westley, what about the A.L.S.W.'s?

These code-words are fun sometimes, but the meaning behind them is pretty grim -- and I think the odds are better than even that Bruce is right here.

It's getting kind of ridiculous how many things need to be coded, though. You have to be careful how you talk about even so general a concept as vexillological dissimulation, lest you be flagged as one of those perfidious connivance conjecturers.

Softly now

Painting at the Buddhist temple on Mt. Bagua,
illustrating the 3rd hexagram of the I Ching

There's a certain hostility in my online circle to the observance of New Year's Day -- an arbitrary date, corresponding to nothing in astronomy or history or religion, and therefore "nihilistic" -- but I've always liked it for precisely that reason. The Kalends of January, representing nothing other than the passage of another year, allows us to focus on that and that alone, looking back on the year just passed and forward to the one just beginning.

I say the day has no religious significance, but this is not entirely true. It is the Octave Day of Christmas and as such marks the circumcision of Christ -- the day he underwent the ancient Abrahamic rite and was given the name Jesus, after the great warrior who was Moses' successor, leading Israel into the promised land where Moses himself could not go. (The original Jesus was, appropriately, called the "son of Nun" -- meaning "son of the Fish" in Hebrew, but in English also suggesting "son of the Holy Virgin" and "son of no one.") Is there not something of Janus in this event, looking back to the ancient Patriarchs and forward to the transcending of the religion of Moses?

This year, though, the Kalends has another primary meaning for me. It was one year ago today that the Maid of Heaven, known to history as Joan of Arc, manifested herself to me, twice in one day, with overpowering spiritual force. I had been anticipating a possible repeat of that experience -- as the Angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith on the same day for four consecutive years -- and I was not disappointed. It was a good deal subtler this time, though, and seemed to come not from some external Heaven but from within my own heart -- but it was still unmistakably her: a subtle whisper that said, "Yes, I am still here with you, but softly now. After the earthquake, a still small voice."

It was she who drove me up the Mountain of the Eight Trigrams and had me spend the first day of the year in a Buddhist temple, of all places. There, one of the old warrior gods, drawn sword in his hand and finger raised before his lips, reinforced her message of "softly now."

This is not an injunction to secrecy, but something else. The synchronicity fairies had seen to it that, less than hour before entering the temple, I had read these words from one of Whitley Strieber's strange visitors: "Form an assault on secrecy. . . . It is the greatest present evil," and "Human life is about freedom, and secrecy is the murderer of freedom."

(These lines are from a strange little book called The Key, and the key is one of the attributes of Janus, whose Kalends this is. According to René Guénon, Jesus Christ has sometimes been represented in the form of Janus because he is called in the old liturgy the Key of David -- an appellation ultimately deriving from Isaiah, 22nd chapter, 22nd verse.)

Why the Maid?, I've often asked myself this year. Of all the saints and angels and resurrected beings who could have taken an interest, why her? She is such an anomalous saint, so superlatively holy and yet devoted to a mission that seems so secular and political. Why was someone like her chosen for such a worldly mission as the liberation of France from the English? And why has she returned now, in an era when any involvement in politics seems like a spiritual death-trap, when one would have thought someone like St. Anthony the Great would have been more appropriate?

Joan was born among a French people who were no more holy than les goddams, as they called the habitually profane English, and she made them holy -- some of them, anyway, enough to make a difference. She drove the whores out of the camp, sent the soldiers to Mass, and transformed thousands of souls by the sheer force of her personality. I suppose that, rather than the military and political consequences that followed, was what really mattered.

Elsewhere in The Key, Strieber asks his visitor, "What is the most important thing that Christ said?" The answer: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium" (this was in 1998). This seems to be enjoining a sort of passivity that is opposite of the warrior spirit of the Maid -- and yet at the same time it is a synchronistic link to her. "I had a standard," she said at her trial, "whose field was sown with lilies. There was a figure of Christ holding the world and on each side of Him was an angel. . . . Written above: Jhesus Maria."

In writing this post, I was unsure whether calends or kalends was more correct, which led me to the Wikipedia entry for that term. In explaining how the Romans reckoned dates, it said, "For example, April 22 is the 10th day before the calends of May." April 22 is a date that has significance for me for personal reasons, so I thought it a minor coincidence that it had happened to be chosen as an example. Then, when I wanted to quote the Maid's description of her banner, I searched my own blog for lilies, which turned up not only the post I had been looking for ("The first rainbow flag") but also "I have enough water lilies, I need more crocodiles" -- a post about Roger Anthony in which I note that he died on April 22, 2014. Anthony's name also syncs with my passing reference above to St. Anthony the Great, mentioned as a saint very different from Joan, just as Anthony contrasts the crocodile with the water lily. (In Flaubert's novel about St. Anthony, the saint sees "crocodiles playing upon lyres" on the walls of the pagan temple in Heliopolis; I myself just spent the day in a pagan temple, and lyre-playing aquatic reptiles sync with Mr. Icthus-Oress.)

It is traditional to see in the New Year a new beginning, a dawning. Whatever personal dawn we might experience this year, though, it will take place within the larger context of the long sunset of our dying civilization. Softly now . . .

Softly now the light of day

Fades upon my sight away.

