From the Narrow Desert: Leprechauns

Showing posts with label Leprechauns. Show all posts

Monday, June 24, 2024

The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus

I keep finding more in the central cover illustration of Animalia by Graeme Base:

As discussed in "GAEL," what I noticed first was the lion, green gorilla, and elephant, arranged in a line along the left side of the picture. Then I noticed that one of the elephants in the book is apparently named Eric, and that the cover shows an elephant right next to a knight on horseback -- encoding the name of Eric Knight, the author of the novel Lassie Come-Home. Just below Eric and the Knight is a golden jackal, suggesting the golden dog on the cover of Lassie Come Home. In my post "Lassie Come Home," I recorded a hunch that Lassie has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, who is menaced by the Dragon and has to go into hiding. Sure enough, right above Eric and the Knight on the cover is a menacing-looking dragon in flight. The D page in Animalia is titled "Diabolical Dragons Daintily Devouring Delicious Delicacies." Revelation 12 says that the Dragon is "called the Devil" (i.e, diabolical) and that it "stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born."

The Knight carries a banner, the end of which points to a herd of zebra -- a juxtaposition which suggests the zebra-striped flag of Brittany:

The flag of Normandy, the other part of Armorica, is a red field with two gold lions.

Under the banner is another black-and-white animal, an ostrich. In The Satanic Verses, the image of an out-of-place ostrich running along the English beach is associated with the Norman conquest. Rosa Diamond has just been daydreaming about that history -- "Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk" -- when

Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, -- running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, -- swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich.

These references to travel between Britain and Armorica fit right in with "The Gospel of Luke on Lobsterback," where I even propose that the "lobsters" may actually be soldiers, like our Knight. The Knight has the face of a hog, and both hogs and lobsters are well-known as non-kosher animals. As in Peter's vision in Acts, "unclean" animals may symbolize "Gentiles" -- the Gentiles entrusted with bringing the lost sheep of Israel, and their lost Gospel of Light, safely home:

I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders (1 Ne. 21:22).

The language is from Isaiah, of course, and for "set up my standard" many translations have something like "raise high my banner."

Confirmation that this hog Knight with his banner has to do with the Lassie Come Home story can be found on the H page of Animalia, where we learn that the hogs on horseback are "hurrying homeward":

William Wright's recent post about Ali with an I and Daniel with an L led me to look up a 2019 post of mine about Dante's claim that I and EL were the two earliest names for God. I was surprised to find that the post also included this detail from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch:

My interest at the time was in the owl, and how it proves that the creature in the basket in Bosch's painting The Conjurer is also an owl (not a monkey, as some have claimed). Looking at it now, though, what I see is an anthropomorphic hog, like our Knight, leading a golden dog on a leash -- as if bringing Lassie home. He is also dressed in dark green and carries a lute, suggesting this detail from the L page of Animalia:

Hieronymus is the Latin form of the name Jerome. I don't know how I could have posted so much about lions in a library, even referring to the library as a "study," without making the connection with Albrecht Dürer's famous copper engraving Saint Jerome in His Study:

Sleeping on the floor next to the saint's pet lion is a contented-looking dog. Lassie has come home.

One more thing to mention. In the vision described in "Étude brute?" -- which primed me to notice the Lions in a Library image in Animalia -- an indirect vision of the Holy Family -- Joseph and his wife and son, radiating light to bright for me to look at them (perhaps identical to William Wright's "Family of Light"?) -- was followed by my being led into a library or study by a "Bull of Heaven," which I described as being "something like an aurochs." Later I noted that the Bull is a traditional symbol of the House of Joseph. This symbolism comes from Deuteronomy:

[Joseph's] glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh (Deut. 33:17).

