Reader’s Guide

The symbols and source material below are a key for the novel As A Thief in the Night. Our hope is that readers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the book will be able to do so here. In each instance we have included an image of the symbol or reference involved, the portion of Thief it appears in, and, if necessary, a quote from a relevant source. What we have not done is interpret the material within the context of the novel. This can, and should only, be done by the reader, who must always be relied on to use his or her own artistry to arrive at the meanings most appropriate to them.

Chapter One: Marga

How long would the flame whisper to him? The pupils of his plain blue eyes contracted as the fire bent to his hand. The scent of sulphur rose from the match as a fallen leaf, fall-stained red and yellow, trembled as he held it eye level between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
Joseph Campbell explains the difference between the Left and Right Hand Paths in Mythos, Psyche and Symbol.

Adam and Eve

The scent of sulfur rose from the match as a fallen leaf, fall-stained redmain.php and yellow, trembled as he held it at eye level between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He brought the flame to the leaf's curved edge and watched the fire draw its edges together and consume it.

“Then the eyes of both them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”
-Genesis 3:9

Climbing the rotting driftwood and rusted wire fence he caught and tore his Luke Skywalker t-shirt. Small drops of blood showed through the white cotton. He had scratched his side.

“All heroes are shadows of Christ”
-John Piper

BM: “Does a movie like Star Wars fill some of that need for the spiritual adventure? For the hero?”
JC: “Oh, it’s perfect. It does the cycle perfectly.”
-Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

Ezra sat down on a rock that stood up out of the water. He thought of the icebergs he had learned about in school and how only a small portion is visible to the eye while the greater portion remains a mystery unless examined by special means.

"The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
-Sigmund Freud

Two Rainbow Trout swam around his ankles, courting each other. They came face to face, looking to him as if they were about to collide, but passed seamlessly by and circled each other. He watched the creases they made on the stream's surface then followed them as they disappeared under the glare of the water's mirror.

“In this Platonic Year (the ‘aion' of Pisces), which has lasted for two thousand years, there has been a conflict between great opposing forces, which is symbolized in astrology by two fish swimming in opposite directions. As Jung delineates this history, he sees the conflict as raging between spirituality and materialism (spirit vs. body) and
a parallel conflict between good and evil.
-Murray Stein
From the Introduction of 'Jung on Evil'

We have missed the dance, but we come in time to witness the first stirrings of alchemy. They dance in the fall, usually in mid-October, in the small lagar to the side of the old schoolhouse. There, with old speakers on the front porch playing, on this occasion Peter Gabriel's Security album, the grapes are tread by the sisters. And then they make the wine.

Walpurgis Night

Walpurgis, Ontario is a small town with a population of just over two thousand just seventy-five kilometers southwest of Toronto.

Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was, alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.
-Bram Stoker

Mount Parnassos, Delphi, Greece

They had only one customer, a Greek who owned a restaurant named Parnassos that sat upon a hill just off of the Walpurgis main square.

“The Thyiades, as the Dionysian women were called at Delphi, awakened the god who for the first half of the two year period vanished into the dark depths of the Delphic mountain country around Parnassos.”
-Carl Kerenyi
Dionysus, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life

Zeus gives birth to Dionysus out of his thigh.

Despite being born prematurely at seven months, and the early threats this had posed to his health, he was tall for his age, though thin.

"In the compulsion of birth pains, the thunder of Zeus flying upon her, his [Dionysos'] mother [Semele] cast from her womb, leaving life by the stroke of a thunderbolt. Immediately Zeus Kronides received him in a chamber fit for birth, and having covered him in his thigh shut him up with golden clasps, hidden from Hera. And he brought forth, when the Moirai (Fates) had perfected him, the bull-horned god (theos taurokeros), and he crowned him with crowns of snakes (drakones), for which reason Mainades cloak their wild prey over their locks.”
-Euripedes, The Bacchae

"Elsie, why did my dad leave us?" Ezra interrupted abruptly.

Elsie and Olyvia exchanged a knowing glance.

"Mom said there was a storm that night, that there was lightning and that it split the oak tree in the church yard..." His voice trailed off. The video game in the background made exploding sounds as Layne blew apart asteroids.

Elsie looked at him softly. "There was no storm, Ezra. No thunder, or lightning, or rain," she said before he could ask.

Maenad with thyrsus.

Ezra’s eyes traced the slightly faded, serpentine, ivy tattoo that ran up Olyvia’s ankle all the way to her lower calf. It peaked out from under her long, thin summer skirt as she stirred the must with a long wooden stick. The stick had a strange looking pinecone on its end.

