From the Narrow Desert: Vultures

Showing posts with label Vultures. Show all posts

Monday, July 1, 2024

Valhalla, I am coming!

In "Zinc Zeppelin," I connected the Z page from Graeme Base's Animalia with Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song." The song is about Vikings, and one of the lines is, "Valhalla, I am coming!"

The V page in Animalia depicts the Valhalla Variety Venue, with a picture of a Viking visible near the top of the picture:

This page was actually one of the main reasons I bought Animalia in the first place. My May 1 post "Armored vultures and Cherubim" discusses a cartoon character called Victor the Vulture and connects him with the Cherubim.

Up in the corner, next to the vicar and the Viking, we have the five black stripes in the form of a vent:

Victor wears a badge with a picture of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, on a sky-blue background as if it is flying through the air:

This is a link to "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car." In "Just how far did Hinbad and Rinbad travel?" I connect this yellow car with Elijah's chariot of fire, in which he traveled all the way to Heaven -- or, translated into Viking terms, to Valhalla.

The Beetle is located just below Victor's blue butterfly-shaped bow tie. This same juxtaposition appears on the B page:

Friday, May 31, 2024

Yeats, Joan, and Claire

Yesterday, May 30, I enjoyed "good luck" all day. Everything just went unusually smoothly, with lots of little good things just happening to happen. Therefore, when I had a few free hours in the afternoon and had a sudden hunch that I should go to a particular used bookstore, even though it meant a 40-minute drive to another city, I figured it was a good day for pursuing hunches.

When I arrived, I realized that I had brought very little cash with me and wouldn't be able to buy much, but I thought I'd look around anyway. I was immediately drawn to a small table with several Tarot decks, including two different editions of the Rider-Waite. I'd been to this store countless times, and they'd never sold Tarot cards before. I know it's basic common sense that you do not buy magical items secondhand, especially if you don't know who the previous owner was, but I'd been without a physical Rider-Waite deck for some years now, and I felt impressed to buy one. "It's okay," put in the helpful excuse-maker on my shoulder (right or left?). "You can just reconsecrate them."

I picked up one of the decks, but the price tag slightly exceeded what I had in my pocket. When I checked the second one, though, I saw that I had exactly the right amount of cash to buy it. That seemed like a sign, and I decided to get it.

Even though that decision left me with exactly zero dollars to spend on anything else, I took a brief look at the books anyway. One I would definitely have bought was W. B. Yeats and His World by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eaven Boland, which had lots of illustrations. Because of my sword vision earlier that day, my first thought was to wonder whether it included a photo of the poet's magical sword (yes, he owned one), so I flipped through the book to check. No sword pics, alas, but this cartoon caught my eye:

It shows a woman dressed in black, standing atop the globe with two books under her feet, one of which is labeled "Gregorian Chants," and looking out into space at a giant flying Koran. A female Gregory was the main thing that got my attention, as a possible link to Odessa Grigorievna. I also happened to briefly start reading the Quran just a few weeks after the Grigorievna dream. I was vaguely aware that a Lady Gregory had been one of Yeats's associates but knew essentially nothing else about her and couldn't understand what the cartoon was trying to say. Today I went to Wikipedia for a quick rundown, where I read that she had been born on March 15, 1852 -- the Ides of March. This was shortly after reading William Wright's post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')" -- on which much more below -- in which he interprets two things said by a female voice as referring to me: "Beware this one!" and "When I dream, I dream about books!" I was born on the Ides of March (as in "Beware the Ides of March!") and have had many dreams about books. Lady Gregory, it turns out, shares my birthday, and the cartoon looks as if it might depict her dreaming about the Quran.

Anyway, I didn't buy the Yeats book. I took the Tarot deck to the counter to pay -- and discovered to my surprise that I was eligible for a special discount! Instead of spending every bit of my cash, as I had expected, I received $99 (about three US dollars) back -- so I went right back to the bookshelves to browse some more. I found Richard Cavendish's 1975 book The Tarot -- a large hardback full of color photos and certainly far too expensive to buy with my remaining cash. When I picked it up, though, I saw the price sticker: exactly $99. That seemed like another sign, and I bought it.

Flipping through Cavendish's book later, I was surprised to discover a full-page portrait of Yeats!

