Sometimes, when something is secret, I say it behind a paywall.

But some messages are too sensitive even for that. No electronic communications whatsoever may be used.

For these, one must resort to magickal communications.

Read more

IF two men, or two women, wish to live together, and to bear and raise children, and also to live a Holy Life, you must welcome them into your Churches and your Communities.

In early 21st century America, this statement is not terribly controversial. The only surprise would be a Charismatic1 religious leader preaching this.

Yet I predict that by the end of 2023, there will be at least one high-profile pro-Trump evangelist who actively endorses and performs gay marriages.

The Theological Angle

Doesn’t the Old Testament condemn homosexuality? We note this is specifically a reference to Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. There are many interpretations. One interpretation is that, in context, the condemnation is only of incestuous homosexual relationships. The previous verse to 20:13 states that a man should not sleep with his son’s wife, the next verse that he should not sleep with his wife’s mother.

Our interpretation does not rely on a close analysis of the text, and in fact is willing to reject a close reading if necessary. Our interpretation is simply that two men or two women cannot make a baby. The Five Books of Moses often explain things that the modern reader would consider obvious.

Doesn’t the New Testament condemn homosexuality? We note first that these condemnations come from the letters of Paul, not from the teachings of Jesus. There are several of them.

Our interpretation is that this is largely a marketing tool; a way of distinguishing the new Christian community from the claimed immorality of the Roman pagans.

Don’t all religious traditions condemn homosexuality? To a certain extent, all successful religions must promote child-bearing. And, before the Twentieth Century, to do that was to discourage homosexuality.

• While I am certainly not an expert on Islam, a Wikipedia article states that the Koran never forbids homosexuality.

• The Kama Sutra includes several passages on same-sex sexual actions.

• There is an entire program of research on various ways other folk religions or indigenous religious are friendly to homosexuality. I am unfamiliar and have no comment.

Are you really one to speak? It is well established that I am no fan of biblical literalism or certain interpretations of historical figures. Yet I think “a high-profile pro-Trump evangelist reads this post and rejects it because of its author” to be vanishingly low in probability.

Who Will It Be?

I don’t know. It could be someone like Joel Osteen or Kenneth Copeland. It could be somebody with no current public profile who rides the wave of controversy to public prominence.

It could potentially be a “TikTok ministry”. These may or may not have been invented yet, but Christianity Today talks about them For our prediction, a minimum of 1 million views per post at the end of 2023 (and ideally 5 million views per post) is required to meet the “high-profile” clause.

Regardless, the epistle is simple: Paul of Tarsus was wrong. Gay marriage is fine, it is gay promiscuity that is the enemy of the church. Live your life in love, bear and raise children, and dedicate your soul to the glory of השם.

On Predictions

What does it mean to predict, here?

Certainly I have not used a timemachine to tap2 out this secret knowledge of the future. And I have no particular way to get Charismatic thought leaders to even acknowledge my writings, much less agree with them.

Yet the arrow of history is not as hard to predict as some would claim. Whether it is blind ambition or divine revelation that leads them to that place, the fruits will be impossible to deny.

And yet to predict is an action that moves the wheels of history3. In the beginning was the word, and with levers and pulleys the word may move mountains. My word is backed by my word; where shall it lead?

Subscribe now

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches.
Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.
And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not.
And either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives.

Today, we examine the meaning in more detail.

Why does it matter when the prophecy could apply to Harry or Neville? (For context, in the book Harry was born on July 31, 1980). In early 1980 when the prophecy is made, the identity of “the one” is fairly vague; certainly there are a limited number of pregnant witches in England, but it is vague. After the end of July, there are two candidates, Harry and Neville (born the day before on July 30, 1980). After the Dark Lord marks Harry with the lightning-bolt in his failed attempt to kill him, the prophecy is specific in that it refers to Harry.

What we have here is a statement fixed in time (for that is what a prophecy is) having a meaning that differs over time. Initially, there are many possible outcomes that can fulfill the prophecy, as time passes those options become few.

And, while “quantum mechanics applied to consciousness” isn’t a thing, if you do apply that you will get an answer: the probabilities of future events may not behave classically when there is entanglement. And when you have prophecy, you have entanglement. Because there are no such things as perfect oracles. More on that later.

