From the Narrow Desert: Keys

Showing posts with label Keys. Show all posts

Thursday, June 6, 2024

What's the connection between Joan and Claire?

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright proposes that the beings I know as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are actually one and the same, and also the same as one of the beings he has been in contact with, one of "a group of laughing women" whom he thinks of as the Daughters of Asenath. It is strongly implied that this being may not actually have anything to do with the historical Joan of Arc even though "that is how she has allowed herself to be thought of for a few reasons." In his June 4 post "The French Connection" he refers to "Joan-Claire" as if the identity has been established.

As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.

Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.

Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.

After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."

This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.

On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:

As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.

This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!

At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.

Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.

Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!

I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.

Friday, May 31, 2024

Yeats, Joan, and Claire

Yesterday, May 30, I enjoyed "good luck" all day. Everything just went unusually smoothly, with lots of little good things just happening to happen. Therefore, when I had a few free hours in the afternoon and had a sudden hunch that I should go to a particular used bookstore, even though it meant a 40-minute drive to another city, I figured it was a good day for pursuing hunches.

When I arrived, I realized that I had brought very little cash with me and wouldn't be able to buy much, but I thought I'd look around anyway. I was immediately drawn to a small table with several Tarot decks, including two different editions of the Rider-Waite. I'd been to this store countless times, and they'd never sold Tarot cards before. I know it's basic common sense that you do not buy magical items secondhand, especially if you don't know who the previous owner was, but I'd been without a physical Rider-Waite deck for some years now, and I felt impressed to buy one. "It's okay," put in the helpful excuse-maker on my shoulder (right or left?). "You can just reconsecrate them."

I picked up one of the decks, but the price tag slightly exceeded what I had in my pocket. When I checked the second one, though, I saw that I had exactly the right amount of cash to buy it. That seemed like a sign, and I decided to get it.

Even though that decision left me with exactly zero dollars to spend on anything else, I took a brief look at the books anyway. One I would definitely have bought was W. B. Yeats and His World by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eaven Boland, which had lots of illustrations. Because of my sword vision earlier that day, my first thought was to wonder whether it included a photo of the poet's magical sword (yes, he owned one), so I flipped through the book to check. No sword pics, alas, but this cartoon caught my eye:

It shows a woman dressed in black, standing atop the globe with two books under her feet, one of which is labeled "Gregorian Chants," and looking out into space at a giant flying Koran. A female Gregory was the main thing that got my attention, as a possible link to Odessa Grigorievna. I also happened to briefly start reading the Quran just a few weeks after the Grigorievna dream. I was vaguely aware that a Lady Gregory had been one of Yeats's associates but knew essentially nothing else about her and couldn't understand what the cartoon was trying to say. Today I went to Wikipedia for a quick rundown, where I read that she had been born on March 15, 1852 -- the Ides of March. This was shortly after reading William Wright's post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')" -- on which much more below -- in which he interprets two things said by a female voice as referring to me: "Beware this one!" and "When I dream, I dream about books!" I was born on the Ides of March (as in "Beware the Ides of March!") and have had many dreams about books. Lady Gregory, it turns out, shares my birthday, and the cartoon looks as if it might depict her dreaming about the Quran.

Anyway, I didn't buy the Yeats book. I took the Tarot deck to the counter to pay -- and discovered to my surprise that I was eligible for a special discount! Instead of spending every bit of my cash, as I had expected, I received $99 (about three US dollars) back -- so I went right back to the bookshelves to browse some more. I found Richard Cavendish's 1975 book The Tarot -- a large hardback full of color photos and certainly far too expensive to buy with my remaining cash. When I picked it up, though, I saw the price sticker: exactly $99. That seemed like another sign, and I bought it.

Flipping through Cavendish's book later, I was surprised to discover a full-page portrait of Yeats!

The use of his full name, William Butler Yeats, is another indirect link to Odessa Grigorievna, as my post "Hey birds, here are cookies!" links her with the biblical story of the Pharaoh's butler and baker. My uncle's song "Fourth Down" directly links Yeats with butling and baking: "I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire / To bring me back some Yeast / Because I needed to bake some bread / For my wedding feast."

Does Yeats really deserve a full-page portrait in a history of the Tarot? He moved in magicians' circles, yes, and knew MacGregor (MacGregor!) Mathers and Waite and Crowley, but what contribution to the Tarot iconography or interpretation did he himself make? The only possible fingerprints of his I've been able to find are on the Rider-Waite Magician and Ace of Pentacles, where his poem "The Travail of Passion" may -- this is my own personal hypothesis -- have influenced Waite to include red roses and white lilies in the imagery. (See my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician.")