Where the King James has unicorns, the Douay-Rheims translation favored by Catholics has -- following no less an authority than Saint Jerome himself! -- rhinoceros. Most modern translations have wild ox, meaning the aurochs. These three animals, then, may be considered interchangeable as symbols of the House of Joseph. Here they are on the cover of Animalia:

The unicorn and rhinoceros caught my eye first, but there's also a yak in the background. Does that count as a "wild ox"? We usually think of the yak as a domestic animal, but there are still wild yaks in the Himalayas. The domestic yak is Bos grunniens ("grunting ox"), while the wild yak is Bos mutus ("silent ox"). Why bring up the scientific names? Because I specifically described the animals in my vision as "silent bulls."

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Sheppards and cloud animals

On November 29, William Wright posted "Keep Me Crazy," a music video from a band called Sheppard.

The video begins with people looking up at the clouds, which assume the form of a giraffe:

Last night I checked Chris Knowles's blog and read his December 4 post "Synchro-Tsunami: The King of Hell," which is all about an actor named Mark Sheppard. The recurrence of the name Sheppard made me think of the "Keep Me Crazy" video again. A repeated line from the song is "I've been walking blind in the dark, never see the sun," which syncs with the name of Chris's blog: The Secret Sun.

Today a free desk calendar arrived in the mail, a gift from an investment bank:

The cloud/Sheppard juxtaposition makes me think of Berger des Nuages, "Shepherd of Clouds," by the surrealist sculptor Jean Arp. Arp's account of the piece's development, as quoted on Wikipedia, ties in with another recent sync theme:

When I woke up, I found on my sculptor's bench a small, playful, lively form of a certain obesity, like the belly of a lute. It seemed to me that it evoked a leprechaun. So I named it that way. And now one day, this little elf character, through a Venezuelan medium, suddenly finds himself the father of a giant. This giant son looks like his father like an egg to another, a fig to another, a bell to another. Like the father, it is difficult to define. And like all definitions, the one given on Monday was different from the one on Tuesday. Any definition of matter, of the atom, from the pre-Socratic to the present day ... what a disturbing cloud! Was this what made the young giant decide to become a cloud shepherd?

Monday, December 4, 2023

Green and the Mushroom Planet

In Green, leprechauns kidnap Lily Green and put her in a fake rocket ship before taking her to the leprechaun realm. Once there, she finds a letter left for her by her late grandmother, written in green ink. In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Tyco Bass runs an ad in the newspaper to recruit a boy to build a spaceship to go to Basidium. Although the rest of the newspaper is black-and-white, his ad is printed in green. In Green, the green ink is understandable (they're leprechauns; all their things are green), but the Mushroom People have no special affinity for that color, and it is never explained why the ad was green.

The leprechauns in Green have hair "with the merest hint of green." Likewise, the Mycetians (Earth-based Mushroom People) have just a hint of green in their skin color -- subtle enough for them to pass as human without attracting undue attention.

Both the leprechauns and the Mushroom People deal with security breaches by administering a drink that causes forgetfulness.

The Mushroom People, both on Basidium and on Earth, use Mushroom Stones as symbolic decorations, and there is a hint that they may have used them as money in the past. These are round, flat on one side and convex on the other (like a mushroom cap), and have symbols engraved on the convex side, one of which is always a mushroom. In Green, one of the leprechauns gives Lily the gift of "a domed gold button, a four-leaf clover embossed on its shiny surface." A domed button would have the same shape as a Mushroom Stone; in fact, when I search for domed button, the very first hit is offering "Bronze Mushroom Domed Buttons" for sale. One gets the impression that Eleanor Cameron and Laura Peyton Roberts somehow received essentially the same mental image and interpreted it in the context of their respective fictional worlds.

Here's a description of a Mushroom Stone, from A Mystery for Mr. Bass:

Each amulet was exactly the same size, about an inch and a half across, and all were in the shape of mushroom heads or half-balls. Each had deep lines cut into it on the domed top which crossed at the center so that the dome was divided into pie-shaped wedges, and in each one of these wedges was a different, curious carved design or picture. On every amulet one of these pictures was always a mushroom.