The use of his full name, William Butler Yeats, is another indirect link to Odessa Grigorievna, as my post "Hey birds, here are cookies!" links her with the biblical story of the Pharaoh's butler and baker. My uncle's song "Fourth Down" directly links Yeats with butling and baking: "I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire / To bring me back some Yeast / Because I needed to bake some bread / For my wedding feast."

Does Yeats really deserve a full-page portrait in a history of the Tarot? He moved in magicians' circles, yes, and knew MacGregor (MacGregor!) Mathers and Waite and Crowley, but what contribution to the Tarot iconography or interpretation did he himself make? The only possible fingerprints of his I've been able to find are on the Rider-Waite Magician and Ace of Pentacles, where his poem "The Travail of Passion" may -- this is my own personal hypothesis -- have influenced Waite to include red roses and white lilies in the imagery. (See my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician.")

This made me think of my February 2 post "What's the second key?" -- the first key being the Rosary. I had written:

One [key] should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

Where did this idea come from, of there being two keys, one of which is the Rosary? See my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes":

I thought to myself [of the Rosary], "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

In William Wright's post, on which I said I would have more to say, he proposes that the beings I think of as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are one and the same. He actually ends the post -- which was written on St. Joan's Day (i.e., May 30, the anniversary of her death) -- with "Happy Feast Day, Claire." I had forgotten that in my first encounter with Claire she had quizzed me about the "true" form of a Yeats poem, and specifically a poem about the Irish god Aengus. One of the things I learned today from skimming the Wikipedia article for Lady Gregory is that she used to publish under the pseudonym Angus Grey.

In that post, I also mention that the only keys mentioned in the Book of Mormon are those of Laban's treasury. One of Laban's greatest treasures was the sword Makmahod -- recently connected with Joan and thus perhaps also with Claire.

Now look back at the photo of the full-page portrait of Yeats. Up in the corner is the name of the chapter in which it is found: "The Universal Key."

Does that settle it? Is the Tarot -- particularly in its Yeats-adjacent Rider-Waite form -- the long-sought second key? I wasn't sure until I opened up my new cards and saw what was printed on the backs:

A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily. I thought at first it was the Rose of York, but that should be barbed and seeded proper (i.e., with green leaves and a yellow center). This one is all white, even the leaves, suggesting that it is the blossom of an all-white tree -- with obvious implications from a Mormon or Tolkienian point of view.

Are Joan and Claire the same being, as William Wright suggests? The possibility had never crossed my mind, but my immediate inclination is to think that it may well be true. Serendipitously running into all this Claire-related content on Joan's Day is obviously a data point in favor of the hypothesis. Another data point is the poem I published yesterday for St. Joan's Day. An earlier draft had ended with the line "And act -- however high the stakes," but then I felt something nudging me to change it to "Clear-eyed -- however high the stakes" -- even though being clear-eyed had no obvious connection with the overall theme of the poem. The French word for "clear" is clair -- or, in the feminine, claire.

Coincidence? Here's another. Last Joan's Day I wrote, but did not publish, a translation of a French poem by St. Thérèse de Lisieux. (This year, by "coincidence," I did another translation from Thérèse just five days before Joan's Day.) I was tolerably happy with it as a translation but felt that its take on Joan was not my own, and thus I never ended up posting it. It's still in my Drafts folder, dated May 30, 2023, so I looked it up. Here's the original:

A Jeanne d'Arc

Quand le Dieu des armées te donnant la victoire
Tu chassas l'étranger et fis sacrer le roi
Jeanne, ton nom devint célèbre dans l'histoire
Nos plus grands conquérants pâlirent devant toi.

Mais ce n'était encor qu'une gloire éphémère
Il fallait à ton nom l'auréole des Saints
Aussi le Bien-Aimé t'offrit sa coupe amère
Et tu fus comme Lui rejetée des humains.

Au fond d'un noir cachot, chargée de lourdes chaînes
Le cruel étranger t'abreuva de douleurs
Pas un de tes amis ne prit part à tes peines
Pas un ne s'avança pour essuyer tes pleurs.

Jeanne tu m'apparais plus brillante et plus belle
Qu'au sacre de ton roi, dans ta sombre prison.
Ce céleste reflet de la gloire éternelle
Qui donc te l'apporta ? Ce fut la trahison.

