Showing posts with label 42. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 42. Show all posts

Friday, December 1, 2023

The top of the city

William Wright has posted about Vizzini, a character played by Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride (all Mormons know and love that movie; there are no exceptions), which reminded me of the only other Wallace Shawn movie I’ve seen: Vanya on 42nd Street. I left a comment saying that was a link to the number 42 and the Empire State Building, but I had misremembered. It’s not the Empire State Building that’s on 42nd Street.

It’s the Chrysler Building. You know, the one that’s as big as a preternaturally big slug.

The main character in Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series is David Topman, who is based on the author's own son David. Chrysler is from Kreisel, meaning "top" (the spinning toy), so Topman is basically a translation of Chrysler.

It occurs to me that the 1993 Kate Bush song "Top of the City" -- reportedly inspired by the skyline as seen from her hotel room when she was in New York promoting Hounds of Love in 1985 -- could be an unintentionally specific reference to the Chrysler Building, which is the "top" of the city in two senses.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Blue Boat Home

On yesterday's post, "William Alizio's links to other stories," I left this comment at 9:20 this morning:

The rainbow is another link to 42, since a rainbow has a radius of 42 degrees.

At 10:50, William Wright left this comment (quoted only in part here):

While in the process of playing hymn #172 "In Humility Our Savior", I suddenly realized that the hymnbook was green. Based on your dream, I became curious what the lettering on the spine was like. Sure enough, gold lettering "Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" running down the spine.

[. . .]

Lastly, blue does come into this as well. Hymn #172 is also the tune for a song that was my daughter's favorite for awhile - the song is called "Blue Boat Home" arranged by Peter Mayer (original by Rowland Pritchard back in the 1800s), which likens the Earth to a boat flying through space with all of us as passengers.

I looked up and listened to "Blue Boat Home," which is apparently a Unitarian Universalist hymn. (UUs have a thing for space. I remember them reciting some thing about "the womb of stars" the handful of times I attended their services in Columbus, Ohio.)


It's funny how the same melody can have a completely different feel when the lyrics and instrumentation are changed. "In Humility, Our Savior" is a "sacrament hymn" and thus brings back the smell of white bread and chlorine. Funny how chlorine -- not incense or whatever, but chlorine -- should be a "churchy" smell for me, but sacrament and baptisms were almost the only times I had any exposure to chlorinated water growing up. "Blue Boat Home" evokes no such memories, and I rather like it. Here's the first stanza:

Though below me, I feel no motion standing on these mountains and plains.
Far away from the rolling ocean still my dry land heart can say:
I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known.
The wide universe is the ocean I travel and the earth is my blue boat home.

Googling the lyrics led me to a blog called Blue Boat Home, and one of the recent posts there caught my eye: "One Night in Cleveland," because of its first paragraph:

In 1996, my sister and her boyfriend had just moved into a new apartment in Pittsburgh, and they invited my family to join them for Christmas. I decided to take the bus there from my college in Grinnell, Iowa, which meant I had layovers in Des Moines, Chicago, and Cleveland. As I recall, the Cleveland layover was from roughly 11pm to 2am.

The year 1996 was an important year in my own life, and I was living in the Cleveland area at that time. (Seeing that year made me think "When will be the next 1996?" -- meaning the next year to have the same calendar. Next year, it turns out.) The mention of "college in Grinnell" also jumped out at me, as I did first grade at Grinnell Elementary School when I lived in New Hampshire.

The post is an anecdote. At the bus terminal in Cleveland, the author met a scruffy-looking man who gave him "a drinking glass that had clearly been stolen from a restaurant." Later, in Oakland, the author runs into a similar-looking person on the sidewalk:

It was a different guy but seemed cut from the same cloth. I opened my backpack and took out the drinking glass. I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I met a friend of yours this morning in Cleveland. He'd want you to have this." I gave him the glass and walked off.

That's the end of the story. I'm not sure what relevance it has, but I have a hunch that it will turn out to have some, so I'm documenting it for future reference. (Tim made Strieber drink something from a glass he had taken from the hotel bathroom, but that's a rather tenuous connection.)

Now for the real syncs.

Shortly after 4:00 this afternoon, I went out for early dinner, as I have classes from 6:00 to 9:30 with no breaks. The Alice Merton song "No Roots" was playing in the restaurant:


The chorus is "I've got no roots, but my home was never on the ground," repeated many times. Compare this to "Blue Boat Home": Although I feel as if I'm on solid ground, in fact "I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known."

As soon as that song was over, the next song that came on was "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men:


In this song, the repeated line is "Though the truth may vary, this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore" -- a very strong sync with "Blue Boat Home," since both imply that it is only in death that we reach the shore.

I was not familiar with either of these songs before. I made a note of the lyrics I was hearing and looked them up later.

After I'd finished eating, I sat in the restaurant for a while reading The Philosopher's Pupil, by Iris (literally "Rainbow") Murdoch. I turned to page 172 and thought, "Hey, that's the hymn number William Wright mentioned," the hymn that has the same tune as "Blue Boat Home." This is what I read on that page:

His bath was a large boat-shaped affair made of white tiles with blunt ends. . . . the steaming water fell from the taps at a controlled temperature of forty-two degrees Centigrade.

The very first sentence on the next page, 173, is this:

He had not been there [the Methodist church in his hometown] for a long time and felt a weird shock when he recognised the numbers of the hymns.

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.)

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.


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.")


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.

Ace of Hearts

On the A page of Animalia , an Ace of Hearts is near a picture of a running man whom I interpreted as a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger....