From the Narrow Desert

As announced in my last post, I'm putting the sync fairies on hold for a few weeks while I try to make sense of what they've already given me. And like it or not, the linchpin of the recent cloud of syncs (do clouds have linchpins? Jeeves?) is this stupid and gratuitously offensive (not that there's anything wrong with that) meme I found on 4chan:

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Hercules in New York

The running man in the foreground of the meme is Arnold Strong as seen in his debut film, Hercules in New York (1970). After this breakthrough role, he would ditch this English-language stage name and replace it with his real surname, Schwarzenegger. In German, the word for a black man is Schwarzer, and their version of our "n-word" is Neger. Etymologically, Arnold's surname means "person from Schwarzenegg" ("Black Ridge") and is unrelated to the racial slur. Still, though, Mr. Strong's becoming Mr. Schwarzenegger obviously syncs with the idea of replacing English words with nigger.

By the way, there are two different places called Schwarzenegg: one in Austria, and one in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.

For now anyway, Hercules in New York is available on YouTube in its entirety, and it's a pretty decent contribution to the "so bad it's good" genre:

In the scene from which the still in the meme is taken, the demigod Hercules, having just arrived in New York and been befriended by "Pretzie," a nebbishy pretzel vendor, happens upon a park where some college athletes are training. Here's a sample of the top-notch dialogue:

Pretzie: Where are you going?

Hercules: Over there.

Pretzie: What for?

Hercules: To show them how to throw the discus.

Pretzie: No, no. You've gotta stay here. You can't go buttin' in there.

Hercules: They would not like me to instruct them?

Pretzie: No, it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed.

Hercules: I am Hercules.

So Herc wants to participate in sports with a group of white New Yorkers but is forbidden because there are "no outsiders allowed."

Throughout Herc's adventures in New York, the scene periodically changes to Olympus, where we see Zeus and various lesser gods observing him through -- uh, a big white crystal ball. You remember Zeus's famous crystal ball, right?

Near the end of the movie, Hercules is in trouble, having lost his divine powers and disappointed the gangsters who were counting on him to win a televised weight-lifting competition against a black dude. To save this wayward son of Zeus from the irate gangsters, the Olympians send down Atlas and, you guessed it, Samson! You remember all those Greek myths about Samson, don't you? No explanation is offered of how this Hebrew worthy came to be living on Mount Olympus after being crushed to death in the temple of Dagon; he is just mentioned matter-of-factly, as if he belonged there just as much as Mercury and Apollo and the rest.

Two other bodybuilders briefly show up and join the brawl without having any noticeable effect on Herc's fortunes. It's not clear which of them is supposed to be Samson, as they both have short hair, but in the end it is Hercules himself who ends up playing the Samson role of bringing down the pillars -- only in this case the "pillars" are just stacks of large cylindrical objects, wrapped in brown paper, in the warehouse or wherever it is they're fighting. (The characters never call it anything other than "that building.") Still, the allusion to Samson is obvious and obviously deliberate:

These "pillars," unlike those of Samson, aren't actually load-bearing structures supporting the building, so nothing falls down other than the pillars themselves. Somehow this translates into a final victory for Herc -- I guess we are to assume that all the gangsters were crushed by the falling objects? -- because the scene immediately cuts to Herc and Pretzie, now apparently without a care in the world, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. 

Radio: Any time you wish me to be with you, all you need to do is think of me, and there I shall be, in your mind and in your heart, for as long as you want me to be, as long as you need me. Due to temporary atmospheric difficulties, we were interrupted in our broadcast. We resume . . .

Pretzie: Herc? Herc? "Any time you need me, any time you want me, just think of me, and I'll be there for as long as you want me to." Yeah. I think I'll eat an apple.

