From the Narrow Desert: Noah

Showing posts with label Noah. Show all posts

Thursday, June 27, 2024

Nautical Newts

At this rate I'm going to go through the whole freaking alphabet.

A newt is a kind of salamander. Although the picture is captioned "Nine Nautical Newts Navigating Near Norway," there are only six newts in the boat. The remaining three are in the water and are only partially visible. This immediately made me think of the Knight of Wands, recently discussed in "More on Joan and Claire." The Knight's outer garment is printed with salamanders -- six full salamanders plus a few partially visible ones.

The newts are navigating the open sea, while the Knight and his salamanders are traveling through the deserts of Egypt. That's a pretty big discrepancy, but as it happens, I just mentioned in a comment on "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" that "Egypt was also underwater when it was discovered" according to the Book of Abraham. This was following a train of thought started by the fact that the Hog Knight on the cover of Animalia is accompanied by an ostrich, which had made me think of a passage from The Satanic Verses related to the Norman Conquest. The Nautical Newts are also accompanied by an ostrich.

Actually, the Hog Knight has a lot in common with the Knight of Wands:

Both are wearing armor and riding in the same direction. The helmet of the Knight of Wands even appears to have one of those hounskull-style visors which, when closed, would give the Knight a "pig-faced" appearance. The Hog Knight holds a flagpole with a banner; the Knight of Wands holds a staff which, in my post, I connected with a flagpole as well. The Knight of Wands is in Egypt; the Hog Knight's banner, as seen inside the book, is decorated with what appear to be Egyptian hieroglyphics:

In the comment, I quote the statement that the discoverer of this underwater Egypt was "the daughter of Ham" and that she "afterward settled her sons in it," and I suggest that "hogs could be a punning reference to 'Ham.'" That Ham pun in its classic form, the one famously referenced by Bloom in Ulysses, includes a desert reference:

Why should no man starve on the deserts of Arabia?
Because of the sand which is there.
How came the sandwiches there?
The tribe of Ham was bred there and mustered.

Ham, bread, and mustard -- a very respectable pun. "Mustering" is something that military men do, which fits with the warlike portrayal of the tribe of ham in Animalia. Mustard is also interesting in connection with the Nautical Newts. It is the scholarly consensus that "eye of newt," the famous witches'-brew ingredient, originally referred to mustard seed. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus compare the Kingdom to a grain of mustard seed, and Joseph Smith adapted the parable to apply to the Book of Mormon:

Let us take the Book of Mormon, which a man took and hid in his field, securing it by his faith, to spring up in the last days, or in due time; let us behold it coming forth out of the ground, which is indeed accounted the least of all seeds, but behold it branching forth, yea, even towering, with lofty branches, and God-like majesty, until it, like the mustard seed, becomes the greatest of all herbs. And it is truth, and it has sprouted and come forth out of the earth, and righteousness begins to look down from heaven, and God is sending down His powers, gifts and angels, to lodge in the branches thereof.

The mustard seed is planted and grows in a field, but the mustard seed is also mentioned in Luke in connection with the idea that a tree could be planted in the sea by those with sufficient faith:

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you (Luke 17:6).

Joseph Smith connected the mustard seed with a book of scripture buried in the earth. The Nautical Newts appear to have their own seaborne scripture -- a Nautical New T., or New Testament. Keeping in mind that the word translated as gospel in the Bible literally means "good news," the symbolism is pretty clear:

The name of the newspaper is The Northern Star, which makes me think that this "gospel" is the writings of the Lost Tribes, as mentioned in 2 Nephi 29, since those tribes are traditionally thought of as being "in the North." We typically speak of the Ten Lost Tribes, but they could also be reckoned as nine, if (as is often the case in the Bible) Joseph is counted as a single tribe rather than being divided into the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. The Book of Mormon never gives them a number, though we know that there were 12 tribes in all and that three (Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) were not "lost."

Touching the newspaper is a snail shell. Well, I suppose it's actually a nautilus shell, given the alphabet theme, but it certainly looks like a snail shell. In "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback," I specifically brought in snails as a symbol of a Gospel being transported across the sea. The snail in that analysis (from Lewis Carroll) was paired with the whiting, and here the snail shell is white. In Carroll, the idea of whiting having their tails in their mouths is emphasized; we see the same pose in the salamanders on the Knight of Wands.