This made me think of my February 2 post "What's the second key?" -- the first key being the Rosary. I had written:

One [key] should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

Where did this idea come from, of there being two keys, one of which is the Rosary? See my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes":

I thought to myself [of the Rosary], "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

In William Wright's post, on which I said I would have more to say, he proposes that the beings I think of as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are one and the same. He actually ends the post -- which was written on St. Joan's Day (i.e., May 30, the anniversary of her death) -- with "Happy Feast Day, Claire." I had forgotten that in my first encounter with Claire she had quizzed me about the "true" form of a Yeats poem, and specifically a poem about the Irish god Aengus. One of the things I learned today from skimming the Wikipedia article for Lady Gregory is that she used to publish under the pseudonym Angus Grey.

In that post, I also mention that the only keys mentioned in the Book of Mormon are those of Laban's treasury. One of Laban's greatest treasures was the sword Makmahod -- recently connected with Joan and thus perhaps also with Claire.

Now look back at the photo of the full-page portrait of Yeats. Up in the corner is the name of the chapter in which it is found: "The Universal Key."

Does that settle it? Is the Tarot -- particularly in its Yeats-adjacent Rider-Waite form -- the long-sought second key? I wasn't sure until I opened up my new cards and saw what was printed on the backs:

A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily. I thought at first it was the Rose of York, but that should be barbed and seeded proper (i.e., with green leaves and a yellow center). This one is all white, even the leaves, suggesting that it is the blossom of an all-white tree -- with obvious implications from a Mormon or Tolkienian point of view.

Are Joan and Claire the same being, as William Wright suggests? The possibility had never crossed my mind, but my immediate inclination is to think that it may well be true. Serendipitously running into all this Claire-related content on Joan's Day is obviously a data point in favor of the hypothesis. Another data point is the poem I published yesterday for St. Joan's Day. An earlier draft had ended with the line "And act -- however high the stakes," but then I felt something nudging me to change it to "Clear-eyed -- however high the stakes" -- even though being clear-eyed had no obvious connection with the overall theme of the poem. The French word for "clear" is clair -- or, in the feminine, claire.

Coincidence? Here's another. Last Joan's Day I wrote, but did not publish, a translation of a French poem by St. Thérèse de Lisieux. (This year, by "coincidence," I did another translation from Thérèse just five days before Joan's Day.) I was tolerably happy with it as a translation but felt that its take on Joan was not my own, and thus I never ended up posting it. It's still in my Drafts folder, dated May 30, 2023, so I looked it up. Here's the original:

A Jeanne d'Arc

Quand le Dieu des armées te donnant la victoire
Tu chassas l'étranger et fis sacrer le roi
Jeanne, ton nom devint célèbre dans l'histoire
Nos plus grands conquérants pâlirent devant toi.

Mais ce n'était encor qu'une gloire éphémère
Il fallait à ton nom l'auréole des Saints
Aussi le Bien-Aimé t'offrit sa coupe amère
Et tu fus comme Lui rejetée des humains.

Au fond d'un noir cachot, chargée de lourdes chaînes
Le cruel étranger t'abreuva de douleurs
Pas un de tes amis ne prit part à tes peines
Pas un ne s'avança pour essuyer tes pleurs.

Jeanne tu m'apparais plus brillante et plus belle
Qu'au sacre de ton roi, dans ta sombre prison.
Ce céleste reflet de la gloire éternelle
Qui donc te l'apporta ? Ce fut la trahison.

Ah ! si le Dieu d'amour en la vallée des larmes
N'était venu chercher la trahison, la mort
La souffrance pour nous aurait été sans charmes
Maintenant nous l'aimons, elle est notre trésor.

And my version:

To Joan

The God of Hosts gave thee the field --
The king was crown'd, the foe did yield --
And all the conq'rors France had known

Did pale before the name of Joan.

Yet thy name, too, had paled and died

If not by suff'ring sanctified.

The cup which caus'd our Lord to shrink,

He offer'd thee -- thou, too, didst drink.

Thou wast, like Him, rejected, left

Alone, of all thy friends bereft.

Not one did come to kiss thy chains,

To still thy tears, to share thy pains.

When Charles the Seventh took the throne,

How brightly then thy glory shone!

But brighter still that glory ray'd

In dungeons dark -- alone, betray'd.

Our Lord did, too, to this sad vale

Come down to seek out death, betray'l.

Through Him we see with clearer eyes:

Now suff'ring is our greatest prize.

