Vaughn J. Featherstone

This warranted a second post for the day.

In William Tychonievich's latest post titled Pumpkin-eating Lizardmen and Marshall Applewhite, he references the dream I had of the pumpkin-eating deer, and does a really good job of tying some additional things together, both to support some of my initial interpretations (for example, the deer as Numenoreans under the influence of Sauron) but also to expand and even be more specific on some of the symbolism.  

For example, although I have gone out on a limb and equated Peter with Pharazon, I did not recognize or even think of any of the points he made in his post that tie Peter very specifically to these pumpkin-eating lizard-deer.  How obvious, I thought, after I read his post, and I was surprised I hadn't thought of at least the Peter Pumpkin-eater rhyme.  I had forgotten about the Boutros Boutros-Ghali joke, and its placement in the post titled Pumpkins are Dear (Deer).

So, I was extremely interested to read that post, see where he took it, and what connections he made.

It was really well done, I thought.  There was another reference or nod to Peter, though, hiding right there in his post that he may have missed.

He mentions emeritus LDS General Authority Vaughn J. Featherstone, who passed away back in 2018.

First, one bit of trivia regarding Elder Featherstone.  I believe he is the only LDS General Authority that I have a picture with.  True fact.  

I served my LDS mission in Queensland Australia from 1998 to 2000, and he was our Area President (a person who oversees several Missions or geographies).  When I first started out, I was serving in northern Queensland in a small town called Ayr with the nearest major town being Townsville, about an hour away.

Featherstone came to do a mission tour accompanying our Mission President, and joined us for a Zone Conference in Townsville that my trainer and I drove into town for.  There were only a few missionary companionships in that particular part of far northern Queensland, so it was a pretty intimate setting.  Featherstone spoke for quite some time, and even conducted some fairly interactive training.

I was less than a month out in the mission field, so was still pretty green.  In one segment, he had us individually stand up and he role played an investigator (what we missionaries called those looking into the Mormon church).  He asked me to stand up, and proceeded with a question regarding polygamy, something like  "Elder Wright, I hear you Mormons practiced polygamy.  I just can't accept that.  What do you have to say about it?".  I can't remember what I said in response, but I definitely remember him looking me right in the eye and saying "That is a stupid answer.  Sit down".

Other missionaries also earned similar comments, so I wasn't alone.  It turns out the point he was trying to get across was that when an investigator asks a question like that, we need to come back with an answer about the Book of Mormon.  His logic went something like:  If the Book of Mormon is true, then that means Joseph Smith was a Prophet.  If he was a Prophet, then that means the Mormon church is the true church, has the Priesthood, has living Prophets today, etc.   In other words, when an investigator was asking about these various concerns, the real question they were asking was whether the Mormon church was 'true', and to answer that we needed to take them back to the Book of Mormon.

At the time, this made a lot of sense to me.  I have since obviously seen the multiple inherent flaws in that line of thinking, as I am now one who definitely believes that the Book of Mormon is what it says it is, but that the Mormon church, in its current form, is most definitely not (thanks Brigham and company).

I remember him also sharing stories about he could know things about people.   In one instance, he said that he got a horrible feeling about a person when they walked into a room, someone he had never met, and asked the Stake President to look into them.  Turns out it was a bad dude.  In another instance, he told the story of a woman who came into confess about committing adultery.  He asked her if she was able to identify who the other offending party was (not sure why he needed to know?), and she told him that she wouldn't share that.  A name popped into his head, and he said "Alright, then I will tell you who it is".  He said the name, and it turned out he was right.

So, after we had all been called stupid and been put on notice that Elder Featherstone was able to look into each of our very souls, it was with some amount trepidation that each of us one by one went to go take individual pictures with him.  Was he going to send anyone home right there on the spot after spending a few seconds next to them in close proximity?

Thankfully no, and he turned out to be a really nice, understanding, and thoughtful guy, based on my own experience with him.  He would later be replaced by Elder Johnson, and that guy came across as fairly intense and/or insane by comparison.

Anyway, stepping back from memory lane, why am I bringing up Vaughn Featherstone here?

Well, remember I have a little thing with names right now, so I decided to look Vaughn up.  William has now mentioned him twice, first in the original post quoting him, and then in this most recent post mentioning that he had quoted him.  The first time I noticed given my past association with Vaughn.  The second time his name screamed at me to look this up.

The results were interesting, to say the least.

The first thing I noticed is we have Stone here.  A Feather-Stone, to be exact.  Birds have feathers, and sometimes feathers show up on people's doorsteps, as well, I thought as I looked at this name.  They can be all types of colors, feathers, but sometimes they are Black.

What about Vaughn?  That turns out to translate directly as "Little".  So Vaughn Featherstone translates into Little Feather-Stone.  I guess there is also that  J. in there (or was that supposed to be Jay?).  Using just first and last name, and leaving aside the feather, we have Little Stone.

Peter's name also translates directly as Little Stone.  So pretty clean tie to Vaughn Featherstone, but we just have this extra Feather hanging around.  I decided that we would just translate it as Peter-with-a-Feather, or perhaps Feathered Peter?  A Feathered Peter could also be a kind of bird, right?  

Anyway, I thought it was remarkable, though not surprising at this point, that we have a name referencing Peter (in disguise) in a post that not only references Peter specifically, but seems to support this link between him, Pharazon, and the Numenoreans.

And the fact that it is a man named Vaughn J. Featherstone who is known (apparently, per William... I actually wasn't aware, or didn't remember) for a theological reading of Humpty Dumpty is just about perfect in terms of putting this all together.