"In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god (Dionysus) or his worshippers. "
-Sir James Frazer
The Golden Bough

Faust in His Study, Rembrandt (Mephistopheles entering through the window)

Heavy grapes shower

Their sweet excesses

                                             Into the presses;

                                             In streams are flowing

                                             Wines that are glowing

-Faust
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Very Still Life, Jack Kevorkian

Olyvia ignored her comment with a sideways glance. “Then in his sixties he takes this art class. Have you seen his paintings?”
“Yeah,” Sarah answered hesitantly, “and he obviously has some talent, but to me they’re gratuitous, like his speech. It seems like he’s just using death to be controversial, to make a name for himself. He enjoys the attention.”
“Death is what moves him. We don’t know, maybe he’s made a pact with it.”

Bernard Picart, The death of Semele by Zeus’ lightning.

But the couple loved Ezra and Layne deeply, and both did all they could to try to spare the boys the pain implicit in having a father who had abandoned them, and a mother that Fate had taken by fire.

“...and so appareled, came to Semele; but she whose mortal body could not bear such heavenly excitement, burst into flames and was incinerated by Zeus’ gift.”
Her child (Dionysus) was torn out of her womb unfinished and -this part is scarcely credible- was sewn into his father’s thigh, where he was brought to term.”
-Ovid, Metamorphoses

The goats were outside the barn in the enclosure again. They began their song and the noise drew itself out along a line of haunted air, rose to a pitch higher than anything he thought an animal could produce, and then fell to a soft trembling that he thought might just contain beauty, and possibly would have, had the sounds that came before not been so terrible. He looked down at her again. Her eyes, broken open by the phantom song, shone like two moons in the vacuum of cold starless space.

"To begin with Dionysus. We have seen that he was represented sometimes as a goat..."
-Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough

"Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the crucified."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Ecce Homo

“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats."
-Matthew 25:31-32

Chapter Two: The Armour of God

The tragedy of Balyn and Balan

Ezra did what he could to comfort him in the odd purgatory that he seemed to be trapped within, but even when he was smiling he appeared to be sad. Not having a name seemed wrong, so Ezra, having dreamt up a resurrection, decided to give him one: he named him Balyn, after a boy in a story he had read about two brothers named Balyn and Balan.

“Now, said Balin, when we are buried in one tomb, and the mention made over us how two brethren slew each other, there will never be good knight, nor good man, see our tomb they will pray for our souls. And so all the ladies and gentlewomen wept for pity. Then anon Balan died, but Balin died not till the midnight after...”
-Sir Thomas Mallory
Le Morte d'Arthur

Amanti Art

Under the influence of this need the impression he held of his father leaving and the lightning scarred tree in the churchyard had been drawn together by some hidden chain of emotional necessity until the two lines of force had become superimposed upon one another. This strange cohesion bound his father's abandonment, the tree, and the lightning that had split it with such singularity that no denial from the sober mouth of reality could now tear them apart.

"While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.” In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree”
-Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Hans Holbein

To depict Christ just before his resurrection Pentheus had selected Hans Holbein’s “The Body of the the Dead Christ in the Tomb."
“At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot -

Detail, The Sermon and Acts of the Antichrist, Luca Signorelli

The second painting that interested Ezra, Luca Signorelli's "Sermon and Acts of The Antichrist," was put up during the last two weeks of instruction as Mr. Pentheus spoke about The Book of Revelation. Two things about this painting continued to draw his thoughts to it in the days after he had seen it on the crumbling wall: that the man who had painted it had made the false prophet in the image of Jesus, and that Satan, who stood to his side whispering in his ear, and the man who looked so much like Christ, seemed to share a left arm and hand.

by Pietro da Cortona

"Reverend Father in God, I present to you these persons to receive the laying on of hands." Father Richard, with the bishop standing beside him, projected his voice out over the congregation, paused for the purpose of profundity, and then raised his eyes to indicate Ezra and his classmates.
Bishop Wrychuss cleared his throat audibly: "Take heed that the persons whom ye present be duly prepared and meet to receive the laying on of hands.”

"Then laid they [their] hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost".
-The King James Bible, Acts 8:17

Ezra looked down at his hands and began to hum, and then to sing along with the song that was playing on the radio. It was a song about a car—a car in which the woman singing wanted to escape. There was a man that she wanted to escape with, too. Her own mom had run away, and she could no longer stand the place she was living and the people that looked down on her. The song was about the feelings she’d had as she’d made her getaway. Now, new thoughts raced through her head; the man held her, and things would be different where she was going, things would be different and she would belong.

