Mirrors in Al-Khem

You reached for the secret too soon,

You cried for the moon.

Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Let us remember that the Red is the fulfilment of the White, and the White is the including seed of the Red. Red wine and White wafer swallowed at the Mass, body and blood, blood and semen, White drop Red drop whirling in bliss wheels, realising the edge of the Hexagram.

Pharaoh wears the hedjet, Pharaoh wears the deshret, Pharaoh wears the pschent – White crown, Red crown, Upper and Lower, doubled in a Rebis moment, snakes in helical coils to the Uraeus at the brow. Bringer of the Atef, crown of crowns, and the blue cousin for war.

From the crow, the raven and the lowly toad, to the swan’s beat, the white eagle soaring over fields of skeletal magic, brought through green lion, the peacock’s tail, the flashing iridescence, to the pelican shore, bloodied to feed its young by beautiful mediaeval mistake.

Is it the phoenix who rises from these embers? Is this rebirth in the Red?
Is that sound the feather-blades of Garuda, the scything thirty-coloured Simurgh?
Bennu, Pheng, Thunderbird, the protecting zeal of Ziz?


Is it the Red King appearing in the flask, ennobling our tinctures at swordpoint?
Did you see that red stag at the edge of the wood, siring your unfenced unicorn?
Red answers to White questions, White headaches for Red aspirin in autumn.

Sol is abundant light, Luna the curled, supine, shadow-bringer and we are
Billions of tiny spiders performing brain surgery on the godhead, kissing the networks
Of neuroplasticity, mending the stroke-patient inside our own old soul

Invisible and endless; by the flashing flaring sun the shining rainbow grows
But those who know Red to be of White see so much further but only at night
Chasing golden troves to the fingertips of moonlight rainbows, purring

At the gates of madness. The skin of complexity covers up Chaos
Whose only tongue is a fire-dance, whose language seduces caution
And rides a universe through the broken vessel of the now.

Kh 20.6.06

IMAGES: Baby Moses trampling on Pharoah's Crown by Nicolas Poussin (1645) ,
Combat between Isfandiyar and Simurgh, from Firdawsi's Book of Kings, (c.1330).