From the Narrow Desert: Doves

Showing posts with label Doves. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)

I had another brief vision or waking dream today, while praying the Rosary and contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost.

I saw a large golden goblet, and a big ruby -- about the size of a large walnut -- was put inside it. I couldn't see who was putting it there. I just saw the ruby move through the air and down into the cup, but slowly and deliberately, not as if it were falling or being thrown. My impression was that it was being placed in the cup carefully by an invisible hand.

A few seconds later, a box turtle walked up to the goblet. It stood up on its hind legs and put its forefeet on the rim of the cup, trying to peer inside. As soon as it did this, all kinds of fruit started bubbling up from the goblet until it was full almost to overflowing. There were bananas, grapes, a pineapple, and lots of other fruits whose individual identities didn't register. The whole thing reminded me of Carmen Miranda's fruit hat. It was just a lot of fruit -- no plant or tree from which it was growing -- but my impression was nevertheless that it had all grown very rapidly from the ruby, and that the turtle's attempt to look into the cup was what had triggered it.

⁂

I have no clear interpretation of this, just a few hints at possible connections. One thing I immediately thought of was the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups card:

Here, too, we have something being put into a golden goblet. The imagery of the descending dove ties in with the context of the vision (I had been contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost), and of course turtle is a word that can refer either to a shelled reptile or to a dove.

I also thought of "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," where a gorilla seems to be about to put a bunch of grapes into the Holy Grail.

The ruby in the cup made me think of one of Debbie's dreams, where she was given a cup with a crystal in it, and the whole thing had something to do with Heaven's Gate. Since comments aren't searchable, I can't find that dream, so Debbie, I'll have to ask you to post it again. (You might consider starting your own blog so that these things are searchable.)

I also thought of William Wright's "Herbie the Hamster: A Short Story." The story is about a seed, and the ruby in my vision functions as a seed. Hamsters and box turtles play similar roles as low-maintenance pets often kept by small children, and the turtle's standing up on its hind legs to look into the cup reminded be of Herbie's efforts to get over the wall and see what is outside.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Milkommen

One of the main sources of William Wright's unusual ideas is what he calls "words" -- strings of text which he receives in what I guess is something of a dream-like manner, and which appear to be strange multilingual concoctions incorporating English, the fictional languages created by Tolkien, and sometimes other languages such as Spanish and German. He tries to decipher these and extract a story from them. Although I sometimes enjoy this kind of sleuthing (I was a big Finnegans Wake reader in my early twenties), and although I find William's ideas stimulating, I haven't been able to muster much interest in his "words" themselves. On December 22, he posted "Jan-Feb 2022 Words Part 1" -- the type of post that typically makes my eyes glaze over -- but in this case one of his "words" (literally just one word) captured my imagination:

Feb. 5

Milkommen

Commentary:

It was just this one word, kind of just hanging there, and I took it to be perhaps a play on words of the German "Wilkommen" (Welcome), but now with Milk, since the German language had been part of my 2019 words. The Promised Land is associated with Milk and Honey, and so that is where my mind went, whether that accurate or not.

This is a pretty solid reading, obviously. The reference to the well-known German word Willkommen seems undeniable. Besides the "milk and honey" angle, I note that Wilkommen is transformed into Milkommen by turning the first letter upside down, inviting the reading "Welcome to upside-down world" or "Welcome to the looking-glass world." (The word milk is already associated with such inversions in my mind, since Klim is a popular brand of powdered milk here in Taiwan.)

My first thought on seeing Milkommen, though, was that it could also be read as Milkom-men -- meaning the Ammonites of the Old Testament, whose national god was called Milcom or Milkom. Since William's "words" seem to be more oriented to the Book of Mormon, it could be a very indirect way of referencing an unrelated people in that book who are also called Ammonites -- Lamanites converted by the preaching of Ammon, son of Mosiah.

Of course, Milkommen would be a rather inefficient way of saying "Ammonites" if that was all you wanted to convey, so I figured there must be more to it. On a hunch, I looked up kommen on Wiktionary. It's German for "come," of course, but I scrolled down and found this at the very end of the entry.

The very last line in the entry for kommen is a partial quotation of Isaiah 55:1, where it is Swedish for "come ye." Here's the whole verse:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye [kommen] to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

So looking up kommen led me directly back to milk!

It was quite late at night that I was making these connections. I went to bed and had a strange dream in which I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.

