From the Narrow Desert: Rosary

Showing posts with label Rosary. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Étude brute?

I’m going to have to up my game as a punster if I’m going to keep up with Claire. This one is hers, received while I was in my study this afternoon (June 17) praying the third decade of the Rosary and contemplating the Nativity.

It means “raw study?” in French but is clearly punning on “Et tu, Brute?” — spoken on the Ides of March by the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This ties in with a few things William Wright has written recently. In “‘Naming’ Joan (and ‘Beware this one!)’” he writes of a being (presumably Claire) saying, “Beware this one!” and, “When I dream, I dream of books.” He thinks these were both references to me: the first because it suggests the Shakespeare line “Beware the Ides of March!” (my birthday), and the second because he thinks of me as someone who reads a lot of books. “Étude brute?” alludes to the same date in the same Shakespeare play, and “study” relates to the idea of reading a lot of books.

In “Grand-Rivière, France: Why not?” William writes of how one of my references to “my study” gave him the idea of the Brass Plates being in a “Study” — meaning a cave full of books — in France. Today I received the French word for “study” while in the very room that had given William that idea.

It is also significant that the words were received while I was doing a Rosary meditation on the Nativity. (I typically pray in my chapel, not my study, but today was an exception.) The last time I did that particular meditation, Saturday, June 15 — also in my study — I had a brief vision which I wasn’t going to write about, but I think now I should.

As the vision opened, I was in a large egg-shaped cavern with no visible exits, and I understood that at the center were the Holy Family, including the newborn Jesus. They were shining so brightly that I could not look at them directly, but I knew they were there. They were attended not by the humble ox and ass of the familiar Nativity scene but by two gigantic otherworldly animals I thought of as “Bulls of Heaven” — something like an aurochs, but golden and with very large, intelligent eyes, and possibly with some sort of feathers or very large scales.

These Bulls conveyed to me telepathically that I was being given permission to walk through the back wall of the cavern. I did so, passing right through the wall as if I were a ghost, and found myself in another cavern, even larger, which was full of books. One of the Bulls was still with me and conveyed a telepathic message about one of the books: “This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves.” Before I could get any clarification of that confusing statement, the vision dissolved.

Being led into a “study,” and introduced to one of its books, by silent bulls is extremely strange. Besides “raw,” another meaning of brute is “an animal without the power of speech.”

All of this is so far over my head that I don’t even know what to say about it. For now I simply report it.

Friday, May 31, 2024

Yeats, Joan, and Claire

Yesterday, May 30, I enjoyed "good luck" all day. Everything just went unusually smoothly, with lots of little good things just happening to happen. Therefore, when I had a few free hours in the afternoon and had a sudden hunch that I should go to a particular used bookstore, even though it meant a 40-minute drive to another city, I figured it was a good day for pursuing hunches.

When I arrived, I realized that I had brought very little cash with me and wouldn't be able to buy much, but I thought I'd look around anyway. I was immediately drawn to a small table with several Tarot decks, including two different editions of the Rider-Waite. I'd been to this store countless times, and they'd never sold Tarot cards before. I know it's basic common sense that you do not buy magical items secondhand, especially if you don't know who the previous owner was, but I'd been without a physical Rider-Waite deck for some years now, and I felt impressed to buy one. "It's okay," put in the helpful excuse-maker on my shoulder (right or left?). "You can just reconsecrate them."

I picked up one of the decks, but the price tag slightly exceeded what I had in my pocket. When I checked the second one, though, I saw that I had exactly the right amount of cash to buy it. That seemed like a sign, and I decided to get it.

Even though that decision left me with exactly zero dollars to spend on anything else, I took a brief look at the books anyway. One I would definitely have bought was W. B. Yeats and His World by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eaven Boland, which had lots of illustrations. Because of my sword vision earlier that day, my first thought was to wonder whether it included a photo of the poet's magical sword (yes, he owned one), so I flipped through the book to check. No sword pics, alas, but this cartoon caught my eye:

It shows a woman dressed in black, standing atop the globe with two books under her feet, one of which is labeled "Gregorian Chants," and looking out into space at a giant flying Koran. A female Gregory was the main thing that got my attention, as a possible link to Odessa Grigorievna. I also happened to briefly start reading the Quran just a few weeks after the Grigorievna dream. I was vaguely aware that a Lady Gregory had been one of Yeats's associates but knew essentially nothing else about her and couldn't understand what the cartoon was trying to say. Today I went to Wikipedia for a quick rundown, where I read that she had been born on March 15, 1852 -- the Ides of March. This was shortly after reading William Wright's post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')" -- on which much more below -- in which he interprets two things said by a female voice as referring to me: "Beware this one!" and "When I dream, I dream about books!" I was born on the Ides of March (as in "Beware the Ides of March!") and have had many dreams about books. Lady Gregory, it turns out, shares my birthday, and the cartoon looks as if it might depict her dreaming about the Quran.

Anyway, I didn't buy the Yeats book. I took the Tarot deck to the counter to pay -- and discovered to my surprise that I was eligible for a special discount! Instead of spending every bit of my cash, as I had expected, I received $99 (about three US dollars) back -- so I went right back to the bookshelves to browse some more. I found Richard Cavendish's 1975 book The Tarot -- a large hardback full of color photos and certainly far too expensive to buy with my remaining cash. When I picked it up, though, I saw the price sticker: exactly $99. That seemed like another sign, and I bought it.

Flipping through Cavendish's book later, I was surprised to discover a full-page portrait of Yeats!

The use of his full name, William Butler Yeats, is another indirect link to Odessa Grigorievna, as my post "Hey birds, here are cookies!" links her with the biblical story of the Pharaoh's butler and baker. My uncle's song "Fourth Down" directly links Yeats with butling and baking: "I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire / To bring me back some Yeast / Because I needed to bake some bread / For my wedding feast."

Does Yeats really deserve a full-page portrait in a history of the Tarot? He moved in magicians' circles, yes, and knew MacGregor (MacGregor!) Mathers and Waite and Crowley, but what contribution to the Tarot iconography or interpretation did he himself make? The only possible fingerprints of his I've been able to find are on the Rider-Waite Magician and Ace of Pentacles, where his poem "The Travail of Passion" may -- this is my own personal hypothesis -- have influenced Waite to include red roses and white lilies in the imagery. (See my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician.")

