From the Narrow Desert: Egypt

Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts

Thursday, June 27, 2024

Nautical Newts

At this rate I'm going to go through the whole freaking alphabet.

A newt is a kind of salamander. Although the picture is captioned "Nine Nautical Newts Navigating Near Norway," there are only six newts in the boat. The remaining three are in the water and are only partially visible. This immediately made me think of the Knight of Wands, recently discussed in "More on Joan and Claire." The Knight's outer garment is printed with salamanders -- six full salamanders plus a few partially visible ones.

The newts are navigating the open sea, while the Knight and his salamanders are traveling through the deserts of Egypt. That's a pretty big discrepancy, but as it happens, I just mentioned in a comment on "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" that "Egypt was also underwater when it was discovered" according to the Book of Abraham. This was following a train of thought started by the fact that the Hog Knight on the cover of Animalia is accompanied by an ostrich, which had made me think of a passage from The Satanic Verses related to the Norman Conquest. The Nautical Newts are also accompanied by an ostrich.

Actually, the Hog Knight has a lot in common with the Knight of Wands:

Both are wearing armor and riding in the same direction. The helmet of the Knight of Wands even appears to have one of those hounskull-style visors which, when closed, would give the Knight a "pig-faced" appearance. The Hog Knight holds a flagpole with a banner; the Knight of Wands holds a staff which, in my post, I connected with a flagpole as well. The Knight of Wands is in Egypt; the Hog Knight's banner, as seen inside the book, is decorated with what appear to be Egyptian hieroglyphics:

In the comment, I quote the statement that the discoverer of this underwater Egypt was "the daughter of Ham" and that she "afterward settled her sons in it," and I suggest that "hogs could be a punning reference to 'Ham.'" That Ham pun in its classic form, the one famously referenced by Bloom in Ulysses, includes a desert reference:

Why should no man starve on the deserts of Arabia?
Because of the sand which is there.
How came the sandwiches there?
The tribe of Ham was bred there and mustered.

Ham, bread, and mustard -- a very respectable pun. "Mustering" is something that military men do, which fits with the warlike portrayal of the tribe of ham in Animalia. Mustard is also interesting in connection with the Nautical Newts. It is the scholarly consensus that "eye of newt," the famous witches'-brew ingredient, originally referred to mustard seed. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus compare the Kingdom to a grain of mustard seed, and Joseph Smith adapted the parable to apply to the Book of Mormon:

Let us take the Book of Mormon, which a man took and hid in his field, securing it by his faith, to spring up in the last days, or in due time; let us behold it coming forth out of the ground, which is indeed accounted the least of all seeds, but behold it branching forth, yea, even towering, with lofty branches, and God-like majesty, until it, like the mustard seed, becomes the greatest of all herbs. And it is truth, and it has sprouted and come forth out of the earth, and righteousness begins to look down from heaven, and God is sending down His powers, gifts and angels, to lodge in the branches thereof.

The mustard seed is planted and grows in a field, but the mustard seed is also mentioned in Luke in connection with the idea that a tree could be planted in the sea by those with sufficient faith:

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you (Luke 17:6).

Joseph Smith connected the mustard seed with a book of scripture buried in the earth. The Nautical Newts appear to have their own seaborne scripture -- a Nautical New T., or New Testament. Keeping in mind that the word translated as gospel in the Bible literally means "good news," the symbolism is pretty clear:

The name of the newspaper is The Northern Star, which makes me think that this "gospel" is the writings of the Lost Tribes, as mentioned in 2 Nephi 29, since those tribes are traditionally thought of as being "in the North." We typically speak of the Ten Lost Tribes, but they could also be reckoned as nine, if (as is often the case in the Bible) Joseph is counted as a single tribe rather than being divided into the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. The Book of Mormon never gives them a number, though we know that there were 12 tribes in all and that three (Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) were not "lost."

Touching the newspaper is a snail shell. Well, I suppose it's actually a nautilus shell, given the alphabet theme, but it certainly looks like a snail shell. In "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback," I specifically brought in snails as a symbol of a Gospel being transported across the sea. The snail in that analysis (from Lewis Carroll) was paired with the whiting, and here the snail shell is white. In Carroll, the idea of whiting having their tails in their mouths is emphasized; we see the same pose in the salamanders on the Knight of Wands.

