From the Narrow Desert: 333

Showing posts with label 333. Show all posts

Thursday, November 2, 2023

The Swiss temple, the Reality Temple, and Jackie Robinson

My posting about the crossed keys of the papacy was started by William Wright's October 26 post "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" which discusses the music video for "Run Boy Run" by Woodkid (Yoann Lemoine, a gay Jew from France):

The video begins with a shot of the LDS temple in Bern, Switzerland, and then shows a boy running away from the temple as fast as he can. Not until now did I make the connection with Arnold running out of the Demiurge's Reality Temple:

Interestingly, the Swiss Temple was the CJCLDS's first "unreality" temple -- the first to replace most of the ceremony with a literal movie.

I began my October 24 post "William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs" by saying that I was "on the lookout for synchronistic occurrences of the numbers 42, 126 and 333." Looking up "Run Boy Run" on Wikipedia, I find that, while the music video is a few seconds longer, the song itself has a duration of 3:33. The "In Popular Culture" section mentions that "It was used in the trailer for 42," which is a movie about Jackie Robinson. In fact, only the instrumental intro -- the part that coincides with the boy running out of the Mormon temple -- is used:

One of the lines from the trailer is, "Mark my words and circle this day. Negroes are gonna run the white man straight out of baseball." The relevance to the meme, in which a form of the word negro is going to replace every word in the white man's language -- and in which we see a white man literally running straight out -- should be obvious. And of course Jackie is repeatedly called the nigger word in the movie.

Jackie Robinson was an outsider -- a black man -- competing with white American athletes in New York City. The running man in the Reality Temple meme comes from a scene in Hercules in New York in which an outsider -- a Greek demigod played by an Austrian bodybuilder in his acting debut -- competes with white American athletes in New York City. (The Dodgers later relocated to California; so did Arnold.)

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs

Yesterday's post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr" left me on the lookout for synchronistic occurrences of the numbers 42, 126 and 333. I was mostly expecting to see those numbers themselves, maybe on license plates or something, but another idea also popped into my head with a curious clarity: Three triangles could represent 333.

I never saw any of the expected numbers. Nor did I run into three triangles anywhere.

This morning (October 24), I checked for new comments on my blog and found one from Wandering Gondola, timestamped 2:54 this morning, on my October 19 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more." In that post, I had referenced one of William Wright's stranger ideas:

William Wright proposes that the first element in the name Moriancumer refers to Moria -- the Dwarrowdelf of Tolkien, subject of the Song of Durin -- and that there is a hidden reference in the Book of Mormon to the Brother of Jared, like Gandalf, opening the gates of Khazad-dûm by uttering the password friend.

William Wright stopped blogging on September 17, announcing that he was finished. When I visited his blog on October 19 to get the Brother of Jared link, that was still where things stood.

Wandering Gondola's comment of this morning ends with this paragraph:

While writing this I thought to check William Wright's blog, and found he's posting again. (A second small sync: Another Will Wright is famous for simulation games, most notably The Sims, which lets players create and somewhat control virtual people. Not-quite-free men!)

Her use of the variant form Will Wright led me to make a connection I hadn't before: I am currently reading Whitley Strieber's novel Majestic. An air force base called Wright Field, often shortened to Wright, is mentioned many times; and the main character's name is Will Stone. Stones -- supernatural, capitalized Stones -- are a central theme on William Wright's blog.

I went straight to Mr. Wright's blog and read his first post since he resumed blogging: "The Great Pumpkin and 'waiting.'" It was posted on October 20, the day after "Syncfest," and it mentions the same Brother of Jared story I mentioned there:

I look to the story, or rather my updated story, of the Brother of Jared to demonstrate the truth of that sentence I just wrote. He moved a mountain by faith. In an earlier post, I suggest that the mountain that he moved was actually Durin's Door in order to access the mines of Moria, obtain Mithril that could be fashioned into stones, and have Jesus fill those stones with light.