This made me think of my February 2 post "What's the second key?" -- the first key being the Rosary. I had written:

One [key] should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

Where did this idea come from, of there being two keys, one of which is the Rosary? See my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes":

I thought to myself [of the Rosary], "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

In William Wright's post, on which I said I would have more to say, he proposes that the beings I think of as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are one and the same. He actually ends the post -- which was written on St. Joan's Day (i.e., May 30, the anniversary of her death) -- with "Happy Feast Day, Claire." I had forgotten that in my first encounter with Claire she had quizzed me about the "true" form of a Yeats poem, and specifically a poem about the Irish god Aengus. One of the things I learned today from skimming the Wikipedia article for Lady Gregory is that she used to publish under the pseudonym Angus Grey.

In that post, I also mention that the only keys mentioned in the Book of Mormon are those of Laban's treasury. One of Laban's greatest treasures was the sword Makmahod -- recently connected with Joan and thus perhaps also with Claire.

Now look back at the photo of the full-page portrait of Yeats. Up in the corner is the name of the chapter in which it is found: "The Universal Key."

Does that settle it? Is the Tarot -- particularly in its Yeats-adjacent Rider-Waite form -- the long-sought second key? I wasn't sure until I opened up my new cards and saw what was printed on the backs:

A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily. I thought at first it was the Rose of York, but that should be barbed and seeded proper (i.e., with green leaves and a yellow center). This one is all white, even the leaves, suggesting that it is the blossom of an all-white tree -- with obvious implications from a Mormon or Tolkienian point of view.

Are Joan and Claire the same being, as William Wright suggests? The possibility had never crossed my mind, but my immediate inclination is to think that it may well be true. Serendipitously running into all this Claire-related content on Joan's Day is obviously a data point in favor of the hypothesis. Another data point is the poem I published yesterday for St. Joan's Day. An earlier draft had ended with the line "And act -- however high the stakes," but then I felt something nudging me to change it to "Clear-eyed -- however high the stakes" -- even though being clear-eyed had no obvious connection with the overall theme of the poem. The French word for "clear" is clair -- or, in the feminine, claire.

Coincidence? Here's another. Last Joan's Day I wrote, but did not publish, a translation of a French poem by St. Thérèse de Lisieux. (This year, by "coincidence," I did another translation from Thérèse just five days before Joan's Day.) I was tolerably happy with it as a translation but felt that its take on Joan was not my own, and thus I never ended up posting it. It's still in my Drafts folder, dated May 30, 2023, so I looked it up. Here's the original:

A Jeanne d'Arc

Quand le Dieu des armées te donnant la victoire
Tu chassas l'étranger et fis sacrer le roi
Jeanne, ton nom devint célèbre dans l'histoire
Nos plus grands conquérants pâlirent devant toi.

Mais ce n'était encor qu'une gloire éphémère
Il fallait à ton nom l'auréole des Saints
Aussi le Bien-Aimé t'offrit sa coupe amère
Et tu fus comme Lui rejetée des humains.

Au fond d'un noir cachot, chargée de lourdes chaînes
Le cruel étranger t'abreuva de douleurs
Pas un de tes amis ne prit part à tes peines
Pas un ne s'avança pour essuyer tes pleurs.

Jeanne tu m'apparais plus brillante et plus belle
Qu'au sacre de ton roi, dans ta sombre prison.
Ce céleste reflet de la gloire éternelle
Qui donc te l'apporta ? Ce fut la trahison.

Ah ! si le Dieu d'amour en la vallée des larmes
N'était venu chercher la trahison, la mort
La souffrance pour nous aurait été sans charmes
Maintenant nous l'aimons, elle est notre trésor.

And my version:

To Joan

The God of Hosts gave thee the field --
The king was crown'd, the foe did yield --
And all the conq'rors France had known

Did pale before the name of Joan.

Yet thy name, too, had paled and died

If not by suff'ring sanctified.

The cup which caus'd our Lord to shrink,

He offer'd thee -- thou, too, didst drink.

Thou wast, like Him, rejected, left

Alone, of all thy friends bereft.

Not one did come to kiss thy chains,

To still thy tears, to share thy pains.

When Charles the Seventh took the throne,

How brightly then thy glory shone!

But brighter still that glory ray'd

In dungeons dark -- alone, betray'd.

Our Lord did, too, to this sad vale

Come down to seek out death, betray'l.

Through Him we see with clearer eyes:

Now suff'ring is our greatest prize.

A note after the poem offers this as "a more literal translation of the final stanza":

Ah! If the God of love had not come to this vale of tears
To seek betrayal and death,
Suffering would have had no appeal for us.
Now we love it; it is our treasure.

So I took some liberties with that final stanza, the chief effect of which was -- to add a reference to clearer eyes that was not in the original!

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Makmahod in France?

Sometimes while I am praying my daily Rosary -- my discursive mind preoccupied with rattling off the Latin formulae, my imaginative mind centered on Christ -- I will receive flashes of extremely vivid mental imagery. These are typically very brief but of such intense clarity that they seem somehow clearer than ordinary physical vision. I received such an image today.

It was essentially the image seen on the Ace of Swords in the Tarot: a luminous hand holding aloft a sword with a gold crown hovering like a halo around the blade. This is a very familiar image to me, and I was not surprised to see it today, as it closely resembles the coat of arms of Joan of Arc, my patron saint, who was executed 593 years ago today. A novel feature had been added, though: Something was written on the blade, in capital letters separated by centered dots. I have reconstructed the inscription as follows:

· L · R · D · M · E · R · A · N · S · E · A · S · C ·

The image was only visible for a fraction of a second, so it was impossible to take in and remember the exact sequence of letters. However, I am 100% confident that I have reconstructed it correctly, triangulating from three different impressions about what it means.

My first impression was that it essentially said, in somewhat garbled spelling, "Lord, me answer. Ask." I understood this to mean that if you want to receive knowledge from God, it is necessary to formulate and ask a specific question -- though that point is somewhat undercut by the fact that I received what is in this post without asking anything in particular!

