From the Narrow Desert

My last post ended with Samson tying firebrands to the tails of foxes, which made me think of the browser Firefox. And this made me think of the other meaning of the word fire.

And that's when I realized that tights are a kind of socks.

I had previously connected Fox in Socks with Joe Biden (see my posts Slow Joe Crow and Lots of new blue goo now), so you can well imagine that it came as something of a shock to suddenly realize that not only is Biden's middle name Robinette, but his two sons are called Beau and Hunter.

Well, shoot! What are the chances of a bull's-eye like that?

All three Biden men are alumni of Archmere Academy. The school's colors are deep ("lincoln"?) green and white, and the school newspaper is called The Green Arch.

Archmere is a Catholic school, and the Bidens are nominally Catholic -- "Mary men," you might say.

Biden's 2020 campaign logo was notable for omitting the letter E, replacing it with speed lines suggesting that the D had zoomed in from somewhere else.

And perhaps Biden thinks of himself as a Robin Hood figure: He knows he's stealing, but he also thinks he's a hero for doing so. I'm referring to the election, of course, but the "Robin Hood" project of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is also something one associates with the Left.

I have connected Fox in Socks with the Red Sun and with Betelgeuse -- which, it occurred to me, is connected with archery because it is in the constellation Orion the Hunter. It turns out, though, that Orion isn't actually an archer; the part of the constellation that looks like a bow is "officially" either a shield or a lion.

Or both!

However, running a Google image search for betelgeuse archer did turn this up -- from, of all places, the white nationalist site Stormfront.

It's a comment on a thread called "Giant star Betelgeuse (or 'Beetlejuice') is dimming & changing shape." (I have no idea why this astronomical topic was being discussed on a political "hate" site; there is nothing about politics or race or anything in the entire thread.) The comment, posted on February 19 of this year, reads: "If Betelgeuse explodes tomorrow it only means it actually exploded on a day 650 years ago, during the age when England still fought with bows and arrows" -- with, in case the meaning were not clear, a very large picture of some Englishmen doing just that.

It seems a strange thing to zero in on. The point is simply that Betelgeuse is very far away (642.5 light years) and that anything we observe happening to Betelgeuse actually happened hundreds of years ago. Any historical figure or event or outdated technology would have served to make the point, but the poster chose to focus on archery, and specifically archery in England. The 14th century is, of course, around the time the Robin Hood legend began to become popular.

Bringing this all back to the Sun card, note that Robin Hood is classically depicted -- in the Disney film and Men in Tights, for example -- with a large, often red, feather in his cap. The rider on the white horse on the Rider-Waite card wears the same ornament.

Rider, wait!

I have connected this rider with the first horseman of the Apocalypse: "And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer" (Revelation 6:2).

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Note added: I'm not sure how I could possibly have missed this before! I've just connected the rider on the white horse with Robin Hood, in part because of the red feather he wears. In my post Red crows of the Sun, I connected that feather with what it says on the tin: legendary red crows associated with the Sun in Chinese folklore. How could it have escaped my notice that there is a Robin Hood movie in which Hood rides a white horse and is played by an actor whose name literally means Red Crow?

Russell means "red." Crowe means "crow." This isn't just a bull's-eye; this is splitting an arrow on the bull's-eye!

(Incidentally, it's really possible to do that. The famed "Robin Hood shot" has been duplicated three times by a kid from South Dakota with the ridiculously appropriate name Mike Merriman.)

And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, . . .

-- Luke 13:32

Who reads Fox in Socks as prophecy? Nobody, that's who! -- said the man of many wiles to the Cyclops.

This will be an even more disjointed post than usual.

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Anyone who reads The Magician's Table will know I've been on a Sun kick these days. I got started on it by reading a post by Richard Arrowsmith that mentioned a connection between the Sun card (the 19th trump) and the birdemic (also numbered 19). As I followed the links the synchronicity fairies gave me, I found that I was increasingly focusing on the idea of two contrasting suns -- epitomized by Superman's Red Sun of Krypton and Yellow Sun of Earth.

Today I realized (not until today!) that this is eerily similar to the path that Arrowsmith's own synchromysticism led him down way back in 2009 -- but his "other sun" was identified with Sirius, and Sirius is a blue star.

Arrowsmith's discovery, not mine; each quotation mark is a tiny i.

My other sun, in contrast, is red. Well, if Sirius is the most famous blue star, what's the most famous red one? Of course: Betelgeuse -- a star to which the sync fairies have already tried to draw my attention.

What does Betelgeuse have to do with Fox in Socks? Well, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…

... couldn't we say that this liquid full of beetles is now a bottle of beetle juice?

Incidentally, notice that there are four of these beetles and that, given the way they are beating each other with paddles, they might well be called beatles. As Fox in Socks was published in 1965, just a year after the most famous episode of the Ed Sullivan show, this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

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The 6-by-6 magic square, traditionally associated with the Sun, adds up to 666. Rudolf Steiner created the name Sorath -- his "demon of the sun" -- so as to add up to 666 in Hebrew gematria. In the Hebrew system, the first nine letters correspond to the numbers 1-9, the next nine to the numbers 10-90, and the remaining four (for Hebrew lacks the 27 letters needed for a complete system) to the numbers 100-400. Thus, the 6th letter (vav) has a value of 6, and the 15th (samekh) has a value of 60. The 24th letter would be 600, but Hebrew only has 22 letters, so Steiner uses resh (200) and tav (400). He puts those four letters together to make Sorath (samekh-vav-resh-tav).

What if the same system were applied to English? Since the English alphabet is longer than the Hebrew, only three letters are necessary to make 666 -- and those three letters are FOX.

Fox is the English equivalent of Sorath, each being the shortest possible way of expressing 666 in its respective language.

Sorath, the sun-demon whose number is 666, obviously corresponds not to the Yellow Sun of Earth but to the Red Sun of Krypton. (The atomic number of krypton is 36, linking it to the 6-by-6 square.) We have tentatively connected this Red Sun with the star Betelgeuse.

The Fox in Fox in Socks is red, and the story ends with his being unceremoniously shoved into the beetle juice.

The juxtaposition of the Red Sun with blue beetles would have seemed perfectly natural to King Tut, whose pectoral shows just that combination.

And while Seuss must certainly have known of the Beatles when he wrote Fox in Socks, he could not have known of this particular record, released at a much later date in Mexico.

I don't remember "Pigguies"; do you?

"Here comes the sun!" say the four blue beetles as the red fox is pushed into their bottle.

If Fox is the Red Sun, his nemesis Knox -- who is yellow, and whose name recalls the proverbial "more gold than Fort Knox" -- is the Yellow Sun. This true Sun is Shamash -- for whom Samson was named. Samson, like Knox, caught foxes.

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.

And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.

-- Judges 15:4-5

These fire-spreading foxes reinforce the identification of the fox with the sun. This is further strengthened if we look at the numbers involved: 300 foxes, 150 firebrands. Using the same system that told us FOX = 666, we can see that 300 corresponds to U, and 150 to SN.

(Cross-posted at The Magician's Table, despite its negligible Tarot content, due to its connection to themes discussed there.)

Last night I was out on a night hike with my wife, who is Taiwanese. It was a clear night, and she was asking about some of the stars.

"And that one's called Betelgeuse," I said, pointing to the big red star in Orion.

She looked slightly disgusted. "Seriously?" she said. "Because it's red?"

It took me a second to make the connection, but here in Taiwan, bright red betel juice, spat by those who have the habit of chewing areca nuts wrapped in betel leaves, is a familiar sight!