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.
