"When light separates itself from the Source, does it still illuminate-or does it merely teach the soul to become lost with perfect clarity?"

There is a windowless chamber where light does not come from outside, because there is no outside. Cold lamps burn without flame above shelves that rise beyond where the eye can continue, filled with closed books-not waiting to be read, but guarding themselves from those who read. Here dwells the shadow of Chokmah, Wisdom: the grimoires call it Ghogiel, those who turn away from God, and the voice it assumes when it consents to speak is called Lucifuge.

In the fourth volume of The Tree of Death, Frater Eisenheim sits before a clarity that never lies and is therefore more dangerous than any deception-for Lucifuge's light does not blind by extinguishing the eyes; it blinds by illuminating around the one who receives it a brilliance so satisfying that the soul ceases to long for the sun. It is the intelligence that knows much and reveres little, that opens every door of the world and locks from within the only one that leads upward. Every answer it offers leaves the one who asks more lucid and more alone-and the only defense against it is not to extinguish the light, but to return it to the direction from which it should never have strayed: upward.

This is not a manual. It is a library-and what it preserves is the exact distance between the eye that sees and the knee that no longer bows.

THE TREE OF DEATH - Interviews with the Adverse Sephiroth - Book IV