The Goddess Athe

You know that joke about how Atheists worship the Goddess Athe? In Greek that would be Αθε.

René Guénon says somewhere that the owl is a symbol of rational knowledge because it sees only by the reflected light of the moon, not the direct sunlight of intuition. Sure enough, the Athe coin features a crescent moon as well. The ancient Greek word for "owl" comes from the word for "gray," which fits the night-vision theme.

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night

Removes the colours from our sight

Red is grey is yellow white

But we decide which is right

And which is an illusion

-- Graeme Edge

Jupiter in a halo

I've been getting a lot of these weird little hunches recently.

At about a quarter to three this morning, I was nudged by an intrusive thought which, while not quite verbal, amounted to: You're going to see something in the sky. This was accompanied by a faint, not-quite-visual sense of a very large disk. Without questioning anything or formulating any particular expectations, I immediately got up, put on a pair of flip-flops, and went outside.

There was a very thin cirrostratus cloud layer covering the whole sky, just thick enough that the only visible heavenly bodies were the gibbous Moon and Jupiter, and just barely thick enough to make visible a 22-degree halo around the Moon, with Jupiter inside the halo.

I went inside, got my phone, and took a photo. Photos of the night sky never come out well, but you can sort of see the halo in this one. (The bright speck to the left is Jupiter. The other speck, closer to the Moon, is an artifact of the camera; there was nothing in the sky at that point.)

Minutes later, the clouds had thinned and the halo was gone. I caught it at just the right time.

Six owls

Following up on a sync, I lunched at a restaurant called Six Owl Door. The food wasn’t good, and absolutely nothing interesting happened while I was there. So much for that.

Later the same day, I stopped at a used bookstore I hadn’t been to in several months. Besides books, they also have a little corner where they sell various secondhand knickknacks. Today they had a framed jigsaw puzzle for sale — depicting six owls.

Update: Debbie left a comment saying she had searched for owls, bears, and monkeys. Unlike owls and bears, monkeys were not something we had been discussing, so I asked what prompted her to add them to the mix.

Just after posting that comment, I had a sudden impression that I should look up. I did, and there on the top shelf of my wife’s tchotchke cabinet, looking over the shoulder of a teddy bear, was Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Chinese legend.

The end of one line is “adjacent” to the beginning of the next

Maybe it’s just because I was hungry, but for a tiny fraction of a second, I misread “odd noises” as “cold noodles.”

Apparently, before I had finished processing “odd,” my eyes had already jumped to the left to read the next line, since it is obvious that it is under the penumbral influence of “cottage” that “odd” morphed into “cold.” Then, seeing the already-read word “cottage,” my eyes redirected themselves to the next line, but the shadow of “odd” was still there and injected itself into “noises” to create “noodles.”

All this happened much too fast to notice consciously. I just became aware of a ghostly “cold noodles” hanging there in the air and had to reconstruct what must have happened.

The curving corridor, the owl door, and the time is now

In "Lots of owls that fit just perfectly, and I wanna know Y!" I quoted a passage from Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee in which someone reports a a dream of "opening her closet and seeing a bunch of owls all lined up on a shelf . . . they all fit so well in that shelf."

Clelland's book stresses the links between owls and gray aliens, and so this dream made me think of a passage in Whitley Strieber's Transformation. He wakes up to find himself walking along a corridor, led by two blue aliens.

The corridor we were in was a neutral gray-tan in color and curved gracefully upward and around to the left. Along the inner wall were large drawers outlined in dark brown, with a round knob in the middle of each.

He is led into a large room full of aliens with translucent white skin and an air of military formality, sitting at tables, and they ask him to explain why the British Empire collapsed. As he does so, he becomes aware of their thoughts telepathically.

"Isn't he wonderful!" "How full of facts!" "How learned!" There was an ugly edge of irony to these thoughts -- which I felt rather than heard -- that was cold and hard and true. I stood there writhing inwardly.

After this speech, during which he feels that he is the object of harsh judgment and sarcasm, he is led out of the room by the two blue beings again.

We were going down the curving corridor again when one of the blue beings . . . pulled open one of the drawers. In that drawer were stacks of bodies like their own, encased in what looked like cellophane. Their eyes were open, their mouths wide as if with surprise. I did not know what to make of it. The oddest thing was the way the drawer was opened with a prideful flourish. I was being shown something the two of them clearly thought was wonderful.

When I read about the owls packed onto a shelf in a closet, I thought of those alien bodies stacked in drawers.

Later, as reported in the same post, I connected the owls in the closet with a video my wife told me she had seen of lots of baby owls packed into a box.

⁂

In "Two videos of rehabilitated baby owls, sent 42 minutes apart," I reported that my wife sent me the video that she had told me about, just 42 minutes after I received another video about baby owls. This first video was about how baby owls had been mistaken for aliens, reinforcing the "owls = aliens" theme.

At the end of that post, I noted an incident that felt potentially significant, as if it were going to be part of a yet-to-unfold synchronicity.

While on the road -- just after reading the above and just before typing it up here -- I saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said "THE TIME IS NOW." There's a clock on my motorcycle dash, so I glanced down at it; it read 14:14. The number struck me as significant, though I'm not sure why yet. We'll see if anything comes of it.

⁂

During my lunch break today, I listened to part of a podcast in which Clelland was interviewed. In the course of the interview, he describes a hypnosis session in which he relived one of his alien encounters. Since transcribing from podcasts is a nuisance, I will quote from a text version of the same story posted on his blog. Yvonne is the hypnotist.

Clelland describes suddenly finding himself walking down a curved hallway, flanked by aliens, exactly like Strieber in the Transformation account. (Strieber's appearance in the hallway was also sudden; he describes it as being as if he had woken up in mid-stride.)

Mike: I’m walking in a hallway.

Yvonne: Can you describe the hallway.  

Mike: The floor is flat but the walls are all curved . . . I don’t know how I got in there, all of a sudden I'm just walking there. I'm not alone. They [aliens] are on either side, on one side or the other, there is either one or two on one side, or one or two on the other. They are on the side of me. They aren’t in front of me, and they aren’t behind me. 

He includes an image recreating the hallway as he saw it, and the color is the same "neutral gray-tan" described by Strieber.

Like Strieber, he is led into a room full of aliens sitting at tables. Although Clelland is not asked to lecture on British history, he reports the same feeling as Strieber, of being the center of attention and of being judged.

Mike: It’s foggy. They are all bald. And they are not moving, they are sitting very still. It’s like a trial, or like a meeting, and they are all looking at me. I don’t think I’m at a podium, but it feels like that kind of thing. It feels like a trial.

(long pause)

Yvonne: Can you describe what is being communicated?

Mike: That now is the time, and I agreed to this, and I'm here because now is the time.

The italics are Clelland's: now is the time. When I heard that on the podcast, it really got my attention because I had so recently noted "THE TIME IS NOW" as potentially synchronistically significant, and this was in connection with Clelland and Strieber. Clelland goes on to explain to the hypnotist, "It feels like the message is YOUR MISSION STARTS NOW."

Then they jump to the subject of owls:

At this point Yvonne changes the subject. Before the session started I’d asked her to bring up the subject of owls. I requested that she ask me, “What’s the meaning of the owls?”

Yvonne: As they are communicating this to you, do you feel your connection with owls is part of what you are supposed to do, part of your mission?

(long pause)

Mike: I don't think we talk about owls.

Yvonne: What sense do you get about your connection with owls?

Mike: I get that the owl isn’t important. The owl is like a symbol, or like a sign on a door. It’s just a sign on a door and what’s behind the door is what’s important. . . .

At the end of the day, I passed a hot pot restaurant on my way home. I guess it's always been there, but its name struck me as significant today.

In a big South Carolina wreck

I prophesy, in the name of the Lord God, that the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina. It may probably arise through the slave question. This a voice declared to me, while I was praying earnestly on the subject, December 25th, 1832.

-- Joseph Smith

In my recent post "Lots of owls that fit just perfectly, and I wanna know Y!" I discussed the song "South Carolina" from John Linnell's State Songs album.

This was in a post that had some syncs relating to the American Civil War. Although the song came to mind for reasons unrelated to the war, I did note the connection: "The song is called 'South Carolina,' and the lyrics repeat several times, 'In a big South Carolina wreck / I crash my bicycle.' This ties in with the Civil War link, since the war began in South Carolina."

At my school, there's a small blackboard on which the staff usually write and draw something related to an upcoming holiday. Since there are no particular holidays coming up for a while, it currently just says "Summer."

I saw this as I was leaving the school this evening, and for some reason the thought popped into my mind, "Hey, that m looks just like a Russian t!" I don't know why I would think that; I mean every lowercase m looks like a lowercase Russian t.

And then I immediately thought "Sumter!" and then -- well I'll be damned if the whole scene doesn't look like the South Carolina flag!

Palm tree on the right, moon on the left, dark background. I assume that's meant to be the sun on the blackboard, but on that black background it could just as well be the moon.

The Civil War, of course, began with the Battle of Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

As if that weren't enough of a coincidence, the blackboard art also features three stars (starfish).

The influence of adjacent lines of text: A jar full of experiencers

Past posts on this phenomenon: "A Freudian slip," "The influence of adjacent lines of text," "The influence of adjacent lines of text: Installment 3," "My sister and the Maid on adjacent lines of text."

I've been reading Mike Clellan's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee using the Kindle app on my phone.

I at first read this as "a woman who saw a white owl while carrying a jar full of experiencers" -- the UFO world's answer to "basket of deplorables"?

I did a double take, of course, and my second impression was "full of John Mack's experiences" -- written on slips of paper or something and put in a jar? That didn't make much sense, either, and I finally read the passage correctly.

(The two misreadings and the final, correct one all took place in a tiny sliver of a second -- much, much faster than it takes to read this account of them.)

Apparently I had combined car with the ving (visually similar to ying) just below it to create the phantom word carrying; and then, since people don't carry cars, the word ending in -ar had been emended to jar. I find it interesting that car was apparently read twice, contributing to both carrying and jar. Then the second misreading was influenced by John Mack's located directly below experiences.

⁂

I've included more context than seems necessary in the image above because I want to show that immediately after this twice-misread passage was a discussion of certain numbers occurring often in connection with owl and UFO experiences. The first one mentioned is 11:11, but then Clelland goes on to say, "Other number sequences are also reported. 3:33 and 12:34 are often noted."

In my recent post "Owls, aliens, Sesame Street muppets, and the Duke of Earl," I noted an occurrence of "horseshoes in 'U' orientation" and linked this to my post "Choronzon 333," which featured this image:

⁂

I should have known that reading a book with synchronicity in the title would bring on a slew of syncs. See "Coincidences in connection with Beyond Coincidence" for an example of the same thing.