To the right of the snail shell, we can see the ghostly image of what I suppose is meant to be a nurse, but her hat -- a rectangular shape marked with a cross -- is symbolic shorthand for "Bible," confirming our interpretation of the newspaper.

The Newts are navigating "Near Norway." Norway is, etymologically, "the northern way," which fits in with the Lost Tribes theme. The Old English name for Norway was Norðmanna land -- "Northman Land" -- which is also the etymological meaning of Normandy. Since Armorica (comprising Normandy and Brittany) has been so prominent in the sync-stream of late, we could think of "Near Norway" as referring to the Northman Land nearer to Britain -- i.e., Normandy as opposed to Norway in Scandinavia.

Finally, coming back to Ham for a moment, note that he is also implicitly present in the Nautical Newts picture, as one of the eight passengers on Noah's Ark:

By the way, I wasn't kidding about going through almost the whole alphabet. Stay tuned next time for the esoteric significance of Zany Zebras Zigzagging in Zinc Zeppelins.

Thursday, October 12, 2023

Freeman again

The word or name Freeman has been in the sync-stream recently. (See the October 7 post "Freeman Zimmerman" and the links there.) I've also been reading Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages and am currently on the part about the Great Pyramid of Giza, which includes various speculations as to how it might have been built.

Today, one of my private students had some questions about a magazine article he had read. It mentions that the pyramids were built by "free men":

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Further syncs related to my Kanye dream and Facsimile 1

Yesterday (November 4), I taught a children's English class in which the word ancient came up (from an article saying that surfing was "an ancient sport," originating in the fourth century BC). After explaining the meaning of ancient, I checked comprehension by asking, "Have you ever seen anything ancient?" A 10-year-old girl immediately replied that she had visited a museum a few years ago and seen an Egyptian mummy case -- and then added that there were also "four little things with different heads, like a person and a dog and an eagle, and I don't remember what the other one was" -- clearly a description of the canopic jars ("Elkenah" and friends) which have featured in my recent posts.

Today, following a link on AC, I read an article called "MK Ultra, Transgenderism, and Feminization of Men." This bit pinged my syncdar:

The term “hypnosis” comes from the Greek word hypno, meaning sleep. Hypnotic trance has its roots in Earth’s oldest civilizations. The first mentions of it date back 5,000 years to ancient Egypt where it was used in rituals in the Temple of Imhotep. “Temple sleep" was an hours-long ritual using herbs, rhythmic drumming, and prayer recitation to induce a hypnotic dreamlike state. This ritual trance was believed to allow a person to heal ailments, see the future, or contact the gods. The ancient Greeks adapted their own forms of temple sleep used by Oracles to divine the future for powerful men like Alexander the Great. Shamans around the world have used similar techniques since ancient times with drumming, chant, and natural hallucinogens to induce ritual trance in the same way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, esoteric physicians and psychologists like Franz Mesmer gave hypnosis techniques new life. French scientists at the Nancy School were the first to formally study hypnotism as we know it today. This led to hypnosis being used by psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
In the 1920’s, hypnosis was often portrayed comically in Vaudeville stage acts and later in Hollywood, leading to its modern association with quackery. [. . .]

This was only the second time I had heard of the Egyptian ritual of "temple sleep"; the first was yesterday, when I found a reference to it in Mission des juifs, where Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre attributes its invention to no lesser a personage than Moses himself -- pre-Exodus, when he was (Saint-Yves claims) a priest of Osiris:

He [Moses] recommended that well-chosen persons sleep at night in the Temple, to receive oneirocritical or other communications of interest to either the individual or the Society.

(Definition of oneirocritical: "of, relating to, or specializing in the interpretation of dreams" -- c.f. Sigmund Freud's best-known work.)

When I had read this reference in Saint-Yves, I had vaguely imagined initiates sleeping on the floor of the temple, but when I read the second reference, in the MK Ultra article, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that, no, they probably used some sort of ritual bed --and that I was almost 100% certain what that bed looked like. A quick Google search confirmed what I already intuitively knew: One of the first results had a picture of someone sleeping on a lion couch:

The image is just from some random YouTube video, and I have no idea how archaeologically sound it is, but the sync fairies don't care about that. The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, people have connected "temple sleep" with the lion couch. Saint-Yves, rather improbably, connects "temple sleep" with Moses -- just as Joseph Smith had, equally improbably, connected the lion couch with another major biblical figure.

