From the Narrow Desert

Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son of our great God, which shall be shed for the atonement of our sins (Alma 24:12-13).

On crossing the river Erymanthus at what is called the ridge of Saurus are the tomb of Saurus and a sanctuary of Heracles, now in ruins. The story is that Saurus used to do mischief to travellers and to dwellers in the neighborhood until he received his punishment at the hands of Heracles. At this ridge which has the same name as the robber, a river, falling into the Alpheius from the south, just opposite the Erymanthus, is the boundary between the land of Pisa and Arcadia; it is called the Diagon.

Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft

Our polyvinyl chloride soft.

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter . . . .

In my very early childhood my thinking was mostly visual, and abstract words generally each had a specific mental picture associated with them. I remember that I often used to pray "Thank you for the world," and that the image that always accompanied the word world was a rainbow.

Le royaume du monde est remis à notre Seigneur et à son Christ.

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15).

When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room. He says he did not think, at the time, whether they had the light of the sun or artificial light; but that it was just as light as day. They laid the plates on a table; it  was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed, and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ."

I ended my post "Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears" by expressing the hope that the sync fairies would develop the Aztec lizardmen theme introduced there. They immediately obliged, at least in part, by sending William Wright a dream about "Deer Hunting, Dir Hunting, and the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company." No Aztec angle yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

In the dream, William shot a large number of deer that had come to eat his pumpkins, and he understood that this group of deer was known as the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company.

William's interpretation involved the assumption that the deer were a sort of rebus referring to the Elvish word dîr, which means "man" -- not the race of Men as opposed to Elves, but an adult male of any race. I thought that was kind of an anticlimactic decoding. That animals in a dream might represent people almost goes without saying; using a bilingual pun to convey it scarcely seems worth the trouble.

I immediately thought of a different homophone, though. In my May 17 post "Pumpkins are dear" -- referring directly to William Wright's pumpkins, the same pumpkins the deer wanted to eat in the dream -- I repeated an old joke I had heard in the 1990s about the Egyptian politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, so the joke was that Ghali must mean "pumpkin-eater" -- as in the nursery rhyme "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater." What the name Ghali actually means, though, is "dear." So dear/deer are directly equated with pumpkin-eaters, and in a post that specifically references the pumpkins on William Wright's farm. Total bull's-eye.

In his dream post, William writes, "What was interesting to me is that Lizardmen were explicitly and very clearly in my mind linked to the deer in my dream.  What do Lizardmen have to do with deer?" All he comes up with in answer is the dîr thing, which only addresses the men part. The lizard element remains unexplained.

Last night I read this in Adrienne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters:

Nearby, on the north bank of the Alpheios River, Saurus's ("Lizard's") Ridge was named after a giant killed by the mythical Heracles.

I looked up Saurus in Pausanias (apparently the only source for this story), and he is described only as a robber or bandit, with no indication that he was anything other than a man -- a man named Lizard.

Saurus is a Latinized spelling of a Greek name more properly transliterated as Sauros -- or, in the accusative form, Sauron. "Lizardmen" are Sauron's men. This fits with William Wright's interpretation of his dream, in which the deer represent Númenóreans under the influence of Sauron, coming to buy pumpkins. In "The 96, the 48, and the white bull," posted just after "Pumpkins are dear," I note that buy, sell, and trade all have the same S:E:G: value. It's perhaps worth noting that in Chinese, 蜥蜴人 ("lizardmen") is pronounced exactly the same as 西異人 ("strange men from the West").

Remembering that "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater" was one of the nursery rhymes Aleister Crowley subjected to tongue-in-cheek Kabbalistic analysis, I looked up his commentary. I found that it is discussed immediately after "Humpty Dumpty," and that he even mentions Humpty's belt or cravat:

This is so simple as hardly to require explanation. Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter; and it is only too painfully familiar to us that all the king's horses and all his men cannot restore us to the height.

Only The King Himself can do that!

