From the Narrow Desert: Cucurbits

Showing posts with label Cucurbits. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite

I ended my post "Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears" by expressing the hope that the sync fairies would develop the Aztec lizardmen theme introduced there. They immediately obliged, at least in part, by sending William Wright a dream about "Deer Hunting, Dir Hunting, and the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company." No Aztec angle yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

In the dream, William shot a large number of deer that had come to eat his pumpkins, and he understood that this group of deer was known as the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company.

William's interpretation involved the assumption that the deer were a sort of rebus referring to the Elvish word dîr, which means "man" -- not the race of Men as opposed to Elves, but an adult male of any race. I thought that was kind of an anticlimactic decoding. That animals in a dream might represent people almost goes without saying; using a bilingual pun to convey it scarcely seems worth the trouble.

I immediately thought of a different homophone, though. In my May 17 post "Pumpkins are dear" -- referring directly to William Wright's pumpkins, the same pumpkins the deer wanted to eat in the dream -- I repeated an old joke I had heard in the 1990s about the Egyptian politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, so the joke was that Ghali must mean "pumpkin-eater" -- as in the nursery rhyme "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater." What the name Ghali actually means, though, is "dear." So dear/deer are directly equated with pumpkin-eaters, and in a post that specifically references the pumpkins on William Wright's farm. Total bull's-eye.

In his dream post, William writes, "What was interesting to me is that Lizardmen were explicitly and very clearly in my mind linked to the deer in my dream. What do Lizardmen have to do with deer?" All he comes up with in answer is the dîr thing, which only addresses the men part. The lizard element remains unexplained.

Last night I read this in Adrienne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters:

Nearby, on the north bank of the Alpheios River, Saurus's ("Lizard's") Ridge was named after a giant killed by the mythical Heracles.

I looked up Saurus in Pausanias (apparently the only source for this story), and he is described only as a robber or bandit, with no indication that he was anything other than a man -- a man named Lizard.

Saurus is a Latinized spelling of a Greek name more properly transliterated as Sauros -- or, in the accusative form, Sauron. "Lizardmen" are Sauron's men. This fits with William Wright's interpretation of his dream, in which the deer represent Númenóreans under the influence of Sauron, coming to buy pumpkins. In "The 96, the 48, and the white bull," posted just after "Pumpkins are dear," I note that buy, sell, and trade all have the same S:E:G: value. It's perhaps worth noting that in Chinese, 蜥蜴人 ("lizardmen") is pronounced exactly the same as 西異人 ("strange men from the West").

Remembering that "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater" was one of the nursery rhymes Aleister Crowley subjected to tongue-in-cheek Kabbalistic analysis, I looked up his commentary. I found that it is discussed immediately after "Humpty Dumpty," and that he even mentions Humpty's belt or cravat:

This is so simple as hardly to require explanation. Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter; and it is only too painfully familiar to us that all the king's horses and all his men cannot restore us to the height.
Only The King Himself can do that!
But one can hardly comment upon a theme which has been so fruitfully treated by Ludovicus Carolus [i.e., Lewis Carroll], that most holy illuminated man of God. His masterly treatment of the identity of the three reciprocating paths of Daleth, Teth, and Pe, is one of the most wonderful passages in the Holy Qabalah. His resolution of what we take to be the bond of slavery into very love, the embroidered neckband of honour bestowed upon us by the King himself, is one of the most sublime passages in this class of literature.

In my May 3 post "Hometo Omleto," I quote a speech from Mormon leader Vaughn J. Featherstone where he says that, while the king's horses and men couldn't put Humpty together again, "the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him." How funny is it that this respectable Mormon general authority was unwittingly cribbing from the Great Beast himself?

Another of the rhymes Crowley expounds upon is "Little Bo Peep" -- and here we have at least a tentative Aztec link. As I have discussed in "Tezcatlipoca and John Dee," Dee possessed an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, on the leather case of which is this inscription:

Kelly did all his feats upon
The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;
Where playing with him at Bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep.

The person referred to is Dee's disreputable partner Edward Kelley, of whom Crowley very credibly claimed to be the reincarnation.

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult, used to go by the pseudonyms Bo and Peep. Applewhite is a strange name, but I guess it means the "white" of an apple -- the inner part, under the skin, which becomes visible when you take a bite out of it. This ties right in with my (recently linked) 2020 post "Yes, lizard people are Mayincatec," where I quote this passage from a Whitley Strieber novel:

One [of the reptilian aliens] had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.

