Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

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Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

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Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

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Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

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Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

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After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

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Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A new FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

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In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

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What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.

Armored vultures and Cherubim

In my last post, "How is an armadillo like a griffon vulture in the Crimea?" vultures are connected, by way of armadillos, with armored knights. This reminded me of two cartoon characters I used to draw as a child: Victor the Vulture and Sylvester the Snake. None of the cartoons have survived, but they were drawn in the style of Walt Kelly's Pogo. Victor wore a visored helmet like a medieval knight's, a baldric, and a scabbard; and Sylvester would ride inside the scabbard as if he were a sword, with his head sticking out where the hilt would be. There was a running gag that Sylvester liked to eat apples, which he swallowed whole, and when he and Victor were on a mission, he would always end up finding some apples and getting distracted by them.

The idea of a vulture wearing armor like a knight is a pretty unusual one, I think.

In recent syncs, the vulture (particularly the genus known as "griffon vultures") has been interchangeable with the griffin, and particularly the griffin in The Tinleys, which lives at the top of a mountain and turns out to have godlike powers. In Russian (the vultures in the syncs have been Russian/Ukrainian), the word for "vulture" also means "griffin."

I had always assumed that griffin was related to the French griffe, "claw," but apparently not. Etymonline suggests a more surprising connection:

Klein suggests a Semitic source, "through the medium of the Hittites," and cites Hebrew kerubh "a winged angel," Akkadian karibu, epithet of the bull-colossus (see cherub).

So griffin may be related to the biblical word Cherubim. Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life:

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Gen. 3:24).

Victor the Vulture wears a sword belt, but instead of a sword it contains a snake that like to eat apples -- a pretty obvious link to the Garden of Eden story. The snake is even called Sylvester, meaning "forest dweller." The griffin in The Tinleys lives at the top of "the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around." Ezekiel places the Cherub and the Garden of Eden on a mountaintop:

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire (Ezek. 28:13-14).

In Nephi's vision, too, the Tree of Life is seen on "an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot" (1 Ne. 11:1).

Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree

I dreamed that I went back to my family's old home in Ohio (which in real life no longer exists, the land having been sold to Hell Hollow Wilderness Area when my parents moved to Virginia), realizing that I'd completely forgotten to visit it regularly to feed the pets.

When I arrived, I found that the house was now occupied by a married couple whom I could not see or here but of whose presence I was aware and with whom I could communicate telepathically. I thought of them as "G and his wife," with no particular idea of what the G stood for, and I didn't find their invisibility to be anything strange. I certainly didn't think of them as "ghosts" or anything. I took it for granted that they were fully physical flesh-and-blood human beings but that they existed on a wavelength that made them inaccessible to my ordinary senses.

G's wife led me down into the basement (which was enormous) and to what I guess could be described as a walk-in fireplace. It was a very large circular room with a high domed ceiling, full of smoldering logs and coals, and I understood that its purpose was to heat the house. She asked me to use a poker to break all the half-burnt logs into smaller pieces, and I said (telepathically), "To stoke the fire. I understand." I thought the purpose was to expose more unburnt wood to the oxygen and get the fire burning stronger.

In this assumption I was wrong. As I "stoked" the fire, the logs crumbled to coals, which quickly became ashes, and then the ashes became a thick gray mud. This, it turns out, was exactly what G wanted. He and another person, who I think was called Diego (at any rate it was definitely a Spanish name), appeared and announced that this was now their dojo. "Diego and I like to spend all day every day fighting here!" G announced. (All these people were still invisible and inaudible; I could "see" and "hear" them only in a metaphorical way.) G and Diego were each connected to the center of the domed ceiling with something like the silk dragline used by a falling spider. They would swing around on these lines, meet in the mud, and tussle.