Free from care, from labor free,

Lord, I would commune with thee.

As all dies that can die, and all burns that can burn, distractions fall away and we find ourselves, in the midst of this unfolding apocalypse, "free from care, from labor free." Only God remains, and God's.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Happy New Year.

Come quickly, O Frabjous Day!

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

-- Hebrews 4:12

There's been a lot of talk about the Mark of the Beast these days, and the rough consensus of those in my extended spiritual circle seems to be that while the pecks and the surveillance system associated with them may not be the Mark -- that is, that the Revelation of John is unlikely to be a coded description of 2021 specifically -- it is an extremely clear example of that sort of thing: a mark of a beast.

And what shall we call this particular beast, this venomous juggernaut of malarkey, this personification of sinister hypodermic shenanigans which is at the same time a sort of apotheosis of complete and utter bullshit? Isn't it obvious? With a nod to the Brits, whose formerly localized slang for a particular medical procedure went global this year, I give you the Jabberwock.

And, well, we know how that poem ends. Carroll said that, while he understood the etymologies of most of the nonsense words in Jabberwocky, he was never quite able to figure out where vorpal had come from. One commentator's proposal is that it was made by taking alternate letters from the words verbal and gospel -- the Word of God, quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword. Snicker-snack!

Hold on, and pray that the Frabjous Day be hastened. Because it is coming, and heads will roll, but what is to come after is still undecided. Pray not for the guillotine, that debased parody, but for the True and Vorpal Sword.

Maid of Heaven, be with us.

The deceivableness of unrighteousness

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:10

This passage was brought to my attention when it was quoted in a review of That Hideous Strength at Bennett's Phylactery. Most English Bibles have deception or deceiptfulness, but deceivableness is also a possible reading of the Greek, and I think this is a case in which the King James translators were clearly inspired. What do we see all around us in 2020-21 but the deceivableness of unrighteousness, because they received not the love of the truth?

Francis Berger makes the same point in a comment on his post "The Unapologetic Cruelty of None Are Safe Until All Are Safe."

The masses may indeed be under some sort of spell, but this does not absolve them of personal responsibility. They chose to fall under the spell and continue to choose to remain under that spell. The masses are not passive victims, and we should not make excuses for them.

Only God searcheth all hearts, but it is my considered opinion that there are very few, if indeed any, innocent victims of the birdemic scam and the other Big Lies of our time. The deceived are complicit in their own deception. To quote the Bennett's Phylactery article I linked, "Everyone involved knows on some level that they are being lied to -- and they not only assent to the lie, but workshop it, and refine it, and pass it along."

There's an obvious paradox involved in knowingly being deceived -- Carlyle's "sincere cant," Twain's "believing what you know ain't so." To know that you are being deceived, you must know that what you believe is a lie -- but if you know it's a lie, in what sense do you believe it? I think that's an extremely important philosophical and psychological question that deserves careful reflection, and I've been nibbling away at it over the years. On rough-and-ready terms, though, everyone knows what "on some level" means and knows -- firsthand -- what it means to be guilty of sincere cant. These things are always easier to recognize in others, though, and the world of 2020-21 has given us all ample opportunity for that!

The paradox of these times

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

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

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

Why this is hell, nor are we out of it.

Faust. Where are you damn’d?

Meph. In hell.

Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-- Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

In an insightful new post, William Wildblood asks, "Are we in hell now?" You will want to read the whole thing, but here are a few highlights, interspersed with my own thoughts.

It would be my contention that just as there is a divine plan for mankind so there is also a demonic plan. . . . Their aim is to absorb the energy from human souls for their own benefit and use. They have cut themselves off from the source of life and need life energy to maintain their existence. So they seek to corrupt souls. 

I found this an interesting take on demonic motivation, which has always been hard for me to understand. Pure spite just doesn't seem like enough of a reason for the devil to keep working tirelessly, millennium after millennium, for something that brings no benefit to him personally. It seems plausible that the devils must in some way need human damnation, that they must be soul-predators, vampires.

William suggests that, just as plants get their life energy from the Sun, so non-demonic beings get their life from God. The demons, who have cut themselves off from God, would be analogous to animals, which, because they cannot photosynthesize for themselves, must prey directly or indirectly on those who can. Not for nothing is the Satanic system called the beast. The devils "seek to corrupt souls" in order to cut them off from God -- which either "kills" them, making them suitable food for the devils, or forces them to become soul-predators themselves. I'm not entirely sure this is true, but if it is, it has some interesting ramifications -- including that there are likely two different sorts of damnation: that of the cannibalized, and that of the cannibals.

What is their aim? It is still the corruption of souls as it always has been but now there is something else. I believe, and I believe this because of what I can observe around me, because of the pattern of recent history and because of intuition, that they are seeking to make hell on Earth. That is to say, they are seeking to externalise hell onto the physical plane, to extend their domain, as it were.

The whole demon-possession subplot in the Synoptic Gospels -- especially the story of the devils who, being cast out of a man, begged to be allowed to possess a herd of swine -- strongly suggests a strong desire among the devils to extend their domain into the physical. Something similar is hinted at in the Genesis 6 story of the fallen angels who descended to earth and took human wives. The motivation behind this is not obvious, but perhaps we should make more of an effort to understand it.

