The rain god and the weather dogs

On the road today I stopped at a red light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a helmet similar to the one pictured below, except that the color scheme was different. The helmet was predominantly green and black. The words "RAIN GOD" were written in white, with the "GO" in green. (I didn't take a photo and wasn't able to find a photo of the exact same helmet online.)

This caught my attention because the Chinese word for "dog" is 狗 -- transliterated gou and pronounced like the English word go. (When I was first learning Chinese, the P. D. Eastman book title Go, Dog. Go! served as a mnemonic.) So the helmet design highlights the dog in God, and it is a green dog. I connected this with my recent posts God and dog at the Panama Canal and The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) A further coincidence is that this helmet is produced by a company called Zeus; an important step in the train of associations in my "God and dog" post had been that Suez:Zeus::dog:God. Looking at the photo now, I also notice a black "two-prong crown" behind the words "RAIN GOD," but I can not be sure the helmet I saw also had this.

(Incidentally, if the letters GO, written in a different color, are removed, what remains is an anagram of INDRA -- who was indeed a "rain god" and is considered the Indian counterpart to Zeus,)

A rain dog. Words that become other words when written backwards. Suddenly I thought of a story fragment one of my sisters had written when she was a little girl, called The Planet Tennalp. Fortunately, my family has kept lots of our juvenilia and I have it in a PDF, so I was able to look it up. It begins thus:

Once upon a time there lived seven dogs. Their names were: Thunder, Lightning, Snowy, Misty, Rainbows, Showers, and Sleet. They were the Weather Dogs. They lived on Tennalp.

Weather Dogs, including one named Showers. And of course Tennalp is basically just planet written backwards. As we read on, we learn that Tennalp was created by a sorcerer called Nrogara (Aragorn backwards) from the planet Dalrow (world backwards, with a vowel added for pronounceability). Given this context of things written backwards, it can scarcely be considered a mere coincidence that the opening sentence -- "there lived seven dogs" -- contains a backwards devil as well as a backwards God.

All this flashed through my mind in a second as I waited at the red light. In my original "God and dog" post, I recounted a story from Whitley Strieber in which God/dog was associated with seeing a coincidentally meaningful license plate. I glanced down at the license plate of motorcyclist with the Rain God helmet: "192 NYT." NYT was at least a meaningful series of letters -- New York Times -- so, although the number didn't immediately mean anything to me, I memorized it for future reference. Later, while still on the road, I suddenly thought that 19 - 2 = 18 and 19 + 2 = 21, so the number encodes 1/8/21 -- January 8, 2021. Of course it doesn't, though, because 19 - 2 is actually 17. So close!

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Note added: I just looked again at the PDF file I opened to check The Planet Tennalp -- 33 pages of miscellaneous story fragments with titles beginning Mo-Sa -- and noticed that the very first page is one of my own childhood compositions, from which I quote the second paragraph.

He walked over to his coon-shee, who was nibbling at the rich, green moss which carpeted the forest floor. The coon, too, was a recent purchase. It was a strong, healthy stallion of good pedigree, and the flickering patches of green on its sleek, black coat were unusually brilliant. It carried on its back a huge, lidded basket with several small saddle-bags tied to it.

What is this coon-shee? The name is a hybrid of Cŵn Annwn and cú sídhe -- Welsh and Irish faery-hounds, respectively -- and my idea was that they were actually faery horses (or, to be precise, diminutive chalicotheres), mistaken by outsiders for dogs because of their small size and clawed feet.

Do I really need to make that coinsídhence pun again? You must surely be getting tired of it.

American politician spontaneously combusts!

This is from an email I wrote on December 10:

Since we're sharing unjustifiable premonitions, the phrase "spontaneous human combustion" has been persistently presenting itself to me recently, together with the idea that some prominent person (possibly [I name a specific American politician]) is going to fall victim to that extremely unusual phenomenon, causing a sensation. Obviously the odds against any such thing happening are astronomical, but I wanted to go on the record just in case.

I can't say exactly when these "spontaneous human combustion" premonitions began, but certainly no later than November 26, when I used the phrase in an unrelated blog post because it had been on my mind.

