“Emanating”
Sample from ATYYA
Now you are one with the wind
With the water, with the stars
With all of nature, with all animals
And with all humans;
You feel the heat and light
Emanating from the flame in your heart
You are radiant with the glow of love.
Phosphorus / El-Zahra / Prometheus / The Good King
Phosphorus
The Greeks named the morning star Phosphorus—the light that rises before dawn. Hesperus was the same body seen at twilight. The ancients did not at first realize they were one; only later did observation reveal a single orbit behind two names—the same star rising and setting on opposite horizons. Phosphorus was expectation, Hesperus fulfillment; one light arriving, the other departing. The pairing expressed continuity, the unbroken rhythm between beginnings and endings. “Bringer of light” meant illumination that anticipates rather than conquers—a glow that announces the day but yields to it.
El-Zahra
In Arabic, El-Zahra means “the shining one” or “the radiant.” The term was applied to both Venus and to certain human figures, often women, associated with purity and intelligence. In the Islamic Golden Age, philosophers and mystics alike described light or fire that reveals without consuming—illumination as the highest attribute of the divine.
She is brilliance tempered by proportion, an image of clarity that reveals without injury. In this she stands as counterpoint to the story of Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysus, whose demand to see Zeus unveiled resulted in her annihilation. Too direct a vision of the divine leads not to enlightenment but to ash. The philosophers of the Golden Age, writing centuries later, drew a similar distinction: to cling too tightly to light is a form of error. Excess, in the Buddhist sense, is attachment—the wish to possess revelation rather than dwell within it.
In Tibetan Dzogchen (the “Great Perfection”), the term rigpa names a state of “pure awareness,” sometimes called “pure light” or “pure seeing.” It is the condition of perception unclouded by grasping, where mind and world are transparent to one another. El-Zahra belongs to this same lineage of restraint—not an ascetic denial but the discipline of equilibrium.
Prometheus
Prometheus, in Greek, means “forethought.” In Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, he is a Titan who fashions humankind from clay and steals fire from Zeus to give them life. In later Hermetic texts, the demiurge—the craftsman god who forms the world—becomes the antagonist, not the creator of light but its jailer. Within that cosmology, Prometheus can be read as the counter-movement: not rebellion against heaven, but resistance to the prison of matter. He is the lightning strike that arrives just when it is needed, when a single flame might keep a family from freezing to death.
This polarity—between maker and liberator, between form and spark—is reflected in alchemical language. The human being is the half-made or half-awake king: partly clay, partly fire, suspended between inertia and illumination. To embrace the spark is to continue the work of transformation; to refuse it is to remain bound, repeating the torment that the later myth externalized in the chained Titan. In this reading, Prometheus is neither thief nor rebel but intermediary—the intelligence within matter that remembers its origin.
Rough Stone, Rolling: Ashlar Work
The same mythic grammar reappears in the symbolism of Freemasonry, where the initiate shapes the rough ashlar—the unhewn stone—into the perfect ashlar fit for the temple. The chisel and mallet, the compass and square, the letter G at the center of the emblem—all point toward geometry and generative order: the disciplined transformation of raw material into meaning. It is a Promethean labor, a belief that technical, economic-based craft itself can also re-make an individual.
My great-grandfather was a practical Freemason, his mark carved on the granite of his grave. He left his wife—my great-grandmother Rhea—and their three young sons, Jeffry, James “Jim” (McBeth > Mcbeth), and Glen, to work in California during the Great Depression. Jim Macbeth later became a stone sculptor in the 1960s and then the Art Department Head of Weber State University in Ogden, Utah; on his sabbatical, he traveled to Greece to choose stones for his mid-century, non-representational sculptural work in person. The family carried that quiet ethic of the craft: shaping what you can with what you have.
The phrase “a rough stone rolling” captures the same motion—the restless, unfinished search for form. It’s an American idiom of becoming, of traveling toward one’s own refinement, even in the timeless archetypical way of “Going West to California.” In it survives the hope of Prometheus: that through work, even ordinary work, the spark of creation can be preserved.