If hell can be defined as separation from God then it should be obvious that we are in hell now.

And if the speculation above is true, it means that those who are sufficiently separated from God to have entered a hell state here on earth have two possible fates: to "die" spiritually or to turn to soul-cannibalism. And isn't that what we see all around us -- the zombie masses and the vampire elite?

You don't have to go out and do anything publicly but through your thoughts and prayers you can serve God and help souls struggling for truth in the spiritual quagmire of the contemporary world. This world may be turning into hell but heaven awaits those who simply wake up to that fact.

"This is hell," said Mephisto to Faust, "nor am I out of it" -- because hell is in the last analysis not a geographical location but a state of the soul, and wherever you go, there you are. One likes to imagine Jesus responding to a similar question -- "How comes it then that thou art out of heaven?" -- with, "Why this is heaven, nor am I out of it." Wherever you go, there you are.

To an extent unprecedented in history, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death -- but for those who turn to God, it is possible at the same time to lie down in green pastures and walk beside the still waters, to sit at table in the presence of our enemies.

"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? . . . Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live" (Isa. 55:1-3).

Apocalypse means unveiling

As I was out on a night hike, contemplating and trying to get a sense of what is about to happen, this sentence came into my mind: "Apocalypse means unveiling." This was accompanied by a burst of -- uh, "imagery," I guess, though that's not really the term; something neither visual nor aural but suggestive of both. The best way I can describe it is to say it feels like a complicated multidimensional geometric shape unfolding and articulating itself in the mind, with a powerful sense that a mass of information has been transferred just below the threshold of normal consciousness. (If I were to focus on its aural-like aspect, I might compare it to a recording of Donald Duck played back at very high speed, as un-sublime as that sounds!) The tip of that iceberg, the only part that can be verbalized, was the sentence, "Apocalypse means unveiling."

I very rarely have such experiences, so when I do, it naturally captures my attention. I therefore have no very satisfying explanation for the fact that, some 20 minutes later, I had completely forgotten it! I was left only with a vague sense that I had forgotten something, something important, something that I needed to write about . . . I struggled to recall, retracing my steps and my trains of thought, and then -- with the abruptness of a forgotten dream-memory spontaneously recovered in the late afternoon -- it all came back to me.

In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.

Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.

But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

-- Luke 12:1-5

My sense is that the next big event is not going to be an event at all, but a revelation of what has already been done — a revelation so clear that even those who slept through the global coup will not be able to ignore it.

Blood in the wine

Most dreams evaporate from memory within minutes of waking, but this one has persisted for several days and keeps coming back to mind as something potentially significant. It's a dream, and as such obviously can't be expected to make sense in a linear, point-by-point manner, but I still feel as if it were trying to communicate something.

⁂

A couple had arrived at house and were taking groceries out of their car. I think I was their guest or something, and I felt that courtesy demanded that I help them by carrying the heaviest items. I was too slow, though, and they were already carrying everything themselves. It particularly bothered me that the woman was carrying a big cardboard box which was full of various things and looked quite heavy. I tried to take it from her, but she wouldn't let go of it. Feeling that I had to do something to help, I took a few of the heaviest items out of her box and carried them -- three bottles of wine, one red and two white.

Since I was only carrying a few things, I got into the kitchen first and was about to set the bottles down on the table when I noticed that one of the white-wine bottles had started leaking profusely and was about to fall apart. Although it felt exactly like glass in my hand, it wasn't breaking the way glass breaks. It was more like a piece of ice that looks solid but has little seams of melt inside which have compromised its structural integrity. I felt that some parts of the bottle had sort of slipped down vertically -- I thought of that collapsing ice sheet footage they always show in global warming documentaries -- and that, while the bottle was still in one piece for now, it would shortly break apart entirely.

I knew that wine wasn't cheap, so my concern became how to save as much of it as possible before the bottle shattered. There were a few items of glassware on the table, including a wide-mouthed hobnail glass carafe. It looked slightly dusty but otherwise clean, and I decided to hold the collapsing wine bottle over it and let it catch as much of the wine as possible. I guess I salvaged about half of it.

Now that the wine was in a clear container, I could see that it wasn't white wine at all but rosé -- and then I saw why. There was a long, curving laceration along the periphery of my right palm, from the base of the thumb almost to the base of the pinky, and it had been dripping blood into the carafe. (I hadn't noticed before because there was no pain; there generally isn't in dreams.) I found that a large, very thin piece of broken glass had slipped under the skin of my palm. (I assumed it was from the wine bottle, although looking back on the dream now I can see it was much too clear and too thin for that.) I slowly drew it out, grimacing and inhaling through my teeth as I did so even though there was no pain. I was still bleeding a bit, though not nearly as much as you'd expect from a cut like that, and I dabbed at the wound with a tissue.

Then I looked again at the half-full carafe and realized that all my efforts had been wasted. "They can't drink this, I said. "This is my blood."

Immediately I checked myself: "'This is my blood'? That's blasphemous!"

⁂

Besides the fairly explicit reference to the Last Supper at the end of the dream, I think there's also a clear allusion to Jesus' saying about wine and bottles. (He was actually talking about wineskins, not glassware, but the King James uses "bottles.")

