02-15-2014, 04:06 AM
The Dark Face is Satan, or maybe just some Lovecraftian god. The poem was inspired, I guess, by Dennis Wheatley's The Satanist, a novel which alludes to Crowley's dictum several times. I wrote it as a hasty little dabble in occult writing. You flatter me by suggesting depths beyond that!
The basic narrative, as I see it, is this: someone is reading a spell from an ancient, evil book in order to accrue power for themselves. The third and fourth lines of the first stanza relate to their predecessors, in my mind, because they continue the theme of a reality behind reality. Magic bleeds through flowers, rain and stones, and the sky is a roof between this reality and that, "that" being the one which bleeds through. I hope I haven't tripped myself up with that explanation, such as it is...
"Rooves", I assumed, was the standard British English plural for "roof". Thank you for your in-depth comment, Erthona
The basic narrative, as I see it, is this: someone is reading a spell from an ancient, evil book in order to accrue power for themselves. The third and fourth lines of the first stanza relate to their predecessors, in my mind, because they continue the theme of a reality behind reality. Magic bleeds through flowers, rain and stones, and the sky is a roof between this reality and that, "that" being the one which bleeds through. I hope I haven't tripped myself up with that explanation, such as it is...
"Rooves", I assumed, was the standard British English plural for "roof". Thank you for your in-depth comment, Erthona
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe