From the Narrow Desert

Yesterday's "tongues" post, in which it is assumed that an unusual word is intended to allude to at least two different words simultaneously, reminded me of a dream I had back in 2002 or 2003.

I dreamed that I was at some sort of social event, and that among those present was Mark Hofmann (who is known for having forged several Mormon historical documents and then murdered three people to cover his tracks, and who in real life is serving a life sentence in Gunnison). Mark stood up and announced that he had composed a haiku and would like to share it with everyone. He took out a small note card (about the size of a business card) and read, with what was clearly deliberately garbled pronunciation, something that sounded like this:

The broo jerroo
Ih is yerroo
The broo jerroo

I understood this as:

The blue Jell-O
It is yellow
The blue Jell-O

I repeated back the haiku as I had understood it and said, "Mark, that doesn't make any sense. And anyway, it's not a haiku because it doesn't have 17 syllables."

Mark gave a smug smile, clearly gratified at my playing such a perfect straight-man role in the joke he had set up, and triumphantly turned his note card around so everyone could see what was written on it. It read:

The brother of Jared
He is a hero
The brother of Jared

Utah Mormons are notoriously fond of Jell-O, so the Jell-O reading of the haiku is a stereotypical reference to the shallowest aspects of Mormon Corridor culture. I took Hofmann's trick as a sarcastic commentary on the current state of Mormondom, on how what should have been something deep and epic -- the faith of the brother of Jared -- had devolved into something having more to do with various colors of flavored gelatin. From Deseret to desert to dessert.

I like to have some idea of the physiognomy of the authors I read, and so I've been trying, without success so far, to find a photo of Daymon Smith. One correspondent suggested that if I couldn't see his face I could at least hear his voice by looking up an interview he did some time back on the Mormon Stories podcast. I found a four-part series of such interviews, recorded in 2010, and listened to some of them. The third episode dealt with the corporate side of the CJCLDS and ended with a story about how economically motivated decisions had led first to a glut and then to a shortage of temple clothing.

John: So you're in white, you're dressed in white.

Brinley: With the green, yeah.

Margi: Apron.

After the blood moon of Rev 6:12

6:13

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind

I have recently posted on the number 666, and on a dream about Charles Manson and Timothy Leary. This latter connection was reinforced this morning when I followed a link on Anonymous Conservative to a 2019 Telegraph article called "Making a murderer: did the CIA's secret LSD labs turn Charles Manson into a killer?" Leary is not mentioned in the article, but of course his name is synonymous with LSD.

Less than an hour after skimming the Manson article, I was stopped at a traffic light and suddenly became aware of the license plates of the three motorcycles stopped in front of me: NB6-616, MRK-75?? (I forget the last two digits, maybe 74?), and LDS-286. These entered my consciousness simultaneously and were all immediately perceived as meaningful.

I read the first one as "Nota bene: 66(1)6" -- that is, note well the number of the beast. (Some manuscripts of Revelation have 616 instead of 666.) Later I realized that NB itself could also stand for "number of the beast."

In that context, MRK obviously suggested the word mark, as in "mark of the beast." It also made me think of marek, which I (erroneously?) believed to be the Arabic word for "apostate." Back in 2002, when I had recently left the CJCLDS and sometimes lurked on exmormon.org, one of the regular posters there used the handle Al-Marek and explained that it meant "the apostate" in Arabic. Apparently, though, he just made that up; checking various online dictionaries and translators, I can find no such Arabic word.

Since MRK had made me think of my 2002 apostasy from Mormonism, the last license plate really jumped out at me. LDS of course means Latter-day Saint, i.e. Mormon, and 286 is the Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) value of my full name. That is, if A=1 and Z=26, the sum of all the letters in William James Tychonievich is 286. (The number of the beast is also traditionally interpreted in terms of gematria, 666 and 616 being the values of two different transliterations of Nero Caesar.)

The combined message of the license plates was, then, "Mark well the number of the beast, apostate Mormon William James Tychonievich!"