A note after the poem offers this as "a more literal translation of the final stanza":

Ah! If the God of love had not come to this vale of tears
To seek betrayal and death,
Suffering would have had no appeal for us.
Now we love it; it is our treasure.

So I took some liberties with that final stanza, the chief effect of which was -- to add a reference to clearer eyes that was not in the original!

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Orion, Oriana, Orellana

Yesterday, May 14, I posted "Orion on May 6, 2024 (Taiwan time)," documenting a sync involving that constellation.

This morning I remembered that the 1995 James Gurney book Dinotopia: The World Beneath, which I have posted about here before, has a character named Oriana -- as if a feminine form of Orion. Looking up that old post -- "Syncs: The World Beneath" -- I find that it is dated May 13, 2023, almost exactly one year before yesterday's Orion post. Oriana's name does not occur in the text of the post but can be seen in one of the images I posted from the book:

Oriana's half-key must be combined with Arthur's to form the "completed spiral key" which opens the door to the World Beneath. (Arthur is another astronomical name, related to Arcturus.) This theme of two keys that must be combined recently resurfaced in my February 7 post "What's the second key?"

In yesterday's post, one of the places where Orion turned up was in a Taiwanese magazine for students of English. This morning, just after looking up last year's Oriana post, I taught a student who uses a different English magazine published by the same company. Today's article was about the legend of El Dorado and included this reference to an explorer named Orellana:

In many dialects of Spanish, ll is pronounced the same as y, making this name extremely similar to Oriana. I don't think I would have connected Orellana with Orion had it not been for the intermediate link of Oriana.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David.

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Sync homework report: Dead Reckoning

So I watched Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, an extremely looong Tom Cruise movie of whose existence I had been blissfully unaware until a week ago. Unfortunately, my wife was out of town. Every time someone appears to die in a movie, she asks me, "Is he dead?" and I would have enjoyed being able to answer, "I reckon."

In my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I discussed a sync video that focuses on the theme -- found both in Dead Reckoning and in another movie, Uncharted, which I haven't seen -- of two cross-shaped keys that must be combined and used together. Starting with the assumption that one of the two keys represents the Rosary (literally "garland of roses"), I reasoned that the other might be associated with lilies and ended up linking it to Fortuna and the idea of luck and coincidence. You can read the post for the details of that train of thought.

When the two keys are introduced in Dead Reckoning, we see them on a screen labeled красный and белый -- "red" and "white"; one of them is decorated with two small red jewels, and the other with white ones. This difference is never mentioned by any of the characters -- they never specify which key they're talking about beyond "the other key" -- but it's there, and it fits with the idea of a rose key and a lily key. Very early on, we learn that one of the keys is in the possession of a woman named Ilsa Faust. Faustus means "fortunate" in Latin, so a female Faust is clearly a link to Fortuna. Her key should be the white one, then, and such proves to be the case. The other key, the red one, turns out to be in the possession of a character called the White Widow. Since white is a symbol of virginity, and Jesus' mother was a widow, this is consistent with the red key being linked to the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So far, so good. No really new light is shed on the meaning of the two keys, but at least it confirms what I've got.

(By the way, William Wright, you asked what it means for the Rosary to be one of the keys. I'm working on a post about that.)

⁂

I was expecting key syncs going in, of course. What I wasn't expecting was a link to my January 7 post "My tail is dun." The title of that post is a reference to a scene in the Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle, in which Dor dictates an essay to a magical "spelling bee," only to have the insect replace most of the words with correctly-spelled homophones. Thus the final sentence, "My tale is done," comes out as "My tail is dun." I ended the post with a reference to Paul H. Dunn, bringing in a third homophone.

In Dead Reckoning, there's a scene where the character Benji is trying to disarm a bomb, which requires him to solve "a cylinder cipher. There's eight wheels" (a nod to the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune). Then Benji realizes that "the wheels, they spell out a message: You are done."

"No way," says Benji's partner Luther. "Not yet, we aren't." Then Benji clarifies:

"It's my last name," Benji says. "It knows who I am."

Confusion between done and a homophone is a pretty specific feature, not something you run across every day.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

What's the second key?

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is. I assumed it was one of two keys because of prior syncs about pairs of keys. This curiosity was reinforced when, on February 2, Francis Berger posted "The Society of Crossed Keys is Real???!!!" -- about a fictional society in a Wes Anderson film and its real-world counterpart, each of which has a pair of crossed keys as its logo. It's not at all the sort of thing Frank usually blogs about, and it seemed like an obvious sync wink. On February 3, I even bought The Small Golden Key, a 1985 book by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Thinley Norbu, which I happened upon in a used bookstore, just because of its title -- even though I don't think Buddhism could possibly be the second key, at least not for me. I know many serious Buddhists, have read many Buddhist books, and recognize the great value of Buddhism for some people, but my deepest self categorically rejects it.

