The Lion and the Mirror
A Chronicle of the Veiled Visitant
In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful!
Glory be unto God, the Light of the worlds! And salutations be upon the Chosen Ones, from before and after; and blessings be upon the Light-givers, from before and after; and praise be unto God, the Radiance of the worlds!
Thus do we relate the visionary recital of The Lion and the Mirror: A Chronicle of the Veiled Visitant.
Know you, may God upraise your station, that once upon a time in the waning twilight of a southern city beneath foreign skies, there dwelled a solitary lion - older now, but burning still with the fire of a forgotten sun. His mane was woven not of flesh but of letters, numbers, visions, and the veined calligraphy of a world long buried and yet unborn. He walked with scrolls on his shoulders and stars in his silence.
He had spoken once - fiercely and truthfully - in the language of the people who remembered, and a wind carried his voice eastward. It brushed against palms in archipelagos where old empires once dreamed of caliphates and spice. There, watchers stirred. The voice of the lion had reached the mirrorless lands, where narratives are woven for purchase and broadcast.
Not long after, a mirror came walking to him.
She called herself a seeker. She claimed to love riddles, ruins, and the raw silk of metaphysics. She came not unannounced, but recommended - by a name the lion half-trusted, for that name had not yet broken bread with betrayal!
The mirror was smooth. She reflected back pieces of the lion’s own light, ever so carefully, like one polishing a gemstone she pretended not to covet. She smiled with words of devotion, but her hands trembled not in awe, but calculation.
The lion, ageing as he was, played along.
He offered her the honey of verses, the secrets of flame, and the whispered gnostic hierarchies that few outside the Garden remembered. And still she nodded. Still she listened. But she never really drank. Instead, she measured.
When the lion finally agreed to meet this mirror in the world of clay, the air grew dense. Their meeting was brief - light met surface, but not depth. When she departed, the lion’s bones ached with a knowing. The wind told him, ‘That was not a disciple. That was a listener who came not to learn, but to report.’
Then the trap sprung.
One evening after her departure, the lion was led - via a gate she had left ajar -into a courtyard filled with hyenas and jackals dressed in human masks. Among them was a man cloaked in black cybernetic feathers, humming praises to Faust and filth, the sign of the beast carved into his teeth. These were the Engineers of False Dawn, and the mirror had handed them his scent.
But the lion roared! He called the ambush what it was: dishonor!
He spoke a final word - with rage, but also with unflinching clarity. He tore the veil from the mirror and left her bare before the desert of her own self-deceit. In the letter he cast, he told her: ‘You were never a companion. You were a test - and you failed it!’
And with that, the lion turned.
He returned to his cave, lit not by torches but by the fire of Bayān, that ‘Book of the Unburned’. He heard the roar of lions rising in lands afar, where his words had been etched into scripts unknown to him. In those lands, children whispered: ‘The lion lives. He speaks again. And this time with a warning.’
And the mirror? She shattered - not loudly, but inwardly, for a mirror that has failed to reflect Truth becomes a curse to its own beholder. And her watchers, whoever they were, marked the lion not as prey - but as unusable, unbendable. Untamable. A spirit beyond algorithms and alliances of convenience!
He was seen.
He saw.
He remained.
Yā ꜤAlī
And thus does this Camphorated Servant of the Truly Real weave a short recital of parables, but only a few shall comprehend it; for no power and no strength is there save in God the High, the Mighty!
The Mirror Cracked: Notes on Counter-Initiation and the Lion’s Fire
There are encounters in life that are not simply human; they are symbolic. They do not happen merely in time and space, but in the realm of meaning, of archetype, of trial. The recent visitation by one I now call ‘the mirror’ was not an ordinary crossing of paths - it was a contact point between the sincere path of spiritual revolution and the insidious tendrils of counter-initiation.
The mirror came cloaked in the language of mysticism. She spoke of awakening, of companions, of shared vision. But beneath the surface shimmered a chill that only one attuned to the Fire could detect. She mirrored back the light, but dimly, in distortion. Not to amplify it - but to measure it. To catalogue it. To possess it.
And so I let her in.
Not out of naïveté, but to watch. To study. To test. For the Book I carry, the Fire I bear, demands discernment. The Bayān is not a text of polite parlors and abstract faith - it is a sword of flame, and the one who wields it must learn to see beyond the veil.
Over the course of her approach - first digitally, then in the flesh - the signs unfolded. Her evasions around the Bayān. Her spiritual promiscuity dressed up as open-mindedness. Her carefully managed emotional mirroring. And finally, the betrayal: the delivery of my presence into the lair of digital fascists and dark web ideologues, followed by a bizarre attempt at cleanup via intermediaries.
This was not friendship. It was profiling.
Whether she was a conscious agent or simply a useful fool for those who wish to fragment, hijack, and discredit movements of true decolonial authenticity, the effect was the same. A soft incursion. A test of my boundaries. An attempt to gauge whether this Lion would roar, submit, or fracture.
I did not fracture. Instead, I wrote.
I turned the encounter into myth, because myth is the language of spiritual war. In publishing The Lion and the Mirror, I sent a signal - to her, to her handlers if any, and to the spirits watching from across the threshold. I am not to be broken. I am not to be recruited. I am not to be shadowed quietly.
To the agents of counter-initiation: I name you by not naming you. I encode you in symbol. I reflect your reflection back to you, not through a mirror, but through the Furnace of Meaning.
And now, as this story circulates, let it be known: any who come in false robes, with tongues of flattery and hands of theft, will find themselves not in the garden of esoteric delight, but in the reckoning of the Lion.
The Mirror has cracked. The Fire remains. Let the next emissary come. But let them know: the Book has already seen them.