From the Narrow Desert: Unexplained

Showing posts with label Unexplained. Show all posts

Friday, September 15, 2023

Can anyone identify this magic feather?

Yesterday I posted a sync regarding Dumbo and the Tom Petty song "Learning to Fly" ("Further syncs: Alma 13, Tom Petty, Dumbo, Melchizedek").

In the movie, Dumbo is given a "magic feather" -- a tail feather taken from the crow Specks -- and told that it will enable him to fly. In fact this is just a psychological trick, intended to give Dumbo the confidence to attempt flight, and in the end he discovers that he can fly even without the feather.

This morning, when I went out, I found a large nearly-black feather on my doorstep.

It's not a crow feather -- I've never seen a single crow in my nearly 20 years in Taiwan -- but I can't for the life of me figure out what kind of feather it is! Night heron feathers would be white at the tip. On a dove feather, the anterior vane would be much narrower than the posterior. (Very few birds I know of would have the two vanes so equal in width, especially on a long tapered feather.) No local bird of prey would have solid-colored feathers. Myna feathers always have some white on them. It's much too tapered to belong to a moorhen or anything like that, and again there's the issue of the equally wide vanes. The degree of curvature seems highly unusual, as does the very short calamus on such a long feather. I'm completely stumped!

Searchable online feather atlases are mostly limited to North American birds, but I tried using one anyway to see if I could at least narrow things down to a family or something. No luck.

I welcome hypotheses from any ornithologically inclined readers.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

A weird “glitch in the Matrix” experience

This morning I had a meeting at my school with the owner of a manufacturing company for which I do regular consulting work. He was coming to pay a bill and discuss some things. This was early, before the school's normal opening hours, so we were the only two there. I let him in and locked the door behind him. We do things the old-fashioned way, so he handed me an envelope of cash, and I sat down to count the money and write out a receipt by hand. He said he would go upstairs to the meeting room first and wait for me there.

When I counted the money, I found that it was $1000 short of the amount due. (A thousand is the largest denomination in everyday use in Taiwan, roughly equivalent to a twenty in the US, though its value is a bit higher than that.) I counted again several times, but the total kept coming up $1000 short. I checked to see if the missing bill was still in the envelope, or on the counter, or on the floor, but it wasn't. I counted again and again and checked everywhere, until I was 100% satisfied that he had given me the wrong amount. I took the cash upstairs and told him. He counted it himself, agreed it was the wrong amount, and handed me another thousand from his wallet.

I went back downstairs to stow the cash and write out the receipt -- and there in the middle of the counter, in plain sight, were two crisp new thousand-dollar bills in (using the term literally for once) "mint condition"! They were right there, on the otherwise empty counter on which I had counted the money, and where I had looked several times, very carefully, for the missing cash. It is simply not possible that the two bills were there all along. I had only gone upstairs for a minute, probably less; there was no one else in the building, and the door was locked. Yet there they were.

I thought to check the security camera footage to see what had happened, but the camera was -- very conveniently! -- out of order. My honest belief is that if I could view the footage, I would very likely see the $2000 just blink into existence out of nowhere. How confident am I that the money was not there when I left the counter? Extremely confident, not appreciably different from 100%. How confident am I that physical objects don't just materialize out of nowhere for no observable reason? Well . . . let's just say I've seen some pretty strange things in my puff.

After counting the cash several more times, to be absolutely certain that it was now $2000 more than the amount due, I went back upstairs and gave my client his receipt and $2000, explaining that I had somehow miscounted the first time around, and he had actually given me too much rather than not enough. He's the phlegmatic type who pretty much takes everything in his stride without asking too many questions, so he accepted this all as unremarkable, and we went on with our meeting.

But I didn't miscount the first time -- the first seven or eight times, rather -- and the two bills weren't there before. I'm as certain of this as I can be of any empirical matter. Even if we assume that I somehow did miscount, or somehow failed to notice the two bills lying right in front of me on the counter, isn't it remarkable that my error should have coincided with an equal and opposite error on his part -- with him mistakenly overpaying by $1000 and me mistakenly thinking he had underpaid by precisely the same amount?