Ah ! si le Dieu d'amour en la vallée des larmes
N'était venu chercher la trahison, la mort
La souffrance pour nous aurait été sans charmes
Maintenant nous l'aimons, elle est notre trésor.

And my version:

To Joan

The God of Hosts gave thee the field --
The king was crown'd, the foe did yield --
And all the conq'rors France had known

Did pale before the name of Joan.

Yet thy name, too, had paled and died

If not by suff'ring sanctified.

The cup which caus'd our Lord to shrink,

He offer'd thee -- thou, too, didst drink.

Thou wast, like Him, rejected, left

Alone, of all thy friends bereft.

Not one did come to kiss thy chains,

To still thy tears, to share thy pains.

When Charles the Seventh took the throne,

How brightly then thy glory shone!

But brighter still that glory ray'd

In dungeons dark -- alone, betray'd.

Our Lord did, too, to this sad vale

Come down to seek out death, betray'l.

Through Him we see with clearer eyes:

Now suff'ring is our greatest prize.

A note after the poem offers this as "a more literal translation of the final stanza":

Ah! If the God of love had not come to this vale of tears
To seek betrayal and death,
Suffering would have had no appeal for us.
Now we love it; it is our treasure.

So I took some liberties with that final stanza, the chief effect of which was -- to add a reference to clearer eyes that was not in the original!

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears

I ran across this tonight in a /pol/ humor thread:

I know absolutely nothing about Warhammer, so this was all new to me. What first caught my eye was Bretonnia -- "The fr*nch but they're humans" -- because the name is obviously based on Brittany (home of the Bretons), and William Wright just posted "Nyarna and Brittany Spears" and "The Brittany Spears: A quick follow-up." These posts are not about the singer but about spears from the French region of Brittany. In Warhammer, apparently, Bretonnia is known as the Land of Chivalry. Image searches turn up lots of knights, many of them armed with spears:

The Tomb Kings -- "The egyptians but they're skeletons" -- also caught my eye because the giant vulture Odessa Grigorievna has recently been associated both with a giant skeletal bird and with the story of the Egyptian Pharaoh's baker. No bird angle, but Egyptian skeletons still seemed somewhat relevant.

An image search for warhammer tomb kings turned up several pictures with big birds in the background:

The scraggly wings reminded me of Gregor from The School for Good and Evil, the giant skeletal bird mentioned above:

Searching for tomb kings bird, I found that these birds are called Carrion. According to the Warhammer Wiki:

Carrion are terrifying Undead birds of prey that resemble reanimated Giant Vultures which feast upon the carcasses of those that have fallen within the lands of ancient Nehekhara, now the Land of the Dead.

This is just about perfect. Like Gregor, they appear undead -- William Wright says Gregor "looks like a vulture made out of bones, sinew, and feathers." Like Odessa Grigorievna, they are giant vultures and feast upon carcasses.

The first image in the Wiki article is this, captioned "A pack of Carrion attack a Bretonnian mounted expedition":

Only two weapons are visible in this image: a pair of Brittany spears.

I do hope the sync fairies will do something with the Aztec lizardmen, too. I mean, that's kind of badass. Not quite as badass as an Aztec lizardman in a New Sex Pistols T-shirt, but still.

Monday, May 27, 2024

Hey birds, here are cookies!

Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories came up in my attempt to describe my recurring dream of break-dancing frogs. Our parents read us those stories countless times when we were kids, and one line from them became a family catchphrase. In Frog and Toad Together, Frog and Toad bake some cookies that are so delicious that they lack the will power to stop eating them. They try various ways of forcing themselves to stop, such as putting the cookies high up out of their reach, but nothing works. In the end, Frog takes the cookies outside and shouts, "Hey birds, here are cookies!" Birds come and eat up all the cookies, and Frog comments that now that the temptation is gone, he and Toad "have lots and lots of will power."

That's really the only Frog and Toad story I have any clear memory of. To me, Frog and Toad are synonymous with "Hey birds, here are cookies!"

In a comment, William Wright connects my break-dancing frogs with Gregor the Stymph (skeletal bird-monster) and Odessa "Sally" Grigorievna the vulture. Both are humans who have been transformed into animals. Gregor is a prince who doesn't want to be called a prince, and Odessa Grigorievna resists being called Sally, which means "princess." The usual animal for princes to be transformed into is of course the frog. (My 2021 post "The Emperor's orb" begins with birds of prey and ends with the Frog Prince.) I think the stereotypically "Russian" garb of my break-dancing frogs (black and white Adidas tracksuits) also suggests a connection with this vulture who is actually a Russian woman.