To the right of the snail shell, we can see the ghostly image of what I suppose is meant to be a nurse, but her hat -- a rectangular shape marked with a cross -- is symbolic shorthand for "Bible," confirming our interpretation of the newspaper.

The Newts are navigating "Near Norway." Norway is, etymologically, "the northern way," which fits in with the Lost Tribes theme. The Old English name for Norway was Norðmanna land -- "Northman Land" -- which is also the etymological meaning of Normandy. Since Armorica (comprising Normandy and Brittany) has been so prominent in the sync-stream of late, we could think of "Near Norway" as referring to the Northman Land nearer to Britain -- i.e., Normandy as opposed to Norway in Scandinavia.

Finally, coming back to Ham for a moment, note that he is also implicitly present in the Nautical Newts picture, as one of the eight passengers on Noah's Ark:

By the way, I wasn't kidding about going through almost the whole alphabet. Stay tuned next time for the esoteric significance of Zany Zebras Zigzagging in Zinc Zeppelins.

Sunday, May 12, 2024

Rainbows and the number eight

With seven each of creatures clean;
Of unclean, two -- yet I have seen
How mercy doth prevail in Heaven:
Though man's an unclean creature, seven
The Lord permitted to embark
Along with me into the ark.
My sons, my wife, my sons' three wives --
He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

Early this morning I was reading in a coffee shop, as is my wont. I read the two Epistles of Peter and then turned to The Eighth Tower by John Keel.

Both Epistles mention Noah as one of eight survivors of the Flood: "the ark . . . wherein few, that is eight, souls were saved" (1 Pet. 3:20), and "saved Noah the eighth person" (2 Pet. 2:5). The story of the Flood is, among other things, a just-so story about the origin of the rainbow.

The Eighth Tower has that word eighth in its title, and the cover illustration shows the seven traditional colors of the rainbow plus an eighth color, black:

The author's name as given on the cover -- John A. Keel -- contains an anagram of Noah. (John A. is also an anagram of that other nautical prophet, Jonah.) A keel is part of a ship.

In the book, Keel provides a diagram of part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- including eight "colors" -- and then discusses how UFOs often appear first as red or violet and then move through the spectrum:

Just as I was reading this, the background music in the coffee shop was a song called "Inside a Rainbow":

Thursday, February 2, 2023

No H in Snake

There's an old (1979) music theory textbook called No H in Snake. I have no idea why it's called that, even though I was taught out of that book as a child. I think one of the activities involved arranging cards with musical notes on them into a row, or "snake," and the notes only go from A to G, so "no H." Anyway, I think you'll agree that it's a very memorable title -- which we used to press into service as the best deadpan surrealist response whenever anyone said "Remember there's no I in team."

In my last post, I noticed the logo for Taiwan's National Health Insurance, which is a stylized green H.

Back in 2021, I noted that the British equivalent of Taiwan's socialized healthcare, NHS, is Hebrew for "snake" -- and also the initials for No H in Snake.

H is the 8th letter, and 8 is the lemniscate. This made me think of the old 8chan logo, which was a green lemniscate that suggests a two-headed snake. The snake imagery was made explicit in the new 8kun logo, though it is unfortunately no longer green.

That 8chan lemniscate -- a mirror-image S in green -- looks a bit familiar, doesn't it?

No H in Snake -- if a figure-eight can represent a snake (à la 8kun), then that gets us to this:

As the context of that magazine cover should make clear, the "NOH8" slogan has nothing to with not hating people and everything to do with promoting the idea that sexual pathologies and perversions are good. The more usual symbol of this ideology is the rainbow -- symbol of God's promise to Noah never to flood the earth again -- so it it presumably not a coincidence that "NOH8" brings to mind Noah and the eight people who were saved in the ark.

Doing an image search for noah 8 brought up this, with a green cursive L similar in general design to the 8chan logo and the No H in Snake treble clef.

Monday, April 18, 2022

Noah's eyes revisited

Turn around, bright eyes

I posted "Noah's eyes" on April 12 of last year, speculating that humans may originally have had eyes like chimpanzees (brown irises and black sclerae) and that Noah may have been a mutant introducing blue irises and/or white sclerae into the gene pool.

This was based on a passage from Mauricio Berger's Sealed Book of Mormon.

And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.

I had been reading Berger's Sealed Book because it had the endorsement of the highly intelligent John P. Pratt, but by the time I posted "Noah's eyes," I had already concluded that the book was very obviously fraudulent. Nevertheless, when I read that bit about how "his eyes were different," it rang true.

