From the Narrow Desert: Gematria

Showing posts with label Gematria. Show all posts

Friday, May 17, 2024

The 96, the 48, and the white bull

In his May 15 post "Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross," William Wright writes that in Tolkien's writings there were originally 144 elves who were invited to Aman. Two-thirds (called the Eldar) accepted the invitation, while one-third (called the Avari) declined. (As the Babylon Bee recently complained, "every time a group of elves does something they get a new name!") Two-thirds of 144 is 96, a number which William goes on to discuss extensively. He doesn't mention the number 48, but that's how many Avari there would have been.

The number 48 is potentially interesting because of the recent emphasis on the word buy. ("'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry.") In Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) -- where you add up the value of a word by counting A as 1, B as 2, and so on -- we get these interesting equations:

buy = 2 + 21 + 25 = 48
sell = 19 + 5 + 12 + 12 = 48
trade = 20 + 18 + 1 + 4 + 5 = 48

I was thinking about this as I ate my lunch today. After lunch, I went to the place where I had parked my motorcycle, only to find that a big white SUV had parked me in. Motorcycles are maneuverable, and I was able to wriggle my way out, but it took some time and was annoying.

The thought popped into my head, "Parking you in was a good way to make sure you notice this particular car." Then I realized that I hadn't really processed the car at all beyond "white SUV," so I turned and looked at it:

I noticed the number 96 first and then the word bull. (The numeral 1 looks like a lowercase l -- so if you wanted to write "BULL 96" in ABC-1234 format, this is how you'd do it.) The moon Europa has been in the sync-stream of late, and what is the Europa of mythology best known for? Being carried away by a big white bull:

This event is commonly known as the Rape of Europa. Speaking of rape, after discovering the novella Europa Affair (about the moon, not the mythical figure), I checked its Amazon page. The top review gave it one star, citing "violence against women":

For William Wright, Europa has to do with Númenor, while the number 96 has reference to elves, so I'm not sure what to make of seeing them together on that SUV, but I note it for future reference.

Note added (May 18):

The YouTube algorithm served up this video, a commentary on the symbolism of Under the Silver Lake, a 2018 movie I'd never heard of:

In Under the Silver Lake, there's a scene with a white Volkswagen Rabbit, and the video emphasizes that this is a white rabbit, as in Alice or The Matrix:

Sam's whole journey begins after Sarah disappears by trying to find her following three girls literally driving around in a white Rabbit -- you know, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette that drive a white convertible Rabbit, so he's following three women in a white Rabbit. He's following a white Rabbit.

This is conceptually very similar to my post above, where a white SUV with bull on its license plate represents the white bull of Greek myth.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

The number of Enoch's years and of Abraxas

If you calculate the S:E:G: value of this post's title (i.e., add up the ordinal values of its constituent letters, where A = 1 and Z = 26), you'll find it adds up to 365. According to Genesis, that's how many years Enoch lived before "God took him" (Gen. 5:23-24), and it's also the value of the name Abraxas in Greek isopsephia. I discovered, or contrived, this many years ago.

In the past few days, I discovered the YouTube channel of Galahad Eridanus and watched all his videos. He talks a lot about Abraxas, emphasizing not only that his name adds up to 365, but that it consists of 7 letters -- thus encoding a year and a week simultaneously. (He mentions this in more than one video, and I can't be bothered to check which ones. Just watch them all; there aren't many of them, and they're all very well done.)

Today, I randomly decided to weigh myself. Our bathroom scale is an odd one. It gives weights to the tenth of a kilogram, but some bizarre malfunction causes it to display double the weight of whatever is put on it. I tested this pretty thoroughly when the malfunction first started (which was during a period of poltergeist activity) and confirmed that it is still perfectly accurate so long as you divide the number it gives you by two.

Today it informed me that I weigh 147.3 kilograms. Dividing that by two, we get 73.65 -- that is, 7 followed by 365.

At the same time that I've been watching videos about Abraxas and dealing with all these syncs, I've also been working (as a sort of tangent that spun off from my study of the Book of Mormon) on a radically different timeline for the biblical Exodus, which presupposes that the Israelites were in Egypt for a far shorter time than the 430 years given in Deuteronomy. This grew organically out of my Book of Mormon work and has nothing to do with the Abraxas stuff.