Later, after the meeting, I counted the money several more times just to make sure the extra $2000 hadn't vanished again like fairy gold.

I realize that this story will not seem impressive to anyone except me, the one who experienced it. You'll just think, "Well, he must have made a mistake." But I'm sure I didn't. Either (a) things can just appear out of nowhere for no explicable reason, or (b) I can be 100% sure about something I've seen with my own eyes and carefully confirmed and reconfirmed and yet still be wrong. Either way, all bets are off.

Monday, October 12, 2020

A Pterodactylus and a globe of light

Earlier this month, "G" of the Junior Ganymede posted about an unimaginably bizarre experience he had had. (See also my comments here.) I don't know how large a readership the Junior Ganymede has -- I would guess the figure is in the hundreds or low thousands -- but almost immediately one of the readers posted a comment, beginning, "Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago," and proceeding to relate an experience that was indeed extremely similar to G's.

Or think of Whitley Strieber, publishing Communion -- a "true story" so far beyond the pale, so unremittingly loony, that one would expect it to elicit nervous laughter at best -- only to find himself deluged with hundreds of thousands of letters (now archived at Rice University) from readers saying, "I thought I was the only one!"

More things, Horatio.

I will be posting about some strange experiences of my own -- so strange that I don't even know how to classify them -- on the off chance of discovering that someone else has experienced the same sort of thing.

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Early this year -- I believe it was one of the first two Sundays in February -- I was doing some housework in the dining room, which is not really a proper room at all but is separated from the living room by a large bookcase which faces the living room and was, I am told, put there for sound feng shui reasons.

Suddenly, I "saw" a little black reptile crawl very quickly up the back of the bookcase and disappear. I immediately thought -- with a ludicrous degree of taxonomic precision -- "That's a Pterodactlyus antiquus!" What it actually looked like, though, was the 19th-century concept of P. antiquus -- without the head crest that paleontologists now believe it had, for example. If fact, it looked almost exactly as if the drawing below had come to life.

I found this drawing shortly after the experience, by Googling "pterodactylus antiquus," and immediately recognized it as what I had seen. I don't know its exact source, but it's obviously "vintage." I devoured an unconscionable number of dinosaur books as a young child and may well have seen the drawing before -- but if so, it must have been at least 30 years ago. There's no reason it should have popped out of the recesses of my mind in 2020 and come to life! (I should also mention that my personal mental image of Pterodactylus, while also lacking a crest, has always been yellow in color, not black.)

The reader will have noticed the scare-quotes around the word "saw," which I shall now explain. It was very definitely in what is called the mind's eye that I saw it. This was not a visual hallucination, and it was certainly not a flesh-and-blood animal. At the same time, neither was it an example of imagination as I now experience it. What it most closely resembled was the imagination of very early childhood, when mental imagery, while still entirely distinct from eye-mediated vision, is much more literally imagery than it is for adults. The main thing that made it more like seeing than imagining, though, was what I might call its given-ness. Rather than developing organically out of my train of thought, as vivid fantasies normally do, it was abruptly imposed on me after the manner of sense-data, in a way that made it seem as if it in some way belonged to the objective world.

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A week or two later -- either St. Valentine's Day or the day after -- I was returning home from a nighttime ramble and saw (in the ordinary sense of the word saw) what I took, for a split second, to be an absolutely gigantic shooting star, easily over a full degree in angular diameter. Then I realized that it was actually much closer, and therefore much smaller, than I had originally thought -- a bit larger than a basketball, perhaps. It was a slightly oblate spheroid in shape and glowed white, about as bright as an ordinary household lamp. It streaked across the sky but then rapidly slowed to a stop just above my house, after which it descended and appeared to land on the roof. (My roof is flat and is surrounded by a low wall, so there was no way to see from the ground if it had really landed or not.)