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved (Matt. 9:17).

In the dream, this is reversed: It is the new bottle (or newly bought, anyway) that breaks, and some of the wine is saved by transferring it to an "old bottle" (the dusty carafe).

My sense immediately upon waking was that the breaking bottle represented the ongoing collapse of our civilization -- particularly of what used to be called "Christendom." That civilization has been the carrier of much that is of great value (the expensive wine), of which I wanted to save as much as possible before the collapse was complete.

The new wine bottle thus represents the modern System, and the dusty carafe must represent something older that I was attempting to transfer the wine of Christianity into. While I don't consider myself at all "reactionary," and tend to think of the Romantic Christian project as something fundamentally new, it is in a certain sense a return to the old -- to animism, for example, and other pre-Hellenistic ways of thinking (Hellenistic philosophy being the glass bottle in which Christianity was immured almost from the beginning). At any rate, the carafe was obviously just a stopgap measure, not a long-term receptacle for the precious wine.

The change from the tinted glass of a wine bottle to the clear glass of the carafe could also represent an increase in clarity, a little less "seeing through a glass, darkly" than before. (Yes, glass in that verse means "mirror," but my dreaming subconscious reads the KJV more naïvely.)

There are many possible interpretations of the blood. At the most basic level, it represents the (minor but certainly not negligible) element of risk, suffering, and self-sacrifice inherent in the project.

It also represents the addition of the personal, the embrace of a more participatory role in faith and in Creation. Instead of passively imbibing something that I figure ought to be good because it was bottled up a long time ago in "a good year," I add my own life's blood to the mix. Not intentionally, I might add; it just happens in the process of trying to salvage the vintage wine.

As the end of the dream hints, there is certainly an element of presumptuousness in taking a DIY approach to Christianity, as if one were arrogating to oneself the role of the religious leader -- almost as if one were trying to usurp the role of Christ himself. ("How can I say, 'This is my blood'? That's blasphemous!")

"Priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world" (2 Nephi 26:29), but in the dream I say (changing the emphasis a bit), "They can't drink this; this is my blood." The blood-wine concoction is suitable only for myself. As for the couple, well, they still have a bottle apiece.

Joyfully, joyfully marching

One of the hymns I grew up singing as a Mormon was "We Are All Enlisted," from the 1866 hymnal The New Golden Chain of Sabbath School Melodies. The first verse ends thus:

Haste to the battle, quick to the field;

Truth is our helmet, buckler, and shield.

Stand by our colors; proudly they wave!

We're joyfully, joyfully marching to our ----

And of course we kids would always belt out "GRA-AVE!" -- which, unlike the printed lyric, "home," at least rhymes. It was supposed to be a joke -- imagine joyfully marching to one's grave! -- but I actually think it's better than the New Golden Chain version in terms of both rhyme and reason. Johnny comes marching home again when the war is over, not when he's hasting to the battle. And countless martyrs have joyfully marched to their grave.

Only the first verse features this subverted rhyme. Is it possible that this not mere ineptitude on the part of our anonymous Sabbath School Melodian but rather an intentional evocation of the unspoken ghost-rhyme "grave" -- like the evocation of "hell" in "I Worry So for Dear Old Bill"?

Bruce Charlton has compared our situation to Ragnarök.

In the Norse myth of Ragnarok the prophecy is that, at the end, the gods will fight the giants; and will lose. So why do the gods fight?

The gods fight because that is how they win.

The gods are Men - the giants are demons. 

Ragnarok is the final battle of the spiritual war on earth. 

And Men will lose the last battle - on earth. 

(How could it be otherwise? The giants are just too powerful.)

But choosing to fight against the giants, the demons; we win in Heaven, and eternally.

So - like the Norse gods; we prepare for Ragnarok.  

We are all enlisted till the conflict is o'er -- and at the material level, yes, we are marching to our grave. Defeat is assured. At the spiritual level, though, the true destination of our march is God, who is our home.

Note: Checking William Wildblood's blog, I find a new post, "Be Cheerful." Something in the air.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid

A reader sent me this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (from August 17, 1989), with the subject line "Calvin predicts the peck."

Calvin's original plan is to charge people to drink his "curative elixir," but in the end he decides to call it a "debilitating disease drink" and charge people not to drink it. The joke relies on the commonsense understanding that people are willing to pay to get something good, but that anything they're willing to pay not to get must be bad.

The 2020s, however, are stranger than fiction. We are told that the birdemic peck is totally safe, offers protection against a deadly disease that cannot be treated in any other way, and is obviously in everyone's own self-interest to get -- and that people need to be bribed with donuts and joints and lottery tickets to get it, and penalized if they don't. The message is, essentially, "Calvin's curative elixir: $1.00 not to have any." 

Emphasis on "as we know it"

Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

-- Revelation 12:12

I am not afraid. I was born for this.

-- the Maid

Et in Arcadia . . .

It's Thanksgiving Day for us Americans, and I was just thinking that one of the main things I'm thankful for this year is that I was in Taiwan when the birdemic BS hit the fan. Here the response has been, while still insanely out of proportion to the actual health risk, much more measured than almost anywhere else in the world. No lockdowns, no forced closures of businesses, nothing like that. People wore masks for a while, but there was never any strict enforcement, and now even that has gone back to normal ("normal" including, in East Asian countries, a certain background level of voluntary mask-wearing).