My second impression was that it was an anagram of "Arc's realm ends." Given the context, I of course thought first of Joan of Arc and the Kingdom of France. That kingdom did indeed end, and Joan's banner was burned in the Revolution. Joan was never known as Arc in her lifetime, though, and arc also means the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel. As I mentioned in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," for me a rainbow represents the word world:

In my very early childhood my thinking was mostly visual, and abstract words generally each had a specific mental picture associated with them. I remember that I often used to pray "Thank you for the world," and that the image that always accompanied the word world was a rainbow.

"Arc's realm," then, refers not only to France but to all the kingdoms of the world.

My third impression was that each of the letters stood for a word -- and no sooner had I formulated that thought than I knew, conceptually if not literally, what words they stood for. As soon as I'd finished my Rosary, I went straight to a French Bible to confirm my hunch. The inscription stands for this:

Le royaume du monde est remis à notre Seigneur et à son Christ.

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15).

I'm sure many of my Mormon readers will immediately have recognized the significance of this being written on a sword. According to a discourse by Brigham Young, this very phrase was written on the blade of the Sword of Laban:

When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room. He says he did not think, at the time, whether they had the light of the sun or artificial light; but that it was just as light as day. They laid the plates on a table; it was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed, and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ."

We call it the Sword of Laban, but it may well be of nobler origin than that. According to several secondhand reports, collected by Don Bradley in his indispensable book The Lost 116 Pages, it was also the sword of Joshua, wielded in the conquest of Canaan, and was very likely originally made for (or even by) Joseph in Egypt and carried out of that country in the Exodus with his bones.

Can we add Joan of Arc to the list of possible bearers of this storied blade? Perhaps. The origins of her sword are mysterious. She found it behind a church altar, having been led to it by her voices, and it appeared to be of great antiquity. Who knows who put it there or where it originally came from? At any rate, whether or not Joan's sword was literally and historically the Sword of Laban, it seems undeniable that today's vision is identifying the two, at least symbolically.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Sync homework report: Dead Reckoning

So I watched Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, an extremely looong Tom Cruise movie of whose existence I had been blissfully unaware until a week ago. Unfortunately, my wife was out of town. Every time someone appears to die in a movie, she asks me, "Is he dead?" and I would have enjoyed being able to answer, "I reckon."

In my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I discussed a sync video that focuses on the theme -- found both in Dead Reckoning and in another movie, Uncharted, which I haven't seen -- of two cross-shaped keys that must be combined and used together. Starting with the assumption that one of the two keys represents the Rosary (literally "garland of roses"), I reasoned that the other might be associated with lilies and ended up linking it to Fortuna and the idea of luck and coincidence. You can read the post for the details of that train of thought.

When the two keys are introduced in Dead Reckoning, we see them on a screen labeled красный and белый -- "red" and "white"; one of them is decorated with two small red jewels, and the other with white ones. This difference is never mentioned by any of the characters -- they never specify which key they're talking about beyond "the other key" -- but it's there, and it fits with the idea of a rose key and a lily key. Very early on, we learn that one of the keys is in the possession of a woman named Ilsa Faust. Faustus means "fortunate" in Latin, so a female Faust is clearly a link to Fortuna. Her key should be the white one, then, and such proves to be the case. The other key, the red one, turns out to be in the possession of a character called the White Widow. Since white is a symbol of virginity, and Jesus' mother was a widow, this is consistent with the red key being linked to the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So far, so good. No really new light is shed on the meaning of the two keys, but at least it confirms what I've got.

(By the way, William Wright, you asked what it means for the Rosary to be one of the keys. I'm working on a post about that.)

⁂

I was expecting key syncs going in, of course. What I wasn't expecting was a link to my January 7 post "My tail is dun." The title of that post is a reference to a scene in the Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle, in which Dor dictates an essay to a magical "spelling bee," only to have the insect replace most of the words with correctly-spelled homophones. Thus the final sentence, "My tale is done," comes out as "My tail is dun." I ended the post with a reference to Paul H. Dunn, bringing in a third homophone.

In Dead Reckoning, there's a scene where the character Benji is trying to disarm a bomb, which requires him to solve "a cylinder cipher. There's eight wheels" (a nod to the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune). Then Benji realizes that "the wheels, they spell out a message: You are done."

"No way," says Benji's partner Luther. "Not yet, we aren't." Then Benji clarifies:

"It's my last name," Benji says. "It knows who I am."

Confusion between done and a homophone is a pretty specific feature, not something you run across every day.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

What's the second key?

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is. I assumed it was one of two keys because of prior syncs about pairs of keys. This curiosity was reinforced when, on February 2, Francis Berger posted "The Society of Crossed Keys is Real???!!!" -- about a fictional society in a Wes Anderson film and its real-world counterpart, each of which has a pair of crossed keys as its logo. It's not at all the sort of thing Frank usually blogs about, and it seemed like an obvious sync wink. On February 3, I even bought The Small Golden Key, a 1985 book by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Thinley Norbu, which I happened upon in a used bookstore, just because of its title -- even though I don't think Buddhism could possibly be the second key, at least not for me. I know many serious Buddhists, have read many Buddhist books, and recognize the great value of Buddhism for some people, but my deepest self categorically rejects it.

On February 5, I was checking a few YouTube channels and found a video posted by the synchromystic channel LXXXVIII finis temporis on January 25. It's about two recent movies I've never seen and didn't even know existed until today: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Uncharted (2022), both of which share the oddly specific feature of two keys in the form of crosses (cf. crossed keys) which must be combined and used together:

The video doesn't mention it, but a further coincidence between these two movies is the names, both of which refer to navigation in a situation where essential information is lacking. "Uncharted" of course refers to regions for which no map has been made. "Dead reckoning" means estimating one's current position from a known past position plus an estimated velocity, rather than ascertaining it directly by means of landmarks, stars, or satellite. (The idea of Laplace's demon -- who knows every detail of the present and therefore can predict every detail of the future -- is dead reckoning taken to extremes; see the recent mention of Laplace in "Pokélogan.")

If the Rosary is one of the keys, and on September 3, 2022, I had a dream in which "I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key," then the other key should also somehow have the form of a cross. That left me stumped for a while.

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. Or roses are red, and the complementary color would be green. Those thoughts didn't lead anywhere at first, but then they clicked when I remembered one of the lines in the video, from the Mission: Impossible movie: "The key is only the beginning." Where had I heard a line like that before?