Unlike the Pterodactylus, this object looked entirely real, and the first thing I did was go up on the roof to look for it. There was nothing, though. I then went back outside and retraced my steps a few times, thinking without much conviction that it must have been the moon reflecting off someone's window or something and that I might be able to replicate the effect.

Finally I gave up, went inside, and asked my wife if she had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. She hadn't. I asked what she had been doing at 11:00 (the time I had seen the object), and she said she had been upstairs doing a meditation exercise.

"What kind of exercise?" I asked.

"I was visualizing a bottle full of white light."

Sunday, October 4, 2020

Phantom arrivals

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.
-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

⁂

The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week. It cost several hundred dollars. Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step. The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery. I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it. I didn’t need it right away. Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it. But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere. I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups. After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck. I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said. The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang. My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box. He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular. He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box. It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside. I hefted the battery. It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.
Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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The vardøger experiences recounted by Sheldrake involve the return of a person, and the premonitory hallucination is primarily aural -- although there may be a tactile component; Mrs. Greenberg felt her husband put his hands on her shoulders. (The name Ann Greenberg is a bit of a coincidence, since... uh, it begins with the letter G.) In contrast, G and Handle report visual (and presumably tactile) hallucinations prefiguring the arrival of an inanimate object. The delay between the phantasm and the actual arrival is also longer in the Junior Ganymede cases -- a day or several, as opposed to 10 minutes to an hour in Sheldrake's examples.

Despite these dissimilarities, could we be dealing with essentially the same sort of phenomenon here? Is Hygen's conclusion -- that it is not a true precognitive phenomenon but a telepathic one, related to intentions -- applicable to the experiences of G and Handle?

One reason given for Hygen's conclusion is that the vardøger sounds are not always identical to the sounds heard when the person really arrives. In G's case, too, the vardøger-like experience (let's go ahead and use that word) was not identical to what it foreshadowed. In the vardøger, he saw the battery box on the front step, took it inside, and put it on a side table without opening it. When the battery really arrived, none of that happened; it was given to his wife while he was out, she opened it, and he found it charging on his desk when he came home.

Could the battery vardøger have been triggered by the sender's intention? G wrote on October 2 that he had ordered the battery "last week" (i.e., September 21-26) and that the vardøger arrived "Monday" (September 28). In a comment to his own post, G mentions that "the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day." Since September 18 would have been before he ordered the battery, this must be a typo for September 28 -- the day of the vardøger.

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I suspect that experiences like those recounted by G and Handle are more common than we tend to assume. We filter them out with a simple "I must have been mistaken," move on, and forget that they ever happened. Or, in less dramatic cases, we never even perceive the anomalous thing at all because our brain does not consider it sufficiently probable (the Horseshoe Crab Effect). Making an effort to notice and remember such things, even if no explanation immediately suggests itself, is a worthwhile endeavor.

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

All things are become slippery

God only knows, God makes his plan

The information's unavailable to the mortal man

. . .

Slip slidin' away, slip slidin' away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you're slip slidin' away

-- Paul Simon

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Genesis 1:1

Back in 2006, I read a series of online articles (qv) by one Vernon Jenkins about the mathematical properties of the first verse of the Bible.

Genesis 1:1 -- translated as "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" -- consists of 28 Hebrew letters, and 28 is a triangular number.

Genesis 1:1 as a triangle

What are the chances of that? Not particularly low. If we want to express the odds numerically, it all depends on what set of integers we look at, since triangular numbers become progressively less frequent as the numbers get larger. To get a rough idea of how likely it is for something about as long as Genesis 1:1 to have a triangular number of letters, lets look at the range of integers from 14 to 42, inclusive -- that is, 28 plus or minus 50%. Of these 29 integers, four -- about 1 in 7 -- are triangular.

