My last post, "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," dealt with two seemingly unrelated syncs: one about omelettes, and one about the word tempests in the Book of Mormon and a Mormon writer named Tempest. But perhaps they are related after all, via Walt Whitman. Though the review, linked on A&L Daily, which ...

There have always been wars so the end times prediction of wars and rumours of wars should not seem especially relevant now, and yet it does. Perhaps because wars usually have some kind of sense to them, territorial, tribal, monetary and the like. But recent wars seem to be without any sense at all and simply war for ...

This morning, while far from home, I suddenly wanted an omelette -- that specific dish, which is not at all common here in Taiwan. I tried to think of any restaurants in the area that might have such fare on their menu, but in the end I gave up and got something else instead. While waiting for my food, I decided to ...

Tolkien depicted the nature of evil with a depth and power only possible to a good Man. But what is the extremity of evil as depicted in The Lord of the Rings?

Which sentences would you nominate?

My candidate is quoted over at The Notion Club Papers blog.

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From The Two Towers "Shelob's Lair" (slightly edited):

‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ Gollum said often to himself, when the evil

mood was on him, as he walked the dangerous road from

Emyn Muil to Morgul Vale, ‘we’ll see.

'It may well be, O yes,

it may well be that when Shelob throws ...

As I was reading The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered this morning, I unexpectedly came across a footnote referencing -- incongruously in this book set in a distant Tolkienian past -- a rock song that had been in Daymon's head when he wrote a certain part of it:

The song? "When You're Gone," by The Cranberries, a ...

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To my eye, drawing lines between the five brightest stars; Auriga (the charioteer) is a great pentangle in the night sky; and one that includes Capella (meaning "chapel") - which one of the brightest stars, and one that is usually high overhead.

Because I have "a thing" about ...

I have begun to think so.

It is impossible to be sure, because the whole world of communication is full of lies and fakes; as well as sheer ignorance and honest error.

But the attempts to maintain some kind of civilization outside of the West - which is long-since committed to suicide - are apparently unravelling ...

because the worst person to tell you about a book is the author (and in this case it’s even worse because the author is me), here’s what other people have said about Sketches of Alice.

(do not read too much into the fact that they are all writers, please).

anyway, it might pique your interest, or ...

This is the standard reading of Nephi's list of what is included in the Plates of Brass (1 Ne. 5:11-13):

And he beheld that they did contain:

(1) the five books of Moses [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy], which gave an account [in Genesis] of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who ...

As a complement to William Wildblood's reflections on the potential value for Christians in what might be termed pagan-ism; Laeth makes an interesting point about the possibility of a future pagan religion in The West (edited):

Jupiter stopped answering the Romans, and Jesus stopped answering the Christians. This ...

In a geopolitical world where treachery and gratuitous murder are openly and officially celebrated; it's become pretty easy to appear "good" - merely by defending The System, and its continued functionality.

When contrasted with a mainstream moral system increasingly based-upon paranoid resentment and Schadenfreude - ...

A few passages in the Book of Mormon appear to contain errors immediately followed by corrections. This is probably the most obvious instance:

. . . and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace (Alma 24:19).

Since "weapons of peace" doesn't make any sense, the ...

In my reading of Rudolf Steiner I came across a fourfold division of Beings into what he called "bodies" but which might better be understood as "levels".

Ego - Astral - Etheric - Physical*

The first and last are easy to grasp - Ego is me-my real-self which is eternal; and Physical is the mortal material body. ...

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered an alternate account of Fëanor's creation of the Silmarils. In this telling, the three gems begin as "light-seedlings" taken from the Trees of Valinor, but later "to seeds again returned they, who once as light were never so housed," and thus the Silmarils are not ...

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no man is an island, but a couple can build a boat.

(how you read the above says a lot about you, doesn’t it)

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the only real war now is about preventing what is yet to be created.

some people say this has always been the case, but i don’t think that’s true. there were forward thinking eras, ...

William Wildblood's latest post analyses and expresses well something I have felt for as long as I have been a Christian.

Edited excerpt:

Paganism died out for a reason. It was superseded by the advent of Christ who really did make all things new.

And yet some things were lost in the process, in particular a real ...

In Christendom, I'm at a lossTo find a symbol more iconicThan our Holy Christian Cross. Invert it, though, and it's demonic.

The swastika in HindustanIs thought an image most auspicious,Dear alike to gods and man. It's mirror-image, though, is vicious.

In Jewry, too, there is a signFor everything on which we ...

by Susana Imaginário.

this is the second book in the Timelessness series. i reviewed the first one here.

i tried to keep SPOILERS to a minimum, but you know, beware.

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the book starts out very dark, and overall it’s much darker and more moody than the first. and it makes sense since the Dharkan who ...

The rivalry between Christianity and paganism seems to be reviving in the West as the secular materialism of the post-war period becomes increasingly threadbare and unsatisfactory. Once our stomachs are full and we have a roof over our heads and maybe a family of our own, many of us find there is still something ...

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This is just so wrong

I have written before about the scam that is dark chocolate - how everyone really wants milk (and/or white) chocolate; but gets coerced, shamed, or indoctrinated into that inversion of enjoyment which is dark chocolate.

Dark chocolate is the decadence of the over-indulged ...

It has been my contention since the second half of 2020 that the nature of dominant "establishment" evil has evolved and transformed from the goal of global totalitarianism (international omni-surveillance and micro-control of populations) to a resentment-rooted and spitefully-motivated destructiveness.

The ...

I have no comment on geopolitical events known to me only through propaganda produced by professional liars in service to their father. I'm just noting a sync.

This morning, following a link on the Orthosphere, I skimmed part of Edward Feser's post "[One country's] war on [another country] is manifestly unjust." ...

I was reflecting on the fate of the New Age spirituality, which began in the late seventies but hit public consciousness from the middling 1980s.

There was a tremendous growth in this (loose) "movement" - involving huge numbers of people thousands of whom were professionals (made a living from it), thousands of book ...

This afternoon, although I was eager to continue pursuing an exciting new train of thought on my Book of Mormon blog, I had a sudden urge to go hike the skywalk at Eight Trigrams Hill first. I hadn't been there in many months, and I had something else I very much wanted to spend my time on instead, but we take random ...

The King in Yellow, which I am currently reading for sync-related reasons, repeatedly mentions the black stars in the skies of Carcosa, the first mention being in the Author's Dedication, which quotes Cassilda's Song from the play for which the book is named:

Strange is the night where black stars rise,And strange ...

This turned out to be unexpectedly lengthy and speculative, but I think the hypotheses it introduces have got legs.

I mentioned this in passing in my last post, "Is El a Lamanite god in the Book of Mormon?", but I don't think "the harlot Isabel" (Alma 39:3) was just a hooker -- which in turn means that "these things" ...

No El, no El, no El, no El-- Christmas carol

(That epigraph is just a throwaway pun, of course, though it is perhaps worth noting that this very old carol includes a non-biblical detail concerning the new star which seems to be right out of the Book of Mormon: "And to the earth it gave great light / And so it ...