For the record: Fake Russell M. Nelson quote about “racism” removed from official CJCLDS website

On October 5, following a link sent to me by an email correspondent, I read a summary of President Russell M. Nelson's remarks at the recent General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), published on the Church's official website. Transcripts of his remarks were not yet available, and I do not watch videos, so this was at the time my only source. I was dismayed to see President Nelson quoted as saying that "any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God's plan of happiness for His children."

Today I saw that transcripts were now available at the CJCLDS website, so I decided to read President Nelson's remarks in full. His only remarks about "racism" were in his Sunday morning talk "Let God Prevail":

Each of us has a divine potential because each is a child of God. Each is equal in His eyes. The implications of this truth are profound. Brothers and sisters, please listen carefully to what I am about to say. God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear. He invites all to come unto Him, “black and white, bond and free, male and female.”

I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin.

I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice. Today I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.

The question for each of us, regardless of race, is the same. Are you willing to let God prevail in your life? Are you willing to let God be the most important influence in your life? Will you allow His words, His commandments, and His covenants to influence what you do each day? Will you allow His voice to take priority over any other? Are you willing to let whatever He needs you to do take precedence over every other ambition? Are you willing to have your will swallowed up in His?

Conspicuous by its absence is the quote about discrimination being morally wrong. I did a double take and revisited the link to the summary, only to find that it had changed. Everything was the same except the parts about "racism" -- the subtitle and one paragraph, both of which had been completely rewritten. There is no retraction or indication that the article has been modified since it was first published.

This page is not archived by the Wayback Machine, but fortunately Google still has a cache of the original version.Since a Google cache link is obviously not going to be good for long, I reproduce the entire summary below, with the changes shown in strikethrough and red.

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President Nelson at October General Conference: Let God Prevail, Embrace the Future, Live ‘a New Normal’

Prophet reminds Latter-day Saints that racism is “morally wrong” and contrary to God’s plan of happiness and His purpose of the gathering "God does not love one race above another," President Nelson said

Moving forward, embracing the future with faith, seeing turbulent times as opportunities to thrive spiritually and choosing to let God prevail in our lives. Those were some of the key messages shared by President Russell M. Nelson during the 190th semiannual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

While President Nelson expressed joy for the opportunity and ability to gather virtually for the conference, he also expressed sorrow to all those impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters and other hardships.

“Through it all our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, love us! They care for us!” he said. “They and Their holy angels are watching over us.”

President Nelson added that despite the current commotion in the world, we can look to the future with joy as we turn to our Savior Jesus Christ.

“Let us not spin our wheels in the memories of yesterday. The gathering of Israel moves forward. The Lord Jesus Christ directs the affairs of His Church, and it will achieve its divine objectives.”

Are You Willing to Let God Prevail in Your Life?

During the Sunday morning session of the conference, President Nelson taught about the gathering of Israel and how that is related to our willingness to let God be the most important influence in our lives.

“The only way to survive spiritually is to be determined to let God prevail in our lives, to learn to hear His voice and to use our energy to help gather Israel,” he said.

During the address, President Nelson reiterated that God loves all of his children and emphasized that racism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot be tolerated.

“Let me be clear, brothers and sisters, any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God’s plan of happiness for His children. It is also contrary to His very purpose of the gathering.”

"I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin."

As President Nelson taught saints to see themselves participating in the gathering of God’s children taking place right now, he issued this prophetic invitation:

“As you study your scriptures during the next six months, I encourage you to make a list of all that the Lord has promised He will do for covenant Israel. ... Ponder these promises. Talk about them with your family and friends. Then live and watch for these promises to be fulfilled in your own life.”

Embrace the Future With Faith

Speaking during the women’s session to women and young women ages 11 and up, President Nelson expressed his love and appreciation for all they have done to be everyday heroes during these difficult circumstances. He also reminded them of the Lord’s promise that “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear” (Doctrine and Covenants 38:30) and urged all to take steps to be more temporally, spiritually and emotionally prepared.

He shared three principles to consider:

1. Create places of security
2. Prepare your mind to be faithful to God
3. Never stop preparing

President Nelson taught, “Our ultimate security comes as we yoke ourselves to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ! Life without God is a life filled with fear. Life with God is a life filled with peace.”

Live ‘a New Normal’

In his concluding address on Sunday afternoon, President Nelson acknowledged in today’s world we often hear the term “new normal.” But he invited disciples of Jesus Christ to embrace “a new normal” that includes turning one’s heart to God, repenting daily, ministering to and serving others, keeping an eternal perspective and living each day to be better prepared to meet God.

