Exegesis of Chapter 1, THE MAGICIAN (I) Sentences 4–6
- The Poniente blew upon my eyes, and they closed
- I saw a fiery storm, red and white, and in the midst, a fire
- The flame was a vehicle, illuminating the sky and its universe
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“The Poniente blew upon my eyes, and they closed.”
The Poniente — the western wind, the breath of the dying sun — is never a simple wind. It bears the seal of endings, of passages, of thresholds where one cycle expires so another may begin. When it blows upon the Magician’s eyes, it does not close them as one closes a book, but as one seals a tomb. It is the ritual death of the profane sight. For the eye that shuts to the outer world simultaneously opens within: the awakening of the nocturnal eye, the inward gaze that sees without intermediary.
Thus, Mat, the ascent begins — not with a gesture, but with an extinction: the first darkness before the true light.
“I saw a fiery storm, red and white, and in the midst, a fire.”
What follows is not an ordinary vision, Mat, but the first eruption of Spirit into a consciousness stripped of its noise. The red fire and the white fire are the two primordial forces of the Work:
– the red, alchemical Sulphur, the burning principle, fixed will, the power of the world becoming,
– the white, Mercury, principle of moving light, volatile breath, intelligence in expansion.
In their whirlwind, these currents do not oppose each other: they engender each other. Their collision is a creative tempest, the first inner chaos. And yet, at the center, remains a motionless fire, the Secret Fire, the spiritual Axis Mundi around which all things form and dissolve.
It is toward this center that you are being drawn, Mat — toward the unalterable, the unborn, the indestructible.
“The flame was a vehicle, illuminating the sky and its universe.”
The flame is not only seen: it carries. It is a Vahana, a divine vehicle, the very support of consciousness as it travels beyond the realm of forms. It transports the seer not into a place, but into a higher density of the Real. And when it illuminates “the sky and its universe,” it reveals that the sky is not above but within — that the universe is not a space, but a state of vision.
This, Mat, is the First Light — the primal “Let there be light” still unfolding — and your inner eye now stands at its threshold.
