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.)

The reddest red Sun in our hearts

And Satan came among them, saying: I am also a son of God

-- Moses 5:13

There's a bad Sun on the rise

The red sun is the evil sun. I've already discussed how Superman derives his powers from the "yellow" sun of Earth and is rendered helpless by the red sun of Krypton.

Superman's home world, with its red sun, takes its name from the element krypton -- atomic number 36.

A longstanding occult tradition associates each of the astrological "planets" with a particular magic square. The planets are put in their Ptolemaic order (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and assigned magic squares accordingly, with the smallest square being assigned to the most distant planet. Thus, a 3-by-3 magic square (the smallest possible, excluding the trivial case of 1) is associated with Saturn and a 9-by-9 square with the Moon. The 6-by-6 magic square, then, belongs to the Sun.

This magic square contains the first 36 natural numbers -- the atomic number of krypton -- the sum of which is 666, the biblical number of the beast. Thus is Krypton associated with the idea of an evil sun. And, as we know from Superman, this evil sun is red.

While the best known characters in Rudolf Steiner's demonology are Lucifer and Ahriman, he also wrote of a "Sun-Demon" called Sorath -- a name so created as to add up to 666 in Hebrew (samekh vau resh tau = 60 + 6 + 200 + 400 = 666).

One describes the Christ-Being as the genius of the sun who unites himself with the earth and becomes also the genius of the earth. . . . But there is also an opposing principle to the Lamb, there is also a Sun-Demon, the so-called Demon of the Sun, that which works in the evil forces of man, thrusting back the force of the Lamb . . . Sorath is the name of the Sun-Demon, the adversary of the Lamb. . . .  and this, if we convert the several letters into their numbers [in Hebrew gematria] is a very veiled way of expressing 666.

The passage I have quoted is interesting because it introduces two opposing solar beings. Christ is "the genius of the sun who unites himself with the earth and becomes also the genius of the earth" -- i.e., he is specifically the Sun of Earth. In opposition to this good genius is Sorath, the evil "Demon of the Sun," whose number is 666. This is the sum of all the natural numbers from 1 to 36, and 36 is the number of krypton. Thus, in opposition to the Sun of Earth, the Sun of Krypton.

There is a good Sun, then, and an evil one, and the Tarot card called the Sun embraces both in its symbolism. This post will look at what might be called, if the expression can be permitted, the dark side of the Sun -- its aspect as the Red Sun of Krypton.

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The East Is Red

A red sun . . . a demonic red sun . . . hmm, what does that remind me of? 'Tis the east, and Chairman Mao is the sun! Yes, when he wasn't busy earning his Nobel Prize in Killing People, the Chairman pursued a second career as a sun-god.

毛主席是我們心中的紅太陽
Chairman Mao is a red sun in our hearts

Comparing the ruler to the Sun is nothing new, of course -- what else is a crown than a representation of the Sun's "golden" rays? -- but Mao (whose surname means "hair"; Samson again!) stands out as a red Sun -- you know, the evil kind. And not just red, super-duper-red. For the title of this post, I've loosely translated a common Maoist slogan as "the reddest red sun in our hearts" -- but the original Chinese actually calls him "the reddest reddest red sun" (最紅最紅的紅太陽) -- and that, my friends, is pretty damn red. It’s like, how much more red could Chairman Mao be? And the answer is none. None more red. This is a guy who clearly didn't want anyone mistaking him for the Yellow Sun of Earth. (Yellow, incidentally, was the traditional color of the Sons of Heaven who ruled before the revolution, the words for yellow and emperor being homophones.)

The Tarot shows the Sun as yellow -- or, occasionally, green -- never as red. However, other aspects of Red Sun propaganda are echoed in the Rider-Waite card. It is scarcely surprising that the Reddest Red Sun tends to shine down on the red flag of revolution, as seen above. Sunflowers were also a popular theme, the idea being that the people follow Chairman Mao just as faithfully as sunflowers follow the Yellow Sun of Earth. The example below is one of many I could have chosen.

敬愛的毛主席，我們永遠忠於您！
Dear Chairman Mao, we will always be loyal to you!

The Sun card also features a wall, and I thought perhaps I could find a few propaganda posters of the Reddest Red Sun shining down on the Great Wall of China -- but no such luck. The Great Wall was, it turns out, seen as a symbol of feudalism and -- despite Mao's obvious respect for Qin Shi Huang's pioneering work in "burning books and burying scholars" -- was ignored by the Reds. White horses are for similar reasons conspicuous by their absence.