President Nelson announced plans to build six new temples before he ended the conference with this blessing of peace:

“I bless you to be filled with the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ. His peace is beyond all mortal understanding. I bless you with an increased desire and ability to obey the laws of God.” He continued, “I promise that as you do, you will be showered with blessings, including greater courage, increased personal revelation, sweeter harmony in your homes and joy, even amid uncertainty.”

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What does this mean? Here are the possibilities:

1. Since transcripts were not yet available, the article was prepared from notes and the quotes were therefore not verbatim. This is implausible. The fake Nelson quote is not at all similar in wording to anything that he actually said, and the article is full of other direct quotes which were perfectly accurate and did not need to be modified.

2. The article was prepared using scripts President Nelson had written prior to delivering his talks. When the talks were actually delivered, he followed his script until he came to the part about "racism" -- when he was suddenly moved by the Spirit to say something other than what he had originally planned.

3. An accurate script or transcript of President Nelson's remarks was available at the time the summary was written, but some fifth-columnist in Church employ deliberately and dishonestly modified the part about "racism," hoping no one would notice. Eventually someone did notice, and the falsehood was quietly corrected.

4. The original quote was correct, and it is the new version -- and the published transcript of the talk, and the accompanying video -- that has been dishonestly modified. This sounds like crazy conspiracy-theory talk, but, incredibly, I cannot rule it out. Watch the video (as I finally did, my curiosity overcoming my videophobia for once), and you'll find that the camera cuts to a new angle just before the four paragraphs I have quoted above (about "racism"), and then again just after them, so the video could conceivably have been edited. I find this possibility implausible as well, because it would imply that Nelson himself was directly involved in the deception, and because it seems like an awful lot of work to go through to replace one antiracist statement with another, slightly different one.

To any of my readers who may have watched the Conference live, what do you remember President Nelson saying? Which quote is correct?

UPDATE: Several family members and acquaintances who watched the Conference live and took notes have confirmed that the currently available version of the talk is correct; so far, only one person remembers differently. Commenter MC has also confirmed the correctness of the current version by showing that people posted quotes from it -- but not from the deleted version -- on Twitter in real time. Possibility 4 can be considered disproven.

We categorically condemn all forms of racism.

Saying that in 2020 is like saying, in the midst of an ongoing Communist revolution, "We categorically condemn all exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie."

Well, exploitation should be condemned. And sometimes the middle class does exploit the working class. But in context -- the context of a triumphant evil movement that defines everything, including everything good and true, as the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie -- what you're really saying is "Shoot more kulaks." Or, to paraphrase somewhat, "Hail Satan."

So that's how it is. If you make a point of categorically condemning "racism," no matter how defensible the literal content of your statement may be, I'm going to see it as a declaration of allegiance to the god of this world. And I'm not going to be wrong.

Can you smell what the Puny Rock is cooking?

 So I saw someone wearing this T-shirt today: "Being emotionally manipulative isn't very puny rock of you." (The photo's not very clear because it was night and because I had to take it without being conspicuous, but I saw it very clearly and am sure I have transcribed it correctly.)

I really couldn't figure it out. I imagined a movie or TV program where Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is magically shrunk down a tiny size, after which he is known as "the Puny Rock," and later when he does or says something emotionally manipulative, someone criticizes his behavior as being out of character.

Finally I Googled the sentence and found what I really should have guessed -- that the original version, of which this is a mutant knockoff, says "punk rock." The original was apparently popularized by a K-pop star who wore it once.

(By the way, if pop music from Korea is called K-pop, what do you call rap music from California?)

Phantom arrivals

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.

-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week.  It cost several hundred dollars.  Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step.  The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery.  I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it.  I didn’t need it right away.  Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it.  But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere.  I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups.  After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck.  I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said.  The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang.  My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box.  He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular.  He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box.  It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside.  I hefted the battery.  It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.

Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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The vardøger experiences recounted by Sheldrake involve the return of a person, and the premonitory hallucination is primarily aural -- although there may be a tactile component; Mrs. Greenberg felt her husband put his hands on her shoulders. (The name Ann Greenberg is a bit of a coincidence, since... uh, it begins with the letter G.) In contrast, G and Handle report visual (and presumably tactile) hallucinations prefiguring the arrival of an inanimate object. The delay between the phantasm and the actual arrival is also longer in the Junior Ganymede cases -- a day or several, as opposed to 10 minutes to an hour in Sheldrake's examples.

