LA PAPESSE

...in the city of millarius*, I met with the famous po-warrior Boe an Fop’h who had invited me over for dinner. I’ll tell you later about that man’s interesting eating habits. Our meal was light, but good. There was a lot of wine, red wine, dry. We had a bottle each, but we didn’t feel dizzy. “There is magic at work anytime friends meet around a proper table” declared Boe. Then he said: “There is a fantastic and mysterious quality about the Universe that many people forget or do not want to see. Some god is responsible for it all, the people say, or there is a set of laws and principles that explain it all, say some other people. That remains a mystery, a sort of night, a metaphorical Night that’s very dark, so dark that most of us trying to get across the darkness get lost on the way, fighting uselessly with po-monsters and meta-creatures of the mind that swallow us, and that’s it. Only he or she whose personality allies the most rigorous logic with the most exquisite sensitivity can find the way across the Night, guess what is hidden, and detect or make out what is the fabric of this world. The intuitive character, whose sight might very well not be the best when it comes to some ordinary business, is nonetheless the favorite hero of any story inspired by Isis, the Priestess of Mystery, the Goddess of the Night. I have a painting here” said Boe, “that I would like to show you. It is a Botero, the original. It was stolen, and brought here for me to show you now, for some reasons that you will hopefully understand later on, while an excellent copy was left in its place, on Earth, with the rest.” Boe took out a painting from behind an oblong panel. It was the portrait of a woman who could have been a man, she was very androgenic, but nevertheless she was a she, and quite beautiful if you ask me. Her stance spoke to my imagination. She was sitting still, calm, inscrutable, silent, hieratic-there really was something about her that was related to a feeling for the sacred. Behind her was a wall, red and blue. The first color often represents fire, vigor, strength. The second one, blue, usually means air, the Oxygon, the breathing that feeds the fire, and life. Those two colors put together, in that context, they remind us of the fundamental duality of our world: The Thing And Its Reflection, or The Absence And The Absence Of Absence, if you like. Certain people have called them Jokan and Bahoz. If you can grasp that, that’s it: You are enlightened. You are the Eye that is the Body that has that Eye that is looking at itself. What is, and what can see itself. That is not something to be known, but to be correctly imagined, that is, if you’ve got Isis on your side.

Anyway, that’s what I told my friend Boe an Fop’h. He seemed satisfied, but he wanted me to go further. I told him: “The Night is cold. The Priestess is well clothed, with a white stole that’s coming down on her chest. It symbolizes the shining light that will guide the Explorer of the Night. -What about the cat?” asked Boe. “That is a Sphinx” I replied, “waiting for us with these three questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where do we go?” …but I wanted to say something about the sleeves of that woman’s dress, especially the right one with its alternating stripes of black and white, light, and darkness. There isn’t one without the other, not even darkness: “If there is no light there can be no darkness.”

There was also a book. The woman was touching it with the tip of her left fingers. That is the Book of Secrets. “Do you know what are the secrets in that book?” asked me the po-warrior. I answered with a smile.


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*an Esfodi city or village name never begins with a capital letter.

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[Picture: La Papesse by reading_is_dangerous (painting by Botero)]

This week’s Blogging for Charity challenge was to write a poem inspired by Botero’s painting. This is my entry.

I recommend Oswald Wirth’s introductory book, the Tarot of the Magicians, and his Tarot Deck/Ow78.