And this is a passage from Scott Alexander's novel Unsong which I read yesterday, December 20. The story exaggerates the uncertainties surrounding the 2000 presidential election (the "hanging chads" and all that), such that inauguration day comes and goes without a clear winner. George W. Bush finally takes office on March 20, due to a decision by the Supreme Court secretly manipulated by Dick Cheney behind the scenes. On January 29, 2002, he delivers his State of the Union address. There has been no 9/11 in this alternate history; instead, a terrorist magician named Dylan Alvarez, leader of an organization called BOOJUM, has been assassinating people. President Bush's address concludes thus:

"[. . .] But with the help of all the brave people in different government departments and all around the country working on this case, we’ve got Alvarez on the run and are tightening the noose around his neck. Some of these people are here with us tonight. People like Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. Like Michael Gellers, a police officer who successfully defused a BOOJUM bomb in Philadelphia. Like Sonja Horah . . .”

President Bush spontaneously caught fire. “HELLLPPP!” he screamed as the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches watched on in horror. “HELLLPPP . . . HELL . . .”. By the time Secret Service agents reached him at the podium, he was already a charred corpse.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

In the story, Jahorah is the true pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, called the Mortal Name because it causes anyone who speaks it to die on the spot. (Since this is Unsong, biblical puns are never far from the surface; here, as in Exodus, we have the name of God coming from a burning Bush.)

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What is the nature of the relationship between my persistent "premonition" and the Unsong passage? The thing is, I'm fairly sure I've read the Bush episode before, although I have no conscious memory of it. My first encounter with Unsong was the interlude about Trump and about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe predicts the outcome of the 2016 election. Enjoying that, I started reading the book from the beginning but couldn't really get into it -- so I stopped halfway through Chapter 1 and just read some (maybe all?) of the interludes. I know for certain that I read Trump, Obama, Miss American Pie, and There's a Hole in my Bucket. As I've said, I have no memory of having read Bush -- not even a sense of familiarity after reading it yesterday -- but I think I surely must have.

I started reading Unsong all the way through on or shortly after November 16, which is the date of an email from a reader recommending it to me. So such evidence as I have suggests that my premonitions about spontaneous human combustion began shortly after I began to read the novel.

The most prosaic explanation of my "premonitions" is that starting to read Unsong triggered subconscious memories of the Bush episode, which appeared in my mind as the free-floating idea of an American politician spontaneously combusting. I mention again that I had no idea at all that that idea was connected with the book I was reading, or that the politician was Bush. (I had another specific politician in mind, in fact.) It's not clear why that particular episode would present itself to me like that, but apparently it did.

Another possibility, is that my premonitions were genuinely precognitive -- but that what I was "premembering" was not an actual event in the world but just my reading a fictional account of such an event. My past work on precognition has shown that one of the most common things to premember is something from a book or movie one is about to read or watch.

Both of these two interpretations would mean that the premonitions were essentially a false alarm, relating to a novel and not to the real world, and that no one is actually going to spontaneously combust.

Looking a little deeper, though, one can see signs of the synchronicity fairies' involvement. Why did a reader happen to recommend Unsong at that particular point in time? Why did I happen to remember or premember the spontaneously combusting politician (but not that it was Bush) rather than any of the other episodes in this rather long novel? Why does the context of that episode -- a disputed election, not resolved until long after the usual date -- fit so nicely with current events in December 2020, when I read it?

To be clear, I am not predicting that anyone is going to spontaneously combust -- that's just a little too crazy even by my standards -- but I am suggesting that the "burning Bush" episode may have some hidden significance that will become clear in the coming weeks or months.

The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)

So I was listening to various songs from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence, and YouTube decided that what I really wanted to listen to next was a Fleetwood Mac song called "The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)."

Fleetwood Mac is a band I associate with synchronicity because one Christmas when I was a teenager, I gave my father a Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a T-shirt that said "Only you know if you're hungry" -- and he gave me the same Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a sweatshirt said "Only you know if you're hungry"! Despite that, I don't really know their music very well and had never heard of this particular song.

