Imagine with me, if you will.
Imagine with that deep faculty that built worlds for you as a child.
That, if you try, even now, can make trees speak and rivers laugh.
Back and back. Beyond the ages of Iron and Bronze and Stone.
Into the Golden Age, and this is not the age of metal-glint.
This is the age of honeycomb and honeydew, of mead-blood and winedark sea. Of nectar and ambrosia and the golden apples of Idunn and the Hesperides.
Drink with me, all flushed and rolling, all whispering, all gorged on godflesh and wreathed in smoke. Swallow it down as it boils and bubbles in the belly and bowels.
Falling back and back, dizzy and something lifting in your chest, something peeling back, the muscles of your face shifting, baring your teeth in a smile so very eagerly shared by all the others in the room.
Perhaps they have hair like snakes, faces all ash-white and blood-daubed; ochre-bodied, painting fingers that writhe and twist in strange and potent shapes that leave electric blue-traces across your vision.
Did you think you were the only one? The only child of this ancient knotted line; your breath like all the winds flasked in skin, all tied together with thread?
And now you are undone, the storm unleashed:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. - Kubla Khan, Coleridge
Imagine then. Imagine, yes.
Imagine the salt on the wind, the iron in the blood. The crackle of flame.
He waits beside the fire, there in the bloodlight of womb, there in the centre of the very heart of big bellied verdant Mother.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
The antlered shadow there, scalp festooned with the roots of the bone-tree, stretching up and down into darkness, wreathed in laurel and vines. There, all enmeshed, lie serpents and eagles, black-eyed and unblinking in their wisdom.
He throws the bones, carves the lots; weaves a cat’s-cradle out of his own viscera. She nourishes him there. in the darkness. Enfolds him as he tends the flame that he brought from the stars with a word that is not a word..
Such a handsome beast is he. Such a monstrous uncreated coming-together and breaking apart of vision and form. Did you think yourself the only one, when he still remains buried here in dark earth?
The shining colours of his guts; with one deft pull he snares you; ten thousand masks cast out by his shadow; plays you like a lute, like a liar strumming a lyre.
Down and down. There lies his spear, his club, his bow, his skull-breaker, his arrow of gold.
Down and down, in fire and flux, in ice and pestilence. There he sits, in the age of honey and amber. Even the rocks groan and bleed at the pulsing of his drum, as he bores his way down through the top of your head, as he kisses, wakens the snake and she rises to meet him
The secret centre. He drinks from the freezing fount and transmutes it to intoxicating gold.
Pharmakon. Body and blood. He gives himself to us, so to be devoured, to ignite the fire in our breast and bellies.
A mocking smile, echoed from the other end of time:
“Do this, in remembrance of me.”
We, the hunted, lay ourselves prostrate, as his curved bone knife cuts us free, hands roughly kindling organs, filling them with light and darkness. With solemn mockery, he cleaves the stone of our heart in two; we are to bleed forever, to stream back across the tracks, to this, the place beyond beginning and end.
Bones disarticulated and dismembered, we are naught but hide and flesh to be stitched together with thorn, scratched and cut down to the bones, our marrows stuffed with secrets.
Burns us black, so he does, until we all go up in smoke; draws us in, holds us there, and then expels us as changed breath and a gesture, so we rise and stream forth from that place; almost to see her emerge from the darkness, this lady of feline grace and hawkish beauty, this leader through the labyrinth.
We do not imagine her, flanked by kings of beasts, heavy pawed and golden. Do not see her in feathered cloak and covered in gleaming jewels. Do not see her place her hand upon his shoulder, and watch him strengthen, watch the weariness we never saw was there, the loss of what he gave for us, be banished once more. We do not see her give him the cup, the mark of her eternal favour.
For this is just postulate. Just a might be.
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