From the Narrow Desert: Twins

Showing posts with label Twins. Show all posts

Sunday, March 24, 2024

She’s so rocky, shisa star

Last Tuesday, March 19, I happened to hear on the radio somewhere the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky." (Looking the song up on Wikipedia just now to get the correct date, I find that the duration of the song is 3:24 -- and here I am posting this on 3/24.) I've never had the slightest scintilla of interest in Spears or her music, but it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's a pretty catchy melody, I guess, by that one Swedish guy who was writing all the American hits at that time. Here's the music video -- full of the bog-standard subtly-in-your-face stuff that Monarch Mind Control types like to analyze (did you notice the inverted pentagrams on her wallpaper?), but otherwise pretty uninteresting:

The weird thing is that what's been stuck in my head is not the original but rather a version that has rocky in place of lucky, as if making fun of a stereotypical Japanese accent. I have this free-floating memory -- likely an anecdote from my brother Joseph's time in Japan -- of a Japanese person reading a children's story with the recurring line "'I'm so lucky,' says Ladybug" but mispronouncing the two key words as rocky and Radybug. For whatever inscrutable reason, my subconscious mind decided to splice that comical error into the Britney Spears song.

It's getting kind of annoying, actually. Time and again, here I am minding my own business only to catch myself singing under my breath, "She's so rocky, she's a star / But she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart." (For some reason, the word lonely slipped through the Japanese-accent filter unscathed.)

Stars, sensu stricto, are not rocky. In the word's broader sense, though, embracing all heavenly bodies, we could call Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars "rocky stars." This rocky star is a "she," though, which rules out the masculine Mercury and Mars. Venus doesn't look "so rocky," with its thick cloud cover, so that leaves the Moon as the strongest candidate.

"She cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart . . . why do these tears come at night?" This made me think of my May 2019 post "Lacrimae lunae" ("tears of the moon"). This had featured John Opsopaus's version of the Moon card of the Tarot, in which "glowing tear drops . . . fall . . . from the recumbent crescent" of the Moon:

In the 2019 post, Opsopaus's card was paired with this image from a phonics textbook. The sync was that one of my students had colored half of the water drops in the picture red, as in the card:

The picture above shows twin girls in red tops. The music video repeatedly shows Spears as "Lucky" -- the white-gowned sacrificial starlet -- sharing the screen with her alter ego, Britney the wholesome girl-next-door, who wears a red top. Although we never see two red-topped Britneys in the same frame, there are clearly two of them. In the sequence below, we see Lucky striding through a room, with Britney on her right in the foreground, immediately after which she walks past another Britney seated on a sofa on her left in the background:

We also see a waxing crescent moon in the video, the same phase shown on the Tarot card:

There is also a rectangular skyscraper to either side of the Moon, suggesting the two towers of the Tarot card.

The persistent Japanizu of rocky made me wonder whether "she's a" could actually be a Japanese word, maybe shiza or shisa. A search confirms that shisa is the Okinawan version of the Chinese guardian lions which appear in pairs outside temples and such. While the Chinese originals are just lions, their Okinawan counterparts are considered to be "a cross between a lion and a dog." (Notice that Google suggests "half dog" as a related search term. I'm cereal.)

This is an extremely strong sync with the Moon card of the Tarot. Traditional versions of the card show two dogs, one on either side of the Moon, likely representing the constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor.

In December 2020, the Grateful Dead released a new music video for their 1970 song "Ripple." It was full of modified imagery from the Tarot, including this take on the Moon card:

That's right, the two dogs have been replaced with a pair of Chinese guardian lions. That's why I say that shisa -- half dog, half guardian lion -- is such an extremely strong sync.

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.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

A ptero more to Green Lantern's liking

I went to Project Gutenberg to look something up, and this was one of the recent releases (March 26, 2023) featured on the homepage.

It's not yellow, but pterodactyls of any color grace the covers of few enough books to make it a noteworthy coincidence nonetheless.

I scrolled down to the table of contents and saw that the third chapter, about pterosaurs, is called "Pirates of the Air" -- pretty similar to "winged raiders," isn't it?

According to the rather dated science of The Monster-hunters (1916), all mass-extinction events were caused by ice ages, and the periods punctuated by these ice ages are characterized as "empires."

With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly diminished in size and again became an inland sea, while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began. . . . Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also. The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean lost its opening to the ocean, and became once more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer-blooded mammals.

The above quote is not in the "Pirates of the Air" chapter but in the next one, "Seeing the Sea-serpent," so the fact that pterodactyls get top billing in the list of casualties of the K-T extinction event is curious. This syncs with my March 18 post "Sync: Another yellow ptero, St. Valentine's Day, Empire of the Ants."

There, too, pteros are unexpectedly highlighted (in the thumbnail) in an account of the K-T extinction. And, as the title indicates, the same post features a sync having to do with the phrase "Empire of the Ants" -- paralleling the similar "Empire" phrases in The Monster-hunters.

The "Seeing the Sea-serpent" chapter also features this illustration, captioned "The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived."

Isn't that a familiar turn of phrase? Where have we seen that before? Oh, right.

Looking at the list of illustrations after the table of contents, I noticed that the second one on the list was called "Scylla of the Seven Heads" -- one of a small collection of images of "Monsters Thought Real by the Ancients."

This got my attention because on March 17 I had posted old (2015-16) Scylla and Charybdis syncs in "Sync: Skylark and Charybdis" and included a picture of Scylla, though with the canonical six heads rather than seven.

I Ctrl-F'ed Scylla to see if she put in any other appearances in The Monster-hunters, and lo and behold:

"No signs of Scylla and Charybdis," said a voice behind him.
"That's so, Uncle George," the boy said, turning, "this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn't it? But I'd rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses' ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What do you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”
"Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture.
"Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it's not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still."