Only I'd remembered the gematria wrong. As soon as I was off the road and could use a calculator, I added it up and found that the number of my name is actually 268, not 286. To make the license plate match my name, I would have to transpose the last two digits. And what about the other part of the license plate, LDS? If we perform the same transposition on it, we get, yes, LSD. (And if we transpose the last two phonemes of Latter-day Saint, we get Latter-day Satan, i.e. the antichrist or "beast." The S:E:G: value of LDS or LSD is 35; three and a half, or 3.5, a prominent number in the Book of Daniel, is borrowed by Revelation and associated with the antichrist.)

The LDS/LSD connection is made in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk and Spock have time-traveled back to the 1980s, and Kirk tries to explain Spock's odd appearance and behavior by saying he "did a little too much LDS" in the sixties. I referenced this line recently in my April 29 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," when a YouTuber dismissed a bit of Mormon-adjacent folklore (the Gadianton Canyon Incident) as most likely the result of "shrooms or LSD."

I have no particular interpretation of all this so far. We'll see where the sync fairies decide to go with it.

Looking for "The Windows of Heaven" led me to a YouTube channel called "Hard-to-Find Mormon Videos" -- and I thought, could it be possible? Might they have uploaded "That Which Was Lost"? And they have!

I've periodically scoured the Internet for this extremely quotable video for years, but always in vain. Now, at long last, here it is: the Mormon take on the hippies, from 1969.

Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more. By this ye may know if a man repenteth of his sins—behold, he will confess them and forsake them.

And now, verily I say unto you, I, the Lord, will not lay any sin to your charge; go your ways and sin no more; but unto that soul who sinneth shall the former sins return, saith the Lord your God.

I know, I know, I said that I would quit

All right, I promise, no more after this

We should not even pretend that we 'will do better in future' and will strive to 'cease sinning' because this is not true. We will not do better, nor will we strive to do better; instead we will carry on sinning just as we do now. However, we acknowledge and repent this.

Trigger warning: Mormon temple symbolism discussed (but no covenants of secrecy violated). Also, I use the word Mormon. Mormon, Mormon, Mormon!

⁂

Some years ago I wrote a post (qv) about the marks on the breasts of the Garment of the Holy Priesthood, which officially represent the Masonic square and compass but in fact look like the letters L and V. I proposed the hypothesis (which I still stand by) that the resemblance was deliberate and that, in addition to the Masonic meaning, the breast marks stood for Lux and Veritas -- a Latin translation, current in Joseph Smith's New England, of the biblical Hebrew terms Urim and Thummim. (The Urim and Thummim were worn in the breastplate of the high priest, just as the breasts are pricked with the square and compass in a Masonic initiation.) In that post I mentioned in passing one of my earlier fancies about the meaning of the L and the V.

The fact is, the Garment marks don’t look like a square and a compass (though one can see the resemblance once it has been explained). They look like the letters L and V. As an uninitiated teenager, I always thought of them as standing for the words life and vita. (The words came from Vita Adae et Evae, a pseudepigraphical work I had read in translation as Life of Adam and Eve. I knew that the Mormon temple ritual dealt with the life of Adam and Eve, so I suppose that’s why I made the connection.)

I should emphasize that I "thought of them as" standing for life and vita -- not that I ever believed that they might in fact stand for those words. When I was a toddler and still somewhat uncertain as to which shoe went on which foot, my parents resorted to writing a big R in sharpie on the sole of one sneaker and an L on the other -- and so every time I put on my shoes I thought to myself "Roar, lions!" (or, if I happened to pick up the left shoe first, "Lions, roar!"). Of course I knew that the letters in fact stood for right and left, but that knowledge did nothing to break the fanciful association with lions roaring. In much the same way, every time I was on laundry duty and had to fold my parents' temple Garments, I always thought to myself "Life, vita" even though the letters obviously couldn't actually mean that. I mean, what would be the point of representing the same word twice, in two different languages?

