From the Narrow Desert

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.

I dreamed that I went back to my family's old home in Ohio (which in real life no longer exists, the land having been sold to Hell Hollow Wilderness Area when my parents moved to Virginia), realizing that I'd completely forgotten to visit it regularly to feed the pets.

When I arrived, I found that the house was now occupied by a married couple whom I could not see or here but of whose presence I was aware and with whom I could communicate telepathically. I thought of them as "G and his wife," with no particular idea of what the G stood for, and I didn't find their invisibility to be anything strange. I certainly didn't think of them as "ghosts" or anything. I took it for granted that they were fully physical flesh-and-blood human beings but that they existed on a wavelength that made them inaccessible to my ordinary senses.

G's wife led me down into the basement (which was enormous) and to what I guess could be described as a walk-in fireplace. It was a very large circular room with a high domed ceiling, full of smoldering logs and coals, and I understood that its purpose was to heat the house. She asked me to use a poker to break all the half-burnt logs into smaller pieces, and I said (telepathically), "To stoke the fire. I understand." I thought the purpose was to expose more unburnt wood to the oxygen and get the fire burning stronger.

In this assumption I was wrong. As I "stoked" the fire, the logs crumbled to coals, which quickly became ashes, and then the ashes became a thick gray mud. This, it turns out, was exactly what G wanted. He and another person, who I think was called Diego (at any rate it was definitely a Spanish name), appeared and announced that this was now their dojo. "Diego and I like to spend all day every day fighting here!" G announced. (All these people were still invisible and inaudible; I could "see" and "hear" them only in a metaphorical way.) G and Diego were each connected to the center of the domed ceiling with something like the silk dragline used by a falling spider. They would swing around on these lines, meet in the mud, and tussle.

At the end of a fight, what looked like some sort of corporate logo appeared in the air near the top of the ceiling. My first impression was that it was the Chupa Chups logo, but then I saw that it was actually G's wife's name. (I apprehended this fact directly, without being aware of what her name actually was.) Then the logo rotated clockwise several degrees, which had the effect of making the n at the end of the name look like a b, transforming the name to Cheb. (This implies that her name was Chen, but I had no sense of this fact during the dream and was somewhat surprised to discover it upon waking.) The logo then disappeared.

I recognized Cheb as the name of one of the ancient Spider Lords in Colin Wilson's novels, and I thought that this whole thing -- the fight on draglines and the transforming name -- was a reference to a theory G entertained that his wife was actually the reincarnation of a very important spider.

I was less concerned about the meaning of the logo than about the fact of its appearance. A logo appearing in midair at the end of a performance was something that happened on TV, not in real life. "G," I said, "how did that happen? Did you make it happen, or are we in a movie?"

"Well," he said, "let's say it's a preview  for a movie."

Later, I was out walking in the hemlock-beech woods that surrounded the house. I found a beech tree that had a little hollow at a fork in its trunk, and there was a small fire smoldering in the hollow. I thought I'd better "stoke" that fire, too, and I did this in the literal sense of adding fuel. The risk of starting a forest fire did cross my mind, but I dismissed it, figuring that G and his wife knew what they were doing keeping a fire burning there.

A few minutes later, I turned back and saw that the tree next to the one I had "stoked" was now on fire -- sort of. The flames were white in color, they didn't seem to be consuming the tree, and only that one tree was affected. The flaming tree gave the impression of a Persian cypress, which would be quite out of place in those woods, but I think it was the flames that made it appear to have that shape.

Some other invisible people were nearby, and I alerted them to the flaming tree. They expressed disappointment that no one had thought to bring a large blanket with which to beat out the flames. After a few failed attempts to beat out the flames with my jacket -- most of the blaze was too high for me to reach -- I ran back to the house to get a blanket.

