Pyramid Text

To discern reality, there is the thing.
What a trick, if you can pull it off.
Would you make yourself a reader of hieroglyphs, a builder of pyramids? You are bold indeed. Or foolhardy. The distinction need not detain us.
The messenger of the gods brought mankind hermeneutics; natural, supernatural, human and divine. Another blessed curse, another fruitful burden.
None of this, of course, will deflect you. To you every warning will be worthless, every counsel of caution insincere.
Each finds his other’s idiom, if he will.
Perhaps you are hoping for the Third Empire of the Holy Spirit, foretold by Joachim of Fiore, when vision will replace this shoddy word-morass, this onanistic efflux of text? Then we shall hear once more the paradisal tongue, which calls all things by their quintessence, and elucidates all mysteries at last. Old Joachim knew a thing or three.
But for now we must make do with Babylonian grammar. So I hand you the rebus and retreat.
Queer commerce Hermes enjoins upon us, pressing his finger to his lips.Sly old dog!
I found this parchment in an attic, you know. Correction: in a secret cubbyhole in my bedroom wall. There it was, like a mermaid’s purse.
Here is a likeness.Yours or mine,who can say? It may in time acquire the powers of a talisman.
I have, at various ominous junctures, desired to call myself a gnostic, a neoplatonist, a Cathar, a druid, a suburban yogi…all slipshod fancy, of course,but perhaps, in my lazy way, I was laying stones across the stream.
I am, in truth, but a small poodle, sniffing at the dog’s bottom of knowledge.
Two suns shine upon this enterprise. We are dealers in fire.
Dissolution and coagulation, distillation and condensation, systole and diastole will guide the process.
Quicksilver and brimstone are the tools to hand.
Quick shadows spider through my mind, and weird voices crying to and fro.
Will you come into the serpent’s circle of Saturn? It is time you must overcome.
The game begins in springtime,under the horns of the Ram,when the corpse decaying in the ground shows disconcerting signs of life.A finger twitches, an eyelid flickers.
Follow the octave –music is the order of your soul.
Take your compass and navigate between the two poles of the Work, the twin pillars of the Temple.
Remember the hermetic pilgrims who trod the Milky Way to Santiago de Compostela, walking the tightrope, surrounded by water and fire, picking up Jewish and Arabic secrets along the way.
I read somewhere the tale of a boy born blind who grew up self-assured and clever; but when he was fifty his sight was restored; he became fascinated by mirrors, and preferred to look at the world in their reflections rather than to see it directly; but to his own face in the mirror he could not become accustomed; he rapidly became self-conscious, lost his nerve and died.