The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.") 

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph? 

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods. 

What if Dot got in the Green Door?

A lemniscate is a figure-eight. D and Δ are the fourth letters of their respective alphabets, so a lemniscate made up of two Ds or two Δs encodes 4 + 4 = 8. A square also represents the idea of four, so a figure-eight made up of two squares would express the same idea.

Suppose there were a building with 11 windows, each in the shape of a digital-clock eight. The eleven windows would represent 8 × 11 = 88. I wonder what color door such a building might have.

H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Herbert Hoover = HH = 88.

Congratulations, Dot! We knew you could do it.

Dot is a short form of the name Dorothy.

The door Dot enters is that of a school. My last post was about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The Grail isn't anything you might have heard it is except for perhaps the generative principle of nature itself. We are all within the grail. This is how God comes to know us. We are like fish in a great ocean, bound to our school. When the question is asked the realm is restored.

The /x/ post also implicitly identifies the hourglass with the Holy Grail. The hourglass is a figure-eight, and the Grail is a cup. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- the post that prompted the email that started me on this whole Green Door wild goose chase -- I did a one-card Tarot draw, and it was the Eight of Cups. In the same post, I included this photo of a door in which I fancied I could see the image of an owl. I didn't notice it at the time, but the door also features a lazy-eight lemniscate.

I continued my discussion of the Eight of Cups in "The Wizard at the green door," which is also where the Wizard of Oz image above was originally posted. In that post, I connect the Green Door with the vesica piscis and the fish.

Looking at "The Wizard at the green door post" now, I find that the first comment is a cryptic one from ben: "Mr Owl's left side, her right side." I didn't know what that meant when he posted it, and I still don't, but running into it again now was a bit of synchronicity. A couple of days ago I read this in the preface to Paul J. Nahin's book An Imaginary Tale.

As a second example of "an error that wasn't," a reader wrote to complain that in figure 5.8 (the circuit diagram of a phase-shift oscillator) the voltage u is to the right of voltage v, but in the text I refer to the voltage u being to the left. This assertion stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment (I had confused left and right? -- my Lord, I must be dumber than an owl!), until I realized he was looking at the resistor-capacitor feedback network in the circuit, despite the fact that in the text I specifically state I am talking about the voltages on the input/output terminals of the amplifier connected to the network. (Thank the Lord, I'm not dumber than an owl! Such are the little things that give pleasure to the mind of an old mathematics writer at midnight.)

How often have you seen or heard a confusion of left and right mentioned in the same breath as an owl?

Note added: The story of Dot getting in comes from this old book (how old I'm not sure, as no date of publication is given. The "treasure" theme on the cover may be significant to at least one of my readers.

"Road Map to Success" -- and a picture of a map to an island, which can hardly be reached by road! "Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters; . . . The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls" (Isa. 43:16, 20).

(Honor and owl were juxtaposed in "Break on through to the other side," too.)

As mentioned in "Green Door 101," in the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall," the main character passes through a green door into an enchanted garden where he finds "two great panthers there... Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid." I had found the reference to "spotted panthers" a bit odd, since the word panther as used today normally refers either to a puma, which is not spotted, or to a black leopard, whose spots are not typically visible. In the Journeys book, though, I found this:

"Black with spots" -- with black spots! -- a strange description. At any rate, this is pretty explicitly a spotted panther, like those seen beyond the Green Door in the Wells story. And a "big cat . . . with spots" is obviously related to a cat named Dot, a cat who also went through the Green Door. In Dot's case, it was the green door of an elementary school named after a president who had the same Christian name as Herbert George Wells.

The Wizard at the green door

In "The Locust Grove crop circle," I describe how I spontaneously visualized a vesica piscis while contemplating the Eight of Cups, and how Debbie then drew my attention to the titular crop formation, the structure of which includes both a vesica piscis and a shape like the anomalous "moon" on the Eight of Cups.

Yesterday (August 5), the homework for one of the English classes I teach happened to include this exercise:

Venn diagrams are fairly commonplace, but this one is uniquely relevant. As you can see, the two circles are for singular and plural nouns, with nouns that do not change form going in the middle section. One of the words that needs to be written there is fish -- as in vesica piscis. Also notice that what is printed on the other side of the page is faintly visible, and that right in the vesica is a picture of a baby, tying in with the vesica as a yonic image and a symbol of birth.

The vesica piscis is obviously closely related to the ichthys, or "Jesus fish," and Jesus (the baby in the picture above?) can also be thought of in terms of the Venn diagram -- the intersection of human nature and divine nature. Does that mean that Jesus had "two natures," as classical theology has it, or does it mean that there is only one nature? "One or two?" asks the Venn diagram with the baby.

Whitley Strieber used a Venn diagram on the cover of his book Jesus: A New Vision. As in the Locust Grove formation, there is a smaller circle inscribed in the vesica piscis.

I have discussed this vesica piscis sync first to get it out of the way, but it was actually the second one of August 5. Earlier that day, one of my young students (from a different class) drew this on the whiteboard during a break between classes: a vesica piscis inscribed in a circle, with the remainder of the circle colored green. I didn't get a chance to snap a photo, but this is a schematic reconstruction. It looked very close to being a mathematically precise vesica piscis, one by the square root of three.

The Locust Grove formation features a circle inscribed in a vesica piscis, with a narrower lens (too narrow to be a true mathematical vesica) inscribed in the circle.

"What's that?" asked one of the other students.

"It's a watermelon!"

"Why is it empty in the middle?"

Why indeed? It's a very strange way of drawing a watermelon, and it made me think of "Cucurbits from an alien land" and the melon or gourd as a gateway to the dream realm. As Debbie has pointed out, the "yoni" shape of the vesica piscis is closely associated with the symbolism of the door -- and in this case it's a green door -- a circular green door, like the one Gandalf knocks on.

The "watermelon" drawing also resembles a green letter O, as seen on the original cover of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And how could I have forgotten that The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film version) also has a scene in which someone knocks on a green door?

And this green door includes a smaller, circular green door.

In the book, the Guardian of the Gates, who lets Dorothy and company into the Emerald City is described as being "about the same size as the Munchkins" -- that is, very short, like a hobbit. In the movie, Dorothy and her friends first ring the doorbell, but the doorman insists that they knock instead, drawing their attention to a notice that says, "Bell out of order. Please knock."

In The Hobbit, Bilbo is first disturbed by one group of dwarves after another showing up and ringing his doorbell, and then:

[T]here came a loud knock. Not a ring, but a hard rat-tat on the hobbit's beautiful green door. Somebody was banging with a stick!

Bilbo . . . pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other. More dwarves, four more! And there was Gandalf behind, leaning on his staff and laughing. He had made quite a dent on the beautiful door . . . .

It is Gandalf, a Wizard, who knocks on the green door. When Dorothy knocks on the green door and is asked to state her business, she says, "We want to see the Wizard."

The Wizard is a representative of the supernatural or divine world, so this ties in with the Script line, "You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door." (Banging is the very word used by Tolkien.) Sometimes you knock on God's door, and sometimes he knocks on yours. Jesus said both, "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matt. 7:7, Luke 11:9) and "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him" (Rev. 3:20).

When Mormon artist Greg Olsen decided to illustrate that last verse, guess what color he chose to make the door?

Greg Olsen, Let Him In (2005)

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Note added: In this post, I talk about Gandalf knocking on a door just after I refer to "the melon or gourd as a gateway to the dream realm." How could I have forgotten that in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf opens another door by uttering the word mellon?