"Finding the key is just the beginning" -- on the cover of a novel whose main character is literally named Lily Green. The key isn't a cross, but it does have a little cross cut into the bit. Definitely a hit, but not the answer. I mean, a young-adult novel about leprechauns can't very well be the second key!

Going back to thinking of what sort of "key" might complement the Rosary, I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David! That is the label commonly given to this diagram from the Absconditorum Clavis of Guillaume Postel:

One element of this otherwise forgotten diagram had great influence on the development of the esoteric Tarot. If you look at the bow of the key, it has the letters ROTA written around its circumference That the word rota, "wheel," is intended is clear from the fact that the word also appears on the bit of the key. Éliphas Lévi noticed that when rota is written in a circle, it can also be read as Tarot. I've written several posts about ROTA on my Tarot blog if you want all the details, but the upshot is that the Rider-Waite Tarot, by far the most influential English-language deck, ended up with those four letters written on the Wheel of Fortune:

The significance of this in the present context is that the Wheel of Fortune -- at least this extremely influential version of it -- is a key. Not only that, but it features two crosses united as one. The eight-spoked wheel of Fortuna is a very old symbol, but in Waite's version, the eight spokes clearly consist of two crosses. The diagonal cross, consisting of simple lines, connects the four letters of the Hebrew name of God. The other cross, decorated with alchemical symbols, connects the four letters of ROTA.

This is a little digression, but I want to note it as a rather impressive synchronicity. I hadn't thought of Postel's Key of David since I did all those Wheel of Fortune posts back in 2019, and I've never had any real interest in it beyond its influence on Lévi. I've never made any attempt to analyze the other symbols it incorporates, such as the various geometric shapes inside the bow of the key. However, on February 5, I was notified of a new post by Galahad Eridanus, who posts very infrequently. (His last post was in October 2023.) It's called "The Edge of the Age," and one of the things he talks about is

the kinds of knots you tie your brain in when you try to predict from oughts instead of ises, and to account for "weird behaviour" from inside the model that is causing the behaviour to seem "weird" in the first place.

After a brief discussion of Ptolemaic epicycles, the go-to example of this sort of thing, he talks about another convoluted astronomical theory -- Kepler's idea that the (heliocentric) orbits of the planets could be mathematically derived from a series of nested Platonic solids. He includes this diagram:

Going from the outside in, we have: a sphere, a cube, another sphere, a tetrahedron, and then lots of much smaller shapes. Now compare that to the bow of Postel's key: a circle, a square, another circle, and a triangle. The triangle is even trisected so that it looks like a tetrahedron.

At first I assumed that Kepler's theory must have been one of the many ideas Postel incorporated into his key diagram, but looking up the dates I see that Absconditorum Clavis was published in 1547, before Kepler was born. Either Kepler was inspired by Postel, or they both drew from some earlier source -- or else the similarity, like my running into the two diagrams at the same time, is just a massive coincidence.

Coming back to the Wheel of Fortune as a key, this helped me make sense of the relevance of the novel Green. It's a novel about leprechauns, and luck, as an actual faculty possessed by leprechauns and by humans like Lily Green who have leprechaun blood, plays a massive role in the plot. Four-leaf clovers, all that jazz. Luck is fortune, Fortuna is Lady Luck. In my recent post "O Fortuna velut luna . . .," I even mentioned Fortuna as an Irishwoman (in a Piers Anthony novel), a clear link to Lily Green, the girl with leprechaun blood in her veins.

The second cross/key has to do with luck, fortune, coincidence, synchronicity -- in contrast perhaps to the repetitive always-the-sameness of the Rosary. A cross is a pretty good symbol of coincidence: two completely different (perpendicular) lines just happen to meet, such that a point on the one line is literally coincident with a point on the other. In fact, the title of a recent post, "One-eyed × purple people eater," following common usage in Taiwan, used a cross to indicate coincidental juxtaposition.

I noted that the two movies in the LXXXVIII video, chosen because they both featured pairs of cross-shaped keys, also share navigation-themed titles: Dead Reckoning and Uncharted. Fortuna is also associated with navigation; in Classical art, she is typically depicted holding a ship's rudder. Her other famous attribute, the eight-spoked wheel, resembles a ship's helm. Debbie has repeatedly pointed in comments here to the connection between the ship's helm and the eight-pointed star, and I thought of her when this image showed up on my browser's home screen on February 1:

Stars, of course, are themselves closely associated with luck.

In later iconography, Fortuna is sometimes depicted with a blindfold, like Justice. The idea of a blind navigator -- one who must navigate under information-deprived conditions -- is another link to Dead Reckoning and Uncharted.

One last coincidence to note: Fortuna's eight-spoked wheel is, as I have noted in past Wheel of Fortune posts, an ancient alternative form of the Christian Ichthys symbol:

The eight-spoked wheel, just like the cross, can symbolize either Christ or Fortuna. The fact that its Christian meaning is tied to the Greek word for "fish" is a further coincidence. I posted about the medieval poem O Fortuna back in 2019 and then again yesterday. Both posts included this little cartoon, based on punningly misreading Fortuna as a reference to fish:

I'm going to need some time to process all this, but it seems like a promising step forward in understanding the two-key theme. Of course "One key is the Rosary, and the other is synchronicity" isn't a solution to the riddle but just a starting point. "Finding the key is just the beginning."

Thinking about words that sound like tuna has reminded me of the greatest music video of all time. And now it's reminded you of it, too. You're welcome:

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

The Green Door finally closes

Starting back in July 2022, I used to explore from time to time a restaurant that went out of business and was abandoned in 2015. They put up a green sheet-metal wall around it, but the green door in the wall was never locked, and you could just walk in. See "Owl time, and cold noodles," "The Green Door," and "Phoenix syncs."

This past Sunday (January 21), I happened to pass the abandoned restaurant and decided that I would go back that night and explore it again. I ended up getting sidetracked and not going, though. Then on Monday I found this:

That's right, nearly a decade after going out of business, the restaurant is finally closed. I'm quite sure the lock was not there when I passed it on Sunday, so I'm not sure if I should feel disappointed that I missed my last chance to explore or lucky that I wasn't inside when they locked it up!

I don't know what prompted someone to lock the place up now, after nine years. I was hoping it would be a combination lock, since they're obviously not going to open it very often and would thus have set it to something easy to remember and therefore easy to guess. No such luck; it's a key lock.