In order to get a blanket, I would have to find a suitable word with which to conjure one up. In the house I found a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the classic green rooster logo, and began hurriedly scanning the side of the box for a suitable word. I found a possible candidate in the word croied, which I mentally pronounced to rhyme with void. "That might work," I thought. "Haven't I heard of croied sheets before, or croied bedding?" Wanting to be sure, I took down a dictionary (shelved together with the corn flakes for some reason) and looked up croi. I found nothing, but then I remembered that the base word is spelled croix, with the silent x being removed when a suffix is added. (Croix is French for "cross," but I was still mentally pronouncing it as "kroy," not "krwah") Looking up croix, I found a long list of definitions, including one that said "the absolute penis," but couldn't find anything bedding-related.

"Wait," I thought, "did that say 'the absolute penis'? That's pretty weird." I looked back through the list of definitions to find it again, but I found that all the definitions were now written in Chinese, and that I had lost the ability to read Chinese. I was still trying to decipher these Chinese definitions -- all I could figure out was that one of the characters was likely pronounced huang, though I wasn't sure which of the many characters with that pronunciation it might be -- I woke up.

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I've learned from William Wright that the point-of-view character in a dream doesn't always represent the dreamer himself, but that we sometimes dream from the point of view of another. In this case, I think it highly likely that I was represented in this dream by G, not by the character I experienced as being "me." I was actually known as G when I worked at Burger King as a teenager. For some reason, many of the employees there were known by celebrity surnames associated with their given names -- a concept roughly comparable to Cockney rhyming slang, I guess. For example, there was a guy named Jimmy who was always referred to as Page, and I, the guy named Bill, was called Gates, which was later shortened to G. This became sufficiently "official" that my name tag had nothing but the letter G on it. It is suggested in the dream that G's wife is called Chen, which is my own wife's maiden name. My wife also used to use the English name Charlotte -- inspired by, you guessed it, the arachnid heroine of Charlotte's Web.

(Unfortunately, the whole time I was known as Gates, no one once said "Groovy greets" to me.)

So who is Diego? And who is the point-of-view character? No idea so far.

The tree, burning with white flames but not consumed, suggests both the Burning Bush of Moses and the glowing white Tree of Life in the dreams of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr. Given these connotations, the fact that the point-of-view wants to put the tree out by beating it with a blanket suggests that he's not a good guy.

A white cypress in particular reminded me of something, and after a while I figured out what it was: A tree of that description appears on John Opsopaus's (hand-drawn by a non-artist; cut him some slack) version of the Star card of the Tarot:

Checking his essay on that card, I find that it's yet another Tree of Life reference:

[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.

The bird, incidentally, is the lion-headed Anzû, which has appeared on this blog once before.

The morning after the dream, I taught an adult English class. One of the students asked me out of the blue, "What's the difference between a cedar and a cypress?" I provided the Chinese translations and just said they were two different kinds of trees. "Are Christmas trees usually cypresses?" she asked. I said I'd never heard of them being used that way, and that Christmas trees are usually firs, spruces, or pines. Strange questions to ask, but they tie in with the idea of a white cypress as the Tree of Life. In my December 8 post "The White Tree of Life . . . Saver," I mention the all-white artificial Christmas tree we use at my school and connect it with the Tree of Life.

One of the other students in that class had brought a tote bag with something about the Tree of Liberty written on it. I was only able to see part of it. The first line said "THE TREE OF LIBERTY" and the second line said "FAR AWAY IN THE," with the final word not visible. I'd never heard of the Tree of Liberty outside of the Jefferson quote about watering it from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. 

Note added: I forgot to include this in the original post. After my dream but before my morning class, I saw that some secondhand English children's books had been delivered to my school. I picked up one at random, with the nondescript title People and Places, and opened it up to the table of contents, where I saw this:

The picture, apparently showing some kind of controlled burn in Australia, synched in a broad way with themes from the dream, enough to make me turn to the pages on Australia, where I found this:

I have no idea how the aborigines make that gray-white body paint, but it certainly looks like it could be made from ashes mixed with water.

