The suffering man is in prison – love’s prison – where he remains confined while the woman he loves broke free and fled. Similarly, the Soul will one day free itself of the Body’s prison. Before this happens, however, let us hope that, with the ardour that these stains of red seek to evoke, it will first break its chains and renounce its prisoner-like sadness and self-absorption. This is the message that the heavenly messenger brings to the suffering man.

The lover frees herself from her loved one, bringing their love to its end. Likewise, the Soul separates from the Body, though still wrapped in the cold bands of its last physical raiment. It departs, taking with it, to the moist Garden of Eden where one day a new life will be born, a golden treasure.

...might so much suffering be nothing other than a metaphor of the Soul’s incarnation and decarnation? Its acqui- sition of a ‘Soma’, a body dark and cold as stone, is it a metaphor of how painfully we are conceived from the division of the original One?