Oddly, I had just been thinking about keys on Sunday. Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!) On Sunday, I took up the Rosary again after my break, and the sensation was remarkable. The beads felt like a living thing in my hands, and I could feel my mind sliding into a subtly but distinctly different mode of consciousness. I thought to myself, "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

This train of thought led me to do a word search for key in the Book of Mormon. Somewhat surprisingly, given that "keys" would become, so to speak, a key concept in Mormonism as it later developed, there is only one mention in the BoM, and it's quite literal:

And as I went forth towards the treasury of Laban, behold, I saw the servant of Laban who had the keys of the treasury. And I commanded him in the voice of Laban, that he should go with me into the treasury. . . . And I also spake unto him that I should carry the engravings, which were upon the plates of brass, to my elder brethren, who were without the walls (1 Ne. 4:20, 24).

The next day, when I discovered that I would now need a key to get into the abandoned restaurant, I remembered a dream I had had on August 26, 2023, recorded in "Phoenix syncs":

Remember the abandoned restaurant I explored in July 2022? I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced.

I was with my brother, trying to get plates -- exactly the circumstances surrounding the Book of Mormon's one and only mention of keys.

Then I remembered that in September 2022 (see the comments to "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup") I had actually dreamed about a rosary being a literal key. Not until I looked it up just now did I remember that this was in the context of exploring an abandoned building:

I’ve just remembered a fourth dream vignette, in which I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

Could this possibly be a garbled precognition? If you look back up at the photo of the locked door, you'll see that the lock is attached to a chain, superficially similar to a string of beads. If I were to unlock the padlock and leave the chain hanging, it would look a bit like "the rosary hanging from the keyhole" in the dream. In the dream, I found the rosary/key in the abandoned building. Is it possible that whoever locked up the restaurant left the key hidden somewhere nearby and that I could find it? Only one way to find out.

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Note added (Jan. 24): In the above post I describe how my rosary beads "felt like a living thing in my hands," prompting me to think, "It's magic!" At the end of the post, I say that a metal chain is similar to a string of rosary beads. The next day, I was reading The Magician, the fifth book in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. Several pendants on gold chains have been discovered which seem to have mysterious powers. Niall, the human protagonist, takes two of them to Steeg, an artificial intelligence, who promptly destroys them, saying that he has discovered "that these devices can be animated with some kind of living force" and are therefore extremely dangerous. Steeg then reprimands Niall for focusing on the pendants themselves and ignoring the chains.

"But I didn't think the chains made any difference."

"That is what you were intended to think. In fact, they are part of the device."

"I'm sorry."

"That is unnecessary. Now that we understand the danger, it is possible to anticipate it."

Niall said: "But do you understand how it works?"

"No. I said I understand the danger. But since I am designed for purely rational thinking, I am unable to understand the principles of magic."

The words caused a prickling sensation in Niall's scalp. "But are you sure it is magic?"

"The ability to make living forces manifest in dead matter must be defined as magic."

This parallels very closely what I wrote about the rosary the day before I read it. When "living forces manifest in dead matter" -- when what ought to be an inanimate object feels as if it were alive -- that's magic. My seemingly living matter was a rosary; Niall's was a metal chain -- something which I had explicitly compared to a rosary in my post.

Niall very naturally but incorrectly assumes that only the pendant has any power and that the chain is just a chain. Likewise, someone unfamiliar with a rosary would naturally focus on the crucifix and think of the string of beads from which it depends as incidental, when in fact the beads are the main thing.

Monday, December 18, 2023

Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens

Last night I dreamed that I was hearing a "spidery" (slow, high-pitched, ethereal) performance of the Monkees song "Listen to the Band." I awoke with a vague sense that the lyrics had been in Latin but couldn't remember any of them.

In the morning, I said my Rosary, and the Salve Regina brought the dream back to my memory. After all, what is Salve, . . . Mater misericordiae but a Latin translation of "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman"? Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae -- "To thee do we cry, Eve's exiled children" -- what are we asking but that she "listen to the banned"? Of course the problem is that we are so intent on being listened to that we forget to listen: "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens."

After the Rosary, I attended a sacrament meeting at the tiny English-speaking branch in Taichung -- the first time I have set foot in a Mormon church in well over a decade and probably closer to two. The CJCLDS has changed a lot in that time, but the sacrament meeting experience is just exactly the same as ever -- including, yes, its characteristic boringness, but not only that. I appreciated the total silence at some points in the service -- a commodity in short supply in Taiwan. I found myself thinking of it as "Quakerish," though I know Quakerism only through books.

Mormons don't do anything remotely like a liturgical calendar -- they don't even go to church on Christmas Day unless it happens to fall on a Sunday -- but one concession to the season is that Christmas carols are sung instead of ordinary hymns. Today, one of the selections happened to feature the only Latin in the Mormon hymnal: "Angels We Have Heard on High," with the Latin refrain Gloria in exclesis Deo. I thought it was funny: Earlier this year, I had tried and failed to find a Latin Mass in Taiwan, and then the one day I decide to go to a Mormon church instead, they have Latin!

Then I realized -- how had I not noticed it before? -- that "Angels We Have Heard on High" has pretty much the same tune as "Listen to the Band." Transpose "Angels" into G major (Mormons sing it in F major), map two measures of "Angels" to each measure of "Listen," and they fit almost perfectly. I don't have the musical talent to do it properly myself, but someone ought to. You can listen to a quick and dirty proof of concept here.

There's a certain thematic overlap, too: "Angels we have heard" -- "Listen to the band" -- the angel band. You could introduce the combined songs with that Negro spiritual about "ten little angels in de band."

I guess YouTube knows it's Christmastime, too. This evening the algorithm served up Denmark + Winter's version of "Little Drummer Boy." That syncs with "Listen to the Band," too. "Shall I play for you, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum, on my drum? Mary nodded. . . ." -- "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman . . . play the drum a little bit louder."

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

They shall take up serpents

When I got up this morning, I found that the wallpaper image on my phone had inexplicably been changed from an astronomical photograph to one of a coiled rattlesnake -- a photo I had found online and saved on October 18. I guess I must somehow have set it to wallpaper while asleep or half-asleep, but I have absolutely no hint of any memory of doing so. Changing the wallpaper would have been a multi-step process -- tapping through several screens in Settings, scrolling through to a not-so-recent photo -- and I don't see how I could possibly have done it without the benefit of full waking consciousness, but I did, obviously.

