Exegesis THE HIEROPHANT (V) Sentences 4–6
4 The darkness became ethereal, the night of an iridescent azure
5 Watercolorist, put away your brushes by day, paint after midnight
6 Paint in solitude, only a gecko might observe you
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4 “The darkness became ethereal, the night of an iridescent azure”
Here, night ceases to be a simple absence of light. It becomes a substance, a threshold medium where matter thins and perception widens. “Ethereal darkness” suggests a veil lifted from reality, revealing hidden colors usually swallowed by obscurity. The “iridescent azure” is not the color of the sky but the shimmer of the invisible: the liminal glow seen only by initiates, mystics, and those who have trained their vision to perceive the subtle. This is the moment when the world slips into its occult spectrum, when the sacred groves open, and the veil between inner and outer dissolves.
5 “Watercolorist, put away your brushes by day, paint after midnight”
A command, almost an initiation. Day symbolizes surface reality — noise, intention, ego, the constraints of the conscious mind. But midnight invites the subconscious, the spirits, the whispering currents that shape true visions. To “paint after midnight” is to let intuition guide the hand, to surrender technique to trance. It is an invocation of nocturnal creation, where the watercolorist becomes a vessel rather than an author. The line establishes a ritual of artistic secrecy: creation must bloom in the hours when even time seems to hold its breath.
6 “Paint in solitude, only a gecko might observe you”
This solitude is a deliberate ritual, a withdrawal into the nocturnal chamber where true creation descends. The gecko, that small island guardian from Ibiza, expert in walking across ceilings as though gravity were a superstition, becomes the sole witness. No human eye may intrude; the act is forbidden to spectators. From above, the gecko watches you with an inverted gaze, perceiving the world upside-down, the way shamans say spirits do. In several South American traditions, the gecko is considered a messenger between the visible and the invisible, a creature that crosses thresholds silently and carries subtle signs through its presence.