There's a person in the form of an apple white, on the T-shirt of a lizardman with an Aztec sword.

Just after writing the above, I went on YouTube to look for something and was greeted by the face of none other than Marshall Applewhite himself:

The video is from a popular anti-Mormon channel which normally focuses on that religion but occasionally does episodes on other soi-disant "high-demand religions" (one of their favorite buzzwords) so that they can imply that Mormonism is basically the same thing. Today, of all days, they decided to do Applewhite, of all people.

Monday, May 20, 2024

"Look at that pumpkin!" the visitors say

In my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I mention an anecdote from Whitley Strieber about an alien going door-to-door selling squash. I also note that I had initially misremembered the story and thought that it was pumpkins the alien was selling, but that in any case the Chinese language does not distinguish between the two: 南瓜 can mean either "squash" or "pumpkin."

Although most people would say Strieber's books are about "aliens," he himself almost never calls them that. In an effort to be neutral and avoid jumping to the conclusion that they are of extraterrestrial origin, he prefers to refer to the Other People as visitors. In the anecdote in question, quoted in my 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land," Strieber describes his friend Michael Talbot talking to a stranger at the door at five in the morning:

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

This quote highlight's Strieber's idiosyncratic use of the word visitor. Obviously Michael was well aware that the stranger standing at the door was a "visitor" in the ordinary sense of that word; what Strieber means is that Michael didn't suspect it was an alien.

Today I saw this in one of my students' textbooks:

The first sentence on the page is, "'Look at that pumpkin!' the visitors say." These are of course visitors in the ordinary sense -- Cheng is locally famous as an excellent gardener, and "people come from all over to see the beautiful plants" -- but the word still jumped out at me due to the synchronistic context. Note also that the story is set in China, and it is in Chinese that "squash" and "pumpkin" are interchangeable. I had mentioned Chinese only because I live in Taiwan and speak that language every day. This book, though, is published in America and distributed worldwide, so the fact that this story happens to be about Chinese people is a coincidence. (Visitors of the Strieberian type are often described as looking "Chinese.")

In the story, the Emperor of China holds a gardening context. Each gardener is given a seed to plant and told that the one who grows the most beautiful plant from it will be the next emperor. In the end, it is revealed that all the seeds were dead and that the contest was actually a test of honesty. Cheng, the only one honest enough to bring the emperor an empty flowerpot, wins and is chosen to be his successor.

In Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon, the "word" -- an idea or belief -- is compared to a seed which is planted in the heart, and if the seed grows, that means "that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me" (Alma 32:28).

When one has invested a lot in a particular seed, there is a temptation to trick oneself into believing it has borne fruit even if it hasn't -- perhaps, like the dishonest gardeners in the story, by introducing other seeds into the pot and pretending that what grows from them has grown from the original seed. Resisting that temptation is a difficult but important form of honesty.

Friday, May 17, 2024

Pumpkins are dear

Recent posts about pumpkins brought back to mind something I heard on the radio back in 1992, when Boutros Boutros-Ghali had just taken office as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The dialogue went something like this:

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali! What a name, eh?”

“It’s actually really interesting. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, from the Greek Petros. There’s no p sound in Arabic, so it became a b.”

“I never knew that! And what does Ghali mean?”

“Pumpkin-eater.”

A bit too culturally insensitive to air on NPR today, I know, but the nineties were a better time.

In yesterday’s post “Come and buy pumpkins,” William Wright mentions that he used to sell pumpkins for two dollars each but that now they’re three thanks to inflation. He links my post “A loaf of bread is dear” and reiterates that dear, which usually means “beloved,” can also mean “expensive.” (The Russian word for “dear” exhibits the same range of meanings, as I point out in my post.) So William’s pumpkins are dearer than they used to be.

Ghali obviously doesn’t really mean “pumpkin-eater,” so what does it mean? It means “expensive, precious, dear, beloved.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian, which explains how he ended up with the Arabic version of the name of a Christian saint. My 2011 “bread is dear” dream included a reference to the Coptic language. Saint Peter is considered by Catholics to have been the first pope. The second pope was Linus, a name we today associate with the Great Pumpkin.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry

Earlier today I posted "'Come buy,' call the goblins," in which I quote six lines from Christina Rossetti's long poem "Goblin Market" -- and of these six, the one I promote to headline status is the one that says, "Come buy." It's a major theme in the poem, which contains no fewer than 21 instances of "Come buy."

