Given the recent sync context, in which the gold and silver keys of the pope figure prominently, it was the gold key that caught my eye:
It's only one key, not the two demanded by our theme, but I think it still fits. According to the Vatican website, this is what the two keys mean:
The gold one, on the right, alludes to the power in the kingdom of the heavens, the silver one, on the left, indicates the spiritual authority of the papacy on earth.
On the calendar, what's inside the chest the gold key opened? A mountain and the sky -- heaven and earth. It is the papal key-to-heaven and key-to-earth combined into a single object.
Regular readers will know that I've often posted here about a particular sort of reading error, in which adjacent lines of text contaminate one another, resulting in a misreading. Just now I was scrolling through blog comments to see if there was anything new, and I misread this one from William Wright:
It's very strange that I should have misread this, since it's a comment I had already read and replied to, and I knew what it said, Nevertheless, this time around my brain momentarily misread green man's as green mantis -- the interpolated letters presumably being contributed by the tiara on the line above. The prior probability of a mantis, rather than a man, being green may also have played a role. Of course the error was corrected almost instantaneously, lasting just long enough for me to consciously notice it.
Seeing -- or hallucinating -- a mantis in connection with Roman Catholic clerical headgear made me think of M. C. Escher's well-known woodcut Dream (Mantis religiosa), which depicts an enormous praying mantis on the chest of a dead or sleeping mitered bishop.
When I was trying to find an image of that woodcut to include here, though, one of the search results caught my eye:
Wait, does that Latin inscription say what I think it does?
Yes, it's a piece called Inside Saint Peter's, Rome, and the inscription is from Matthew 16:19: "I will give [unto thee] the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Jesus is speaking to Peter, considered by Catholics to be the first pope, and it is this very verse that is the source of the crossed keys as a papal symbol.
I found this, remember, by searching for a picture of a praying mantis.
Incidentally, that comment from William Wright occasioned a minor sync with my recent reading of the Psalms. Since I mentioned a couple of Psalms syncs in "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I might as well make a note of this one as well. Mr. Wright thought that the green man(tis)'s tiara was "a golden beehive." Psalm 19 -- the same psalm featured in the "Reality Temple" post -- includes this verse:
More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb (Ps. 19:10).