Kneeling in prayer with this group he was impressed to locate the temple at Bern, Switzerland’s capital. The next morning before the travelers left for Holland, they inspected several sites and chose one in the southeastern part of the city and assigned Swiss-Austrian Mission president Samuel E. Bringhurst to acquire the property. President Bringhurst, however, discovered that this parcel had just been acquired for the city of Bern as a college site. Conferring with David O. McKay by phone, President Bringhurst was directed to identify other potential sites to be inspected by President McKay when he returned for his regularly scheduled visit to Switzerland in early July. 

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

This morning, in response to a request from Bruce Charlton, I was brainstorming possible codewords for the current conflict in Philistia. (I'm the one who coined birdemic and peck, though not Fire Nation.) This is a tough one, because one of the parties in the conflict has a very long history of being nicknamed, and all of those nicknames are actually more likely than plain English to attract the attention of the hate police. An unusual degree of outside-the-boxness is called for, but it can't be so obscure that readers can't figure it out. So what are the options? The Garbanzos, as in hummus? (Sorry, Brits, garbanzo is just a superior word to chickpea.) Blues vs. Greens, as in the Byzantine chariot-race factions, a byword for pointless hostility?

Maybe, you should worship a fish god.

-- Gene Ray, Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human

After being reminded by the sync fairies of the existence of the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare, I've been rereading it for the first time since childhood. I've just got to the part about the nix that says "Nix, nix!" The nix is described as shapeshifting between human, fish, and half-human-half-fish forms.

Today, I found this whiteboard art in my classroom.

When I asked what it was, I was informed that it was "You! But you're a mermaid!" Then one of the kids said, "美國人魚!" -- a rather clever pun in Chinese, splicing together 美國人 (American) and 美人魚 (mermaid).

Besides the nix in Night Mare, the illustration suggests Dagon, the Philistine god whose temple Samson demolished.

I take anything Samson-related as a good omen. Stand me by those pillars! Oh, and, kids, it's mer-MAN!

Given how much I've been blogging about Samson lately (here and at The Magician's Table) and about songs about New Orleans, and given how often I cite the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, it might seem hard to believe that I never knew there was a Leonard Cohen song called "Samson in New Orleans." But I didn't. I discovered it tonight.

Here are the lyrics, with a few interesting passages highlighted.

You said that you were with me
You said you were my friend
Did you really love the city
Or did you just pretend

You said you loved her secrets
And her freedoms hid away
She was better than America
That’s what I heard you say

You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The remnant all dishonored
On the bridge of misery

And we who cried for mercy
From the bottom of the pit
Was our prayer so damn unworthy
The Son rejected it?

So gather up the killers
Get everyone in town
Stand me by those pillars
Let me take this temple down

The king so kind and solemn
He wears a bloody crown
So stand me by that column
Let me take this temple down

You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The chains are gone from heaven
The storms are wild and free

There’s other ways to answer
That certainly is true
Me, I’m blind with death and anger
And that’s no place for you

There’s a woman in the window
And a bed in Tinsel Town
I’ll write you when it’s over
Let me take this temple down

Deus vult.

And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, . . .

-- Luke 13:32

Who reads Fox in Socks as prophecy? Nobody, that's who! -- said the man of many wiles to the Cyclops.

This will be an even more disjointed post than usual.

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Anyone who reads The Magician's Table will know I've been on a Sun kick these days. I got started on it by reading a post by Richard Arrowsmith that mentioned a connection between the Sun card (the 19th trump) and the birdemic (also numbered 19). As I followed the links the synchronicity fairies gave me, I found that I was increasingly focusing on the idea of two contrasting suns -- epitomized by Superman's Red Sun of Krypton and Yellow Sun of Earth.

Today I realized (not until today!) that this is eerily similar to the path that Arrowsmith's own synchromysticism led him down way back in 2009 -- but his "other sun" was identified with Sirius, and Sirius is a blue star.

Arrowsmith's discovery, not mine; each quotation mark is a tiny i.