Update 2 (11:00 p.m.): I checked my YouTube subscriptions and found this just-uploaded video which begins by zooming in on the words printed on the side of a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. I haven’t watched the rest of it yet, but already that’s a pretty specific sync:

"Pokélogan" -- as an alternative name for the Pokémon Lapras -- comes from two sources. The first is the poké- element in Pokémon, which comes from the English word pocket. The second is pokelogan, an obscure dialect word of unclear origin, meaning "marshy or stagnant water that has branched off from a stream or lake."

I've acquired from William Wright the habit of looking strange words up on Eldamo to see if they mean anything in any of Tolkien's Elvish languages. The search string pok returns only this:

So it means "bag" or "pouch," just as poké- means "pocket."

Logan returns no results, but loga and logn are both hits:

I haven't cherry-picked here. Both loga and logn return only these results, all of which are about swamps and thus directly related to the meaning of pokelogan. Tolkien may well have been influenced by the English words pouch and pocket when he coined poko, but it would be quite a stretch to say that the second half of an extremely obscure American dialect word inspired the Oxford Anglo-Saxonist to create loga and logna.

I think this is just as impressive a hit as Prika-vlein, and it suggests that Pokélogan may have more synchronistic importance than I had thought. One possibly important angle that comes to mind is that Pokélogan was specifically the name of a Lapras keychain, the purpose of which is to keep keys together. See yesterday's post about "keys . . . which must be combined and used together."

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On a mostly unrelated noted, William Wright has been posting a lot lately about the 1980 movie Xanadu. In the February 6 post "Ho!" he does for Xanadu what I've just done for Pokélogan above: break it into two parts and look them up on Eldamo. The components into which he separates it are xan and adu. This made me think of Xan, the name of the mosquito in the Popol Vuh, and I had the thought that every time I killed a mosquito, I could say, "Xan, adieu!"

And shrink not, brothers, from the kill:
'Tis but your own suck'd blood you spill.

His latest Xanadu post, yesterday's "How can you be talking to me? You're a movie!" is about a scene in which Kira tells Sonny to look up the word muse in the dictionary. He does so and finds at the end of the entry a sentence addressing him by name. Then she turns on the TV, and the characters on the TV show also start talking to him.

Today I was reading Calvino in a coffee shop, and the background music got my attention when the singer sang the word green at precisely the same moment that I read the word green. (It had to be that word of course!) Then a new song came on, which turned out to be "Too Deep To Turn Back" by Daniel Caesar. It begins thus:

So what's the price?
We're like mosquitoes to light, in a sense
I feed off bio-luminescence

"Mosquitoes to light"? Isn't it usually moths that we talk about in that connection? Then when it got to "I feed off bio-luminescence," it made me think of William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend," in which he characterizes Ungoliant, Tolkien's giant spider-demon, as "acting very much the vampire in sucking the last light from the Trees." A vampire drinks blood, like a mosquito, but this vampire was instead drinking light, and specifically light which came from living organisms, the Two Trees. Feeding off bio-luminescence, you might say.

Near the end of the song we have these lines:

Oh Lord Jehovah, what's this I see?
Bourgeoisie tryna silence me
They don't know what I've been through
Don't know what I pree'd
Seeing shit that you see up in your TV screen

That seems to tie in with Sonny seeing some supernatural shit up in his TV screen in Xanadu.

Yesterday I did some urban exploring and kept running into capital letter Rs in strange orientations -- upside down, backwards, "lazy," etc. Today, I saw someone wearing a hoodie with a huge blackletter R (normal orientation) and under it -- in Latin, but written as if it were German -- Fortis Fortuna adiuvat -- one of several Latin versions of the proverb "Fortune favors the bold."

This served as a reminder that I had been meaning to post about Fortuna ever since she came up in William Wright's January 26 post "Predators, Manticores, Dwarf-Lions, the Mary Celeste, Sirens, and Illusions." In that post, he discusses a movie called The Last Unicorn, which I have never seen, and a character in it called Mommy Fortuna. Fortuna is the Latin name of the goddess Tyche, ancient mother of all Tychonieviches, and I suppose I show myself her true son in having taken "The highway is for gamblers" as my personal motto.

I thought of the old medieval poem from Carmina Burana which begins O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis -- "O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable." I posted about this back in 2019 as part of a series of posts on the development of the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card. The post even mentions "my august ancestress Tyche or Fortuna herself," tying in with the Mommy Fortuna theme. After holding forth on the philosophical meaning of the symbol, I end with a throwaway pun:

I had no deeper meaning in mind than that cats like to eat tuna, but Túna, as a geographical name from Tolkien's writings, where it is glossed "Hill City," has appeared several times on William Wright's blog, suggesting other possible meanings.

The idea of Fortuna as a single goddess who changes "like the moon" was synchronistically interesting to me. William's post with Mommy Fortuna was largely in response to my own January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge." In that post, I discuss the Piers Anthony character Chameleon, who first came up on my blog as the mother of the character Dor. In the novel A Spell for Chameleon, we meet three very different women -- Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon -- who all turn out to be the same person, Chameleon, who undergoes extreme physical and psychological changes in a regular cycle following the phases of the moon. He personal lunar cycle only has three "phases," though.

In my January 5 post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," I recount a dream in which a woman going by the pseudonym Claire Delune (i.e. clair de lune, "moonlight") elicited from me a poem about the phases of the moon, but only three phases were mentioned:

From none to half, or half to all,
Or all to half, or half to none
Takes seven days, and this we call
A week, and now my tale is done.

It was the final line of this poem that first got me thinking about Chameleon, by way of her son Dor, as detailed in my January 7 post "My tail is dun."

On January 25, just after posting "An old pre-dator," I posted "Surround, confound," about a dream in which three women were singing. In comments there, William Wright suggested that, though they appeared human, the women in the dream might actually represent spiders. Then he added that they also reminded him of the Sirens.

That checks out. There were three Sirens according to Hesiod and many later writers (though not Homer, oddly), and as William notes there is something spider-like in the way the Sirens passively wait for victims to be drawn into their trap.

Then I thought of another female trio from myth: the Fates. One of them, Clotho, even has the spiderly task of spinning thread. Fate and fortune are clearly closely related concepts, which can be personified either as a single changeable woman (Fortuna) or as three different women (the Fates). Just as Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon in A Spell for Chameleon are aspects of a single woman, Chameleon; there is another Piers Anthony novel, With a Tangled Skein (which I have not read), in which Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are aspects of a single Irishwoman.

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Several things have conspired to make me think of a Tarot card in connection with all this -- and no, not the Wheel of Fortune, but Strength.

First, the hoodie I saw today used fortis instead of the more canonical audentes. The card called Strength in English is Fortezza in Italian and Force in French, both of which derive from fortis.

Second, the card features an orange-colored tame feline, like the "Oh, for tuna!" image.

Third, in my October 2020 post "Can the deck itself be prophetic?" I discuss how the structure of the Rider-Waite deck itself successfully predicts the outcomes of five U.S. presidential elections in a row. (It strongly predicted a Trump win in 2020, though, which failed to play out.) In connecting the eighth trump with the 2008 election, I identified the woman on the card with Barack Obama's mother. Her name was Dunham, which means "hill home" -- a close cousin to the "Hill City" of Túna

Fourth, when I ran an image search for fortune favors the bold, this was one of the results:

Fifth, wolves have been in the sync stream, which prompted regular commenter Debbie (Ra1119bee) to leave a comment on this morning's post "The pillar of blackness" about how wolves have been paranormally associated with her. The first time she told me that story was in response to an email I sent her back in October 2021, just a few days after we first "met" online. I had written (edited slightly for privacy):

The other day, as I often do when some new person enters my life, I asked, "So who is this Debbie lady?" and drew a single Tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck. I got Strength, which portrays a woman with a lion. As I have detailed elsewhere on my blog, this image likely descends from pictures of Samson killing a lion -- with Samson's long hair causing someone along the line to mistake him for a woman. The idea of a "female Samson" relates directly to your name: Samson was one of the 12 biblical Judges, and the only female Judge -- the only woman ever to play Samson's role -- was Deborah. Note also that when Samson returned to look at the body of the lion he had killed, "behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion" (Judges 14:8).