For my lower-level English classes for children, I maintain a spreadsheet of every vocabulary item (word/meaning pair) in their textbooks and on which pages each occurs. When I'm preparing to teach a particular page, I can then see at a glance which words on it should already be thoroughly familiar to my students, which they have encountered once or twice before, and which may be totally new to them.

This afternoon, I was preparing to teach this passage:

With a few clicks of the mouse, I sorted my spreadsheet so that every word on this page (and the facing page, not pictured) was listed in descending order of how many times it had appeared previously in the textbooks. What immediately jumped out at me was -- come buy!

Come had previously appeared in their material 37 times; buy, 35 -- and thus the two words came to be put together in that order.

After taking the above screenshot so I could put it in this post, I noticed that if you read from ask to buy -- keeping in mind that these are words from an article about growing vegetables, ordered according to how many times they had previously appeared in a particular set of textbooks -- it almost reads as a coherent utterance. Very little tweaking is needed:

Ask these, for when many water[s] them their every need did [provide], why then [did they] come buy?

Before and after that section, the series of words has no apparent meaning -- only the part I happened to include in my screenshot.

In "Goblin Market," the goblins try to sell faerie fruit to unsuspecting maidens. The textbook article is about vegetables, but the illustration is a huge photo of a pumpkin -- which is not only technically a fruit but perhaps the goblin fruit par excellence, due to its association with Halloween.

No sooner had I typed that than I glanced down at my desk and saw something I had put there just this morning and then promptly forgotten about: a little plastic bag of individually wrapped candies with jack-o'-lanterns on the wrappers.

The candies had been included as a free gift with something my wife had ordered online, and she had given them to me to bring to the school for my students. I had commented at the time how strange it was for them to have given her free Halloween candy in May.

The goblins in the poem sell typical sweet fruits -- "Apples and quinces, / Lemons and oranges, / Plump unpeck'd cherries," and so on -- but recasting the goblin fruits as pumpkins made me notice a connection I hadn't made before: an incident in one of Whitley Strieber's books where one of his goblin-like alien visitors appears to be going door-to-door selling squash. You can read about it in my June 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land." The post even mentions that I had misremembered the story, thinking it had been pumpkins that the alien was selling. (Pumpkins and squash are the same in Chinese anyway.)

This is all weird for sure. We'll see where it goes.

Saturday, February 4, 2023

An appearance of Jesus to some Ute Indians in 1920

In my June 2021 posts "Synchronicity: The locusts of Joel, and the traveling man" and "Cucurbits from an alien land," I mention this story I heard from Stan Bronson when I was a Mormon missionary stationed in Moab, Utah, in 1998.

This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins. My memory of the anecdote is a bit hazy, so I suppose I should try to track down Mr. Bronson, if he's still around.

I tried unsuccessfully to track down Mr. Bronson and eventually gave up.

Although I wrote Sinawava, thinking that was the standard spelling because of the Temple of Sinawava in Zion National Park, I actually remember Bronson pronouncing it Sinawav, without the final vowel. Here's what I remembered about what he said about Ute religion in general: The Ute word for their own tribe was Nuch, and Nuchach (whence Utah) was the collective term for mankind. The Ute homeland was called Avikan. They had two main gods: Tavwach, meaning "man forever" or "endless man"; and Sinawav, meaning "he who leaves footprints of light." Bronson believed that these were the names under which the Utes knew God the Father and Jesus Christ. The devil was called Apugat, "evil one." I heard all this described orally, only once, 25 years ago, but those names at least have stuck with me. Oh, and the Ute name for the Earth was Tuvwup. (In all these ad hoc transliterations, ch is pronounced as in church, and the vowels have their standard Continental sounds.)

Apparently gods with names that are variations on Tavwach and Sinawav are common to many tribes in that area, and the Temple of Sinawava is actually named after a Paiute god. Some online sources identify Tavwach and Sinawav with Wolf and Coyote, the latter being the typical "trickster" god, which seems totally inconsistent with Bronson's interpretation. Other sites have Sinawav as the creator god and Coyote as a separate character. I guess the names have attached themselves to a wide variety of characters and/or have been very differently interpreted by people with different presuppositions -- Mormon beliefs about the Indians' Christian ancestors in Bronson's case, generic "Coyote" stories in the case of some others.

