Mythic Form and Herophany is an open question written in yellow ink in notebook 67, beside the passage labeled “Strange rocks”: “Forma mítica y herofanía [en esa serie sobre los que estuvieron bien alto]. ¿Y qué vieron?” (“Mythic form and herophany [in that series about those who were very high up]. And what did they see?”).
| Notebook | C67 |
| Spanish entry | Forma mítica y herofanía |
The annotation
The same folio holds the genealogy of the twelve children of Maleika, green ink announcing all the apocalypses together, and blue ink on the neutrality of the Mercane. The yellow ink only asks.
Herofanía is the note’s spelling of hierofanía, the sacred manifesting itself; mythic form is the figure the manifestation takes to be told. The note shifts the question from who to what: not the roll of those who climbed, but what each saw.
Candidates for the series
- The climb of the grown tower, c. 1890 A.D.A. (Eiffel Tower Tournament): the Regulators (Maleika, El Fabuloso and company) ascended through prismatic barriers to the Cup of a Hundred Wishes; El Fabuloso, looking down from the top, made the wish toward U-5-7-1.
- Those who must climb the Mountains of the Moon, above Lake Victoria, to seek the serpent’s egg (Lapis Philosophorum), as the blue ink of the next page commands.
- Doubtful: the one who wished to see the sea before the end and saw the cosmos divided in four (Multiple apocalypse). He descends to the shore, so he is outside the series unless mythic height means visionary height.
Open questions
- What those at great height saw is unanswered; the question is kept open as a task, to cross-check the notebooks case by case.
- If the ink pattern holds (black records; blue continues and leaves questions open; green prophesies in images), yellow may be the Narrator’s contemplative register.