From the Narrow Desert: Figs

Showing posts with label Figs. Show all posts

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Temple clothing in reverse, green shooting star, green figs

It's been 22 years since I last set foot in a Mormon temple, and the distinctive clothing worn there isn't something I think about very often. Basically, it's all white, with the exception of a small apron, which is green. The outfit for men includes what looks like a baker's hat.

I like to have some idea of the physiognomy of the authors I read, and so I've been trying, without success so far, to find a photo of Daymon Smith. One correspondent suggested that if I couldn't see his face I could at least hear his voice by looking up an interview he did some time back on the Mormon Stories podcast. I found a four-part series of such interviews, recorded in 2010, and listened to some of them. The third episode dealt with the corporate side of the CJCLDS and ended with a story about how economically motivated decisions had led first to a glut and then to a shortage of temple clothing.

The interviews were very well conducted and interesting, and I realized I'd never listened to anything else from Mormon Stories before, so I decided to give them a try. I started with what YouTube told me was their most popular episode: a two-part interview with Brinley Jensen, who served as a missionary during the birdemic hysteria and was sent home early due to mental health issues. The interview was quite engaging in human-interest terms, and I listened to the whole thing. A few minutes into the second part they mention temple clothing, and specifically that it's all white with a green apron:

John: So you're in white, you're dressed in white.

Brinley: With the green, yeah.

Margi: Apron.

I was listening to this as I washed the dishes, and just then I noticed the logo on my dish detergent:

All green, including a baker's hat, with a white apron -- the Mormon temple color scheme in reverse. The brand is 小綠人, "Little Green Man," and they don't make any food products, so I'm not sure why their mascot is dressed as a baker. Because they use baking soda, I guess?

The Mormon apron is green because it represents the fig-leaf aprons worn by Adam and Eve. Here the whole man is green, so I thought, "I guess he's a fig-man."

Then I noticed the green shooting star that is also part of the logo. Last year I saw a green fireball in the sky, so later, after I'd finished the dishes, I looked up my post about it, called "Once in a red moon?" because my green fireball had been on the same day as a "Blood Moon" eclipse in the U.S. Ben left a comment connecting the red moon and shooting star with figs:

After the blood moon of Rev 6:12

6:13

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind

Untimely figs would of course be green figs, which have come up many times on this blog.

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."

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

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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.

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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.

Friday, September 23, 2022

The voice of the turtle, the green figs, and the Blessed Virgin again

In my September 1 post "I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove," I wrote about being followed by a bird of that description (which, by the way, has not reappeared since I wrote that post). Connecting it with the red dove that appears on the Rider-Waite Magician card, which I had interpreted as a symbol of prayer, I took it as an injunction to pray more -- in particular, to be stricter with myself about praying the Rosary every single day. In my original post about the red dove on Waite's card, I had quoted Waite's reference to "flos campi and lilium convallium" -- which I encountered again when I looked up "the voice of the turtle" in the Bible and found that it was in Song of Solomon 2:12, and that that chapter begins "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys." I noted in my post that I had thought "Rose of Sharon" and "Lily of the Valleys" were Marian titles used in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, but that in fact they are not. I also noted the reference in v. 13 to "green figs," synching with my own recent experience with green figs.

Today, on a whim, I started reading La mère de Dieu (1844), an early devotional work written by the then-obscure Alphonse Louis Constant six years before he took up magic and began to be known as Éliphas Lévi. Beginning on p. 52, Lévi describes an imaginative scene in which the young Mary, only three years of age, feels drawn to the Temple, enters it, and receives a revelation of her destiny as the future Mother of God. In describing her rapture, and her spiritual communication with the unborn Christ, Lévi draws heavily on the language of the Song of Solomon. On p. 57, I found this:

This is a very close paraphrase of Song 2:12-13 -- a passage which I had connected with praying to Mary, but only very indirectly, by way of an obscure detail on a Tarot card and an incorrect memory of the content of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Here is Lévi connecting the same passage with Mary very directly.

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Many sparrows, again, and various other sync links

In my August 7 post "Standing in the Hall of Fame, and Christ at the door," I recount how, looking for Greg Olsen's painting of Jesus knocking at a green door, I ran across his painting of Jesus with sparrows.