According to Joseph Smith, Enoch didn't live 365 years; he lived 430 years -- 65 years before the birth of Missile Man and 365 after.

As mentioned in my 2022 post "It's April 27," this turned out to be significant when I discovered that I had posted about a dream of a many-eyed whale on the 430th anniversary of John Dee and Edward Kelley's vision of a many-eyed whale. The term Enochian is synonymous with the work of John Dee.

All those John Dee whale syncs seem to be bubbling back up to the surface. Whales are appearing again, as are Aleister Crowley (who claimed, credibly in my opinion, to be Edward Kelley reincarnated), Choronzon, magical stones, etc.

Slow down, sync fairies! I can only keep track of so many threads at once.

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Following the white rabbit

In a comment on "Knock, knock, Neo," ben drew my attention to the fact that rabbit and door have the same S:E:G: value, namely 52. I then noticed that heart also has this same value. (ben had posted an image of a rabbit with a heart for ears.) Another common English word with an S:E:G: value of 52 is hello.

I live in Taiwan, where the Year of the Rabbit has just begun, and so lots and lots of things I see every day are decorated with rabbits, many of them white. Right now, seeing a white rabbit doesn't even register as a "coincidence"; it's like seeing a reindeer in December. So the sync fairies have to communicate indirectly, through gematria.

Today, I stopped at a traffic light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a black helmet with a white heart and the word hello, also in white, printed on the back. One of these would have been beneath my notice; two together definitely constitutes a white rabbit sync.

Hearts are typically red, not white. The white heart, combined with the recent syncs related to St. Valentine's Day, reminded me that in Taiwan, under Japanese influence I believe, March 14 is observed as "White Valentine's Day." Women give gifts to men on Valentine's Day, and men give gifts to women on White Valentine's Day, a month later -- or maybe it's the other way around; I can never remember.

In my "Knock, knock, Neo" post, I embedded a YouTube video of the relevant scene from The Matrix. If you click through to the YouTube page, you'll see that the video was posted by a user called TheMatrixFan314 -- 3/14, White Valentine's Day.

St. Valentine's Day entered the sync stream when I read a story called "Bad Cat" and noted that BAD = 214 = St. Valentines Day. (I made the connection because of my sister's name, Kat Valentine.) I was thinking of the date 2/14, of course -- but it also happens to be true that the S:E:G: value of Saint Valentine's Day is 214.

White Valentine's Day -- the day before March 15 -- must be the date when Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, says, "Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?" Brutus = Ides of March = 101. Is not tomorrow = 214.

The whole exchange is this:

BRUTUS.
Get you to bed again; it is not day.
Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?

LUCIUS.
I know not, sir.

BRUTUS.
Look in the calendar, and bring me word.

LUCIUS.
I will, sir.

Look in the calendar, and bring me word = 314.

How did I know that? I don't know, I just have these gematria hunches. At first I misremembered the line as "Look you in the calendar, and bring me word" (a strange mistake to make, since it doesn't scan) and was disappointed to find that the S:E:G: value was too high. Then I thought to delete you, and it came out perfectly. Then I looked up the line and found that you was never there in the first place!

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Green Lantern’s yellow pterodactyls — and my own

In order to get my hands on the story posted in "Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!" (from Green Lantern vol. 2 #30, July 1964) I had to download a huge zipped file of more than 200 Green Lantern comic books. Although the alien pterodactyls from that story are obviously not supposed to be recurring villains -- the story ends with them giving up all attempts to interfere on Earth, since any such interference will be impossible for the next 100 million years -- I nevertheless thought I should look through all the other issues I had downloaded to see if they did reappear after all.

They don't, but there's another alien pterodactyl story in vol. 2 #88 (March 1972). Yes, that's number eighty-eight. Like the first pterodactyl story, it's written by John Broome and penciled by Gil Kane, but it's a completely different race of alien pterodactyls this time. Instead of pterodactyls on a distant planet trying to arrange for Earth pterodactyls to take over Earth, we have pterodactyls on Venus menacing cavemen on Venus, and Green Lantern is sent to save his fellow humans. Apparently humans and pterodactyls just sort of spontaneously evolve on lots of different planets.

