Let's kill the Ravan within

I found this by chance while searching for (of all things) a picture of Donald Duck playing a trumpet.

I had to look it up, but the reference is to the Hindu holiday of Dussehra (Vijayadashami), which commemorates the god Ram's victory over the 10-headed demon king Ravan. (The forms Rama and Ravana are also common.) What it made me think of, though, was the Red crows of the Sun. In that post, I quoted this story about the solar crows of Chinese legend.

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.

Ravan sounds like raven, which isn't much different from a crow. Just as there were 10 sun crows, the picture above shows seven Ravan-heads, each with what looks like a sun on its helmet. And Ram, like Houyi, is a "celestial archer."

The E.T. card?

The other day, I asked, "Who or what is behind the sudden spike in UFO coverage in the media?" and drew a single card from the Rider-Waite deck. I got the Deuce of Wands.

The card depicts a man contemplating a globe. I immediately thought of the old Klaatu song "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" -- particularly the lines "We've been observing your earth / And one night we'll make a contact with you."

(Incidentally, the song ends with "To send the message / We declare World Contact Day." Today I looked up World Contact Day for the first time and found that it is my birthday, March 15.)

If you had to choose one Tarot card to communicate the message, "It's aliens -- extraterrestrials," which would you choose? The Star is an obvious choice, I suppose, but it just shows a woman on Earth, with the stars overhead. The Rider-Waite Deuce of Wands is the only card that shows the Earth -- the whole globe -- and shows a man outside of it, quite literally an extra-terrestrial being.

The image of an "extraterrestrial" holding the Earth in one hand also bring to mind the ending of the original Men in Black film, where our entire universe is revealed to be contained inside a marble which an alien picks up with one hand.