Today, I searched for sinawav footprints of light -- spelling the god's name without the final vowel, trusting my memory over the blokes who make the plaques at Zion National Park -- and found more than I had hoped for: a transcript of a 1999 address by Bronson himself closely paralleling what I had heard from him the year before: "Cross of the San Juan Mission." I had remembered the Ute names perfectly, it turns out, but had rather garbled the watermelon incident. The person they encountered was not Sinawav per se but Jesus Christ in his own person, complete with crucifixion scars, and he wasn't carrying the watermelons. The Indians were on their way to buy watermelons when they met him, and he said when questioned that he liked watermelons. Here is the story.

Ute Indian oral histories by Avikan White Mesa Jim Mike (Chee Maik), his daughter Pochief, and his son Billy . . . state that in August, about the year 1920, Jesus Christ appeared to Jim and three other Ute men as they traveled on horseback from their camp at southeastern Utah's Sand Island on the San Juan River to buy watermelons from the settlers in the little Mormon town of Bluff, headquarters of the San Juan Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The account, told in its entirety to this writer in 1986 by Pochief and Bill Mike, states that Jim Mike, his son Harry, his son-in-law Jack Fly, and another unnamed son, were approaching Bluff when they met a bearded man with long un-braided hair walking barefoot toward them in the sandy roadway. The man spoke, calling Jim Mike by his secret Ute name. Jim responded, saying, "You must be Jesus." The man smiled and pointed to himself. Jesus Christ was known to have been a somewhat frequent visitor among the Ute people; therefore, as the four men dismounted from their horses they were anxious to begin asking questions which members of their clan had been told to ask the next time any of them saw Jesus. During the ensuing conversation with the Creator, Christ held his hands out to the four men, showed them the Marks of the Crucifixion, and declared in the Ute language, "I want you to know -- you would not have done this to me here."

Later, the story is told again in more detail:

Many of the Utes have been righteous enough to be personally ministered to by the Creator, himself, as was the case with Jim Mike and his sons as already told in part at the beginning of this writing. In 1970, while interviewing Jim Mike, this writer had the privilege of hearing the century-old Ute Indian member of the "Mormon" Church testify, saying, "I saw Jesus, and he called me by my Secret Ute Name." Jim Mike had also seen Jesus a number of years earlier, when as a young boy he was in a group of Utes who saw Christ at Cross Canyon, near Sleeping Ute Mountain, Jesus told all who saw him at that time that they would live to be 105 years old and that then they would pass away. Jim Mike died in 1977 at the age of 105.

In 1983, this writer was asked by the White Mesa Avikan Ute people to serve as their historian. Then, in 1986, nine years after the passing of Jim Mike, the Old Holy Man's daughter Pochief, along with his son Billy, related to this writer the previously untold part of their experience. The account was told by Pochief, through an interpreter, with Billy concurring. As mentioned earlier, the incident related in the following story took place in August, sometime around the year 1920. The story goes:

"Our Father, Jim, our Brother Harry, my husband, Jack Fly, and our other brother (when questioned by this writer about the other brother, Pochief and Billy both said that they could not remember the other brother's name) were traveling on horseback from Sand Island where the Utes were camped, to Bluff City to buy watermelons from the Mormons. Just before they came to Cottonwood Wash, they met a man walking toward them in the sandy roadway. The man had long, un-braided hair, and a beard. He wore a robe with un-hemmed sleeves, and his feet were bare.

The man spoke, calling Jim by his secret Ute name. Jim answered, "You must be Jesus!" The man smiled, and pointed to himself. Jim and the other men dismounted from their horses and started asking Jesus questions. They asked, "Where do you live? Where do you sleep? Jesus pointed toward the sky. They asked, "Where are you going? " Jesus gestured down the road in the direction from whence the men had come. They asked, "What food do you like to eat?" Jesus did not answer. They asked, "Do you like watermelon and corn?" Jesus spoke in the Ute language and said, "Yes I do."

The men were fascinated by the feet of Jesus, because they were very smooth and clean, like pearly white, even though he was walking barefoot in the sandy roadway. They asked "Doesn't this hot sand burn your bare feet?" Jesus said, "It is not hot to me."

