Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Anansi — illustration by Pamela Colman Smith, 1899, from a collection of Jamaican Anansi stories. Colman Smith (later famous as the artist of the Rider-Waite tarot) captured the trickster's characteristic quality: alert, watchful, present at the center of a web of connections that only he fully understands. In the beginning, stories did not belong to people. They belonged to Nyame , the sky god — the supreme deity of the Akan people of what is now Ghana, the god who holds the world and who in the beginning held all stories too, keeping them in a box high in the heavens where no one could reach them without his permission. A man — or a spider, depending on the moment, since he is both — went to Nyame and asked to buy the stories. Nyame named the price: four impossible things. You must bring me the hornets (who sting before you can see them coming), the python (longest and most dangerous of serpents), the leopard (fastest and most deadly of predators), and the fairy (an inv...