From the Narrow Desert: Skull

Showing posts with label Skull. Show all posts

Monday, April 1, 2024

Chips, clips, and the eclipse

On Holy Saturday night -- or rather the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning -- I woke up from a dream, scribbled down a few words on the notepad I keep by my bed, and went back to sleep. In the morning I read this:

White or yellow "chip" or plate found on Annunciation Day

I remember little about this dream. I know that I put the word chip in quotation marks because the object was referred to as a chip in the dream but due to its size -- a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter -- I thought upon waking that plate was more accurate. It was made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and was covered with engravings. The environment in which it was found -- an indoor area full of dead leaves -- suggested the abandoned restaurant I started exploring back in July 2022. This is not the first time I have dreamed about finding "plates" in such a place. In my September 2023 post "Phoenix syncs," I wrote this:

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. In the second dream, during a nap on September 1, I found a large mantis inside the restaurant, and it kept unfolding more and more of its joints until, its limbs fully extended, it was larger than I was. I was trying to think of a way to get it out the door without hurting it.

On March 28, a couple of days before the "chip" dream, I had posted "Annunciation rescheduled to coincide with eclipse," about how the Catholic Church was celebrating the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which is normally on March 25, on April 8 this year, the same day as the solar eclipse.

On Easter morning I found something new on my refrigerator door, some random thing my wife had ordered online:

At first I thought it said "FRIES Chips" -- bilingual American/British packaging -- which made me think of my "chip" dream, but then I noticed that it actually says Clips, and that it's a box of plastic clips in the shape of crinkle-cut French fries. But clips is still synchronistically interesting, since it's part of the word eclipse. Then I realized that the whole word eclipse is actually there, since on either side of the text is a set of three horizontal lines suggesting the letter E.

In "Eclipse skull and crossbones" (and earlier posts linked there), I connect skull imagery with the eclipse. In "Turning suns into black holes," photos of a blacked-out sun are juxtaposted with a photo of a single eye. Today I ran into a skull with a single eye on /x/:

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Skulls, crescents, twins

Yesterday I posted "Eclipse skull and crossbones," continuing the theme of "The eclipsing moon as a skull." In the comments, Debbie introduced the theme of twins -- though it had, I thought, only a rather tenuous connection to what I had posted. (The post discussed the "eclipse crossroads" city of Carbondale, from which Debbie free-associated to carbon paper, carbon copies, and twins.)

Yesterday evening, approximately six and a half hours after Debbie's comment, I saw this on /x/, illustrating a thread dedicated to the astrological analysis of "evil people":

I guess this was just intended as a sinister-looking representation of the sign of Gemini, but the details are quite synchy. The twins have skull heads, and above each skull is a crescent, synching with the idea of the moon as a skull. Centered above them is a cross, suggesting the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois, where the paths of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses intersect. The two crescents, besides representing the moon, could also represent solar eclipses just before or after the moment of totality. (Only very thin crescents, like those in the image, would have this ambiguity. A wider crescent moon is quite distinct in shape from a partially eclipsed sun.)

The constellation of Gemini represents Castor and Pollux, whose "white skullcaps" (and connection with the "second moon," Basidium) I discussed in my December 2 post "They are the eggmen."

This afternoon I ran across this image on /pol/ and clicked on it because it said "The Story of Gog And Magog" -- Gog came up in the March 6 post "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" -- but the rest of it turned out to have nothing to do with that title:

All nonsense, in case you were wondering. The white and black crescents in Éliphas Lévi's iconic image represent mercy and justice, not anything racial, and the Goat itself shares nothing but a name with the alleged idols of the Knights Templar. Their "Baphomet" -- most likely a corruption of the name Mahomet -- was usually described as a severed human head, a head with three faces, or -- most notably -- a human skull.

Also interesting is the reappearance of the twin crescents from the Gemini image, together with the "Gog and Magog." My uncle William John used to say that Gog and Magog were "the apocalyptic equivalent of Tweedledee and Tweedledum" -- meaning that both sides in the Battle of Armageddon would consist mostly of evil clowns, morally indistinguishable -- so there's the twin theme again.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement

Some unmanned untethered free association here. It's a constitutional right, after all.