Well, it turns out that Noah's "different eyes" are a legitimately ancient tradition, found in a fragment from the Book of Noah which has come down to us as part of the Enoch literature. (This is presumably Berger's source, since he is obviously familiar with the Book of Enoch.)

And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness.
And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. And he said unto him: 'I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels, and I fear that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth. And now, my father, I am here to petition thee and implore thee that thou mayest go to Enoch, our father, and learn from him the truth, for his dwelling-place is amongst the angels.'

Nothing seems more likely than that Noah's "bright" (blue/white) eyes should have been progressively exaggerated over time until they became eyes that lit up the whole house like the sun when he opened them.

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Noah, the eighth

With seven each of creatures clean,
of unclean two. And here is seen
how mercy doth prevail in Heaven:
Though man's an unclean creature, seven
the Lord permitted to embark
along with me into the ark.
My wife, my sons, my sons' three wives:
He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

We read in 2 Peter 2:5 that God "spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly."

This is typically interpreted as a reference to the fact that "eight souls were saved by water" (1 Pet. 3:20) in the ark, and "the eighth" (person is not there in the Greek) means in this case "one of eight." It would be more natural, though, for a reader to take as meaning that Noah was "the eighth" in the same sense that Enoch was "the seventh from Adam" (Jude 1:14) and think that Noah was the eighth in line of descent from Adam.

In fact, in Genesis 5 as we have it now, he was the tenth. In the parallel genealogy given in Genesis 4, though (see "City of Enoch"), it is the eighth place which corresponds to Noah.

In the Genesis 4 genealogy, Lamech is the seventh generation from Adam, heads a family of seven (he takes two wives, each of whom bears two sons), and says, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold" (Gen. 4:24).

In Genesis 5, Lamech is the ninth generation and the father of Noah -- but he lives for 777 years, a strong hint that he may originally have been identical to the Lamech of Genesis 4, who is so closely associated with the numbers 7 and 77. That would make Noah "the eighth."

Monday, November 8, 2021

St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected

I was visiting in-laws yesterday and happened to notice a children's toy they had in their house: a stuffed bear that looked exactly like Winnie-the-Pooh -- the Disney version, yellow with a red T-shirt -- but written on the T-shirt were the English words Mischievous Dog. This kind of "mutant knockoff" product is common enough in Taiwan, but this one caught my attention and seemed significant somehow. I thought I should take a photo but in the end decided not to, so sorry, no illustration.

I tried to think what possible significance Winnie-the-Mischievous-Dog could have, but all that came to mind was that in my October 25 post "Bear with Biden" I had mentioned Winnie-the-Pooh in connection with Xi Jinping, Bernie Sanders (Bernie means "bear," and Pooh lived "under the name of Sanders"), and Robin Hood ("he belongs to Christopher Robin, and his name is simply Hood written upside down").

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In my November 4 post "Doves of Tarshish," I note that both Jonah and Columbus mean "dove," and that both Jonah and Columbus are associated with the Tartessos, Spain. In the post, I wrote out the full name Christopher Columbus because his Christian name seemed important, too, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I thought of the legend of St. Christopher, who was supposed to be a giant with the head of a dog, but it didn't seem to have any relevance to Columbus or to Jonah.

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Last night I checked my YouTube subscriptions, which I hadn't done in a few weeks, and found a new (November 3) video from Jonathan Pageau called "Finding the Giant Dog-Headed St. Christopher in the Bible." I immediately recognized this as possibly relevant both to the "Doves of Tarshish" sync and to the "Mischievous Dog" toy. I had previously highlighted the second half of the name Christopher Robin in connection with Pooh, and this was a possible link to the first. And could the biblical connection possibly have anything to do with Jonah? I watched the whole video.

Pageau begins with a brief summary of the St. Christopher legend -- a giant monster or dog-headed man who carries people (and ultimately Christ himself) across a river -- and says that in the Bible we often find monsters and animals associated with crossing water. The first example he gives is that of Noah -- who, escaping a world of giants, crosses the floodwaters in a boat full of animals. The Noah story is also the first mention of the dove (jonah) in the Bible; and while Pageau never actually mentions Jonah, he clearly fits the pattern as well, being swallowed by a monstrous animal while crossing the water.

After the biblical examples, Pageau relates the story of St. Christopher in more detail and emphasizes the role of trickery: After tricking the king of Canaan and the devil, St. Christopher is himself tricked by Christ. What a mischievous dog!