Chapter Three: Something Consuming in Salem

The magician held the quarter in front of his face between his thumb and forefinger, stared at it intently, brought it to his mouth, and then bit off the top half of it.

-

Judas Iscariot and the thirty silver pieces.

"That's twice I've done it. If you like, I'll perform the same feat as many as twenty-eight more times, for a total of thirty. Young man, what is your name?"
"Ezra."
"Ezra, do you have thirty silver coins in your pockets?" The boy felt absent-mindedly around the front of his pants.
"No, sorry, I don't.”
"Well then, I'll give you back over to your friends in hopes that one day you are fortunate enough to carry that much money around with you. Thank you for your help." The magician took his hand in both of his, shook it, bowed slightly, and sent him on his way.

"Then one of the 12, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, 'What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?' And they covenanted with him for 30 pieces of silver.”
-Mathew 26:14-15

The hanging of the Salem witches.

After accusations were made, after it had been ascertained that certain women had in fact been visited by the devil and had been asked to perform deeds on behalf of the Prince of Darkness, such as the baking of urine cakes and the murders of the servants of God, it was decided by the righteous right hand of Our Lord (personified by the local church and legal authorities) that those women so moved by the spirit of Lucifer should be put to death.

Grave of Sarah Good, the accused Salem witch.

Yes, those women would hang until they were dead, and their souls would be cast into infinite, unimaginable fields of fire where they would have the privilege of mingling their screams of terror and unending agony with their damned brothers and sisters—all of them burning, burning, burning.

Hathorne: Sarah Good what evil spirit have you familiarity with?
Sarah Good: None
Hathorne: Have you made no contract with the devil?
Sarah Good: No.
-The Salem Witchcraft Papers
Sarah Good under examination

Maenad being pushed on swing by a satyr.

Swing and spiral, swing and spiral, swing and spiral. The swing hung high in his grandfather's living room.

“In Athens the girls let themselves be swung in chairs hanging in trees and the boys were permitted to imitate them, since on Choës Day, the 'day of the wine pitchers,’ they imitated as far as possible everything that was done publicly at the feast of Dionysus.”
-Carl Kerenyi
Dionysus, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life

Tituba, the accused witch, instructing the children on the Devil.

Tituba (for suddenly he remembered her name) tapped the side of the pot a few times with a wooden spoon and then removed it from its hook above the fire.

Hathorne: Why do you hurt these children?
Tituba: I do not hurt them.
Hathorne: Who is it then?
Tituba: The devil for ought I know?
Hathorne: Did you never see the devil?
Tituba: The devil came to me and bid me serve him.
-The Salem Witchcraft Papers
Tituba under examination

John William Waterhouse

Just as Ezra had warned them, in the spot where the pot had originally been placed, a black circle had been burned into the floor.

“I now take my wand and from the center of the circle I face the area between the air and fire quarters.”
-Witch’s Circle: Rituals and Craft of the Cosmic Muse
Mary Kay Simms

Chapter Four: Lunar

Belle River, Ontario

Joseph Papineau, the ship's stout and weather beaten captain, spotted the mouth of a tree-lined river beyond rising waves, and pointing his drunken finger (which was missing its tip as a result of a fight at an Irish harbor bar) shouted, "Quelle Belle River!"

The fortune of us that are the moon's men
Doth ebb and flow like the sea,
Being governed, as the sea is, by the moon.

-William Shakespeare, King Herny IV

“The moon hero is the tragic hero in whom darkness rests, he has his own death in him, and he sheds his death as a serpent sheds its skin. The moon is therefore associated with the serpent, lord of the energies of the earth, who sheds his skin to be reborn: the reborn serpent, the reborn moon.”

-Joseph Campbell

"What was he doing?" he asked the Bird Man after the service was over.
"He was speaking in tongues."
"Speaking in tongues?"
"You haven't heard that before?"
"No."
"It's the language of the Holy Spirit. When you pray, sometimes you're filled with the Holy Spirit and it speaks through you like that."

Chapter Five: Messenger

Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He had the look of what Elsie would have called a "scholar”.

