Sunshine Superman

 More on the Sun -- and what color is it anyway? -- at The Magician's Table.

Welcome to the Normalarchy!

It has been decided that the new totalitarian world order will be called the New Normal.

People used to be ruled by a hierarchy -- from hieros, "holy" -- but our masters no longer make any claims to (of all things!) holiness. They're just normal guys, regular Joes, and the Satanic agenda they enforce is just common sense and basic decency. It's not even political, really, so don't try to "play politics" by disagreeing with it!

It's not a hierarchy anymore. It's a Normalarchy.

Hair and pillars, and pills

Hillary Clinton

Here's Mrs. Clinton's current blurb on Twitter.

It used to say "pantsuit aficionado" as well. That's gone, but "hair icon" is still there.

And here are her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaign logos.

Both logos turn the letter H into two blue pillars -- with an American flag in front of them (2008) or a red arrow cutting through them (2016).

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Nancy Pelosi

The name Pelosi literally means "hairy" in Italian, and of course there was that hooha about how, whilst publicly professing her support for Satan and all his works, she visited a non-Satan-approved hair salon on the sly.

The Pelosi coat of arms prominently features two pillars.

The Italian pelo, "hair” — whence Pelosi — comes from the Latin pilus. The English word pillar derives from the very similar Latin word pila.

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Joe Biden

Mr. Biden's interest in other people's hair is well known.

His own hair has also occasionally made headlines.

As for his connection with pillars, the guy's initials are JB.

These are Jachin and Boaz -- the two pillars that stood in front of Solomon's temple and later became an important symbol in Freemasonry. The J pillar is typically on the right, as specified in the Bible, but the Hebrews read from right to left, so it's still JB, not BJ.

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Donald Trump

Mr. Trump is very obviously a "hair icon" as well.

His connection with pillars is that he knocks them down. As I have said many times, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign logo depicts Trump (the red arrow pointing right) slashing through the two pillars of establishment party politics.

What other "hair icon" is known for knocking down pillars? Samson. Just as Samson's strength depended on his never getting a haircut, Trump has kept the same hairstyle for a really long time. And like Samson, who was a Nazarite from the womb, Trump has never had an alcoholic drink in his life -- despite, like Samson, living a somewhat profligate life in other respects.

The name Samson derives from Shamash -- the Sun -- and I have already discussed Trump's connection to the Sun card of the Tarot. The German form of Samson (Trump is of German extraction) is, since Luther's translation, Simson. The TV show "The Simpsons" is known for having predicted a Trump presidency way back in 2000, and it portrays him -- like every other character -- with a bright yellow face.

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Red and blue pillars

The historical Jachin and Boaz, described in some detail in the Bible, were made of bronze and followed the same design, and there is no indication that they differed in any way. As Masonic or occult symbols, though, the two pillars are often represented as contrasting. You can see this in the illustrations I have given above. In one, Jachin is topped by the celestial, and Boaz by the terrestrial, globe. In the other, Jachin is white and Boaz is black.

Another convention sometimes encountered is to make Jachin red and Boaz blue.

In the lower of the two illustrations above, red Jachin is marked with the alchemical symbols of air and fire and is topped with the Sun; blue Boaz, in contrast, is associated with the feminine elements of earth and water, and with the Moon. (The words aesch and maijm written at the top of the picture are transliterations of the Hebrew words for fire and water, respectively.) The Sun is emitting a beam of light labeled pater. The Moon -- which, oddly, has its dark side facing the Sun -- is actually radiating a beam of darkness, labeled with the word mater written upside-down. (The upside-down M is now a W, transforming mater to water.)

This association of Boaz with inversion is reinforced by the alchemical symbols on the pillars; we naturally think of the fire triangle as a "normal" triangle and the water triangle as "upside down." Elsewhere in the picture, the word superius is written right-side up against a white background, thus associating it with Jachin; inferius, written upside down against a darker background, is linked to Boaz.

Strangely, despite both the historical positions of Jachin and Boaz and the universal symbolism of left and right, this picture puts Jachin (father, Sun, air, fire, higher, right-side up) on the left and Boaz (mother, moon, earth, water, lower, upside down) on the right. The only justification I can see for this is to make Jachin the "first" pillar and Boaz the "second" for those accustomed to reading European languages. (Another oddity: Since when is Taurus between Aries and Pisces in the zodiac?)

