"Wanting connections, we found connections - always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else..." - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum pg 449
One of the symptoms that you've been working on the May Day Mystery is that you begin to see connections between it and everything else you see in school, in the news, and in your pleasure reading. This is a condition called Apophenia, which Wikipedia page connects to pages on Numerology, Theomatics, and Cryptography (all of which are involved or related to the May Day Mystery).
This page is intended to display all of the connections that I see between the May Day Mystery and the world at large.
The Baroque Cycle
This extensive historical fiction series by Neal Stephenson takes place shortly after the English Civil War and the Reformation, and many of the events mentioned in the Mystery either occur or are mentioned in these books. In addition, the topics of Economics, Science, and Cryptology are frequently discussed.
Neurocam International
This is another mysterious secret society, akin to the Orphanage in many ways. The two organization appear to be connected by Fowles' book The Magus, which the Orphanage mentions in their 17th e-mail to Hance (RD19e) and is also important to Neurocam as well.
They also seem to share The Crying of Lot 49. The Orphanage used it in ADW 5/1/04 and Neurocam used it in an assignment.
Foucault's Pendulum
This is almost unfair, as the book itself is referenced by the Orphanage. The entire plot of this book involves secret societies and some people seeing connections where none exists.
Mexico
The Pimp has said on several occasions (example) that the Orphanage has operations in Mexico, and that said operations involve killing Pigs. This brings to mind the little reported violence between police and drug cartels in northern Mexico, especially along the border. The city of Cananea (just south of Tucson) is a major drug trafficking center, with 850,677 pounds of Marijuana seized in the past year.
Some articles to use as further reading on the subject:
- "The Drug War's Battlefield." TIME Magazine. 26-May-2008. pg 14-15.
- "Lawless Days." TIME Magazine. 2-June-2008. pg 11.
- Grillo, Ioan. "Law and Disorder." TIME Magazine. 16-June-2008. pg Global 9-10.
Immigrants
According to NPR, May 1st of this year (2008) was the date of a rally in MacArthur Park in support of immigrant rights.
Web Comics
Two webcomics that I read have made comics relating to elements of the May Day Mystery (although not to the mystery itself). There is a good xkcd comic about the Riemann Zeta Function, and an Irregular Webcomic about the Fourier Transform. (Incidentally, the Irregular Webcomic comic is a parody of xkcd.) Oh, and there's an xkcd about the Fourier Transform.
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon
This book, like the Baroque Cycle above, is all about money and cryptography. One passage in particular drives right at the heart of one of the mystery's themes:
"Hilbert, Russel, Whitehead, Godel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics down and beginning from scratch. [...] It led to a renaissance...like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back from scratch." (Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. New York: Avon, 1999. pgs 113-4.)
There, we have much of the mathematics in the May Day Mystery tied into the undercurrent of Revolution that permeates it.
Plato's Republic and The Bible
I found references to Hirelings in The Republic 374b and in Job 7:1