Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord

The King James Version will always be the Bible I know and love best, but reading a different translation from time to time can be helpful, too, as it makes the familiar unfamiliar and helps one to see it in a new way. Such has been my recent experience reading the Penitential Psalms in the Vulgate translation of St. Jerome. My attention was particularly arrested by the 10th verse of Psalm 32 (called Psalm 31 in the Greek numbering used by Jerome). This is the King James Version I have always known:

Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.

And here is the Vulgate, followed by the Douay-Rheims, which is an English translation of the Vulgate rather than of the original Hebrew.

Multa flagella peccatoris, sperantem autem in Domino misericordia circumdabit.

Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord.

Insofar as I can judge, the sorrows, wicked, and trusteth of the King James are more faithful to original Hebrew than the Vulgate's flagella, peccatoris, and sperantem. However, Jerome sticks closer to the Hebrew when he translates the first clause without a verb, literally "many scourges to the sinner." This is not really grammatical in English, though, so the King James inserts shall be, italicized to indicate that those words are not present in the Hebrew, while the Douay-Rheims instead uses are. I think both are justifiable from the Hebrew, which has no verb at all.

I've always read the KJV Ps. 32:10 as one of those contrasts between the righteous and the wicked that one associates more with the Proverbs than with the Psalms: one type of person will suffer, while a contrasting type will be encompassed with mercy.

The Vulgate suggests a different reading: not a contrast between two types of people, but between the present state of sinners and (what may be) their future state. All sinners suffer, but those (sinners) who trust in the Lord will be encompassed about by his mercy (chesed, "lovingkindness"). I think this is a much better fit for the overall tenor of the psalm, which is not about how much better it is to be righteous than wicked, but about a sinner who suffered, acknowledged his sin to the Lord, and found forgiveness.

I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah (v. 5).

The idea of confessing to the Lord sheds important light on what it really means to confess one's sins. It cannot primarily mean admitting that one has in fact performed this or that action. God obviously already knows what you have done! Acknowledging or hiding one's sin cannot be a question of letting God know or trying to prevent him from knowing. I think confessing to God does not mean telling him what you have done but rather recognizing that what you have done was sinful -- rather than making excuses or trying to justify or rationalize it.

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Minor synchronicity:

When I said that obviously no one would literally try to prevent God from knowing what they had done, Cain came to mind as a possible exception. When God asks him where his murdered brother Abel is, doesn't he lie and say, "I know not"? Then I realized that, while this was clearly an evasion, it was probably not actually a lie. Cain really didn't know where Abel had gone, only that he was no longer in his body.

Just after thinking that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read this in his latest post: "Men die and their spirits leave the world, and go... nobody knows where."

As a further synchronicity, the title of the post is "Tolkien's Elves and Men both need to trust in God." The pre-Christian David's trust in God is similar in nature to the kind of trust Tolkien's Men, similarly ignorant of Christ, would have needed.

The limits of AI

The materialistic cultus of Fo

The Histoire de la magie of Éliphas Lévi includes a brief section on China. After extolling the occult wisdom of the I Ching and Confucius, Lévi has this to say about the next development in Chinese thought:

After Confucius came the materialistic Fo, who substituted the traditions of Indian sorcery for the remnants of Egyptian Transcendental Magic. The cultus of Fo paralysed the progress of the sciences in China, and the abortive civilisation of this great people collapsed into routine and stupor.

Who is this Fo? Have you never heard of him? Well, you probably have, but under a different name. Fó (佛), from the Old Chinese *but, is nothing other than the Chinese transliteration of a Pali and Sanskrit word we have adopted into English with minimal modification: Buddha. Fo is the Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, and the cultus of Fo is Buddhism.