In the MK Ultra article, "the Nancy School" appears in the same paragraph as "temple sleep." In my Kanye dream, Ye was carrying a coffin-like plywood box and said that "Aunt Nancy" had gone to sleep in it and never woken up.

At the end of the passage I have quoted, "Vaudeville" is juxtaposed with "quackery." Yesterday, in a post that probably left my readers scratching their heads, I felt an urgent need to post about some imagined spiritual kinship between Marx Brothers comedies and the music of Billy Joel. In this post, I characterized the Marx Brothers as "classic Jewish Vaudeville" and provided as a sample of their style a clip from the 1933 film Duck Soup.

The Billy Joel thing wasn't my only sudden strange idea about pop music yesterday. Out of the blue, I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about the song "You're the One" as performed by the Vogues and, moved by a strange sense of certainty about a song with which I have only a passing familiarity, I spent quite a bit of time scouring YouTube in vain for any evidence that they had ever sung "Ooh, never leave me, DO NOT deceive me" (definitely the correct lyrics!) rather than the vastly inferior Mandela-effect version "please don't deceive me," which is all that can be found in the current timeline. It was an extremely strange thing to get hung up on, but in the course of my searching I stumbled upon another old Vogues song I had completely forgotten about: "Five O'Clock World" -- which begins with the words "Up every morning just to keep a job" and later says "in my five o'clock world she waits for me." In my Kanye dream, Aunt Nancy had written a note saying "Wake me up at 5 p.m." before going to sleep forever.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

How Egyptian was Moses, and how Mesopotamian?

I have recently stressed the complete absence of any afterlife teaching from the Torah of Moses. Kevin McCall left a comment pointing out that (according to a tradition reported centuries later by St. Stephen) "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7:22) and thus must surely have been familiar with the afterlife beliefs that played so prominent a role in Egyptian religion.

This made me ask the question, Just how Egyptian was Moses, really? I have often assumed, from his being raised in Pharaoh's palace, that he was almost entirely Egyptian by upbringing and had little direct knowledge of his ultimately Mesopotamian heritage. (Abraham was from Mesopotamia.) When God spoke to him from the burning bush, Moses said,

Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, "The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you"; and they shall say to me, "What is his name?" what shall I say unto them? (Ex. 3:13)

His name was El, of course -- El Elyon, El Shaddai -- but Moses didn't know that. When the voice from the burning bush identified itself as "the God of thy fathers," Moses had to ask, in essence, "The God of my fathers -- uh, which God is that again?" He comes across in this passage as fundamentally deracinated -- and, presumably, thoroughly Egyptianized.

When you ask what about Moses was distinctly Egyptian, though, it's hard to come up with much. The miracles, certainly, feel far closer to Egyptian than to Babylonian magic, but is there anything Egyptian in his teachings? Genesis 1-11 is of course indisputably Mesopotamian in nature, with many parallels to the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh, and the Law of Moses itself has its closest parallel in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi. One can see how secular scholars would conclude that the Torah was written during the Babylonian exile, but the other possible explanation is that these were traditions preserved from the time of Abram of Ur.

The golden calf of Aaron has always seemed Mesopotamian to me, too, a symbol of El or Adad. The Egyptians had bovine gods as well (Hathor, the Apis Bull), but Aaron seems to identify it as a non-Egyptian deity -- "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." I don't think the Hebrews could readily have imagined any Egyptian god taking their side against Pharaoh, the manifestation of Horus.

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I think that, while Moses was indeed raised as an Egyptian and "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," he deliberately rejected that heritage, tried to learn about the traditional (broadly Mesopotamian) religion of the Hebrews (collecting the stories we now have in the Book of Genesis), and tried to interpret his own experiences through the Hebrew lens. The afterlife is not passively omitted from the Torah, as if it "hadn't been discovered yet," but was actively excluded by Moses as part of the Egyptian tradition he rejected. I think this has more to do with the individual personality of Moses than with anything else; it is interesting to speculate how the development of the Hebrew religion might have been different if Moses had been less of a purist.

Despite this active effort to be un-Egyptian, did something of the Egyptian spirit nevertheless come through in Moses and his work? If so, I have not noticed it -- but perhaps that is simply because I am less familiar with Egyptian thought and religion than with its Mesopotamian counterparts.