From the Narrow Desert: Vampires

Showing posts with label Vampires. Show all posts

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach

My last two posts have featured syncs with a cross or crucifix between the antlers of a stag. Today, on one of my truly-random rambles through Taichung, I found this on a the door of a closed restaurant. (It's Chinese New Year; everything is closed.)

It's a pretty odd thing to find in February in a non-Christian country. It appears to be permanently attached to the door, not a seasonal decoration. But the important thing, sync-wise, is that right at the top we have Christ -- as part of the word Christmas -- located between the antlers of a stag. Exactly centered between the antlers is Ch -- a transliteration of the Greek X, the cross. Notice also that each of the two circles around the stag is broken into eight segments, suggesting the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune.

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Chameleons have been in the sync stream. Today I read a bit in Shadowland by Colin Wilson and also started reading Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Shadowland is the sixth installment in the Spider World series, which deals mainly with human beings and giant spiders. In the bit I read today, a new intelligent species is introduced: color-changing "chameleon men." I didn't see that coming. Then later I started reading Swamplandia!, about a family that runs an alligator theme park in Florida, and found this:

According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator . . . . That monster's surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa's dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa's Chameleon Baptism (p. 31).

I don't really get why they called it that. Because the dots being erased from her skirt is sort of like changing color? The meaning of "Chameleon Baptism" is not explained, and so far (I'm on page 52) it hasn't been referenced again. In Shadowland, the main character meets the chameleon men after they pull his unconscious body from a river, he having just gone over a waterfall. In William Wright's January 24 post, "'Get to the choppa!': A skin-removing Chameleon hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger," which started this whole chameleon theme, he writes that in the movie Predator, "Arnold even gets a 'baptism' after his run away from the Chameleon." By "baptism," he means jumping into a river and going over a waterfall, much like Niall in Shadowland; and the "Chameleon" is of course the nearly invisible humanoid Predator, much like Niall's "chameleon men."

In my own syncs, the red chameleon has been particularly important, as has its long red protruding tongue, which has also been seen on a Pokémon and a female vampire:

When I checked in with The Most Censored Publication in History today, I was greeted by this image:

An AI-generated image of Lady Liberty with vampire fangs and an extremely long protruding red tongue -- what more natural way to illustrate a story about Zuck censoring the supreme leader of Iran?

Later, since I'm finding Swamplandia! quite a good read so far, I googled the author, Karen Russell. This is what came up:

Look at the books that are highlighted: First, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I already knew about. (It's why I bought Swamplandia!, as documented here.) Second, an edition of Swamplandia! with a red alligator on the cover -- which is even more unusual than a red chameleon! It's an unusually short-snouted gator, too, looking more like a lizard, and even looks as if it has a chameleon-like crest at the back of its head. (My own copy is a different edition, with a regular alligator-colored alligator. If you do an image search for swamplandia, the seventh result is the first one with a red gator. Still, that's the one Google chose to highlight.) And right next to this thing that looks an awful lot like a red chameleon, the word VAMPIRES. And is it just me, or does that leaf make the lemon look like a hand grenade?

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Here's something else I read in Swamplandia! today which confused me:

I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café (p. 32).

Wait, the clock is inside an alligator's stomach? Then how can anyone see it to check the time? My best guess at the author's intended meaning, taking both inside and stomach rather loosely, is that there was some skin taken from a gator's underbelly, with the clock mounted in the center. But my literal interpretation on the first read, together with the word hook in the following sentence, made me think of Hook's nemesis in Peter Pan, a crocodile that made a ticking sound because it had swallowed a clock. In the Disney movies, the crocodile's name is actually Tick-Tock.

Then, on the same truly-random ramble that led me to another Christ-between-antlers, I found this:

Okay, what exactly is that on the left? I mean, it's obviously meant to suggest a clock (with no hands), but what about the other features? What's that thing on top, that gives it the shape of a cartoon bomb? Is it supposed to be a stopwatch? But why does it look like it has some black liquid in it? Is it a bottle, and that thing at the top is the cap? But I've never seen drink sold in a bottle like that. It looks more like a perfume bottle or something. . . .

Then I remembered something else I had read in Swamplandia! today. After the death of the narrator's mother, no one in the family is doing laundry:

I don't know what [my brother] was doing for clean clothing during that period; for months my sister and I had been spraying out undershirts and shorts with Mom's perfume. . . . two pumps, per sister, per day. We were using Mom up, I worried, and for some reason that fear made me want to spray on more and more. The perfume worked like a liquid clock for us: half a bottle drained to a quarter, that was winter.