But one can hardly comment upon a theme which has been so fruitfully treated by Ludovicus Carolus [i.e., Lewis Carroll], that most holy illuminated man of God. His masterly treatment of the identity of the three reciprocating paths of Daleth, Teth, and Pe, is one of the most wonderful passages in the Holy Qabalah. His resolution of what we take to be the bond of slavery into very love, the embroidered neckband of honour bestowed upon us by the King himself, is one of the most sublime passages in this class of literature.

In my May 3 post "Hometo Omleto," I quote a speech from Mormon leader Vaughn J. Featherstone where he says that, while the king's horses and men couldn't put Humpty together again, "the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him." How funny is it that this respectable Mormon general authority was unwittingly cribbing from the Great Beast himself?

Another of the rhymes Crowley expounds upon is "Little Bo Peep" -- and here we have at least a tentative Aztec link. As I have discussed in "Tezcatlipoca and John Dee," Dee possessed an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, on the leather case of which is this inscription:

Kelly did all his feats upon
The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;
Where playing with him at Bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep.

The person referred to is Dee's disreputable partner Edward Kelley, of whom Crowley very credibly claimed to be the reincarnation.

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult, used to go by the pseudonyms Bo and Peep. Applewhite is a strange name, but I guess it means the "white" of an apple -- the inner part, under the skin, which becomes visible when you take a bite out of it. This ties right in with my (recently linked) 2020 post "Yes, lizard people are Mayincatec," where I quote this passage from a Whitley Strieber novel:

One [of the reptilian aliens] had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.

There's a person in the form of an apple white, on the T-shirt of a lizardman with an Aztec sword.

Just after writing the above, I went on YouTube to look for something and was greeted by the face of none other than Marshall Applewhite himself:

The video is from a popular anti-Mormon channel which normally focuses on that religion but occasionally does episodes on other soi-disant "high-demand religions" (one of their favorite buzzwords) so that they can imply that Mormonism is basically the same thing. Today, of all days, they decided to do Applewhite, of all people.

The Aztec lizardman appears to have a facial horn, like Gregole (Gregor as pronounced by the Japanese) from the anime Guyver, https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Gregole

I know absolutely nothing about Warhammer, so this was all new to me. What first caught my eye was Bretonnia -- "The fr*nch but they're humans" -- because the name is obviously based on Brittany (home of the Bretons), and William Wright just posted "Nyarna and Brittany Spears" and "The Brittany Spears: A quick follow-up." These posts are not about the singer but about spears from the French region of Brittany. In Warhammer, apparently, Bretonnia is known as the Land of Chivalry. Image searches turn up lots of knights, many of them armed with spears:

Carrion are terrifying Undead birds of prey that resemble reanimated Giant Vultures which feast upon the carcasses of those that have fallen within the lands of ancient Nehekhara, now the Land of the Dead.

That's really the only Frog and Toad story I have any clear memory of. To me, Frog and Toad are synonymous with "Hey birds, here are cookies!"

In a comment, William Wright connects my break-dancing frogs with Gregor the Stymph (skeletal bird-monster) and Odessa "Sally" Grigorievna the vulture. Both are humans who have been transformed into animals. Gregor is a prince who doesn't want to be called a prince, and Odessa Grigorievna resists being called Sally, which means "princess." The usual animal for princes to be transformed into is of course the frog. (My 2021 post "The Emperor's orb" begins with birds of prey and ends with the Frog Prince.) I think the stereotypically "Russian" garb of my break-dancing frogs (black and white Adidas tracksuits) also suggests a connection with this vulture who is actually a Russian woman.

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great (Rev. 19:17-18).

He shouted in a loud voice, "HEY BIRDS, HERE ARE COOKIES!"

Birds came from everywhere.

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head: And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days: Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee (Gen. 40:17-19).

Osiris, Seth's victim, is sometimes called tštš. Allen translates this: "the dismembered one". . . . We shall see below that Egyptian representations show there was a close relationship between the Seth-animal and the griffin. The name of a griffin with an animal body, wings and a falcon's head, is tštš. Leibovitch has translated this name as: "celui qui déchire, qui met en pièces" [the one that tears in pieces] (p. 5).