On February 5, I was checking a few YouTube channels and found a video posted by the synchromystic channel LXXXVIII finis temporis on January 25. It's about two recent movies I've never seen and didn't even know existed until today: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Uncharted (2022), both of which share the oddly specific feature of two keys in the form of crosses (cf. crossed keys) which must be combined and used together:

The video doesn't mention it, but a further coincidence between these two movies is the names, both of which refer to navigation in a situation where essential information is lacking. "Uncharted" of course refers to regions for which no map has been made. "Dead reckoning" means estimating one's current position from a known past position plus an estimated velocity, rather than ascertaining it directly by means of landmarks, stars, or satellite. (The idea of Laplace's demon -- who knows every detail of the present and therefore can predict every detail of the future -- is dead reckoning taken to extremes; see the recent mention of Laplace in "Pokélogan.")

If the Rosary is one of the keys, and on September 3, 2022, I had a dream in which "I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key," then the other key should also somehow have the form of a cross. That left me stumped for a while.

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. Or roses are red, and the complementary color would be green. Those thoughts didn't lead anywhere at first, but then they clicked when I remembered one of the lines in the video, from the Mission: Impossible movie: "The key is only the beginning." Where had I heard a line like that before?

"Finding the key is just the beginning" -- on the cover of a novel whose main character is literally named Lily Green. The key isn't a cross, but it does have a little cross cut into the bit. Definitely a hit, but not the answer. I mean, a young-adult novel about leprechauns can't very well be the second key!

Going back to thinking of what sort of "key" might complement the Rosary, I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David! That is the label commonly given to this diagram from the Absconditorum Clavis of Guillaume Postel:

One element of this otherwise forgotten diagram had great influence on the development of the esoteric Tarot. If you look at the bow of the key, it has the letters ROTA written around its circumference That the word rota, "wheel," is intended is clear from the fact that the word also appears on the bit of the key. Éliphas Lévi noticed that when rota is written in a circle, it can also be read as Tarot. I've written several posts about ROTA on my Tarot blog if you want all the details, but the upshot is that the Rider-Waite Tarot, by far the most influential English-language deck, ended up with those four letters written on the Wheel of Fortune:

The significance of this in the present context is that the Wheel of Fortune -- at least this extremely influential version of it -- is a key. Not only that, but it features two crosses united as one. The eight-spoked wheel of Fortuna is a very old symbol, but in Waite's version, the eight spokes clearly consist of two crosses. The diagonal cross, consisting of simple lines, connects the four letters of the Hebrew name of God. The other cross, decorated with alchemical symbols, connects the four letters of ROTA.

This is a little digression, but I want to note it as a rather impressive synchronicity. I hadn't thought of Postel's Key of David since I did all those Wheel of Fortune posts back in 2019, and I've never had any real interest in it beyond its influence on Lévi. I've never made any attempt to analyze the other symbols it incorporates, such as the various geometric shapes inside the bow of the key. However, on February 5, I was notified of a new post by Galahad Eridanus, who posts very infrequently. (His last post was in October 2023.) It's called "The Edge of the Age," and one of the things he talks about is

the kinds of knots you tie your brain in when you try to predict from oughts instead of ises, and to account for "weird behaviour" from inside the model that is causing the behaviour to seem "weird" in the first place.

After a brief discussion of Ptolemaic epicycles, the go-to example of this sort of thing, he talks about another convoluted astronomical theory -- Kepler's idea that the (heliocentric) orbits of the planets could be mathematically derived from a series of nested Platonic solids. He includes this diagram:

Going from the outside in, we have: a sphere, a cube, another sphere, a tetrahedron, and then lots of much smaller shapes. Now compare that to the bow of Postel's key: a circle, a square, another circle, and a triangle. The triangle is even trisected so that it looks like a tetrahedron.

At first I assumed that Kepler's theory must have been one of the many ideas Postel incorporated into his key diagram, but looking up the dates I see that Absconditorum Clavis was published in 1547, before Kepler was born. Either Kepler was inspired by Postel, or they both drew from some earlier source -- or else the similarity, like my running into the two diagrams at the same time, is just a massive coincidence.