At the end of a fight, what looked like some sort of corporate logo appeared in the air near the top of the ceiling. My first impression was that it was the Chupa Chups logo, but then I saw that it was actually G's wife's name. (I apprehended this fact directly, without being aware of what her name actually was.) Then the logo rotated clockwise several degrees, which had the effect of making the n at the end of the name look like a b, transforming the name to Cheb. (This implies that her name was Chen, but I had no sense of this fact during the dream and was somewhat surprised to discover it upon waking.) The logo then disappeared.

I recognized Cheb as the name of one of the ancient Spider Lords in Colin Wilson's novels, and I thought that this whole thing -- the fight on draglines and the transforming name -- was a reference to a theory G entertained that his wife was actually the reincarnation of a very important spider.

I was less concerned about the meaning of the logo than about the fact of its appearance. A logo appearing in midair at the end of a performance was something that happened on TV, not in real life. "G," I said, "how did that happen? Did you make it happen, or are we in a movie?"

"Well," he said, "let's say it's a preview  for a movie."

Later, I was out walking in the hemlock-beech woods that surrounded the house. I found a beech tree that had a little hollow at a fork in its trunk, and there was a small fire smoldering in the hollow. I thought I'd better "stoke" that fire, too, and I did this in the literal sense of adding fuel. The risk of starting a forest fire did cross my mind, but I dismissed it, figuring that G and his wife knew what they were doing keeping a fire burning there.

A few minutes later, I turned back and saw that the tree next to the one I had "stoked" was now on fire -- sort of. The flames were white in color, they didn't seem to be consuming the tree, and only that one tree was affected. The flaming tree gave the impression of a Persian cypress, which would be quite out of place in those woods, but I think it was the flames that made it appear to have that shape.

Some other invisible people were nearby, and I alerted them to the flaming tree. They expressed disappointment that no one had thought to bring a large blanket with which to beat out the flames. After a few failed attempts to beat out the flames with my jacket -- most of the blaze was too high for me to reach -- I ran back to the house to get a blanket.

In order to get a blanket, I would have to find a suitable word with which to conjure one up. In the house I found a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the classic green rooster logo, and began hurriedly scanning the side of the box for a suitable word. I found a possible candidate in the word croied, which I mentally pronounced to rhyme with void. "That might work," I thought. "Haven't I heard of croied sheets before, or croied bedding?" Wanting to be sure, I took down a dictionary (shelved together with the corn flakes for some reason) and looked up croi. I found nothing, but then I remembered that the base word is spelled croix, with the silent x being removed when a suffix is added. (Croix is French for "cross," but I was still mentally pronouncing it as "kroy," not "krwah") Looking up croix, I found a long list of definitions, including one that said "the absolute penis," but couldn't find anything bedding-related.

"Wait," I thought, "did that say 'the absolute penis'? That's pretty weird." I looked back through the list of definitions to find it again, but I found that all the definitions were now written in Chinese, and that I had lost the ability to read Chinese. I was still trying to decipher these Chinese definitions -- all I could figure out was that one of the characters was likely pronounced huang, though I wasn't sure which of the many characters with that pronunciation it might be -- I woke up.

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I've learned from William Wright that the point-of-view character in a dream doesn't always represent the dreamer himself, but that we sometimes dream from the point of view of another. In this case, I think it highly likely that I was represented in this dream by G, not by the character I experienced as being "me." I was actually known as G when I worked at Burger King as a teenager. For some reason, many of the employees there were known by celebrity surnames associated with their given names -- a concept roughly comparable to Cockney rhyming slang, I guess. For example, there was a guy named Jimmy who was always referred to as Page, and I, the guy named Bill, was called Gates, which was later shortened to G. This became sufficiently "official" that my name tag had nothing but the letter G on it. It is suggested in the dream that G's wife is called Chen, which is my own wife's maiden name. My wife also used to use the English name Charlotte -- inspired by, you guessed it, the arachnid heroine of Charlotte's Web.

(Unfortunately, the whole time I was known as Gates, no one once said "Groovy greets" to me.)

So who is Diego? And who is the point-of-view character? No idea so far.