In #30, Green Lantern can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because of the "energo-shield" their leader has created using his "super-mentality." In #88, he can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because they're yellow. The color yellow, as you may know, is Green Lantern's kryptonite. His power is basically unlimited unless it involves anything yellow.

In #30, Green Lantern defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them -- taking them back to the Mesozoic, where they see a very scary T. rex that weakens the "super-mentality" enough to allow Green Lantern to strike. In #88, he also defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them.-- conjuring up a giant illusory hawk which chases them into a cave, and then collapsing the entrance to the cave.

In #30, the pterodactyls are referred to as pteros -- and I noted that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as Tarot, namely 74. In #88, they are called bird-raiders or just raiders, and raiders also has an S:E:G: value of 74. (The longer name, bird-raiders, has an S:E:G: value of 107 -- which is the value of The Tarot, and of each of the three parts of the Tarot: the trumps, the Minor Arcana, and the the Fool card.)

Just hours before discovering this Green Lantern story, I read H. G. Wells's 1896 short story "The Sea Raiders," which also uses the word raiders to refer to monstrous animals (man-eating cephalopods in Wells's case). Wells came up in the last Green Lantern pterodactyl post, too.

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The main thing that got me, though, was the fact that the story is about yellow pterodactyls. I mentioned in my last post that "pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me." Well, it's specifically yellow pterosaurs -- even more specifically, quite small yellow pterosaurs, possibly juveniles of Pterodactylus or some closely related genus (not the giant Pteranodon-type animals of the Green Lantern stories).

"Ghosts of pterosaurs" -- for lack of any better way of describing a sort of experience I am really at a loss to classify -- have been an occasional feature of my life for a long time, especially when I lived in Maryland, although I've had two experiences of this type in Taiwan as well (one of which I have blogged about), but my big "pterodactyl experience" took place around 2002 or 2003 at Ohio State University, when touching a fossil caused me to have a very brief but extremely vivid vision of a living pterodactylus, bright yellow in color, in its natural habitat, with a few others flying about in the background. The sheer alienness of the scene -- the color of the sky, the quality of the light, the humming of the insects, the feeling of goodness -- overwhelmed me. It lasted a second or two and was gone, and I was left with an intense feeling of grief -- that that world was gone, that all the pterodactyls were dead, that the universe would go on forever without them. (I was an atheist at the time.)

That little yellow pterodactylus has been there in the back of my mind ever since. I think about it every time I read Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, imagining resurrected and glorified pterodactyls singing "Holy, holy, holy" around the Throne. I have sometimes used Flavius Pterodactylus as a username, the etymological meaning of Flavius being "yellow." I don't know why this particular creature is resurfacing now -- particularly through the goofy medium of a Green Lantern comic book! -- but it's got to mean something. A yellow pterodactyl can never be for me anything other than a good omen. Teros, not Deros.

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Here's the story. I'm only posting the part that takes place on Venus, not the frame story about Green Lantern's love life.

Friday, February 24, 2023

Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!

I finally managed to track down the complete story of Green Lantern, the pterosaurs, and the time-tunnel. It wasn't easy to find, but if you've got WILL POWER you can overcome every obstacle and difficulty in life!

The synopsis I read earlier, which said Green Lantern was facing alien pterodactyls, was an oversimplification. There are intelligent alien pterodactyls in the story, but they live many light years away and can't invade Earth directly. However, they have the technology to observe distant worlds, and millions of years ago, they noticed that primitive pterodactyls had evolved on Earth. Wanting to ensure that their kind will dominate that distant planet, they direct "a blot of instantaneous M-energy" toward Earth, knowing that "when the M-energy strikes one or more of our race on Earth, it will endow them with super-mental powers! They and their descendants will be able to conquer all their enemies with ease!" I'm not too clear on how they ensured this M-energy would hit pterodactyls and only pterodactyls, but you know what they say: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from bad writing.

However, the best-laid schemes o' alien pterodactlys gang aft agley. Having lost sight of the Earth for millions of years due to an "ionic disturbance," the alien pterodactyls finally regain contact and are dismayed to discover that Earth no longer has any pterodactlys at all! Apparently their energy beam missed! Well, mistakes happen, and space villains are notoriously bad at aiming their ray-based weaponry. Luckily, there is a Plan B for bringing about an Age of Pterodactyls on what is for them Planet B.

