From the Narrow Desert

William Wright proposes that the first element in the name Moriancumer refers to Moria -- the Dwarrowdelf of Tolkien, subject of the Song of Durin -- and that there is a hidden reference in the Book of Mormon to the Brother of Jared, like Gandalf, opening the gates of Khazad-dûm by uttering the password friend.

While writing this I thought to check William Wright's blog, and found he's posting again. (A second small sync: Another Will Wright is famous for simulation games, most notably The Sims, which lets players create and somewhat control virtual people. Not-quite-free men!)

I look to the story, or rather my updated story, of the Brother of Jared to demonstrate the truth of that sentence I just wrote.  He moved a mountain by faith.  In an earlier post, I suggest that the mountain that he moved was actually Durin's Door in order to access the mines of Moria, obtain Mithril that could be fashioned into stones, and have Jesus fill those stones with light.

In the video, there are 3 colored triangles and also loose colored string on the set.  At the midpoint of the video (about the 2 minute mark), we find Petty singing in front of a black backdrop.  He then proceeds to smash through this backdrop to reveal a member of the band behind it.  With that band member is the red triangle, and the red string now seeming to extend out from both him and the triangle.  We then see the blue triangle with the same band member now with blue string, and lastly the yellow triangle, but this triangle is inverted and now, to me at least, resembles more something like a jewel or diamond.

Sam: Does anybody ever experience light without any source? You see it on the wall or on the ceiling. It could be in a triangular shape or round. Sometimes I see a triangle. Three triangles together on the ceiling. Has anybody else seen that?

The stone it called to me

And now I see the things the stone has shown to me

A rock that spoke a word

An animated mineral it can be heard

. . .

And now it is your turn

Your turn to hear the stone and then your turn to burn

The stone it calls to you

You can't refuse to do the things it tells you to

In the dream, I was back in the house I grew up in (and that my parents still live in).  I was talking with my dad about something, and I started to say something like "It just feels like things are close, because I can hear you guys upstairs on your ceramics making a lot of noise".  As I was saying this, my dad's face transformed into that of Keanu Reeves as the character of Neo in the Matrix movies, which was a bit strange, and I found that it was difficult to tell whether the words I said were coming from me or the person I was now facing as Neo.  As soon as I became aware of this, I woke up.

In the video for "The Statue Got Me High," as the intro is playing -- the part that freaked me out so much when I first heard it and made me remember the three triangles -- the camera zooms in on a giant ceramic cup and saucer:

As they sing, "And now I see the things the stone has shown to me," we see this:

This video was made seven years before The Matrix, but it certainly seems to prefigure it:

After reading Mr. Wright's posts, I found a new comment from Wandering Gondola -- who plays lots of video games so I don't have to -- pointing out that my three triangles in a triangular configuration suggest the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda franchise. It's a bit different (Zelda on the left, a reconstruction of what I saw on the right) but certainly suggestive:

Zelda made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and then I seemed to remember that Fitzgerald had appeared on this blog once before. He had indeed, in the October 2022 post "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," featuring this image:

What's that on F. Scott's head? Look familiar? The image on the Zeus Is a Dick book also suggests a line from "Statue": "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."

In my 2022 post, I connect this juxtaposition of Fitzgerald and dick with Tender Is the Night -- a novel in which the main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, are based on the author and his wife, Zelda.

Oh, by the way, the F stands for Francis.

I've also just noticed that "Statue" contains an indirect Michelangelo reference: "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie" -- alluding to the apocryphal story about Michelangelo saying he created his masterpiece by "just chipping away anything that doesn't look like David."

2016 Mar 3 (Thu) – I read a few pages (pp. 87-89) of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine in [a cafe called] FM Station. They were playing the Lukas Graham song “7 Years,” which I had never heard before. It begins:

Once I was seven years old, my mama told me

Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely.

Once I was seven years old.

It then goes through various other ages: once I was 11, 20; soon I’ll be 30, 60. It ends by repeating the opening lines quoted above.

While listening to this, I was reading pp. 88-87 [sic] of Dandelion Wine. The children are discussing how Colonel Freeleigh is a “Time Machine” because he can remember so many of his past experiences.

‘Maybe old people were never children, like we claim with Mrs. Bentley, but, big or little, some of them were standing around at Appomattox the summer of 1865.’

Tom and Doug discuss what Doug calls “far-traveling” – meaning going back in time through memory.

“Far-traveling. You make that up?”

“Maybe yes and maybe no.”

“Far-traveling,” whispered Tom.

“Only one thing I’m sure of,” said Douglas, closing his eyes. “It sure sounds lonely.”

Thus the chapter ends.

A bit earlier in the book, on pp. 72-73, old Mrs. Bentley insists that she was once a little girl, but the children refuse to believe it. She shows them a photo to prove that she was 7 years old once.

In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old…

“Who’s this little girl?” asked Jane.