All these correspondences are consistent with the American political symbolism, current since 2000, of red Republicans and blue Democrats. But in the Hillary Clinton logos, where I have interpreted the two pillars as symbolizing the two parties, both pillars are blue -- and now, in 2020, they both bear the initials of the blue candidate, Joe Biden. And this, too, is appropriate. While the Republicans may be "the party of the right" by comparison to the Democrats, both parties are by any historical (indeed, by any sane) standard very, very far to the left. It's a blue world.

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Red and blue pillers

Can anyone read this discussion of red and blue pillars without being reminded of red and blue pillers -- those who have metaphorically taken the red or the blue pill of Matrix fame?

Pill derives from Latin pilula, a diminutive of pila, "ball" -- which in turn is believed to derive from pilus, "hair" (meaning originally a ball of hair).

Prior to the 2000 election, neither of the political parties in the U.S. was consistently associated with any particular color. "Red states" and "blue states" date back no earlier than the days of Bush and Gore. The Matrix was released in 1999, but it "correctly" puts the red pill in Morpheus's right hand and the blue one in his left.

In the film, taking the red pill means facing reality, and taking the blue pill means staying in a comfortable delusion and "believing whatever you want to believe." In recent years, the term "red pill" has -- again, appropriately -- increasingly come to be associated with the political right, and in particular with anti-feminism. (When Maroon 5 released an album called Red Pill Blues, they had to apologize and assure their fans that "we are all hardcore feminists in the band.") The association of the color blue with what would later be called feminism dates back at least to the time of Lord Byron.

(Ironically, the Wachowski brothers, who created the metaphor, are firmly in the "believe whatever you want to believe" camp; as of this writing, what they currently want to believe is that they are actually the Wachowski sisters.)

Matrix -- originally meaning "womb" -- derives from mater. One of the meanings of matrix is a grid, or anything arranged in rows and columns. Take another look at that Jachin and Boaz picture.

At the bottom is a grid -- a matrix -- and the triangular alchemical symbols on the two pillars can be seen as arrows indicating direction. The blue pill(ar) leads down into the matrix, and the red pill(ar) up out of it.

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But we no longer have a red J and a blue B. Both pillars, both J and B, are now blue. Blue J -- blue jay -- and yes, in case you were wondering, a blue jay is a corvid. There's a Beatles song called "Blue Jay Way," and this is how it begins.

There's a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We'll be over soon they said
Now they've lost themselves instead

What should we do, finding ourselves in Blue Jay World? Well, the Beatles themselves said it best: Please don't belong.

How did the "Drumpf" crowd miss this?

Oh, right, because les Schtroumpfs are blue and der Drumpf is orange.

Rendre le Grand Schtroumpf à nouveau grand!

You're fired!

I. Can't. Stop.

Telling the synchronicity fairies to take a hike was, it turns out, about as smart as giving a hornets' nest a whack with a baseball bat. They immediately unleashed a fire hose of syncs on me and -- okay, I give up. In true Charltonian fashion, I repent, but I'm not going to stop. See The Magician's Table for my latest post on the birdemic as the sole ill.

On the positive side, I have been able to keep one part of my resolution. I haven't been reading the news or anything like unto it. Actual news was cut out of my diet ages ago, of course, but I had still been reading news satire (Babylon Bee), news-focused bloggers (Vox Day, William Briggs, Laura Wood), and even President Trump's Twitter. For a few days after the recent election, I even (I blush to confess) took a peek or to at the New York Times -- but just for the election results! The modern-day equivalent of reading Playboy for the articles.

Since deciding to take a break -- which was, I know, like two days ago -- I haven't touched any of that. And I don't intend to until February. Let the whole electoral drama play itself out; there will be plenty of people to watch the show without me having to be one of them.

Throwing a bone to the sync-fairies

Okay, this is not technically political. If I post it, will you get off my back?