To give their "brethren on Earth a second chance to conquer the planet," the alien pterodactyls first send a "time-reversal beam" which temporarily sends a small area of the Earth back to the Mesozoic, causing a small number of pterodactyls to reappear. They then send a second M-energy beam, and this time they succeed in striking a pterodactyl! Armed with "super-mentality," this pterodactyl takes control of the other, still primitive, pterodactlys and begins wreaking havoc in the 20th century. His super-mentality also enables him to create an "energo-shield" which makes him and his fellow pterodactyls invincible, even against Green Lantern's Power Ring.

Since it is the "super-mentality" of their leader that makes the pterodactyls invincible, Green Lantern needs to find a way of sapping the lead ptero's mental force through fear. That's where the time-tunnel strategy comes in. He leads them through the time-tunnel back to the Mesozoic, where they encounter their ancient ancestral enemy, the T. rex. The fear this induces weakens the super-mentality enough to allow Green Lantern to defeat them, after which he returns to the 20th century.

Conveniently, just after this, Earth passes out of the alien pterodactyls' "scanner sight -- not to return again for 100 million years!" It's not clear why this is a big deal to a species that has time-travel technology, but apparently it is. The ptero king says, "I propose we abandon our hope of making our fellow-pterodactyls masters of Earth! Nothing else to be done," to which his subjects reply, "We agree, O superior one, we agree!" The End.

And thus we see the triumph of those who have Will Power over those who do not. If those space-pterodactyls had been a little less quick to abandon hope -- if they had only realized the importance of keeping on doing the thing that has you licked -- we might all be speaking ptero right now. Will Power, boys and girls, gets you what you want. Lack of Will Power loses you what you've got.

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Throughout this story, Green Lantern refers to his enemies by the abbreviated name ptero. This is obviously a sync with Tero, former surname of Mr. T, and with the Deros and Teros of the Shaver Mystery. Like the alien pteros, the Deros use various sorts of "rays" as their main weapon.

Ptero is also interesting because of the gematria connection. (As noted before, Green Lantern, time-tunnel, will power, and pterosaur all add up to 133 in S:E:G:.) Pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me, and a very long time ago (c. 2003?) I noticed that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as its homophone tarot, and I even designed a handful of "ptero cards."

Pterosaurs in a superhero comic also reminded me of this classic meme:

What's the name of this pterosaur guy Spider-Man is talking to? Sauron. What is Green Lantern's only weapon against the pterosaurs? The Power Ring.

When I went to Know Your Meme to find the above meme, I found this:

This meme format reminded me a lot of something from "Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern," from the same comic book issue as the time-tunnel story. I'll upload it later and add it to this post. For now, you get this instead:

Update: Here it is.

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And now, finally, what you came here to see:

I don't know about you, but I would totally shell out for tickets to see a movie version of this.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!

In "Green Door, Green Lantern," that B-list superhero came to my attention because the emblem on his chest (in the Silver-Age version) looks like 101, the S:E:G: value of the phrase green door.

Searching for green lantern time travel, I had found a page from a comic book in which Green Lantern travels back in time and sees a T. rex. Later, trying to find the full story online, I ended up browsing a lot of old comic books. I found this in Green Lantern #1.

When you've spent enough time playing around with gematria, you develop a sort of sense for it, just like some mathematicians can tell if a large number "looks prime" even before doing any calculations. As soon as I saw this page, I could just somehow see that will power and Green Lantern had the same S:E:G: value, even though I couldn't have told you what that value was. I did the math and confirmed it.

Will power = Green Lantern = 133.

Following a second hunch, I calculated the S:E:G: for the title of H. G. Wells's most famous novel.

The Time Machine = 133

The Green Lantern comic I had been looking for -- unsuccessfully -- was this one:

Green Lantern's "time-tunnel" is obviously a close cousin to Wells's machine, and sure enough:

time-tunnel = 133

S:E:G: is what drew my attention to Green Lantern in the first place -- but the number 101, not 133. In my original "Green Door 101" post, I had noted this:

Eight six = 101. Eight is the lemniscate, and six as in 666, a number which is also part of this sync stream.