“It’s me!”

The two girls held onto it.

“But it doesn’t look like you,” said Jane simply. “Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.”

They looked at her for a long moment.

“Any more pictures, Mrs. Bentley?” asked Alice. “Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?”

The girls chortled.

“I don’t have to show you anything!” said Mrs. Bentley.

“Then we don’t have to believe you,” replied Jane.

“But this picture proves I was young!”

“That’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.”

Like the song, this focuses on the fact that one was younger in the past – with a specific focus on “seven years old.” Both also emphasize loneliness.

Longue journée

Qui s'achève dans une chambre foncée

J'entends au loin les sirènes

Qui comme une vague me tirent, m'amènent

Chez Morphée

Émerveillé

Ce doux piège

Ou les gammes en délire s'arpègent

M'emportent si loin des villes

Et je fuis,

je fuis les escadrilles du privilège

Beau sortilège

On solde les vieux pays au marché des gorilles

Caché dans les bras de Morphée je rêne

Nemo en exil

Sur mes rêves fragiles

Long day

That ends in a dark room

I hear the sirens in the distance

Which like a wave pulls me, brings me

To Morpheus

Amazed

This sweet trap

Where delirious scales arpeggio

Take me so far from the cities

And I run away

I flee the squadrons of privilege

beautiful spell

We sell the old countries at the gorilla market (???)

Hidden in the arms of Morpheus I reign

Nemo in exile

On my fragile dreams

I've been out of commission for a bit with a case of food poisoning, and it had the effect of turning my dreams into something more like delirium or schizophrenia than like ordinary nocturnal dreams. The visual element was not lifelike at all but consisted solely of constantly changing symbols and diagrams, and I felt that these were being expounded with great clarity and that suddenly I got it The overall feeling of the experience was similar to that attending a dream I had a few years ago which enabled me to perceive Mozart's Magic Flute as a single unified whole, an audible diagram of great complexity and symmetry -- or perhaps more like what the fellow in the John Linnell song feels when he realizes that Montana is really just a leg, with the round part just the way you would espect. I can't really remember much of the content of this supposed revelation -- likely because there is no there there -- but at the time it felt as if the mysteries of the universe were being unfolded to my view.

Central to the dream was the symbol D∞D and its variants D&D and 484 -- and a significant portion of the dream constituted a direct death threat from the synchronicity fairies if I dared to share any of what had been revealed to me. The allusions to extinct species like the dodo and the T. rex were veiled threats, you see, and one of the meanings of D&D was "Death & Death" -- referring to One Death and Seven Death, characters from the Mayan Popol Vuh. And one and seven make eight, as do four and four. (The Chinese words for "four" and "death" are near-homophones, a fact that is the basis of many East Asian superstitions.)

Back on February 23, I received an email about the Rosary from someone whose email address includes the string "1and7," which I suppose is what put my in mind of such Popol Vuh pairs as One and Seven Death and One and Seven Hunahpu.

During the dream, I felt that I had a moral duty to disregard the death threats. Upon waking, I found that I couldn't remember enough of the forbidden knowledge to share it anyway.

Today, after the fever dream, a bit of random link-following led me to the MythoAmerica article "50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America." In the article, these two pictures are juxtaposed:

The Popol Vuh for our times pic.twitter.com/cNmaGKV1V3

— Hernan Cortes (@CyberPunkCortes) April 30, 2022

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps

Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction

Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

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.

Neo : You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?

Choi : All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.

Hillary Clinton

Here's Mrs. Clinton's current blurb on Twitter.

It used to say "pantsuit aficionado" as well. That's gone, but "hair icon" is still there.

And here are her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaign logos.

Both logos turn the letter H into two blue pillars -- with an American flag in front of them (2008) or a red arrow cutting through them (2016).

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Nancy Pelosi

The name Pelosi literally means "hairy" in Italian, and of course there was that hooha about how, whilst publicly professing her support for Satan and all his works, she visited a non-Satan-approved hair salon on the sly.

The Pelosi coat of arms prominently features two pillars.

The Italian pelo, "hair” — whence Pelosi — comes from the Latin pilus. The English word pillar derives from the very similar Latin word pila.

⁂

Joe Biden

Mr. Biden's interest in other people's hair is well known.

His own hair has also occasionally made headlines.

As for his connection with pillars, the guy's initials are JB.

These are Jachin and Boaz -- the two pillars that stood in front of Solomon's temple and later became an important symbol in Freemasonry. The J pillar is typically on the right, as specified in the Bible, but the Hebrews read from right to left, so it's still JB, not BJ.

⁂

Donald Trump

Mr. Trump is very obviously a "hair icon" as well.

His connection with pillars is that he knocks them down. As I have said many times, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign logo depicts Trump (the red arrow pointing right) slashing through the two pillars of establishment party politics.

