From the Narrow Desert: Bees

Showing posts with label Bees. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

From MacGyver to Grigori

Yesterday or the day before, while I was out on the road, I suddenly thought for no apparent reason of the TV character MacGyver. I never watched MacGyver growing up (we watched very, very little television) but had a general idea of who he was. My wife was a big fan of the show, though, and shortly after we got married -- so around 14 years ago -- we rented and watched all seven seasons together. At that time, I had looked up the lead actor on Wikipedia, but yesterday I found that I couldn't remember his name, only that his first name might have been Richard. I also remembered that Wikipedia had said that before he played MacGyver he had been in a soap called General Hospital, which I had never even heard of. That one biographical detail, and nothing else, had stuck in my mind all these years. For a few minutes, I was repeating "MacGyver, Richard, General Hospital" in my mind, hoping the rest of the actor's name would come to me, but it never did.

Later that day, I saw on the news that an actor known for being in General Hospital -- all the headlines mentioned the show -- had been shot dead in an attempted robbery. Had I not looked up the star of MacGyver all those years ago, I would not so much have suspected the existence of a TV show called General Hospital.

This morning I checked blog comments and found a new one on my latest post, "Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears." Jason had this to say:

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

Guyver is an alternate spelling of Gyver, as in MacGyver. I hesitated to click the link, though, because most anime triggers a mild (and sometimes not so mild) disgust reaction in me.White guys who like anime are called weebs, and I remembered once saying in an email that "whatever the opposite of a weeb is, I'm that." Today, I thought, "Well, what is the opposite of a weeb? Weeb spelled backwards? Beew?"

That reminded me of my recent post "There's more than one way to spell a bee," in which the idea of a "mirrored bee" came up. Weeb is almost a mirrored bee, except that there's an extra w thrown in.

Eventually, I got around to looking up those two General Hospital actors. The guy who played MacGyver was Richard Dean Anderson. The one who was recently shot was called Johnny Wactor. That's right, he was an actor whose surname was just actor with an extra w thrown in.

Wactor comes from the German Wächter -- which means "watcher" and is the German name used for the Grigori, the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. In other words, it's a German translation of the name Gregory/Gregor/Grigori.

Saturday, May 25, 2024

Saint Thérèse's bee poem

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!

There's more than one way to spell a bee

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.

Thursday, May 9, 2024

The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

I was close enough to the dreaming state to experience auditory hallucinations like that but still sufficiently awake for a conscious and somewhat coherent train of thought. I thought about how a commenter on the Prika-vlein post had suggested that a word like pika just naturally sounds like it should mean something small, citing the metric prefix pico- (one-trillionth). Yes, I thought, but nano- doesn't sound phonaesthetically small. I remembered that as a child, before I knew the scientific meaning of nano-, I had invented an imaginary creature called a nanosnake. This was a dinosaur-scale beast with the general body shape of a very long-necked plesiosaur, but with no flippers or other limbs. It had a beak like a parrot and a pair of small wings on the back of its head, which it used to keep its head held high for long periods without its neck tiring.

At this point I lapsed into a full dreaming state, and my reminiscences about the nanosnake gave way to the sudden panicked thought that perhaps I had accidentally swallowed a nanosnake -- meaning, this time, a microscopically small snake. This felt like an extremely urgent problem, and I was panicking, unable to think clearly. An immaterial woman was nearby, trying to help me by shouting advice. "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" she kept saying, the way you might say, "Stop, drop, and roll" to someone who was on fire.

She was telling me to do a mudra -- one of a number of named hand gestures that carry symbolic meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism -- but that just made me panic even more. There are lots of different mudras, and my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to what little I can still remember from that Central Asian Art class I took back in college to meet a diversity requirement. I had no idea which one I was supposed to do. I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem. I still had no idea if it was what I was supposed to be doing, though.

Apparently not, as the ghostly woman kept right on shouting, "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" Finally, as if in exasperation at my thick-headedness, she spelled it out: "Menelmacar mudra!"

