Robin Hood

My last post ended with Samson tying firebrands to the tails of foxes, which made me think of the browser Firefox. And this made me think of the other meaning of the word fire.

And that's when I realized that tights are a kind of socks.

I had previously connected Fox in Socks with Joe Biden (see my posts Slow Joe Crow and Lots of new blue goo now), so you can well imagine that it came as something of a shock to suddenly realize that not only is Biden's middle name Robinette, but his two sons are called Beau and Hunter.

Well, shoot! What are the chances of a bull's-eye like that?

All three Biden men are alumni of Archmere Academy. The school's colors are deep ("lincoln"?) green and white, and the school newspaper is called The Green Arch.

Archmere is a Catholic school, and the Bidens are nominally Catholic -- "Mary men," you might say.

Biden's 2020 campaign logo was notable for omitting the letter E, replacing it with speed lines suggesting that the D had zoomed in from somewhere else.

And perhaps Biden thinks of himself as a Robin Hood figure: He knows he's stealing, but he also thinks he's a hero for doing so. I'm referring to the election, of course, but the "Robin Hood" project of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is also something one associates with the Left.

I have connected Fox in Socks with the Red Sun and with Betelgeuse -- which, it occurred to me, is connected with archery because it is in the constellation Orion the Hunter. It turns out, though, that Orion isn't actually an archer; the part of the constellation that looks like a bow is "officially" either a shield or a lion.

Or both!

However, running a Google image search for betelgeuse archer did turn this up -- from, of all places, the white nationalist site Stormfront.

It's a comment on a thread called "Giant star Betelgeuse (or 'Beetlejuice') is dimming & changing shape." (I have no idea why this astronomical topic was being discussed on a political "hate" site; there is nothing about politics or race or anything in the entire thread.) The comment, posted on February 19 of this year, reads: "If Betelgeuse explodes tomorrow it only means it actually exploded on a day 650 years ago, during the age when England still fought with bows and arrows" -- with, in case the meaning were not clear, a very large picture of some Englishmen doing just that.

It seems a strange thing to zero in on. The point is simply that Betelgeuse is very far away (642.5 light years) and that anything we observe happening to Betelgeuse actually happened hundreds of years ago. Any historical figure or event or outdated technology would have served to make the point, but the poster chose to focus on archery, and specifically archery in England. The 14th century is, of course, around the time the Robin Hood legend began to become popular.

Bringing this all back to the Sun card, note that Robin Hood is classically depicted -- in the Disney film and Men in Tights, for example -- with a large, often red, feather in his cap. The rider on the white horse on the Rider-Waite card wears the same ornament.

Rider, wait!

I have connected this rider with the first horseman of the Apocalypse: "And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer" (Revelation 6:2).

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Note added: I'm not sure how I could possibly have missed this before! I've just connected the rider on the white horse with Robin Hood, in part because of the red feather he wears. In my post Red crows of the Sun, I connected that feather with what it says on the tin: legendary red crows associated with the Sun in Chinese folklore. How could it have escaped my notice that there is a Robin Hood movie in which Hood rides a white horse and is played by an actor whose name literally means Red Crow?

Russell means "red." Crowe means "crow." This isn't just a bull's-eye; this is splitting an arrow on the bull's-eye!

(Incidentally, it's really possible to do that. The famed "Robin Hood shot" has been duplicated three times by a kid from South Dakota with the ridiculously appropriate name Mike Merriman.)

Crazy like a fox

And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, . . .

-- Luke 13:32

Who reads Fox in Socks as prophecy? Nobody, that's who! -- said the man of many wiles to the Cyclops.

This will be an even more disjointed post than usual.

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Anyone who reads The Magician's Table will know I've been on a Sun kick these days. I got started on it by reading a post by Richard Arrowsmith that mentioned a connection between the Sun card (the 19th trump) and the birdemic (also numbered 19). As I followed the links the synchronicity fairies gave me, I found that I was increasingly focusing on the idea of two contrasting suns -- epitomized by Superman's Red Sun of Krypton and Yellow Sun of Earth.

Today I realized (not until today!) that this is eerily similar to the path that Arrowsmith's own synchromysticism led him down way back in 2009 -- but his "other sun" was identified with Sirius, and Sirius is a blue star.

Arrowsmith's discovery, not mine; each quotation mark is a tiny i.

My other sun, in contrast, is red. Well, if Sirius is the most famous blue star, what's the most famous red one? Of course: Betelgeuse -- a star to which the sync fairies have already tried to draw my attention.

What does Betelgeuse have to do with Fox in Socks? Well, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…

... couldn't we say that this liquid full of beetles is now a bottle of beetle juice?

Incidentally, notice that there are four of these beetles and that, given the way they are beating each other with paddles, they might well be called beatles. As Fox in Socks was published in 1965, just a year after the most famous episode of the Ed Sullivan show, this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

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The 6-by-6 magic square, traditionally associated with the Sun, adds up to 666. Rudolf Steiner created the name Sorath -- his "demon of the sun" -- so as to add up to 666 in Hebrew gematria. In the Hebrew system, the first nine letters correspond to the numbers 1-9, the next nine to the numbers 10-90, and the remaining four (for Hebrew lacks the 27 letters needed for a complete system) to the numbers 100-400. Thus, the 6th letter (vav) has a value of 6, and the 15th (samekh) has a value of 60. The 24th letter would be 600, but Hebrew only has 22 letters, so Steiner uses resh (200) and tav (400). He puts those four letters together to make Sorath (samekh-vav-resh-tav).

What if the same system were applied to English? Since the English alphabet is longer than the Hebrew, only three letters are necessary to make 666 -- and those three letters are FOX.

Fox is the English equivalent of Sorath, each being the shortest possible way of expressing 666 in its respective language.

Sorath, the sun-demon whose number is 666, obviously corresponds not to the Yellow Sun of Earth but to the Red Sun of Krypton. (The atomic number of krypton is 36, linking it to the 6-by-6 square.) We have tentatively connected this Red Sun with the star Betelgeuse.

The Fox in Fox in Socks is red, and the story ends with his being unceremoniously shoved into the beetle juice.

The juxtaposition of the Red Sun with blue beetles would have seemed perfectly natural to King Tut, whose pectoral shows just that combination.

And while Seuss must certainly have known of the Beatles when he wrote Fox in Socks, he could not have known of this particular record, released at a much later date in Mexico.

I don't remember "Pigguies"; do you?

"Here comes the sun!" say the four blue beetles as the red fox is pushed into their bottle.

If Fox is the Red Sun, his nemesis Knox -- who is yellow, and whose name recalls the proverbial "more gold than Fort Knox" -- is the Yellow Sun. This true Sun is Shamash -- for whom Samson was named. Samson, like Knox, caught foxes.

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.

And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.

-- Judges 15:4-5

These fire-spreading foxes reinforce the identification of the fox with the sun. This is further strengthened if we look at the numbers involved: 300 foxes, 150 firebrands. Using the same system that told us FOX = 666, we can see that 300 corresponds to U, and 150 to SN.

(Cross-posted at From the Narrow Desert, due to its relation to past Fox in Socks posts.)

Red Sun, Yellow Sun

One day, you'll look
To see I've gone
For tomorrow may rain, so
I'll follow the sun

-- The Beatles

Once you've noticed something, it's everywhere. Found this flipping through a random children's book (Flying Colors by Robert G. Fresson) at a secondhand bookstore.

Apparently, the man in yellow with his yellow sun is leaving the larger country represented by the red sun and becoming independent. Can a Mormon see this and not be reminded of a certain prophet, often depicted in yellow robes, leaving his country and heading east under the guidance of a yellow ball?

This is Lehi holding the Liahona. The name Lehi also occurs in the Bible, where it refers to the jawbone of an ass with which Samson slew a thousand men. The name Samson comes from Shamash, the Sun, and I have repeatedly drawn connections between Samson and the Sun card.

The origin and meaning of the word Liahona is unknown. However, one fanciful but fairly influential proposed etymology analyzes it as l-iah-ona --  the first two elements being the preposition "to" and the divine name Yah, and the last (I told you it was fanciful!) being On, the Hebrew name for the Egyptian city more usually known by its Greek name Heliopolis. Since Heliopolis is the City of the Sun, and the Sun produces light, the whole is supposed to mean "to God is light." The Greek name Heliopolis was used because that city was a cult center of the sun gods Ra and Atum; but the Hebrew On comes from the city's native Egyptian name, which mean "the pillars" -- Samson again!