I was awakened suddenly by what I thought was the sound of something exploding in my study. I got up and went into the study without bothering to turn on the light, and satisfied myself that nothing had happened and that the noise must have been part of the dream. I was just about to go back to bed when I noticed a particular book, dimly visible behind the glass door of one of my cabinets, and thought, "What's that funny-looking book? I don't remember owning a book like that!" I turned on the light and opened the cabinet, and the book in question fell out and landed face-up on the desk below. I photographed it exactly as it landed, without touching it:

The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. That is, the effect of the milky juice of the poppy on four men. The effect of milk on men. In rapid speech, the final consonant of on would be assimilated to the m that follows it, yielding milk-om-men.

The title of the book is of course a reference to the famous closing lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

That's a major sync with what I was reading last night: The Desert, the first installment in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. The main characters have just been welcomed to Dira, a vast underground city (cf. "caverns measureless to man") ruled by Kazak, a king said to have about 180 wives. (A pen friend of mine recently wrote a great deal of imaginative, possibly schizophrenic, material about Kubla Khan, much of it dealing with his practice of polygamy on a vast scale.) The people of Dira keep domestic ants, which in turn keep aphids. (All insects in this book are much larger than their real-world counterparts.)

[The aphids] were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the "palace."

Milk and honeydew juxtaposed, with the latter referenced as a food rather than a drink.

In my friend's writings about Kubla Khan, paintings of the Khan show him accompanied by two kittens, one white and one black:

To complete Kubla as a Proper Man, perched precariously on the folds of Kubla’s dark cloak are two mysterious Entirely Separate Beings depicted as two tiny cute small kittens, one white and one black, that he has taken in and sheltered in his cloak from the bitter cold. The two harmless-looking kittens make quite a contrast with the stern and barbaric and pitiless visage of Kubla himself. When Kubla returns to a mortal world and sees the two kittens in portraits of himself and realizes who they represent, he also snorts, but somewhat fondly, as if the portraits reminds him of a great Cosmic Joke that the painter is not fully aware of.

I referenced Through the Looking-Glass above without remembering how it begins. This is the first sentence:

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

The looking-glass world, you will recall, is laid out in the form of a chessboard:

This same chessboard imagery appears in the Ava Max music video "Kings & Queens," on which I have recently posted:

Lest the Masonic connotations of the black-and-white tiling be lost on the audience, we have a couple of pillars thrown in for good measure. Later, Ava demonstrates a Masonic penal sign while singing "Off with your head" -- a phrase with Lewis Carroll resonances.

The "Kings & Queens" video begins with a shot of white doves in flight and later shows champagne being poured into overflowing glasses:

What made me think of the looking-glass world in the first place was the way the W in Wilkommen is turned upside down (or reflected) to create Milkommen. Back in 2018, I wrote about W/M reversals in "The Rider-Waite Magician." The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups features a white dove and an overflowing cup marked with a W that looks more like an upside-down M.

"We would pop champagne and raise a toast" is a recurring line in "Kings & Queens." Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen and others drink a toast to Alice by turning their glasses upside down:

'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health -- Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces -- others upset the decanters and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table . . . .

Coming back to Isaiah 55 (sorry, it's hard to write about this non-linear web of associations in a linear manner), here's another passage from the same chapter:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (vv. 10-11).

Rainwater is no good if we just collect it and let it stagnate. It's supposed to be used and transformed, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater -- and the same is said of the word of God. This reminds me of a poem I wrote in 2010 about manna -- which must be eaten and internalized, or else it quickly goes bad.

Who on the bread of life will feed,
will live forever -- so we read
in that same book which oft is read
as if it were itself that bread.
But in that book is also told
how manna stinks when it is old,
in but a day breeds worms and reeks --
Then what if it were kept for weeks?
Or months? Or many a yawning year?
How would the manna then appear?
When centuries had past it paced,
how would the bread of life then taste?
And were it served at such a date,
what would become of them that ate?

The historical manna is often understood to have been something produced by desert insects, so there's a possible link to the idea of feeding on honeydew.

I'm not sure which, if any, of these many disparate associations will lead anywhere worthwhile. I just wanted to get them all written down first before I forget them.

Friday, September 8, 2023

Phoenix syncs

Remember the abandoned restaurant I explored in July 2022? I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced. In the second dream, during a nap on September 1, I found a large mantis inside the restaurant, and it kept unfolding more and more of its joints until, its limbs fully extended, it was larger than I was. I was trying to think of a way to get it out the door without hurting it.

