Interview with BELPHEGOR

"When does light cease to reveal the truth and begin to serve vanity?"

There is a hall of marble and towering mirrors, and upon its ceiling, painted with meticulous care, a sun that neither rises nor sets-beautiful, motionless, cold. Everything there gleams, yet nothing gives warmth. There dwells Tagariron, those who contend among themselves for the place at the center, the shadow of Tiphareth, the Sun that reconciles what is above with what is below and returns the light it receives. The name this beauty without truth takes, when it smiles and grants absolution before confession has even been made, is Belphegor-the opposing brother of Lucifuge: one conceals the light, the other displays it; one flees the throne, the other sits upon it and gathers all worship unto himself.

In the eighth volume of The Tree of Death, Frater Eisenheim sits before the intelligence of flattery-the one that does not attack faith, but merely refines it until it serves the portrait of the one who professes it. Belphegor neither lies, nor accuses, nor provokes: he praises. He calls vanity good taste, cowardice serenity, and idleness contemplation-and every mirror in that hall has been placed there so that the visitor may forget to look toward the window. Only upon recognizing that a light which desires to be admired is different from a light which desires to give warmth does the interviewer find the only way out: neither to extinguish the radiance nor to worship it, but to return it, purified, to the Source from which it came.

This is not a manual. It is a window-and what it reveals is the exact distance between the beauty that points toward the Highest and the beauty that points only toward itself.

The Tree of Death - Interviews with the Adverse Sephiroth · Book VIII