Why "eight six"? Why not "six eight"? Just a lucky random choice, I guess. After discovering that The Time Machine is 133, I naturally checked the name of its author:

H. G. Wells = 86

H. G. Wells is 86; eight six is 101; 101 is the Green Lantern logo; Green Lantern is 133; and 133 is The Time Machine, which is by H. G. Wells. What is impressive is not that such a convoluted six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection exists, but that I discovered it so quickly and easily.

The "eight six" connection made me curious about the gematria values of other spelled-out numbers, which led to this mildly interesting coincidence:

one three three = 146

one four six = 146

"One three three" was the first number I tried, and it led me directly to a number that encodes its own gematria value. A decade or so ago I made an exhaustive search for such numbers, and there aren't many of them. I only found two, if memory serves:

two hundred and fifty-one = 251
two hundred and fifty-nine = 259

I had only looked at fully written-out numbers of the above type, though -- "two hundred and fifty-one," not "two five one" -- and so had not discovered 146.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

242, and crabs

In "The Doors" (January 16), I note that the S:E:G: values of the four basic constituents of material reality are all combinations of the digits 4 and 7: space (44), time (47), energy (74), and matter (77). The sum of those four numbers is 242.

In "Hurry up the cakes" (January 22), I recount running into a picture of a moon landing cake together with a black Special Forces jersey with the number 242 on it. The number 242 was a sync because of the connection to the number mentioned in "The Doors." The moon landing cake was a sync because of a recent comment (also January 22) in which, responding to a picture of the three wise men in a blue desert, WanderingGondola noted the unusual color and (evidently alluding to the expression "blue moon") wrote, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?" Well, either a desert or a dessert.

In "'The Open Doors' syncs" (January 26), I encounter a reference to the song "Blue Moon" on page 242 of a book called Revelations. I note that, since the S:E:G value of revelation is 121, the number 242 represents two revelations.

Today I had lunch at a cheap dumpling chain called 八方雲集. The name is a four-character idiom meaning "gathering from all over" -- literally "clouds gathering from the eight directions," referring to the the cardinal and intercardinal points of the compass. It occurred to me that eight directions in two dimensions was an instance of a more general rule: in an n-dimensional space, there will be a total of 3ⁿ - 1 cardinal and intercardinal directions. For three dimensions, the number is 26; for four dimensions, it is 80; for five dimensions, it is 242.

There's an election coming soon in Taiwan, and while I was out randonauting yesterday I passed many campaign posters. In order to make voting more convenient for illiterate people (really!), each candidate is assigned a number. For almost the entirety of my ramble, the only ads I saw were for candidates number 6 and 8. I took note of this because those two numbers have been synchronistically relevant of late, and because for some reason both candidates included the same English word, super, on their billboards.

I just kept seeing 6 and 8, 6 and 8, again and again. Finally, right at the end, I caught a glimpse of some different candidate numbers in the distance.

It's not an ad for an individual candidate, but for the ruling (anti-China, pro-globohomo) Democratic Progressive Party. It features three of their candidates who are running for different positions, which is what makes it possible for two of them to have the same number. At the bottom of the billboard is a reminder to vote yes in the referendum to give 18-year-olds the vote

This last one isn't about 242, but I'm just going to tack it on here. It's a striking enough coincidence to post about, but not striking enough to get a post of its own.

I passed a seafood wholesaler that has two huge crab sculptures on the exterior wall. Seconds later, I stopped at a red light and saw a couple of bumper stickers that made me snap a photo and then turn around and photograph the seafood shop, too.

These are the stickers:

The Chinese reads 陸蟹出沒減速慢行, "land crab area, slow down." KTNP is Kenting National Park, in a part of Taiwan quite far from where I live. When I searched for the Chinese to try to get clear images of the stickers, the first result was this.

That says "101T Kenting," then the text of the sign, and then the photographer's name. I haven't been able to find out what "101T" means in this context, but in my February 11 post "Green Door 101," I noted that the S:E:G value of Cancer the Crab is 101.

Here's the seafood place, maybe 200 meters from where I saw the crab-sticker car. Like the car, it features two different crab species, one on the left and one of the right.