As soon as she had said that, I woke up.

Menelmacar, I know thanks to recent posts by William Wright, is one of the Elvish names for the constellation Orion. (The only Elvish name for Orion I had known previously was Telumehtar.) A few days ago he posted "Orion and his most excellent pose," about the position of Orion's arms -- a mudra in a broad sense -- and how the same gesture appears in a Lionel Richie music video and in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

So this is the Menelmacar mudra, I guess. Remember it in case you ever accidentally swallow a nanosnake.

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One of the reasons my half-awake mind had jumped from pico- to nano- was that shortly before going to bed, I had listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat," which is from the album Nanobots.

The song is full of off-the-wall metaphors for inversions of the usual order of things: "The words assassinated the book / The kitchen cooked and ate the cook," etc. This reminded me of William Wright's first post to feature the Menelmacar mudra, "Dancing on the ceiling," in which he quotes a Book of Mormon variant of Isaiah:

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

I had just been reading in John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse about the Fatima apparitions of 1917:

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

The children understood their mysterious visitor, who finally identified herself somewhat cagily as "the Lady of the Rosary," to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. In Maria Carreira's perception, though, the Queen was overruled by the bees. This association of bees with the Queen of Heaven made me think of the Sugarcubes song "The Bee":

The key lines are these:

Oh, hot bee
Queen of heaven
With glossy trunk
Buzz to me

I don't know what "glossy trunk" was intended to mean -- I guess a bee's thorax is its "trunk," or torso? -- but it sounds more like a description of a tree than of a bee. Specifically, it would be a reference to the texture or appearance of a tree's bark, so that's another tie-in with "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat."

The odd phrase "Oh, hot bee" is another link to the bee-buzzing Lady of Fatima. In the grand culminating apparition on October 13, 1917, Keel reports that "A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly."

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I had started reading this Fatima stuff last night, after reading William's post "Twos-day: San Ramon, another Walt, and flying into the Sun." In that post, he mentions seeing the date 02/22 and realizing that the number 22 (which had been appearing in syncs) could be a date, and that his own birthday was such as date: July 22. I left a comment saying that in the past I had thought of Monday the 22nd as a day of good omen, the reverse of Friday the 13th, and that my first spiritual experience had taken place on Monday, July 22, 1996.

It was just after reading that post and leaving the comment that I picked up Operation Trojan Horse and read this, in the lead-up to the account of the Fatima events:

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

There is no apparent reason for giving this girl's exact date of birth. In a book that mentions hundreds of different individuals, a word search for the word born confirms that no other person's exact date of birth is given. For some reason, Keel made a point of mentioning that Lucia Abobora, later of Fatima fame, was born on the 22nd.

This morning, reading on in Keel, I found a much more specific sync. Recall that in my comment on William's blog I had mentioned one particular date: Monday, July 22, 1996, and gave it as the date of a spiritual experience. The year 1996 was a leap year beginning on a Monday; these occur every 28 years. The last one before 1996 was 1968. The next one after 1996 is the present year, 2024. Today I read this in Keel:

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

That's Monday, July 22, in year with a calendar identical to that of 1996 (and 2024). And seeing the Blessed Virgin obviously qualifies as a spiritual experience.

Friday, February 9, 2024

Follow-up on antlers, crosses, and the Liahona

In general, I have my Romantic Christian posts, which are read, commented on, and linked by my fellow Romantic Christian bloggers (e.g. Bruce Charlton, Francis Berger, and William Wildblood); and I have my synchronicity posts, which have dominated the blog in recent months, and which get engagement mostly from a different set of readers (e.g. Debbie, William Wright, and WanderingGondola). There's not normally a huge amount of cross-pollination between these two groups.

