From the Narrow Desert: Saruman

Showing posts with label Saruman. Show all posts

Saturday, November 11, 2023

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name

I very rarely go out for breakfast, but this morning I just thought I would. Then, when I was about halfway to my intended destination, I began feeling a magnetic tug in the opposite direction. The only thing I can really compare it to is an experience I had several months ago when I found a fledgling dove, alone and in distress, and it somehow communicated its homing instinct to me by a sort of psychic rapport; I "followed the tug" and successfully returned it to its parents.

This time, the tug took me to a small bakery and café. I ordered a coffee and a croissant, found a table, and took a seat. I glanced up at the wall opposite me, and it was with a mixture of excitement and foreboding that I saw a sync-fairy calling card: a small framed photograph of the Empire State Building:

Next to it was a photo of a fingerpost with signs in Russian saying how many kilometers it was to Leningrad, Moscow, Berlin, and Vladivostok; based on the distances given -- only 35 km to St. Petersburg -- it must have been taken somewhere in the Leningrad Oblast (which is still called Leningrad even though the city's name has been changed back).

Over breakfast, I finished reading Christopher Morley's Swiss Family Manhattan -- which turns out to be completely bonkers, very much in the spirit of Hercules in New York. Lots of little sync winks there. It mentions "a radio station a the Vatican" (cf. William Wright's Nabisco post, linking the papal keys with radio antennas), and -- appropriately for a book by Morley -- there is a scene in which a hum is exterminated: "the scream of the wind outside drowned for a moment the steady hum of the motors."

After finishing Swiss Family Manhattan, I checked William's blog and started reading the latest post, "Calling out (fictional) demons." I haven't yet finished reading it, but it deals with the identity of "Tim" and the possibility that he may be Saruman or some similarly nasty character. The reader will recall that my own speculations have tentatively connected Tim with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's The Key and with a story I wrote a long time ago featuring an alien named Tim. This got my attention in William's post:

As I thought more about Tim, I was reminded of my own experience with "Mrs. Baal-ox". I don't know her real name, and I think I shared that she had told me even her name at the very end of her haunting of my mind and pen, but I promptly forgot it (likely for good reason).

Last night I had dug up my old Tim story -- dated February 27, 1997. The main character, William Alizio, is characterized by his boring routine lifestyle, his profound lack of curiosity, and his blasé reactions to the most extraordinary goings-on:

One day, after he had finished pretending to work, William Alizio came home and noticed two little bald men with blue robes and dunce caps. They were sitting in his living room. One of them was reading the TV Guide. The other one was eating a big bowl of Hidden Treasures with no milk. William Alizio noticed some empty boxes of Hidden Treasures on the floor. He went into the kitchen and ate a can of chicken noodle soup. Then he went into the living room.

"I would like the TV Guide when you are done," he said.

The little bald man who was reading the TV Guide stood up and said, "You may call me Tim or Timothy."

The other little bald man stood up and said, "You may call me Patrick or Pat."

Then the little bald men sat down.

Tim did not give William Alizio the TV Guide, so William Alizio said to Patrick, "I know how to tell which ones have treasures in them."

"I know," said Patrick.

"Oh," said William Alizio. "How many boxes have you eaten?"

"Four," said Patrick.

"Oh," said William Alizio. "Then that's the last box."

"Yes," said Patrick. "When I finish it, I will tell you why Tim and I are here."

"Oh," said William Alizio.

Tim then asks permission to circle the name of a program in the TV Guide, attempting to pique Alizio's nonexistent curiosity with the information that "it has four adjectives and one noun, just like my secret name." This secret is clearly burning a hole in his pocket, and he tries, like a passive-aggressive Rumpelstiltskin, to prod Alizio into guessing it.

"That's nice," said William Alizio.

"I can't tell you my secret name," said Tim, "so don't try to find out."

"Patrick has finished the Hidden Treasures," said William Alizio.

Tim and Patrick both stood up and grabbed William Alizio. "Are you William Alizio?" they demanded.

William Alizio admitted that he was.

"We have come to take you away," said Tim.

"Our spaceship is in your backyard," said Patrick.

"Oh. I was wondering what that purple thing was," said William Alizio.

"Our spaceship," explained Patrick.

"You must come with us," said Tim, "because we have laser guns." He and Patrick pulled purple laser guns out of their robes.

"But I have to go to the office tomorrow," protested William Alizio.