Just logging syncs. We'll see if they lead anywhere.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires

In Last night's post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," I connected the chameleon (etymologically "dwarf lion") with the lion-headed serpent (standard meme representation of the Demiurge) and with the manticore on the cover of the Piers Anthony novel A Spell for Chameleon. Fantasy manticores aren't often portrayed as red, but this is a historically correct manticore, following the earliest description of the beast, by Ctesias, as having "cinnabar-red fur":

This afternoon, after my previous post, I decided to check /x/, which I haven't done in a week or two. I found this thread, featuring red chameleons in the picrel:

This is a colorized version of an originally black-and-white Escher print. Obviously the whole point of a chameleon is that it can be any color it wants to be, but the default color in pictures is either green or multicolored. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of an all-red chameleon before, so it's an unusual artistic choice. They're not actually all red, though, but have blue eyes. Ctesius specified that the manticore, though otherwise as red as cinnabar, was "blue-eyed." Notice also that the chameleon's long red tongue is emphasized.

My post with the manticore began with a meme of a cat (a "dwarf lion" in another sense) in the role of the camouflaged Predator from the 1987 movie of that name:

In the /x/ thread about The World Atlas of Mysteries, the only image reply, aside from several photos of pages from the book, was a psychedelic-looking image of a cat:

Between the Predator post and the current one, I posted "Surround, confound," in which a song I heard in a dream (in three dreams, actually) turned out to have similar lyrics to one from a TV adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. Therefore, when I saw a thread on vampires on /x/, I naturally clicked:

The picrel shows the vampire with an extremely long red tongue, just like the chameleon on the cover of The World Atlas of Mysteries. (She also appears to have bat wings, like the manticore.) This is an unattractive and clearly non-human trait, which is at odds with the text of the post:

Sometimes I see people make fun of the idea that vampires are attractive and "faggy" the way the media portrays them. But isn't this exactly the type of vampire that would blend in the easiest with society and be the superior predator compared to the monstrous one?

The quintessential "attractive and faggy" vampire is surely Lestat de Lioncourt (lions again!) from Interview with the Vampire, who is literally a homo and who is played by Tom Cruise in the 1994 movie adaptation. (Just now, trying to find where the name Lestat had come from, I found this Facebook post by Anne Rice, which mentions Lestat's "blue eyes, his feline grace.") The assertion that a "superior predator" would "blend in" clearly syncs with the Predator cat meme and the idea of the Predator as a "chameleon."

One more /x/ post caught my eye in the context of the red manticore and red chameleons:

The devil "appeared as the traditional red thing." Beyond that, I'm not sure how relevant the post is, but I did find it interesting that the devil asked about the "law of the black star," as William Wright has been posting about black holes recently.

Two Tarot cards also come to mind in connection with the red manticore and chameleon (lion-headed reptile). One is the Rider-Waite Two of Cups, which has a red lion's head (with wings, like the manticore) above a caduceus with serpents:

The other is "Lust," the card that replaces Strength in Aleister Crowley's black-mass parody of the Tarot. (His "Wickedest Man in the World" brand demanded that he rename all the virtue trumps.) The Whore of Babylon is shown riding a manticore-like creature with a lion's body and mane, human faces, and a long tail suggestive of "le Demiurge" itself:

Note the symbols at the bottom of the card, connecting it with the Hebrew letter Teth and the sign of Leo. Leo is the lion, of course, and the esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries associated Teth with the serpent, and specifically with the red serpent. (This is why Oswald Wirth, who mapped Teth to the Hermit card, added a red serpent to his otherwise traditional version of that trump.)

Interestingly, the first image response in that "What do vampires look like?" thread said that a vampire looks like Aleister Crowley:

Jimmy Savile was given as another example of what a vampire looks like, but there are enough creepy images in this post as is without my inflicting that on my readers.

Surround, confound

I had essentially the same dream repeated three times last night. I take any recurring dream to be potentially significant. I am an observer in this dream; I don't appear as a character. Here's how it goes:

There are three women working together in a kitchen. They appear to be Mexicans in their late twenties or early thirties, and two of them are pregnant. In the living room nearby, the television is on. They decide they want to take a break from their work and sing together. There is already very loud music coming from the television, and I think it strange that they don't turn it off.

Preparatory to singing, the two pregnant women temporarily remove the babies from their wombs. I don't see how this is done, but it is apparently very easy to do and doesn't require surgery. Each baby is wrapped up in spider silk to keep it safe while it is out of the womb, and they are placed side by side on the kitchen table.