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The other day I happened to be searching archive.org for a particular, somewhat obscure Tarot-related text from the last century and eventually, way leading on to way as it does, found myself looking at the frontispiece of a certain Liber Θ, which appears to be some sort of Crowley-inspired revision of Golden Dawn material (it claims to be "a traditional instruction of the R.R. et A.C., revised and expanded"). This is the diagram I saw.

Life in the upper left, Vita in the upper right (okay, L·I·F·E· and V·I·T·A·; these Crowleyans and their magickal puncktuation!) -- corresponding precisely to the L and V on the Garment, which I had fancifully so interpreted in my teens. (The L is over the wearer's right breast, but is on the left to someone looking at the garment from the outside.)

Notice also that the word life is accompanied by the letter T, with right angles suggesting a square; and vita by a letter A so stylized as to suggest the Masonic compass, which is always open at an angle of 60 degrees. (Though this sort of thing of course varies from font to font, the letter A more usually has an angle of approximately 36 degrees, forming a golden rather than an equilateral triangle, as can be seen in the word VITA itself.)

This T and A are part of the word TARO/ROTA, to be read clockwise -- a motif, originating in Éliphas Lévi's interpretation of Guillaume Postel, on which I have posted quite a bit. This diagram offers yet another possible orientation of those four letters.

The choice to write it as TAPO -- with a Greek P rather than a Latin R -- is a strange one, since the Greek version of TARO/ROTA properly uses Ω rather than O. We thus have the reverse of the version used in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, which has a Latin R with a Greek Ω. (Even the Greek word βίος is written in Latin characters here -- inadvertently calling to mind a Basic Input/Output System! -- making the use of the Greek P even stranger.) At any rate, this anomalous spelling is fortuitous in the present context, since the two remaining marks on the Garment are the "navel mark" and the "knee mark" (the latter being esoterically located at the mouth). The letter O suggests the navel, both visually and by way of the Greek ὀμφαλός. P is ambiguous; as a Greek letter, it derives from the Semitic ר, meaning "head"; as a Latin letter, it comes from פ, "mouth."

I was listening to Louis Armstrong on YouTube, and somehow or other this showed up in the sidebar. I found it compelling enough to listen the whole thing (quite unusual for me, since my tolerance for video is generally very low), and so I pass it along to whoever might happen to read this post.

The lady in the video is apparently a member of one of the "Restoration Branches" of Mormonism -- a Missouri-based conservative movement which broke off from the RLDS when that denomination began to become converged in the 1980s. (The RLDS, a never-polygamous sect of Mormonism which followed Joseph Smith III rather than Brigham Young, has since degenerated into a "liberal Christian" type group called the Community of Christ.)

As someone who takes both Mormonism and close encounters seriously, I should mention that the person this woman and her friend encountered does fit the traditional folklore about the Three Nephites -- but also that about the so-called Nordic aliens (no suitable link suggests itself, but you know the guys I mean). I'm not trying to explain-away either tradition in terms of the other; just noting the similarity.

Yet I confess that sometimes I
Still manage to annoy
My dearest friends, but that’s a fault
Of many a Mormon boy.

-- a formerly-beloved Mormon song

I'm not sure why this seemingly trivial matter should seem so very important to me right now, but it has nevertheless become for me a matter of great spiritual urgency that I be done with tolerance and passive resistance and just nail my theses to the door already.

I will no longer link to anyone who employs euphemisms such as "Restored Christian" in order to avoid using the word "Mormon." Update: That would essentially mean not linking to any faithful church-Mormons, which has turned out to be too much of a constraint. I now link freely to these people, as to lots of other people I disagree with.

I will no longer publish comments that employ euphemisms such as "Restored Christian" in order to avoid using the word "Mormon."

To be clear, I have no problem whatsoever with calling the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by its full, revealed name -- but it is increasingly clear to me that the real thrust behind the current rectification-of-names campaign is not so much to encourage the use of the revealed name as to to suppress "the M-word."

In case you hadn't noticed, "Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square" does not include the revealed name of the church any more than the oldspeak "Mormon Tabernacle Choir" did. "Restored Christianity" is no more the revealed name of the Mormon religion than "Mormonism" is. These changes are being made for reasons other than those stated, and I do not support them.

