VII. Presence
He Who Found the Beast in the Labyrinth
The Mythic Crossing
The Horned God of the Forest wore antlers as a crown, sitting cross-legged among the beasts — not ruling them but belonging with them, the horns the sign that the divine and the animal had been reconciled in a single body, a single sitting, a single breath.
The creature in the labyrinth — the bull-man, the beast in the maze — was denied and became monstrous through the denying. He was hidden at the centre of a structure designed to conceal the shame of his existence. He devoured what was sent to him because devouring was the only relationship the denial permitted. What is denied becomes monstrous. What is reconciled becomes whole.
The Traveler’s Record
I found the beast at the centre of the labyrinth I had built around it — the corridors of avoidance, the walls of respectability, the turns and dead-ends of a structure designed to keep me from arriving at the centre where the thing I feared most waited.
The beast was smaller than I expected. Smaller and sadder, its eyes the eyes of a creature that has been confined too long in a space too small. It looked at me. I looked at it. The looking was the reconciliation — not a ceremony, not a dramatic embrace, but a mutual recognition, a seeing that went both ways simultaneously. I sat down on the floor of the labyrinth’s centre and the beast sat beside me. We breathed together. The walls, having no further purpose, began to thin. The light came in. The beast did not flinch.
— A History of the Great Wheel and the Ten Gates
For the psychological mechanics and traps of this gate, see VII. Presence in A Wanderer’s Guide to the Gates →