That could be a striking coincidence -- or, more likely, he reads this blog, and my shout-out influenced his decision to start posting again. Be that as it may, it certainly is a striking coincidence that Mr. Wright ends his post by talking about three triangles in a Tom Petty music video:

In the video, there are 3 colored triangles and also loose colored string on the set. At the midpoint of the video (about the 2 minute mark), we find Petty singing in front of a black backdrop. He then proceeds to smash through this backdrop to reveal a member of the band behind it. With that band member is the red triangle, and the red string now seeming to extend out from both him and the triangle. We then see the blue triangle with the same band member now with blue string, and lastly the yellow triangle, but this triangle is inverted and now, to me at least, resembles more something like a jewel or diamond.

And then I suddenly remembered what "three triangles" had meant to me decades ago.

Approximately 20 years ago, when my brother and I were rooming together in college, he asked to borrow my battered copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion. When he was near the end, he brought it to me, showed me one of the pages, and said, "Why on earth did you write 'The Statue Got Me High' in the margin?"

Well.

In 1994 or thereabouts, I discovered They Might Be Giants and Whitley Strieber, in that order. The first time I listened to the TMBG song "The Statue Got Me High" (from the 1992 album Apollo 18), it just absolutely scared the bejesus out of me. As soon as I heard the very brief instrumental intro before the singing starts, I got goosebumps and my mouth went dry, and it jogged loose a free-floating memory, unattached to anything else, of looking up at my bedroom ceiling and seeing three small triangles of bright white light, themselves arranged in a triangular pattern. I still don't know why, or why I had such an extreme emotional reaction to that image. I decided the song was "satanic" but from time to time felt the urge to listen to it again anyway -- which would always leave me terrified and vowing never to play it again.

Communion also scared me to death. I guess I spent quite a lot of time being scared to death in those days. But nothing scared me more than the shock of recognition when I read this passage, from a transcript of an abductee support-group meeting:

Sam: Does anybody ever experience light without any source? You see it on the wall or on the ceiling. It could be in a triangular shape or round. Sometimes I see a triangle. Three triangles together on the ceiling. Has anybody else seen that?

Notice that the comment that led me to William Wright's "three triangles" post was on a post of mine with "ceiling lights" in the title. Part of Mr. Wright's explanation for his decision to start blogging again is "I just find stones are on my mind constantly, even as I go about other things. It is just always there."

Now check out some of the lyrics to "The Statue Got Me High":

The stone it called to me
And now I see the things the stone has shown to me
A rock that spoke a word
An animated mineral it can be heard

. . .

And now it is your turn
Your turn to hear the stone and then your turn to burn
The stone it calls to you
You can't refuse to do the things it tells you to

Fortunately I am no longer capable of being scared to death, but this is still really, really weird.

Note added:

After posting this, I went and read the other new William Wright posts. In the October 22 post "Fiber optic cables, ceramics, and ethernet conversions: A stone metaphor," he relates a dream he had a few months ago:

In the dream, I was back in the house I grew up in (and that my parents still live in). I was talking with my dad about something, and I started to say something like "It just feels like things are close, because I can hear you guys upstairs on your ceramics making a lot of noise". As I was saying this, my dad's face transformed into that of Keanu Reeves as the character of Neo in the Matrix movies, which was a bit strange, and I found that it was difficult to tell whether the words I said were coming from me or the person I was now facing as Neo. As soon as I became aware of this, I woke up.

In the video for "The Statue Got Me High," as the intro is playing -- the part that freaked me out so much when I first heard it and made me remember the three triangles -- the camera zooms in on a giant ceramic cup and saucer:

As they sing, "And now I see the things the stone has shown to me," we see this:

This video was made seven years before The Matrix, but it certainly seems to prefigure it:

After reading Mr. Wright's posts, I found a new comment from Wandering Gondola -- who plays lots of video games so I don't have to -- pointing out that my three triangles in a triangular configuration suggest the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda franchise. It's a bit different (Zelda on the left, a reconstruction of what I saw on the right) but certainly suggestive:

Zelda made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and then I seemed to remember that Fitzgerald had appeared on this blog once before. He had indeed, in the October 2022 post "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," featuring this image:

What's that on F. Scott's head? Look familiar? The image on the Zeus Is a Dick book also suggests a line from "Statue": "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."

In my 2022 post, I connect this juxtaposition of Fitzgerald and dick with Tender Is the Night -- a novel in which the main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, are based on the author and his wife, Zelda.

