Out of Darkness into Light

Out of Darkness into Light

… a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path       Psalm 119

“… and so, my dearest Aunt, to the last epic term of my course for which you have so generously provided.  For my final Assignment I was given an old manuscript, E Tenebris in Lucem, and told to study it from board to board. Never have I found a task so hard. Getting into the book was no problem, quartered oak is my cover of choice and a pleasure to devour, but the elegant hand of the text and the miniatures illuminated with malachite and lapis lazuli, hammered gold and cinnabar, told a story so shocking that I felt I was making a diabolical journey through a land of macabre fantasy.

I walk in a dark forest, where the dense foliage overwhelms the light and the stony path has no visible ending. I peer out between the massive trunks and I can see a landscape of savage beauty and wretched tragedy. A great wall of water, Leviathan risen from the ocean, pounds inexorably across the land, casually destroying everything in its path - whole villages smashed, animals trees and men tossed together into the air like feathers in the wind.  There are small children working long cruel days in factories, young boys with rifles across their shoulders forced marching into war. In the backstreets  of the sex trade there are prisoners in the brothels, while lone servants are bullied and abused in the despotic mansions of Mayfair and Belgravia.

Behind me in a war that has no end I hear a nation mourn its dead, the flowers of many forests cut down and trampled beneath the mine and the gun, enemy united with enemy in an unseemly dance of sinew, blood and bone. The little Forest Owlet cries for its home disappeared under the blade of an illicit axe, the Amoy Tiger roars in vain for its dead mate while a single humped back whale sings its erie threnody to an empty sea.  It is as if all the oppressed and dispossessed beings of the earth are gathered at my back and raise their voices in a great anthem of mourning which first envelopes and then overwhelms me. Numb, I shrink into my orange shell, fold my six legs and await my fate.

The dark canopy opens and there ahead on a wide sunlit plain, tall figures clothed in light open their arms to sorrow, to despair and to a world full of fear. The landscape changes again: a tigress and her cubs come out of the forest; flowers paint the ground where blood was spilled, and new saplings spring from the craters of urban devastation. Slaves are set free; the starving and the dispossessed are sheltered and fed; old enemies embrace. It is a new song this shining world sings now, an anthem of love and hope.

I make my way along the path through the soft grass into the golden light of a new day, the final leaf of my book. As I approach the old oak board, the gateway back to my home, I pass by the figures of light. One, with eyes deep and dark as the waters of Bethesda, gives me a blessing, and I see that  his hands are marked with scars where perhaps iron nails had once been driven through…

Your affectionate Nephew,    A. Bostrychus Capucinus “

Naomi