My most recent sync-post, though, "A cross between two antlers, and the Liahona spindles," not only includes Frank's blog in the syncs but led to a response post there, "Going Where We Need to Go Versus Going Absolutely Nowhere." Frank discusses the Liahona and legends relating to the white stag and the stag with a crucifix between its antlers. Then, before quoting Bruce Charlton, he mentions in passing that Bruce "has also been connected to the antler/crucifix/St. Eustace in a meme, of all things." I followed the link to Frank's 2021 post about that meme. Notice his choice of words in describing the meme's effect (underlined in red by me):

Quite synchronistically interesting in light of the image I posted which caused him to revisit that old meme:

As I noted in my last post, this image was presumably intended as a reference to a kind of cocktail called a Jägerbomb, but the sync fairies can commandeer anything for their own purposes.

In the context of the Liahona, a sacred artifact described in the Book of Mormon, it is perhaps relevant that that book is often abbreviated as BoM. Back when I was a Mormon missionary, some of my associates would even thus abbreviate it in speech, pronouncing it bomb.

In Taiwan, the game of Hangman -- where you guess letters in a target word or phrase, and with each wrong guess a body part is added to the hanged stick figure -- is commonly played in a different form, called Bomb, where there is a cartoon bomb with a segmented fuse, and one segment of the fuse is erased for each wrong guess. So there's another link between the cartoon bomb and the hanged/crucified man.

In its classic Marseille form, the Hanged Man of the Tarot is hanged between two branches with many protruding stumps, suggesting the antlers of a stag:

Later in my antlers post, I posted a photo of a cross on a pair of automatic sliding glass doors, so positioned that when the doors opened the cross would be split in half. In a comment, William Wright wrote:

I had just posted on "X marks the spot" while thinking (though not stating) that the X in question may not necessarily lead to the actual 'place', but a door or entrance to that place.

The cross on the doors was oriented as a +, not an X, but today I happened to see this on the gates of a construction site near my home:

This is the same concept -- a cross centered on the place where two doors meet, such that opening the doors will split it in half -- but this time the cross is in diagonal X orientation.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my antlers post seemed to draw together two different circles of readers of this blog. I thought of this in terms of the two crosses coming together, as discussed in "What's the second key?"

The wallpaper in the hallway just outside my personal chapel shows a bamboo forest with the sun shining through it. Today I noticed for the first time that the rays of the sun make it look like an eight-pointed star, suggesting the union of two crosses, so I took a photo. Earlier, I had passed a parked car with BEE on the license plate and taken a photo of that. Later, when I opened the photo app on my phone, the two thumbnails were so positioned as to make it look like a single photo, with the BEE car driving toward the eight-rayed sun:

Compare that to this image, which I posted in "What's the second key?"

In the Book of Mormon, the Liahona was used to guide a ship across the sea to the Promised Land. In the Ward Radio video I embedded in my last post, someone says that Hugh Nibley proposed that the word Liahona comes from a Hebrew or Egyptian word meaning "queen bee."

I normally take Hugh Nibley's linguistic speculations with a shaker or two of salt, but interestingly Frank recently linked to "By the waters of Mormon: an open letter to Christian Esoterists," a (highly recommended) essay by a non-Mormon writer from Portugal who calls Nibley "one of the most important intellectuals not only of Mormonism but of the 20th Century."

Monday, January 22, 2024

White Feathers, Strange Sights

In the late afternoon, the waxing gibbous Moon, high in the bright blue sky, kept catching my eye -- or drawing my eye, rather; I kept craning my neck up to look at it. It seemed somehow smaller than usual -- I would have estimated it at 25 arcminutes if I didn't know better -- and very, very white, without the slightest hint of yellow. Something about it made me think of a small white feather, pennaceous along the edge, plumulaceous along the ragged-looking terminator. Once while I was looking at it, a bone-white egret -- a black-legged E. garzetta, as free as the moon of any hint of yellow -- flew across my field of vision, reinforcing the white-feather imagery.

Then, as I crested a hill, the Sun came into view -- low on the horizon, deep red-orange in color, and absolutely enormous, subjectively appearing to be close to three degrees in diameter. The contrast with the Moon -- appearing under normal conditions to be the same size and color as the Sun -- couldn't have been greater.