Oh, by the way, the F stands for Francis.

I've also just noticed that "Statue" contains an indirect Michelangelo reference: "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie" -- alluding to the apocryphal story about Michelangelo saying he created his masterpiece by "just chipping away anything that doesn't look like David."

Monday, October 23, 2023

Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr

Can anyone help me out with this?

Some years ago I read a story set in the future, and one of the characters mentioned more-or-less in passing the legend of the great painter Michael the Archangel, whose paintings had (I think) some sort of magical qualities -- the implication for the reader being that, in this distant future, the memory of Michelangelo Buonarroti had become conflated with religious traditions about the Archangel Michael.

I read very little science fiction, so this should be easy for me to trace to its source, but I'm drawing a blank. If any of my readers happen to remember this story, too, please help jog my memory.

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I thought it might be from Scott Alexander's Kabbalistic sci-fi novel Unsong, so I did a word search for archangel -- not a very smart choice, since one of the main characters is an archangel! One of the search results caught my eye. The Archangel Uriel is conversing with Sohu West. (In the original, archangels speak in all caps. I have spared the reader this annoyance.)

"I run continental drift, and guide the butterfly migration, and keep icebergs in the right place, and prevent people from boiling goats in their mothers' milk. . . . I have never seen anything to convince me that God plays an active part in the universe. His role seems to be entirely ontological."

"You can't be a deist! You're an archangel!"

"I am not a very good archangel."

"What about San Francisco?" [which in the novel has been transformed into heaven on earth]

"God can have a right hand as well as a left hand. I see no evidence that either is controlled by any head. . . . God created Adam Kadmon, the fundamental structure that binds everything together. . . ."

In my October 21 post "17 years ago our eyes were opened," I mentioned "migrating monarch butterflies." San Francisco is a link to the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel," also posted on October 21. God's right hand is mentioned (in connection with San Francisco), and then the creation of Adam Kadmon; in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, God touches Adam with his right hand; in the Babylon Bee article quoted in that post, Pope Francis (who, like San Francisco, is named after St. Francis), glues himself to God's right hand.

What of the idea of a God with no head? Both of the posts just linked deal with a YouTube video by Galahad Eridanus. Yesterday I watched all the other videos on his channel, including this one:

In this video, Eridanus says:

I've said to a few friends of mine that I see [Aleister Crowley's philosophy of] Thelema as a decapitated version of the same philosophy in my work -- that the two systems bear some philosophical resemblance to each other and that there is a certain resonance between them. However, my ideas find their symbolic head in Christ and the spirit of Christianity. This can be seen in the fact that the head of Abraxas represents Christ in my cosmogram. Thelema, by contrast, has no such authority. . . . Because of this choice of words, "decapitated," it gave me pause when I discovered that the Bornless Ritual which Crowley performed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was originally called the Headless Rite, and it begins with these words: "I summon you, Headless One!"

(See, by the way, my October 9 post "Philip, the headless horseman.")

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Now here's a really weird coincidence. On October 21 -- the same date I posted two posts linked above -- I read Chapters 9 to 11 of the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon. I noticed that in Chapter 10, three different things were described as lasting "forty and two years":

And when [Riplakish] had reigned for the space of forty and two years the people did rise up in rebellion against him; and there began to be war again in the land, insomuch that Riplakish was killed, and his descendants were driven out of the land (Ether 10:8).

And it came to pass that Levi did serve in captivity after the death of his father, for the space of forty and two years (Ether 10:15).

And it came to pass that Com drew away the half of the kingdom. And he reigned over the half of the kingdom forty and two years (Ether 10:32).

I later did a search and found that the number 42 occurs nowhere else in the Book of Mormon; all three instances are in the same chapter. I made a note to write a post about that later -- but what would the post say? Just that the number 42 shows up three times in this chapter and nowhere else? What would be the point of posting that?

As I was composing this present post, though, the reference to Aleister Crowley made me think of something: Didn't Crowley write something about the "Tenth Aethyr," and haven't I mentioned that on this blog before? Yes. The Tenth Aethyr is mentioned in passing in the June 2022 post "Choronzon 333." Galahad Eridanus's YouTube username is @Eridanus333.