The Odessa Grigorievna dream begins with my seeing "in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it." That, combined with the Frog and Toad story, made me think of this passage from the Book of Revelation:

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great (Rev. 19:17-18).

Notice how close Arnold Lobel comes to the biblical language of "cried with a loud voice":

He shouted in a loud voice, "HEY BIRDS, HERE ARE COOKIES!"

Birds came from everywhere.

The main difference of course is that Frog and Toad's birds eat baked goods, while John's eat human flesh. However, there is biblical precedent for equating the two:

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head: And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days: Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee (Gen. 40:17-19).

I know that's kind of a dark direction to go with something as charming as Frog and Toad, but it does seem to be what the sync fairies have in mind.

It has not escaped my notice that both cookie and cake (Toad plans to bake a cake after the cookies are gone) suggest the Egyptian frog-god Kek, who is also called Kekui. Kek has been explicitly connected with cake in memes -- e.g. forty keks and topkek. Topkek is particularly interesting, since Pharaoh's baker specifies that his cakes were "in the uppermost basket."

The griffin as a guardian angel again

Cleaning out some folders this morning, I happened upon a copy of Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion (1967) by the Dutch Egyptologist Herman te Velde. Looking him up now, I find that te Velde died on May 26, 2019, so I narrowly missed discovering his treatise on the anniversary of his death. (I found it at around 7:00 this morning, which is 1:00 a.m. in the Netherlands.)

Glancing through the opening pages, I was surprised to find quite a lot of references to griffins, of all things!

Osiris, Seth's victim, is sometimes called tštš. Allen translates this: "the dismembered one". . . . We shall see below that Egyptian representations show there was a close relationship between the Seth-animal and the griffin. The name of a griffin with an animal body, wings and a falcon's head, is tštš. Leibovitch has translated this name as: "celui qui déchire, qui met en pièces" [the one that tears in pieces] (p. 5).

I had actually thought of the unidentified "Seth-animal" a few days ago, while reading Adreinne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters, wondering if it, like the griffin, might trace its origin to fossils. I figured the Seth-animal would be beyond the primarily Graeco-Roman scope of Mayor's book. but doing a word search now shows that it is in fact mentioned in a part of the book I haven't read yet, where she cites Herbert Wendt's theory that Seth's head "might have been based on the skull of the Libytherium (a large giraffid similar to Samotherium)."

Although I had recently thought of Seth while reading about griffins, I never knew until today that the Seth-animal was associated with actual griffins, or even that griffins appeared in Egyptian art at all.

Te Velde goes on to describe art from the tombs at Beni Hasan, where the Seth-animal is repeatedly depicted together with a griffin and a snake-headed creature.

Te Velde floats the hypothesis that these three fantastic beasts might represent different aspects of Fate:

Fate in the shape of the Seth-animal at Beni Hasan, however, does not seem to represent the good fortune, but the bad fortune of the hunter, accompanying his guardian angel, the falcon-headed griffin. The animal with the snake's head might stand for a synthesis of both aspects. Psais or Agathos Daimoon was afterwards represented in the form of a snake (pp. 23-24).

He means that the griffin represents good fortune, but the use of the phrase "guardian angel" is synchronistically interesting. Starting with my May 1 post "Armored vultures and cherubim," I have been identifying griffins with the Cherubim of the Bible (popularly thought of as "angels") and particularly with the Cherubim in their role as guardians of the Tree of Life. Vultures have also been identified with griffins, and the "armored vulture" of that post's title is a cartoon character whose sidekick is a snake, just as the griffin of Beni Hasan is accompanied by a snake-headed animal.

The vulture entered the sync stream in April 28, with my dream about "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask." William Wright recently referenced this in his May 25 post "Good and Evil, and a large bird named Gregor" -- referencing the movie The School for Good and Evil, with its large vulture-like bird whose name suggests my own vulture's patronymic. In the clip he posted, the vulture-like Gregor is interacting with a character named Agatha. This is the feminine form of the Greek word agathos, "good," the same word used in the te Velde quote above.

