Scripture and coded messages

A few years ago, I started noticing that there was a significance attached to the use of some people's mentions of the wedding of Cana, site of Jesus' first miracle of turning water into wine, and wine generally. There is Tara Westover, for instance, the author of Educated, saying she started to lose her faith in Jesus when she began drinking wine while studying at Oxford. Then there is the whole premise of The Da Vinci Code, that Jesus used specially-fermented vinegar (wine quickly becomes vinegar with the right bacteria in it) to fake his death and then went off to Europe afterward. For reasons inexplicable to me at the time, The Alchemist became a much-lauded book. 

I think some people have been convinced in our modern times that Jesus was an ancient alchemist who used his skills to do what his disciples viewed as miracles because of their not knowing how he did them. References to alchemy and Cana appear to be their justifications and nods to each other that they "are in on the secret" and know Jesus wasn't really the son of God.

I worry that anyone who has fallen for this line of thinking is mistakenly accepting that modern understandings of how to do some biological feats--such as pull off "living death" or making food/drinks/salves with impressive biological effects--would have been available 2000 years ago when life was relatively primitive and drab and too often short and brutish. We only just figured out the structure of atoms and how they come together to form molecules within the last two centuries.

Recently, I looked at the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible and its short account of the wedding of Cana in John 2:1-11. I took the four passages that are framed by the word "wine" and did double-cancellation on them before applying possible ring ciphers. I was surprised to see that there was a pattern emerging in what resulted in recognizable terms/references. The ring cipher that pairs "L" with "Y" ("lie") and "S" with "E" ("sea") turned up letter combinations that look like amen, Louie, pounds, needy, and juvie ("youth"). The ring cipher that pairs "P" with "J" and "O" with "K" turned up letter combinations that look like lox (or locks?), egg, jar, axon, bow, fad (or fade?), and HTP (or HTTP?).* Even without doing a ring cipher on one passage, I got a result from double cancellation that looked like "G-D Ra," an apparent reference to an Egyptian "little-g" god.

Language changes a lot over time. I think our language has been "nudged" over the centuries since the KJV was written in such a way as to create meaning in what would otherwise be random letter combinations. I've seen enough in the way of intentional publishing "typos" with significant meanings now to realize that some people in the publishing and typesetting industries are not the innocent technicians they are widely considered to be (when people in other careers even consciously think about them, which is rare...). Today, those industries include those in information technology who write our word processing software and who can, via algorithms, influence which stories and articles get more exposure.

If you're a BBC Sherlock fan, you probably remember the episode where Watson and Sherlock spend a few hours going through a library looking for a book that was used in sending coded messages. I think the Bible has been being used as a source of codes. Thanks to the Gideons and other Christian movements, the KJV of the Bible is probably the most widely-found English book on the planet. The very first book anyone in the English-speaking world should expect to find being used for coded messages is the KJV Bible.

That raises an interesting question: What other scriptures are being used for sending coded messages? The Torah? The Koran? And, if so, who is using them that way and for how long have they been doing it? Those books are much older than the KJV Bible.

* (Interestingly, I didn't find the ring cipher that pairs "P" and "D" to result in recognizable terms; I wonder if that might be because P.D. now means police department and there's been an intentional steering of our common language usage away from revealing to law enforcement how the KJV is being used.)

Myristoylation, HID-1, nutmeg, and colon cancer

I recently came across a possible encoded message that was about an "apo-HID." "Apo" in biology means a molecule that is missing an important subpart such that it no longer does what it is usually supposed to do.

There is an enzyme called "HID-1." It looks like an "apo" version of it exists when myristoylation fails to occur:

Finally, we verified that a conserved N-terminal myristoylation site was required for HID-1 binding to the Golgi apparatus.

"HID-1 is a peripheral membrane protein primarily associated with the medial- and trans- Golgi apparatus," 2011, online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4875289/

In eukaryotes, most proteins must undergo alternative splicing and extensive modifications, such as protein glycosylation, phosphorylation, or lipidation, after synthesis to reach their active and functional forms. Indeed, attachment of lipid groups is vital for proteins to achieve their final native structure and to allow intracellular transport for them to reach the appropriate cellular localization. Protein lipidation can be divided into four major types: N-myristoylation, S-palmitoylation, prenylation, and glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchor conjugation.

N-myristoylation is a ubiquitous protein lipid modification that occurs cotranslationally in eukaryotes and involves attachment of myristic acid to the N-terminal glycine (Gly) of a wide range of substrate proteins.

"Protein N-myristoylation: functions and mechanisms in control of innate immunity," 2021, online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7966921/

What is myristic acid? It's a saturated fatty acid. (See https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C544638.) It's found in butter, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and especially in nutmeg oil:

Nutmeg butter has 75% trimyristin, the triglyceride of myristic acid and a source from which it can be synthesised. Besides nutmeg, myristic acid is found in palm kernel oil, coconut oil, butterfat, 8–14% of bovine milk, and 8.6% of breast milk as well as being a minor component of many other animal fats. It is found in spermaceti, the crystallized fraction of oil from the sperm whale. It is also found in the rhizomes of the Iris, including Orris root.

Downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myristic_acid on October 8, 2024.

Myristic acid appears to have an anti-tumor effect in the human body. 

Myristic acid has been widely confirmed to have strong antitumour effects, which induce apoptosis of many kinds of tumor cell[s], such as breast cancer cells, prostate cancer cells, stomach cancer cells, liver cells, and other.

"Antimicrobial potential of myristic acid against Listeria monocytogenes in milk," 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41429-019-0152-5. 

Nutmeg itself in mice has been demonstrated to help prevent the formation of colon cancer tumors. See "Modulation of Colon Cancer by Nutmeg," 2015, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6334305/.

HID-1 is more highly expressed in cancers generally. See https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000167861-HID1/pathology. Perhaps I found a valid message pointing to a need to increase the N-myristoylation of HID-1 to help prevent cancer tumors. It would be interesting to look at whether the myristic acid content of milk has been decreasing at the same time as there has been an increase in colon cancers in young adults.

[Update: Because milk has myristic acid and milk/dairy consumption is very high globally, I think there is something even more complicated going on than just the presence or absence of myristic acid. The process of N-myristoylation apparently uses the compound CoA-HS:

Downloaded from https://alchetron.com/Myristoylation on October 8, 2024.

What if our dairy processing nowadays is making it so there is either too much or too little CoA-HS and so affecting N-myristoylation? It would be interesting to see what other small molecules nutmeg contains in conjunction with HID-1 and myristic acid. Is there a lithium version of this myristoylation ingredient (e.g., CoA-LiS) that causes myristoylation to happen differently? Is there a -1 sulfur anion that messes with the process? Or, what would happen if there were two-proton hydrogen in place of the usual H+ ion? How I wish I had better technology to see what is in my food!]