Behold my hands and feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.

-- Luke 24:39 

Rabbi, where dwellest thou?

-- John 1:38

Mystery is the essence of man's nature, and whatever presents itself to mankind under a mysterious appearance will always excite curiosity and be sought, even when men are satisfied that the veil covers nothing but a cypher. . . . 

Those who become Freemasons only for the sake of finding out the secret of the order, run a very great risk of growing old under the trowel without ever realizing their purpose. Yet there is a secret, but it is so inviolable that it has never been confided or whispered to anyone. Those who stop at the outward crust of things imagine that the secret consists in words, in signs, or that the main point of it is to be found only in reaching the highest degree. This is a mistaken view: the man who guesses the secret of Freemasonry, and to know it you must guess it, reaches that point only through long attendance in the lodges, through deep thinking, comparison, and deduction. He would not trust that secret to his best friend in Freemasonry, because he is aware that if his friend has not found it out, he could not make any use of it after it had been whispered in his ear. No, he keeps his peace, and the secret remains a secret. 

Everything done in a lodge must be secret; but those who have unscrupulously revealed what is done in the lodge, have been unable to reveal that which is essential; they had no knowledge of it, and had they known it, they certainly would not have unveiled the mystery of the ceremonies. . . . 

In the mysteries of Ceres, an inscrutable silence was long kept, owing to the veneration in which they were held. Besides, what was there in them that could be revealed? The three words which the hierophant said to the initiated? But what would that revelation have come to? Only to dishonour the indiscreet initiate, for they were barbarous words unknown to the vulgar. I have read somewhere that the three sacred words of the mysteries of Eleusis meant: Watch, and do no evil. The sacred words and the secrets of the various masonic degrees are about as criminal. . . . 

In our days nothing is important, and nothing is sacred, for our cosmopolitan philosophers. Botarelli publishes in a pamphlet all the ceremonies of the Freemasons, and the only sentence passed on him is: "He is a scoundrel. We knew that before!" . . . In our days everything is inconsistent, and nothing has any meaning. Yet it is right to go ahead, for to stop on the road would be to go from bad to worse.

I am not a Mason myself, but thanks to pamphlets published by scoundrels, I am quite familiar with the content of the blue lodge ceremonies. I have also participated dozens of times in the Mormon version of a Masonic initiation, known as the Endowment, and it was on this latter experience, as much as on my knowledge of Freemasonry properly so called, that I found myself reflecting as I read Casanova's assessment. In what follows, I will pass freely between the two, considering them (and the Eleusinian mysteries) to be instances of the same sort of thing. (I trust my Mormon readers need not fear any bandying-about of the sacred; I will be discreetly vague.)

"Sublime trifles," though it seems merely flippant at first, strikes me as a very perceptive characterization of Masonry. The secrets revealed to Masonic initiates consist primarily of (1) secret handshakes and passwords and such, the only purpose of which can be the safeguarding of the real secrets; (2) injunctions to be good and true and other such moral platitudes (analogous to the Eleusinian secret of "Watch, and do no evil"); and (3) some rather straightforward symbols representing said moral commonplaces, such as a draftsman's compass as a symbol of "keeping within due bounds"; and (4) a simple allegorical drama about the assassination of a master mason, the main thrust of which seems to be the importance of protecting the handshakes and passwords. So, yes, these are trifles. Those "secrets" that are truly secret (i.e., no one but a Mason or a reader of scoundrelly pamphlets would know them) are in themselves of little meaning or importance, and those that are meaningful are the common property of all mankind and may be known intuitively or by cultural osmosis without the need for secret initiatory ceremonies. Yet there is a secret -- so Casanova says, and I believe him -- something to be gotten from those trifles which is sublime and worth getting.