As discussed in my last post, my thoughts after waking soon turned to Jannes and Jambres, the Egyptian magicians who duplicated some of the miracles of Moses and Aaron -- including turning rods into snakes:

And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, "When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent."

And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods (Ex. 7:8-12).

This echoes an earlier miracle, the first shown to Moses after he was called by the burning bush:

And Moses answered and said, "But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee."

And the Lord said unto him, "What is that in thine hand?"

And he said, "A rod."

And he said, "Cast it on the ground."

And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

And the Lord said unto Moses, "Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail" -- and he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand -- "that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee" (Ex. 4:1-5).

Taking a snake by the tail is crazy, suicidal behavior -- but Moses did it, and it became a rod in his hand. Not until today did I think to connect this story with the strange promise in the epilogue to the Gospel of Mark:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

A few fringe groups like the Church of God with Signs Following take this as an invitation to practice ritual snake-handling as a demonstration of faith. I suppose most "normal" Christians are taught what I was: that the intended meaning was that God could miraculously protect believers from snakebite when necessary (as reportedly happened with Paul in Acts 28), not that we should "tempt God" by intentionally risking it. The Bible does say they shall actively take up serpents, though. The only biblical account of someone doing that is that of Moses -- and in his case what had been a serpent became a rod in his hand.

I think this miracle has a similar symbolic meaning to that of Jesus walking on the surface of the stormy sea: You take something slithery and treacherous, treat it as firm and solid, and it becomes so for you. This is shown in the "King and Lionheart" video, where slithery insubstantial creatures of light become solid enough to climb or run across when treated as such:

I think this may also be related to Samuel's prophecy about all things becoming slippery:

Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them (Hel. 13:34-36).

Isn't this Moses' first miracle in reverse -- or rather the first part of the two-part miracle? Lay a tool down -- a rod, say -- and it comes to life and slithers away. The difference is that the accursed "cannot hold them" again, but Moses can -- provided he has the courage to reach out and take a living snake by the tail.

This connection came to me in a meditative state this afternoon while I was saying my Rosary. It struck me how like a snake the string of beads was, and how when I took it up it became as solid and reliable as the iron rod of Lehi. Then I remembered that very similar imagery had been used in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet:

And now, to the boys' amazement, Ta drew from around his neck the beautiful necklace of stones and flung it up to them -- and as it came slithering and swerving upward through the green air, it seemed almost like something alive. "You must divide the stones between you," said Ta, "and because of them, you will always remember me . . . . Those stones were taken from our Sacred Hall in the depths of the mountains, and are given only to the kings of our people" (p. 117).

Stones -- more solid and inflexible even than a rod -- slither like something alive. Despite Ta's instruction, the boys never do divide the stones between them; the necklace remains intact.

Back on Earth, the boys believe the necklace has been lost, washed away to sea, but later Chuck produces it, and it is explicitly likened to a serpent:

And like some marvelous rainbow-colored serpent the necklace of Ta poured from his fingers and hung there, swaying back and forth in the bright air (p. 168).

Asked how he had recovered it, Chuck explains:

I looked down into one of those little rock pools, and I thought, 'What a beautiful crab.' And then I thought, 'But there's never been a crab as beautiful as that!' and I got down on my knees and put my hand in the rock pool -- and pulled out Ta's necklace (p. 168).

There's an echo of Moses here, too. Reaching for a crab in a rock pool may be considerably less foolhardy than taking a serpent by the tail, but in ordinary circumstances you would still be risking a nasty nip. When he grasped the "crab," though, it became a necklace of stones in his hand.

Given all the brilliant colors of Ta's necklace, I almost think that the crustacean Chuck saw in the pool must have looked more like this:

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Consider praying the Rosary.

That's it, really. That's what I want to say in this post -- and I say it particularly to those of my readers who might not have considered it, including those who are not Catholic, as I am not Catholic, including my Mormon brothers and sisters. The Holy Dominican Rosary is one the most precious gifts the Roman Church has given the world. It is there for anyone who wishes to make use of it. God will let you know if you are one of these.

I strongly recommend praying it daily. I strongly recommend using Latin. I strongly recommend using a physical rosary, preferably one with wooden beads. Ash Wednesday would be a perfect time to start. Plenty of information for beginners is readily available online.

To those who balk at "praying to Mary," consider the following: Was Gabriel wrong to say, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee"? Was Elisabeth wrong to say, "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb"? Is it ever wrong to ask a fellow Christian to pray for you now and at the hour of your death? Have the answers to any of those questions changed because Mary is now in Heaven?

Just consider it. That's all I'm saying.

Saturday, January 28, 2023

More open doors

Today being Saturday, I prayed the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, as is my habit. Before doing so, I decided to search online for things people had written about that particular set of Mysteries, something I had never done before. I ended up on this page, posted on May 11, 2022, just 18 days before I bought my own rosary. Regarding the Mystery of the Nativity, the author had this to say:

Mary, your trust in the Lord opened the door to God in a precious way. Teach us to trust in God so that we can bring the real presence of Jesus to others. Help us to discover the joy that you knew at the birth of Jesus!

In the Whitley Strieber story "The Open Doors," von Neumann wants to cover up all evidence of aliens because the more people believe in them, the easier it is for them to manifest in our reality. He fears a situation in which widespread belief would mean "two billion open doors" (the world population at the time), leaving us completely vulnerable to the alien presence. In a very similar way, Mary's faith is portrayed in the quote above as creating an open door through which God can manifest.

In a comment on my "Open Doors" post, ben wrote:

I wonder if, in ancient times, there might've been a process in which the knowledge of a deity would spread and that would allow for stronger interactions with that deity. This would have to do with the idea of a deity's name being important, the need to invoke the name of the deity, to be regularly thinking/speaking (praying) to the deity.

This has to do with the whole idea of reality being made both by itself and the participant in reality, somehow.

Some months ago, I had a dream in which a very large rosary served as a key to a door. I mentioned in one of the comments here on my blog but can't find it now because comments aren't searchable.