Despite these dissimilarities, could we be dealing with essentially the same sort of phenomenon here? Is Hygen's conclusion -- that it is not a true precognitive phenomenon but a telepathic one, related to intentions -- applicable to the experiences of G and Handle?

One reason given for Hygen's conclusion is that the vardøger sounds are not always identical to the sounds heard when the person really arrives. In G's case, too, the vardøger-like experience (let's go ahead and use that word) was not identical to what it foreshadowed. In the vardøger, he saw the battery box on the front step, took it inside, and put it on a side table without opening it. When the battery really arrived, none of that happened; it was given to his wife while he was out, she opened it, and he found it charging on his desk when he came home.

Could the battery vardøger have been triggered by the sender's intention? G wrote on October 2 that he had ordered the battery "last week" (i.e., September 21-26) and that the vardøger arrived "Monday" (September 28). In a comment to his own post, G mentions that "the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day." Since September 18 would have been before he ordered the battery, this must be a typo for September 28 -- the day of the vardøger.

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I suspect that experiences like those recounted by G and Handle are more common than we tend to assume. We filter them out with a simple "I must have been mistaken," move on, and forget that they ever happened. Or, in less dramatic cases, we never even perceive the anomalous thing at all because our brain does not consider it sufficiently probable (the Horseshoe Crab Effect). Making an effort to notice and remember such things, even if no explanation immediately suggests itself, is a worthwhile endeavor.

The Emperor and the number 4

Jean-Pierre Payen, 1713

One of the distinctive characteristics of so-called Tarot de Marseille "Type I" decks ("Type II" being the standard Tarot) is that the fourth trump, the Emperor, has, in addition to the Roman numerals at the top of the card, an Arabic numeral 4 floating in front of his face. Only the Emperor has this; every other trump has only the standard Roman-numeral label at the top. The question is, why?

It is customary for Tarot commentators to see in the Emperor's crossed legs and the rough triangle formed by his head and arms, an allusion to the alchemical symbol for Sulfur, which is a cross surmounted by a triangle. However, one could just as easily see the Emperor's legs as forming an Arabic numeral 4 -- and this numeral is also very close to the astrological symbol for Jupiter.

The resemblance of the Emperor to the god Jupiter -- who also sits on a throne, holding a scepter, with an eagle at his side -- should be obvious.

1st-century Roman statue of Jupiter

Other representations of the number 4 can also be connected to Jupiter. Although the Tarot de Marseille consistently uses strictly additive Roman numerals (IIII, VIIII, XIIII, XVIIII), the standard Roman numeral for 4 is IV -- the first two letters of the name Jupiter (IVPPITER). It was to avoid taking the name of Jupiter in vain that many Roman sundials, although they used the subtractive IX for 9, opted for IIII instead of IV. (The Tarot de Marseille uses "IV" only in the names of the trumps Justice and Judgment, with which it would not be disrespectful to associate Jupiter.)

The Greek numeral for 4 is the letter Δ (cf. the triangle formed by the Emperor's upper body). This is also the initial of Διεύς, the ancient form of the name Zeus and cognate with the Latin deus (which, besides its primary meaning of "god," was used as an imperial title).

Finally, I note -- although it is almost certainly a meaningless coincidence -- that Nicolas Conver's 1760 deck, often considered to be the canonical Tarot de Marseille, gives this trump the anomalous name L'empereup. If IV suggests Jupiter, surely UP does as well. If UP represents Jupiter, then the full title of the Conver trump is nothing less than le M. Père Jupiter.

All in all, I find the links to Jupiter to be much stronger than the more traditional ones to alchemical Sulfur.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Back in 2007, a Taiwanese mother hired me to coach her eight-year-old son, who was preparing for an English recitation contest in which he was to recite two texts -- a soliloquy from Macbeth and some sententious glurge from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The mother stressed that understanding was not important. So long as her son could rattle off the two pieces fluently, with flawless pronunciation, she could care less whether he could tell "the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand" from "the way to dusty death." We worked hard. Within the limits of my commission, I thought I'd done a pretty bang-up job, and when the day of the recitation contest arrived, he delivered his text with impeccable consonants and stirringly simulated conviction -- all perfect until he came to the end:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound financial structure,
Whether in government, business, or personal affairs.

He was heartily applauded by the audience of parents, who of course didn't know what he'd just said any better than he did, and ended up taking second place. Somehow I managed to keep a straight face throughout.

