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?

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Samson and the Strength card

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?

More Tarot-relevant art from York Minster

From Joseph Halfpenny's Gothic Ornament: Architectural Motifs from York Cathedral (1795).

This is, I suppose, an abbess, but her crozier might easily cause her to be mistaken for a female bishop, and her crown (unusual but not unheard-of for an abbess) is something one associates with the papacy. She is also holding a book, as is the Female Pope of the Tarot.

These two depictions of Samson show that holding a lion's jaws open (as in the Strength card of the Tarot) was standard symbolic shorthand for victory over that beast.

Update: An anonymous commenter has informed me that the Papess-like figure is St. Etheldreda of Ely, who was both an abbess and a queen.