"No, you don't," said Tim.

"Then I have to pretend to do yard work," said William Alizio.

"No, you don't," said Patrick. "You have to come with us in our spaceship. We are going to take you to our planet."

"Okay," said William Alizio.

He went into Tim and Patrick's spaceship. It looked like a big, purple horseshoe crab with headlights. Tim and Patrick showed him around, and then the spaceship took off.

When I read this last night, two things got my attention. First, Tim and Patrick dress in blue, just like the former's recent namesake. I had remembered purple being their signature color, which it apparently is, but nevertheless their robes are blue. Second, their spaceship -- which Alizio had already seen but paid no attention to -- looks like a horseshoe crab. Ever since my brother Luther's 2013 post "Seen but not True," Horseshoe Crab Effect has been my mental shorthand for the way something can be right in front of you, "hiding in plain sight," but effectively invisible until it has been pointed out to you, after which it becomes obvious. Here, in 1997, for no apparent reason, is a similar term in a similar context.

Now, though, the secret name -- which only Tim has, not Patrick -- stands out. Besides synching with William Wright's "Mrs. Baal-ox" comment, it also reminds me of Strieber's visitor in The Key, who is also coy about his name. (As printed in the book, Strieber's words are in italics; the stranger's, in roman.)

I know that you can ask very clever questions. Don't try to play with me, Whitley.

That's an even more clever answer -- what's your name, anyway?

If I said Michael?

An archangel in a turtleneck?

Legion, then?

I think you're a perfectly ordinary person with an ordinary mother and an ordinary name.

I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.

Notice the immediate context, with its focus on being "clever." ("Tim. He's very smart.") When Strieber insists that the stranger must have a perfectly ordinary name -- the whole point of the Monty Python joke is that "Tim" is about as ordinary as it gets -- the stranger replies that he "can imagine no greater honor." What does Tim mean, anyway?

I didn't know that, by the way, despite usually being a pretty etymologically savvy guy, until William Wright pointed it out. I had always unreflectingly assumed that the name meant "fear of God," but of course that would make it half Latin and half Greek -- uncharacteristically sloppy of me to think that.

So I'm going to go ahead and start calling Strieber's visitor Tim. It adds up. This also seems to reinforce William Wright's idea that Tim may be Saruman, however we are to interpret that. He had earlier identified Saruman with a character in a music video who reads from a book with keys on the cover. Strieber published his conversation with Tim in a book called The Key, with a key on the cover.

As I was making these connections, a song started playing in the background, one I'd never heard before:

Drink what's in your cup
You have to get right up
The music never stops
You got me, I got no alibi
You got me, I got no alibi
No alibi

That was weird, because I remembered that Tim had made Strieber drink something he didn't want to drink. I looked it up. Strieber wakes up the morning after the visit, finds the illegible notes he took, and questions the whole event:

Had he been real, or a dream? If you took notes in your sleep, they might look like this.

Then I also remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had. . . . I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused. So this must have been a dream. In real life, I would never have drunk something like that.

Except, across the strange life I have lived, I could remember drinking the same bitter liquid at the end of other extraordinary experiences, such as in the eighties when I was having contact experiences.

In this context, "You got me, I got no alibi" felt like an admission from Tim: You got me. You figured out who I am. Yes, I'm that weirdo who barged into Strieber's hotel room. Yes, I'm the chap William Wright calls Saruman. You got me, I got no alibi.

Something else I remembered from The Key is that Tim kept hinting, without outright claiming, that he had been present in Nazi Germany -- implying, but again not quite asserting, that this was in the capacity of "a Jew in the camps." This, together with the name-guessing theme, made me think of "Sympathy for the Devil":

I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

That was the only verse I could think of, so I looked up the lyrics. Here's what immediately precedes the lines quoted above:

Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

"St. Petersburg," a.k.a. Leningrad? "Around" like within a 35-km radius?

Isn't it odd that when I saw that photo, before "Sympathy for the Devil" had even crossed my mind, I tried to deduce where it had been taken and even looked up the Leningrad Oblast and found its coat of arms? I wouldn't ordinarily have processed the image beyond "fingerboard with a bunch of signs in Russian."

The Leningrad and Berlin signs are both pointing to the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building has been a hallmark of recent syncs. St. Petersburg and Nazi Germany are the two places the devil claims to have been in the Rolling Stones song.

