art and life

1. Ash-Wednesday
by T S Eliot
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing
again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

2. And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

3. It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother

4. For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.
At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over

5. the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.
IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the
springs
Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking,
wearing
White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem

6. The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time

7. The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who
wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.
O my people.
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross

8. The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the
time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude
where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the
voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew
be shaken and reply.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
 And let my cry come unto Thee. Comment is free
 How to believe

9. Series: How to believe
Previous | Next | Index
TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday – a call to
spiritual awareness that falls short
As with Dante, this is a poem in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of
heaven
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o Roz Kaveney
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o theguardian.com, Tuesday 6 May 2014 15.05 BST
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10. TS Eliot pictured in 1919. 'There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this
replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious
vision.' Photograph: EO Hoppe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Among the first fruits of TS Eliot's conversion were the first three parts of the poem
that he ended up calling Ash Wednesday and that, accordingly, we think of, not
wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece. Ash Wednesday is – after all – a
set of rituals and prayers that Anglicanism ended up transferring across from
Catholicism essentially unaltered. For a high Anglican like Eliot it was perhaps
especially important that Protestants such as Thomas Cranmer tried to remove them
and failed. The liturgy is a reminder of mortality and a call to repentance both
individual and collective; the poem does these things, but also creates, in its later
sections, an idealised medieval landscape, a jewelled pictorial Book of Hours to
contemplate as well as pray over.
Yet that is not all that is going on here. When the poem was first published as a whole
in 1930, it was dedicated to Vivienne, from whom he was increasingly estranged but
not yet formally separated. Eliot had chosen as his spiritual adviser a clergyman who,
after hearing his confession, agreed that he should probably end the marriage – it's
worth remembering that for Eliot, who never tried to divorce Vivienne, this meant,
because he took these issues seriously, a choice of celibacy. This is perhaps not
entirely surprising given how he had written of the sexual life in The Waste Land and
in Sweeney Agonistes; his misogyny meant that he blamed and went on blaming
Vivienne. (When he appeared as the murderer Crippen for fancy dress, she went as his
cross-dressed mistress and accomplice, not his wife and victim.)
For a religious poem, Ash Wednesday has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time.
Even more than The Waste Land, it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions
as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they
echo. The first section, for example, originally had the title of a love poem by the
Florentine Cavalcanti that its first line echoes: "Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai"
– "Because I do not hope to turn again".
We are so used to reading what Eliot wrote, with its evocation of spiritual dryness, its
sense of himself as "an aged eagle" with stubs instead of wings – he was 40 – learning
"to sit still" and find spiritual solace in withdrawal and renunciation, that it comes as a
shock to realise that in the poem he chose to echo, the dying Cavalcanti is still
praising his mistress, sending his poem to be her comforter. There is something quite
creepy in his dedicating the whole poem to Vivienne when the first section so totally
refuses to be the sort of love poem it echoes.
The second section is just as sinister, but also Eliot at his most beautiful and lyrical.
The echoes here are of courtly love again, but also of Dante – the leopards that have
eaten the poet's heart and brains leaving his bones dry are associated with sins like
lust and idleness and gluttony – and the brothers Grimm. Unpack that reference and
we find long-concealed murder and betrayal revealed and punished against all odds –
what was there in Eliot's marriage to Vivienne that makes him feel such a sinner?
That was so dreadful that his confessor thought he should end it? That makes the
bones glad to be done with life – "we are glad to be scattered, we did little good to
each other"?

11. Yet tied to these moments of nightmare – and the ones in the next section where Eliot
is pursued on a staircase by sinister ghosts and urban squalor – is the evocation of a
Lady, who is the Virgin, and all of the Beloveds of courtly love, and most especially
Dante's Beatrice, and is also associated with gardens and fertility and a sort of organic
community. She is also, presumably, Emily Hale, whom Eliot's poetry associates with
gardens from the beginning; Eliot demonises one of his muses and places another on a
goddess-like pedestal, and in both cases you end up feeling that the real woman gets
progressively erased from his work.
It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and
never children. By separating from Vivienne, and adopting celibacy, Eliot was
accepting childlessness. In a more or less contemporaneous poem called Marina, he
talks of yearning for a daughter – echoing Shakespeare's Pericles and his reunion with
his child against the odds, but also, in the epigraph, Seneca's Hercules, waking from a
madness in which he has killed wife and child. There is something deeply sad, but
also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated
and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even
when he is being cryptic.
The later sections of the poem are a call to spiritual awareness, and acceptance of
divine forgiveness. There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of
himself as a preacher calling the world to order – it was after all, the original family
business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem
is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and
talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of Ash
Wednesday, the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are
Eliot.
This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are
stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly
(the lyric "Lady of silences" in the second section) is much more effective than the
later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that
attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do.
Today is Ash Wednesday and although
I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not
posting on T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) would be a lost opportunity. Below is a
Dantean reading of Eliot’s poem. The wonder of Eliot’s poetry (like most great
poetry) is that it can lead you anywhere. So read this post and take from it what you
will but take a break before reading the poem. Grab a coffee, watch Downton Abbey,