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:

In addition to the skull imagery, we have crossed bandoliers, suggesting the X-marks-the-spot of the 2017 and 2024 eclipse paths, centered on Makanda, Illinois. My post "Makanda" is about the coincidence of seeing Makanda on an eclipse map shortly after reading about a giant spider named Makanda in a Colin Wilson novel.

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.

Eclipse skull and crossbones

Besides Makanda, the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois also includes Carbondale -- which has an interesting city logo:

That design looks a little too perfect to be a coincidence, and sure enough, it's not. It was introduced months after the 2017 eclipse and explicitly references the two eclipse paths:

[Carbondale Mayor Mike] Henry said the logo is an abstract crossroad, which fits with Carbondale being the "eclipse crossroads of America." In the middle of the design, it looks like a keyhole, which Henry said suggests the door is always open in the city.

He may think it looks like a keyhole, but to me a round white shape superimposed on a white X looks like a skull and crossbones, a theme that came up in "Human skull on the ground, turn around":

In a comment on that post, I added, "The motorcyclist’s jacket shows a star (like the sun) being eclipsed by a dead white object (like the moon)," a link reinforced by "The eclipsing moon as a skull."

Notice the phrase "judgement day" there -- spelled the British way even though it was posted from America.

The article about the Carbondale logo said that a lot of people had been mocking the logo on social media -- some of them stooping so low, the mayor is shocked to report, as to "draw vulgar things on it on Facebook" -- so I wondered if any of these cowardly basement-dwelling idiot anonymous troll-demons had worked the Jolly Roger angle. An image search for carbondale illinois skull and crossbones turned up further confirmation that the moon is a skull:

That image came from the 2013 archive page for a blog called Skull-A-Day. The image itself is from a December 7 post of skull art by Justin Ferreira; and on the same archive page is a December 29 post in which a reader from Carbondale, Illinois, submitted a photo of milk in a sink forming a skull-like shape.

The crescent moon skull design -- with the face on the concave surface of the crescent, and with dark orbits suggesting dark glasses -- reminded me of the old Moon Man meme.

This led me to look up and reread A. T. L. Carver's proposal that, just as Pepe the Frog is the ancient Egyptian god Kek, Moon Man is Thoth. The last bullet point got my attention:

Okay, so both Moon Man and Thoth:

Are associated with the moon
Have a crescent moon aspect to their heads
Deal with words and vocalizing
Are “judgement day” figures who lay down the law and establish an order

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Human skull on the ground, turn around

The upcoming total eclipse of the sun has been in the sync-stream of late, which is probably what put Bonnie Tyler's 1983 song "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in my head.

That in turn made me think of the audition scene from the 2010 movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid, where the sing the intro to the Tyler song, with the repeated line "Turn around":

That led to the Tyler song being replaced in my head by "Turn Around" (1992) by They Might Be Giants, which is about turning around and seeing a human skull:

Turn around, turn around
There's a thing there that can be found
Turn around, turn around
It's a human skull on the ground
Human skull on the ground
Turn around

This train of thought occurred while I was on the road, and while I was thinking about the human skull on the ground, I saw this on the back of the jacket of the motorcyclist in front of me:

This reinforced the skull theme, and I found myself thinking about the scene in Hamlet where he addresses the skull and trying to remember the lines: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times . . . ." And that was about as much as I could remember; I've only read Hamlet a couple of times.

Hamlet was borne on the back of Yorick, who is now a skull -- and now a skull was borne on the back of a motorcyclist.

After posting "Booby trap," which ends with a meme of a cat saying, "It's a booby trap!" I had a vague memory of having seen a meme years ago involving a cat and the Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" line. I couldn't remember any details, but I ran an image search for admiral ackbar cat just to see what would turn up. I didn't find what I was looking for, but among the search results was this old New Yorker cartoon:

I liked the drawing style, so I forgot about Admiral Ackbar and cats and just searched for benjamin schwartz cartoon. One of the results immediately got my attention:

That's the iconic Hamlet scene I had just been thinking of, with the twist that the prince is turning around.

On a whim, I searched for skull solar eclipse, and the first result was this T-shirt, about the very eclipse that started this whole train of thought:

The date of the eclipse is written as 04.08. In Hamlet, the next scene after Act 4, Scene 7, is the scene with the skull.

Searching for bonnie tyler skull also turned up "Total Eclipse of the Heart":