Ordinarily, a red setting Sun will redden the whole sky around it, but in this case, perhaps due to the complete lack of clouds, this huge engorged Sun somehow coexisted with a regular blue sky. This strange combination made me think of a picture I painted in New Hampshire in 1983, when I was four years old, which I still have for some reason. I think at first it survived many years more or less by chance, and after that it was just too old to consider throwing away. When I got home, I dug it out of my files and photographed it:

(I like to think Vincent van Gogh might have painted something like this when he was four years old, and called it Wheatfield with Brontosauruses. Unfortunately, Vincent was already in his twenties when sauropods began to emerge in popular consciousness.)

I photographed the painting with my phone and uploaded it so that I could download it from my laptop for this post. When I went to get it from the cloud, I ran across this meme I had saved on January 9, which also features a dinosaur silhouetted against the setting Sun:

Come to think of it, my dinosaur painting also bears a certain resemblance to this image I posted two months ago, in "Yellow Light and the Mushroom Planet":

The dinosaurs are walking to the right, as in my painting. This despite the fact that people -- myself very much included! -- almost always find it much easier and more natural to draw animals facing left rather than right.

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Since I haven't posted anything for a while, I'll go ahead and tack a random dream onto this. It's from a few nights ago, but I wasn't online at the time.

In the dream, it was common knowledge that in a normal forest, the canopy is more or less one continuous beehive. There are leaves and things on the lower levels, but once you get up high enough, the branches are all coated with black honey-dripping material created by bees.

I was working in a library where we were trying to create the same effect. We wanted all the bookcases to have books and books and books and then when you get high enough just this tarry black material full of bees and honey. The trick was to find a way of attracting bees to set up shop on the tops of the bookcases, and I had discovered that the best way to do this was to get big brown waxed-paper bags of frozen shoestring potatoes -- the kind they use to make French fries at fast-food places -- and put a few bags on top of each bookcase. Bees would come to eat the potatoes and then stay and build the sticky black hives we were after. This was very successful, and it made our library look very old and respectable and forest-like.

One of the very special features of this library was that we had a whole bookcase devoted to books written by members of the Moody Blues, with one shelf for each member. We had to pad out Mike Pinder's shelf with a few volumes of Pindar, the Theban poet, and there were a few other random books thrown in, including Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence by Jacques Cousteau, but conceptually it was all Moody Blues. We were very proud of it. For some reason, we put all the books on the shelves while the bookcase was lying down on the floor, and then we had to carefully lift it up into position without any of the books falling out. We successfully did this and kept commenting on how great it was that we had managed to get it "perfectly vertical." We had also managed to get the sticky black beehive at the top perfectly flush with the ceiling without damaging either hive or ceiling. All in all, it was extremely satisfactory and was something no other library could offer its patrons.

Friday, December 15, 2023

Go out, believe out. Go in, believe in.

This was spoken to me in a dream last night. The meaning is that when we enter or leave a particular environment, we change not only our outer behavior but also our beliefs. In an environment where a certain thing is believed, you will find yourself believing it, too, to a non-trivial extent. This happens automatically, and the best way to safeguard against it is to be consciously aware of it.

In the dream, I caught some bees -- plucking them from the air with my fingers like Daniel-san with his chopsticks -- and placed them around the edges of doorways, where they obediently stayed.

"Do those bees live in the doorway?" someone asked. "Is their hive there?"

"No, not yet," I said. "It's just a few bees for now, but I hope they will build hives soon."

"But I don't like bees."

"Well, you'd better get used to them. They're our friends."

I meant that they were our friends because the proximity of stinging insects would make people more alert and nervous as they passed through doorways, raising their consciousness and making them less susceptible to the belief-altering effects of entering and leaving places.

Friday, September 15, 2023

When life gives you lemons, make le monde

On September 13, William Wright posted "Deseret Book vs. Deseret's Book" -- deseret being a word from the Book of Mormon, supposed to mean "honeybee," and widely used in Mormon-related branding. At the end of the post he mentions that since I've begun engaging with his blog, the synchronicity fairies seem to have taken an interest in him. (Many such cases!)