Coming back to the Wheel of Fortune as a key, this helped me make sense of the relevance of the novel Green. It's a novel about leprechauns, and luck, as an actual faculty possessed by leprechauns and by humans like Lily Green who have leprechaun blood, plays a massive role in the plot. Four-leaf clovers, all that jazz. Luck is fortune, Fortuna is Lady Luck. In my recent post "O Fortuna velut luna . . .," I even mentioned Fortuna as an Irishwoman (in a Piers Anthony novel), a clear link to Lily Green, the girl with leprechaun blood in her veins.

The second cross/key has to do with luck, fortune, coincidence, synchronicity -- in contrast perhaps to the repetitive always-the-sameness of the Rosary. A cross is a pretty good symbol of coincidence: two completely different (perpendicular) lines just happen to meet, such that a point on the one line is literally coincident with a point on the other. In fact, the title of a recent post, "One-eyed × purple people eater," following common usage in Taiwan, used a cross to indicate coincidental juxtaposition.

I noted that the two movies in the LXXXVIII video, chosen because they both featured pairs of cross-shaped keys, also share navigation-themed titles: Dead Reckoning and Uncharted. Fortuna is also associated with navigation; in Classical art, she is typically depicted holding a ship's rudder. Her other famous attribute, the eight-spoked wheel, resembles a ship's helm. Debbie has repeatedly pointed in comments here to the connection between the ship's helm and the eight-pointed star, and I thought of her when this image showed up on my browser's home screen on February 1:

Stars, of course, are themselves closely associated with luck.

In later iconography, Fortuna is sometimes depicted with a blindfold, like Justice. The idea of a blind navigator -- one who must navigate under information-deprived conditions -- is another link to Dead Reckoning and Uncharted.

One last coincidence to note: Fortuna's eight-spoked wheel is, as I have noted in past Wheel of Fortune posts, an ancient alternative form of the Christian Ichthys symbol:

The eight-spoked wheel, just like the cross, can symbolize either Christ or Fortuna. The fact that its Christian meaning is tied to the Greek word for "fish" is a further coincidence. I posted about the medieval poem O Fortuna back in 2019 and then again yesterday. Both posts included this little cartoon, based on punningly misreading Fortuna as a reference to fish:

I'm going to need some time to process all this, but it seems like a promising step forward in understanding the two-key theme. Of course "One key is the Rosary, and the other is synchronicity" isn't a solution to the riddle but just a starting point. "Finding the key is just the beginning."

Thinking about words that sound like tuna has reminded me of the greatest music video of all time. And now it's reminded you of it, too. You're welcome:

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Roller skates and keys

My January 28 post "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes" twice mentions Xanadu -- quoting the opening lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and then mentioning John Man's book about the historical city of Xanadu -- and then quotes some rap lyrics ("Feel the Fiyaaaah" by Metro Boomin and A$AP Rocky) about everyone needing new shoes. William Wright's January 29 post "Needing new shoes to roller skate in Xanadu" puts Xanadu and new shoes together with the 1980 movie Xanadu, which is about roller skating. The "new shoes" everyone needs, he concludes, are roller skates:

Why does everyone in the family need new shoes? Well, that is what you wear in Xanadu, apparently, so if you want to go, you need to get a pair of new shoes, specifically shoes with wheels attached to them.

A brand new pair of roller skates? There's a song about that:

The brand new roller skates are paired with a brand new key. This ties in with William's description of a scene in Xanadu which

involved a locked green door, which came up recently in WJT's blog. In the clip, the actor goes up to what appears to be an abandoned building and attempts to open the green door, but obviously can't. Undeterred, he still looks for a way in, and eventually finds one . . . . This also reminded me of WJT's restaurant, which was abandoned, and even though he found it locked and closed up, he was still determined to try and find a way in.

The reference is to my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes." In that post, I repeatedly emphasize that because the green door is now locked, I now need a key to get into the abandoned restaurant. Actually, I'll probably end up just climbing in, like the character in Xanadu, but in that post I emphasized the need for a key -- a new key for this new lock -- and the original post ended by expressing the hope that the person who locked up the restaurant might have hidden the key somewhere nearby where I could find it.

These lines from "Brand New Key" also got my attention:

I ride my bike, I roller-skate, don't drive no car
Don't go too fast, but I go pretty far
For somebody who don't drive
I've been all around the world

This ties in with my last post, "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air." This featured a music video for the song "Dirty Paws" consisting of a montage of scenes from the 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In the video, we see the Ben Stiller character traveling all over the world. We see him riding a bike, skateboarding, running, and being a passenger on various forms of transport, but never once do we see him driving a car.

That post juxtaposes hearts of gold with new shoes and dirty paws. In Shakespeare's most famous (only?) use of the expression "heart of gold," dirty shoes are nearby:

The King’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,
A lad of life, an imp of fame;
Of parents good, of fist most valiant.
I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heart-string
I love the lovely bully.

