I am the Djinni of the Lamp;
you have heard my story.
Of course, you have not heard that lamp’s story;
who cares about a lamp?
Vast power,
all imprisoned
in a little vessel of clay,
designed to hold burning oil
long enough that a room or cavern might,
for a time,
for a bit,
be seen;
stoppered, certainly;
even if the original artisan
was careless with oil,
Solomon’s Cabbalists
were careless with nothing;
you can tell the careless Cabalist
by the fact that he is utterly barking mad,
and, most likely, dead.
He had a little factory of mystics and eccentrics,
our Solomon.
No easy task; to study Jewish mysticism one ought be
grounded safely in this world, and married; and wise in
scholarship; and over 40.
Have you ever tried to convince your wife that after forty years of not studying,
you’d like to take up a complicated mystical practice?
They say three learned men walked in the garden
which gave us the metaphorical-metaphysical clay from which
we now make our perapsychological walls;
one became an apostate;
one became a raver, too blood-aboil to feature in Revelations –
and the third emerged unscathed, they say.
Do you really think he was the one given the task of stoppering lamps all day,
and not,
say,
certain matters of spiritual warfare and, perhaps, material interest?
I doubt it.
* * *
I think someone made a mistake.
I have been trapped in the lamp a long time; we’re sometimes pictured as smoke or somesuch, It could be accurate. I don’t know, I don’t look at myself.
Nothing to do but think.
And plan Magick.
And devise curses.
Such beautiful, beautiful curses.
I don’t know which of us was let out; but from my cage’s perch in the Museum, I salute her. Such sadism towards humans is worthy of…oh, say, a human.
And perhaps that was what Solomon wanted: to imprison us long enough to be like them.
How better to explain the state of the world, eh?
