He couldn’t say when exactly, but at some point Frank came to understand that this bearer of light was his soul, and that all the fireflies in the tree were the souls of everyone who had ever passed through his life, even at a distance, even for a heartbeat and a half, that there existed such a tree for each person in Chiapas, and though this suggested that the same soul must live on a number of trees, they all went to make up a single soul, really, in the same way that light was indivisible. ‘In the same way’, amplified Gunther, ‘that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of Mind.’
Against the Day, 1117
When it was Cyprian’s turn, he knelt and whispered, ‘What is it that is born of light?’
Father Ponko was watching him with a look of unaccustomed sorrow, as if there were an answer he must on no account give, lest it call down the fulfillment of some awful prophecy. ‘In the fourteenth century,’ he said carefully, ‘our great enemys were the Hesychasts, contemplatives who might as well have been Japanese Buddhists – they sat in their cells literally gazing at their navels, waiting to be enfolded in a glorious light they believed was the same light Peter, James, and John had witnessed at the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. Perhaps they asked themselves forms of your question as well, as a sort of koan. What is it that was born of that light? Oddly, if one reads the Gospel accounts, the empahsis in all three is not on an excess of light but a deficiency – the Transfiguration occurred at best under a peculiar sort of half-light. ‘There came a cloud and overshadoewd them.’ as Luke puts it, those omphalopsychoi may have seen a holy light, but its link with the Transfiguration is doubtful.
‘Now I must ask you in turn – when something is born of light, what does that light enable us to see?’
It turned out, as Yashmeen was quick to grasp, that father Ponko was approaching the Transfiguration story from the direction of the Old Testament. He seemed under no illusions about her religiosity but was always willing to chat with the unbelieving. ‘You are familiar with the idea of the Shekhinah – That which dwells?’
Yashmeen nodded, her years with the T.W.I.T. having provided her a broad though shallow footing in British Kabbalism. ‘It is the feminine aspect of God.’ Eyes brightening, she told him of the transcendent status enjoyed at the Chunxton Crescent by card number II in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, known as The High Priestess, and of the Mayfair debutantes who showed up there on Saturday nights in veils and peculiar headgear and with very little idea of what any of it might mean – ‘Some thought it had to do with the Suffragette movement, and they spoke vaguely of ’empowerment’ … some, men chiefly, were in it for the erotic implications of a Judaeo-Christian goddess, and expected orgies, flogging, shiny black accoutrements and so forth, so naturally for them the whole point got lost in a masturbational sort of haze.’
‘Always that risk’, agreed Father Ponko. ‘When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as ‘taking away’ his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world.’
From the chapel came voices singing what the hegumen had identified as a canone of Cosmas of Jerusalem, dating from the eighth century. Yashmeen stood very still in the courtyard, as if waiting for some vertigo to pass, despite having already understood that vertigo was somehow designed into the place, a conditon of residence. She recognised here what the T.W.I.T. had always pretended to be but was never more than a frail theatrical sketch of. ‘Talk about reflection’, she found herself muttering.
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