Even those dreadful periods of “dryness” and of despair seem but the necessary lying fallow of the Earth. All those “false paths” of Magic and Meditation and of Reason were not false paths, but steps upon the true Path; even as a tree must shoot downwards its roots into the Earth in order that it may flower, and bring forth fruit in its season.
Aleister Crowley, John St. John, Prologue
What am I doing here, trying to make my way in a spiritual tradition whose roots are in the remote past, far from all the challenges of the present moment?
Paulo Coelho, Aleph
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth.” [via]