Did Lévi realize this? Apparently not. His reference to "Indian sorcery" suggests an awareness that Fo was an Indian teacher whose thought was later adopted by the Chinese; on the other hand, he characterizes Confucianism as "Egyptian," so that may not mean much! His ignorance of the identity of Fo is evident in his statement that he came "after Confucius," when in fact the two lived at roughly the same time. Confucius lived c. 551-479 BC, and the Buddha's dates are generally given as either 563-483 or 480-400 BC. However, Buddhism (Fójiào, "doctrine of Fo") did not enter China until much later, in the first century AD, and Lévi apparently assumes that Fo was a Chinese person of that era.

Lévi's highly negative assessment of "Fo" can be contrasted with what he has to say about "Buddha" in India:

To the revelation of Krishna succeeded that of Buddha, who married the purest religion to philosophy of the highest kind. The happiness of the world was thus held to be secured and there was nothing further to expect, pending the tenth and final incarnation, when Vishnu will return in his proper form.

I take this as conclusive proof that Lévi did not know that Fo was the Buddha. How could he knowingly have said that the man "who married the purest religion to philosophy of the highest kind" was "materialistic" and caused the spiritual collapse of the Chinese civilization?

How is it possible to know anything at all about Fo-ism and its influence on Chinese civilization without also knowing that Fo is the Buddha? I attribute it to Lévi's being French. The English who went to China would already have been quite familiar with India, and would immediately have recognized Fo as the Chinese name for an Indian figure they already knew. The first French missionaries to China, in contrast, may well have known little or nothing about India and may have written about "Fo" without knowing who he was, and Lévi's understanding of Chinese religious history is presumably based on such French works.

I have been quoting A. E. Waite's English translation of Lévi's book. Waite always adds a footnote anytime he disagrees with Lévi or thinks he is in error, and yet he has nothing to say about "Fo," so he was also apparently unaware of the Fo-Buddha identity. But that is only to be expected. Waite would have learned about China by reading English books, written by people who knew who Fo was and therefore translated the title as Buddha. Like anyone else who reads Lévi without knowing any Chinese, he would probably have assumed that "Fo" was some Chinese figure he didn't happen to have heard of and wouldn't have found anything remarkable in that.

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The name Buddha has strongly positive connotations for most people. Even those who are not Buddhists generally think of him as someone who was very wise and deeply spiritual. What happens, though, if you read about the teachings of "Fo" and their influence on the Chinese civilization, but do so through a veil of ignorance, without knowing that this "Fo" is none other than the vaunted Buddha? Well, you might end up with an anomalous assessment like Lévi's: (1) that Fo was materialistic, (2) that he promoted low "sorcery" as opposed to high magic, and (3) that his influence put an end to the creativity of Chinese civilization.

How just is that assessment, if not of the historical Buddha himself, at least of Chinese Buddhism personified as "Fo"? I have no special knowledge of Chinese history, but here are my impressions as someone who has lived in Taiwan for nearly 20 years and has known many Chinese Buddhists.

To start with the second charge, sorcery in modern Taiwan is overwhelmingly a Taoist phenomenon, and orthodox Buddhists disapprove of it. Of course the line between the two religions can be very blurry, with many temples featuring statues of the Buddha or Guanyin (Avalokiteshvara) alongside those of the Taoist gods, but with very few exceptions all the Chinese sorcery I have ever seen or heard of has been purely Taoist in character, with little or no discernible Buddhist influence. Buddhist sorcery is apparently a thing (see Tibet), but plays little role in Chinese Buddhism as I know it.

About Buddhism's effect on Chinese creativity, it is an interesting possibility. It seems clear enough that ancient China was highly creative, and that modern China is not, but I'm not convinced that Buddhism is the reason. Journey to the West, for example, is a highly creative work of literature which is Buddhist -- though it can be argued that the Buddhism is only superficial and that its "heart" is still very Taoist. (Taoist influence in Journey to the West is perhaps comparable to "pagan" influence in The Divine Comedy.)

Materialism is the most interesting charge, though, and I think the most astute. At first glance, it seems absurd to say that Buddhism is more materialistic than the doctrine of Confucius, who had a deliberate policy of not saying anything about gods or spirits. Buddhism rejects the material as illusory, scorns money and physical pleasure, and teaches reincarnation, which implies the existence of spirits. How can that be called materialistic? On the other hand, Buddhism is notoriously the favorite religion of atheists, which must mean something.