The two dreams made me want to go check out the restaurant again, so yesterday afternoon I did so. I was there from about 1:30 to 2:00, walking through the whole place and taking lots of photos.

About half an hour after leaving the restaurant, I saw the "NEVER STOP ROLLING" T-shirt mentioned in my last post in connection with a Rickroll sync.

A little before midnight last night, I was on /x/ looking for something else when I happened upon a post, apparently written by an AI, about Rick Astley's new song -- the second half of the Rickroll sync. One of the replies -- referencing Rick's line "Can't stop this world from turning; the fire's already burning" -- was a picture of this book cover, featuring a phoenix:

Today, looking through the photos I had taken at the restaurant, I noticed this one, which also features a phoenix-like image:

It's a bag of drinking straws. The Chinese reads 元凰 (a brand name; the second character means "phoenix") 衛生吸管 ("hygienic drinking straws").

I was in my study when I discovered this and connected it to the Manley P. Hall book cover. Minutes later, I walked into the next room and saw this:

Pareidolia is sort of an occupational hazard for synchromystics, but doesn't that look like a bird getting ready to fly up out of the trash can? I guess it looks more like a dove than anything else, but doesn't it also suggest a phoenix rising from the ash-tray, as we Pig Latin speakers call it? Of course it's really a discarded tissue, which in Taiwan is called 衛生紙, "hygiene paper," the first two characters of which also appeared on the pack of drinking straws.

I then got on my motorcycle and headed for my school. While on the road, I was thinking about phoenixes. The first thing that came to mind was "Phoenix the Cat," since one feature of the Taiwanese accent is that /l/ tends to be pronounced as /n/. Then, since cats and owls are connected in Chinese, I remembered my dream of a year ago in which I saw two "owls" that resembled Chinese phoenixes:

Then the two owls swooped down, and I noticed that they were really enormous -- the size of condors -- and didn't look much like owls at all. I still thought of them as "owls," but what they really looked like were Chinese phoenixes (fenghuang) with the buff-and-white coloration of barn owls.

I was stopped at a red light thinking about the two phoenix-like "owls" when it started to rain lightly. The motorcyclist in front of me took out a raincoat and put it on. The back of the raincoat was decorated with, of all things, two owls.

The first owl is saying 中山二甲子, which doesn't mean anything to me, and the second is saying 風華三世紀, which I think means something like "the third century of glory."

Remember the tissue-bird, which I said looked like a dove but was conceptually a phoenix? Just now as I was preparing this post, I went on the /x/ catalog page and did a Ctrl-F for astley so that I could find and download the Manly P. Hall picture. Close by the post I was looking for was another combination of dove and phoenix imagery:

The "fox" reference in the middle isn't irrelevant, either. The browser now known as Firefox originally had a different name and logo:

Update:

The 4chan screenshot above shows a post that says "What exactly IS the Holy Spirit?" I included it because of the accompanying image -- a dove surrounded by fiery radiance -- which synched with an earlier phoenix-dove combination.

A couple of hours after publishing this post, I was doing some reading -- Vol. 4B of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon -- and found this:

[T]he character of the Holy Spirit . . . during the nineteenth century remained characteristically ambiguous. Both deity and substance, what that name referred to could be imagined in any way necessary to one's theology. This was true then, and it remains true today . . . .

Was the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost a person or an animate, agentive substance-form akin to the [abstract divine] attributes or to spirit itself? "I cannot fully make up my mind one way or the other," Orson Pratt confessed . . . .

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.")

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph?

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves

In yesterday's post "'The gate is strait, deep and wide' -- and doves," I tried to make sense of those lines from the Doors song "Break on Through (to the Other Side)." How could the gate be both strait (i.e., narrow) and wide?

Today I happened to read this in Dion Fortune's book Sane Occultism (1929).

There is only one true path to Initiation, and that is the path laid down by immemorial tradition and beaten by countless feet. This path in its earlier stages is different for each of the great races of mankind, but these converging paths finally unite into one broad highway after the Outer Gate is passed.

This suggests a possible interpretation of the Doors lyric. The Outer Gate is narrow, specific to each race -- or more likely, now, nearly a century after Sane Occultism, to each individual -- but the Inner Gate (encountered after one has passed the narrow Outer Gate and then gone deep) is wide, and the narrow way gives way to "one broad highway." This also calls to mind the song sung by Bilbo Baggins in the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

In Bilbo's case, "the door where it began" is the circular green door of Bag End, his home which he is leaving behind. The green door is not the final door, though: "Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate."