So, what am I to conclude from all this? That Tim is evil? Okay, but what's puzzling me is the nature of his game. If he's the devil, shouldn't he be trying to get me to do something instead of just going around pointing at things and saying, "Hey, look, there's the Empire State Building again"? Is he just here to keep me distracted and waste my time? Surely there are plenty of less involved ways of doing that! The only real life change I can think of that I've made as a result of sync-fairy activity has been taking up the Rosary, and it's pretty hard to see that as a bad thing. "An evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray."

I will say that some of my syncs have led some other people down some pretty dark paths. (Not naming names, iykyk.) Am I being used for that purpose by Tim and company? Do I need to stop publishing syncs?

The other issue is this: Who's Tim? Apparently the being responsible for at least some of my syncs. What's telling me Tim is evil? Syncs. If Tim is evil, syncs are unreliable -- but if syncs are unreliable, I have no particular reason to think Tim is evil. And anyway, I already knew syncs were unreliable! I don't use them to "prove" anything or base life decisions on them.

I need to think about this some more and try to figure out what it all means.

Friday, November 10, 2023

The masculinity of the sync fairies

If you run a Google image search on fairies, roughly 100% of the results are female. Even if you run an image search for Peaseblossom -- addressed as "monsieur" in Shakespeare -- 80 or 90% of the results are female. Fata and hada and fée are all grammatically feminine. If you call a man a "fairy," you're calling him a poof. This is clearly a word with overwhelmingly feminine connotations.

It has never once occurred to me to think of my "synchronicity fairies" as female.

Of course I first started using the term only as a playful personification of the phenomenon of synchronicity, but even such personifications have an implicit sex. The sexually unmarked figure of the Grim Reaper, for example, is universally thought of as masculine by English speakers, who are often surprised to find that "he" is female on most of the Continent. I've always thought of the sync fairies as plural -- another curious assumption, I suppose -- and have thus never had occasion to give them an explicit grammatical gender. Implicitly, though, in my mind they've always been as masculine as the Reaper.

I remain unsure of the extent to which synchronicity is deliberately orchestrated by intelligent beings -- as opposed to being generated by my own mind, or being an aspect of just "how the universe is" -- but over time I've drifted more and more in the direction of seeing "synchronicity fairies" as more than just a figure of speech. When, for the first time, one of them appeared in human form in a dream, I was not at all surprised that it was the form of a man, and even of a very masculine man with the deportment of "high-ranking military brass" (from before the military was gay, I mean). I realize that "Tim" as I have described him has almost nothing in common with the popular image of a "fairy," but I felt nothing incongruous in his being the face of the sync fairies.

I never really noticed this, or how strange it is, until I read William Wright's latest post, "Saruman, you rat... you've left fingerprints." William is now of the opinion that recent syncs -- his and mine -- have been the work of a demonic being he identifies with Lord of the Rings villain Saruman. And what occasioned this change of perspective was the jarring realization that, while he had privately been speculating that the sync fairies were the "seven daughters of Asenath," I had actually been dealing with male entities all along.

I will be thinking and writing more about the Saruman post later. While I do not share William's assumption that all of Tolkien's fictional characters really exist, the broader question of whether the sync fairies are good or evil is obviously a very important one. In this post, though, all I want to do is note how the two of us had made opposite assumptions about the sex of the fairies, and that each was taken aback at the discovery that the other's assumption had been different.

Reader, what is your own implicit assumption? When you read "sync fairy" references here, do you imagine male or female entities?

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building

It's apparent, as noted in "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs," that the sync fairies are symbolically identifying the Swiss Temple in Bern with the Empire State Building, but it hasn't been clear why. Trying to figure out the connection, I watched the 42 trailer a few more times.

The end of the trailer features the Jay-Z track "Brooklyn Go Hard." The first time around, I didn't catch the lyrics beyond "I'm Jackie Robinson," so I figured it was a song about the ballplayer, perhaps even written specifically for this biopic. Well, not exactly. Aside from the refrain of "Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard," here are the lyrics that appear in the trailer:

I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them
I jack, I rob, I sin,
Ah, man, I'm Jackie Robinson
'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen

So Jay is punningly saying that he's Jackie Rob-'n'-sin, an artful Brooklyn dodger, because he fathers and abandons bastards; commits carjackings, robberies, and sins; and traffics in cocaine without being incarcerated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the black liberation Robinson represents -- Jackie Robinson led the way, and look where blacks are today! I don't think Robinson himself had any criminal background -- in his era it had yet to become the norm -- but either way, it's an odd and not exactly respectful soundtrack choice for a movie that portrays him as a hero.