Now it happens that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet does double duty as a numeral, and it is this that forms the basis of the Kabbalistic practice of gematria, in which a Hebrew word or text can be interpreted by translating it into a number (adding up the values of its constituent letters) and then looking either at the properties of that number itself or at other Hebrew words that add up to the same value. For example, the Hebrew phrase translated as "And lo, three men" in Genesis 18:2 adds up to the number 701 -- which "proves" that the three men mentioned are the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, because the Hebrew phrase "These are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael" also adds up to 701. (A corresponding practice, called isopsephia, exists for the Greek language and is presumably what is being alluded to by the famous New Testament statement that the "number of the name" of the apocalyptic beast is 666.)

The gematria value of Genesis 1:1 is 2701 -- another triangular number. This is a much larger number than 28, so its being triangular is a somewhat more impressive coincidence. Calculating the odds the same way we did before, we look at the range of numbers from 1350 to 4052 and find that 38 of these 2703 numbers are triangular -- about 1 in 71. Taking the product of these two probabilities, we can say that the chance of a verse like Genesis 1:1 having both a triangular number of letters and a triangular gematria value is about 1 in 500 -- fairly improbable, but not astonishingly so.

But 2701 isn't just any triangular number. It also happens to be the product of 37 and 73 -- the 4th hex number an the 4th star number, respectively. (The product of the nth hex and the nth star is always triangular, so that's not an additional coincidence.) Such numbers are extremely rare; the first six numbers in the series (products of the nth hex and the nth star; let's call them starhex numbers) are 1, 91, 703, 2701, 7381, and 16471.

The fourth starhex number, 37 × 73 = 2701

The figure above demonstrates what a starhex number is. The figure consists of 73 little hexagons arranged in the shape of a six-pointed star. The center of this star is itself a larger hexagon, made up of 37 of the little hexagons. Each of the 73 little hexagons is itself made up of 37 tiny circles, duplicating on a smaller scale that central hexagon. The total number of tiny circles is 37 × 73 = 2701 -- the starhex number which is the gematria value of Genesis 1:1.

Of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, how many have a gematria (or isopsephia) value which is a starhex number? Eleven. How many of those 11 verses also have a triangular number of letters in the original language? Only two. The other one is Leviticus 20:27: "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them" -- 55 letters, with a gematria value of 2701. I find it quite humorous that the only Bible verse to share these unusual properties of Genesis 1:1 should be what is surely one of the most embarrassing verses in the whole Bible! (To any atheists looking for ammo to use against the likes of Vernon Jenkins, you're welcome.)

(By the way, a tip of the hat to Richard Amiel McCough, whose searchable gematria database of every word and verse in the Bible is what has made it so easy for me to discover the information in the previous paragraph. I especially appreciate Mr. McCough's willingness to continue to host this and other Bible resources, created when he was a believing Christian, even though he has since become a standard-issue atheist and "debunked himself.")

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Texas sharpshooting

All things considered, how impressed should we be with these mathematical properties of Genesis 1:1? Not very. While it is obviously extremely unlikely for any particular verse to have those particular properties, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is pretty obviously at work here. (The sharpshooter, you will recall, fired some shots into the side of a barn and then painted a target around the largest cluster of bullet holes.) When you consider the virtually infinite number of mathematically interesting properties a given number could possess, it becomes clear that any number you care to analyze will turn out to have some extremely unusual combination of those properties. Is there any reason at all to expect that a particularly significant Bible verse would add up to the product of the nth star and the nth hex -- rather than being, say, a large prime, or a perfect number, or the product of three consecutive Fibonacci numbers, or whatever? Of course not. Jenkins is painting the target after the shots have been fired.

Here's another of Jenkins's "amazing" properties of Genesis 1:1. If you take the product of the gematria values of every letter in the verse, divided by the product of the gematria values of every word in the verse, and then multiply that by the number of letters over the number of words -- you get 3.141554509... × 10¹⁷. Ignore the 10¹⁷ bit, and you have the approximate value of pi, correct to 5 significant figures.