At the end of the video, Pageau promotes a graphic novel he and his brother are writing, which is based on the legend of St. Christopher and has the palindromic title God's Dog. This made me think of my December 2020 post "God and dog at the Panama Canal" -- the Panama Canal being a place where people cross from one body of water to another.

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Pageau's characterization of Noah as someone who crossed the waters in a boat full of animals made me think of a similar story from the Book of Mormon: the Jaredites. At the Tower of Babel, when everyone's language is confounded, Jared and his family have their original (the original) language preserved by the Lord. They leave Babylon and sail across the sea in "barges" (actually fully enclosed submersible vessels) full of animals. Jonah imagery is also clearly present: "For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea" (Ether 2:24)

Of the animals the Jaredites bring with them, one in particular is singled out for emphasis: "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:3). What a weird and evocative image -- swarms of honeybees crossing the ocean as if in "a whale in the midst of the sea"! (Bees in the belly of the beast is also a link to Samson.)

The bees the Jaredites carried with them are surely an exceedingly minor plot point in the Book of Mormon, but the word deseret has taken on a life of its own and been embraced as a symbol of Mormonism. What is now the state of Utah was called Deseret when it was a quasi-independent Mormon theocracy, and the flag of Utah still prominently features a beehive. On Twitter, the hashtag #DezNat (for Desert Nation) identifies one as what passes today for a Mormon "hardliner." A phonetic "Deseret alphabet" was developed under the direction of Brigham Young, and the name is still used for such things as Deseret Industries (Mormon thrift stores) and the Deseret News. (Since deseret in the Book of Mormon refers specifically to honeybees from Babylon, I guess Deseret News has the same name as the Babylon Bee!)

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Bees and honey are stereotypically associated with the bear. In "Bern, baby, bern!" (a follow-up post to "Bear with Biden"), I noted that the name Beowulf means "bear." Well, it actually means "bee wolf," but this is usually assumed to be a superstitious euphemism for the bear, along the lines of the Russian medved ("honey eater"). The dog and the wolf are the same species, and the bear -- also a member of Caniformia -- was apparently seen as a sort of super-wolf. Back in 2018, I postulated, citing beowulf and medved as evidence, that the "Big Bad Wolf" of fairy tale fame was originally a bear. (Unlike wolves, bears huff and puff, can climb onto a roof, and could more plausibly swallow a human being whole than could the much smaller wolf.) I suppose I can now add "Mischievous Dog" to this list of canine bear-euphemisms. St. Christopher, a gigantic dog-faced man whose name means "Christ-bear-er," would also seem to have ursine resonances.

This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat.

My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red. This got me thinking about red hats and how the Big Bad Wolf (i.e. bear, i.e. Biden) is the antagonist of someone named after a red hat. But, no, it gets more specific than that: I have identified the Sun card of the Tarot with Donald Trump, but I have also said that the baby on that card who is riding a horse and carrying a red flag represents Robin Hood. Little. Red. Riding. Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood is swallowed by a bear but, like Jonah, comes out again alive -- Resurgens in arc(t)a incubatus. Somewhere in the Origin, Darwin reports seeing a bear swimming around with its mouth open catching insects in the water, and speculates that this could have been the first step in the evolution of the whale. Jonah's ork, Noah's ark, Riding Hood's arktos. Jonah, as I have said, is Hebrew for "dove"; the Hebrew for "bear" is dov.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Jonas, Jason, Sonja

In my last post, "Dove and serpent," I mentioned reading in the Wikipedia article on Jonah about a possible link, proposed by Joseph Campbell, between Jonah and Gilgamesh. Campbell also made another link:

Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas, which differs from Jason only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah

So Jason and Jonas are anagrams, both in English and an Greek. There is a third such name, in English anyway: Sonja. In yesterday's "Look who's still showing up in syncs," I quoted a passage from Unsong about Jonah. In last December's post "American politician spontaneously combusts," I quoted a passage from the same novel that prominently featured the name Sonja.

"[. . .] But with the help of all the brave people in different government departments and all around the country working on this case, we’ve got Alvarez on the run and are tightening the noose around his neck. Some of these people are here with us tonight. People like Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. Like Michael Gellers, a police officer who successfully defused a BOOJUM bomb in Philadelphia. Like Sonja Horah . . .”
President Bush spontaneously caught fire. “HELLLPPP!” he screamed as the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches watched on in horror. “HELLLPPP . . . HELL . . .”. By the time Secret Service agents reached him at the podium, he was already a charred corpse.