On August 19 . . . I had posted about the version of this card that appears in the music video for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple" (https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2021/08/strength-in-grateful-dead-ripple-video.html). In the "Ripple" version, the woman is black and wears a crown of red flowers. . . . The "Ripple" version also removes the Samson imagery, replacing the lion with a wolf.

Sur-round me

Con-found me

I need your lo-o-o-o-o-ove

Come to me

And let my ever-loving arms surround you

Come to me

And let my infinite embrace confound you

The banana spider myth claims that the Huntsman spider lays its eggs in banana flower blossoms, resulting in spiders inside the tip of bananas, waiting to terrorize an unsuspecting consumer. This is supposed to explain why monkeys allegedly peel bananas from the "wrong" end.

I insisted on eating them "the monkey way" -- meaning with the skin peeled back but not removed, as I had seen monkeys eating them in cartoons.

In yesterday's post "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist," I mentioned listening to the Denmark + Winter cover of Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" and thinking of it as being sung by a spider.

For starters, this is just very spidery music. Anyone who has spent any time interacting with spiders in an indoor environment will know that they are extremely responsive to music, being drawn to some kinds and repelled by others. (I believe there have even been a few studies by The Science on this, drawing broad-brush conclusions to the effect that spiders prefer classical to techno or something like that.) And, though Johnny Cash himself would surely leave them cold, Denmark + Winter's ethereal rendition of "I Walk the Line" is exactly the kind of music spiders like. In fact, when I played it last night, a large male cane spider came out from his hiding place under the wooden slats of my balcony floor and joined me, waving his pedipalps a bit in the tentative way they do, which is about as close as cane spiders, a nervous breed, ever get to dancing.

As I suppose is obvious, I'm fond of spiders. Tolkien apparently thought of them simply as horrible and disgusting, which is also my father's view. (Once, when my father was explaining what made spiders so repulsive -- "big fat gut, long skinny legs" -- a friend of mine overheard and responded with an indignant "Hey!") With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

As for the lyrics, "I keep my eyes wide open all the time" is obviously applicable to spiders, but the main thing is the repeated phrase "I walk the line" itself. Walking the line is what spiders do.

Today, wondering about possible meanings of "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn," I put do spiders produce oil into a search engine. I was pretty sure they don't, but it can't hurt to check, right? Apparently it's a common misconception -- there are lots of sites debunking it -- that spiders do produce oil, and that this has to do with their ability to "walk the line." Here's what the Spider Myths Site has to say:

Myth: Spiders have oil on their feet that keeps them from sticking to their own webs.

Fact: Everyone who educates about spiders has heard the question "why don't spiders stick to their webs?" many times. Who first came up with the oil-on-the-feet idea is unknown, but it must have originally been a perfectly reasonable guess, or hypothesis. Since the decades-old origin of this idea, in some circles it's become a dogma. It's been repeated countless times in print and online. There are even classroom lesson plans built around this false "fact".

To quote two of the world's leading experts on spider silk use (Fritz Vollrath and Edward Tillinghast) writing in 1992: "Ecribellate spiders simply tiptoe around the glue, which they deposit in spheroidal globs. When a spider accidentally steps into one of these glue balls, as it sometimes does, it suffers no more inconvenience than a human stepping into a wad of gum. When a fly slams into the web, however, it hits about 50 of the droplets, enough to make it stick." I might add that most spiders don't even make sticky silk, and those that do (mainly orbweavers and cobweb weavers) still have many non-sticky threads in various parts of their webs.

