The Secret (a treasure hunt) / Image 01

The face in the rocks is a impregnable match for the manner editorial cartoonists portrayed Ronald Reagan, the former California governor who was elected president in 1980, soon before The Secret was published. There is the stick out, rounded chin, the overdo sharp-pointed nose, the smile, the wrinkles, the eyes squeezed about closed, the broad brow, and the haircloth dyed dark and combed into a pompadour. It was a identical coarse theatrical performance of Reagan in the early 1980 ‘s ( back when people hush read newspapers ) and the profile is credibly meant as a bare hint toward California .

  The facial features of the woman appear to be Asian.  In keeping with the immigration theme of The Secret, the city most closely connected with Asian immigration to the United States is San Francisco, California. The delineate of the board mail is very similar to the profile of a cable car, one of the iconic symbols of San Francisco .     Golden Gate Park is one of the major open spaces in San Francisco.  It is positioned just across the Great Highway from the Pacific Ocean and it forms a long rectangle that flares out slightly at the northeast corner.  The panel on the front of the woman’s dress has a similar shape and a similar flare, suggesting that it is a map of the park. The “ Gh ” at the top of the full-dress panel may be a reference to the Great Highway, which forms the westerly boundary of the park. The charwoman ‘s crossed arms represent Crossover Drive, where Highway 1 crosses the park. Stow Lake and Strawberry Hill would be united into the bluing strawberry-shaped area directly below the woman ‘s wrists .

tell suggests that the amphetamine helping of the gore ( above the thwart arms ) is reversed. That would explain the backwards “ Gh ” and it would explain why the draco ‘s head touches the left border rather than the right edge, to show where the Golden Gate Park Senior Center is located on Fulton Street. But the lower region of the panel is not reversed, because it clearly shows the “ flare ” where the park expands outwards as Fulton bends at 7th Avenue .

If the dress is intended to be interpreted this means, so that the cross arms match Highway 1 and the bottom conclusion of the panel matches the eastern end of the park, then the western area between Great Highway and Crossover Drive is basically reduced to about nothing. This might indicate that we are meant to focus our attention on the eastern end of the park .

If you ‘re not on the grind in San Francisco, you can still explore the eastern end of the park using the official Interactive Golden Gate Park Map . Some features on the woman ‘s face, peculiarly the eyes and nose, resemble features on the faces on the two concrete sphinxes that are located near the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park .

The charwoman ‘s dilute, arching eyebrows that form a semicircle above each eye resemble the eyebrows on the Buddha sculpture in the japanese tea garden at Golden Gate Park .

All of those sculptures are in the easterly end of the park, in the area emphasized by the map on the womanhood ‘s apparel .

For a closer look, see the full-sized effigy comparison .   The design for the dragon appears to be based on a pair of ironwork griffins that adorn the doorway of the Golden Gate Park Senior Center, located at 6101 Fulton Street on the northern edge of the park. The dragon wing human body looks like a waterfall. Huntington Falls is on Strawberry Hill. It ‘s fed by an artificial reservoir at the top of the hill, which could be symbolized by the circular shape beside the wing, the tips at the crown of the wings showing the water ‘s “ entrance indicate ” feeding the fall. A 360-degree scene of the site is available on Google Maps .
( Notice the hand rail for the fall stairway below the reservoir. )

  The shape below the crossed arms and beside the dragon’s wing is similar to a strawberry (including the dotted texture). This could make it a hint toward Strawberry Hill, the island in the middle of Stow Lake.  The lake and the island would be just below Crossover Drive in our rotated map. The tall, rounded stones behind the woman are alike to the stones that make up Huntington Falls on Strawberry Hill in Golden Gate Park. It is n’t clear, however, when these ( artificial ) stones were added .

  A 1901 photograph of the falls by the Detroit Photographic Company shows a more roughly and jagged sketch. The fact that Image 1 shows the round off stones suggests that Preiss visited the parking lot sometime after construction was well afoot. We know, however, that the book was published well before the make was finished in 1984 .

If construction was taking place on the island in 1981 when Preiss came through, it is highly improbable that he would have buried a casque there where it could be destroyed. It is far more likely that he found a spot with a horizon across the water to the falls and the new rocks . Notice the subtle lap formed by the dots in the “ strawberry shape ” of the effigy. ( It is apparently the only circle of this kind in the whole dress texture. ) If the form itself is Strawberry Hill, then the encircle of dots might indicate an area of sake at the eastern peak of the island, where the Huntington Falls stairway is located. This web log post ( and source for the painting ) shows pictures of the stairways at the web site .

