The breath metaphor

In Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and many other languages the word for "spirit" and "breath" (and often "wind" as well) is the same. (We can see this in our English words spirit and respiration, from the same Latin root.) "Breath," being more concrete, was presumably the original meaning of these words, with "spirit" being a metaphorical extension of that sense.

Why that particular metaphor?

One obvious reason is that breath is one of the things that distinguishes a living person from a corpse, and that we also encounter it (as wind) in disembodied form. It is easy to imagine a person's breath -- more so than, say, his heartbeat -- living on as a disembodied being after that person's death. Perhaps the earliest imagined "spirits" in the superhuman sense -- proto-gods -- were such characters as Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, and Eurus -- invisible, obviously real, and clearly of the same nature as human breath.

Another possible reason is that breath is the medium of speech -- which is really only modulated breath -- and it is speech that expresses our thoughts and feelings. In fact, there is a case to be made (others have made it, though I don't remember who) that speech is what originally gave rise to our self-awareness -- that we spoke to others, overheard ourselves, and thus began to know ourselves. Silent self-overhearing, like silent reading, came only later. The Bible describes thinking as a kind of internal speaking: "The fool hath said in his heart. . . ."

Most appropriately, though, breath is volitional but only potentially so. Our heartbeat is beyond out conscious control, but we can easily control our breathing if we choose to do so. Most of the time we do not, though, and it goes on automatically. I think something similar is true of our thoughts and the behavior that comes from them. We have free will but use it far less often than we imagine, and I think it is possible in principle to live out one's life without ever once exercising it, just allowing one's thoughts and actions to happen -- "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind" (Eph. 4:14). But we can live differently. The kingdom of heaven -- meaning, if we take it in a stupidly literal sense, the realm of the wind-gods -- is within you.

Is Homer's wine-dark sea related to the mystery of violet?

Some months ago, I recorded a vivid fantasy in which I saw the Homeric heroes Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun and noted that this would explain Homer's famous "wine-dark sea."

Homer's "wine-dark sea" seems bizarre to us moderns, for whom wine is red and the sea is blue. Under a blue sun, though, the sea would not look any bluer than anything else, and "red" -- reflecting less blue light than any other visible color -- would be a close cousin to "dark."

Obviously, I don't really believe the Sun was ever blue, though, so Homer's sea remains a mystery.

Homeric Greek (like several other languages) apparently only had four basic color words -- black, white, red, and yellow. Of the four, black is obviously the best fit for the color of the sea, and arguably for "red" wine as well. (The color of tea is similarly ambiguous. The sort of tea that is called "black" in English is called "red" in Chinese.)

Basically red, or basically black?

So it's not surprising at all that Homer would use the same color word -- black -- to describe both wine and the sea. Still, "wine-dark" is surprising. Many languages consider pink a shade of red and would call a pink piglet "red" -- but would they ever call it blood-red? Even if piglets and blood are both "red" in some languages, a piglet obviously isn't the color of blood and would never be described that way. We can see something similar in English. In Old English, as in modern Russian, there was a basic distinction between light blue (Russian голубой) and dark blue (Russian синий), similar to the distinction between pink and red. Modern English uses blue (originally meaning "light blue") for both -- but sky-blue is still used exclusively for things that are light blue like the sky, not dark blue like the sea. Homer's calling the sea "wine-dark" is precisely as strange as a modern English speaker calling it "sky-blue."

On the other hand, there's my wife, who (like my father) is incapable of distinguishing certain shades of blue (that of my eyes, for instance) from gray. At first I thought this was purely a linguistic phenomenon -- that she applied the label blue to a somewhat different range of colors than I did. Once, though, we were arguing over whether a particular blanket was blue (as it very obviously was!) or gray, and I said, "When I say gray, I mean the color of a mouse. Look at that blanket. Could a mouse be that color?" And she insisted that, yes, a mouse could be that color!

Grey as a mouse?

Run an image search for "cartoon mouse" or "cartoon elephant," and you'll find a surprising number of results that are blue -- so apparently my wife is not alone in this. So, who knows, perhaps Homer really did see the sea as being the same color as wine.