The three women then sing together in English, and they have very good voices. The song is simple, with only three lines, and is repeated several times:

Sur-round me
Con-found me
I need your lo-o-o-o-o-ove

(The word love is drawn out over six musical notes, which is why I have written it as I have.)

An entirely different song is being played on the television -- some sort of loud rock-'n'-roll with a male vocalist -- and I am astonished at how well the two songs harmonize, as if they had been written to be sung together. In each of the three repetitions of the dream, though, the song on the television is different but the women's song is the same, and the harmony is still perfect.

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Googling the lyrics after waking up, I find that they're quite similar to "Come to Me" by Daniel Hart and Sam Reid, from Interview with the Vampire (Original Television Series Soundtrack), released in 2022:

Come to me
And let my ever-loving arms surround you
Come to me
And let my infinite embrace confound you

A bit odd, that. One doesn't usually associate love with being surrounded and confounded. I'm quite sure I'd never heard "Come to Me" before. In fact, I didn't know until today that Interview with the Vampire had ever been adapted for television, though I understand there was a movie version back in the 1990s with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

I suppose the fact that this is specifically a song from television is a further sync with the dream.

The babies wrapped in spider silk are obviously an influence from the Spider World novels I am currently reading, in which giant spiders catch human prey, including children, and wrap them up in silk. The spiders in the novel actually eat human beings, but real-world spiders drink their prey rather than eating it, which is a link to vampires. William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend" explicitly connects giant spiders with vampires.

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Aleister Crowley on Joseph Smith; and a minor sync about "soci-owl-ogy" and vampires

Today I read Massimo Introvigne's paper "The Beast and the Prophet: Aleister Crowley's Fascination with Joseph Smith," which I ran into the other day while searching for any link between Joseph Smith and the mandrake. (This paper was a hit because it mentions Crowley's Mandrake Press.) It was moderately interesting; Crowley had, as may be expected, no very deep understanding of the Mormon Prophet, but he does allude unmistakably to him in Moonchild:

All gave way to a most enigmatic figure. It was an insignificant face and form; but the attribution of him filled all heaven. In his sphere was primarily a mist which Iliel instinctively recognized as malarious; and she got an impression, rather than a vision, of an immense muddy river rushing through swamps. And then she saw that from this man's brain issued phantoms like pigeons. They were neither Red Indians nor Israelites, yet they had something of each in their bearing. And these poured like smoke from the head of this little man. In his hand was a book, and he held it over his head. And the book was guarded by an angelic figure whose face was extraordinarily stern and unbeautiful, but who scattered with wide hands the wealth of life, children, and corn, and gold. And behind all these things was a great multitude; and about them were the symbolic forms of exile and death and every persecution, and the hideous laughter of triumphant enemies. All this seemed to weigh heavily upon the little man that had created it.

After finishing the paper, I fell to wondering who this Massimo Introvigne was. Google summarized him as "Italian sociologist" and sent me to his Wikipedia page. I noted that he was born on June 14, that he has written about various "new religious movements" including Mormonism, and that there is a whole section of the entry called "Popular culture and vampires":

He was the Italian director of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, which included the leading academic scholars in the field of the literary and historical study of the vampire myth. In 1997, J. Gordon Melton and Introvigne organized an event at the Westin Hotel in Los Angeles where 1,500 attendees came dressed as vampires for "creative writing contest, Gothic rock music and theatrical performances".

After browsing that, I began reading a new book: Frederick H. Cryer's Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation, beginning with the unpromisingly jokey Introduction. One of the headings in the Introduction is "Soci-owl-ogy?" -- which caught my eye because of its possible relation to recent owl syncs, but it turned out to be nothing but a sniggering reference to an American graduate student who, with his provincial accent, "spoke unceasingly of 'soci-owl-ogy,' and was so enthusiastic in his advocacy of the science that he once" employed a stupidly inept mixed metaphor in singing its praises. Har-har. Anyway, it still counts as an owl reference in the eyes of the sync fairies.

A couple of pages later, still under the "Soci-owl-ogy?" heading, we read this:

Ultimately, structural functionalism relies on a species of teleological argumentation in which the telos in question is the equilibrium presupposed by the researcher. One is reminded of the old joke in which a passerby, seeing a hippy walking along snapping his fingers, asks him why he does so. "Man, it keeps the vampires away!" he is told; and when he asks if the hippy really believe that finger-snapping repels vampires, the other replies, 'You seen any vampires lately, have you?'"

Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies! Not off to a great start, this book. If this cat blows any more of this bad jazz, I don't think I can be arsed to stick around for whatever groovy might be stashed with his frame.

Anyway, sociology and vampires: not a juxtaposition you run into every day.