As for the Endowment, I would certainly balk at using the word "trifles," mostly because, while the handshakes and passwords and straightforward symbols and moral commonplaces are all there, the content of the drama -- drawn from the opening chapters of Genesis, one of the deepest parts of one of the deepest books in the world -- is so much richer than that of its Masonic counterpart. Then again, it's all based rather closely on the Bible -- i.e., the most familiar and widely read book in the history of the world and as such the farthest thing possible from "secret" knowledge. Since virtually everything taught in the Endowment is also taught in publicly available scriptures, it is not clear what purpose is served by the pretense of secrecy. Mormons will say that the content of the Endowment is particularly sacred -- but what about it makes it more sacred than what may be read in the Bible? While there are of course some departures from and additions to the Mosaic narrative, I think it's safe to say that no great secrets are revealed, no startling new doctrines kept hidden from the uninitiated. Casanova's suggestion that "the veil covers nothing but a cypher" made me think of how the Endowment ceremony culminates in the initiate's finally being allowed to pass through the Veil of the Temple and discover what lies on the other side -- which turns out to be essentially a large living room, well appointed but not otherwise out of the ordinary, where nothing in particular is done, said, or revealed.

Yet there is a secret, something undeniably sublime about the Endowment, and the secrecy/sacredness is part and parcel of it, which is what makes me so ready to believe Casanova when he says something similar about ordinary Masonry.

Joseph Smith is reported to have said, "The secret of Masonry is to keep a secret." Éliphas Lévi listed "to be silent" as one of the four magical Powers of the Sphinx. Some of the Gospels have Jesus stress secrecy so much that Frank Kermode called his book about the Gospel of Mark The Genesis of Secrecy. Secrecy and silence seem to be something more than mere prudence -- seem to be seen as positive goods in their own right.

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The purpose of Masonic (and Mormon) secrecy is not to keep information from the general public. This can clearly be seen in the way those institutions have reacted (or failed to react) to leaks, exposés, and the like. Masonry has been using the same passwords and secret handshakes for centuries, even though they have been revealed to the public many times over and are now trivially easy for anyone to find out. If you really care about protecting private information, then when someone hacks into your account, you change your password. In fact, you change your password from time to time regardless, just to be safe. The Masons have never changed their passwords, even though everyone knows them by now. (Even in Casanova's time, the reaction to a Masonic exposé was "He is a scoundrel. We knew that before!") If the Masons really cared about information security, good old Jachin and Boaz (really terrible passwords; anyone who knows the first can easily guess the second) would have long since been replaced by something more like "correct horse battery staple."

I can only conclude that the importance of the secrecy lies not in the supposed result (outsiders not knowing things) but rather in the act of secret-keeping itself. Masonry (and Mormonism, and the ancient Mysteries) is based on the principle that keeping secrets is good for the soul. Is that true? I can think of three possible reasons that it may be.

First, it is a form of discipline, a way of practicing self-control. "If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body. Behold, we put bits in the horses' mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body" (James 3:2-3).

Second, very often our reasons for talking about things are unworthy and related to pride. When I post to this blog, for example, I constantly have to watch myself, to make sure that I am honestly expressing the truth to the best of my ability and not just trying to seem interesting or insightful to others. "Climb a mountain, tell no one" was a meme going around the Internet a while back -- tell no one, not because no one must know that you have climbed a mountain, but because the policy of telling no one ensures that you climb for the right reasons.

Third, there is the idea that non-communication may facilitate deeper and more thorough thought. As Robert Frost puts it in "Build Soil,"

I will go to my run-out social mind
And be as unsocial with it as I can.
The thought I have, and my first impulse is
To take to market I will turn it under.
The thought from that thought I will turn it under
And so on to the limit of my nature.
We are too much out, and if we won't draw in
We shall be driven in.

This idea exists in tension with the idea that communication leads to clear thinking, that you don't really understand something until you have tried to explain it to someone else. I find truth in both views, and perhaps Frost's agricultural metaphor acknowledges as much. After all, you don't keep turning your crops under forever; in the end you do want to take something to the market. So perhaps there is value to the Mormon distinction between the scriptures, which may be publicly discussed, and the Endowment, which must be contemplated in silence. Both social and unsocial thinking are necessary.