Fate in the shape of the Seth-animal at Beni Hasan, however, does not seem to represent the good fortune, but the bad fortune of the hunter, accompanying his guardian angel, the falcon-headed griffin. The animal with the snake's head might stand for a synthesis of both aspects. Psais or Agathos Daimoon was afterwards represented in the form of a snake (pp. 23-24).

The original, as published in Histoire d'une âme:

Aux premiers feux du matin,
Formant son riche butin,
On voit la petite abeille
Voltiger de fleur en fleur,
Visitant avec bonheur
Les corolles qu'elle éveille.

Ainsi, butinez l'amour:
Et revenez chaque jour,
Près de la crèche sacrée,
Offrir au divin Sauveur
Le miel de votre ferveur,
Petite abeille dorée!

My English version:

See the little insect which is
Gathering its daily riches
In the morning hour.
Joyful, it the petals waketh,
Enters and the honey taketh,
Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,
Taking love in place of nectar,
All that thou canst hold.
Gather thou of all that pleases,
Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,
Little bee of gold!

William Wright's May 22 post "What is even more amazing than a talking dog?" included a picture of a worksheet where you have to do sums to solve an anagram, the answer being "a spelling bee."

The red and green boxes are my own addition. I first noticed that the second column of letters -- ABIL -- suggested the French word for "bee," abeille. Then I noticed that the missing letters are right there to the right, and that if you take all the letters in the green box, you can spell abeilles, "bees."

What about the remaining letters, in the red box? The only phonotactically plausible way of stringing them together is peng. My first thought was that this might be an abbreviation for pengolodh, "lore master," an Elvish word which has come up on William's blog before. Then I realized that it was awfully close to the Mandarin for "bee" (or "bees," as Chinese nouns are not marked for number) which is transliterated feng. Linguistically, it's usually a fairly safe bet that any word with /f/ evolved from an older form with /p/, and such proves to be the case here as well. The Old Chinese for "bee" began with a /p/ sound, and this is still preserved in some non-Mandarin dialects. Unfortunately, the vowel has changed, too, so no modern or historical dialect of Chinese actually has peng for "bee." Still, it certainly suggests that Chinese word in its various forms.

In writing this post, I also noticed for the first time that William's son actually misspelled spelling on the worksheet as speiling. According to Google Translate, that's the Norwegian word for "mirroring." Not sure if that means anything. My first thought in connection with a "mirrored bee" was Thérèse de Lisieux, whose autobiography I recently bought and whose name contains a mirrored deseret.

Tigers are part of this, too . . . . My hippie uncle, also called William Tychonievich, used to rock and roll under the stage name Billy Tyger, a handle intended to reference both his (our) own name and William Blake. One of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell is "The crow wished everything was black; the owl that everything was white."

As I was walking, for some reason one of William Blake's Proverbs of Hell popped into my mind: "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." Seconds after thinking of that out of the blue, I rounded a bend in the trail and passed a couple walking with their young son. The boy was wearing a T-shirt with a cute cartoon picture of a tiger, helpfully captioned, in English, "TIGER CUTE."

I was listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, and when it got to the part where Nephi says they "did live upon raw meat in the wilderness" (1 Ne. 17:2), I wondered how the word meat was to be understood. Certainly by Joseph's time it had already acquired its modern meaning of "animal flesh," but the language of the Book of Mormon is patterned after that of the King James Version of the Bible, which even in its time was very linguistically conservative. For example, even though the KJV was written in Shakespeare's day, and Shakespeare commonly uses singular ye/you after the French fashion, as a more formal or respectful alternative to thou/thee, the KJV follows the older Anglo-Saxon convention, in which ye/you is always plural and thou/thee is always used for the singular. (This is an extremely helpful feature of the KJV text, making it much less ambiguous than modern thou-phobic translations.) Joseph Smith mostly imitates the KJV, but imperfectly so, and there are many unambiguous instances of singular you in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes the two groups of second-person pronouns almost seem to be in free variation -- for example, "And now Zoram, I speak unto you: Behold, thou art the servant of Laban." (2 Ne. 1:30). Would even Shakespeare have countenanced singular you when addressing a servant?