Friday, September 9, 2022

Life Is Romantic, The Travail of Passion, and the Sorrowful Mysteries

While on the road this afternoon, I fell to thinking about the term Romantic Christian -- designating the approach to Christianity advocated by Bruce Charlton, William Wildblood, Francis Berger, and myself -- and about how it is somewhat suboptimal because it is not a single word and because it cannot be abbreviated without confusion (since RC, in a religious context, normally means Roman Catholic). While my mind was thus occupied, I saw this printed on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me:

I took this as synchronistic confirmation that Romantic is after all the best term to be using. The T-shirts equation of Romanticism with life also struck me as appropriate, since a big part of the Romantic Christian approach is a focus on Heaven as eternal life (rather than eternal rest, absorption into God, etc.) and on God as the living God, existing in time. An emphasis on life is also typical of the Gospel and First Epistle of John.

Later in the day, as is my habit on Fridays, I prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, which are (translating): the Prayer in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. My meditations on the Rosary are highly visual in nature, the verbal part of my brain being preoccupied with the prayers themselves, and my mental image of the Prayer in the Garden is heavily influenced by the Yeats poem The Travail of Passion (which alludes to all five of the Sorrowful Mysteries).

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream:
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Today my meditations were also colored by the T-shirt synchronicity: "Life is Romantic: Romantic Crown." Jesus' crown, plaited of thorny plants, was a crown of life, in contrast to the inorganic gold and jewels worn by worldly kings. "Why do ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life?" (Morm. 8:39).

While imagining Jesus praying among "the flowers by Kidron stream . . . Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream," I suddenly realized the relationship of roses and lilies to one of the strange features of the T-shirt inscription: the use of an upside-down W in place of an M. My recent experience with a red dove had led me back to my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician." In that post, I connect the red dove flying upward on the Magician card with the white dove flying downward on the Ace of Cups -- and I note that the Ace of Cups is marked with a W which is actually an upside-down M, confirming that it is an inversion of the Magician. I see now that the birds themselves have the form of a stylized W and M.

As detailed in the 2018 post, the red dove represents the Pillar of Severity and prayers ascending to heaven, and the white dove represents the Pillar of Mercy and blessings descending to earth. The red dove flying to heaven made me think of the Mosaic rite for cleansing lepers (Leviticus 14), which involves killing a bird in a clay vessel over running water (cf. the white dove over a vessel with running water on the Ace of Cups), dipping a living bird in its blood, and then releasing this bloody bird in an open field (cf. the Magician's red dove, surrounded by what Waite calls flos campi et lilium convallium, "flowers of the field and lilies of the valley").

Blood crying to heaven is a familiar biblical expression, and Jesus bled (or sweat as if her were bleeding) as he prayed in the garden. By "coincidence," just before seeing the "Life Is Romantic" T-shirt, I had read this in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie:

Paracelsus knew the mysteries of blood; he knew why the priests of Baal made incisions with knives in their flesh, and then brought down fire from heaven; . . . he knew how spilt blood cries for vengeance or mercy and fills the air with angels or demons.

He goes on to relate an anecdote from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier about certain Asian magicians who caused a small piece of wood to grow up into a flowering mango tree in the space of half an hour, by cutting themselves and rubbing the wood with their blood.

The Magician card alludes to Gethsemane via the red dove of prayer flying upward, surrounded by garden flowers. The Ace of Cups shows the content of Jesus' prayer in the garden -- "if thou be willing, remove this cup from me" -- and the white dove descending alludes to Heaven's response: "and there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him."

The Yeats poem begins with an open door: "When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide." This reminds me of a recent dream:

I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

After the dream, I counted the words in the Latin Pater Noster and found that there are exactly 50, corresponding perfectly to the five decades of the Rosary.

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name (Rev. 3:7-8).

Incidentally, Abraham von Franckenberg's illustration of Guillaume Postel's interpretation of the "key of David" would later influence Lévi significantly, particularly in his idea of writing the word ROTA/TARO around the rim of a wheel.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove

One of these little guys has been stalking me for the past few days. The photo is from Wikipedia, not my own, because he's extremely camera shy. It's an appropriate photo anyway because it shows him the way I usually see him: running off with a look on his face that says, Oh, no! He's seen me again!

When I open the front door, I see him flying off. When I get on my motorcycle, he pops out from behind the front wheel and runs for it until he's clear to start flapping.. While I'm on the road, he'll swoop down and cross my path once or twice, all casual-like, but mostly stays out of sight. He stakes out the school all day while I'm there and is usually loitering nearby when I get off. I may be exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. This bird is suddenly everywhere. I've never fed him or done anything else to attract him, so I'm really not sure what his game is.

I can't really be sure it's the same bird every time, of course. Back in America, I used to recognize individual Carolina mourning doves by slight differences in their wing markings, but red turtles lack any obvious distinguishing characteristics. (I guess the black "collar" mark would be my best bet?) So it's possible that it's a different dove every time, and that I've attracted the attention of the whole species. Which would be weirder?

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Birds generally mean something, of course, and I've naturally been wondering what this one means. Today my student's English magazine offered this interpretation.

"Doves are usually connected with peace." Yes, usually. Those are white doves, though, and red is universally the color of war. What could a red dove mean? Then I suddenly remembered that I had written about the red dove before, in my (very long) 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," because a small red dove appears on the Magician's table on that card.

The front edge of the Magician’s table features a series of three carvings. The first appears to be ocean waves, the second is unrecognizable, and the third is a bird in flight. Comparing it with the bird on the Ace of Cups, which clearly represents the dove of the Holy Spirit, we see that they are almost identical in shape. The cup-shaped capital of the table leg just below the Magician’s bird reinforces the connection. While the dove on the Ace of Cups is white and flies downward, the Magician’s dove is red and flies upward.

This reminded me of something Valentin Tomberg had written in Meditations on the Tarot about the symbolism of prayers going up to God and blessings coming down. Not remembering that I had quoted that very passage in my 2018 post and just had to scroll down to find it, I instead brought up the Kindle app on my phone and searched for meditations. This is what came up.

Unsurprisingly, my Tomberg books came up as the first results -- but look what else it recommended: an edition of Marcus Aurelius with a red bird on the cover. Not a dove (it looks more like a red crow), but still!