Recently, it occurred to me to wonder if Homer's wine-dark sea had anything to do with the mystery of violet. Technically, purple is a mixture of red and blue light, while violet is a spectral color lying between blue and ultraviolet on the spectrum, and is thus further from red than blue is. For most people, though, spectral violet looks exactly like purple. (The RGB color system used by the screen on which you are reading this is unable to display spectral violet at all, but no one notices the absence of this basic color.) For other people -- including me, I think, as well as whoever wrote "Roses are red, violets are blue" -- spectral violet does not appear at all red; instead, the visible spectrum ends with darker and darker blues finally giving way to black. The sea is dark blue, indistinguishable from spectral violet as I see it. For many other people, both red wine and spectral violet appear "purple." Is this fact -- that the last color of the rainbow looks purple (that is, dark magenta) to some and dark blue to others -- related to the mystery of the "wine-dark sea"? As far as I know, no one individual would ever perceive wine and the sea as being the same color, but perhaps a culture including both violets-are-blue people and violets-are-purple people could have developed a convention of calling both wine and the sea "violet." This doesn't explain Homer's "wine-dark oxen," though, since oxen are never either purple or blue, but it still seems a promising line of inquiry.

Noah's eyes

Blue irises and white sclerae

This is from Mauricio Berger's Sealed Book of Mormon (Sealed Moses 4:3). Little things like this have a way of capturing my imagination.

And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.

In context, watcher refers to angels that were mating with human women, as recounted in the Book of Enoch and alluded to in Genesis 6. Noah's eyes were sufficiently "different" that his father, Lamech, feared he might not be fully human -- but of course all humans alive today are supposed to be the descendants of Noah, so "Noachian" eyes -- eyes of a type like those of the watchers, but unknown among antediluvian humans -- must be commonplace, perhaps even universal, among modern humans.

My first thought was that Noah must have had white sclerae. This trait is now so universal among humans that the sclera is commonly called the "white of the eye" -- but our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have black sclerae (darker than the iris), and so our distant ancestors may well have had all-dark eyes as well. Interestingly, bonobos have sclerae which, while not as white as our own, are lighter than the iris. Among gorillas and orangutans, sclera color varies from individual to individual, much like iris color in some human populations, and may be either lighter or darker than the iris.

Another obvious possibility is that Noah had "blue eyes" -- meaning blue irises. When we think of "eye color," we think of the iris, taking it for granted that the sclera is always white. Among monkeys and apes generally, though, it is sclera color that is variable, while irises are almost universally brown. I am open to correction by any primatologists among my readers, but I believe it is correct to say that (excluding albinos from consideration) no other monkey or ape has blue eyes; certain lemurs are our closest blue-eyed relatives, and blue eyes in lemurs are genetically different from those in humans and apparently evolved independently. It seems quite likely, then, that early humans were all brown-eyed, and that blue eyes appeared later.

If we are all descended from blue-eyed Noah, though, why do so few of us (8 to 10%) have blue eyes? Well, Noah was apparently a mutant, so we can assume that neither his wife nor any of his three daughters-in-law had any blue-eye genes. Since blue eyes are recessive, all of his children and grandchildren would have been brown-eyed. His great-grandchildren (assuming they were the product of cousin-marriages among his grandchildren) would have been 6.25% blue-eyed -- reasonably close to the modern percentage.

Thus far I have been trying to guess the nature of "Noachian" eyes by thinking of ways (some) human eyes differ from those of our nearest relatives, but we are also told that Noah's eyes were like those of a watcher. Are there any hints in old books as to what the watchers' eyes looked like? Nothing in the Bible or Book of Enoch comes to mind, but aren't the Greek gods -- heavenly beings that came down, mated with human women, and begat the "mighty men which are of old" -- likely the same beings as the watchers? And we know from Homer that Athena, at least, had distinctive eyes. Her stock epithet is γλαυκῶπις -- which could be calling her eyes either "bright, gleaming" or "blue-green, blue-gray." I do not believe Homer gives any of his human characters eyes of this sort. Athena's epithet leads us back to the two possibilities I have already discussed: Athena's eyes may have been blue or gray, or they may have been unusually "bright" because her sclerae were white rather than black.

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Why bother writing a post like this, about what Noah's eyes might have been like if a certain obviously bogus book were actually true? Because -- and I am quite confident in saying this -- if I don't, no one else will!

Notice: A new FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil

Recently I was thinking about the handful of prophets I regard as epoch-making -- Moses, David, Jesus, Joseph Smith -- and I fell to wondering who the next one would be. A comment I had read on the Junior Ganymede blog kept coming back to me: "Does the restoration need restoring?" ("Restoration" referring to the work of Joseph Smith.)