Jesus talked about other things, and then he held his hands out toward the men and showed them his crucifixion scars and said, "I want you to know -- you would not have done this to me here."
Jesus then went on his way. The men mounted their horses and rode on toward Bluff. As the crossed Cottonwood wash they met a Model T Ford, traveling in the same direction as Jesus.

The men bought their watermelons and rode back to Sand Island and told their wives about talking with Jesus. We (Pochief and the other women) said, "We want to see Jesus too! Let's go and find him!" We saddled our horses and followed the men up to the road where we found Jesus' tracks. We followed the tracks until we say where he got in that Model T Ford, so we followed the car tracks. We saw where he got out of the car and left the road and started walking cross-country. We knew it would soon be dark, so we galloped our horses as fast as we could go, following Jesus' tracks. Jesus was going so fast that he must have been flying, but still leaving footprints, because we knew that no one could walk over that much ground so fast. When it got dark, we camped and got up the next morning and followed his tracks some more. The footprints came to a little stream of water and crossed to the other side. As Jesus' tracks went across a small sand dune on the other side of the stream there was one last footprint and the tracks disappeared. Jim said, "Jesus walked up into the sky." We circled all around the area for a long time trying to pick up his trail again, but we couldn't find any more tracks, so we went home disappointed.

About two weeks later, Jim was out on Douglas Mesa (by Monument Valley) talking with some Navajo friends, and he told them about seeing Jesus. They said, "We saw him too. He came into our camp while we were having a 'sing' for our sick brother." The Navajos told Jim that at first they didn't know that the man was Jesus. They asked the man if he wanted something to eat, and he said "No -- but I can help this sick man if you want me to." The Navajos said that they wanted him to help their brother, so, Jesus put his hands on the sick man's head and said a prayer. Then Jesus told the people goodbye, and left the camp. The man got well, so the Navajos knew that it must have been Jesus who had come, so they followed his tracks trying to find him. They came to one last track and the footprints disappeared.

I think that's a much more interesting and evocative story than the garbled fragment I was able to remember! I especially like the image of Jesus hitching a ride in a Model T.

One odd discrepancy: "The men were fascinated by the feet of Jesus, because they were very smooth and clean, like pearly white . . . . Jesus talked about other things, and then he held his hands out toward the men and showed them his crucifixion scars." If they had been staring at his feet, wouldn't they have noticed the crucifixion scars there first?

Saturday, August 6, 2022

The Wizard at the green door

In "The Locust Grove crop circle," I describe how I spontaneously visualized a vesica piscis while contemplating the Eight of Cups, and how Debbie then drew my attention to the titular crop formation, the structure of which includes both a vesica piscis and a shape like the anomalous "moon" on the Eight of Cups.

Yesterday (August 5), the homework for one of the English classes I teach happened to include this exercise:

Venn diagrams are fairly commonplace, but this one is uniquely relevant. As you can see, the two circles are for singular and plural nouns, with nouns that do not change form going in the middle section. One of the words that needs to be written there is fish -- as in vesica piscis. Also notice that what is printed on the other side of the page is faintly visible, and that right in the vesica is a picture of a baby, tying in with the vesica as a yonic image and a symbol of birth.

The vesica piscis is obviously closely related to the ichthys, or "Jesus fish," and Jesus (the baby in the picture above?) can also be thought of in terms of the Venn diagram -- the intersection of human nature and divine nature. Does that mean that Jesus had "two natures," as classical theology has it, or does it mean that there is only one nature? "One or two?" asks the Venn diagram with the baby.

Whitley Strieber used a Venn diagram on the cover of his book Jesus: A New Vision. As in the Locust Grove formation, there is a smaller circle inscribed in the vesica piscis.

I have discussed this vesica piscis sync first to get it out of the way, but it was actually the second one of August 5. Earlier that day, one of my young students (from a different class) drew this on the whiteboard during a break between classes: a vesica piscis inscribed in a circle, with the remainder of the circle colored green. I didn't get a chance to snap a photo, but this is a schematic reconstruction. It looked very close to being a mathematically precise vesica piscis, one by the square root of three.

The Locust Grove formation features a circle inscribed in a vesica piscis, with a narrower lens (too narrow to be a true mathematical vesica) inscribed in the circle.

"What's that?" asked one of the other students.

"It's a watermelon!"

"Why is it empty in the middle?"