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Armored vultures and Cherubim

In my last post, "How is an armadillo like a griffon vulture in the Crimea?" vultures are connected, by way of armadillos, with armored knights. This reminded me of two cartoon characters I used to draw as a child: Victor the Vulture and Sylvester the Snake. None of the cartoons have survived, but they were drawn in the style of Walt Kelly's Pogo. Victor wore a visored helmet like a medieval knight's, a baldric, and a scabbard; and Sylvester would ride inside the scabbard as if he were a sword, with his head sticking out where the hilt would be. There was a running gag that Sylvester liked to eat apples, which he swallowed whole, and when he and Victor were on a mission, he would always end up finding some apples and getting distracted by them.

The idea of a vulture wearing armor like a knight is a pretty unusual one, I think.

In recent syncs, the vulture (particularly the genus known as "griffon vultures") has been interchangeable with the griffin, and particularly the griffin in The Tinleys, which lives at the top of a mountain and turns out to have godlike powers. In Russian (the vultures in the syncs have been Russian/Ukrainian), the word for "vulture" also means "griffin."

I had always assumed that griffin was related to the French griffe, "claw," but apparently not. Etymonline suggests a more surprising connection:

Klein suggests a Semitic source, "through the medium of the Hittites," and cites Hebrew kerubh "a winged angel," Akkadian karibu, epithet of the bull-colossus (see cherub).

So griffin may be related to the biblical word Cherubim. Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life:

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Gen. 3:24).

Victor the Vulture wears a sword belt, but instead of a sword it contains a snake that like to eat apples -- a pretty obvious link to the Garden of Eden story. The snake is even called Sylvester, meaning "forest dweller." The griffin in The Tinleys lives at the top of "the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around." Ezekiel places the Cherub and the Garden of Eden on a mountaintop:

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God . . . . Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire (Ezek. 28:13-14).

In Nephi's vision, too, the Tree of Life is seen on "an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot" (1 Ne. 11:1).

How is an armadillo like a griffon vulture in the Crimea?

The first of the two dreams recounted in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" has a scene in which carrion birds, including the vulture of the title, flock around a carcass. This made me think of Jesus' saying that "wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together" (Matt. 24:28). The intended meaning of this saying has always been unclear to me, so I checked several Bible commentaries to see if anyone had any good ideas. Interpretations are all over the map, ranging from Christians flocking around Jesus to the Roman legions descending on Jerusalem, so what Jesus meant is anyone's guess.

In terms of sync, though, this note in Marvin Vincent's Word Studies in the New Testament (1897) caught my eye:

In my dream, the vulture is a griffon vulture (I identify it as Gyps africanus, but all griffon vultures look pretty similar), and its name is Odessa Grigorievna -- Odessa not normally being a personal name but rather the name of a city in the Ukraine, situated on the northern shore of the Black Sea. In Vincent's commentary on Matt. 24:28, he specified that "The griffon vulture is meant" and then shares a brief anecdote about how "In the Russian war vast numbers [of griffon vultures] were collected in the Crimea . . . although previously scarcely known in the country." The Crimea is on the northern shore of the Black Sea, not at all far from Odessa, and would later become part of the Ukraine.

The Ukraine is hardly the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of vultures -- Vincent mentions that they are "scarcely known in the country" under normal circumstances -- so it's quite a coincidence that my vulture should be named Odessa and that Vincent should devote half of his very brief note to a story about vultures in the Crimea.

⁂

In "The Tinleys and the small key of David," I connect the griffon vulture from my dream with a story I wrote as a child in which two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small are tasked with killing a griffin. I mention in the post that "their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly." Tinley Big was 20 feet tall; Tinley Small, only two feet.

I wrote the above note about griffon vultures in the Ukraine before a morning tutoring session with an adult student. He had read an English article about armadillos, and we discussed it together this morning. I had not seen the article prior to our meeting. A few parts of the article caught my eye:

In the first two lines of the article, we have armored juxtaposed with certainly. The next paragraph talks about the extreme size difference between the smallest armadillo species and the largest. This syncs with my story about two armored knights, one 10 times as tall as the other, whose names are a pun on the word certainly.

But obviously nothing in an article about armadillos is going to sync with Vincent's story about griffon vultures in the Crimea, right? . . . Right?