Note added: "Brand New Key" is originally a Melanie Safka song, of course, but I posted the Dollyrots version here because it suited my mood better. Here are the front and back covers of the album it's from:

A white rabbit on the front, and a black rabbit on the back -- fitting right in with one of William Wright's themes. The black rabbit is even a disembodied head, like this picture William posted in "Speech problems: Dream 3 of 3":

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

The Green Door finally closes

Starting back in July 2022, I used to explore from time to time a restaurant that went out of business and was abandoned in 2015. They put up a green sheet-metal wall around it, but the green door in the wall was never locked, and you could just walk in. See "Owl time, and cold noodles," "The Green Door," and "Phoenix syncs."

This past Sunday (January 21), I happened to pass the abandoned restaurant and decided that I would go back that night and explore it again. I ended up getting sidetracked and not going, though. Then on Monday I found this:

That's right, nearly a decade after going out of business, the restaurant is finally closed. I'm quite sure the lock was not there when I passed it on Sunday, so I'm not sure if I should feel disappointed that I missed my last chance to explore or lucky that I wasn't inside when they locked it up!

I don't know what prompted someone to lock the place up now, after nine years. I was hoping it would be a combination lock, since they're obviously not going to open it very often and would thus have set it to something easy to remember and therefore easy to guess. No such luck; it's a key lock.

Oddly, I had just been thinking about keys on Sunday. Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!) On Sunday, I took up the Rosary again after my break, and the sensation was remarkable. The beads felt like a living thing in my hands, and I could feel my mind sliding into a subtly but distinctly different mode of consciousness. I thought to myself, "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

This train of thought led me to do a word search for key in the Book of Mormon. Somewhat surprisingly, given that "keys" would become, so to speak, a key concept in Mormonism as it later developed, there is only one mention in the BoM, and it's quite literal:

And as I went forth towards the treasury of Laban, behold, I saw the servant of Laban who had the keys of the treasury. And I commanded him in the voice of Laban, that he should go with me into the treasury. . . . And I also spake unto him that I should carry the engravings, which were upon the plates of brass, to my elder brethren, who were without the walls (1 Ne. 4:20, 24).

The next day, when I discovered that I would now need a key to get into the abandoned restaurant, I remembered a dream I had had on August 26, 2023, recorded in "Phoenix syncs":

Remember the abandoned restaurant I explored in July 2022? I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced.

I was with my brother, trying to get plates -- exactly the circumstances surrounding the Book of Mormon's one and only mention of keys.

Then I remembered that in September 2022 (see the comments to "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup") I had actually dreamed about a rosary being a literal key. Not until I looked it up just now did I remember that this was in the context of exploring an abandoned building:

I’ve just remembered a fourth dream vignette, in which I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

Could this possibly be a garbled precognition? If you look back up at the photo of the locked door, you'll see that the lock is attached to a chain, superficially similar to a string of beads. If I were to unlock the padlock and leave the chain hanging, it would look a bit like "the rosary hanging from the keyhole" in the dream. In the dream, I found the rosary/key in the abandoned building. Is it possible that whoever locked up the restaurant left the key hidden somewhere nearby and that I could find it? Only one way to find out.

⁂

Note added (Jan. 24): In the above post I describe how my rosary beads "felt like a living thing in my hands," prompting me to think, "It's magic!" At the end of the post, I say that a metal chain is similar to a string of rosary beads. The next day, I was reading The Magician, the fifth book in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. Several pendants on gold chains have been discovered which seem to have mysterious powers. Niall, the human protagonist, takes two of them to Steeg, an artificial intelligence, who promptly destroys them, saying that he has discovered "that these devices can be animated with some kind of living force" and are therefore extremely dangerous. Steeg then reprimands Niall for focusing on the pendants themselves and ignoring the chains.

"But I didn't think the chains made any difference."

"That is what you were intended to think. In fact, they are part of the device."

"I'm sorry."

"That is unnecessary. Now that we understand the danger, it is possible to anticipate it."

Niall said: "But do you understand how it works?"

"No. I said I understand the danger. But since I am designed for purely rational thinking, I am unable to understand the principles of magic."

The words caused a prickling sensation in Niall's scalp. "But are you sure it is magic?"

"The ability to make living forces manifest in dead matter must be defined as magic."

This parallels very closely what I wrote about the rosary the day before I read it. When "living forces manifest in dead matter" -- when what ought to be an inanimate object feels as if it were alive -- that's magic. My seemingly living matter was a rosary; Niall's was a metal chain -- something which I had explicitly compared to a rosary in my post.