Whether or not spirit is ontologically separate from matter (monism vs. dualism) is not really the point of materialism. Joseph Smith taught that "all spirit is matter" (D&C 131:7), but he was not in any meaningful sense a materialist. A true materialist is one who takes the features of material objects -- impermanence, determinism, ontological complexity, lack of inherent meaning -- and attributes them to everything. Chinese Buddhism as I know it (mostly through the late Chan Master Sheng-yen and his disciples) does that. There is a strong focus on the "causes and conditions" underlying everything, including human actions. Everything, including the human soul, is impermanent and lacking in reality because it is made up of parts whose current relationship or configuration will not last forever -- very close to "atoms and the void." Nothing, including human love, is ultimately real or has any significance; and the only real goal is the negative and highly materialistic one of the cessation of all suffering.

This may or may not be a distortion of what the Buddha originally taught, but I have read a bit of modern Chinese Buddhist literature and had long philosophical discussions with modern Chinese Buddhists, and I believe I am representing their thought -- "Fo" as he appears today -- fairly. And I believe that this "materialistic cultus of Fo" grew out of the original Buddhism just as naturally and inevitably as Epicureanism grew out of the thought of Plato.

Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision

I was at a bookstore yesterday to place an order for some textbooks, and I happened to see these two books displayed together.

In the context of the Greek name Zeus, the phrase a dick suggests ádikos, “unjust.” Since Zeus was proverbially just, this would be a blasphemous inversion of a common piety, analogous to Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

In my recent post "A forgotten literary movement," I recounted a dream in which I asked one person after another to help me remember the name of an early 20th-century literary movement. The only name I could remember associated with the movement was Francis Scott Key, which I knew wasn't right. No one was able to help me with the name of the movement, except one person who suggested, "Wasn't there a group of writers around that time called the Schmucks?" Upon waking, I guessed that the "Francis Scott Key" I had been thinking of must have been the early 20th-century novelist Francis Scott Key ("F. Scott") Fitzgerald.

In the above display, Fitzgerald is juxtaposed with the word dick. In my dream, it had been suggested that "Francis Scott Key" might have been part of a group called the Schmucks -- and schmuck is the Yiddish counterpart to dick, meaning both "penis" and "contemptible person."

I have never read anything by Fitzgerald, but I do own one of his novels: the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Tender Is the Night. On the back cover, between the title and the summary, is the boldface quote, "Help me, help me, Dick!" -- Dick Diver being the main character, based on Fitzgerald himself.

On the Fitzgerald book in the photo above, a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on Fitzgerald's head. In a few recent posts, including "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," I have discussed a Time magazine cover in which a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on the head of Kamala Harris. I commented that the cup on her head made me think of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, who wore a cup-shaped headdress. Originally a combination of Osiris and the bull-god Apis, this god was later combined with Zeus and worshipped as "Zeus-Serapis."

(My earlier posts have associated the white cup both with the owl and with Serapis. Last night, I happened to see a random shitpost on /x/ which had a picture of a German woodcut of a bull-headed Moloch idol and said, “This is Moloch. His name is pronounced MOE-lock. He is an owl. That is all.” Yesterday, someone emailed me some of Royal Skousen’s textual research on the Book of Mormon. Among its new-to-me conclusions was that the name printed as Mulek in the BoM as we have it is a scribal error, and that this character’s correct name is Muloch, interpreted by Skousen as a variant of Moloch. In the /x/ thread, an anon argued that Moloch was itself an error for the common noun melek, “king.”)

"Zeus is a dick." Dick is Fitzgerald's fictional alter-ego. Zeus is Serapis. Fitzgerald is portrayed as Serapis.

In the posts about the white Starbucks cup, one of the commenters mentioned that the name Starbuck comes from Moby-Dick., which brings us to the next thing that caught my eye yesterday.