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I've always liked to think my old friends the synchronicity fairies had a hand in that particular error, plugging a line of Junior's pompous fluff into the slot marked "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

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This memory recently came back to smack me upside the head. Somehow, by slow degrees and without fully realizing it, I have been allowing the media to recolonize my mind, to such an extent that today I caught myself thinking with excited anticipation that tomorrow was September 29. What I was anticipating was, not to put too fine a point on it, the prospect of watching two disgusting old liars have a lying contest on television -- and the angel on my shoulder, who is not above resorting to sarcasm, snapped me out of it by whispering, "Yes, and it's sure to be 'full of sound financial structure'!"

Macbeth's soliloquy may be a bit bleak as an assessment of life, but it's turned out to be a pretty accurate description of the Fake Media World. The main difference, of course, is that the FMW offers up nothing so innocent as a tale told by an idiot. It's a tale told by evil liars, and if you willingly give it one second of your time, the idiot is you.

And so I repent, recommit to not drinking one single drop of their stinking Kool-Aid, and turn back to reality.

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The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

-- William Wordsworth

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

-- James Joyce

The Ace of Cups: A brief overview of its development

Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo, Cary-Yale, Marseille, Rider-Waite

The cards pictured above are representative of the different forms the Ace of Cups has taken over the years in Italy, France, and England. None is a straightforward representation of a cup.

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The Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo card depicts a fountain. The main body of it resembles a goblet, but there is a column rising up from the center of this cup, supporting a head with two or more spouts from which water flows down into the cup, and this head is topped with a sculpture of a bird of some kind. This is certainly not the sort of thing that anyone could lift to his lips and drink from. If the lower basin were a bit wider, it would look like the sort of bronze fountain that might serve as a garden ornament; but perhaps the narrowness of the basin is simply an artifact of the shape of the card. The whole thing almost makes me think of a samovar, though of course no real samovar is designed like that.

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The Cary-Yale and Marseille cards share the same basic design: a large goblet covered with a complicated structure resembling a castle or cathedral. I have not been able to find pictures of any real objects quite like the one depicted on these cards, but the Spanish chalice and monstrance shown below, both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, come close.

Spanish chalice and monstrance (late 15th century)

The chalice, on the left, is apparently almost unique; at any rate, I have not been able to find any other example of a chalice with a cover at all similar to that seen on the Marseille Ace of Cups. (Chalices don't normally have covers at all; any object that looks like a covered chalice is likely a ciborium, for holding hosts.) The monstrance, on the right, is one of a large number of similar objects, and its resemblance to the object on the Ace of Cups is obvious. The rub, of course, is that it's not a cup and lacks any cup-like component. (The purpose of a monstrance is to display some holy item, in this case the Eucharistic host.) If we took the top part of the monstrance and used it as a cover for the chalice, then we'd have something almost exactly like the Marseille Ace of Cups. I have not been able to find any examples of such an object, but apparently there is such a thing as a combined chalice-monstrance, with the monstrance doing double duty as the cover for the chalice. The photo below shows such an object, though the style of the monstrance is quite different from that seen on the card.

I think we must conclude, then, that the version of the Ace of Cups seen in the Cary-Yale and Marseille decks is a chalice with a cover serving as a monstrance. Both cards clearly show windows in the sides of the object, allowing for the display of the host, and the yellow circles in some of the windows on the Marseille card were perhaps originally Communion wafers.

Despite the fact that the Cary-Yale and Marseille cards show what seems clearly to be a Eucharistic chalice, which should contain wine, both appear to contain water instead. A blue squiggle is visible in the window in the Cary-Yale card, and the Marseille card features what I take to be three gouts of blue water spurting out of the chalice portion of the object. As far as I know, while it is customary to add some water to the sacramental wine, a chalice would never normally be filled with water alone.

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Waite, ever the eclectic, alludes to both the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo and the Marseille cards. The basic Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo layout -- a cup-shaped fountain with a bird at the top -- is reinterpreted in light of the Eucharistic imagery of the Tarot de Marseille. What was a mere birdbath ornament on the Italian card is transformed by Waite into the dove of the Holy Ghost, descending toward the chalice with a consecrated host in its bill. This is fairly common iconography -- see the First Communion clipart below -- but it was a stroke of inspired genius on Waite's part to hit on it as a way of uniting the Italian fountain and the French monstrance in a single image.

Despite this very explicit Eucharistic imagery, though, it is still water, rather than wine or blood, that pours from the chalice. The water issues in four or five streams (five on the card, four in Waite's description in the Pictorial Key; it is unclear which is the error), the shape of which makes it clear that they come from a fountain and not simply from an overflowing cup.

A dove hovering over water calls to mind the baptism of Jesus, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that Jesus connected his baptism with drinking from a cup: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38). Another scriptural allusion would be to the "living water" of the Fourth Gospel: "But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).