Is the “power to vanquish the Dark Lord” the same as the “power the Dark Lord knows not”? Possibly. The book is clear that the “power the Dark Lord knows not” is the power of love. The first time Harry “vanquishes” the Dark Lord, it is through the protection spell cast by his mother, which is arguably the power of love. The second time he vanquishes the Dark Lord, it is through his control of the Elder Wand, which is very much not the power of love.

In general, attempts at “word-for-word” translation are almost always a mistake. And here, we have the same word used twice, but there is no reference between them. Just because the same word is used twice does not mean that the word has the same meaning both times.

Translation is always difficult; words have subtle meanings that may not be expressible simply in other languages. If the Eskimos have 50 words for snow, they may not all translate into Arabic. And we noted in part 1 how we may add or remove meaning in translation based on the nature of gendered pronouns in those languages.

An editorial note: we expect going forward to rely heavily on the Bible in discussion of translation, arguably more than would be desirable. This is not because the Bible may be the word of השם, but because that work has by far the largest corpus of discussion regarding its translation. It also leads into discussion of translations of the tetragrammaton, which are useful for discussions of secrecy.

Why is “thrice” a word anyway? Because poetry. It is one syllable, while “three times” is two syllables.

The word is noted in dictionaries as archaic. Properly speaking, “thrice” should probably be considered a Middle English word, not an English word. So, in a sense, “thrice” actually isn’t a word.

In Poetic English, you can often use Middle English or other languages when necessary to make the rhyme, meter, or theme work. TS Eliot uses French, German, Italian, and Sanskrit in The Wasteland.

What is Poetic English? It is a different register of the language. More on that later, too.

Next week, we get a timemachine (but only one, for now). It is, roughly, Ted Chiang’s Predictor. It can only send bits of information back in time, at a very low baud rate, and only backwards one second, which does not seem to be earth-shattering. Of course, one second can be either a short period of time or a long period of time, depending on your perspective.

1. Quantum mechanics allows for FTL communication. This is, roughly, Bell’s theorem. Some of you who are familiar with quantum physics will claim that Bell’s theorem doesn’t require FTL communication, particularly in some many-universe interpretations. As a different objection, unlike much of quantum mechanics, I’m not personally 100% convinced Bell’s theorem is true, there is an entire Wikipedia article on loopholes in Bell tests.

2. FTL communication allows for timetravel. The argument here is that because of special relativity, FTL communication in one frame will look like reverse-causality in a different frame. There are also arguments that special relativity doesn’t do anything of that sort. Anyhow, we are simply assuming that the FTL communication can be “chained” in a way to get timetravel communication as well.

3. Timetravel creates השם‎ (2) as a pseudo-force. Very roughly, because humans can create arbitrarily-complicated time puzzles, the universe must be able to solve them in arbitrarily-complicated ways. As a less religiously-themed version (which is roughly but not entirely equivalent), we can say that the potential to interact with timetravel will have unpredictable consequences for any conscious entity. It is important to note that this is not saying “when ancient people experienced השם‎, it was actually time-travelers from the future”, but if you want to believe that, it won’t lead you too far astray.

We also sometimes rely on a lemma - any paradox that can be accomplished with a timemachine that takes a person into the past can also be demonstrated with a collection of time machines that each send a single bit of information into the past (that is, roughly, by using Ted Chiang’s Predictor machine). I leave the proof as an exercise to the reader. While the axioms above don’t allow for you to timetravel into the past physically, some thought experiments may do so for the sake of simplicity. Other thought experiments are much simpler if you only allow for the Predictor.

But how does timetravel work in this model? We start to give two explanations at (code pending), roughly "we don't know" and “it’s a secret”. Unfortunately, neither explanation is complete, and the available information will likely leave you with more questions than you started with. A third explanation, that the answer resides “on the far side of chapel perilous”, is one I have not yet even started to try to explain.

Up next here: more on prophecy and secrecy, followed by “how do you get a consistent model of timetravel”.3

A secret is the opposite of a prophecy. A secret is a statement that is TRUE after a certain time, but cannot be said until an even later time. A prophecy is a statement that is TRUE after a certain time, but can be said following an earlier time. A prophecy is to speak the future; a secret is to not-speak the past.