12. but try to read the poem without me in your head. I’d love to hear any interpretations.
Enjoy.
For Eliot, Dante was more than a poetic master who had achieved the heights of
poetry. As Eliot struggled through life literally searching for perfection, he
rediscovered Dante, finding in his poetry not merely a poetics but also a way of life.
Now, I don’t solely mean in regards to religion, in fact I am hardly concerned with
religion at all. Eliot himself had written in that ‘It is wrong to think that there are parts
of the Divine Comedy which are of interest only to Catholics’ and in his address
‘What Dante Means to Me’ (1950)—after his religious conversion—he stated, ‘to call
[Dante] a “religious poet” would be to abate his universality.’ Eliot looked to Dante
because Dante had succeeded in attaining the closest thing a poet could to poetical
perfection, and he had done it regardless of the social and personal complexities of
life. Eliot, initially captivated by Dante’s poetics, would come to grow engrossed by
the man as their respective lives began to mirror one another to the extent that the
modern and the medieval can.
Although Eliot’s early poetry uses many religious themes and motifs, it is not until
1925 that his poetry begins to convey any sort of leaning toward a single dogma. In
fact, Eliot had regarded Buddhism as perhaps the most compelling form of
spiritualism at the time of The Waste Land. Given these early, protean views, readers
rising out of The Waste Land and moving directly into Ash Wednesday will
experience one of poetry’s most difficult transitions in regards to philosophical
positioning; however ambivalence may be what Eliot is attempting to convey, as it is
his belief that the highest stage possible for the civilized man ‘is to unite the
profoundest skepticism with the deepest faith.’
In 1925—two years prior to his
conversion and the subsequent writing of what is now part II of Ash Wednesday—
Eliot had begun to reassess his studies of Dante. Sometime between 1926 and 1929
(the year Eliot published his most substantial work on Dante), he would come to
parallel his beliefs most fundamentally with those of Dante’s. It is likely that—on
some level—Dante influenced Eliot’s religious conversion. Despite its religious
leanings, Ash Wednesday—as Eliot says of Dante’s Paradiso—is not didactic. The
religious, Dantean themes in Ash Wednesday have been thoroughly excavated by
scholars, as the allusions are relatively more palpable than they are in his other poetry.
However, what is most important is that in Ash Wednesday Eliot searches for (and
seems to gain) a particular assurance that his poetry can bridge the gap between the
‘low-dream’ of the modern world and the ‘high-dream’ of Dante’s vision. Ash

13. Wednesday marks Eliot’s personal-poetic search for the ability to materialize the
Word Incarnate with the written word.
Eliot’s view that ‘all faith should be seasoned with a skillful sauce of skepticism’ is
what makes the first line of Ash Wednesday and the position of the speaker’s
philosophy throughout so difficult to fully ascertain. Eliot institutes several
disjunctive techniques as a type of objective correlative that sustains the vacillating
nature of the speaker’s mind. These are the overlay of space and place, a lack of
linearity, and ambiguous lexicon or multiple entendre. The ‘turn’ in the opening line
of Ash Wednesday denotes the linchpin around which the whole poem rotates:
ambiguity. The turn will come to signify the turning toward God, the look to a secular
past, glimpses toward the future and many other possibilities. Most importantly, the
turn is the repetitious but non-retrogressive movement from the active will to the
contemplative mind.
Part I portrays the struggle between the individual’s will and intellect, collating the
two pressing skepticisms within its ambiguity. That Eliot begins Ash Wednesday with
an almost direct translation of Calvacanti followed by an almost direct quote from
Shakespeare, marks Eliot’s first skepticism. The ‘gift’ Eliot desires to be gifted with is
poetry that can transcend to heaven. Through the rewriting of text, Eliot tries to attain
‘a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been
written.’ The word of the poet and the transcendent Word are wholly deliberated upon
in both the fourth poem, in which the pure poetic imagination is considered, and the
fifth poem, where the poet’s adequacy in the expression of reality is questioned. This
questioning of his poetic transcendence is most explicitly present in his humility at the
gate of Purgatory in the third poem: ‘Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy
/ but speak the word only.’
The passage through the gate of Purgatory will mark the full religious conversion and
it is figured within a poem that is an exodus more fully realized than The Waste Land;
the exodus here is one of necessary, willful expiation, as for Eliot the ascetic way of
penance is the means to the way of grace. The will (which wavered in the opening
poem) is strengthened in the final two lines, representing not the altered word of some
poet but rather the pure speech of transcendence through the voice of the Churches
invocation of Mary: ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.’ The death
is the spiritual death leading to baptismal rebirth that Eliot had feared (‘Why should
the aged eagle stretch its wings?’) out the outset.
The second poem of Ash Wednesday was originally titled ‘Salutation’, referring to the
first time Beatrice greets Dante in La Vita Nuova III: ‘with a salutation of such virtue
that I thought then to see the world of blessedness.’ In La Vita Nuova, Dante struggles
twice with the desire of the physical; first with Beatrice and later with a mysterious
lady to whom he is attracted. It is possible that Eliot’s renunciation of the ‘blessèd
face’ is in fact the physical face, which Dante renounced in order to attain salvation,
and not a turning from the spiritual face.