A whale juxtaposed with the word vision. This made me think of the synchronistic saga of the whale with many eyes. Eyes are organs of vision, and I had also used that word repeatedly with reference to Dee and Kelley’s whale experience. See for example “I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s many-eyed whale vision.”

Then I noticed that the word could also be read as VI Sion. I had recently read the seven Penitential Psalms aloud in Latin, and they include a few references to Sion (the Latin spelling of Zion). The first Penitential Psalm is Psalm VI, and the sixth is De Profundis, which alludes to Jonah’s prayer from within the belly of the whale.

Then I thought that V. I. Sion could stand for Veni in Sion, “come to Zion.” At the same time, V. I. is 5 followed by 1. In Isaiah 51, we read “Et nunc qui redempti sunt a Domino revertentur, et venient in Sion laudantes,” “Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion” (v. 11). Just two verses previous, the Lord is addressed as the one “that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon” — Rahab being a sea monster similar or identical to Leviathan, and thus a link to the whale.

Later that day, we visited some of my wife’s relatives. Our young nephew showed me a children’s book about sea creatures, opening up to a page that had a picture of a whale shark mislabeled (in both Chinese and English) as a “great white shark.” When a whale is called a great white, that’s obviously another link to Moby-Dick.

The TV was on, and there was a trailer for some sort of romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. In one scene, the Clooney character is reluctant to swim with dolphins, saying, “Are you sure they’re not sharks?” but is persuaded to jump into the water. The scene then cuts to him saying, “I can’t believe I got bit by a dolphin!”

A forgotten literary movement

In my dream, I was explaining to various friends and family members what was troubling me:

"This is driving me crazy. I remember that there was a literary movement in the early 20th century, and they had a short, simple name -- but I can't remember what it was, and I can't find any reference to it anywhere! It wasn't the Beatniks, although the two movements had a lot in common. This movement was earlier than the Beats, sort of a precursor I suppose, but they had a name just as simple and memorable as Beatniks. Something like Rat Pack, maybe? Not that, of course, but that sort of name. The strange thing is that I can't remember the name of a single figure from this movement, although it feels is if they're all on the tip of my tongue. When I try to think of their names, all I can come up with is Francis Scott Key, which obviously isn't even the right century. I can't name any of the novels, either, though I do vaguely remember one of the movies associated with the movement. It was called The something Kid -- like The Topeka Kid or something like that, or maybe just The Kid -- and I can remember what the picture on the DVD case looked like: black and white photo with a young boy standing there in oversized clothes and -- oh, I can't remember what those hats were called, either, but one of those hats, you know, like you'd wear in a Guy Ritchie movie. One of their themes was that kids grow up too fast, and their work was a bit sentimental sometimes, but there was also a certain element of tough-guy posturing. They foreshadowed film noir in certain ways, I think you'd say. Anyway, that DVD apparently no longer exists. I can't find any trace of it anywhere. . . ."

I gave this explanation to one person after another, and no one had any idea what I was talking about -- with the exception of one of my brothers, whose only suggestion was, "Wasn't there a group of writers around that time called the Schmucks?" I became convinced that this was some sort of Mandela Effect -- that this whole literary movement had been retroactively erased from history, leaving only a few fragmentary but insistent memories in the minds of a few people like myself.

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Upon waking, I figured that I had been describing garbled memories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (full name Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) and the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid -- but would anyone say that Fitzgerald and Chaplin were part of the same "literary movement"? And the movement of which Fitzgerald was a defining member was given the boring, nondescript label Modernism -- nowhere near as cool or memorable as Beatniks or Rat Pack. Or maybe Lost Generation was the name I was trying to remember? Anyway, a very strange dream.

The love of God in the Tarot

Three of the seven virtues are explicitly present in the Tarot. Over at The Magician's Table, I discuss where to find the other four, particularly Charity.

Is calling a woman a dog less offensive if you say she's one of the most beautiful breeds in the world?

Spotted among the sidebar clickbait pics on Breitbart today:

I haven't seen such a hilariously offensive picture-caption mismatch since Michael Jackson died.