I'm obviously being reminded of the need to pray -- I just went two days without praying the Rosary, the first such lapse since I began the habit, and this red dove -- who, besides having been identified in my own writings as a symbol of prayer back in 2018, also suggests the Rosary by his color -- is here to get me back on track. I open and close my prayer sessions with the Prayer to St. Michael, and that martial archangel is also well represented by the red dove. I suppose Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and commander-in-chief, who jotted down his Meditations in his spare moments at camp during a military campaign, is also a "red dove" kind of guy.

My reference above to "my" dove as simply a "red turtle" made me think of the famous line in the Song of Solomon about how "the voice of the turtle" (meaning the turtle dove) "is heard in our land" (2:12). (I've been reading the King James Bible since I was little, and it has never said anything other than "the voice of the turtle"; don't let those Mandela Effect people tell you any different.) Looking it up just now, I find that the chapter begins with "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys" (2:1) -- in the Vulgate, "Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium." I quoted this, too, in my "Rider-Waite Magician" post, because Waite himself references it in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, saying that the roses and lilies on the Magician card are "the flos campi and lilium convallium, changed into garden flowers, to shew the culture of aspiration." Commenting on this, I had written:

What did the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys mean to Waite? I could have sworn that they appeared in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as symbolical titles of that personage, but that turns out to have been a hallucination of memory.

So there's another link to praying to Mary -- Mary as a rose no less -- and thus to the Rosary.

An even weirder sync came when I read the "voice of the turtle" verse itself and found what comes immediately after:

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs . . . (2:12-13).

This is the only reference to "green figs" in the entire Bible. I recently had my own experience with green figs behind the Green Door, as recorded in "Owl time, and cold noodles":

I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large.

Well, it's . . .

. . . for me to wrap this post up and go pray the Rosary already. Since lilies have come up, too, why not give this a listen?

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Climbing the sycamore tree

Very early on the morning of August 19, I saw a comment asking how I was doing with the Rosary, and the thought that immediately came to mind was, "Someone like me praying the Rosary is like Zacchaeus climbing the sycamore tree." As you will recall, Zacchaeus, the chief publican (meaning a collaborator with the Romans and thus a great "sinner"), was too short to see Jesus in the crowd, so he climbed a sycamore fig tree to get a better view. Jesus saw him, and said, "Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house" (Luke 19:1-10).

I think the sync fairies have been trying to get me to make this connection for a while. An August 9 comment by Debbie mentioned the sycamore tree and that it had biblical significance, but my first thought was not of Zacchaeus but of Amos the Prophet:

Also Amaziah said unto Amos, "O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court."
Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, "I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit: And the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, 'Go, prophesy unto my people Israel'" (Amos 7:12-15).

I like the idea that Amos, the first of the Prophets in the narrow sense of that word, began his career as a gatherer of sycamore figs. My own motto, of course, is "The highway is for gamblers / Better use your sense / Take what you have gathered / From coincidence."

The day before Debbie's comment, I had written "A few days ago I had the thought that a tree could be the equivalent of the Green Door, but I can no longer retrace the train of thought that led me there." (My own Green Door had led me to a fruiting banyan, a close relative of the sycamore fig.)

This morning, the connection became apparent. One of the meanings of the Green Door is the door at which Christ knocks: "if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20). When Christ knocks, you can hear that he's out there, but you can't see him because the door stands between you. So you open the door, and he comes into your house. Zacchaeus, too, could hear Jesus but could no see him, so he remedied the situation by climbing the sycamore tree -- equivalent to opening the door -- and this action, too, resulted in Jesus' coming into his house and dining with him.

I think of praying the Rosary as a sort of hineni, symbolically equivalent to opening the door, climbing the sycamore tree, or saying, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth."

Praying the Rosary as a Mormon

The evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray.

-- 2 Nephi 32:8

Apparently I am not the only Mormon to have been directed to pray the Rosary. Michelle Wiener posted this in 2020:

I haven't spoken much about this -- much less written about it -- but in a sacred experience I had a couple years ago, I was told to "pray the Rosary." While this is common to many Marian-type apparitions (this was not the Virgin Mary speaking, but it wasn't Heavenly Mother, either!), I tried to make it clear that I was not Catholic, but Mormon. But She would not take "no" for an answer.

Wiener ended up with a "Mormon feminist version of the Rosary that I wrote back in 2019, after struggling for several years to come up with a version that worked." In my case, despite the very Catholic (i.e. not-Mormon) nature of the Rosary prayers and Mysteries, the Spirit has insisted that I not modify them in any way -- that I not invent a "Mormon Rosary" for myself but rather pray, primarily in Latin, the actual Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as revealed to St. Dominic and expanded by Popes Pius V and John Paul II, and by the Fátima visitant.

I was also directed to track down and read a particular book (I was given its title in French) by the 19th-century French mystic Éliphas Lévi, who was, among his other spiritual pursuits, a Roman Catholic priest. I have not finished it yet, but early in its pages the case is made that no one should ever, on the grounds that he imagines himself to have a higher or truer understanding of God, scruple at joining himself to the common prayers of mankind. "What God hath cleansed, call not thou common or unclean."

I think this is correct. To cavil, over matters of theological opinion, at something so obviously holy and inspired by God, is to be like the Pharisees, or like those who in their misguided piety dared to say "holier than thou" to Joan of Arc and Joseph Smith.

Beyond this general lesson, I assume I have something important to learn from the content of the Rosary itself, but I'm letting that come in its own time. I suppose a focus on the immediate family members of Jesus Christ, and on how their exaltation is inseparable from his own, is not really as foreign to the spirit of Mormonism as all that.

One of the scriptural objections to Rosary-type prayers is the warning in Matthew against "vain repetitions":

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him (Matt 6:7-8).

But Jesus didn’t say God hears us the first time, making repetition unnecessary; he said God already knows what we need before we ask him, making a prayer uttered only once just as superfluous as one repeated many times. The “vanity” then must lie not in the act of telling God something he already knows (what, if that were the case, could be more “vain” than to pray “thy will be done”?), but in the superstitious expectation of being heard for one’s much speaking.

I have yet to work out all the whys and wherefores, but in the meantime there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that God wants me to pray the Rosary — not a “Mormon Rosary,” but the Rosary — and that the full reason for this will become clear in time.

Does he want you to do so as well? That’s between you and the Holy Spirit of God.