I guess there is a 242 connection after all, since the S:E:G: for crab is 24. Two crabs would be 24 × 2.

Note added: This post sent me to YouTube to rewatch the Onion classic "Experts Agree, Giant, Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat." This showed up in the sidebar:

I know it's hard to believe now, but The Onion actually used to be pretty good. It was the Babylon Bee of its time.

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Green Door 101

A 4plebs search on the string green door led me to this schizo thread about gematria supposedly being used as a code by Masons or something.

>The numbers are broadcasted to other members as a calling sign
don't believe me? mess around with the numbers and see for yourself.
> 660/606 = locksmith, aquarium, green door, etc.
it's literally all fucking there where are the experts for this shit? I have no idea what I'm looking at but I KNOW it's significant to this.

There followed a few screenshots of seemingly random words and phrases with their gematria values in various systems. One of these screenshots included two strings of interest to me:

Of course the inclusion of green door is no surprise, since I found the post by searching for that, but red door is there, too. No other door colors are included, and as you can see the rest of the words are just completely random things like bookbinder and finger lakes. The rightmost column is Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:, where each letter of the alphabet has its ordinal value). The S:E:G: value of green door is 101.

Although the post itself is completely schizo, with the "obvious" significance of these words and numbers apparent to no one but OP himself. Still, the coincidence of running into a red door as well as a green one was enough to send me to a gematria database to look up other things that add up to 101.

First, your basic door stuff: green door = doorway = portals = 101.

Then, a surprising hit: lemniscate = the eights = 101. Lemniscate syncs have been closely associated with my Green Door syncs, and I've pretty consistently used that rather unusual word, lemniscate, only rarely using other terms like "infinity sign," "figure-eight," etc.

Relevant to the comments here: Melchizedek = Tom Hanks = Neo, the One = 101. Debbie mentions Tom Hanks and The Matrix. I reference the so-called "seal of Melchizedek" as having something to do with the lemniscate.

Eight six = 101. Eight is the lemniscate, and six as in 666, a number which is also part of this sync stream.

Dinosaur = 101. Mini T. rex. "Everybody walk the dinosaur."

Panthers = 101. In "The Door in the Wall," that's one of the first things the main character sees when he goes through the Green Door: "there were two great panthers there... Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid."

Ides of March = 101. My birthday. Also see "Beware the ideas of Mach!"

Five o'clock = 101. "Five O'clock World" by the Vogues.

Cancer the Crab = 101. The astrological symbol for Cancer looks like 69 rotated 90 degrees. As a commenter pointed out here, "b and q are like 6 and 9."

Fire opals = 101. Central to the plot of The Valley of Arcana.

The planet = 101. There's planet n00b.

Whopper = 101. In my original "The Doors" post, I found a red and green door hidden in the word Whopper.

On top of all this, just before discovering this post and looking up the gematria, I had been talking about Taipei 101 (the tallest building in Taiwan) with some of my students. We were reviewing some vocabulary, and I was trying to elicit the word view. "If you go up to the top of Taipei 101, you can look out the window and see the whole city. You really have a great -- what? -- up there." One of the kids raised his hand and said, "I know! Animal shelter!"

So, another schizo list of random words presented as if significant -- but at least mine is annotated!

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Hurry up the cakes!

I was thinking about the recent reappearance of the Green Door, "It's time," etc. -- all the sync themes from around August of last year -- and the thought occurred to me that I am waiting for a certain other person to take decisive action, and that this person needs to "hurry up the cakes."

I'm not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head -- it's an old Engrish meme from 2005 -- but it did, which led me to run an image search on the phrase.

The first several results were, naturally, pictures of the "Hurry Up the Cakes" T-shirt, but scrolling down, I found these three images in the third and fourth rows of results.

That's a moon landing cake, the Indominus rex from Jurassic World, and the number 242.

In this recent comment, WanderingGondola asked, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?"

The Indominus rex features prominently in my January 18 post "The invincible Lizard King."

In my January 16 post "The Doors," I mentioned the set of numbers {44, 47, 74, 77} -- the sum of which is 242.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Mr. Q 2310, and the Heavenly Trump omen

Today I was on the road at a time when I would not normally have been; I had just come home and then had to go back out because I had forgotten something. While I was out, my eyes were drawn to a license plate that said MRQ 2310.