Vincent says that the griffon vulture "scents its prey from afar" -- its prey being dead bodies -- and backs this up with a story about vultures from distant countries converging on the Crimea during the war. The armadillo article notes that these animals, too, find food, including "dead animals using their powerful sense of smell. Sometimes they travel long distances in search of food."

Monday, April 29, 2024

Tin soliders and griffins

Yesterday's post, "The Tinleys and the small key of David," featured the name T(h)inley in two different contexts. First, there's Thinley Norbu, author of The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma -- the key word for the purposes of this post being treasure. In the opening pages, Norbu mentions that the Buddha first taught Prajnaparamita "at Vulture's Peak" in northern India. The most common vulture in that part of the world would be the Himalayan griffon vulture.

Second, there are the two main characters of The Tinleys, an unfinished story I wrote as a child about two knights who are both named Tinley and who are ordered by the king to kill the griffin that lives "at the top of Donchatryan Peak, . . . the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around." There is no mention of treasure in the story -- the griffin is targeted because it has been preying on cattle -- but guarding treasure is the classical role of griffins in mythology.

Today I put on some music to listen to while doing paperwork, letting the YouTube Music algorithm choose the songs. One of the songs it served up was "One Tin Soldier" (1969) by Coven, which I'd never heard before. Two tin soldiers would have been a better sync with The Tinleys, but it's still a bit of a sync. The lyrics begin thus:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago
About a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folk below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore
They'd have it for their very own

The valley people kill the mountain people to get the buried treasure, which turns out to be an inscription reading "Peace on earth." The song ends with "On the bloody morning after / One tin soldier rides away." Since all the mountain people were killed, the tin soldier must be one of the valley people who assaulted the mountain -- like the Tinleys in the story.

Yesterday's other post, "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," also featured both a griffon vulture and a buried treasure. In the second of the two dreams it recounts, Joseph Smith (or someone claiming to be Joseph Smith) is trying to sneak into the basement of his own house, where unbeknownst to anyone else, he has hidden " a massive treasure." The only treasure unearthed by the real Joseph Smith was the golden plates -- which, like the treasure in "One Tin Soldier," were buried under a stone on a hill and consisted of written material.

The vulture's name, Odessa Grigorievna ("daughter of Grigory"), suggests the Grigori, the name given to the rebellious Watcher angels in the Slavonic Book of Enoch. After the Watchers are overthrown, they are imprisoned underground. Near the end of the Tinleys fragment, we find similar imagery. On the island where Donchatryan Peak is located, the knights find that things people say on the island sometimes cause bizarre miraculous events to occur, and it is revealed to the reader that this is caused by spirits that are imprisoned inside the mountain -- not Watchers but "listeners":

Meanwhile the gods and spirits of the island sat inside their mountain prison, listening. Centuries ago, the evil Griffon King had trapped them there. They wanted to know what had happened to their island, so they listened to what the islanders said and tried to make sense of it. Through their supernatural powers, what they believed to be true became reality.

So the griffin, which appears at the beginning of the story to be nothing but a troublesome predatory animal, turns out to be an ancient godlike being powerful enough to imprison major deities. (Among those shut up in the mountain are the wind god, the sea god, and the god of reptiles.) I guess who is "evil" in this story is a matter of whose side you're on. Certainly in the Enoch literature it is the Grigori who are portrayed as evil, not the one who imprisons them.

In the Joseph Smith dream, the "Joseph Smith" who wants to sneak into the house to get the treasure appears to be an impostor. ("You don't look like him," says Martin Harris, who knew the Prophet personally.) Odessa Grigorievna -- who appears first as a griffon vulture and then as a Russian woman -- may also be an impostor. She is not a real "griffin" but has assumed that form as a disguise, as evidenced by the fact that she is apparently unable to fly even in vulture form. She first claims to have no name, since a vulture wouldn't have a name, but then lets slip that her name is "Odessa someone's-daughter." She keeps her patronymic, Grigorievna, secret because it is what reveals her true nature.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David.

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."

A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask

I had two strange, rather detailed dreams last night, which I document here in case they should turn out to be significant:

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I dreamed that I was with a "friend," a man, whose identity was not clearly defined. We were outside and saw in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it. My friend pointed out one unusual-looking corvid, which I identified as a pied crow, an African species.