I was, as I say, just thinking that -- when someone told me the news: Masks mandatory in most public areas in Taiwan starting Dec. 1, to be enforced by fines of up to US$500. This would be a stupid and evil policy anywhere in the world, but the stupidity and evil is particularly transparent in Taiwan. Here's the birdemic death data for Taiwan, according to Google:

That's right, a whopping seven deaths -- not 7,000, not 700, just seven -- have been attributed to the birdemic to date, with the most recent more than six months ago. For comparison, Taiwan has a population of about 24 million. Lightning strikes kill an average of 12 people a year. Billionaires outnumber birdemic victims five-to-one. "It's just the flu, bro" would actually be an absurd overstatement, since last year's flu killed 89 people 530 people, plus 15,185 pneumonia deaths, here. In short, the risk of dying of the birdemic in Taiwan is not appreciably higher than the risk of falling victim to spontaneous human combustion.

The mask mandate has generated no noticeable controversy or resistance. After all, winter is coming! There might be a second wave! Seven more people might die! Maybe even eight!

So this is the reductio ad absurdum of 2020. If people in Taiwan -- where IQs are among the highest in the world, and where literally nothing is happening -- can fall for this, then all bets are off. This isn't a case of people erring on the side of safety, or even being innocently bamboozled. This is people with fully functioning brains willfully choosing to be dumber than a bag of hammers. This is civilization committing suicide. This is "2 + 2 = 5." This is the end.

Oh, I almost forgot: #GiveThanks

Just one of those coincidences

From this site:

Ezra [Koenig] tells how [he] knew a classmate in high school who believed that "armageddon" was pronounced "ar-MAGA-don" (similar to the naming conventions of dinosaurs) until the release of the 1998 film Armageddon.

Somehow they neglected to capitalize the d.

No freedom, no stars!

An American politician is giving a speech. "If you're not a free state, you don't get a star on the flag. As simple as that!"

The crowd erupts into chants of "No freedom, no stars! No freedom, no stars!"

I think my dreaming mind has pretty accurately captured the niveau of contemporary politics.

Not with a bang

We are living in times which are both extraordinary and just plain dull. Nothing of any real interest is taking place even though recent events have been both dramatic and unprecedented.

-- William Wildblood

That about sums it up! I had not been prepared for just how stupid the apocalypse would be, how obscene, how inane. Nothing so romantic as an Armageddon, no grand Last Battle, no stern Götterdämmerung. No, the earthy expression turns out to have been nearest the truth all along: when the shit hits the fan.

And how interesting is that?

All things are become slippery

God only knows, God makes his plan

The information's unavailable to the mortal man

. . .

Slip slidin' away, slip slidin' away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you're slip slidin' away

-- Paul Simon

⁂

Genesis 1:1

Back in 2006, I read a series of online articles (qv) by one Vernon Jenkins about the mathematical properties of the first verse of the Bible.

Genesis 1:1 -- translated as "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" -- consists of 28 Hebrew letters, and 28 is a triangular number.

Genesis 1:1 as a triangle

What are the chances of that? Not particularly low. If we want to express the odds numerically, it all depends on what set of integers we look at, since triangular numbers become progressively less frequent as the numbers get larger. To get a rough idea of how likely it is for something about as long as Genesis 1:1 to have a triangular number of letters, lets look at the range of integers from 14 to 42, inclusive -- that is, 28 plus or minus 50%. Of these 29 integers, four -- about 1 in 7 -- are triangular.

Now it happens that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet does double duty as a numeral, and it is this that forms the basis of the Kabbalistic practice of gematria, in which a Hebrew word or text can be interpreted by translating it into a number (adding up the values of its constituent letters) and then looking either at the properties of that number itself or at other Hebrew words that add up to the same value. For example, the Hebrew phrase translated as "And lo, three men" in Genesis 18:2 adds up to the number 701 -- which "proves" that the three men mentioned are the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, because the Hebrew phrase "These are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael" also adds up to 701. (A corresponding practice, called isopsephia, exists for the Greek language and is presumably what is being alluded to by the famous New Testament statement that the "number of the name" of the apocalyptic beast is 666.)

The gematria value of Genesis 1:1 is 2701 -- another triangular number. This is a much larger number than 28, so its being triangular is a somewhat more impressive coincidence. Calculating the odds the same way we did before, we look at the range of numbers from 1350 to 4052 and find that 38 of these 2703 numbers are triangular -- about 1 in 71. Taking the product of these two probabilities, we can say that the chance of a verse like Genesis 1:1 having both a triangular number of letters and a triangular gematria value is about 1 in 500 -- fairly improbable, but not astonishingly so.

But 2701 isn't just any triangular number. It also happens to be the product of 37 and 73 -- the 4th hex number an the 4th star number, respectively. (The product of the nth hex and the nth star is always triangular, so that's not an additional coincidence.) Such numbers are extremely rare; the first six numbers in the series (products of the nth hex and the nth star; let's call them starhex numbers) are 1,  91, 703, 2701, 7381, and 16471.