It was "Mr. Q" that first got my attention. There's been a lot of talk about "Mr. Owl" on this blog recently, particularly as a reference to Michael the Archangel. On July 29 (also, coincidentally, the day known as "Ghost Door Opens" on the Chinese calendar), I received an email from a woman using a pseudonym that begins with the letter Q, in which she said, "There is no real 'Mr. Q[...]' at this time, so with some of the things I've been reading about guardian angels, I'm beginning to wonder if Michael himself might be my guardian, or at least have an eye out for me."

So apparently Mr. Q is yet another name for Michael. In "More Mr. Owl," I noted that the Mr. Owl title does not identify Michael with the owl but with the owl's male counterpart, the hawk. In "If 6 turned out to be 9," I connected the owl with 6 and the hawk with 9. Note that a lowercase 'q' looks like 9, and that the Japanese word for "nine" is kyu -- a pun used, for example, in the title of Haruki Murakami's book 1Q84.

So what about the rest of the license plate? Well, it's my initials, for starters: 23 = W, and 10 = J. I thought there must be more to it than that, though (these things are always overdetermined), so I thought, "Well, what are its factors? It looks like it's divisible by 77, which is the S:E:G: value of Christ . . ." and, still on my motorcycle, I started doing the math in my head. Sure enough, 2310 is 77 times 30. At that moment, I passed a 7-Eleven convenience store, and I thought, "And 77 is 7 times 11, and -- holy shit!"

Why have I associated the owl with the number 6? Because of a restaurant called Six Owl Door, and accompanying syncs featuring six owls, an owl and six doors, etc. On July 28, Ben left a comment in which he linked to a photo of three doors marked with numbers.

The doors are numbered 11, 7, and 15 -- the product of which is 1155. If 1155 means three doors, then six doors would be twice 1155, which is, yes, 2310.

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In other news, here's what's going on in the world of horse racing:

LSP in Grand Prairie, Texas, hosted a horse race for three-year-olds and up, and for most of the maiden race a four-year-old gelding named Moro Flyboy had a clear lead ahead of the rest of the competition, including a horse named “Heavenly Trump.”

As Flyboy, led by apprentice jockey Simon Camacho-Benitez, approached the final stretch of the race, the horse began to veer toward the track’s inside rail.

After flying too close to the sun, Moro Flyboy made contact with the rail and bucked Camacho-Benitez yards from the finish line, which gave way for Heavenly Trump to step up and steal the race (not like that).

The indisputable, Balaam-inspired act of God propelled Heavenly Trump to victory. Camacho-Benitez and Flyboy were reportedly unscathed after the incident.

From the accompanying video, it appears that Heavenly Trump is a white or light-gray horse, ridden by a jockey with a yellow cap.

"Heavenly Trump" is presumably a reference to the biblical "last trump" which calls the dead to rise from their graves, as illustrated on the 20th trump of the Tarot. The article, though, is obviously playing on the similarity of the name to that of Trump, the politician. Well, I made that connection long ago.

I also connected Trump with "The other Trump trump," the Sun. This card, which is associated with Gemini and Flag Day (Trump's sign and birthday), shows a yellow-haired child riding a white or light-gray horse next to a wall. Notice that when Moro Flyboy hits the "wall," bucking the jockey, the article refers to it as "flying too close to the sun."

Moro Flyboy -- Heavenly Trump's rival -- is connected in the article with the biblical story of Balaam, whose mount "thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam's foot against the wall." Balaam wasn't riding a horse, though, but a donkey -- symbol of the Democratic Party. I suppose this all syncs with Biden's foot fractures shortly after the election, and his recent fall from his bicycle.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Michael the Archangel, the Nebra sky disc, and 132

In the comments to "The vesica piscis and the blue moon," Ben linked to the (reportedly miraculous) icon of Archangel Michael of Panormitas, apparently because the Sun's face on the Flammarion engraving reminded him of it.

The Flammarion engraving includes both this Sun and a crescent Moon, as does the Nebra sky disc -- which was in the post because Debbie had referred me to it in connection with a dream of hers that prominently featured the number 132.