My friend wanted to get a closer look at the birds. As we got closer, it became clear that one of them was a vulture, a really enormous vulture, bigger than a man. Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

We got too close to the vulture, and it chased us for some time, on foot for some reason. Eventually, though, its aggression dissipated, and we began to think of it as our friend.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," the vulture replied telepathically. "I don't have a name."

"We usually use names here," I said. "Do you mind if we call you Sally? Wait, first are you a boy or a girl?"

"A girl," she said, and now she looked like a middle-aged Russian woman, not a vulture. She didn't want to be called Sally, though, as it was an embarrassing reminder that she had been a vulture when we found her. She explained this by telepathically conveying an image of a skull with several teeth missing. I figured that among scavengers "bald-headed Sally" (from the Little Richard song) was slang for a carcass that had been picked clean. (Why I thought of this, rather than of the obvious fact that vultures are themselves bald-headed, beats me.)

If not Sally, what should we call her? Any random female name, I guess, like Odessa or something.

Before I could say anything, she said, "Actually, my real name is Odessa someone's-daughter."

I told her I had just been thinking of Odessa as a random name we could give her and what an astonishing coincidence that was. (Somehow I didn't make the connection that she was telepathic.) She was being cagey about her patronymic, but I was sure I could guess that, too: She was Odessa Grigorievna.

I didn't tell her I knew her patronymic.

"Okay," I said. "We'll just call you Odessa. That's good because it sounds like Odyssey, and we can tell people that we call you that because we met at the -- uh, the Achilles, uh, the Iliad --"

"At the 2001 Odyssey Fencing Club," she put in. Fine, we'd go with that.

⁂

In a second dream the same night, I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. Even though these were American characters, I understood that the whole thing was set in Russia.

The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement. I was trying to figure out how to get into the basement but couldn't find the entrance. Then I heard voices and saw that the Harrises were coming out. This showed me where the entrance was, so now I just had to hide until they left and then go down there. I crouched down in the shadows, confident that they wouldn't see me because it wasn't in the script.

The Harrises were dressed all in black and looked like necromancers or something. They were talking in a way that seemed very unnatural but was designed to fill in the viewer on necessary background information. A poorly written script, I thought.

Martin said something abut Joseph Smith III, complaining about him, and his wife said, "Why do you still call him 'the third'? His father's been dead for so long it's scarcely necessary."

"I know," said Martin, "but we're on a first-met basis." I understood this to mean that he had to continue calling him what he had been called when they first met, which was Joseph Smith III.

"As you know," said Mrs. Harris, "we inherited this house from him. And I've never complained, and I don't even mind trying to pay off the debts we also inherited from him." As Joseph Smith, I knew they'd also inherited a massive treasure from me -- I hadn't been such a failure at money-digging as commonly supposed -- but they didn't know where it was.

As Mrs. Harris said this, she went up to a large round table on the ruined first floor, which was covered with a black tablecloth, and began making perpendicular cuts into the cloth with a pair of scissors. I realized they were going to be here for a while.

For some reason, I decided that I'd better move from my current hiding place and hide on the table, under the tablecloth. I somehow did this without Mrs. Harris noticing, but now the problem was that she was making more and more cuts in the cloth, which was bound to expose me sooner or later.

Finally, so much of the tablecloth had been cut away that all that was left was a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

I stood up and was able to see myself from a third-person point of view: Jim Carrey, wearing this ridiculous black spider mask.

"Look, Martin," I said, "It's me, Joseph!"

"You don't look like him," Martin said -- and then proceeded to ignore me completely, as if masked strangers showed up in his house all the time.

"No, look, it's me," I insisted.

"Nope. I remember what he looked like, and he never wore a spider mask."

⁂

Note added (7:20 p.m. same day):

About four hours after posting the above, I clicked on a webm version of a TikTok video on 4chan. The webm had no sound, but apparently the original had background music, which was credited with this text at the bottom:

Apparently there's an American electronic music group called Odesza (a nice compromise among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian spellings!) that did a remix of something from another musician called Zhu. Looking both acts up just now, I find that Zhu was born Steven Zhu on April 28, 1989, so I've posted this on his birthday.

I thought running into a form of Odessa -- and as the name of some people, not a city -- was quite the coincidence.