It is not specified how many wedges each Mushroom Stone is divided into, but it must be an even number (since the lines cross at the center), and four to eight seems likeliest -- much more than that, and the wedges would be too narrow to contain pictures. Couldn't such a design easily be misinterpreted as a four-leaf clover, or vice versa?

Taken on board a spaceship by . . . leprechauns?

In my November 13 post "William Alizio's links to other stories" (which you should read now before proceeding if you haven't already), I mentioned discovering the 2011 novel Green by Laura Peyton Roberts. As you will recall, a dream about a green book had made me search Amazon for books titled simply Green, and this one caught my eye because it has a picture of a key on the cover, like the Whitley Strieber book The Key, which had also been in the sync-stream. Those were the only factors in my initial interest; everything else is serendipity.

From reading Amazon reviews, I discovered that Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns, just as William Alizio is taken away by "little men." Today I started reading the book itself, having tracked down a copy online. The parallels are unreal.

Tim and Patrick, the blue-robed aliens who kidnap William Alizio, have been identified with the two blue-robed Wise Men from the Joseph story -- two Wise Men, not the three of Christian tradition. Lily Green is kidnapped by three leprechauns who, instead of having good Irish names like Pat, Mike, and Mustard, are for some reason named Caspar, Maxwell, and Balthazar. The traditional names for the three Wise Men are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar -- so two of the leprechauns are named after them. Two Wise Men, not three.

Patrick eats all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" -- the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal. The leprechauns, too, have a hidden treasure -- a hidden cave full of gold -- and their reason for kidnapping Lily is so that she can serve as the keeper of this treasure. Early on in Lily's interaction with the leprechauns, this hidden treasure is juxtaposed with the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal:

"Don't be ignorant, girl. Everyone wants to catch a leprechaun."

"Right," I said. "For your Lucky Charms."

Balthazar's eyes narrowed, not a hint of humor about them. "For our gold."

Now the weirdest one. When Tim and Patrick kidnap William Alizio, they take him to their spaceship. You know, because they're aliens. When the leprechauns kidnap Lily -- leprechauns -- they also take her to a spaceship!

"To the rocket ship! The rocket ship!" Balthazar cried.

By then it wouldn't have shocked me if they were space aliens too, but when they jogged around the back of the park's maintenance hut, I saw what they were talking about.

A huge play rocket ship lay on its side, its disassembled metal legs rusting in a heap. The leprechauns charged in through the rocket's open base, carrying me headfirst. . . .

"This'll do," Balthazar panted. "Heave ho, laddies."

Three pairs of hands thrust upward at once. For a moment, I was airborne. Then I hit the curved floor of the fake rocket like a sack of bowling balls.

This is extremely bizarre and contributes nothing to the plot. Lily loses consciousness inside the fake rocket ship, and when she wakes up she is being transported on a dog cart. The leprechauns have been carrying Lily but are getting tired and need some place to stow her -- because whatever a leprechaun carries is invisible, but she will become visible again if they set her down -- and the hiding place the author decided on was a fake rocket ship. Why?

Where do stories come from? Laura Peyton Roberts had a mental image of little men taking a girl into a spaceship -- but because she had decided the men were leprechauns, she had to find some way of making sense of an image that just doesn't belong in a leprechaun story. Maybe they hid her in -- a giant fake rocket ship in a park! Yeah, that's it.

I think a lot of novelists do work that way -- starting with a handful of vivid mental images and building the story from that. I remember Orson Scott Card said he wrote Ender's Game that way. Tolkien, too. The "Black Rider" scene began with a mental image which he first interpreted as being Gandalf. Where do the mental images come from?

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Thin, strange, secret frogs

"Like thin, strange, secret frogs" -- the bizarre and memorable simile with which T. H. White introduces the brothers Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth in his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. (This is Gawain of Green Knight fame; The Green Knight is also the title of an Iris Murdoch novel.) They live in Orkney, in the extreme north of Scotland, and speak Gaelic.