On the other hand, the encircle of dots may be a representation of the chinese pavilion, which is formed by eight cylindrical pillars around a cardinal circular area . Each sleeve of the woman ‘s dress is decorated with two columns of blue squares. The woman ‘s leave index finger is inverted and pointing up at the lower edge of the fourthly course of blocks. The womanhood ‘s proper exponent finger is right-side-up and pointing down at the upper edge of the fourth row of blocks .

Some people have suggested that we are meant to count all the aristocratic squares on each handcuff, but that would n’t explain why the fingers seem to be pointing in such a debate way at certain rows .

besides, the column start very sharply and cleanly at the top with accomplished squares but fade away into shadows at the bottom, indicating possibly that we are only supposed to be doing a accurate count from the acme .

The draco ‘s weave body is presumably meant to represent the winding roads inside the park, but most of it does n’t match up at all. The one exception is at the southern end of Crossover Drive, where Martin Luther King Jr Drive starts at the edge of the park, extends out to the middle of the parking lot, and then makes a broad, sweep act to return to the edge of the park .

The dragon ‘s body captures this reach of road very well, confirming both that A ) the lower helping of the apparel is n’t flipped, and B ) that we should focus on the area equitable east of Crossover Drive .

The dragon ‘s impart talon appears to be making a circle to draw our attention to a little bit of land immediately east of the tip of Strawberry Hill where MLK Drive has begun to curve back to the boundary of the park. The GGP feature in that spot is the Garden of Shakespeare ‘s Flowers .

  The window at the exceed of the double is a fair match for the alcove that holds the break of William Shakespeare in the Garden of Shakespeare ‘s Flowers at Golden Gate Park. At the time Preiss would have visited the park ( around 1981 ), the alcove had sturdy metallic element doors that were closed each night to protect the bust from larceny or vandalism .

The presence of a flower garden beside the arced doorway in the wall would be a good explanation for the first lines of Verse 7 : “ At stone wall ‘s door / The air smells sweet. ”

Shakespeare female chest photograph used under a creative coarse license

Some rights reserved by joshleejosh on Flickr

The alcove with the Shakespeare bust is inactive there, although the metallic doors were removed recently. eminence that the brickwork on either side of the alcove has a radiation pattern like to columns of the Roman numerals I and II. This might be the divine guidance for the Roman numerals on either side of the trim panel in Image 1 .

note besides the gray spheres at the top of the wall. This might be the inspiration for the moons above the arch doorway in the picture .

( photograph with two of our audacious San Francisco researchers, Chris and Isabella, in the Garden of Shakespeare ‘s Flowers in February 2018. )   Just below the barred window in the rock there’s an odd formation that appears to be an older man with bushy eyebrows and a mustache.  This may be a visual reference to the statue of Giuseppe Verdi that stands at an intersection in Golden Gate Park, across the street from the Shakespeare Garden.   

Verdi burst photograph used under a creative park license

Some rights reserved by torbakhopper on Flickr

merely across Stow Lake from Huntington Falls and the chinese pavilion, there is a bannister that ends in a gyrate identical exchangeable to the spiral shown in the stem of the rose in Image 1. The train is where the road around the lake makes a hairpin curl, and the rail is for the steps down to the japanese Tea Garden .

It would be identical utilitarian to know if there has always been a exchangeable spiral railing on any of the handrails that go up Strawberry Hill beside Huntington Falls .   The digits 8 and 3, or the numeral 83, may be visible in the rose stem .

somewhere near Huntington Falls there is a historic marker with a big date of 1893. This may be a reference to that in some manner, although it would be a reach to find a “ 9 ” in the scent of the stem . The other popular interpretation of this image is that it means we should be standing on or near russian Hill behind the iconic sign at Ghirardelli Square. Viewed from behind, the gestural gives a glimpse of a backwards “ Gh. ” This interpretation would explain why the two letters are backwards and why the “ henry ” is shown in lower-case. This explanation would besides match up well with Verse 7 and a space where “ the air smells sweetly. ” And this explanation besides works with the references to cable television cars, because the backwards sign is visible from the Powell-Hyde line .

besides, possibly this is an indication that the trope that we are viewing is in reverse ; in early words, we are looking at the MIRROR double, and to “ get ” what ‘s going on, we need to consider what we see in overrule .