Which is not impressive at all, when you consider the infinite number of possible (and completely arbitrary) mathematical operations that could be performed on something in order to derive a number fairly close to pi, you realize that it means nothing at all.

Returning to our friend the Texas sharpshooter, though, suppose he were to fire his shots, paint his target -- and then fire another round of shots and hit this freshly painted target again? Wouldn't that mean he was a real sharpshooter after all?

Well, Vernon Jenkins has done that. Remember that completely arbitrary set of mathematical operations he performed on Genesis 1:1 to derive pi, correct to 5 significant figures? Well, if you apply the exact same arbitrary set of mathematical operations to John 1:1 (the Bible's other "In the beginning..." verse), you get 2.718312812... × 10⁴⁰. Again ignoring the powers of ten, this is the value of e, also correct to 5 significant figures. That is impressive!

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S:E:G:

Could there be an English gematria?

Hebrew and Greek numerals work basically the same way: The first nine letters correspond to the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine correspond to 10 to 90, and then 100 to 900. (Hebrew only has 22 letters, not 27 like archaic Greek, so the Hebrew system is defective.) But applying the same system to the English alphabet is arbitrary, since the Roman letters have never had those numerical values. When the alphabet is used numerically (in lists or outlines, for example), it's always in a straightforward ordinal manner, where Z represents 26, not 800.

I call this straightforward system -- A = 1, Z = 26 -- Simple English Gematria. By a singularly appropriate coincidence, the words simple, English, and gematria all add up to the same value, 74, in this system, so the total value for Simple English Gematria is 222. I used to abbreviate this as S∴E∴G∴, ironically imitating the Masonic-style punctuation used by Aleister Crowley and other would-be English kabbalists, which I jokingly referred to as "magickal puncktuation" (spelling magick with a k being another Crowleyism). Later I discovered that this phrase, magickal puncktuation, adds up to 222, the same value as Simple English Gematria. This bizarre coincidence made me modify said puncktuation, changing the therefore-signs to colons, so as to represent the number 222.

Because the highest letter value in S:E:G: is 26 -- as opposed to to 400 in Hebrew gematria or 900 in Greek isopsephia -- S:E:G: tends to yield much lower word values than those languages. Still, though, there are some surprising cross-language coincidences. For example, the gematria value of the Tetragrammaton -- the Hebrew name of God, usually rendered Jehovah or Yahweh in English -- is 26, which is also the S:E:G: value of the English word God. In Greek isopsephia, Jesus and Christ add up to 888 and 1480, respectively. Obviously no single word can have such a high value in S:E:G:, but the S:E:G: value of Jesus (and also of cross, Messiah, and gospel) is 74, and both 888 and 1480 are multiples of 74.

Anyway, it crossed my mind to see if I could find an English passage that would somehow be the S:E:G equivalent of Jenkins's Genesis 1:1, with similar properties. Of course there are no searchable S:E:G: databases, so I wouldn't be able to rely on the infinite monkey theorem to guarantee success. Instead I would have to do some bona fide Texas sharpshooting if I was going to hit the tiny target Jenkins had painted. I looked at the English translation of Genesis 1:1, and at the first verses of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants (books of scripture revealed in English rather than in Hebrew or Greek, and so in some sense the English equivalents of the Bible) but found nothing mathematically interesting. So much for that idea.

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Helaman 13

Some months after my failed attempt to find an English answer to Genesis 1:1, I was reading a novel and brooding. This was near the beginning of my relationship with the woman who would later become my wife. We had just had some minor dustup about something, but I was still a novice in these matters, had not yet learned to take feminine drama in my stride, and was pretty sure I had lost her forever. As I contemplated the fragility of everything, how anything can be taken from you at any time and for no particularly intelligible reason, I suddenly thought of a line from the Book of Mormon: "All things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them." I had been an atheist for four or five years at that time, and hadn't read the Book of Mormon in about as long, but into my mind it popped regardless, and I thought it was a nice turn of phrase. (I also thought of Waterus, a blue plush walrus owned by a family friend when we were kids; Waterus's catchphrase was "I'm slipp'ier'n water! I'm slipp'ier'n water!").