So "spider's oil" is a myth, a substance invented by those who don't imagine a spider capable of simply watching its step. Spiders aren't immune to the traps they set for others; they're just careful. (Carefulness lies very close to the essence of spider-nature, I think.) I'm not sure how or whether that ties in with the idea of "spider's oil" as lamp fuel, but it seems worth noting.

Note added: Another "spider-friendly" cover of an originally rougher song is Storm Large's take on the Pixies in the 2013 movie Big Ass Spider (one of the best opening scenes in any movie ever). People understand that this is what spiders like:

William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend" discusses "Ya Hey" and "Step," the only two Vampire Weekend songs I know, both of which I have posted about before. He finds in them allusions to Tolkien's spider-demon Ungoliant and to a rat or mouse which he identifies with another Tolkien villain, Saruman.

So I guess it's time to talk about the poltergeist of July-August 2019.

The first thing that happened was that our phone line suddenly went dead in the middle of a call, and the phone wouldn't work after that. Eventually an electrician found the problem: A cable inside the wall had been snipped neatly in two, as if with a pair of shears. He said he couldn't understand how it had happened. He said sometimes mice will bite wires, but this was such a clean cut, and in a place that should have been inaccessible even to a mouse. And in any case we keep multiple cats, and mice are simply not an issue.

A day or two after that, an air conditioner, a water dispenser, and a television set all suddenly stopped working at the same time. In each case the technician found that a small but important component had mysteriously been cut neatly in two.

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Since some sort of spiritual presence seemed to be involved, I had the bright idea of "interrogating" it with Tarot cards. "Who are you?" I asked, then shuffled my deck, and drew a card: The Devil. "What do you want?" Death.

My reaction to this was, "Oh, come on!" It was just too corny, too cartoonish, too much like something out of a bad horror movie, and it didn't seem to fit the phenomena themselves, which seemed more mischievous than evil. I refused to take it seriously. I wrote at the time, "I think we're dealing with the spiritual equivalent of a 12-year-old boy making prank calls."

The feeling that we were dealing with an "animal" presence of some kind persisted, leading me into this dangerous line of thinking:

So far I haven't tried any prayers or other exorcistic gestures because, to be honest, my hunch is that this entity has shown up at my house the same way animals in need of help always do, and that I should receive it in the same spirit. Of course, to help it I need to know what it needs or wants (besides "death," I mean!). . . . Is it foolhardy to think I might be able to housebreak this thing? My feeling is that as long as I resist the temptation to try to enslave it, I'm not in any real danger . . . .

It's hard for me to understand now how I could have thought that way even for a moment, but I did. Fortunately, I quickly came to my senses:

Here's my thinking. A devil's purpose is not to annoy or terrorize but to tempt, and I think the temptation in this case was to do precisely what I almost did: to welcome this thing, using compassion as an excuse, but in fact motivated by morbid curiosity and pride.

Obviously, anything that calls itself the Devil, and that sees ordinary Christian prayer as a hostile act, should be taken at face value and sent packing. The only thing that made me hesitate to do so was the interesting (but absurd and illusory) prospect of "taming" it, as if I were King Solomon or something, as if I had somehow become a magician just by reading books.  . . . evil seems to be required to explicitly identify itself as such -- and it doesn't get much more explicit than saying "I'm the Devil, and I want death." If I had responded with," Right, well make yourself at home, then," I would essentially have been in the position of Faust inviting the black poodle into his house (and it was perhaps this subconscious connection that made me think of it as being like a stray animal).

I began using prayer against the thing, starting with some prayers that were recommended by a pen friend who is an Anglican priest. Phenomena ceased for about a week, and then this happened:

This type of violence represented a serious escalation, and I stepped up my efforts to get rid of the thing once and for all. What ended up doing the trick was a Latin prayer to St. Michael, recommended by a Catholic friend. (This was my first experience praying in Latin, which is now something I do every day.) When I started the prayer, one of my cats went absolutely berserk, behaving as if it were possessed, but by the end of the prayer, everything was normal, and the poltergeist phenomena never came back. Later that evening, when the Taoist "ghostbuster" team I had called earlier arrived, they said the house was clean and there was nothing for them to do.