Right after the references to Scylla and Charybdis, characterized as "the twin terrors," we read of "the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora." In my March 7 post "Fever dreams and sync: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more," I discuss terrible twins in Mayan myth and The Matrix Reloaded, and I also mention this:

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Fever dreams and syncs: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more

I've been out of commission for a bit with a case of food poisoning, and it had the effect of turning my dreams into something more like delirium or schizophrenia than like ordinary nocturnal dreams. The visual element was not lifelike at all but consisted solely of constantly changing symbols and diagrams, and I felt that these were being expounded with great clarity and that suddenly I got it The overall feeling of the experience was similar to that attending a dream I had a few years ago which enabled me to perceive Mozart's Magic Flute as a single unified whole, an audible diagram of great complexity and symmetry -- or perhaps more like what the fellow in the John Linnell song feels when he realizes that Montana is really just a leg, with the round part just the way you would espect. I can't really remember much of the content of this supposed revelation -- likely because there is no there there -- but at the time it felt as if the mysteries of the universe were being unfolded to my view.

Central to the dream was the symbol D∞D and its variants D&D and 484 -- and a significant portion of the dream constituted a direct death threat from the synchronicity fairies if I dared to share any of what had been revealed to me. The allusions to extinct species like the dodo and the T. rex were veiled threats, you see, and one of the meanings of D&D was "Death & Death" -- referring to One Death and Seven Death, characters from the Mayan Popol Vuh. And one and seven make eight, as do four and four. (The Chinese words for "four" and "death" are near-homophones, a fact that is the basis of many East Asian superstitions.)

Back on February 23, I received an email about the Rosary from someone whose email address includes the string "1and7," which I suppose is what put my in mind of such Popol Vuh pairs as One and Seven Death and One and Seven Hunahpu.

During the dream, I felt that I had a moral duty to disregard the death threats. Upon waking, I found that I couldn't remember enough of the forbidden knowledge to share it anyway.

Today, after the fever dream, a bit of random link-following led me to the MythoAmerica article "50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America." In the article, these two pictures are juxtaposed:

The most famous Native American "Hero Twins" are of course One and Seven Hunahpu. The text accompanying these pictures was "To bring up an old Conan tweet: America is rife with very ancient, un conquered spirits. They incarnate often onto our plane." One of the comments on the linked tweet was this:

The Popol Vuh for our times pic.twitter.com/cNmaGKV1V3
— Hernan Cortes (@CyberPunkCortes) April 30, 2022

In case you don't recognize them, those are the late Bogdanoff Twins, the subjects of many a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory -- including, as with the Native American Hero Twins, "beliefs about them having supernatural abilities."

⁂

On a different note, my recent Venus flytrap post included a reference to the Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" meme, which made me think of this famous variant:

This in turn made me think of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap where someone is waiting for the band at an airport, holding up a sign that says "Spinal Tarp." I tried to find a picture of this but found that I had misremembered. In the movie, Lt. Hookstratten (Fred Willard) says, "You are Spinal Tarp?" but it's not written on a sign. The sign says, "Spinal Pap."

That's when I remembered that carnivorous plants had already appeared in the sync-stream recently, in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the Grail," which discusses an H. G. Wells story about a carnivorous orchid and a poem by my uncle William John about a carnivorous rose. My uncle's poem includes these lines:

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps
Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction
Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

The "spiny paps" are juxtaposed with the word matrix -- the name of the 1999 movie directed by the Wachowski Brothers. While not twins, the Wachowskis have a certain amount in common with the Bogdanoffs -- for example, goofy hair and extreme surgical modification of their appearance.

One of the brothers now wears white-guy dreads, like the Island Boys and the Mississippian Hero Twins (local equivalents of One and Seven Hunahpu). One of the Matrix sequels features white dreadlocked twins:

As the sync fairies would have it, I recently posted about The Matrix in "Knock, knock, Neo" (February 27). This was a follow-up to "Green Door 101," because Neo lives in an apartment with a greenish door labeled 101. In my flytrap post, Debbie had noted how that plant combines green doors and red doors in one.

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

⁂

On February 23, Greg Carlwood posted an episode of The Higherside Chats called "Analog | Newspaper archive anomalies, oddities underground, radium secrets, & Lodestone 101." I made a mental note to listen to it later because of the appearance of the number 101, but I didn't get around to it until today. The "Lodestone 101" segment is using 101 in the sense of "introductory course"; the guest lays out his theory that many ancient religions revolved around the worship of magnetic stones, with the Kaaba in Mecca and the Benben of Egypt being two examples. (He also associates the names Cuba and Kaaba; the Island Boys are from Cuba.)

Immediately after listening to the THC episode, I decided to read some more in the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading. I've been reading it as an ebook on my phone but had taken a break during my illness, in the middle of the story "Jimmy Goggles the God." The story is about a man who, because he is wearing a diving costume (nicknamed Jimmy Goggles), is mistaken for a god by the ignorant [dark-skinned indigenous people] of Papua. When I opened up the Kindle app, this is the "page" it was on. I have of course added the highlighting after the fact.

So their religion revolves around the worship of a "blessed old black stone," exactly as described in "Lodestone 101."

The dark-skinned indigenous people's misapprehension that the narrator is not "a British citizen" but an otherworldy being ties in with "Britain as another planet."

⁂

I should note in passing that the logo used on the charging stations of Gogoro, a popular electric scooter brand here in Taiwan, associate the two poles of a battery (or lodestone) with the lemniscate:

This also makes me think of Roger Anthony's "Negpos the Lion" symbol. The lemniscate an the lion are juxtaposed in the Strength card of the Tarot.