Tulpas, Lithopedions, and Jellyfish Babies
It’s not a birth. The Mother vomits BOB, expelling him from her body, and this leads to the idea that BOB is an abortion, or is a miscarried lithopedion.
Like any good surrealist object, the dark orbs representing BOB and tulpas in Twin Peaks resemble many things at once — chewing gum, used eraser heads, tonsils, placentas, holy stones — and each association carries with it a vast symbolic complex with room to dream (please see my essay The With). It recently came to my attention that BOB and tulpa orbs also resemble stone babies or lithopedions. Stone babies occur when a fetus dies and is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, so it calcifies on the outside as part of a foreign body reaction, shielding the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the fetus and preventing infection.
The eyeless Mother, tulpa orbs, and the Arm also resemble the eyeless and boneless human “jellyfish babies,” born out of the nuclear contamination of indigenous women from the Marshall Islands. After World War II, the U.S. exploded 66 nuclear bombs there, one of which, “Bravo,” was 1,300 times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.