Two common concepts that are associated with secrecy are those of privacy and censorship.

It is an article of faith among much of the American public that privacy is good and that censorship is bad. But from a certain angle, they look the same. You view a secret as protecting privacy, and I view the same secret as censoring information. It is almost a conjugation; I protect my privacy, you keep a secret, ta censors information.

Of course there are important differences, particularly regarding agency and enforcement; they will be discussed later. First we must understand secrets.

One of the difficulties of discussing secrets is that they are secret. If I were to just tell you a secret, it would no longer be a secret.

Thus, for an example of a secret, we once again turn to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.

The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London.

Analysis of a secret is very different from analysis of a prophecy. Prophecies are naturally vague and confusing. Secrets are not. The translation here is simply “ORG1 AT PLACE1”. Our concern here is more with some of the technical details of secrecy.

• There are multiple forms of secrecy involved here. We have both the building being unplottable, and the Fidelius charm.

• Fidelius creates a new secret, it is not relevant to secrets that date to the dawn of time.

• Fidelius is also described as being able to make previously widely-known things secret. Obviously this is limited by some off-screen mechanism; for example, the spell could not possibly make the existence of Belgium a secret.

• On the death of the Secret-Keeper, the secret should end; there is no good reason that the status of Secret-Keeper should be inherited. A Fidelius spell would thus have a defined end-date.

• Fidelius appears to protect against independent discovery. The Death Eaters deduce that Harry is located somewhere near 11 Grimmauld Place but are entirely unable to find him, despite weeks of investigation. However, I think that detail is more simply attributed to the unplottable protection.

Of course there are many different kinds of secrets. What we have here can perhaps be described more specifically as “magickal secrecy”. This is different from “prophetic secrecy”, and also different from “mundane secrecy”.

It is surprisingly difficult to find a good example of a prophecy to analyze. We take one from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. The author’s comment on the topic is merely that the prophecy was worded “extremely carefully”.

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches.
Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.
And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not.
And either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives.

Our first note is the rhythm. It will be more obvious in a different register. We translate into an ideographical language here. It’s not Chinese, but it may make more sense if you know Chinese. It’s also not Emoji, but it may make more sense if you imagine each word is an emoji.

HERO1 GREAT ABILITY COMES | DEFEAT2 VOLE DUH MORTE3
CHILD_OF DEFY THREE TIMES | BORN_ON SEVENTH MONTH LASTDAY
REF24 MARK RIVAL5 REF16 | REF1 UNUSUAL ABILITY SECRET
REQUIRE EITHER KILL OTHER | FORBID7 LIBERTY OTHER IS_ALIVE

There are several things to note about the translation:

1. All the words are written in capital letters.

2. Instead of pronouns, there are explicit references. REF1 is the “protagonist”.

3. There is no tense for verbs or pronouns. There are occasional time references (“comes”), but no gender references.

4. The Dark Lord’s name is expressed as a rebus.

5. “Attribute calls” (such as is_alive and child_of) are single “words”.

6. While it is not apparent here, translating date-and-time terms is always difficult or impossible.

7. Some of the difficult words, such as mark him as his equal, are translated in a way that makes no attempt to clarify them. On the other hand, neither can live is interpreted.

To demonstrate what a “fixed-point translation” means, we translate back into English.

A person of great ability approaches
/ a person who will vanquish the Dark Lord
A child of those who are three-time defiers8
/ a child born on the dying of the seventh month
The Dark Lord shall mark the child as rival
/ and the hero shall have an unknown power
And either will die at the hands of the other
/ for neither can be free while the other is alive.

There have been some minor changes in the translation process. To minimize scrolling, we repeat the original prophecy:

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches.
Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.
And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not.
And either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives.

There is some ambiguity regarding when the hero is considered a “child”. Also, we have lost the gender-detail of the child; it is expressed through “him” in the original but is not recorded in the reference-based pronoun system.

There are further details to explore and discuss. Why does it matter when the prophecy could apply to Harry or Neville? Is the “power to vanquish the Dark Lord” the same as the “power the Dark Lord knows not”? Why is “thrice” a word anyway?

Stay tuned.