Two Darknesses

13 August 2025

I oft' think my heart quite dark,But there is yet a spark;Of Shiva, Saturn's cart¹Which lovely play their part.

Yet there are some of thoseHearts not of Shiva's clothesThat make Ginnungagap weep²For there is darkness of the deep³And the darkness far beyond,One is but a sternly friend,To the other I say; be gone.

Notes

By the editor.

Shiva has a fierce form as Mahākāla, “Great Time” (kāla can mean time or death), whom Tibetans call the Great Black One, the darkness into which all forms dissolve. That is the stern friend of the poem's “darkness of the deep.” In The Immolation of God Shiva is the god of Hell, born from fire. source ↩
Ginnungagap: in Norse myth, the yawning void that lay between fire and ice before the world was made. In the Gylfaginning the northern side fills with ice and frost while sparks from Múspellheim light the southern. The name is usually read as “gaping abyss.” source ↩
Genesis 1:2 (KJV): “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The Hebrew tehom, “the deep,” is cognate with the Akkadian tiāmtum and with Tiamat, the primordial sea. Compare the waters of nothingness in What the Ghosts Actually Are: a darkness that is the ground of things, and a friend. source ↩