In the novel, the reason Bush caught fire was that the name Sonja Horah contained the sequence Jahorah, a magical "name of God" that causes anyone who pronounces it to die on the spot.

What does the name Sonja mean? It's a Russian diminutive of Sophia -- so, wisdom, but a lesser wisdom. This is precisely what William Wildblood ascribes to the serpent in his recent post "The Serpent and the Dove":

The dove is the Holy Spirit, and the innocence of the dove is true spiritual wisdom compared to the earthly, even if it is occult or esoteric, wisdom of the serpent. The serpent represents the wisdom of experience or evolution. In a way, it is the wisdom of matter. But the dove symbolises the wisdom of purity and innocence and truth that comes from God.

Jonas is the dove. Sonja is the serpent. What about Jason? Etymologically, Jason means "healer" -- but in English it sounds like "son of the jay," and I've known several Jasons who went by Jay or even Jaybird. Jason is a corvid, then -- perhaps even the solar crow ("jay-sun"). Jesus paired the dove with the serpent, but Noah (who is also part of the Joan/Jonah pun) paired it with the raven.

Friday, July 30, 2021

Today I learned the Swedish word for "crow"

More Swedish corvid puns in the comments here, for those who just can't get enough.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Sixes

This morning, despite my general aversion to talking video, I somehow found myself watching Jonathan Pageau expound on the meaning of 666.

Instead of the usual gematria/isopsephy approach of finding words and names that add up to 666, Pageau (following the lead of St. Irenaeus and others) focuses on the meaning of 6 itself and other occurrences of it in the Bible. He mentions the six days of creation, the supposed 6,000-year history of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar's golden image that was 60 cubits high and six cubits wide, and the fact that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood occurred.

Pageau doesn't use the term "triangular number," but he does mention that 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, and that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 6² is 666. I would add that 6 is the most triangular number there is: 6 is triangular, 6² is triangular, 66 is triangular, and 666 is triangular.

(Pageau also discusses how and why 666 symbolizes the all-encompassing System from which no one is allowed to opt out, and is well worth watching for those insights, but they are not directly relevant to the synchronicities noted in this post.)

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Just after watching that, I checked some blogs and read a recent post by Vox Day saying that "Thomas Wictor is a goofball" for accepting the official belief that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Vox writes:

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

A commenter asks:

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

Another commenter suggests:

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

Looking this up, I find that there are really only 304,805 letters in the Torah, but that there are assumed to be additional "invisible letters" which bring the total up to the requisite 600,000. The article also says:

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

So obviously, the significance of 6 (times various powers of 10) comes first, and actual figures -- like the numbers of Jewish souls, Torah letters, and Holocaust victims -- are arbitrarily enlarged or reduced to fit that Procrustean bed.

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After writing most of the above, but before publishing it, I met with one of my students, a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for student of English which has articles on a variety of subjects, with accompanying notes on potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar. We went through two of the articles he had read recently -- one about stop-motion animation and one about Oedipus -- so I could explain anything he still didn't understand.

For each article, a handful of vocabulary words are chosen for emphasis, and at the end of the article these are listed, each with a definition and an example sentence.

At the end of the first article, this sentence was used to exemplify the use of the word represent:

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Recall that Pageau had discussed the measurements of the golden statue made by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3:1): six cubits wide and 60 cubits high. The sentence in the magazine didn't use the number six, but the strange focus on the height of the statue still seemed a significant synchronicity. I mean, if you were asked to use the word represent in a sentence, would you naturally come up with a sentence about how tall a specific statue is?

The second article mentioned how the Sphinx drowned herself after her riddle had been solved, so at the end there was an example sentence for drown.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

Now that's a more impressive sync! Six is given as the "official" number of people who died, as in the Holocaust. And they died in "the flood"; recall that Pageau had mentioned that the Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old.

Monday, April 12, 2021

Noah's eyes

Blue irises and white sclerae

This is from Mauricio Berger's Sealed Book of Mormon (Sealed Moses 4:3). Little things like this have a way of capturing my imagination.

And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.

In context, watcher refers to angels that were mating with human women, as recounted in the Book of Enoch and alluded to in Genesis 6. Noah's eyes were sufficiently "different" that his father, Lamech, feared he might not be fully human -- but of course all humans alive today are supposed to be the descendants of Noah, so "Noachian" eyes -- eyes of a type like those of the watchers, but unknown among antediluvian humans -- must be commonplace, perhaps even universal, among modern humans.