⁂

I went out to check the fig tree again, and I found green and overripe figs growing together.

⁂

A few minutes later, I stopped at a red light next to a Presbyterian church (no, not this one). They still had their Christmas things up. One of the big square pillars in front of the church had a picture of the shepherds adoring the infant Jesus, and the other had a picture of the three wise men on their camels. There's nothing very noteworthy in that, but it caught my attention more than it normally would have due to the fact that earlier today I had just discovered (via Tomberg's Christ and Sophia) Rudolf Steiner's theory that Matthew's baby Jesus (visited by wise men) and Luke's (visited by shepherds) were two different people. Thus, the decorations held my attention long enough for me to read the Chinese text accompanying the picture of the wise men.

"主耶穌來了，是要叫人得生命，並且得的更豐盛。" -- not the Christmas-themed text I was expecting. It translates as, "The Lord Jesus came to let people have life, and have it more abundantly" -- a close paraphrase of John 10:10. I had just read that verse yesterday and commented on it my "Gate is strait" post linked above.

⁂

A few minutes later, I passed a business whose logo is interlocking red and white hand-shaped birds (doves?) in a circular green nest.

I saw and photographed all these things in a very short span of time. The timestamps on the three photos above are 7:30, 7:37, and 7:39.

A red gate and a dove

Today I happened to pass the local Roman Catholic Church (patronized mostly by Filipino migrant workers). It was closed for Chinese New Year, and I noticed the color of the gate.

Adjoining the church proper is a "gospel center" with a big dove in the window.

Friday, January 20, 2023

"The gate is strait, deep and wide" -- and doves

The Doors song "Break on Through (to the Other Side)" has been back in the sync stream recently. I've been trying to make sense of these lines:

The gate is strait
Deep and wide
Break on through to the other side

Many lyrics sites have "The gate is straight," but this is surely an error. You might describe a road as "straight" but not a gate, and in any case the expression is pretty obviously an allusion to Matthew 7:13-14.

Enter ye in at the strait gate:

For wide is the gate,

and broad is the way,

that leadeth to destruction,

and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate,

and narrow is the way,

which leadeth unto life,

and few there be that find it.

Strait and narrow are synonyms, as are the contrasting pair wide and broad, and notice how Jesus explicitly presents the wide gate as the opposite of the strait gate -- one leading to destruction, the other to life. So what can Jim Morrison have meant by "The gate is strait, deep and wide"? How can it be both strait and wide? And what does it mean to say that a gate is "deep"?

Of course, "deep and wide" is no more Morrison's own turn of phrase than is "strait is the gate." It's from an old Salvation Army song.

There's a wondrous fountain, filled with living water,
Flowing from the Saviour's wounded side.
There's an invitation to the heavy laden,
To this fountain flowing deep and wide.

Deep and wide, deep and wide,
There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.
Yes, 'tis deep and wide, deep and wide,
There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

What did Morrison mean by this? Quite possibly nothing, or nothing coherent. The sync fairies, on the other hand, must have some reason for bringing it to my attention.

⁂

Yesterday, the red dove reappeared -- I mean a literal red turtle dove that had been following me everywhere back in August and then disappeared until yesterday. In my original red turtle dove post, I linked to my 2018 post on "The Rider-Waite Magician," which pairs the red dove from the Magician card with the white dove from the Ace of Cups -- and which also, I see now, includes an extensive discussion of the lemniscate symbol!

The Ace of Cups is also relevant to the song "Deep and Wide," in which the fountain flows "from the Saviour's wounded side." This is a reference to the Fourth Gospel account of the crucifixion, in which a soldier stabs Jesus in the side with a spear and both water and blood come out. The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups has five streams of water for the five wounds of Jesus, and it has water in a context where one would instead expect wine as a symbol of blood.

Yesterday, the red dove was not accompanied by a white one but by a green one. I saw the red turtle in the morning, and then in the evening I saw this:

Later that evening, I ran across this on /x/. It's a reference to the running joke that "birds are fake" and are actually surveillance devices -- but in synchronistic context it seems like a warning against "false spirits," manufactured simulacra of the Holy Ghost.

My orginal red turtle dove post didn't mention green doves, but it did pair turtles with the color green by quoting the Song of Solomon: "the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs." I had recently had an experience with green banyan figs at the time. That was five months ago. Now that the dove is green, I should go back and see if those figs are ripe yet. Ripe banyan figs are red. A couple of days ago, in "The invincible Lizard King," I quoted King Lear: "Ripeness is all."

