From the Narrow Desert

So, my latest pastime is reading nonsense verse that I myself wrote and analyzing it for hidden meanings.

Whinbad the Whaler was delish

And not unlike Filet-O-Fish.

". . . Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"

"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?"

Pinbad the Pailer was the bloke

Who had a crown, but then it broke.

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

I found this in my Drafts folder, last modified September 20, 2021, with the title “The second baptism.” I post it now, unfinished, for synchromystic reasons.

My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!

Elijah said unto Elisha, "Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee."

And Elisha said, "I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me."

And he said, "Thou hast asked a hard thing."

-- 2 Kings 2:9-10

But Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

And they said unto him, "We can."

And Jesus said unto them, "Ye shall indeed." 

-- Mark 10:38-39

John answered, saying unto them all, "I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire: whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable."

-- Luke 3:16-17

⁂

The prophet John promised a baptism "with the Holy Ghost and with fire" and implicitly identified Jesus as the one who would perform it. I suppose orthodox opinion would connect this prophecy with the extraordinary manifestations that took place at the feast of Pentecost six months after Jesus' death, when "there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2:3-4).

What did John have in mind, though? What could "Holy Ghost" even have meant to a pre-Christian? Well, ghost, spirit, and wind are all the same word in the original Greek, and the very next thing John says is "whose fan is in his hand." A holy wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then a fire to burn up the latter. (For what it's worth, a "rushing mighty wind" also figures in the Pentecost story.)

Wind and fire call to mind Elijah, carried away in a whirlwind of flame, and in fact John, in promising a fire to come after him, may have been thinking of his role (denied by himself but affirmed by Jesus) as the apocalyptic second coming of Elijah.

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings . . . . Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (Mal. 4:1-2, 5).

As John has it, the fire is only for the "chaff," but Malachi and Acts tell a different story. For Malachi, the same fiery Sun that burns up the wicked will heal the righteous. The Christians at Pentecost were engulfed in flames but not consumed. The fire is universal; what differs is how people are affected by it.

"Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble: your breath, as fire, shall devour you. . . .Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly" (Isa. 33:11, 14-15). Breath, in Hebrew as in Greek, is the same word as wind or spirit. For Isaiah, too, the righteous are not spared the fire but are able to live in it. As some old writer cited only as J. Spencer once put it, "Such is the condition of all God's children, . . . true salamanders, that live best in the furnace." (Fellow Mormons can likely guess how I happen to know that quote!)

*

When Elisha was on his deathbed (2 Kgs. 13), the king of Israel came to him and, through streaming tears and with trembling voice, repeated the words Elisha had uttered long before, at the assumption of Elijah: "O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof." Did he think this magic formula would call down the flaming whirlwind of God? Did he see something Elisha didn't? At any rate, no manifestation was forthcoming.

Elisha did not immediately respond, but then -- "Take bow and arrows," he said. "Put thine hand upon the bow, open the window eastward, and shoot."

The king did so.

"The arrow of the Lord's deliverance," breathed Elisha -- and though later writers were to embellish the scene, those were his last words.

They buried him. No whirlwind, no chariot of fire, no flaming horsemen. Another generation passes, and a little more magic passes from the world. "Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?"

*

Jehanne Darc's surname evolved, after her death, into d'Arc -- "of Arc," that is, "of the Bow." A friend sent me the section on Joan of Arc from The Saint Book by Mary Reed Newland. It ends thus:

The pyre, unusually high so all could see, prevented the executioner from giving the customary coup de grâce to shorten her suffering and as the flames rose she cried, "Jesus, Jesus." An English soldier swore that he saw a white bird rise up out of the flames. He stood transfixed until his companions led him away.

What did the white bird mean? Was it her spirit leaving her body, in bird form like an Egyptian ba? No, it was the Dove, and its meaning was that here was another baptism like that of Jesus, but this time by fire. Its implicit message, delivered in the age-old language of signa ex avibus, was, "This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name." (Does that parallel strike you as blasphemous? But why should it? Do you really think Jesus never intended for anyone to follow him?)