My first thought was that Noah must have had white sclerae. This trait is now so universal among humans that the sclera is commonly called the "white of the eye" -- but our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have black sclerae (darker than the iris), and so our distant ancestors may well have had all-dark eyes as well. Interestingly, bonobos have sclerae which, while not as white as our own, are lighter than the iris. Among gorillas and orangutans, sclera color varies from individual to individual, much like iris color in some human populations, and may be either lighter or darker than the iris.

Another obvious possibility is that Noah had "blue eyes" -- meaning blue irises. When we think of "eye color," we think of the iris, taking it for granted that the sclera is always white. Among monkeys and apes generally, though, it is sclera color that is variable, while irises are almost universally brown. I am open to correction by any primatologists among my readers, but I believe it is correct to say that (excluding albinos from consideration) no other monkey or ape has blue eyes; certain lemurs are our closest blue-eyed relatives, and blue eyes in lemurs are genetically different from those in humans and apparently evolved independently. It seems quite likely, then, that early humans were all brown-eyed, and that blue eyes appeared later.

If we are all descended from blue-eyed Noah, though, why do so few of us (8 to 10%) have blue eyes? Well, Noah was apparently a mutant, so we can assume that neither his wife nor any of his three daughters-in-law had any blue-eye genes. Since blue eyes are recessive, all of his children and grandchildren would have been brown-eyed. His great-grandchildren (assuming they were the product of cousin-marriages among his grandchildren) would have been 6.25% blue-eyed -- reasonably close to the modern percentage.

Thus far I have been trying to guess the nature of "Noachian" eyes by thinking of ways (some) human eyes differ from those of our nearest relatives, but we are also told that Noah's eyes were like those of a watcher. Are there any hints in old books as to what the watchers' eyes looked like? Nothing in the Bible or Book of Enoch comes to mind, but aren't the Greek gods -- heavenly beings that came down, mated with human women, and begat the "mighty men which are of old" -- likely the same beings as the watchers? And we know from Homer that Athena, at least, had distinctive eyes. Her stock epithet is γλαυκῶπις -- which could be calling her eyes either "bright, gleaming" or "blue-green, blue-gray." I do not believe Homer gives any of his human characters eyes of this sort. Athena's epithet leads us back to the two possibilities I have already discussed: Athena's eyes may have been blue or gray, or they may have been unusually "bright" because her sclerae were white rather than black.

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Why bother writing a post like this, about what Noah's eyes might have been like if a certain obviously bogus book were actually true? Because -- and I am quite confident in saying this -- if I don't, no one else will!

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Ark in the dark

What I was looking for when I happened upon "The mosquito question" was Yes and No, a very long puppet show in verse. I didn't find it, so the best I can do is quote a few passages from memory.

The character No (Noah) is relating the story of the flood, presented as an undoing of the six days of creation. And just as the creation ends with God seeing that all he had created was good, the flood story begins

When God, surveying all he had
Created, saw that it was bad.

There follows a bit of (clever, allzuclever) pun-heavy badinage in which No's interlocutor questions how anything created by God could be bad, and then No gets back to his story.

I'll answer all in time. Now hark!
God spoke, and said, "Let there be dark!"
And dark clouds gathered in the sky
To hide earth's shame from him on high.
"The vault that keeps the seas below
And those above apart must go,"
Said God. The firmament was broken,
The seas set free as God had spoken.
"Let dry land disappear," said God.
"Let not a scrap of stone or sod
Remain above the surface, though
It top a mountain." It was so.
No fruit tree bearing fruit was seen,
Nor herb, for all that once was green
Was overwhelmed beneath the blue.
All living creatures perished too.
The lions, tigers, bears, and horses
All were turned to bloated corses.
The cattle and the creeping things,
The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings
Had not at last the strength to keep
Them safe above the rising deep --
In short, all things in which was breath
Succumbed to universal death.
And God's own image, which had crowned
His whole creation, also drowned.

Why was I thinking about this? Because Joan of Ark is, as the jokes have it, Noah's wife, and Noah is associated not only with the ark but with the arc (the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel), and now with the dark (d'Arc) as well.

My post on the dark rainbow connected it with the crow. Noah released a raven from the ark (as noted in my original, pre-birdemic post on corvids). And when they made a Noah movie back in 2014, the titular patriarch was played by -- who else?