In another case of its linguistic conservatism, the KJV always uses meat to mean "food" and never in the narrower sense of "animal flesh." How aware was Joseph Smith of that usage, and how closely did he follow it in the Book of Mormon? Need we imagine the Lehites chowing down on steak tartare, or did Nephi perhaps mean salad?

I'll post my conclusion on that question later, on my Book of Mormon blog. Here I just want to note a striking synchronicity occasioned by my preliminary research into it.

While the audio recording was still playing, I used my computer to search the Book of Mormon text for meat, then for food, and finally for flesh, trying to get a sense for how the text uses those words. Since the search function on the website formerly known as lds.org is unusably bad -- I believe "an abomination in the sight of the Lord" is the technical term -- I was doing Ctrl-F searches on a text file from Gutenberg. That means that rather than seeing a whole list of search results on the screen at once, I had to click through them one at a time.

When I clicked for the second search result for flesh, it was 1 Ne. 17:35:

Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God. But behold, this people had rejected every word of God, and they were ripe in iniquity; and the fulness of the wrath of God was upon them; and the Lord did curse the land against them, and bless it unto our fathers; yea, he did curse it against them unto their destruction, and he did bless it unto our fathers unto their obtaining power over it.

The exact instant I clicked, and the screen jumped to this verse with the word flesh highlighted in orange, the audio recording also said the word flesh -- and then I realized that it was reading this very verse! My curiosity had been piqued, you will recall, by 1 Ne. 17:2, and now the audio had gotten to verse 35. I had been listening with half my attention and skimming search results with the other, and now suddenly the two came together, and what I was reading on the screen was exactly the same as what the recording was saying.

This is similar in kind, though not in content, to the sync recently documented in "A loaf of bread is dear."

The territory of the Issedonian Scythians where Aristeas learned about the griffin in about 675 B.C. is a wedge bounded by the Tien Shan and Altai ranges, in an area that straddles present-day northwestern Mongolia, northwestern China, southern Siberia, and southeastern Kazakhstan.

The original wild ancestor of Malus domestica was Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and northwestern China. Cultivation of the species, most likely beginning on the forested flanks of the Tian Shan mountains . . . .

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . . thou wast upon the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28:13-14).

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice or this treasure digging? The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys don’t believe that that’s an actual believable practice of how to find things within the earth, to put rocks into hats and say, Yep, God’s making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time. You know that that’s not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on earth, through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in.

A rabbit cannot spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not first introduced into the hat somehow. They could not grasp the ancient truth that even though the hat always seems empty, it is always full. The rabbit does not come from the sorcerer’s sleeve but only crosses from one delusion to another.

Dr. [Maurice] Bucke peered deep into the empty hat and found only a rose-colored mist that had to be God.

Today I finished the New Testament and started reading the Quran, which I've only read once, more than 15 years ago. Other than the Quran itself, I don't think I've ever read any books about Muhammad or Islam, unless you count The Satanic Verses. Islam-related stuff isn't exactly a staple of my literary diet.

Yesterday I'd nearly finished John Keel's The Eighth Tower, having read 23 of its 25 chapters. Today, just minutes after reading the first few suwar of the Quran, I started Chapter 24. It begins with a history of computers, but about halfway through it suddenly has a lot to say about Mecca and the Kaaba and Mohammed (it was still Mohammed back in 1975) and the rise of Islam. The last words of the chapter are "we will defend our Kaaba to the death."

There is not a single solitary reference to anything Islam-related in the first 23 chapters of The Eighth Tower. The day I pick up the Quran for the second time in my life also happens to be the day I read Chapter 24.

Sam's whole journey begins after Sarah disappears by trying to find her following three girls literally driving around in a white Rabbit -- you know, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette that drive a white convertible Rabbit, so he's following three women in a white Rabbit. He's following a white Rabbit.