The original Dove that flew over Jesus' baptismal waters echoed the dove of Noah flying over the flooded earth. After the Flood, the rainbow -- l'arc-en-ciel, the arc in heaven -- was given as a sign that the earth would never again be flooded. Because, according to later tradition, the next Deluge would not be water but fire. What can survive a deluge? Only an ark. Is it a coincidence that Jeanne d'Arc

And there the draft ends. I would complete it now, but the thing is gone from me.

William Wright has persuaded me to take my recent nonsense poem “With?” more seriously than the spirit in which it was written. I mean, why not? Nonsense writing has long been recognized as a modality of inspiration.

Hinbad the Hailer traveled far

By riding in a yellow car.

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? (Job 38:22-23)

Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand (Isa. 28:2).

Rinbad the Railer, in a sleeper,

Traveled just as far, and cheaper.

Near the end of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman, realizing that his mother doesn't really believe he has been to Basidium but is just humoring him, he determines to take her to see Mr. Bass and go to the Mushroom Planet herself. Just then they are interrupted by a voice from the radio:

"-- and here's a little item that's been giving us a great deal of amusement in the newsroom. A small boy phoned in a few minutes ago to tell us that this morning, very early, before the storm had gotten well under way, but after the big wind had already begun, he looked out of his window and saw a neighbor of his swooped up by the gale and whipped right off into the sky. Up and up he went -- so the little boy said -- turning this way and that, his coat flapping about his ears, until he finally vanished altogether, a mere speck in the clouds." Over the radio came the deep, hearty, jolly voice of the newscaster, relishing to the fullest this ridiculous story. "Well," he finished, still chuckling, "I guess there's just no telling what's going to happen around here. Some storm!"

Mrs. Topman turned, laughing.

"Isn't that funny?" she said. "Imagine!"

"No," said David. "I don't really think it's funny," and he turned and went off to his room to think . . . (p. 148).

Later they go to Mr. Bass's house and meet the boy who made the report:

"I saw him this morning," said he, "but he blew away."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

"Blew away!" burst out Cap'n Tom at last. "Great jumpin' Jehosaphat! What was that ye said -- blew away?"

"Yes, sir," said the little boy respectfully, but in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice. "My mom let me phone the radio station and I told 'em he blew away. I saw him. I looked out of my window when the wind was really getting strong, and I saw Mr. Bass go up in the air like a leaf in the sky --" here the little boy made an upward, fluttering movement of his hand -- "and that was the last of him. After it stopped raining, I came over here to look for him. I looked in his planta . . . in his observatory, and in the closets, and under the bed, and behind the curtains, and down in the cellar, and everywhere, but he's gone. He just blew away" (pp. 157-58).

Mr. Bass reappears in later books in the series, but he is different after blowing away. Most notably, he now has the power to travel by thought -- to think of a place and instantly appear there. The spaceship is no longer necessary. In Time and Mr. Bass, Chuck Masterson asks him what exactly happened that morning when he "blew away," and he explains:

You will recall I told you at the time that I knew I was about to have the most important appointment of my life. I knew somehow that the Ancient Ones had work for me to do, but I did not know what work, nor where. And so when, moved by some strange impulse, I went out into the wind and looked up into the sky, I had a feeling that I was about to leave earth and I was happy and peaceful that I had left my affairs in good order. Then -- away I went, lifted up, up, as if by the wind, but I knew it was a greater power than the wind trying to teach me something I had never experienced before.

At first I was hollow with loneliness, for it seemed to me that surely I had been cast adrift forever in the vast reaches of space. And even after I found myself in my new home on a little planet in a solar system in the galaxy of M 81 in Ursa Major, it was is if I were a blurred picture of Tyco Bass trying to become clear again. I couldn't get focused -- I couldn't get my "me" focused. And when I first used to travel by thought, it exhausted me because I was trying so hard to help my mind and my imagination (because they work together) do something they can do quite easily by themselves. But no longer -- no longer. Now I am focused very clearly and I can do whatever I have to do (p. 24-25).

The parallel to the prophet Elijah, who "went up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kgs. 2:11), is clear. As with Tyco, everyone understands that Elijah was in fact taken up by "a greater power than the wind" and that the experience changed him into something other than an ordinary mortal. In Joseph Smith's terminology, Elijah was "translated" -- a state distinct both from mortality and from the full immortality that comes with resurrection.

