From the Narrow Desert

Momo is an extremely typical cutesy Chinese name — I can think of several companies and characters in Taiwan that use it — and the textbook is Taiwanese, so I had assumed the Momo Challenge was a Chinese-language phenomenon. Having looked it up, though, I see that it was global in scale and that reports of the videos began in July 2018.

Today, May 13, I read in John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower about Momo, short for Missouri Monster, a menacing Bigfoot-like creature repeatedly sighted in that state in the 1970s. According to Keel, “Momo was first seen on July 11, 1972, by the three Harrison children.” Of course, the received opinion is that, sightings schmitings, monsters don’t exist.

This is a pretty impressive coincidence, I think. Although the two incidents are completely different in nature, in each case the creature

Trying to think what relevance Momo might have for me personally, I thought of how the syllable mo represents Mormon in various slang terms in common use on the Internet -- exmo, progmo, nevermo, mopologist, etc.

This made me think of how Ed Decker, the notoriously sensationalistic anti-Mormon, used to claim that Mormons worshiped a dark spirit called Mormo. Looking that word up, I found that mormo (plural mormones) refers to female spirit in Greek folklore, used as a bugbear to frighten children into behaving. The longer form mormolyce is also attested, suggesting that mormones were imagined as werewolf-like creatures. Since one of the things the two Momos in the sync have in common is that they frighten children, this seems relevant.

But, pace Ed Decker, none of that has anything to do with Mormons, right? Actually, there may be a connection. Mormons are so called after the Book of Mormon, which is named after the ancient prophet Mormon, who was named after a place. And how did the place get its name?

Doesn't this suggest that the name Mormon had something to do with the "wild beasts" that from time to time infested the place?

On a more personal note, "a bugbear to frighten children" may remind my longtime readers of one of this blog's predecessors, which, before being renamed Boisterous beholding, was called Bugs to fearen babes withall and had as a header image an anatomical diagram of a cicada. This is a line from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, where bug is used in the sense of "bugbear," but I had deliberately misread it in the modern entomological sense. (The cicada is considered a "true bug.") The reference was to certain big-eyed nocturnal visitants who terrorized me as a very young child and whom I thought of sometimes as "monkeys" and sometimes as "bugs."

Cicadas in a Mormon context have recently appeared on this blog. In my March 18 post "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement," I reference the fringe Mormon Goker Harim, who claims to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared from the markings on the back of a cicada. This was jokingly referenced by William Wright just a few days ago in his post "02/22."

My last post, "Eclipse skull and crossbones" called up a vague memory of a meme in which He-Man's arch-enemy Skeletor was standing with the sun directly behind his head, making it look as if he had a halo -- or an eclipse with a skull instead of a moon. I tried and failed to track it down. One of the search prompts I tried, though, skeletor halo, did turn up eclipse imagery:

This giant spider connection made me take notice when -- casting my net a bit wider and just searching for skeletor meme -- I found this:

Skulls and spiders led me to the black-and-yellow garden spiders that are common in much of the United States: I've seen a few in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head. I can't find a great example of this online, but here's something to give you the general idea:

Besides the vaguely skull-like cephalothorax (much better examples exist but apparently not on the Internet), note the posture, typical of this family of spiders, with the legs arranged in an X and the death's-head at the center. (Incidentally, I used a similar garden spider photo to illustrate a post about giant spiders: "Whitley Strieber with between two and four giant spiders.")

The spider pictured above has a fairly uninteresting bumblebee-type pattern, but many garden spiders have much more intricate designs. When I lived in Maryland, I used to make detailed sketches of their markings in a notebook, thinking of them as "hieroglyphics" and imagining that they might mean something, though I never made any attempt to crack the code.

That memory of copying down "hieroglyphics" off the backs of spiders reminded me of something I'd read about several months ago in the Cultural History of the Book of Mormon: a fringe Mormon called Goker Harim who claimed to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared off the back of an insect of some sort -- a beetle? a spider, even? I found the reference in the Cultural History -- it was a cicada -- and tried to track down the source document online for more details, but to no avail. (I'm not going to pay $9.99 to download it, sorry.) Though I failed to find any details of the story of how the cicada was found and "translated," I did finally find a Word document with a picture of the cicada's markings and an accompanying essay:

It's called "The Judgement Tablet" -- with the British spelling of judgement, even though the author is (I think) American. The essay begins thus:

One of the coincidences noted in my last post was the use of the phrase "judgement day" -- British spelling -- by two different Americans in connection with the skull-moon theme. The cicada tablet essay doesn't actually use the phrase "judgement day," but "Final Judgement" is close enough.