The first thing that caught my attention was the picture that accompanied the song on YouTube -- a naked guy on a white horse, suggesting the Sun card of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

Looking up the picture, I found that it was from the cover of the 1969 album Then Play On -- which was strange, because "The Green Manalishi" wasn't on that album and wasn't even recorded until 1970. After a bit of searching, though, I found that it was included as one of four "bonus tracks" on the Deluxe Edition of Then Play On released by Rhino Records (!) in 2013.

The phrase "two prong crown" also caught my attention. I have been reading Unsong, and in the novel the devil has a weapon called a bident ("like a trident, but with two points instead of three"). The name caught my attention because of its similarity to the name of a certain American politician.

Yesterday, when one of my readers suggested a possible astrological significance of the date January 8, 2021, I had to consult an ephemeris. I was 99% sure which astrological symbol represented Pluto, but I looked it up just to be sure. The reference work I consulted explained that the symbol consisted of "Pluto's circle and a cross or bident." Up to that point, I had assumed that the bident was Scott Alexander's invention, but it turns out it's been a standard attribute of Hades/Pluto all along. In my astrological post, I gave bident the parenthetical definition "like a trident with only two prongs" -- similar to Alexander's wording, but (for no particular reason) using the word prongs instead of points.

So when serendipity threw a "two prong crown" my way (crowns being like tridents in that they generally have more than two prongs), I sat up and took notice.

What about the titular "manalishi," though? Is that even a word? Did they mean maharishi or something?

I looked it up, of course, but before I get into that, let me remind you that in my recent post God and dog at the Panama Canal, I had occasion to mention the coin sídhe, legendary faery dogs of Celtic folklore. And, unlike the Black Dogs that are their counterparts in England, the coin sídhe are green.

According to Infogalactic, this is how "The Green Manalishi" came to be written:

[Peter] Green has explained that he wrote the song after experiencing a drug-induced dream, in which he was visited by a green dog which barked at him. He understood that the dog represented money. "It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song."

This is not a coinsídhence, because nothing is ever a coinsídhence.

Here come the twenties

Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

-- Daniel 2:37-38

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

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

-- 1 Peter 5:8

The final decade of the 19th century was known as the "Gay Nineties." Back in the 1990s, I used to joke that that decade would be remembered by the same name, for entirely different reasons.

Google can confirm.

We've gotten used to using the number 2020 as shorthand for the current dystopia -- but there are less than two weeks left in the year, and I daresay the dystopia is going to last a bit longer than that. Get ready for the second coming of the Roaring Twenties.

Yeah, they ran through the Breyers

 From "The Battle of New Orleans":

Yeah, they ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

The briers = the Supreme Court, as typified by Justice Stephen Breyer -- who, according to allegator Lin Wood, has it in for the President

This may be most important tweet of my life.

Chief Justice John Roberts is corrupt & should resign immediately. Justice Stephen Breyer should also resign immediately.

They are “anti-Trumpers” dedicated to preventing public from knowing TRUTH of @realDonaldTrump re-election.

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 17, 2020

The brambles = ?

The bushes = the RINO establishment, as typified by the Bush family

A rabbit = Justice Amy Coney Barrett -- either individually or as representing the pro-Trump faction within the Supreme Court. (The indirect article is significant: a rabbit = A. Coney!)

The hounds = surely not God! No one can outrun God.

And here's Dolly Parton.

Saturn-Pluto conjunction to end on January 8?

With reference to my recent post about January 8, my correspondent writes:

Also, in this post William Wildblood talked about a conjunction of Saturn and Pluto:

I will quote the relevant paragraph

On a totally different note, there was a conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn in January. This lasts for about a year as Saturn moves forward then goes retrograde in May, going back to within a degree or so of Pluto in October, before moving forward again and going out of orb, as it is called, early next year. Saturn and Pluto are the two of the most difficult (in terms of the challenges they present to human consciousness) planets to deal with. Saturn represents restriction, limitation and what is hard and unyielding while Pluto symbolises forces of death, transformation and destruction. Put together and in Capricorn which is ruled by Saturn, meaning its effects are magnified because of a similarity of expression, they represent quite a package. What it means is that problems that have been suppressed or denied will be brought to a head. There will be no escaping them and they must be faced and dealt with. This will mean hard times but out of that may come, if one reacts with sense and really does face them, a new understanding. The potential for new life or death are both there.