Mephistopheles (steps forward from behind the stove dressed as a travelling scholar, while the mist clears away): Why all the noise? Good sir, what is your pleasure?
-Goethe, Faust

The teacher laughed and pulled his collar away from his neck as if he needed more space to breathe. "No, Mr. Mignon, it's not that at all. In fact, I'm not Catholic either."
"You're not?"
"No. I belong rather," and he bit his lower lip, still amused with the boy's anxiety, "to the Church of Wealth and Taste."

He looked down at his hand and spread his fingers out, admiring his ring. "Do you like it?" He didn't wait for an answer but continued on as if to himself,: "I've had it for a very long time… Since Russia."
"Did you live in Russia?" Ezra asked, thankful for an opportunity to move the conversation away from the wafer.
"For a short time. I had very important business to take up there with a father and his sons, one in particular.”

“On the middle finger of his right hand there displayed a massive gold ring with an inexpensive opal.”
-from ‘The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare'
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Chapter Six: Timing

Dionysus on a cheetah.

Finally, a man on an old Cheetah motorcycle pulled onto the sidewalk beside the front doors. He had long curly hair, a pointed beard, and was old enough to be their father. With the nimbleness of a much younger man he hopped off the motorcycle and then took a moment to wipe some dust off the Cheetah that was painted on the gas tank.

Holy Water

As they approached the door, an old woman carrying a mesh shopping bag stopped to adjust the things she was carrying. Ezra and Adam waited for her to get out of the way, but the bottom of her bag ripped open and a glass bottle of spring water smashed all over the sidewalk. "Jesus Christ!" the old woman yelled, "Jesus Christ!”

"[A]nd the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water.”
-Numbers 5:17, The Holy Bible

Chapter Seven: Jason B. Prism

Nietzsche’s Madness

For some strange reason this was the breaking point for Jason B. Prism. He rushed up to the horse, threw his arms around it as if he were a mother protecting her endangered child, began weeping terribly, and could not be convinced to let go.

“As Nietzsche fell on the pavement, he threw his arms around the neck of a mare that had just been flogged by a coachman. He had to be carried home.”
-Walter Kaufmann
Nietzsche
Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

Chapter Eight: Tikto 5088

Tikto: to bring forth, bear, produce (fruit from the seed)

of a woman giving birth
of the earth bringing forth its fruits
metaph. to bear, bring forth

-The New Testament Greek Lexicon

Birth, by Alex Grey

Sometime over the last few weeks she had begun to be troubled by sporadic but intense lower abdominal pain. Olyvia was not one to run to the doctor for minor discomforts, but during the last few days the pains had grown worse and more frequent.

“Contractions are very strong at this point -usually 60-90 seconds long with intense peaks. ..During transition you’re likely to feel strong pressure in the lower back and rectum, nausea, fatigue...."
-Heidi Murkoff
author of What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Christ the Redeemer, Brazil

Sometime long before Ezra had met The Bird Man or come to the youth group or heard the congregation speaking in strange tongues, an old woman who had belonged to the congregation had donated a large porcelain replica of the Christ the Redeemer statue to the church.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of Icarus

They hid in the weeds to count the cash: it totaled $3,396 dollars! Ezra did the math and they split the money evenly, $1,132 dollars each.

“The number 1132 runs all through Finnegan’s Wake. It’s the number of fall and renewal -the speed of falling bodies being 32 feet per second and 11 being the number of the renewal of the decade. And recall Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where he says at 11:32 ‘...for God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may show his mercy to all.’ Our disobedience, our sinning-the Fall-gives God the chance to show and bring forth his character, which is mercy.”

-Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words

On the Art of James joyce

Sarah Hill Photography, Judas and the Thirty Silver Pieces.

"Okay, fine. How much you got, Gabe?
"Eleven hundred and thirty-two," he said, satisfied with the redress, "and a pocketful of silver.”

"Then one of the 12, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, 'What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?' And they covenanted with him for 30 pieces of silver.”
-Mathew 26:14-15

Christ Crucified on the Tree

He found himself sitting up in the tree. Below, the swings were still moving back and forth. The house, the vineyard, and barns were silent and still. Only the leaves playing back and forth in the breeze could be heard. The sound comforted him.

“The symbolic history of Christ’s life shows, as the essential teleological tendency, the crucifixion or the union of Christ with the symbol of the tree. It is no longer a matter of an impossible reconciliation of Good and Evil, but of man with his
vegetative (=unconscious life).”
-Carl Jung

The only word he could make out was the long one beneath the others: Rex Ivdaeorvm. She poked him sharply with her stick.

And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.
-John 19:19

"Fool boy, enough now! What he done wrote, he done wrote. What will ya do for yourself now?”

“Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.”
-John 19:22

Chapter Nine: The Unchained Earth

Gustav Dore, Dante’s Ninth Circle

Instead he sat frozen, like some haunted soul in Dante's ninth circle, Judecca, at war with himself, waiting to sit down to Easter dinner with those who had been fooled into loving him.

"Now was I, and with fear in verse I put it,
There where the shades were wholly covered up,
And glimmered through like unto straws in glass.
Some prone are lying, others stand erect,
This with the head, and that one with the soles;
Another, bow-like, face to feet inverts.”
-Dante, The Inferno

"Oh, a piece played by a pianist named Leon Fleisher, by Ravel, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand."

"For the Left Hand?"

"Fleisher lost the use of his right hand because of nerve damage. He plays the whole thing with his left.”

"Don't listen. Sin boldly! We must sin to overcome ourselves, to evolve into that which we were meant to be. To transcend our sins, to become greater than them, is worth more than all the timid holiness they preach.”

“To become greater than our sins is worth more than all the purity you preach.”
-Hermann Sudermann, Magda

For a moment he was filled with his friend's small gesture and it occurred to him, for the first time, that perhaps all was not lost. He still had a friend. With that small and infinitely noble act, Ezra felt as Oscar Wilde must have when, condemned as a pervert and sinner, he left the courtroom bankrupt and disgraced and, from among the taunting masses, Robbie Ross stepped out of the crowd and took his hat off to him.

Dionysus and satyr with flute.

Struggling to catch his breath, he looked for something to hold on to so he would not fall. Behind him the flute player picked up his tempo.

“The sound of flutes was heard and the odour of fragrant wine spread all around.”
-Thomas Bullfinch, Dionysus

At last, in the midst of the screaming and laughter, he succeeded in holding Ezra's eyes on his dirty face for a moment. "Now," the madman spit, "you have unchained this earth from its sun.”

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science

It was Jason B. Prism. He had stolen a pomegranate.

“The pomegranate is the fruit of the underworld.”
-Joseph Campbell

Sean Christian Dampier, Persephone’s Pomegranate

Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

Chapter Ten: Dionysus

She scratches a letter
Into a wall, made of stone
Maybe someday, another child
Won't feel, as alone, as she does.

Sitting in an angry chair
With angry walls that steal the air

Pelee Island, Ontario

Elsie was still not convinced that they were doing the right thing. She had not returned to Pelee Island and her father's vineyard for twenty years, and part of her felt like she was sending Ezra to a land of ghosts.

Skull discovered in Greece with two coins over the eyes.

"Here," Ezra said, "I've got fifty cents," and placed it in the man's hand.

"The ferryman of ghosts, Kharon at his oar.”
-Euripedes, Alcestis

Picasso, Young Acrobat on a Ball

The boy was standing on the ball with both feet, teetering back and forth a bit, with his hands up in the air. A big muscular man sat, thoughtful and disinterested, on a stool just across from him. No one else seemed to notice.

Robert Louis Stevenson

"No more sleeping on the job," Nectario said as he walked away. "Wine is bottled poetry, and poetry is the devil's wine, and it’s best not to miss out on either."

"Wine is bottled poetry.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

St. Augustine

“Poetry is the devil’s wine.”
-St. Augustine

On the cover was a large picture of Asylan, the lion, his mane burning around his face like the rays of the sun. Ezra ran his hands across it and remembered staying up late at night, sitting on the floor beside the small night light that plugged directly into the wall, and reaching the point in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where he knew he would not be able to go to sleep until he finished, until the question the story had awakened in him had been answered.

But it was the cover of the book Redford was holding that interested him. It looked half on fire, and on it, standing on the edge of some precipice that he was about to plunge into, was a winged figure that looked into the chasm before him, the posture of his body revealing that his descent would be both a tragedy and a victorious flight.

Wine vats for fermentation.

When Ruiz and Ezra got down to the cellar the next morning, Harold and Edward were setting up a ladder against one of the huge wooden vats.

“There are many frightening tales of how workers, going in to clean an empty vat after fermentation has finished and the wine has been drawn off, have collapsed, overcome by the remaining fumes.”
-Pamela VanDyke Price
The Penguin Wine Book

Dionysus and the Pirates

The Metamorphosis of the Pirates

Ezra stood up in his chains. His movement finally caught the attention of the strange assortment of pirates that had taken him, and with one voice they yelled for him to lie back down.