The painting is called Even a Sparrow and refers to Jesus' saying about God taking note even of the fall of a sparrow. It made me think of two things, though: first, the apocryphal story (Gospel of James; also alluded to twice in the Quran) of the child Jesus making 12 sparrows of clay and making them come to life; and second, a childhood dream in which I had written a book (the second in a trilogy) called Many Sparrows.

By "coincidence," hours after seeing the painting and thinking of the legend of the clay sparrows, I read an allegorical interpretation of that same legend in a book I have been reading, Histoire de la magie by Éliphas Lévi.

Today, wanting to look up a Bible reference for another post, I opened the BibleGateway website. Guess what their "verse of the day" is.

The book I dreamed of having written was called Many Sparrows; Olsen's painting is called Even a Sparrow. Luke 12:7 is one of two verses in the Bible that include the phrase many sparrows (the other is the parallel passage in Matt. 10:31), and it is the only one that also includes the word even. I know this because I searched for even sparrow to see if Olsen's title was in the Bible. Besides Luke 12:7, the only other hit was this:

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God (Ps. 84:3).

This is synchronistically relevant because of my recent visit to Guashan Shaolin temple (related in "When that gorilla beats his chest"), in which I entered through a green door into a room that was supposed to be closed. (This same room also has a circular doorway.) Just outside this room, baskets had been hung from the eaves for swallows to nest in, and several of the birds were doing so. Note also the expression "my King, and my God," which ties into the the "God vs. King" movie poster referenced in "When that gorilla beats his chest."

On August 6, I posted "The Wizard at the green door," and Debbie left a comment in which she discussed the etymology of knock and particularly mentioned its figurative meaning of "deprecate, put down." This made me think of the common expression, "Don't knock it till you've tried it" and how it takes on a different meaning if "it" is assumed to be a door. Both at the temple and at the abandoned restaurant, I had entered a green door without permission -- just "trying" the door instead of knocking on it.

Yesterday, August 8, I posted "Now, O now, in this brown land," a train of thought initiated by listening to a version of "(Dont' Fear) The Reaper" set to an instrumental track by P!nk. It turns out that the instrumentals come from "Try" (a song I'd never heard). This is the chorus:

Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame
Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned
But just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die
You've gotta get up and try, try, try

On one of my don't-knock-it-till-you've-tried-it visits to the abandoned restaurant, I found the wall covered with figs, and I picked one as a souvenir. I have no experience with fig trees, and thus I was caught by surprise when I broke the stem and a gout of sticky white latex spurted out onto my hand. I wiped it off as best I could and washed my hands later.

This morning, I had an English tutoring session with a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for students of English and often asks me questions about it. Today he had some questions about an article on, of all things, figs. The fact that fig latex is a skin irritant was mentioned.

"A liquid that is found inside the fig tree can cause burning when it touches our skin." Well, so what? Just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die.

The fig article also mentioned that "Adam and Eve wore fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, and some believe Eve's forbidden fruit was a fig, not an apple." Adam has been part of the recent sync stream because of his connection with Hercules and Michael. The fig/apple connection is also reinforced by Fig Newtons (also featured in the magazine article), the name Newton being more commonly associated with the apple.

About a week ago, I had a dream about the businessman who showed me the fig article today. In the dream, he was at my house and I was hoping he would leave soon because I was expecting someone else. Finally, he did leave, and immediately the person I had been waiting for arrived. It was the man who had been my best friend's father and my Scoutmaster when I was young. He also happened to be an FBI agent, and in the dream I thought of him only in that latter capacity. He drove up to my house in a shiny purplish-silver sports car, and I though, "It's Mr. Graff from the FBI. I'd better go with him." I got in the backseat, which was very cramped, and asked the person sitting in front of me (one of my fellow Scouts from those days and a personal enemy) to move his seat forward and give me some leg-room. He said it was already as far forward as it would go, and that he didn't have any leg-room, either.

I mention this dream because I almost never think about Mr. Graff these days -- or Brother Graff as we called him as a fellow Mormon -- but I thought about him today because clay sparrows made me think of clay pigeons. Despite being an FBI agent, a colonel in the Marine Corps, and an excellent marksman in general, Brother Graff was just terrible at skeet shooting, and so that quickly became the Scouts' favorite activity because it was so entertaining to outshoot the master. One of Brother Graff's children (my friend's younger brother) was so little that if he held a shotgun properly, the kick would knock him flat, so he always shot "from the hip" -- holding the gun off to his side so that when it kicked it would swing back without hitting him. And he still nailed more pigeons than his father!