It has just come to my attention (in the course of studying the Sun card of the Tarot) that the Wuhan Battle Flag -- created in that city and used by the Republican revolutionaries in China in the early 20th century -- features 19 yellow circles and kind of looks like a -- I don't know, what does it look like to you?

Three unsatisfying models of repentance

Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more. By this ye may know if a man repenteth of his sins—behold, he will confess them and forsake them.

-- Joseph Smith, Doctrine & Covenants 58:42-43

And now, verily I say unto you, I, the Lord, will not lay any sin to your charge; go your ways and sin no more; but unto that soul who sinneth shall the former sins return, saith the Lord your God.

-- Joseph Smith, Doctrine & Covenants 82:7

I know, I know, I said that I would quit

All right, I promise, no more after this

-- They Might Be Giants, "Thunderbird"

We should not even pretend that we 'will do better in future' and will strive to 'cease sinning' because this is not true. We will not do better, nor will we strive to do better; instead we will carry on sinning just as we do now. However, we acknowledge and repent this.

-- Bruce Charlton, "Repenting our compelled obedience to Caesar"

Let's talk about something serious for a change.

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Back when I was a church-Mormon, my understanding of repentance was that implied by the two D&C passages quoted above. Provided I confessed my sin, worked up an adequate degree of sincere sorrow over it, and never did it again, God would forgive me. But if I did do it again, the repentance was null and void and I was back to square one.

It's easy to see the logic behind this view. After all, if you say you repent but don't actually change your life, how exactly is that repentance? The prodigal son quit his riotous living and returned home -- and if he hadn't, that wouldn't have been repentance. What could be more blasphemous than saying Ave Deus, peccaturi te salutant! ("Hail, God, those who are about to sin salute you!") and then going about your business as before? That's not repentance. Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?

Looked at with a cold eye, though, the D&C model of repentance (meaning the one implied by those verses; I don't presume to call it "the" Mormon model) is grossly inadequate. It promises forgiveness only for past sins. It says that provided you become morally perfect (forsake all your sins), God will forgive you for not having been morally perfect in the past. Not exactly reassuring! If that's how it is, we're all damned.

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Which leads us to the Thunderbird model of repentance. (Thunderbird is a kind of cheap wine; the TMBG song is about alcoholism.) God will forgive you only if you "go your way and sin no more" -- but of course you know that, being human, you're going to sin again. But that's okay; you just repent again. Forsaking all your sins is easy; I've done it hundreds of times!

But of course each repentance -- each act of supposedly forsaking your sins forever -- has to be sincere. At the moment of repentance, you can't be thinking that you're probably going to do it again tomorrow; you have to make yourself believe that you've really changed your life for good. Baby, please, I know what I said before, but this time's gonna be different, I swear!

In other words, you have to lie to yourself and lie to God.

Some people will advocate the "fake it till you make it" approach. -- keep on pretending to change your life, trying as hard as possible to fool even yourself, and one of these days it just might really happen! However, to my mind, any moral gains acquired by this method would be more than offset by the habits of self-deception and bad faith that would come with them.

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Finally, there is Bruce Charlton's model. The context is that of sin which is "compelled" by the powers that be -- but not really compelled. What we are literally compelled to do, such that there is no possibility of doing otherwise, cannot even be considered a sin. He is talking about sinful actions which could in principle be resisted -- but only by "heroes of faith," which most of us are not. In other words, the context of government "compulsion" is not really central to his point. All mortals are in a similar situation: We could in principle resist every temptation to sin but in fact are not virtuous enough to do so.

Bruce's idea is that you can know that you're not going to do better -- know that you're not even going to try to do better -- and yet still repent. What can repentance mean if it doesn't mean even trying to change? Basically, it means confessing -- acknowledging that your sins are sins, not making excuses for yourself or trying to kid yourself into thinking that what you're doing is actually right.

Is that really repentance, though? Isn't it just Ave Deus, peccaturi te salutant? Saying "I know this is a sin, but I intend to keep doing it anyway" -- isn't that almost the definition of being un-repentant, of openly and deliberately defying God?

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I don't have any good solutions here. We all sin, and the reason we don't stop is, ultimately, that we don't want to stop -- or don't want it enough, want other things more. How are repentance and forgiveness possible, and what do they mean, for such creatures as ourselves?