The fourth starhex number, 37 × 73 = 2701

The figure above demonstrates what a starhex number is. The figure consists of 73 little hexagons arranged in the shape of a six-pointed star. The center of this star is itself a larger hexagon, made up of 37 of the little hexagons. Each of the 73 little hexagons is itself made up of 37 tiny circles, duplicating on a smaller scale that central hexagon. The total number of  tiny circles is 37 × 73 = 2701 -- the starhex number which is the gematria value of Genesis 1:1.

Of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, how many have a gematria (or isopsephia) value which is a starhex number? Eleven. How many of those 11 verses also have a triangular number of letters in the original language? Only two. The other one is Leviticus 20:27: "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them" -- 55 letters, with a gematria value of 2701. I find it quite humorous that the only Bible verse to share these unusual properties of Genesis 1:1 should be what is surely one of the most embarrassing verses in the whole Bible! (To any atheists looking for ammo to use against the likes of Vernon Jenkins, you're welcome.)

(By the way, a tip of the hat to Richard Amiel McCough, whose searchable gematria database of every word and verse in the Bible is what has made it so easy for me to discover the information in the previous paragraph. I especially appreciate Mr. McCough's willingness to continue to host this and other Bible resources, created when he was a believing Christian, even though he has since become a standard-issue atheist and "debunked himself.")

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Texas sharpshooting

All things considered, how impressed should we be with these mathematical properties of Genesis 1:1? Not very. While it is obviously extremely unlikely for any particular verse to have those particular properties, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is pretty obviously at work here. (The sharpshooter, you will recall, fired some shots into the side of a barn and then painted a target around the largest cluster of bullet holes.) When you consider the virtually infinite number of mathematically interesting properties a given number could possess, it becomes clear that any number you care to analyze will turn out to have some extremely unusual combination of those properties. Is there any reason at all to expect that a particularly significant Bible verse would add up to the product of the nth star and the nth hex -- rather than being, say, a large prime, or a perfect number, or the product of three consecutive Fibonacci numbers, or whatever? Of course not. Jenkins is painting the target after the shots have been fired.

Here's another of Jenkins's "amazing" properties of Genesis 1:1. If you take the product of the gematria values of every letter in the verse, divided by the product of the gematria values of every word in the verse, and then multiply that by the number of letters over the number of words -- you get 3.141554509... × 10¹⁷. Ignore the 10¹⁷ bit, and you have the approximate value of pi, correct to 5 significant figures.

Which is not impressive at all, when you consider the infinite number of possible (and completely arbitrary) mathematical operations that could be performed on something in order to derive a number fairly close to pi, you realize that it means nothing at all.

Returning to our friend the Texas sharpshooter, though, suppose he were to fire his shots, paint his target -- and then fire another round of shots and hit this freshly painted target again? Wouldn't that mean he was a real sharpshooter after all?

Well, Vernon Jenkins has done that. Remember that completely arbitrary set of mathematical operations he performed on Genesis 1:1 to derive pi, correct to 5 significant figures? Well, if you apply the exact same arbitrary set of mathematical operations to John 1:1 (the Bible's other "In the beginning..." verse), you get  2.718312812... × 10⁴⁰. Again ignoring the powers of ten, this is the value of e, also correct to 5 significant figures. That is impressive!

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S:E:G:

Could there be an English gematria?

Hebrew and Greek numerals work basically the same way: The first nine letters correspond to the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine correspond to 10 to 90, and then 100 to 900. (Hebrew only has 22 letters, not 27 like archaic Greek, so the Hebrew system is defective.) But applying the same system to the English alphabet is arbitrary, since the Roman letters have never had those numerical values. When the alphabet is used numerically (in lists or outlines, for example), it's always in a straightforward ordinal manner, where Z represents 26, not 800.

I call this straightforward system -- A = 1, Z = 26 -- Simple English Gematria. By a singularly appropriate coincidence, the words simple, English, and gematria all add up to the same value, 74, in this system, so the total value for Simple English Gematria is 222. I used to abbreviate this as S∴E∴G∴, ironically imitating the Masonic-style punctuation used by Aleister Crowley and other would-be English kabbalists, which I jokingly referred to as "magickal puncktuation" (spelling magick with a k being another Crowleyism). Later I discovered that this phrase, magickal puncktuation, adds up to 222, the same value as Simple English Gematria. This bizarre coincidence made me modify said puncktuation, changing the therefore-signs to colons, so as to represent the number 222.

Because the highest letter value in S:E:G: is 26 -- as opposed to to 400 in Hebrew gematria or 900 in Greek isopsephia -- S:E:G: tends to yield much lower word values than those languages. Still, though, there are some surprising cross-language coincidences. For example, the gematria value of the Tetragrammaton -- the Hebrew name of God, usually rendered Jehovah or Yahweh in English -- is 26, which is also the S:E:G: value of the English word God. In Greek isopsephia, Jesus and Christ add up to 888 and 1480, respectively. Obviously no single word can have such a high value in S:E:G:, but the S:E:G: value of Jesus (and also of cross, Messiah, and gospel) is 74, and both 888 and 1480 are multiples of 74.

