My last post, "Eclipse skull and crossbones" called up a vague memory of a meme in which He-Man's arch-enemy Skeletor was standing with the sun directly behind his head, making it look as if he had a halo -- or an eclipse with a skull instead of a moon. I tried and failed to track it down. One of the search prompts I tried, though, skeletor halo, did turn up eclipse imagery:
This giant spider connection made me take notice when -- casting my net a bit wider and just searching for skeletor meme -- I found this:
Skulls and spiders led me to the black-and-yellow garden spiders that are common in much of the United States: I've seen a few in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head. I can't find a great example of this online, but here's something to give you the general idea:
Besides the vaguely skull-like cephalothorax (much better examples exist but apparently not on the Internet), note the posture, typical of this family of spiders, with the legs arranged in an X and the death's-head at the center. (Incidentally, I used a similar garden spider photo to illustrate a post about giant spiders: "Whitley Strieber with between two and four giant spiders.")
The spider pictured above has a fairly uninteresting bumblebee-type pattern, but many garden spiders have much more intricate designs. When I lived in Maryland, I used to make detailed sketches of their markings in a notebook, thinking of them as "hieroglyphics" and imagining that they might mean something, though I never made any attempt to crack the code.
That memory of copying down "hieroglyphics" off the backs of spiders reminded me of something I'd read about several months ago in the Cultural History of the Book of Mormon: a fringe Mormon called Goker Harim who claimed to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared off the back of an insect of some sort -- a beetle? a spider, even? I found the reference in the Cultural History -- it was a cicada -- and tried to track down the source document online for more details, but to no avail. (I'm not going to pay $9.99 to download it, sorry.) Though I failed to find any details of the story of how the cicada was found and "translated," I did finally find a Word document with a picture of the cicada's markings and an accompanying essay:
It's called "The Judgement Tablet" -- with the British spelling of judgement, even though the author is (I think) American. The essay begins thus:
The Judgement Tablet, also called the Covenant Tablet of the Gentiles, is an advanced style tablet. It has a base and top section in addition to the usual four glyphs. It was written by Achee [i.e., the Brother of Jared] and preserved on a cicada. Written on it is the whole course of history from before creation till after the Final Judgement.
One of the coincidences noted in my last post was the use of the phrase "judgement day" -- British spelling -- by two different Americans in connection with the skull-moon theme. The cicada tablet essay doesn't actually use the phrase "judgement day," but "Final Judgement" is close enough.