In going back through my old emails while writing this post, I found this comment from a friend:

Although it is currently a mystery; I'm pretty sure that, if you find a cure, you will find-out what it was all about at some time later - assuming you remain curious to learn.

I wouldn't say I've found that out yet -- I'm not yet at the point where "It was a character from a Tolkien novel" feels like a real explanation -- but my curiosity has been reignited. After some time, I had more or less set the whole thing aside, contenting myself, like Bartholomew Cubbins and King Derwin, with saying "it just 'happened to happen' and was not very likely to happen again." Now, like so many other things from my past, it's resurfacing and demanding to be made sense of.

After reading William Wright's post, I was going to listen to those Vampire Weekend songs again, but I somehow tapped the wrong thing and ended up instead listening to Denmark + Winter's strange reimagining of Johnny Cash (another "Man in Black" for you, Bill):

"I keep my eyes wide open all the time / I keep the ends out for the tie that binds / Because you're mine, I walk the line." Is it strange to imagine this being sung by an unblinking spider spinning its thread?

To end with a random sync wink: William Wright's introduced Ungoliant in his post "A familiar symbol, secret combinations, and Mama Ungoliant." The "familiar symbol" of the title is a circle inside, or sometimes overlapping with, a triangle. This morning, after writing most of the above but before posting it, I stopped in a clothing store to buy some socks and saw this on a T-shirt:

With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn

Last night I watched the latest video from LXXXVIII finis temporis, about the 1968 movie What's So Bad About Feeling Good and how it foreshadowed the birdemic. There are some pretty striking links there, and I highly recommend the video:

In the movie, the mayor of New York considers force-pecking all the citizens but thinks the people won't go for it, so they instead decide to treat everyone secretly by mixing an inhalable cure into all the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel and releasing it into the atmosphere as air pollution.

Near the end, there's a shot of an airliner with clouds of exhaust coming out of it, with the implication that this is one of the ways the cure is being spread. This led one commenter to write "They put 'The Cure' in the chemtrails."

The commenter's handle is Batman. See my last post, "Are you not entertained?"

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This morning, I started reading the H. G. Wells story "The Valley of Spiders," which I haven't finished yet. So far, we have three hombres riding through a valley when they see this:

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistledown, that drove before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air, and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes -- and then soon very many more -- were hurrying towards him down the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed, turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling on down the valley again. And at that all three stopped and sat in their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon them.

"If it were not for this thistle-down --" began the leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

"It isn't thistle-down," said the little man.

Going from the title of the story, I'm going to assume that these objects have "long cobwebby threads" because they are cobwebs -- cobwebs flying through the air.

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This evening, I glanced at /x/, and one of the threads caught my attention because it had a picture of the Maid of Orléans and said "Say something nice about Joan of Arc, /x/." I clicked in spite of myself. The first few comments were about the level I was expecting -- "she cute" -- "most based woman ever" -- so I was going to close the tab, but then this caught my eye:

Why was this posted in a thread about Joan of Arc? I don't know, probably the same reason Gay Pride Batman saying "Are you not entertained?" was posted in a thread about Yahweh. However it got there, it's a reference to chemtrails as cobwebs in the sky.

The LXXXVIII finis temporis video focuses mainly on the birdemic, but it also points out several 9/11 references in What's So Bad About Feeling Good. September 11, 2001, was just two weeks before Yom Kippur, making it "near the day of purification."

I wrote this in a comment on my own "Are you not entertained?" post -- the one featuring Gay Pride Batman:

Russell Crowe is etymologically “red crow,” not too conceptually dissimilar to a rainbow bat. Ted Hughes called the crow “a black rainbow.” Crowe has played Noah, a link to the dark arc/ark.

"A link to the dark arc/ark" is obviously also a link to Jeanne d'Arc. Joan was also the creator of the first rainbow flag.