Note added: The red sun-disc being held by red hands suggests the Egyptian god Ra.

While the country Lehi was leaving was Babylon-occupied Judah, the prototypical country from which people go out under the direction of the Lord is Egypt.

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Not directly related, but also discovered by chance the same day:

Further confirmation that one of the meanings of the 19th trump, The Sun, is the birdemic.

I happened upon this picture because I had seen the Tupperware logo, noticed its obvious resemblance to -- uh, the Wuhan Battle Flag, which also has 19 circles in a sunburst pattern -- and was searching the Internet in vain for anyone else who had noticed the same thing. I found plenty of stories like this one:

But, although it seems impossible, not one of them mentioned the Tupperware logo. I mean, whether as a joke or as a conspiracy theory, how can you not mention it?

Red crows of the Sun

Ask anyone who knew me when I was about nine years old, and they'll tell you that one of the things I was into was taking photos of black birds -- crows, starlings, grackles, anything black -- and maintaining that they were in fact red birds from outer space, cleverly disguised as black ones from Earth.

Not my photo, but typical of dozens that I took

I  know where the idea of red birds from outer space came from: the 1986 Atari ST video game Starglider -- featuring, among other enemy craft, two kinds of spaceship (the more formidable of which was red) that had been disguised as intergalactic migratory birds (!) in order to evade the security system of the world they were invading. However, the idea that black birds were red birds (just "red birds," not "Stargliders") in disguise was my own, and I have no real explanation for it. A nine-year-old's mind moves in mysterious ways.

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In a recent post on the Sun card and the birdemic, I noted that the child in the Rider-Waite card has a large feather in his hair, reflecting the term birdemic itself.

I thought it a pity, though, that the feather was red. After all, the term birdemic comes from the similarity of the scientific names corvid ("member of the crow family") and Corvus corone (the carrion crow; "Carrion, my wayward Sun!") to the birdemic's official name -- and all crows are, as we are reminded every time we see a purple cow, black. Anyway, it's a feather, and that's close enough. Pity about the color.

Wait, close enough? That's not really the Tarot's style, is it?

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Another recent post of mine discussed how the Sun card alludes to three different flags of China. I wrote,

And before [the Wuhan Battle Flag] there was the Qing Dynasty, whose flag actually looks Chinese and has nothing to do with the Tarot. It is only the revolutionary flags of China that are prefigured by the Sun card.

A curious oversight, that! How, in a post called "The reddest red Sun in our hearts," could I mention and dismiss the flag of the Qing dynasty without noticing that it, too, features a red sun?

Infogalactic describes it as a flag "featuring the Azure Dragon on a plain yellow field with the red sun of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner."

Following that link, I read this about the three-legged crow:

The three-legged (or tripedal) crow is a creature found in various mythologies and arts of East Asia. It is believed by East Asian cultures to inhabit and represent the sun. . . .

The most popular depiction and myth . . . is that of a sun crow called the Yangwu (Chinese: 陽烏; pinyin: yángwū) or more commonly referred to as the Jīnwū (Chinese: 金烏; pinyin: jīnwū) or "golden crow". Even though it is described as a crow or raven, it is usually colored red instead of black.

According to folklore, there were originally ten sun crows which settled in 10 separate suns. . . . Folklore also held that, at around 2170 BC, all ten sun crows came out on the same day, causing the world to burn; Houyi the celestial archer saved the day by shooting down all but one of the sun crows.

So there we have it. Chinese myth associates the Sun with a red corvid -- "a crow or raven . . . colored red instead of black."

Note also the legend that there were originally 10 red sun-crows but that nine of them were shot down. The Sun's number is 19, and I have already noted that this can be seen as a combination of 1 and 9; for example, the Sun is the card of revolution (in both the political and the astronomical sense), and the Beatles wrote two songs called "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9." In much the same way, the Chinese myth features 1 + 9 suns and crows -- the one that we know today, plus the nine that were shot down.

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I have mentioned several times the Sun card's connection to Samson -- the long-haired biblical figure whose name literally means "sun" -- so it is interesting to note that there was a Crow Indian chief known for his extraordinarily long hair, reportedly some 25 feet long. The whites called him, for obvious reasons, Chief Long Hair, but his real Crow name can be literally translated as Red Plume at the Forehead.