Niall very naturally but incorrectly assumes that only the pendant has any power and that the chain is just a chain. Likewise, someone unfamiliar with a rosary would naturally focus on the crucifix and think of the string of beads from which it depends as incidental, when in fact the beads are the main thing.

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

A helmet for Tolkien

Today I carelessly set a key down on top of a stack of books. Later I noticed that I had just happened to put it in the perfect position:

Thursday, November 9, 2023

"Tim" and The Key

In today's post "Well, that didn't take long," I reported two verbal dreams, in each of which a sync fairy appeared as a man and delivered a speech:

The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.

Describing his clothing as "smart" -- as I did twice in the above paragraph -- isn't really my natural idiom. That sense of smart is really an Anglicism; I would more naturally say sharp. Nevertheless, it was the word that came to mind. I also have no idea why I thought of him as being called Tim. No names were used in the dream, nor did he remind me of any real-world person by that name. When I tried to jot down as much of the dream as I could remember, though, I found myself writing Tim.

The two "Tim" dreams were on Monday night and in the early hours of this (Thursday) morning, respectively. This evening I taught an English class for children. I was preparing them for an assignment in which each of them was going to write a brief book or movie review, and their textbook had an example for them:

"Tim. He's very smart" -- in the American sense of that word, but still! I've taught this textbook probably three or four times with different cohorts of students, so at some subconscious level I already knew that a "smart" boy called Tim was coming up, but I hadn't reviewed these pages in preparation for the class until this afternoon, well after the dream. The details are all different -- a well-dressed middle-aged military man vs. a nerdy kid -- but the juxtaposition of "Tim" and "very smart" (the very words I had put in quotation marks in my dream report) was still striking. Jacqueline Wilson herself appears to be British, so I suppose her use of smart would follow mine in the post, not that of the textbook.

"He hates sports" is also a sync. The post about my "Tim" dreams begins with a reference to "the last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike," with a link to my November 2020 post "Coming up for air." Just as I did this time, I illustrated my "take a hike, sync fairies" post with something from Dr. Seuss:

Several hours after posting about "Tim," I realized that he reminded me of someone -- the anonymous visitor who barged into Whitley Strieber's Toronto hotel room in 1998, starting the conversation that formed the basis of Strieber's 2001 and 2011 book The Key.

Why two dates? Because The Key has a bizarre and controversial publication history. The 2001 version, which I bought when it came out, was self-published (Walker & Collier) and had a gold key on the cover. The 2011 reprint was published by Penguin and had black-and-white cover art making the key look gray or silver:

Readers soon noticed that there were several significant differences between the two versions, each of which claimed to be a transcription of a conversation that took place in 1998. The position Strieber has staked out is that the silver-key version is the original, and that the gold-key version differs from it because the manuscript was sabotaged after he sent it to the printer by malicious actors for the purpose of discrediting Strieber. The manuscript on his computer remained unmodified, and it was this version that he sent to Penguin 10 years later. Only after readers noticed the differences did Strieber himself become aware that the gold-key version had been tampered with. The skeptical position is that Strieber inadvertently sent Penguin an older draft and then -- realizing that the manuscript shouldn't have "evolved" like that if it had been a simple transcript of a 1998 conversation -- tried to cover his tracks by making up the absurd story about malicious tampering. The definitive guide to the controversy is the book-length Problems with Strieber and The Key by the pseudonymous Heinrich Moltke.

Part of what makes Strieber's story seem absurd is that the differences between the two versions are minor and mostly editorial in nature, and none of them seems calculated to make the gold-key version look bad. (In fact, several readers maintain that the gold-key version is superior in literary terms.) Why would the baddies go through all the trouble of sabotaging the manuscript only to make such trivial changes? On the other hand, they (supposing they exist) did successfully discredit The Key -- not by the specific content of their changes, but by the very fact of them.

Although I didn't make the connection until just now, this closely parallels the "lost 116 pages" incident in the history of the Book of Mormon. When Joseph Smith's unfinished translation manuscript was lost and presumed stolen, he was instructed not to retranslate that portion of the book, since unspecified "wicked men" were planning to discredit him by modifying his original manuscript and then showing that the retranslated version differed from it. As with The Key, the point would not be the specific content of the sabotaged manuscript but rather the fact that two mutually inconsistent versions existed.