Someone sent me a link to an article arguing that the Resurrection had occurred on April 5, 33. I didn't click the link or read the article; instead, my immediate reaction was, "John Pratt made a strong case for April 6." (John Pratt is a Mormon who has written extensively about astronomy and chronology. I read a lot of his work in the past, but it's been many years.) I recall Pratt arguing that Jesus was born on April 6, not that the Resurrection occurred on that date, but nevertheless I felt an urgent need to visit his website.

It turns out that John Pratt is now a believer in Mauricio Berger, a Brazilian man who claims to have been visited by the angel Moroni, to have the Golden Plates, and to have unsealed and translated part of the sealed portion of those plates, published as the Sealed Book of Mormon (PDF). Mr. Pratt, an honest and highly intelligent man, considers the book to be genuine based on its content. He has also (with other witnesses) seen, touched, and examined the plates themselves. He also points to a premonition of his son's, which occurred in 1979 when the son was seven, that the sealed portion of the plates would be translated by someone named Mauricio "Burger" from Brazil.

At this point I have not yet read the Sealed Book and am not endorsing it -- merely passing on some potentially important news that is not yet generally known. My hunch is that this may well turn out to be entirely genuine.

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Update: I apparently gave Mr. Pratt too much credit, thinking him much too intelligent to be taken in by an obvious fake. However, an obvious fake is precisely what Mr. Berger's plates turn out to be, as documented here: PDF.

As for the "translated" text supposedly derived from them, Mr. Berger claims that the English and Portuguese translations were both revealed to him by miraculous means even though he himself does not speak English. In fact, the English text was very obviously created from the Portuguese using Google Translate or some similar software.

For example, it twice refers to certain angels as belonging to "the order of the stars d'alva" or "the order of the star D'alva" -- a half-English expression obviously deriving from Estrela d'Alva, the Portuguese term for the Morning Star (Venus). Google Translate currently renders a ordem da estrela d'alva as "the order of the star of the morning" if alva is not capitalized; if it is written d'Alva, the translation is "the order of the star d'Alva."

It is also easy to see Google's fingerprints on the bit that retells the story of the "Watchers" from the Book of Enoch. These angelic beings -- called vigias or vigilantes in Portuguese -- are in the English text indiscriminately called watchers, watchmen, and vigilantes. These are all possible translations of the Portuguese, but to call the Enochian watchers "vigilantes" in English is completely absurd.

Verdict: This is very, very obvious baloney, and it has permanently damaged John Pratt's credibility in my eyes.

Guest post: Pig say . . .

THE END

Synchronicity: Diversity in forests

Last Friday, I posted "Calculating beta diversity," in which I explored different types of diversity by considering various hypothetical forests and the tree species in them.

The next day, Saturday, a student had some questions about an article on an English reading comprehension test he had taken. The article was called "What Is a Community?" and began thus:

The Black Hills forest, the prairie riparian forest, and other forests of the western United States can be separated by the distinctly different combinations of species they comprise. It is easy to distinguish between prairie riparian forest and Black Hills forest -- one is a broad-leaved forest of ash and cottonwood trees, the other is a coniferous forest of ponderosa pine and spruce trees.

Not only is that an example of diversity in forests, it is specifically the beta diversity I focused on in my post -- that is, one forest differing from another in terms of its species composition (as opposed to alpha diversity among trees within a single forest).

Incidentally, Kevin McCall (who, unlike me, is a trained mathematician) has taken up the quest for a formula interrelating the various types of diversity. Check out his "Summary and discussion of ecological formulas" if you're interested.

Build up the repertoire

Today I checked Vox Day's blog and skimmed some of his recent posts. One of them had the title "Time to build up the repertoire."

Immediately after that, I decided to look through the unpublished drafts for this blog and clean out the ones that weren't going anywhere. One draft I found, from August 24, 2020, was a note about a dream I had had back then.

I was wandering the streets of what I took to be New York City, and everywhere I went, I kept running into Weird Al Yankovic strolling down the sidewalk strumming a guitar and singing. He seemed to be cycling through the same two or three songs, so I kept hearing them again and again. (I have no real sense of what songs they were; I don't really know Yankovic's work.) Finally, I went up to him and said, "Hey, if you're going to sing on the street, maybe you need a bigger repertoire. People will get tired of hearing the same songs." He accepted this helpful advice graciously.