From this paragraph it sounds like the conjunction is ending in January but I'm not sure because I haven't been able to find anything specific about when it ends, only that it's happening.  But wouldn't that be amazing if it was ending on January 8?

So I checked an online ephemeris, giving the positions of the planets at 05:00 Eastern Standard Time (i.e., Washington, D.C.) for each day in 2021.

When neither the Sun nor the Moon is involved, conjunction is generally defined as an angle of 8° or less. At 05:00 EST January 8, Saturn will be 2°27' Aquarius, and Pluto will be 24°26' Capricorn. That's an angle of 8°1' -- just barely out of conjunction. At 05:00 EST January 7, the two planets will still be in conjunction, at an angle of  7°26'. I don't have access to hourly data, but it appears that the conjunction will end either on Jan 7 or Jan 8. Given a change of 5 degrees in 24 hours, we can estimate that the conjunction will end about four-fifths of the way from 05:00 on the 7th to 0:500 on the 8th -- in other words, almost precisely at midnight!

I also note that one of the symbols of Pluto (incorporated into that planet's astrological symbol) is the bident (like a trident with only two prongs) -- a word which has also been brought to my attention recently by Scott Alexander's novel Unsong, where it is the devil's weapon of choice.

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Update: I've checked with someone who knows more about astrology than I do, and he has confirmed that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction will indeed end on January 8.

January 8?

In a recent post, I mentioned that an email correspondent of mine had looked at the daily Mass reading for December 14 and tried interpreting it synchronistically as a prophecy. That actually wasn't the only date he looked at.

The post inspired me to do my own synchro research (on a much smaller scale).  For each day of the year, the Catholic mass has daily readings.  I checked January 8, January 20, December 14 and also the Sunday after January 20, which is the 24th.

I knew that December 14 was the day the electoral college voted and that January 20 was Inauguration Day, but the other date mentioned didn't mean anything to me. I wrote,

And forgive my ignorance, but what’s the significance of January 8?

He replied,

I realized after sending this email that January 8 was a mistake. I remembered reading that date in a comment, but I must have been mistaken because the significant day is January 6, when Congress meets to count the electoral college votes and declare a winner.

I didn't think anything of it at the time, but that should have been a huge red flag. A mistake? Like an accident? A coincidence? This is synchronicity research -- we don't believe in that stuff! You drop a Tarot card out of the deck while you're shuffling, that's not an accident; it's part of the reading -- probably the most important part.

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The email exchange I've quoted took place on November 16-19, and I revisited it on the eve of December 14. Then I suddenly started thinking of the song "The Battle of New Orleans" -- which I hadn't heard or thought of in decades -- and couldn't get it out of my head. I had a very strong impression that it was relevant to the electoral goings-on but couldn't see how. New Orleans? Trump won Louisiana handily, and it is not one of the contested states. Battle of Atlanta or Detroit or something would have been more apropos.

Yesterday, I attempted an analysis of the song. I gave it my best shot but still felt like I was missing something essential.

Well, today I finally had the bright idea of reading up a bit on the Battle of New Orleans -- the battle, not the song -- and now I know the significance of January 8. I'm quite sure that I didn't know the date of the Battle of New Orleans before -- I had kind of assumed, based on the song, that it took place sometime in 1814 -- but it was January 8, 1815. In fact, "The Eighth" was a major American holiday from the election of Andrew Jackson to the start of the Civil War. As the date of America's last battle against the British, it was considered a sort of second Independence Day. (The war had already been won, and a treaty signed, but the treaty hadn't been officially ratified yet, and news of it had not yet reached New Orleans.)

So I am officially making a prediction that Something Very Big -- most likely Biden's formal concession -- is going to take place on January 8.