"Thin, strange, secret frogs" could also be yet another name for the "monkeys"/"bugs" of my early childhood. Thin, check. Strange, check. Secret, check. Frogs? Well, my 2013 poem "The Bugs" appropriates for its title characters the distinctive onomatopoeia from The Frogs, and in a comment I speculate that "Aristophanes might have been acquainted with this same riffraff, whom he dubbed 'frogs' for those same 'orrible starin' eyes which led me to call them 'bugs.'" The poem also has an epigraph from another Murdoch novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and connects the bugs with the "minor presences" that haunt the character Tallis Browne. In a memorable scene, Tallis pushes a wheelbarrow around the city; "a useful wheelbarrow for putting things in" is one of the "three mysterious gifts" Tim and Patrick give William Alizio. Tallis's estranged wife is called Morgan; Morgan le Fay is the sister of Morgause, who is the mother of White's four thin, strange, secret frogs.

Basidiumites, the Mushroom People in Eleanor Cameron's novels, also have frog-like characteristics, being baldish, greenish, and big-eyed. Frogs are associated with mushrooms ("toadstools"). Mycetians -- "resident alien" Mushroom People, like Tyco Bass, who come from families that have been living on Earth for generations and who can pass as human -- consider Wales to be their Earthly homeland, and most of them have very Welsh names and speak with a Welsh accent. (Tyco eventually reveals that his original name was Tyco ap Bassyd.) This ties in with White's Celtic "frogs."

Contemporary memes (I saved this one on November 13) also associate frogs with a word suggesting Bassyd and Basidium:

Little Green Men with Celtic names are of course a link to the leprechauns that came up in "William Alizio's links to other stories." In fact, the dismissive way the news reports the story of Tyco Bass's "blowing away" reminds me of the "Crichton Leprechaun" incident. Even when a leprechaun shows up in Mobile, Alabama, it's in a neighborhood with a Scottish/Welsh name. Who all seen da leprechaun say yeeaahh!

Monday, November 13, 2023

William Alizio's links to other stories

In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess me name," I linked Tim, a being who appeared to me in the dreams related in the November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's book The Key and with a character called Tim in an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about a man named William Alizio. You may recall that my second Tim dream occurred in unusual circumstances: I was reading Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil when I felt an overpowering urge to sleep, accompanied by a mental singsong chanting a poem by James Joyce ("Sleep now, O sleep now . . ."). I lay down on the floor to sleep, and Tim appeared immediately.

Yesterday's post "Narrative Reasoning" recounts another dream. In the dream, I was in my study and heard a line from the Aeneid in which Turnus addresses the goddess Iris (who is the rainbow) and asks who brought her down to him. In the dream, I thought this referred to the Iris Murdoch book and, looking up at where it had been on my shelf, I found that its place had been taken by a green leather book that said Narrative Reasoning in gold lettering on its spine. Later I went through all the books in my house (which is a lot of books) and found only one that in any way resembled the one in my dream: a big green (though not leather) book with gold lettering, containing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Chamber Music in a single volume. The poem which had called me to "sleep now" while I was reading Iris Murdoch is from Chamber Music.

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Today I was emailed what I guess would be considered "channeled" material, written by someone not known to me personally in June 2019. This material is supposed to have been supernaturally received and to recount true events. It is unpublished, but by a vanishingly unlikely coincidence, one of the few people with whom it had been shared is a reader of this blog and noticed its parallels with the William Alizio story.