I knew what base meant because at one point I had looked up the etymology of based. Before a series of repurposings -- by Lil B, 4chan, and W. M. Briggs -- transformed it into an expression of approval with right-wing connotations, based referred to a basehead, a user of a particular type of cocaine. How exactly does "freebase" cocaine differ from the common or garden form, though? I realized I didn't know, and looking it up led to a breakthrough in interpreting these syncs:

freebase /ˈfriːbeɪs/ noun: freebase cocaine
cocaine that has been purified by heating with ether, taken by inhaling the fumes or smoking the residue.

Ether! You may remember that the reason 42 caught my eye was because of syncs relating that number to the Book of Ether, documented in my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr." The phrase "forty and two years" occurs three times in Ether 10, referring to three different things, and nowhere else in the Book of Mormon.

Following a sudden hunch, I looked up how long the Empire State Building had been the tallest building in the world:

The longest world record held by the Empire State Building was for the tallest skyscraper (to structural height), which it held for 42 years until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in October 1970.

Before discovering this Ether connection, I had been trying to connect The Swiss Family Robinson with the Book of Mormon. The family has four sons, just like Lehi's when he left Jerusalem, and Bern can be linked to Jerusalem because the Bern Switzerland Temple district, oddly, includes Jerusalem.

A better link, though, is with the Jaredites (whose story is told in the Book of Ether). Lehi flees Jerusalem, but the Jaredites flee the Great Tower -- a much closer link to the Empire State Building than Bern is to Jerusalem. The Jaredites also bring lots of livestock across the sea, as do the Swiss castaways.

The people's language is confounded at the Great Tower, making it the likely source of the Tower of Babel story in the Bible (or, for skeptics, vice versa). This aspect of the story is a link to the Swiss Temple. I have mentioned several times that it was the first LDS temple to present the ceremony in the form of a movie. The reason for this change was that, unlike all previous temples, the Swiss Temple had to perform ceremonies in multiple different languages, and a film was the easiest way of dealing with that.

While the Tower of Babel was simply "a tower whose top may reach unto heaven" -- cf. our term skyscraper -- the Great Tower was "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven": not just a tall building but a means of transportation, suggesting Zecharia Sitchin's theory that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship. The video for "The Statue Got Me High" portrays the Empire State Building as a spaceship, quite literally taking its inhabitants into the heavens. See my November 1 post "The Empire State Building -- in space!"

Also, in Hercules in New York, it is from the Empire State Building that Hercules ascends to heaven -- or to Olympus, anyway.

Another thing that caught my eye in the 42 trailer was a building labeled Ebbets Field -- where the Dodgers used to play, apparently. It's an odd name, so I looked up the etymology. It means "son of Isabel" or "son of Elizabeth." The original son of Elizabeth was John the Baptist (who, like the Jaredites, is associated with the honeybee), but the connection I made was with the Björk song "Isobel." I started listening to Björk shortly before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films came out, and I associate "Isobel" with the scene where Gandalf escapes from Isengard. There are these lines from the third verse:

In a tower of steel
Nature forges a deal
To raise wonderful hell
Like me, like me

But the key line is from the chorus:

Moth delivers her message

In the Peter Jackson movie -- though I don't remember it from the novel -- Gandalf escapes from Saruman in the tower of Orthanc in Isengard by sending a moth out as a messenger to summon an eagle.

I note parenthetically, as a sync probably intended for William Wright -- see "The Honey Maid (OR: What crazy people see on graham cracker boxes and Oreos)" -- that when I looked up the above video clip for inclusion in this post, I first had to sit through an ad for Oreo cookies.

I'm not touching this -- I'm ignoring new syncs, remember -- but there it is in case Mr. Wright wants to conclude anything from it.

Saruman in Isengard has already been connected with the orb-pondering Zeus seen in Hercules in New York.

