Tuesday 17 November 2009

Ineffable, glamorous noise

I'm very struck by this quotation [which I found, incongruously enough, here; p.37] from an ancient Hermetic text called the Poimandres. The links, above, have the Greek; here's C H Dodd's English:
I seemed to see the darkness changing into a sort of moist nature, unspeakably agitated, giving out smoke as from a fire, and producing a sort of ineffable, glamorous noise; and then a cry was sent out from it inarticulately.
Isn't that wonderful? I don't mean to trivialise it, but it's easy to imagine precisely the sort of music that passage suggests.

Which is to say: the creation of the universe troped as a rock concert.

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