My other sun, in contrast, is red. Well, if Sirius is the most famous blue star, what's the most famous red one? Of course: Betelgeuse -- a star to which the sync fairies have already tried to draw my attention.

What does Betelgeuse have to do with Fox in Socks? Well, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…

... couldn't we say that this liquid full of beetles is now a bottle of beetle juice?

Incidentally, notice that there are four of these beetles and that, given the way they are beating each other with paddles, they might well be called beatles. As Fox in Socks was published in 1965, just a year after the most famous episode of the Ed Sullivan show, this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

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The 6-by-6 magic square, traditionally associated with the Sun, adds up to 666. Rudolf Steiner created the name Sorath -- his "demon of the sun" -- so as to add up to 666 in Hebrew gematria. In the Hebrew system, the first nine letters correspond to the numbers 1-9, the next nine to the numbers 10-90, and the remaining four (for Hebrew lacks the 27 letters needed for a complete system) to the numbers 100-400. Thus, the 6th letter (vav) has a value of 6, and the 15th (samekh) has a value of 60. The 24th letter would be 600, but Hebrew only has 22 letters, so Steiner uses resh (200) and tav (400). He puts those four letters together to make Sorath (samekh-vav-resh-tav).

What if the same system were applied to English? Since the English alphabet is longer than the Hebrew, only three letters are necessary to make 666 -- and those three letters are FOX.

Fox is the English equivalent of Sorath, each being the shortest possible way of expressing 666 in its respective language.

Sorath, the sun-demon whose number is 666, obviously corresponds not to the Yellow Sun of Earth but to the Red Sun of Krypton. (The atomic number of krypton is 36, linking it to the 6-by-6 square.) We have tentatively connected this Red Sun with the star Betelgeuse.

The Fox in Fox in Socks is red, and the story ends with his being unceremoniously shoved into the beetle juice.

The juxtaposition of the Red Sun with blue beetles would have seemed perfectly natural to King Tut, whose pectoral shows just that combination.

And while Seuss must certainly have known of the Beatles when he wrote Fox in Socks, he could not have known of this particular record, released at a much later date in Mexico.

I don't remember "Pigguies"; do you?

"Here comes the sun!" say the four blue beetles as the red fox is pushed into their bottle.

If Fox is the Red Sun, his nemesis Knox -- who is yellow, and whose name recalls the proverbial "more gold than Fort Knox" -- is the Yellow Sun. This true Sun is Shamash -- for whom Samson was named. Samson, like Knox, caught foxes.

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.

And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.

-- Judges 15:4-5

These fire-spreading foxes reinforce the identification of the fox with the sun. This is further strengthened if we look at the numbers involved: 300 foxes, 150 firebrands. Using the same system that told us FOX = 666, we can see that 300 corresponds to U, and 150 to SN.

(Cross-posted at The Magician's Table, despite its negligible Tarot content, due to its connection to themes discussed there.)

I stand with President Trump.

I repent my pretentious attitude of dismissing Trump and Biden as two interchangeable lying buffoons whose squabbles were beneath my notice. This position was never, in the deepest sense, honest. It represented a forced override of intuition by discursive reason, and was motivated by pride and pusillanimity.

This is shaping up to be a total war, and neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. Mr. Trump is very, very far from being a moral exemplar, but it is becoming increasingly clear -- ever more so as every demon in hell is mobilized against him -- that God is with him and against his enemies. And so am I.

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My uncle and I used to play the "reincarnation game" -- how literally it was to be taken was left ambiguous -- of trying to figure out who various public figures had been in past lives. We were in agreement that Bush fils was George III and that Obama was FDR but could reach no consensus on Trump. My uncle said Caligula; I said Beowulf. We don't play that game anymore, but if we did, I would be very confident in asserting that Trump is Samson.

Samson: kinda goofy, lots of warts, certainly not anybody's role model -- but, as they say, "he also delivered Israel."

Let's hope his story has a happier ending this time around.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?