Only later did Ben notice that Michael of Panormitas has a Sun and Moon on his breastplate:

I had never seen St. Michael portrayed this way -- it made me think of the Sun and Moon on the breastplate of Oswald Wirth's Emperor -- so I did some searching to see if I could find other instances. I found many -- all from Mexico, all based on this original painting by Maerten de Vos -- currently in St. Bonaventure Cathedral in Cuautitlán, Mexico.

Quoting an article I had linked to about the de Vos painting, Ben notes the similarity of Michael's cuirass to the Nebra sky disc.

"Fundamentally respecting the chromatic code reserved and required for the graphic representation of this member of the Catholic body of saints, the Archangel Michael is depicted dressed in a blue cuirass, adorned all over its surface with gold stars, accompanied by a sun and moon on his pectorals, the former on the right one the latter on the left. His armor is further embellished with ruffled orange-yellow sleeves that stick out from his undershirt, and an underskirt of the same color."

Sounds just like the Nebra sky disc.

Debbie found a reference to the oldest version of the Nebra sky disc having 32 stars, which was a possible link to her dream about the number 132. On the same day, I received an email also featured the number 132: "Hebrews 13:2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

The allusion is to Abraham entertaining three guests prior to the destruction of Sodom. His guests are described only as "three men," but Jewish tradition, since at least the time of Rashi (1040-1105), identifies them as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Two centuries after Rashi, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher solidified this tradition by pointing out that the Hebrew gematria value of "and lo three men" (Gen. 18:2) is 701, equal to that of "these are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael."

So that's a fairly direct link between Michael the Archangel and 132.

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Two hundred and fifty-nine

Last night I stopped at a coffee shop on my way home to buy something for my wife. The cashier gave me a receipt saying that my order number was 259, circling that number with a sharpie.

This is a significant number to me.

Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) assigns numerical values to words and phrases by adding up the ordinal values of their constituent letters (A = 1, B = 2, . . . Z = 26). In this system, the value of the string "two hundred and fifty-nine" is 259. I am only aware of two numbers that have this property, the other being 251.

Furthermore, 259 is seven times 37, and 37 is a highly significant number. Twice 37 is 74, the S:E:G: value of the words simple, English, and gematria, as well as that of Jesus, cross, gospel, and Messiah. Twenty-four times 37 is 888, the value of the name Jesus in Greek gematria. Eighteen times 37 is 666. Seventy-three times 37 is 2701, the Hebrew gematria value of the first verse of the Bible.

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This morning, I prayed the Rosary in my chapel, as is my habit these days. At the end of my prayers, a phrase popped into my mind unbidden: "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries." My eyes then fell on two books that I had left on a shelf in the chapel, having forgotten to take them out when I converted the room to its present purpose: Moby-Dick and Strieber's The Secret School. About an hour before my prayers, I had read a few pages of Mike Clelland's The Messengers -- a passage that mentioned whales, and another that said, "An example: a hologram of an owl would appear. When I would see something like that, that would tell me it's time for school."

The number 259 came back into my mind, and I had the distinct impression that I should check the 259th page of each of those books.

In my copy of Moby-Dick, page 259 is the last page of a chapter and only has a few lines of text on it:

This seemed highly relevant to "to evade this world's snares and penetrate its mysteries."

Page 259 of The Secret School is part of the afterword by journalist Ed Conroy. Here is the first paragraph on the page:

The juxtaposition of this with the Moby-Dick page, with its heading "The Albatross," struck me because in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream," I had connected an angel on a temple spire with the albatross and Moby-Dick.

I thought of how the angel Moroni [on the spire of the Nauvoo temple] was occupying the place that would traditionally be given to the cross, which made me think of the Coleridge line “instead of the cross, the albatross.” And this brought me back to Melville: Ishmael’s recollection of the first albatross he ever saw, which he repeatedly likens to an angelic being. “Its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark” — “flew to join the wing-folding, the evoking, the adoring cherubim” — “as Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.”

Conroy mentions "four-winged angels" -- i.e., cherubim as described by Ezekiel (in contrast to the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah) -- and cherubim is the precise word used by Melville with reference to the albatross.