The Good King
The Good King appears across myth as the counterpoint to tyranny: rule as balance rather than command. In the Irish cycles, the Dagda—literally “the Good God”—is both ruler and maker, a being of appetite and abundance. He carries a club that can kill with one end and restore life with the other, and a cauldron that never runs empty. His reign is not moral perfection but right proportion: an acceptance of the world’s fertility and decay as part of one rhythm. In him, governance is physical labor—plowing, feasting, keeping the seasons in tune.
From the Dagda’s myth the medieval Green Man inherits his face: leaves spilling from his mouth, sometimes nose, eyes half-open, half-dreaming. You see him carved into cloisters and doorways, the vegetal intelligence of matter watching over human passage. The image endures because it reconciles hierarchy with humility—the crown and the root bound together.
Far from Europe, the pattern repeats. In the Maya world, kingship was equally cosmological: a ruler’s body stood for the renewal of time. The jade mask of Palenque, carved for the tomb of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, distills that belief into stone. Its surface glows with a living green, the mineral echo of new leaves. The face is calm, lips slightly parted, gaze turned inward as if in perpetual breath. Looking at it too long, I start to cry. The expression is neither sorrow nor triumph but awareness—the stillness of a person who has accepted his return to earth.
Good King rules not by decree but by reflection. In him, divine order becomes humane. Tolkien’s Return of the King carries the same inheritance: a wounded land awaiting the steward who can restore its measure. The hope is always the same—that one day, right rule will again mirror right relation, and the kingdom of God, or of balance, will take shape on earth.
Light That Liberates
Across cultures, the figures who embody illumination are never merely rulers; they are liberators—beings whose radiance dissolves fear and unbinds what has hardened in the world. Krishna is one of the clearest expressions of this pattern: playful, disarming, musical, quietly wise. His brilliance is not the punishing blaze of a sun god but the intimate glow of clarity, joy, and recognition.
He is a king not by lineage but by conduct. In the stories, Krishna steals butter, dances on poisoned rivers, lifts mountains without strain, and counsels a warrior into steadiness with a vision that spans the entire cosmos. His kingship arrives not as decree but as presence—a form of moral luminosity that restores proportion simply by existing in the world with a grounded joy.
Seen this way, Krishna stands closer to the Green Man than to the emperors of epic. Both figures express an intelligence rooted in renewal, humor, and fertility; both resist the rigidity of empire. The Green Man’s leaf-sprung face—half smiling, half wild—offers the same lesson as Krishna’s flute: that vitality can be a form of governance.
This grammar of illumination resurfaced, unexpectedly, in the Bay Area of the 1960s. When A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in San Francisco in 1966, the Hare Krishna movement settled into a city already carrying another kind of awakening. Hippies chanting in Golden Gate Park shared sidewalks with the earliest generation of semiconductor engineers; ecstatic devotion and scientific experimentation unfolded in the same fog-thick air. Both promised liberation through pattern. Both offered altered states—one through mantra, the other through mathematics.
Light in Matter
By the mid-1960s, the Bay Area was developing two very different traditions of illumination. In Golden Gate Park, the new Hare Krishna community chanted a Sanskrit mantra meant to clear perception through repetition; a few miles south, engineers at Fairchild and Stanford were learning how trace amounts of phosphorus or boron could turn silicon into a material that alternated between conductivity and restraint.
Both groups were, in their own ways, experimenting with how pattern changes consciousness. Histories of the counterculture—such as Timothy Miller’s The Hippies and American Values (1991)—often overlook how close this spiritual movement was to the early semiconductor labs chronicled in Christophe Lécuyer’s Making Silicon Valley (2006). Yet both lab and temple practiced a form of disciplined attention: chanting as a stabilizing vibration, doping as a controlled disturbance.
A transistor is, after all, a small argument about how light behaves inside matter, just as Krishna’s teachings in the Bhagavad Gita (c. 2nd century BCE) are an argument about how clarity behaves inside the mind. The Bay Area simply gave these older metaphors physical form: stardust purified, etched, and asked to think.