The tree, burning with white flames but not consumed, suggests both the Burning Bush of Moses and the glowing white Tree of Life in the dreams of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr. Given these connotations, the fact that the point-of-view wants to put the tree out by beating it with a blanket suggests that he's not a good guy.

A white cypress in particular reminded me of something, and after a while I figured out what it was: A tree of that description appears on John Opsopaus's (hand-drawn by a non-artist; cut him some slack) version of the Star card of the Tarot:

Checking his essay on that card, I find that it's yet another Tree of Life reference:

[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.

The bird, incidentally, is the lion-headed Anzû, which has appeared on this blog once before.

The morning after the dream, I taught an adult English class. One of the students asked me out of the blue, "What's the difference between a cedar and a cypress?" I provided the Chinese translations and just said they were two different kinds of trees. "Are Christmas trees usually cypresses?" she asked. I said I'd never heard of them being used that way, and that Christmas trees are usually firs, spruces, or pines. Strange questions to ask, but they tie in with the idea of a white cypress as the Tree of Life. In my December 8 post "The White Tree of Life . . . Saver," I mention the all-white artificial Christmas tree we use at my school and connect it with the Tree of Life.

One of the other students in that class had brought a tote bag with something about the Tree of Liberty written on it. I was only able to see part of it. The first line said "THE TREE OF LIBERTY" and the second line said "FAR AWAY IN THE," with the final word not visible. I'd never heard of the Tree of Liberty outside of the Jefferson quote about watering it from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. 

Note added: I forgot to include this in the original post. After my dream but before my morning class, I saw that some secondhand English children's books had been delivered to my school. I picked up one at random, with the nondescript title People and Places, and opened it up to the table of contents, where I saw this:

The picture, apparently showing some kind of controlled burn in Australia, synched in a broad way with themes from the dream, enough to make me turn to the pages on Australia, where I found this:

I have no idea how the aborigines make that gray-white body paint, but it certainly looks like it could be made from ashes mixed with water.

Update 2 (11:00 p.m.): I checked my YouTube subscriptions and found this just-uploaded video which begins by zooming in on the words printed on the side of a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. I haven’t watched the rest of it yet, but already that’s a pretty specific sync:

The White Tree of Life . . . Saver

I change the wallpaper on my phone from time to time, probably every month or so on average. In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I describe how on August 29 I changed my wallpaper to an image of the White Tree of Gondor, and then less than a month later I found very similar imagery in a book I was reading, The Unseen by Mike Clelland. Since then, I've changed the wallpaper four or five times.

On November 22, as described in "They shall take up serpents," I somehow changed my wallpaper to a picture of a coiled rattlesnake while I was asleep or half-asleep, with no conscious awareness of having done so. I didn't like having that as my wallpaper, but I couldn't decide what I wanted instead. I briefly tried various things and finally, a couple of days ago, reverted to the White Tree of Gondor. (It's unusual for me to go back to an old wallpaper like that.) Once again, the imagery was reflected in what I was reading -- in this case Green by Laura Peyton Roberts.

Spoiler warning, I guess, in case any of you were planning to read a novel about leprechauns written for teenage girls. A peppermint Life Saver falls into the mud, and then this happens:

Where the candy had fallen, something was rising out of the muck. Something weird and spindly and shaped like a . . . tree? Its pointed trunk stretched up toward the moon. Boughs sprouted and began to spread. [. . .] Still the tree kept growing -- up, out, bigger, faster, until it was truly huge. And every inch of root, trunk, and needle was peppermint white, glowing in the moonlight like a bleached bone.

A spindly, all-white tree at night -- matching my phone wallpaper quite closely.

For Mormons, the first connotation of a white tree is not Gondor but the Tree of Life as seen in the desert visions of Lehi and Nephi. The white tree in Green grows from a Life Saver.

My reading about the Life Saver tree also coincided with my employee putting up an all-white Christmas tree at our school. The white tree in Green is not explicitly Christmas-related (the story takes place in summer), but peppermint is a Christmassy flavor (candy canes), and the mention of needles rather than leaves suggests a Christmas-type tree.