Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Where the Rhine narrows below Sankt Goarshausen, the river makes its deepest and most treacherous passage: a channel once split by reefs and whirled by crosscurrents, overhung by a colossal slate cliff more than a hundred meters high. The boatmen of the old river feared the place doubly—for its water and for its voice, since the rock returns a manifold echo , and the murmur of a hidden waterfall once threaded through it, so that the cliff itself seemed to speak. Its name is the Lorelei : from lureln , to murmur, and lei , the old word for slate rock—"the murmuring stone." And upon that murmuring stone, the legend seats a maiden: golden-haired, golden-combed, singing at dusk high above the water, so that the boatmen look up, and looking up, forget the reef, and the Rhine keeps what the song has caught. She has been called the German siren, and the label is almost right and completely insufficient—for the Lorelei is that rarest of legendary beings, a phantom whose birth certif...

William Blake (1757–1827) was not understood by his contemporaries. He was dismissed as a madman, a minor eccentric, a curiosity. A century after his death he was recognized as one of the most original minds in the history of Western art and literature — a poet, painter, engraver, and visionary who spent his entire life in London working in deliberate isolation from the aesthetic fashions of his time, producing a body of illuminated books, watercolors, and engravings that constitute the most sustained attempt in the Western tradition to give visual form to spiritual realities directly perceived. Blake was not depicting metaphors or allegories. He was recording what he saw. From childhood, he reported visions: angels in a tree, the prophet Ezekiel on the ground, God's face at the window. As an adult he conversed with spirits, was visited by historical figures, and received dictation from supernatural beings he described as his "spiritual friends." Whether these experiences...