“Then Dionysus (for indeed it was he), as if shaking off his drowsiness, exclaimed, ‘What are you doing with me?’"
-Thomas Bulfinch
Dionysus, Bulfinch’s Mythology

And then, his bare feet on the ground, he called them up. Two mighty vines, like snakes hungry for the sky, shot up around the ship's mast.

“A vine, laden with grapes, ran up the mast, and along the sides of the vessel.”
-Thomas Bulfinch
Dionysus, Bulfinch’s Mythology

Ezra's father ran to the side of the boat, and seeing what had happened to Deshamps, turned to question Ezra, but as he did, his own odd metamorphosis began. His nostrils expanded and his mouth widened and he too jumped overboard.

"Howbeit, he turned the mast and oars into snakes, and filled the vessel with ivy and the sound of flutes. And the pirates went mad, and leaped into the sea, and were turned into dolphins.”
-Apollodorus, The Library 3

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Ducunt volentem fata, nonlentem trahunt.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Titian, Dionysus discovers Ariadne on the shore of Naxos.

"Naxos," he said, filled with the joyful paradox of knowing nothing about his destination, and yet knowing everything.

`To Naxos steer,’ Quoth Dionysus, ‘for it is indeed my home, and there the mariner finds welcome cheer.’
-Ovid, Metamorphoses

Picasso, Don Quixote

He heard something move in the vines behind him. Turning to see what it was, the most pathetic looking horse he had ever seen emerged from the rows of grapes.

"He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander...”
-Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

G.A. Harker, Don Quixote

He bore down on them, hard and fast, his spear in rest, bracing for what would surely be a horrible impact and probably his death.

"What you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
-Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

“Nectario and me and the others, we are all Zapatista. There is a war going on among the people of the sun, Ezra. We are its messengers, and its soldiers."

Zapatista insurgents, Chiapas, Mexico, Antonio Turok.

Ruiz told him of the struggles of the Zapatista in Mexico, of the corruption of the Mexican government, and the aid and complicity of the Americans.

Ernst Junger

“Books and Bullets have their own destinies.”
-Ernst Junger

Chapter 11: Ariadne

"Ezra?" she asked, quieting down a little. "That's a book in the Old Testament, you know."
"I know."
"Is that who you're named after?"
"No, I'm named after a poet."

“The marvelous painting that I’ve always had above my bed, The Saltimbanques, is a Picasso."

I admit it...what's to say
I'll relive it...without pain
Backseat lover on the side of the road
I got a bomb in my temple
and it's gonna explode
I got a sixteen gauge buried under my clothes...I play...

Dionysus and Ariadne

As if he were just now waking, he opened his eyes slowly and saw Ariadne's face, like the face of an Eastern siren hovering above him in the darkness. She sat beside him on the bed.

"The island where Ariadne was left (Naxos) was the favourite of Dionysus, the same that he wished the Tyrrhenian pirates to carry him to when they so treacherously attempted to make prize of him. As Ariadne sat lamenting her fate, Dionysus found her, consoled her, and made her his wife.”
-Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology

Plato, Detail from The School of Athens, Raphael

"But Plato's philosophers were detached from their thoughts, and from themselves, in the necessary way. Truth was their god, not victory, at least not in the shallow sense most of us think of it, and anything that didn't serve the truth was discarded.”

Chapter 12: Transmutation

The inside of a foundry looks something like an ill begotten hybrid of the industrial world's hell, and a furnace room churning out smoke and heat in the bowels of a late nineteenth century steamship. Everything is black and covered in ash. The molten metal sends up burning fireflies into the air around huge crucibles, machines, and transport vessels. Workers wear heavy, silver, full-bodied protective suits that one would expect to see worn when an alien planet is being explored, or when the damage of a nuclear accident is being surveyed.

Big Sur, California

"Take a job at one of the vineyards, study tragedy, camp at Big Sur."

Gustav Klimt, Tragedy

"Tragedy?" Nick asked, as if it didn't belong with the other two.
"Yeah. I want to read all the great tragedies…" He paused. "I have a suspicion about them.”

“In the Old Tragedy one could sense at the end that metaphysical comfort without which the delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy

“The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy

What made this particular cylinder block unusual though, was that when it was removed from the mould the man removing it discovered that it had hardened into what appeared to be gold.

As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change.
-Carl Jung
Psychology and Alchemy

I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.
-W.B. Yeats
Rosa Alchemica

Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapports with the unconscious and his contents initiate an evolution, more precisely a real metamorphoses of the psyche.
-Carl Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections

An Alchemist at Work

Alchemy Woodcut