I listened to Björk back in the days when people bought CDs, so I had never seen the music video for "Isobel" until today:

It's a black-and-white video prominently featuring organ pipes -- just like the Woodkid video for "Iron":

The "Iron" video ends, as the "Run Boy Run" video begins, with a shot of the Swiss Temple. The word iron derives from the Old English isen, as in Isengard. William Wright has already connected the organ pipes in the "Iron" video with Saruman, in his November 1 post "Stones and Keys, Part 3: The Voice of Saruman":

The man reading from his book of keys (Saruman) is first juxtaposed with those organ pipes. As he reads and speaks, we see cuts to the pipes, continuously zooming in on them. Are they playing? It is hard to say right off the bat, since the music of the actual song is playing. But I believe what we see here, or at least one thing, is the voice of Saruman being piped through those organ pipes.

So that's some interpretive progress, anyway. The Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building represent the Great Tower, and Saruman seems to be involved as well.

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs

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:

(Notice that the name Samson means "sun," and that the meme shows the sun between the pillars of a temple.)

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.

Throughout the whole movie, Zeus and the other gods have been trying to persuade Hercules to return to Olympus. While in the Empire State Building, he suddenly has a change of heart and decides to do so. Pretzie is admiring the view, turns around, and Herc has vanished.

Pretzie goes home and turns on his radio, only to hear Hercules speaking to him through the machine. ("Herc? Herc? Where are ya, Herc? What are you doing in my radio?") He starts having a conversation with his radio, asking Herc if he's ever going to come back even for a visit. Hercules leaves him with this:

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.

And, except for a brief epilogue set on Olympus, that's where the story ends: with Pretzie thinking he'll eat an apple. An exceedingly odd movie.

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The Emperor card of the Tarot

Arnold is a German name meaning "eagle ruler," and the first element in Schwarzenegger means "black." In most pre-Waite versions of the Tarot, the Emperor card features a black eagle -- the Reichsadler which has been the symbol of various German states. This same eagle appears on the coat of arms of modern Austria, Schwarzenegger's homeland. Emperor also syncs with New York and the Empire State Building.

In my January 2022 Tarot post "Pondering his orb," I note that Oswald Wirth (from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland) identified the Emperor card with Hercules, and specifically with Hercules holding apples (cf. the random "apple" reference at the end of Hercules in New York). The emperor is typically shown holding an orb, and I connected this with the "pondering my orb" meme, in which a bearded man stares into a crystal ball much like Zeus's in Hercules in New York. (This meme, in turn, derives from an illustration of Saruman using a Palantir.)

I also connect both the orb meme and the Tarot card with Lehi and his Liahona, and even note that "The name Lehi is associated with Samson, the 'Hebrew Hercules.'" (William Wright has proposed that the Liahona was literally a Palantir. More on that later.)

Another potentially relevant post is "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," which focuses specifically on Oswald Wirth's version of the card (Oswald Wirth, who was from Bern and who identified the Emperor with Hercules). His Emperor has a breastplate with the Sun on one breast and the Moon on the other, and I connect these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's breastplate. See also "Four rams' heads," where I discuss connections between the Emperor card and Zeus.

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Run Boy Run

On October 26, William Wright posted "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" He discusses the music video for "Run Boy Run," by Woodkid. Crossed keys are a prominent theme in this video. When crossed keys are used as a papal symbol, one key is typically silver and the other gold. Mr. Wright identifies these keys with Palantiri: the golden/solar Anor Stone (Liahona) and the silver/lunar Ithil Stone.

The connection with the Reality Temple meme is that the "Run Boy Run" video begins with a shot of the Bern Switzerland Temple while we hear a bell tolling four times. We then see a boy running out of this temple as fast as he can. The boy's running, and various monsters assisting him, is the theme of the rest of the video. Woodkid, who directed the video himself, is a French Jew with no Mormon background, so his choice of this particular building is an odd one.

This temple, dedicated on September 11, 1955, was the first Mormon temple outside the United States. It was originally called the Swiss Temple, not receiving its current name until the 1990s. Like most LDS temples, it has a statue of the Angel Moroni atop its spire, but this was not added until September 7, 2005. The Woodkid video shows the pre-2005, Moroni-less version. The Swiss Temple was the first to replace much of the traditional temple ceremony with a movie. It may be also be relevant that, like all LDS temples, it was closed to black people prior to 1978.

Running out of a temple obviously syncs with the meme about "escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple." Demiurge refers to the creator of the material universe, and the story of the Creation of the universe is central to the Mormon temple ceremony.

This site gives the following account of how the site for the Swiss Temple was selected:

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.