Anyway, it crossed my mind to see if I could find an English passage that would somehow be the S:E:G equivalent of Jenkins's Genesis 1:1, with similar properties. Of course there are no searchable S:E:G: databases, so I wouldn't be able to rely on the infinite monkey theorem to guarantee success. Instead I would have to do some bona fide Texas sharpshooting if I was going to hit the tiny target Jenkins had painted. I looked at the English translation of Genesis 1:1, and at the first verses of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants (books of scripture revealed in English rather than in Hebrew or Greek, and so in some sense the English equivalents of the Bible) but found nothing mathematically interesting. So much for that idea.

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Helaman 13

Some months after my failed attempt to find an English answer to Genesis 1:1, I was reading a novel and brooding. This was near the beginning of my relationship with the woman who would later become my wife. We had just had some minor dustup about something, but I was still a novice in these matters, had not yet learned to take feminine drama in my stride, and was pretty sure I had lost her forever. As I contemplated the fragility of everything, how anything can be taken from you at any time and for no particularly intelligible reason, I suddenly thought of a line from the Book of Mormon: "All things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them." I had been an atheist for four or five years at that time, and hadn't read the Book of Mormon in about as long, but into my mind it popped regardless, and I thought it was a nice turn of phrase. (I also thought of Waterus, a blue plush walrus owned by a family friend when we were kids; Waterus's catchphrase was "I'm slipp'ier'n water! I'm slipp'ier'n water!").

And then it hit me: a sudden, inexplicable conviction that this was the English Genesis 1:1, that this shot in the dark would hit Jenkins's Texas target. This was a good 11 years before I got my first smartphone so, not having a Book of Mormon or a computer handy, I scribbled this down on the yellow Post-It note I was using as a bookmark: "all things are become slippery -- complete quote -- same properties as Gen 1:1." (What exactly did "complete quote" mean in this context? I didn't know. I just wrote down what came into my head.)

Later, at home, I looked up the passage online and found that it was from a sermon by Samuel the Lamanite in Helaman 13, and that it was in fact a "quote" -- Samuel was saying (quoting) what he predicted that his audience would say at some future date. Here, bracketed by "Yea, in that day ye shall say" and "And this shall be your language in those days," is the complete quote:

This seems like a pretty arbitrary block of text to focus on, nowhere near as obviously significant as the first verse of the Bible. It's not even a complete verse or set of verses, but consists of Helaman 13:34-36 and parts of vv. 33 and 37.

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

Despite the arbitrary nature of the passage, I nevertheless felt inexplicably confident that it would turn out to have the same numerical properties as Genesis 1:1. First I counted the number of letters: 630, a triangular number.

The Helaman text arranged in a triangle

Then I calculated the S:E:G: value of the entire passage: 7381, the fifth starhex number.

The fifth starhex number, 61 × 121 = 7381

Later I even went through the laborious calculations whereby Vernon Jenkins had derived pi and e from Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1:, respectively -- just in case it might yield, I don't know, Planck's constant or something, but it didn't. Still, though, a triangular number of letters with a starhex gematria value is pretty darn close to a perfect bull's-eye!

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We're not in Texas anymore

What's impressive about this, and what's not?

It's not impressive at all that somewhere in the Book of Mormon there exists a passage with a triangular number of letters and a starhex gematria value. It's true that such passages are so rare that only two verses in the whole Bible qualify -- but if a "passage" can be any syntactically coherent string of text, without regard for length or for verse boundaries, then obviously the chance of a text as long as the Book of Mormon's containing such a passage must be pretty close to 1.

What is impressive -- extremely impressive -- is not that such a passage exists, but that I found it. And found it on my fourth try: three obvious guesses (Genesis 1:1, 1 Nephi 1:1, D&C 1:1), and then this completely off-the-wall one. "Is your name Kunz? Is your name Heinz? Then is your name perhaps -- Rumpelstiltskin?" There's obviously no way in hell that was just a lucky guess on the queen's part, and Rumpelstiltskin's reaction is perfectly natural: "The devil told you that! The devil told you that!"

So who told me? In the past I have characterized it as a "gematria revelation"; was it?

I think there are only two possibilities. The first is that I revealed it to myself -- that some occult aspect of my mind, the part we file under "the unconscious," had been plugging away, going through the entire Book of Mormon from memory (I had, after all, read the book several times), counting letters and calculating gematria values, until it finally found what it was looking for and presented its discovery to my conscious mind. There is plenty of evidence that the "unconscious mind" enjoys powers of perfect recall and is quite capable of doing something like this.

The other possibility is that it was indeed a revelation -- from God, a Rumpelstiltskinian "devil," or some other such entity. The question then becomes why anyone would take the trouble of revealing such completely random information. I mean, who cares if some random Book of Mormon passage is numerologically akin to Genesis 1:1? What possible significance could that have? Why would God or the devil or anyone else go around telling people that? If it was indeed a revelation, I can only assume that the point had nothing to do with gematria as such but was simply to draw my attention to the passage in question, using something I happened to be interested in at that time as a means of doing so.

It does, after all, seem to be a genuinely prophetic passage, and to relate to our time -- which is what brought the whole thing back to my mind after all these years and made me post on it again.

To those in despair

No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful.
Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful.

-- They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start"

When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.

-- W. H. Auden, The Two

Dogs! Would you live forever?