What other "hair icon" is known for knocking down pillars? Samson. Just as Samson's strength depended on his never getting a haircut, Trump has kept the same hairstyle for a really long time. And like Samson, who was a Nazarite from the womb, Trump has never had an alcoholic drink in his life -- despite, like Samson, living a somewhat profligate life in other respects.

The name Samson derives from Shamash -- the Sun -- and I have already discussed Trump's connection to the Sun card of the Tarot. The German form of Samson (Trump is of German extraction) is, since Luther's translation, Simson. The TV show "The Simpsons" is known for having predicted a Trump presidency way back in 2000, and it portrays him -- like every other character -- with a bright yellow face.

⁂

Red and blue pillars

The historical Jachin and Boaz, described in some detail in the Bible, were made of bronze and followed the same design, and there is no indication that they differed in any way. As Masonic or occult symbols, though, the two pillars are often represented as contrasting. You can see this in the illustrations I have given above. In one, Jachin is topped by the celestial, and Boaz by the terrestrial, globe. In the other, Jachin is white and Boaz is black.

Another convention sometimes encountered is to make Jachin red and Boaz blue.

In the lower of the two illustrations above, red Jachin is marked with the alchemical symbols of air and fire and is topped with the Sun; blue Boaz, in contrast, is associated with the feminine elements of earth and water, and with the Moon. (The words aesch and maijm written at the top of the picture are transliterations of the Hebrew words for fire and water, respectively.) The Sun is emitting a beam of light labeled pater. The Moon -- which, oddly, has its dark side facing the Sun -- is actually radiating a beam of darkness, labeled with the word mater written upside-down. (The upside-down M is now a W, transforming mater to water.)

This association of Boaz with inversion is reinforced by the alchemical symbols on the pillars; we naturally think of the fire triangle as a "normal" triangle and the water triangle as "upside down." Elsewhere in the picture, the word superius is written right-side up against a white background, thus associating it with Jachin; inferius, written upside down against a darker background, is linked to Boaz.

Strangely, despite both the historical positions of Jachin and Boaz and the universal symbolism of left and right, this picture puts Jachin (father, Sun, air, fire, higher, right-side up) on the left and Boaz (mother, moon, earth, water, lower, upside down) on the right. The only justification I can see for this is to make Jachin the "first" pillar and Boaz the "second" for those accustomed to reading European languages. (Another oddity: Since when is Taurus between Aries and Pisces in the zodiac?)

All these correspondences are consistent with the American political symbolism, current since 2000, of red Republicans and blue Democrats. But in the Hillary Clinton logos, where I have interpreted the two pillars as symbolizing the two parties, both pillars are blue -- and now, in 2020, they both bear the initials of the blue candidate, Joe Biden. And this, too, is appropriate. While the Republicans may be "the party of the right" by comparison to the Democrats, both parties are by any historical (indeed, by any sane) standard very, very far to the left. It's a blue world.

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Red and blue pillers

Can anyone read this discussion of red and blue pillars without being reminded of red and blue pillers -- those who have metaphorically taken the red or the blue pill of Matrix fame?

Pill derives from Latin pilula, a diminutive of pila, "ball" -- which in turn is believed to derive from pilus, "hair" (meaning originally a ball of hair).

Prior to the 2000 election, neither of the political parties in the U.S. was consistently associated with any particular color. "Red states" and "blue states" date back no earlier than the days of Bush and Gore. The Matrix was released in 1999, but it "correctly" puts the red pill in Morpheus's right hand and the blue one in his left.

In the film, taking the red pill means facing reality, and taking the blue pill means staying in a comfortable delusion and "believing whatever you want to believe." In recent years, the term "red pill" has -- again, appropriately -- increasingly come to be associated with the political right, and in particular with anti-feminism. (When Maroon 5 released an album called Red Pill Blues, they had to apologize and assure their fans that "we are all hardcore feminists in the band.") The association of the color blue with what would later be called feminism dates back at least to the time of Lord Byron.

(Ironically, the Wachowski brothers, who created the metaphor, are firmly in the "believe whatever you want to believe" camp; as of this writing, what they currently want to believe is that they are actually the Wachowski sisters.)

Matrix -- originally meaning "womb" -- derives from mater. One of the meanings of matrix is a grid, or anything arranged in rows and columns. Take another look at that Jachin and Boaz picture.

At the bottom is a grid -- a matrix -- and the triangular alchemical symbols on the two pillars can be seen as arrows indicating direction. The blue pill(ar) leads down into the matrix, and the red pill(ar) up out of it.

⁂

But we no longer have a red J and a blue B. Both pillars, both J and B, are now blue. Blue J -- blue jay -- and yes, in case you were wondering, a blue jay is a corvid. There's a Beatles song called "Blue Jay Way," and this is how it begins.

There's a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We'll be over soon they said
Now they've lost themselves instead

What should we do, finding ourselves in Blue Jay World? Well, the Beatles themselves said it best: Please don't belong.