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You say you want a revolution

This whole deep dive into the symbolism of the Sun card was precipitated by Richard Arrowsmith's observation that the Rider-Waite card -- despite being published when the Qing dynasty still ruled -- alludes to the bloody flag of the People's Republic of China.

The large star is the Sun, the four small stars are the sunflowers, and the red flag is the red flag.

Before the People's Republic of China, though, there was the common-or-garden Republic of China -- in exile in Taiwan since Mao took power -- and their flag is also alluded to by the Rider-Waite card.

Red flag, blue sky, Sun -- check, check, and check. It is interesting to note that this flag, called the "Blue Sky, White Sun, Wholly Red Earth," recognizes the true color of the "Yellow" Sun of Earth.

And before that, there was the Wuhan Battle Flag -- also red with a sun-like design.

The original Wuhan flag was the "Iron Blood 18-Star Flag," from the 18 provinces of China proper. Later one more star was added to appease the Manchurians -- bringing the total to 19, the number of the Sun card and also of another famous Wuhan product.

And before that 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. More generally, a red banner is a universally understood symbol of revolution, and the crowned baby on a white horse represents the "Year Zero" mentality of all such movements.

In addition to its political meaning, revolution refers to the motion of the Earth around the Sun -- or, before the Copernican Revolution, of the Sun around the Earth.

The Beatles' White Album contains two songs called "Revolution" -- "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9" -- 1 and 9 -- 19. "Revolution 9" is just a collage of noise, but "Revolution 1" has lyrics. And when the lyrics need to cite the name of some particular revolutionary, who do they choose as an example? Ho Chi Minh? Robespierre? Hitler? Lenin? Che Guevara? George Washington? No, you all know the line.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow

Sunshine Superman

Superman wears a red cape -- like the red banner on the Rider-Waite Sun card -- and has a big S on his chest -- the 19th letter of the alphabet, and also the initial of sole, soleil, and sun. That alone would be enough to associate him with the 19th trump -- but there's more. There's the Donovan Leitch song that gave this post its title, for example, or Superman's association with the white horse.

More to the point, though, Superman's power comes from the Sun. He's not super under the red sun of Krypton, only under the yellow sun of earth -- a.k.a. the Sun. (This is another variation on the Samson myth, with the Sun's rays being metaphorically its "hair.")

The color of the Sun's rays is the important thing. Even on Earth, Superman loses his powers if someone nefariously uses a blue filter to turn the Sun's yellow rays to green!

A green Sun is certainly a strange idea, but it apparently had some currency in what Nabokov (a famous synaesthete) called "the pale-green eighteenth century," as witness these Tarot cards from 1730-1742.

I looked up the Nabokov passage in question -- Adam Krug going through some of his notes in Bend Sinister -- and found that the paragraph that ends with the pale-green 18th century begins with the Sun.

Old Zoroastrian motif of the rising sun, origin of Persian ogee design. The blood-and-gold horrors of Mexican sacrifices as told by Catholic priests or the eighteen thousand Formosan boys under nine whose little hearts were burned out upon an altar at the command of the spurious prophet Psalmanazar -- the whole thing being a European forgery of the pale-green eighteenth century.

Why would some Tarot cards make the Sun green? I have no idea. Not only is our Sun not green, there are no green stars anywhere in the universe. The stellar spectrum goes from red to white to blue, but the only place you'll ever see a green star is at an Esperanto conference. Héri, Laurent, and Cheminade chose to make the Sun the one color it could never possibly be.

Anyway, if the Sun's rays were green instead of yellow, Superman would fall out of the sky. And what if they were white?

Trick question. The Sun's rays are white, obviously. If they were really yellow, white things (which look white because they reflect all frequencies of visible light equally) would look yellow. The universal idea that the Sun is "yellow" -- despite the fact that it normally appears to be almost perfectly white -- is something of a mystery. A surprising number of people (not scientists, of course) maintain that the Sun really was yellow in the past. They remember it being yellow when they were children and think that it must somehow have changed. (This is sometimes given as an example of the Mandela Effect.) However, young children even today, despite indisputably growing up under a white Sun, naturally and spontaneously say that the Sun is yellow and draw it that color. (I clearly remember a white Sun throughout my childhood. I also remember tree trunks being gray, despite the fact that all the other children I knew inexplicably colored them brown in coloring books.) The Sun does appear yellow when it is low on the horizon -- the "golden hour" -- but it also appears orange or red around sunrise and sunset; none of that changes the fact that its normal color is white.

In fact, due to its temperature, the Sun's peak emission is at a frequency of about 500 nm. In other words, though it emits a great deal of light at all visible frequencies and thus appears white, it emits more green light than any other color. Perhaps those 18th-century cardmakers were on to something after all!