This syncs with Hercules in New York -- the very scene used in the meme -- in which Hercules (played by an Austrian) is told to stay out of a place because "it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed." Hercules is addressed as "boy" many times throughout the movie.

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The movie 42 and Jackie Robinson

In my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr," I discovered a connection in the works of Aleister Crowley between the numbers 42 and 333. I therefore took notice when I looked up "Run Boy Run" on Wikipedia and found that the song has a duration of 3:33 and was used in the trailer for a movie called 42.

The movie is about Jackie Robinson, the first black player to join an historically white baseball team. His number was 42, and it was retired in all MLB teams in his honor. I found the trailer mentioned on Wikipedia. The main soundtrack is the Jay-Z song "Brooklyn We Go Hard," but the beginning of the trailer does feature "Run Boy Run" (without the vocals).

Like the "Run Boy Run" video, the 42 trailer begins with a shot of a building and a tolling bell. Where "Run Boy Run" has the Bern Switzerland Temple, though, the trailer has the Empire State Building:

Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, so this choice of establishing shots -- a building in Manhattan, rather than the Brooklyn Bridge or something -- is an odd one.

As I mentioned, the main music for the trailer is not Woodkid but Jay-Z. Besides "Brooklyn We Go Hard," two of Jay-Z's other songs about New York City are "Empire State of Mind" and "A Star Is Born," both from the 2009 album The Blueprint 3. I know very little about Jay-Z and his music, but I do know that that because that album -- with its motif of three horizontal red stripes -- came up back in October 2020: "Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020." One of the things I noted back then was that the cover art for "A Star Is Born" made it look like "A Star Is Bern." I connected that with Bernie Sanders at the time, but now it's yet another link to Bern, Switzerland.

The cover art for "Empire State of Mind," unsurprisingly, shows the Empire State Building. Notice also that it features Alicia Keys -- a link to the crossed-keys motif in "Run Kid Run" and thus indirectly to Bern.

Jackie Robinson, who successfully joined a white New York baseball team which had previously excluded blacks, syncs with the running Arnold image from the meme -- which shows Hercules practicing athletics with white New Yorkers who had tried to exclude him as an "outsider." In the 42 trailer, a white man predicts that "Negroes are gonna run the white man straight out of baseball" -- using the metaphor of "running out" to say that Anglo-Saxons are going to be replaced by Negroes. The meme also shows someone "running out" after replacing all English words with a slang form of the word Negro.

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The Swiss Family Robinson

The trailer for the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 begins with music associated with the Swiss Temple in Bern -- a building which, like Major League Baseball, formerly excluded black people. Once Robinson and the Swiss Temple have been linked, this obviously brings The Swiss Family Robinson into the associative web. Its author, Johann David Wyss, was born and died in -- quelle surprise -- Bern.

The Robinson in the title is a reference to Robinson Crusoe, not the name of the family. In Wyss's original, their surname is never given, nor do we learn where in Switzerland they are from. The 1960 Disney movie makes the rather obvious choice to dub them the Robinsons and have them hail from Bern. In the novel, one of the children is usually named Jack in English translations (Jakob in the original), but the Disney movie removes this character, giving the family only three sons -- so we never quite get a Jackie Robinson.

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Psalm 19 and the Sun Tarot card

In the November 1 post "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I note connections between the meme, the 19th Psalm, and the 19th Tarot trump. The relevant passage from the psalm is this:

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).

Not only does the meme show "a strong man to run a race" out of "a tabernacle for the sun"; it literally shows a man named Strong -- that being the stage name used by Schwarzenegger in the film from which the picture is taken. I read Psalm 19 in the course of my regular scripture reading, just two days after finding and posting the Reality Temple meme.

The number 19 is a link to the Sun card of the Tarot, the Rider-Waite version of which is quite similar to the meme. Each shows a shirtless person moving toward the viewer and to the right, with a manmade structure and a huge sun behind him. The face on the Sun is quite similar, as is the pattern of alternating straight and squiggly rays.

One of the main differences is that Arnold is on foot, while the child on the Tarot card rides a white horse. Although Arnold never rides a horse in Hercules in New York, there is an extended chase scene in which he drives two white horses in a chariot (because you can find anything in New York City):

The color scheme matches the Tarot card pretty closely. The chariot is red, like the flag on the card, and the yellow spokes of the chariot wheels suggest the Sun:

I think that about covers the recent syncs that tie in with this meme. Did I miss anything?