Tyco Bass didn't "go to heaven" in the religious sense but rather to a planet in a distant galaxy,among whose people he has some unspecified work to do for the Ancient Ones. He also makes frequent visits to Earth and to Basidium. This fits remarkably well with what Joseph Smith said of translated beings like Elijah:

Many have supposed that the doctrine of translation was a doctrine whereby men were taken immediately into the presence of God, and into an eternal fullness, but this is a mistaken idea. Their place of habitation is that of the terrestrial order, and a place prepared for such characters He held in reserve to be ministering angels unto many planets, and who as yet have not entered into so great a fullness as those who are resurrected from the dead (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 170).

The Mushroom Planet series is full of little surprises like this. Another impressive one is the invention of a "hole in space" several years before the term black hole was coined.

There were in the time of Elijah two rival cults in Israel. The first worshiped a God who may originally have had a name (contemporary scholarship suggests Hadad or Ishkur) but was generally known simply as "the Lord"; the second gave their God a proper name -- but, after centuries of superstitious refusal to pronounce that name or even to write it with its proper vowel points, its precise form is no longer known. Thus it has come about that, in our English Bibles, it is the second of these Gods that is called "the Lord"; while for the first -- the one that the Israelites called "the Lord" -- that Hebrew word is simply transliterated and used as if it were a proper name.

For my part, I shall use the title "Lord" as the Israelites did and deal with the uncertain name of the other God by means of the same expedient resorted to by Victor Hugo, Freud, and others when they had reason to avoid spelling out a particular proper name. Even choosing an initial presents some difficulties, since the Hebrew letter in question can be transliterated as I, J, or Y. Out of deference to Dante (see Paradiso XXVI, 133-138) and to English translations of Moses (Exodus 3:14), I have chosen the first option.

Regarding the detailed differences between the two cults, all we can say for sure is that the followers of the Lord used religious statuary in their worship, while those of I---- tended towards iconoclasm. Any other differences in religious belief or practice are a matter of conjecture.

Everyone will be familiar with the story of the showdown between these two cults on Mount Carmel, instigated by Elijah (whose name means "My God is I----"). The story is related in 1 Kings 18; except for punctuation, paragraphing, and the rectification of names explained above, I follow the King James Version.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, "How long halt ye between two opinions? if I---- be God, follow him: but if the Lord, then follow him."

And the people answered him not a word.

Then said Elijah unto the people, "I, even I only, remain a prophet of I----; but the Lord’s prophets are 450 men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of I----: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God."

And all the people answered and said, "It is well spoken."

When the prophets of the Lord were unsuccessful in obtaining an "answer by fire," Elijah ridiculed them and their God.

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of the Lord from morning even until noon, saying, "O Lord, hear us." 

But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, "Cry aloud: for he is a God; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

Elijah was, of course, more successful in eliciting from his God an apparently supernatural conflagration. (We are told that the fire consumed even the stones of the altar!)

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, "I----, he is the God; I----, he is the God." 

And Elijah said unto them, "Take the prophets of the Lord; let not one of them escape."

And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

Of course that wasn't the end of the conflict. Magic tricks never really converted anyone, nor has making martyrs ever been an effective way of stamping out an unwanted religion. Attempts were naturally made to avenge the 450 murdered prophets, and the feud between the two religions continued for some centuries. In the end, though, so complete was the victory of I---- that in modern languages it is he who is known simply as "the Lord," while his onetime rival, his cult now long extinct, is remembered only as a cartoonish devil once worshiped by idiots in the distant past.


One or two centuries after Elijah, the prophet known as Epimenides appeared in Crete. No one really knows where he came from; the story that has come down to us is that he just emerged from a cave one day, having slept there for 57 years. Although his line "Cretans, always liars" later became the basis of a logical paradox ("If a Cretan says Cretans always lie, is he telling the truth?"), it seems highly unlikely that this tattoo-covered shaman was in fact an ethnic Cretan. We can only speculate as to his true origins, but to me such sparse information as we have suggests that he may have been of Scythian extraction. At any rate, he actually put the line "Cretans, always liars" in the mouth of Minos -- a genuine Cretan -- in one of his poems, so the paradox is saved. In the poem, Minos berates his countrymen for having dared to maintain a "tomb of Zeus."