Why indeed? It's a very strange way of drawing a watermelon, and it made me think of "Cucurbits from an alien land" and the melon or gourd as a gateway to the dream realm. As Debbie has pointed out, the "yoni" shape of the vesica piscis is closely associated with the symbolism of the door -- and in this case it's a green door -- a circular green door, like the one Gandalf knocks on.

The "watermelon" drawing also resembles a green letter O, as seen on the original cover of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And how could I have forgotten that The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film version) also has a scene in which someone knocks on a green door?

And this green door includes a smaller, circular green door.

In the book, the Guardian of the Gates, who lets Dorothy and company into the Emerald City is described as being "about the same size as the Munchkins" -- that is, very short, like a hobbit. In the movie, Dorothy and her friends first ring the doorbell, but the doorman insists that they knock instead, drawing their attention to a notice that says, "Bell out of order. Please knock."

In The Hobbit, Bilbo is first disturbed by one group of dwarves after another showing up and ringing his doorbell, and then:

[T]here came a loud knock. Not a ring, but a hard rat-tat on the hobbit's beautiful green door. Somebody was banging with a stick!

Bilbo . . . pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other. More dwarves, four more! And there was Gandalf behind, leaning on his staff and laughing. He had made quite a dent on the beautiful door . . . .

It is Gandalf, a Wizard, who knocks on the green door. When Dorothy knocks on the green door and is asked to state her business, she says, "We want to see the Wizard."

The Wizard is a representative of the supernatural or divine world, so this ties in with the Script line, "You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door." (Banging is the very word used by Tolkien.) Sometimes you knock on God's door, and sometimes he knocks on yours. Jesus said both, "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matt. 7:7, Luke 11:9) and "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him" (Rev. 3:20).

When Mormon artist Greg Olsen decided to illustrate that last verse, guess what color he chose to make the door?

Greg Olsen, Let Him In (2005)

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Note added: In this post, I talk about Gandalf knocking on a door just after I refer to "the melon or gourd as a gateway to the dream realm." How could I have forgotten that in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf opens another door by uttering the word mellon?

Saturday, June 12, 2021

Cucurbits from an alien land

A real book, owned by my brother; not from a dream

Cucurbits are members of the family Cucurbitaceae, including gourds, melons, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, etc. (This post has nothing to do with the book shown above; I just love the fact that it exists.)

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Sinawava's watermelons

In a June 11 post, I mentioned a story Timothy Greenfield-Sanders told Whitley Strieber about encountering an alien on the road, and said it reminded me of an anecdote I heard (back in 1998) about a Ute Indian's encounter with the god Sinawava.

This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins.

I have so far been unsuccessful in my attempts to track down Stan Bronson and verify the details of this story.

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Alien with squash

Squash, not pumpkins. I'd remembered the story wrong.

This is from Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995). Strieber is writing about an incident that occurred at his cabin in August 1991. He had invited a group of houseguests for the weekend, including the writer Michael Talbot (who would die less than a year later). Strieber wakes up at about five a.m., hears Talbot's voice, goes downstairs, and sees him at the door.

There was a shadow out there. I could see it clearly. It shocked me, because the likelihood of a stranger appearing at our door in this rather isolated area at five in the morning was vanishingly small. Then I saw that the figure was very thin, and seemed to have a huge head.
The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"
It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.
When I realized that Michael thought he was dealing with a bag lady or a beggar, I became embarrassed, whereupon there followed the most hilarious moment in my whole experience with the visitors.
"Don't you realize that could be the creator of mankind," I hissed, wildly overstating the case in order to make him act more dignified.
Barely glancing at me, he muttered, "She's dead broke."
"She can't be dead broke," I said, "she owns the world!"
"I'd give you three dollars for the squash," he said through the door, "but I don't have my wallet."

Later that morning, Talbot reports the whole experience as a dream, but Strieber assures him that it really happened, explaining, "Somewhere along the line I got the impression that she personally conceived of the human race."

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Descartes's dream

Kevin McCall alerted me to the fact that Descartes had dreamed about "melons from a foreign land." I quote from Alice Browne, "Descartes's Dreams," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 40 (1977), pp. 256-260.

On the night of 10-11 November 1619 Descartes, then aged twenty-three, had three dreams which he considered came from on high, and took the trouble to write down and interpret in some detail. Unfortunately his own account of them is not extant; but the account given by Baillet in his Vie de Mr. Des-Cartes, from which I shall be quoting, can be taken as fairly close to Descartes's own.

And here is Browne's translation of Baillet's account of Descartes's first dream:

After he fell asleep, his imagination was struck by the representation of some ghosts which appeared to him, and which terrified him so much that, thinking he was walking in the streets, he had to lean to his left-hand side to be able to reach the place where he wanted to go, because he felt a great weakness on his right-hand side, on account of which he could not hold himself up. Ashamed to be walking in this way, he made an effort to straighten himself; but he felt a violent wind which, carrying him off in a sort of whirlwind, made him spin three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what terrified him. The difficulty he had in dragging himself along made him fear that he would fall at every step, until noticing a school open along his way, he went in to find a refuge, and a remedy for his trouble. He tried to reach the school Church, where his first thought was to go and pray; but, noticing that he had passed a man he knew without greeting him, he wanted to turn back to pay his respects to him, and was pushed violently by the wind, which was blowing against the Church. At the same time he saw in the middle of the school courtyard another person, who addressed him by name, in civil and obliging terms, and told him that if he wanted to go and see Monsieur N., he had something to give him. M. Descartes imagined that it was a melon which had been brought from some foreign country. But what surprised him more was seeing that those who gathered round him with this person to talk were upright and steady on their feet, although he was still bent and staggering on the same ground, and the wind, which had nearly overthrown him several times, was greatly diminished. He woke up . . . .

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Gourd realm

I recently reread the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare. In the novel, the night mares -- who are actual mares, female horses, and are named after lava plains on the moon (Mare Imbrium, Mare Vaporum, etc.) -- live in the "gourd realm." This is the world of dreams, so called because there is a kind of gourd (the "hypnogourd") through which it can be accessed. Mortals who look into the peephole of a hypnogourd become trapped in the gourd realm, but night mares can move in and out of it freely.

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Melon trees on the moon?

I seem to recall that some early modern figure said that he had looked at the moon with a telescope and seen life there, including trees that bore melons which were the primary food of the lunar inhabitants. These inhabitants may, if memory serves, have been something like bears. I can't remember who said this and haven't been able to find the account anywhere.

Ring a bell, anyone? Leave a comment.

UPDATE: I may have been thinking of a series of six articles published in the New York Sun in 1835, supposedly reporting the discoveries of John Herschel but actually written by Sun reporter Richard Locke. These articles are now known collectively as the Moon Hoax.

Dr. Herschel has classified not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees, and nearly twice this number of plants, found in this tract alone, which are widely different to those found in more equatorial latitudes. Of animals, he classified nine species of mammalia, and five of ovipara. Among the former is a small kind of rein-deer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver. The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them, there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire. . . .
We here first noticed the lunar palm-tree, which differs from that of our tropical latitudes only in the peculiarity of very large crimson flowers, instead of the spadix protruded from the common calyx. We, however, perceived no fruit on any specimens we saw: a circumstance which we attempted to account for from the great (theoretical) extremes in the lunar climate. On a curious kind of tree-melon we nevertheless saw fruit in great abundance, and in every stage of inception and maturity (pp. 32-33).

Other cucurbits also put in an appearance.

Immediately on the outer border of the wood which surrounded, at the distance of half a mile, the eminence on which the first of these temples stood, we saw several detached assemblies of beings whom we instantly recognized to be of the same species as our winged friends of the Ruby Colosseum near the lake Langrenus. Having adjusted the instrument for a minute examination, we found that nearly all the individuals in these groups were of a larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race. They were chiefly engaged in eating a large yellow fruit like a gourd, sections of which they divided with their fingers, and ate with rather uncouth voracity, throwing away the rind. A smaller red fruit, shaped like a cucumber, which we had often seen pendant from trees having a broad dark leaf, was also lying in heaps in the centre of several of the festive groups; but the only use they appeared to make of it was sucking its juice, after rolling it between the palms of their hands and nibbling off an end (p. 44-45).

These are the only fruits mentioned in the Moon Hoax article -- cucurbits all!

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And . . . the New York Times!

This article, published under the byline Joe Schmoe, inexplicably appeared on the NYT page on June 8, 2021. It was quickly taken down, with no explanation other than that it had been "published in error."

I found this today by complete chance, while searching Twitter for tweets about Dallin H. Oaks.