The master must establish a sanctuary at far distances, somewhere in the hills, the caves, the subterranean lairs, a remote island, desert, jungle, or sea.
The masters were the ones of otherworldly features, like no others, beyond all others… at once visionaries, liars, sorcerers, thieves, seducers, and assassins… a riddle broken into many pieces here.
He is hopeless in his release, only managing to breathe gasps of sanity with eyes blinded.
Whatever the truth, these treasure hunts are also part of a long history of fascinations with secrets and hidden things which continue to exert their pull from underneath the earth, legends of conspiracies and betrayals that reach further and deeper than any motivation ascribed to them by historical accuracies, mind-boggling accounts of greed and revenge, stories of pirates, thieves, brigands, and cutthroats that live precisely in the dense mist between history and legend.
Spiritual practices modify the boundary of inner and outer: alter flows of consumption, centers of perception, limits of self-care, vectors of accumulation, receptors of bliss.
The square — home to the uprising at its dawn — here serves as a radical quarantine, fabricated by the shepherd-turned-hunter to smother a political sickness…It is an ancient medicinal ritual, this bloodletting.
People, goods, forces seep in and out of the city, along lines both visible and invisible. Cities as continually bordering phenomena. Horizontal roots, flowing fibers, extend as a capillary consequence. Orifices emerge only to melt into bright lava.
Is there a typology of the sacred that generates itself through the forces of torrent and outpouring (that which spills infinitely, bleeds everywhere), and then another that manifests only through processes of containment and drought (that which wastes nothing, overflows nowhere)?
And yet, far from all vertical meditations, we find ourselves confronted with a horizontal universe of black nets strung together as suspension bridges (there can be only unstable travelers/passengers here).
There can be only one, in the end. The rest, like the cobra used in ritual suicide by ancient Egyptian pharaohs, become nothing more than a serpentine sacrifice. The tangled martyrs of the frenzy.