They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.

Zeus is supposed to have been born in Crete, and apparently he once had a tomb there as well! Could "Zeus" have been a real man who lived and died in Crete in the distant past, one of such blessed memory that he was gradually deified in the minds of those who survived him, coming to be thought of as a god, and eventually as God? It's interesting to speculate, but at any rate, by the time Epimenides came along, Zeus was God and God was Zeus, and a "tomb of Zeus" was blasphemous
nonsense.

Later, around the 3rd century BC, Aratus of Soli began his Phaenomena, a didactic poem on the rather unpromising subjects of astronomy and meteorology, with a prayer to Zeus:

From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring; [. . .] Wherefore him do men ever worship first and last. Hail, O Father, mighty marvel, mighty blessing unto men. Hail to thee and to the Elder Race! Hail, ye Muses, right kindly, every one! But for me, too, in answer to my prayer direct all my lay, even as is meet, to tell the stars.

As readers versed in the New Testament will already have divined, the only reason such obscure figures as Epimenides and Aratus are on my radar is that they are quoted there, in Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens as reported in Acts 17.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him "we live, and move, and have our being;" as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring." 

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Although Paul begins with his famous reference to the Unknown God -- implying that the true God is someone over and above the named and "known" gods of the Greek pantheon -- he goes on to quote with approval two different poems about Zeus as if they are about the true God -- which, in my judgment, they are. Where an Elijah would have held Zeus up to ridicule and insisted that his own, better God be worshiped instead, Paul took a different tack. Never did he say that Zeus was a false god, a devil, or a figment of his worshipers imagination. He did not stoop so low as to quibble over names. (As recently as the 18th century, certain French pamphleteers were maintaining that their Dieu -- etymologically, Zeus! -- was the true deity, while the English God was nothing but another name for Lucifer; before you laugh, think if you have ever been guilty of the same thing.) Paul took it for granted that the Athenians already worshiped God and attempted only to correct and expand their ideas regarding him. So Dante says of the Greek pagans not that they worshiped false gods but that "they did not worship God in fitting ways."

Paul, like Elijah, triumphed in the end. It took a century or two, but his God eventually supplanted Zeus entirely.


Well, whose approach was right? Was Zeus God? Was Baal? Is Allah? . . . Is Yahweh?

Logically, either answer to each of those questions can be made consistent with the same facts, since there is no logical difference between believing in something that does not exist and believing false things about something that does exist. When, as often happens, I receive a letter addressed to Mr. Tychanievich or Mr. Pychonievich, is that the name of a person who does not exist, or is it my own name, spelt wrong? Is it more correct for a Yuletide spoilsport to say "there's no such thing as Santa Claus" or "You have some inaccurate beliefs about Saint Nicholas of Myra"? Should I call myself an atheist (which I am, when theism is narrowly defined) or simply say that my beliefs about God are somewhat unorthodox?

The question of which approach to take, then -- of whether to be an Elijah or a Paul -- is a practical rather than a factual one, a question of rhetorical or pedagogical technique, and different situations may call for different approaches. Looking back, and setting aside our squeamishness about mass murder, we can perhaps say that both Elijah and Paul made the choices that were strategically "right."

Note: Synchronicity alert: Just after writing the Epimenides part of this post, which mentions in passing the Liar Paradox associated with his name, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read his then-new post "Does the I Ching have a personality?" He quoted an interview of Philip K. Dick by someone called Mike, including this exchange:

Phil: No, I don’t use the I Ching anymore. I’ll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I’ve ever known. [. . .] One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. 

In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn’t mean to say that. But it had already –

Mike: Then you get a paradox. [. . .] That’s the paradox. It’s lying when it says it’s lying.

Note added: I should make it clear that the form of my question is deliberate: not "Was Jesus really the Messiah?" but "Was the Messiah really Jesus?" I wanted it to have the same form as "Is Zeus really God?" -- where the status of Zeus is being questioned by asking if he is God, the status of God being taken for granted. In the same way, I am taking the divinity of Jesus for granted and questioning the idea of the Messiah, not vice versa.