In this story I was sent, Joseph, his wife Asenath, and their son -- who is a merman! -- are living on the shore, waiting and not really doing anything. The couple finds themselves "unable-unwilling entire, to do much of anything, consequential, at all," being in a state of "lassitude, loss, desuetude." It is upon this scene that "there came to these shores, two cunning wise ones 'wizards,' Blue gowned . . . who first arrived, from shores no longer evident." They enter the couple's house and make themselves at home: "these blue-dressed Ones . . . came stumbling . . . into the reedhouse" of Joseph and Asenath. They stay there for years, trying to extract a secret from Asenath: "seeing here a secret kept," they "desired to look into her mystery, but were by her . . . confounded." For ages, "these four (and a fish-boy) encamped, time being passed without enduring its passage." Finally, the secret -- a prophecy of Jesus -- is revealed to them. After this long visit, Joseph and Asenath depart, led by a rainbow: "An arching bow color-resplendent, shown away these espoused ones . . . that rainbow perceptive led them." Later we are told that Joseph, being "sickly" is carried (by the rainbow, I think; the writing isn't the clearest!) "to lands still green . . . Returned, rainbow whim, treasure following, now to rest."

Compare this to the William Alizio story: Alizio, like Joseph, is stuck in a holding pattern, unwilling to do anything consequential; he spends his time pretending to work, pretending to do yard work, and reading the TV Guide. One day he comes home to find that Tim and Patrick have made themselves at home in his house. Although they are apparently aliens ("little bald men" who arrive in a "spaceship"), Tim and Patrick are dressed as blue-gowned wizards: "blue robes and dunce caps." Just as the blue wizards in the Joseph story are there to extract a valuable secret, Tim and Patrick eat up all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" (the name of a breakfast cereal). Finally, Alizio eats a can of chicken noodle soup while the visitors are there, this being a food stereotypically consumed by "sickly" people.

In the Joseph story, the wizards' robes change from blue to white -- possibly relevant, as William Wright has connected Tim with Saruman the White.

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Today I noticed a link to "these four (and a fish-boy)" on the cover of The Philosopher's Pupil. Here's the cover art on my copy (purchased by its original owner on October 30, 1984, within a stone's throw of the Empire State Building):

Starting from the foreground, we have a man, then a woman, and then a figure in shoulder-deep water who could, for all we know, be a merman. Although pretty much everything in the picture is blue, none of these three foreground figures is wearing blue clothing; only the woman has any visible clothing at all, and her bathing suit is black. Only the two figures in the background -- "these blue-dressed ones" -- appear to be fully clothed. In the story, Joseph and Asenath are on the shore -- with their merman son presumably in the water nearby -- and the two blue wizards come to them from another shore. Here, too, the couple and the blue-dressed strangers are on opposite sides of a body of water. There is also a potted plant on the couple's side, and the story mentions Asenath having "a garden."

Although William Alizio is unmarried, Tim and Patrick send him on a mission with a female partner, and the two of them have to escape danger by swimming across a small body of water.

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Later today, the rainbow in the Joseph story made me wonder again about my dream, which began with Turnus's address to the rainbow goddess and ended with The Philosopher's Pupil being replaced with a mysterious green book called Narrative Reasoning.

Thinking about the green book, I wondered if there were any books titled simply Green. Well, yes, it turns out:

Remember that I'd already identified Tim with the character in this book:

From what I can gather from the Amazon page, Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns -- "snatched from her front porch and deposited with much ceremony into the world of little green men" -- just as William Alizio is kidnapped by "little men" and taken away to their planet. Leprechauns are of course closely associated with rainbows and with the name Patrick.

The first sentence of the first review on the Amazon page is:

Lilybet Green can't imagine anyone capturing a leprechaun for anything other than their Lucky Charms, but Balthazar the Leprechaun is indignant that humans want to capture his people for their gold.

Lucky Charms is a sugary breakfast cereal for children, made by General Mills, just like Hidden Treasures in the William Alizio story. Looking back at the story, I see that it is only Patrick -- the one with a leprechaun-adjacent name -- who eats the Hidden Treasures.

Clearly, finding The Key was just the beginning of this web of syncs.

Both Iris Murdoch and James Joyce were Irish, by the way.