A Snarling Graceful Spiral

“Now,” said Eleleth, stretching his legs and rising to his feet, “when these events had come to pass, he, Sabaoth, made himself a huge four-faced chariot of cherubim and appointed an infinite number of angels to act as his ministers. They cried and sang his gospels, flapped their wings under his gaze and carried his word to the seven dimensions. Under his order, they created the finest harps and lyres.”

Eleleth paced before me, his pale golden feet landing softly on the ruined marble that surrounded the fallen silver tree. The shuffling of his body was soft, lulling me into a deeper state. Because of this, his words went into me, each syllable absorbed into my flesh as though the knowledge had always been part of me.
He continued:

“Sophia took her daughter Zoe. She had the young thing with ripe breasts and flowing red hair sit beside Eleleth, she sat beside him to teach him about the things that exist in the eighth heaven. Sophia placed the angel of wrath on his left to teach him what Zoe could not. Since that day, his right has been called 'life' and the left has come to represent the unrighteousness of the realm of absolute power above.”

He paused and studied my face for a moment. I could not tell what he saw. In me was the dark ocean of curiosity, the confusion of my restless mind, a mixture of desire and obedience. These were all things in me and I searched his eyes like a mirror, looking for the answers that I sought.

“It was before your time, Norea, that they came into being.”
He took a long, slow breath and motioned for me to follow him. I rose. I heard the shuffling of my own feet adding to the music of the trance. Somewhere in the distance there were singing birds. We walked in the shadow of the great giant tree and then passed into sunlight.
Eleleth led me away from the silver leaves and slowly we entered the domain of the golden tree. I looked deep into the branches, into the thick mess of its leaves, the dense thicket of life that it bore without complicated thoughts and manifestations of habit and emotion. I saw thick roots weaving gracefully into the earth. I saw bright fruits that caught my eyes. They dripped like beads from the branches even though the thick trunk was split almost in half, as though smitten by a burst of bright lightning. The fruits were small and lustrous and red.

“Now,” Eleleth told me as we looked over the tree and began to circle its great base, moving clockwise. “When Yaldabaoth saw him, Sabaoth, in this great splendor and at this height, he envied him; and the envy became an androgynous product. This was the origin of Envy. And Envy engendered Death. Death engendered his offspring and gave them each charge of its heaven. All the heavens of chaos became full of their multitudes, but it was by the will of the father of the entirety that they all came into being, after the pattern of all the things above, so that the sum of chaos might be attained.”

He plucked a small fruit and placed it carefully in my hand. I looked down at it, bright as a blood stain, a perfect sphere dwarfed by my fingers.

"There, I have taught you about the pattern of the rulers; and the matter in which it was expressed; and their parent; and their universe."

He finished speaking and looked at me. Again I wondered what he saw.

This was the manner in which I, Norea, was taught by Eleleth. That was the manner in which I felt the depth of my root, a snarling graceful spiral that dipped into the four corners of chaos.