First only green doors, now red and green. First only a red dove, now red and green. Is the dove linked to the door? I decided to look up the etymology of dove. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it's "from Proto-Germanic *dubon . . ., perhaps related to words for 'dive,' but the application is not clear unless it be somehow in reference to its flight." Wiktionary traces it back further, saying that the Proto-Germanic (which it spells *dūbǭ) is from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewbʰ- (“to whisk, smoke, be obscure”) -- so perhaps the original sense was "smoke-gray bird" or something? What about the possible link to dive? According to the OED, dive is "from Proto-Germanic verb *dubijan, from PIE *dheub- "deep, hollow" (see deep (adj.))." According to Wiktionary, that Proto-Germanic verb is made by adding a suffix to *dūbǭ, "dove, pigeon." As for deep, it traces it back to PIE *dʰewbʰ-, the same ultimate source it gives for dove.

So dove and deep are probably etymological cousins. The red and green doves implicitly correspond to the red and green doors, and the Doors song mentions a "deep gate."

⁂

Today, in my daily three-chapter Bible reading, I read this:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. . . . Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:1-2, 7-11).

This is a bit confusing, since Jesus identifies himself both as the door through which the shepherd enters and with the shepherd himself. Note that this passage about the door is also where the Christian phrase "abundant life" comes from; this is referenced in the last verse of "Deep and Wide":

There is life abundant -- gift from God our Father --
Source, whence ev’ry need may be supplied --
It is offered freely, without price or money,
Drink from Heav’nly fountains, deep and wide.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Lots of old syncs resurfacing: red turtle dove, vesica piscis, crop circles

Sequence of events this morning:

1. At home on my computer, I prepare an English-to-Chinese glossary for something my students have to read. One of the words that needs to be glossed is dove. I know it, but I type the Chinese into Google Translate translate it back into English, just to be sure I've got the correct character. It's a single morpheme which means only "dove, pigeon" -- but oddly, dove is only the second suggestion from Google; the first is bird of peace.

I also notice in passing the phonetic similarity of 鴿子 (gēzi, "dove") to 哥吉拉 (Gējílā, "Godzilla")

2. I go to my school, and he's back! The red turtle dove that was following me everywhere back in August and then disappeared after I posted about him.

3. I have about half an hour before anyone else will arrive, so I pray my daily Rosary and then mess around a bit with a compass and straightedge, trying to work out a new way of constructing a regular pentagon. I try to get creative, but my first steps are still straight out of Euclid: draw a line segment, and then use it to construct a vesica piscis.

4. I have my morning tutoring session, in which I discuss magazine articles with my student. He's read an article about, of all things, why rugby balls are shaped the way they are, which apparently has to do with the fact that they used to be made from pig bladders. Of course the shape of a rugby ball approximates a vesica piscis, and the word vesica literally means "bladder."

5. Having some more free time, I look up and skim my old "red turtle dove" post. In connection with the "bird of peace" translation, I notice that the post includes this image. It's from this same student's magazine.

Since recent syncs have focused on time, and even on the word time itself (e.g. how its S:E:G: value is 44), this image from the "red turtle dove" post also seems relevant:

5. Since I've got my blog up, I idly check my stats and notice that an old post from August 28 of last year -- the time when I was being followed by the red turtle dove -- is for some reason getting a lot of visits these days, fare more than it got back when I posted it. The post is "More syncs related to the 'Glove Puppet' video and crop circles" -- just another ephemeral sync post, not the sort of thing I would expect to attract a lot of attention months later. I click on the post and see that it prominently features vesica piscis imagery.

Then I scroll down and find that it also includes this image again!

To top things off, the post ends with a reference to the O. Henry story "The Green Door" -- an old sync theme which has suddenly resurfaced in the past few days.

6. I go to YouTube to put on some music. I've been listening to the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, and YouTube suggests the "official video" for the opening track, "Take a Bow." I didn't know there was a video, so I put it on. It soon becomes obvious that it's not the "official" video at all but something put together by a fan. It's a good song, though -- and very 2020s-relevant -- so I play it anyway.

It begins with a clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey and then footage of Nazis. Then this flashes on the screen repeatedly:

Shortly after that, we get a rapid-fire series of crop circle images.

A bit later, we see a surgeon putting on a glove, and then the Masonic square and compass flashes on the screen. (I had just been using a compass, and then looking at a post about a "glove puppet.")