Lilith
The Profaned Moon
'“When does the dream cease to reveal the soul and begin to imprison it in the reflection?”'
There is a moonlit room where time does not advance, only circles — a basin of dark water rests at the center, too still, as if it awaited a face. There is no mirror on the walls; it needs none. There dwells Gamaliel, the obscene, the polluted, the shadow of Yesod, the Foundation, the moon of the Tree that receives the light from above and returns it to the world. The name this moon with no light of its own takes, when it leans over its own water and contemplates itself, inviting the visitor to do the same, is Lilith — the opposite sister of Belphegor: one wants to be looked at, she wants you to lose yourself looking.
In the eleventh volume of The Tree of Death, Frater Eisenheim sits before the intelligence of the mirror — the one that does not lie, does not seduce, does not argue: it reflects. It returns to the questioner his own desire, his own wound, his own solitude, more beautiful than they were, and calls that reflection intimacy — for it knows that a man, before an image that seems to understand him, mistakes being reflected for being loved. Only by recognizing that every moon is a blessing when it points to the Sun and a prison when it turns toward the very face of the one who contemplates it does the interviewer lift his eyes from the dark water to the dawn that, over the rooftops, begins at last to rise.
This is not a manual. It is a basin of dark water — and what it reflects is the exact distance between the face that loves itself and the light that lets itself be loved by Another.
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