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.)

Can the deck itself be prophetic?

When people talk about the Tarot predicting the future, they're generally talking about a Tarot reading. Cards are selected at random, and the fact of those particular cards' being chosen, rather than others in the deck, is what the divination is based on. But can there be, as it were, "standing prophecies" in the deck itself -- specific future events coded into the cards themselves, independent of any given spread or reading?

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Richard Arrowsmith, the once and (perhaps?) future king of synchromysticism, has recently resurfaced after a seven-year silence and posted on the birdemic. It is, in true Arrowsmith fashion, a very long, sprawling, profusely illustrated post that touches on dozens of different things, but one of the things it does is to tie the birdemic -- the official name of which prominently features the number 19 -- to the 19th Tarot trump, the Sun (especially the Rider-Waite version).

The sun as depicted on the card somewhat resembles the birdemic virus -- a round object with numerous protrusions -- and of course the word corona refers to the outer atmosphere of the sun. The brick wall depicted on the card suggests the lockdowns implemented around the world. But most specifically, and most impressively, the card clearly alludes to the flag of China -- a red flag with one large star and four smaller ones.

One could go further. The sunflowers, as mini-suns, represent the replication of the virus, and they peep over the wall, showing the ineffectiveness of all the lockdown nonsense. The child, with a crown (corona) of mini-mini-suns, goes forth on a white horse, like the first horseman of the Apocalypse, "conquering, and to conquer" -- spreading the birdemic and the subsequent totalitarian coup all over the world.

I find this very impressive, and once pointed out it cannot be un-seen. From here on out, the birdemic is part of the meaning of this card.

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Wondering what other "standing prophecies" might be hidden in the deck, I suddenly had this thought: I'll bet all the trumps whose numbers correspond to U.S. presidential election years -- that is, '00, '04, '08, '12, '16, and '20 -- accurately predict the winners of those elections. So, let's see. Since Mr. Arrowsmith got such impressive results from the Rider-Waite, let's stick with that deck.

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2000: Bush defeats Gore

We're off to a good start. George W. Bush was consistently portrayed as an idiot, but Al Gore was not. He became known for his "Bushims," including the most famous of all: "There's an old saying in Tennessee . . . I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, 'Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . You can't get fooled again!'" (If you type george w bush f into Google, the second search suggestion, after father, is fool me once.)

The Fool card depicts a man walking. Bush was commonly referred to by his middle initial: W, or “Dubya.” His full name is George Walker Bush.

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2004: Bush defeats Kerry

This is an easy one: The sitting president wins reelection. (So much for not getting fooled again!)

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2008: Obama defeats McCain

The most distinctive thing about Obama is that his father was from Kenya, making him (sort of) the "first black president." The lion is predominantly an African animal, and Kenya has one of the highest lion populations in the world. Taking this a step further, the two figures on the card -- one male and from Africa, the other a white woman -- could symbolize Obama's parents. (I know it's totally racist for the white woman to be represented by a person and the black man by an animal, but that's how it is. There are no black people in the Rider-Waite Tarot, so African-ness has to be represented in some other way.)

When it was first decided that Obama was going to be a "rising star," and nobody really knew who he was yet, I remember that NPR ran a "funny" piece about this poor politician who had the misfortune to have a name so similar to Osama. Osama, of course, means "lion" in Arabic.

It was also in 2008 that the slogan "diversity is our strength" began to gain currency (see evidence here).

(Note added: At the time I posted this, Google Trends showed no hits for "diversity is our strength" until 2008. Clicking the link again now, later the same day, I see that this is no longer true! I'm not sure why data for 2004-2007 would have changed in just a few hours' time. Google Ngrams shows the phrase's popularity peaking in 1997.)

Note added: It turns out that Obama is even a Leo (born August 4, 1961).

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2012: Obama defeats Romney

This one's not as obvious as the others have been so far, but wasn't it around 2012 that the noose began to be promoted as a symbol of anti-black racism and to be used in hate hoaxes (at the University of Wisconsin, for instance)? Implicit in the assumption that nooses are racist is the equation hanged man = black man. Notice also the hanged man's O-shaped halo.

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2016: Trump defeats Clinton

The simplest analysis: a trump called "The Tower" = Trump Tower = Donald Trump.

But doesn't it show the tower being destroyed? It seems that neither the tower itself nor either of the two persons falling from it can represent the winning candidate.

The lightning represents Trump -- a "bolt from the blue" whose win surprised nearly everyone. The woman dressed in Democratic blue is obviously Hillary Clinton, and the man -- whose red outer garment hides the fact that he is blue underneath -- represents the fake-conservative Republican establishment.

The imagery of this card also suggests 9/11, which was a major symbolic undercurrent in the 2016 election. Clinton's campaign logo showed two towers, both blue, being cut through by a big red arrow (cf. the arrow-shaped lightning bolt destroying the tower on the card). Clinton later physically fell down on September 11 at a 9/11 memorial event, and in the early hours of the other 9/11, 9 November, Trump was declared the winner.

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2020: Trump vs. Biden

Not exactly subtle. Which candidate has blond/orange hair and is literally named Trump?