Lastly, whatever WJT has must be contagious, because I have Shark Tank running in the background right now and as I am typing that last sentence, I look up at the TV and the first thing I see is an entrepreneur wearing a shirt with "Bee" written across the top as part their logo (Bee as the obvious tie to Deseret). The business is "Bee Sweet Lemonade". So, right as I am typing of Deseret being associated with the commercial arm of the LDS church, there is a Bee-affiliated business trying to raise capital on Shark Tank. I don't know. Seems to tie right into this juice/ nectar thing, also.

Mr. Wright's earlier (August 30) post on Deseret was "In our lovely Deseret: Adding meaning to this name, and Brigham's use of it." This is a reference to a reference to the old Mormon song which begins "In our lovely Deseret / Where the Saints of God have met" -- Deseret being the original name the Mormons chose for what later became the State of Utah. When I heard this song as a young child, not knowing the historical meaning of Deseret, I came up with my own interpretation. I knew that hymns sometimes prolonged Israel to a trisyllabic Iz-rye-ell to fit the meter, so I figured this was a similar poetic trisyllabification of the word desert. (From the narrow desert to the expanded deseret, so to speak.) The Saints had in fact met in a lovely desert, so this made perfect sense to me.

Much later, when I was a missionary stationed in Deseret itself, Alex Carmichael and I wrote some new verses of our own. Here's the one I remember:

In our lovely Deseret
Where the Saints of God have met
There is no one who drinks alcohol or tea
No tobacco do they smoke
Yes, a few of them drink Coke
But it doesn't mention that in D&C

Deseret must have subconsciously dredged my childhood misapprehension back up from my memory, because when I read the word lemonade in Mr. Wright's post, I mentally pronounced it as if it were French (like le monade, if monade were a masculine noun) and thought of it as a poetic trisyllabification of le monde, "the world." The beginnings of lyrics even began to appear in my mind: "In our lovely le-mo-nade / Where have met the Saints of God . . . ."

The earlier Deseret post, introducing the idea that Deseret might me a woman's name rather than a common noun meaning "honeybee," quoted this line from The Words of the Faithful:

Grey Izilba would often drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees, sweet and yet full of sting

This striking image occurs quite early in the book and is one of the few things I remember from my abortive attempt to read it. It associates Deseret and honeybees with a naked woman. Le Monde is also the name given to an image of a naked woman:

"Sweet and yet full of sting" -- isn't that an apt description of the world in which we live? The combination of sweetness and sting makes the honeybee a symbolic cousin to the rose. A rosary is etymologically a garland of roses, and only the subtlest of phonological distinctions differentiates beads -- representing Mysteries both Joyful and Sorrowful -- from sweet-but-stingful bees.

Mr. Wright mentioned that Bee Sweet Lemonade "seems to tie right into this juice/ nectar thing," referring to his September 9 post "Ancient Juice as something that will be brought with the Sawtooth Stone." The sour-but-sweet nature of lemonade does seen to tie in with that "juice" -- which he says has "something to do with bees and honey" but also identifies with the "bitter cup" drunk by Jesus.

This brings up the old Mormon question of whether the fruit of the Tree of Life is bitter, sweet, or both, as discussed in my post November 2022 post "Ave Maria." C'est une symphonie douce-amère, c'est le mon(a)de.

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Honey-tongued Canadian politician swallows a bee live on camera

I don't really have anything to say about this at this point, but it has the feel of an omen, or the first half of a synchronicity, or something like that, so I'm posting it here for future reference.

A bit of minor synchronicity already: I happened to post this just after posting birth and death statistics from the Taiwan government. The bee-swallowing incident made me think of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," and I remembered that I had referenced that rhyme once before on this blog. Looking it up, I found "She swallowed the cat to catch the bird," a post in which I also posted death statistics from the Taiwan government. The post is dated August 14, 2021 -- almost exactly one year ago today.

Sorry about that, sync fairies. I guess I was supposed to post this tomorrow.