A Twisting River of Information

Maybe I'll never tell the whole Lake Monster story here. Maybe I'll just keep referencing it as if the whole thing is already known. I seem to be in That Sort of Mood tonight, but I do need to come back to the Lake Monster because things continue to...reveal? Unfold? I'm not sure exactly what's happening, but it's something.

In talking to a few trusted companions about the Lake Monster, things were mentioned about the mythologies of various Indigenous peoples who lived in our area, and stories of great horned serpents came up. I'm being a bit vague here because I don't want to make it sound like I'm claiming that my Lake Monster must be the exact same spirit that was known to these Indigenous people. I don't know that she's not, but I don't know that she is and too much has been taken from our Indigenous peoples. At this point, I'm looking at the connections as a flow of information to lead me deeper, not as any kind of evidence that these beings are the same.

I learned the name that one of these horned serpents was known by among a specific nation of Indigenous people, and their stories available to me sound more like my Lake Monster than other stories. I didn't think that nation of people had lived in this area, but reading through information on just a brief period of their history showed me I was mistaken. I decided to run some things through the ToA gematria calculator.

I got the same number for "Lake Monster" and the name I learned for the horned serpent. Some of the phrases listed as having that same value grabbed my attention because of how they relate to my experiences so far with the Lake Monster, Yog-Sothothery, and my devotion to a specific deity. I decided to look at what the gematria shows for Yog-Sothoth's name. Something was telling me these numbers would match.

Something was telling me the wrong thing. Perhaps to lead me deeper, though. It wasn't the same number, but it was what you get if you multiply the Lake Monster's number by a number sacred to my deity. And because I've checked before, I know my deity's name matches in numerical value with the Lake Monster's scientific name. So that urged me to check and see what I get if I calculate it for one of that deity's epithets that would be very important to All Things Aquatic and Subaquatic.

That number didn't match the other numbers. I did say this is a twisting river. The flow keeps leading me to weird things in weird ways. I was pulling out the ToA cards for these numbers as I went through, and the words on the one for the value of that epithet are "Ghostly Death Fires / A Haunted Birthplace". That seems completely unrelated to anything I've been looking at so far, so I decided I turned a corner and went too far. Time to back up and either accept that I've got what I was looking for or take another path. I had gotten what I was originally looking for, after all. The rest of this had been from following that gently nudging curiosity.

But I was thinking there was something odd about "ghostly death FIRES" and "a haunted BIRTHplace". I would have expected death and birth to pair in my mind's processing, not fire and birth. (Says the person who skipped over youthful unicorn obsession and went directly toward the phoenix instead.) In the middle of noticing how odd that was, my mind interrupted itself to remind me about something from a dream I had a few nights ago.

There was a book in the dream that was giving instruction on the proper way to spell a word. The word sounded like "higher" or "hire", but the spelling was closer to "heir" (which could relate to birth), and misspelling it would result in the word "fire". That's not what the word would look like, but it's what it would mean. I wrote the words in my dream journal as they were spelled in the dream, but haven't been able to find information yet. I ran them through the gematria calculator and the results meant nothing for me. I've tried looking for how those words might translate in other languages, but have yet to find a language they exist in. 

I got a lot more questions than answers from this. I don't know where the flow of things will lead, but I also don't think this is a dead end. I'm just not there yet.