I looked up "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr" in Liber 418. Here's how it begins:

This Aethyr being accursèd, and the seer forewarned, he taketh these precautions for the scribe.

First let the scribe be seated in the centre of the circle in the desert sand, and let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God --- Tetragrammaton and Shaddai El Chai and Ararita.

And let the Demon be invoked within a triangle, wherein is inscribed the name of Choronzon, and about it let him write ANAPHAXETON --- ANAPHANETON -- PRIMEUMATON, and in the angles MI-CA-EL: and at each angle the Seer shall slay a pigeon, and having done this, let him retire to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing, and sit within his black robe, secretly invoking the Aethyr.

The juxtaposition of angles and Mi-ca-el seemed synchronistically promising. I had been hoping for something about the number 42, though, and in this I was disappointed. So, wondering if Crowley had ever said anything about that number, I Googled aleister crowley "number 42"; the very first results called it the Great Number of the Curse -- which seemed potentially promising, seeing as how the Tenth Aethyr is said to be "accursèd."

I clicked the first link and hit synchronistic pay dirt!

Why a screenshot rather than just a quote? Because check out the header image. That's a picture of the Gnostic god Abraxas, an image which plays no particularly special role in the work of Crowley but is central to Galahad Eridanus's content.

For the sake of later searchability, here is the content of the above screenshot. It is taken from the commentary after the 42nd chapter of The Book of Lies:

This number 42 is the Great Number of the Curse. See Liber 418, Liber 500, and the essay on the Qabalah in the Temple of Solomon the King. This number is said to be all hotch-potch and accursed.

The chapter should be read most carefully in connection with the 10th Aethyr. It is to that dramatic experience that it refers.

There it is: An undeniable link between the number 42 and the 10th Aethyr. The wording even allows it to be read as if "the 10th Aethyr" were a chapter. Incidentally, The Book of Lies is also called Liber 333. In "The Cry of the 10th Aethyr," Choronzon says "My name is three hundred and thirty and three."

Note added:

I finished this post just around lunchtime, and the Crowley-related content put it into my head to have lunch at Café D&D, since their street address is 666. On the way there I passed this restaurant:

Buckskin is a Taiwanese beer brand; its logo is a horseshoe. In writing this post, I had to look up my old post "Choronzon 333," which features a photo of a "Nazi" soldier from the Fire Nation war, with a horseshoe on his skin, with the number 333:

Just after passing the restaurant, I stopped to get a photo of the horseshoe, but it wasn't visible from that side. (I had to make a U-turn to get the photo above.) What was visible from the other side was this:

A rooster's head. Note that in the "Theophany 2022" video above, Eridanus says that "the head of Abraxas represents Christ" in his system, and that Crowley's philosophy is "decapitated" because it lacks Christ. The head of Abraxas is a rooster's head. This is the first comment under the video:

"Interesting note about abraxas: both snakes and roosters are known for having bodies that seem to 'stay alive' for a while after they are beheaded. Ties into bornless ritual etc."

Having taken the photos above, I went on to D&D and had lunch. While I was waiting for my food, I read the last chapter of Ether, which includes this notorious and widely ridiculed verse:

And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died (Ether 15:31).

Shiz, like a snake or a rooster, seemed to stay alive for a while after he was beheaded. The mention of "his hands" in the verse is also relevant in connection with the Unsong quote about God having two hands but no head.

Further note added:

Several hours after posting this, with its references to slaying pigeons and decapitating roosters, I ran across this on a news-and-views site, showing Netanyahu symbolically decapitating a dove:

October 21 -- a date mentioned three times in this post (now four) -- is Netanyahu's birthday.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl

More syncs? More syncs. True player don't get no time to sleep. I see there are some comments on my last post already, but I haven't read them yet. I need to get this typed up first.

In my last post, I identified the constellations Hercules and Draco with St. Michael and the Dragon. I further identified the Dragon with the Metal Worm and Michael with Mr. Owl (as in the palindrome "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm") -- this latter connection being made on the rather flimsy grounds that Michael’s name means "Who is like God?"