-- Frederick the Great

But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go

-- Paul McCartney, "You Never Give Me Your Money"

Others are posting messages of comfort, but I get the distinct feeling that what some people really need is a message of discomfort -- a swift kick in the seat of the pants. So, never being one to dismiss distinct feelings, here goes.

Ahem.

Listen. You were always going to suffer and die. Everyone in your family was always going to suffer and die. Everyone you know was always going to suffer and die. All your earthly efforts were going to come to nought, your country and culture -- and, least we forget, "the economy" -- were going to degenerate and disappear, and the sun was going to expand into a red giant and consume the earth as though it had never existed. All that was always going to happen, and you knew it all along, or would have if you had been paying attention.

If you are in despair now but weren't before, you're an idiot. You do realize this game you signed up for is called mortal life, right? Did someone not explain that to you? Were you expecting something different? I don't know anything about your situation, but I know it hasn't fundamentally changed. You were born on death row. Don't you think that should have made you a little tougher than this?

As for the all the dupes and caitiffs and hypocrites and quislings you suddenly find yourself surrounded by -- I hate to break it to you, but they were already like that. All you're seeing now is what their true colors were all along. That's what the word apocalypse actually means, you know: Revelation. Revealing. Uncovering. The green field coming off like a lid. For just a second, you get a glimpse of all the men behind all the curtains in the world. The whited sepulchers may have looked nicer before they were opened, but they were full of dead men's bones all along.

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You should have come to terms with death and suffering and evil a hell of a long time ago, but if you somehow haven't gotten around to it yet, well, now's your chance to do so. (Or not. Distraction is always an option, of course. I hear porn sites are offering premium memberships for free.)

Suffering is nothing. Suffering is ephemeral. If you think it matters, you're not thinking clearly. Next question.

And death? Well, that's the big question, isn't it? If death is for real, if mortality is the last word, then nothing at all matters or could matter, and you have nothing in particular to do except enjoy "that magic feeling" and kill time until time kills you. Or cut to the chase and kill yourself. It doesn't really matter one way or the other.

Or perhaps there's something after death, in which case something very likely does matter, and you'd better figure out what. Don't expect me to hold your hand here. Do I look like some sort of spiritual guide? Do your own thinking. Get out there and figure things out. It's a pity you waited until you were scared, though. Now it's just going to be that much harder to trust your intuitions as anything other than wishful thinking. Still, better to trust them, as compromised a they are, than what some Random Internet Person says. Best get on it.

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Shall I close by saying that God loves you and everything's going to be all right? Fine. God loves you, and everything's going to be all right. Just keep in mind that God has loved everyone who has ever lived on this earth, and that "everything being all right," by God's standards, is evidently consistent with every imaginable human tragedy. Go read Candide sometime. Or the Book of Job. Or any history book, really. God's love offers no assurance at all against the kinds of things you're probably scared of. In the end, I'm afraid there's just no substitute for learning not to be scared of them. And there are only two ways of doing that.

So, what's it going to be? Philosophy or distraction?

A prophetic bull's-eye from Bruce Charlton

In case you've forgotten about it, go back and take a look at "Apocalypse Now!?" -- posted by Bruce Charlton on 27 November 2019. Here are some of the key passages (italics in original; boldface mine).

I get the feeling that the Apocalypse, which began some fifty years ago, is reaching a crescendo Now. There is a tremendous urgency towards the goal of a global totalitarian takeover by the 'Ahrimanic' powers of evil: that is to say, the type of evil which is cold, calculating, systematic, anti-spiritual, anti-human, bureaucratic and transhumanist.

[. . .]

The interesting aspect is the sheer urgency. There is a very obvious attempt to create a worldwide sense of emergency, of imminent cataclysm, of terrible things that are Just About To Happen... unless, we hand over complete power to the Establishment (preferably the-day-after-tomorrow, or quicker).

And this handover - this Power Grab by the Global Establishment - is being aimed-at Very Soon; on a timescale of months, not years.

[. . .] 

I don't know why this should be, but I am more convinced with each passing month; what is being attempted - now and on a daily basis - is the biggest shift in power in the history of the world; the attempt of a tiny global 'elite' (possessed-by and serving demonic powers) to impose a complete system of behavioural and thought control.

And it is now; this is the Apocalypse; this is what it looks-like from the inside!

If the urgency of the Establishment has a reason, then that will soon become apparent; one way or another (depending upon the individual choices of millions of people) we shall -within the year - see huge changes in everybodys' lives.

It is difficult to believe, I hardly believe it myself; but - as I say - there must surely be a reason for the extreme urgency of this power grab. I don't know what that reason is; but it must be expected to take effect on a timescale of months. 

I can't say I am exactly looking-forward to discovering the answer; because I don't suppose the surprise will be a pleasant one. However, I haven't long to wait.

"I haven't long to wait" was an understatement. Amazingly, this was posted just four days before the first corvids appeared in China, and less than three months before the WHO declared the situation an official birdemic necessitating the ongoing worldwide totalitarian takeover which will without a doubt mean "huge changes in everybody's lives" well within the year. Talk about hitting it out of the park!

Reprise

Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.

-- Job

They sang this at the beginning of the era. Here it is again at the End. I have no time for those who say Dylan wasn't a prophet.