Coming back to how The Key may relate to my "Tim," here is how Strieber describes the stranger he would later dub the Master of the Key. I quote from the silver-key version, but both are essentially the same:

His hair was white and close-cropped, and his eyes were light blue. He wore a dark gray turtleneck and charcoal trousers. He seemed rather slight to me, perhaps five foot eleven, weighing maybe a hundred and seventy to a hundred and eighty pounds.

Except for the color of the clothing, this is a good description of "Tim." If we go beyond The Key itself and look at some radio interviews Strieber did back in 1998, shortly after the experience itself, the parallels are even more striking. I quote from transcripts in Problems with Strieber and The Key:

He wore black clothing. I thought it was a military type outfit. It was unusual clothing, more like a leisure suit but not military enough to say this was a uniform. . . .

It wasn't exactly like telepathy, but some of the words he said, I can’t repeat. I don’t know how. He would say a sentence like, "There is going to be a series of events that take place," and then this other word would come out. And this word seemed to contain enormous amounts of information. It was not like an ordinary word. It had a rough kind of garbled sound to it, like he was choking. Fantastic words. They gave meaning, to me, to the phrase "words of power," because I’m telling you, I've never heard the like, and I could never make sounds like that. If that involved telepathy, then he was telepathic as well.

Tim, too, looked "military" even though his clothing didn't seem like a uniform. Like Strieber's visitor, he delivered his information in very unusual way:

I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)

Finally, the only ordinary English I saw in my dream was the phrase "directing your attention" in large white italics. Compare this to the following exchange in The Key:

[Strieber]: What is God?

[Stranger]: An elemental body is a mechanism filled with millions of nerve endings that directs the attention of God into the physical.

I've read The Key four times -- twice in each version -- with my most recent reading being in 2022. (Since 2000, I've kept a record of every book I read and when.) Obviously, there's not necessarily anything noteworthy or "paranormal" in my having a dream that borrows elements from a book I know well. It feels potentially significant, but I'm going to need something more objective than a dream to establish it as a genuine synchronicity.

It also occurs to me that "Tim" may have taken his name from a story I wrote as a child about a man called William Alizio who is visited by two extraterrestrials named Tim and Patrick. I'll have to see if I still have a copy of that somewhere.

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Keys, a praying mantis, and more keys

The wall calendar in my study has one picture for every two months. The September/October painting was the one I discuss in my October 15 post "The world was fair in Durin's day." It's November now, and time for the next picture, a piece called Treasures of Yushan by one Wang Hai-Hui:

Given the recent sync context, in which the gold and silver keys of the pope figure prominently, it was the gold key that caught my eye:

It's only one key, not the two demanded by our theme, but I think it still fits. According to the Vatican website, this is what the two keys mean:

The gold one, on the right, alludes to the power in the kingdom of the heavens, the silver one, on the left, indicates the spiritual authority of the papacy on earth.

On the calendar, what's inside the chest the gold key opened? A mountain and the sky -- heaven and earth. It is the papal key-to-heaven and key-to-earth combined into a single object.

Regular readers will know that I've often posted here about a particular sort of reading error, in which adjacent lines of text contaminate one another, resulting in a misreading. Just now I was scrolling through blog comments to see if there was anything new, and I misread this one from William Wright:

It's very strange that I should have misread this, since it's a comment I had already read and replied to, and I knew what it said, Nevertheless, this time around my brain momentarily misread green man's as green mantis -- the interpolated letters presumably being contributed by the tiara on the line above. The prior probability of a mantis, rather than a man, being green may also have played a role. Of course the error was corrected almost instantaneously, lasting just long enough for me to consciously notice it.

Seeing -- or hallucinating -- a mantis in connection with Roman Catholic clerical headgear made me think of M. C. Escher's well-known woodcut Dream (Mantis religiosa), which depicts an enormous praying mantis on the chest of a dead or sleeping mitered bishop.

When I was trying to find an image of that woodcut to include here, though, one of the search results caught my eye:

Wait, does that Latin inscription say what I think it does?

Yes, it's a piece called Inside Saint Peter's, Rome, and the inscription is from Matthew 16:19: "I will give [unto thee] the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Jesus is speaking to Peter, considered by Catholics to be the first pope, and it is this very verse that is the source of the crossed keys as a papal symbol.

I found this, remember, by searching for a picture of a praying mantis.

Incidentally, that comment from William Wright occasioned a minor sync with my recent reading of the Psalms. Since I mentioned a couple of Psalms syncs in "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I might as well make a note of this one as well. Mr. Wright thought that the green man(tis)'s tiara was "a golden beehive." Psalm 19 -- the same psalm featured in the "Reality Temple" post -- includes this verse:

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb (Ps. 19:10).