Shortly after posting that, I went outside to take out the trash. I noticed a big gecko on a wall I was walking past, and I stopped to watch it for a bit, thinking, "Hey, it’s a dragon!" This is uncharacteristic behavior; geckos are extremely common in this part of the world, and ordinarily I would no more take notice of one than I would of a cockroach. This one felt like a significant "dragon," though, and I sort of expected something synchromystically relevant to happen with it. Nothing did, though, so after a minute or so I went on my way.

Later, I checked my blog for new comments, and then I checked the stats, which I don't do very often. I saw that I had had about 12,000 hits last month and about 10,000 so far this month. I used the calculator app on my phone to work out about how many hits per day that was.

Then I started reading, you guessed it, Mike Clelland's The Messengers. I came to a section with the heading "333 and orchestrated clues." Seeing that numerologically significant number reminded me that I wanted to check the gematria value of a particular word. I brought up the calculator app to do so and found that my last calculation was still on the screen:

So that got my attention. In this section, Clelland tells the story of a woman who kept running into the number 333 and the time 3:33. It seemed significant, but she couldn't figure out what it meant. Then, on what I infer from astrological clues given later in the text was January 24, 2003, she had a close-range sighting of a large triangular UFO with three lights on it, and the 333 syncs abruptly stopped. This woman was an astrologer, and later she was browsing her ephemeris and noticed this:

For the entirety of 2003, the number 3:33 appeared just one and only time for the Sun, the brightest and most important astrological luminary, and this fell on the very day of her triangle sighting.

Of course in the course of a year, the Sun will pass the 3°33′ mark in each of the 12 zodiac signs, but the standard Swiss ephemeris only gives the planets' positions for midnight Greenwich time each day of the year. That's how I inferred that her triangle sighting was on January 24 (Clelland only says "a winter's evening in 2003"); the emphemeris gives the Sun's position for that date as 3Aqu33′56.

The woman was still at a loss regarding the meaning of 333 until her epiphany finally came in the strangest way imaginable:

Kaye looked at a fish aquarium in the office. She was shocked to see that the little catfish Draco had been chewing on his favorite treat, an English cucumber. She said, "It was almost like a magnet drew my eyes to the cucumber!"

The fish had eaten out the middle of the cucumber slice, so there was now a perfectly formed hole in the precise shape of an equilateral triangle. Seeing this, she realized instantly how all the clues were related and couldn't believe that she had missed something so obvious.

Sounds like one of those koan stories, doesn't it? "At that moment, Kaye became enlightened."

This first caught my attention because of the name Draco (italicized in the original), since I had just posted about the constellation Draco. Then I noticed a really weird coincidence: Kaye saw that a catfish had eaten a triangle out of a cucumber. It just so happens that I have in my house a cat called Triangle and another cat called Cucumber.

And finally we come to the Michael part. Clelland comments:

While there is no owl in this account, it does show up indirectly. The catfish shares its name with Draco the Dragon, a constellation that wraps itself around Polaris, the North Star. In Greek legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and thrown into the heavens where we still see it each night. Minerva, as we know, has a companion little owl.

That's actually just one of many myths relating to Draco (others identify it with Ladon, the dragon that guarded the Golden Apples and was killed by Hercules). But Clelland identifies the (female) conqueror of Draco with the owl. That makes Michael, the male conqueror of the the Dragon, Mr. Owl.

Hercules killed the dragon in order to secure the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. This combination of garden, serpent, and forbidden apples naturally leads one to identify Hercules with Adam. The Locust Grove crop circle was in Adams County, Ohio; and Mormonism holds that Adam is the same person as the Archangel Michael.

What time did I read this story in Clelland's book? Well, my calculator screenshot was at 2:06, and I took a screenshot of the bit about Draco and Minerva at 2:29. That means that at 2:27 -- exactly 3 hours and 33 minutes after posting about Draco in my last post -- I was reading this Clelland story about Draco and the significance of 3:33.

I was going to post all this last night, but it was already very late, so I decided to go to bed and leave it for the morning. I had only been in bed for a few minutes when my wife (who is even more of a night owl than myself) called me to come downstairs. There was a baby gecko in the living room, and she wanted me to catch it and take it outside before the cats killed it.

How's that for a nice synchronistic punctuation mark?