And then it hit me: a sudden, inexplicable conviction that this was the English Genesis 1:1, that this shot in the dark would hit Jenkins's Texas target. This was a good 11 years before I got my first smartphone so, not having a Book of Mormon or a computer handy, I scribbled this down on the yellow Post-It note I was using as a bookmark: "all things are become slippery -- complete quote -- same properties as Gen 1:1." (What exactly did "complete quote" mean in this context? I didn't know. I just wrote down what came into my head.)

Later, at home, I looked up the passage online and found that it was from a sermon by Samuel the Lamanite in Helaman 13, and that it was in fact a "quote" -- Samuel was saying (quoting) what he predicted that his audience would say at some future date. Here, bracketed by "Yea, in that day ye shall say" and "And this shall be your language in those days," is the complete quote:

This seems like a pretty arbitrary block of text to focus on, nowhere near as obviously significant as the first verse of the Bible. It's not even a complete verse or set of verses, but consists of Helaman 13:34-36 and parts of vv. 33 and 37.

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

Despite the arbitrary nature of the passage, I nevertheless felt inexplicably confident that it would turn out to have the same numerical properties as Genesis 1:1. First I counted the number of letters: 630, a triangular number.

The Helaman text arranged in a triangle

Then I calculated the S:E:G: value of the entire passage: 7381, the fifth starhex number.

The fifth starhex number, 61 × 121 = 7381

Later I even went through the laborious calculations whereby Vernon Jenkins had derived pi and e from Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1:, respectively -- just in case it might yield, I don't know, Planck's constant or something, but it didn't. Still, though, a triangular number of letters with a starhex gematria value is pretty darn close to a perfect bull's-eye!

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We're not in Texas anymore

What's impressive about this, and what's not?

It's not impressive at all that somewhere in the Book of Mormon there exists a passage with a triangular number of letters and a starhex gematria value. It's true that such passages are so rare that only two verses in the whole Bible qualify -- but if a "passage" can be any syntactically coherent string of text, without regard for length or for verse boundaries, then obviously the chance of a text as long as the Book of Mormon's containing such a passage must be pretty close to 1.

What is impressive -- extremely impressive -- is not that such a passage exists, but that I found it. And found it on my fourth try: three obvious guesses (Genesis 1:1, 1 Nephi 1:1, D&C 1:1), and then this completely off-the-wall one. "Is your name Kunz? Is your name Heinz? Then is your name perhaps -- Rumpelstiltskin?" There's obviously no way in hell that was just a lucky guess on the queen's part, and Rumpelstiltskin's reaction is perfectly natural: "The devil told you that! The devil told you that!"

So who told me? In the past I have characterized it as a "gematria revelation"; was it?

I think there are only two possibilities. The first is that I revealed it to myself -- that some occult aspect of my mind, the part we file under "the unconscious," had been plugging away, going through the entire Book of Mormon from memory (I had, after all, read the book several times), counting letters and calculating gematria values, until it finally found what it was looking for and presented its discovery to my conscious mind. There is plenty of evidence that the "unconscious mind" enjoys powers of perfect recall and is quite capable of doing something like this.

The other possibility is that it was indeed a revelation -- from God, a Rumpelstiltskinian "devil," or some other such entity. The question then becomes why anyone would take the trouble of revealing such completely random information. I mean, who cares if some random Book of Mormon passage is numerologically akin to Genesis 1:1? What possible significance could that have? Why would God or the devil or anyone else go around telling people that? If it was indeed a revelation, I can only assume that the point had nothing to do with gematria as such but was simply to draw my attention to the passage in question, using something I happened to be interested in at that time as a means of doing so.

It does, after all, seem to be a genuinely prophetic passage, and to relate to our time -- which is what brought the whole thing back to my mind after all these years and made me post on it again.