14. The ‘three white leopards,’ might be
read as a positive inverse of the leopard of lust of Dante’s Inferno, representing a
violent though willful expiation of lust. After the leopards have ‘fed to satiety on my
heart my liver and that which had been contained / In the hollow round of my skull,’
the left over bones ‘shine with brightness’ because of the virtuousness of the Lady.
The now pure essence of the speaker—the ‘I who am’—is able to ‘Proffer [his] deeds
to oblivion’ and his ‘love / To the posterity of the desert,’ which is at once in ‘The
desert in the garden [and] the garden in the desert’ brought about by Mary, ‘The
single Rose’ who is now ‘the Garden / Where all loves end.’
In Part III, the speaker has awoken from the dream of contemplation at the violet hour
and come face-to-face with three stairs of the active will. The progression of the
winding staircase holds in the balance the presence of a metaphysical poetry within
the modern world. ‘The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green’ who enchants
‘the maytime with an antique flute’ is not only a look back to secular desires—
figured here in pagan imagery—which once enchanted the heart, but, if it is
succumbed to would assert that modern poetry is only capable of the ‘low-dream.’ For
this reason the look back to the pagan imagery on the third stair can
only be glimpsed through a ‘slotted window
bellied like a fig’s fruit’ (109); the vision is impeded upon by the narrowed window of
secularism because both the will and the intellect are torn between the secular wor(l)d
and the Wor(l)d of God. As Eliot climbs the third stair, having gathered the ‘strength

15. beyond hope and despair,’ he is able to humbly admit that he can ‘speak the word
only’. After this admission, he is able to re-experience for himself the vision of God’s
Word that he had only evinced through Ezekiel beneath the juniper tree, and he
recapitulates the experience through the great mediator of the Word (Dante) who Eliot
considered to have the gift of incarnation.
While walking ‘between the violet and the violet’ in a garden where the ‘fiddles and
the flutes’ of the pagan scene have been ‘bear[ed] away’, Eliot is able to initiate his
transcendence. His memories of the previous years are restored through a ‘bright of
cloud tears’ and he subsequently will be able to write ‘With a new verse the ancient
rhyme’ in order to ‘Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream.’ Then the Lady,
Word of no speech, ‘signed but spoke no word.’ Logos is witnessed but it is still
mediated through an Other.
However, he does not experience the transcendental movement into the still point of
Incarnation. He is still aware of the ‘the empty forms’ of the secular world and also
that through the process of memory he may renew the ‘salt savour of the sandy earth.’
In this moment, when face-to-face with a carnal past, ‘the weak spirit quickens to
rebel.’ It is not until the crucial moment when he ‘[spits] from the mouth the withered
apple-seed’ thereby purging himself of humanity’s first failure that he can attempt to
reach Logos on a personal and intellectual level.
In this lesson, you will learn what Eliot's poem 'Ash Wednesday' is about and what it
means within the context of the speaker's struggles as he moves toward God and his
own redemption.
We also recommend watching Introduction to T.S. Eliot: Author Background, Works,
and Style and Shakespeare's Venus And Adonis: Summary, Analysis & Quiz

16. Summary
'Ash Wednesday' is often referred to as
Eliot's conversion poem because it is
one of the first long poems he wrote
after converting to Anglicanism, the
officially established Christian Church
of England. The title refers to 'Ash
Wednesday,' the first of the forty days
of Lent, which is a time for self
reflection, sacrifice, and repentance.
The poem is divided into six sections,
and it deals with the speaker's aspiration
to move from a sense of spiritual
despair to spiritual salvation.
Six Sections
In Section 1, the speaker is set to reject
all worldly things. In the first two
stanzas, he rejects the hope of any
fulfillment in worldly diversions, any
TS Eliot
potential for joy in existence, and acknowledges that the 'one veritable transitory
power' is insubstantial, prone to fading away into thin air.
In stanzas three and four, the speaker rejoices in his own helplessness to change the
human condition, rejects the beauty of the world and its temptations, and calls upon
humanity to 'pray to God to have mercy upon us.' In the final stanza of Section 1, the
speaker rejects all worldly dreams and aspirations, 'Because these wings are no longer
wings to fly/ But merely vans to beat the air.'
In Section 2, the stanzas appeal to the Lady, the Mary figure, and introduce three
white leopards that have eaten the speaker's flesh and released his bones to sing,
crediting the Lady's goodness that his bones now 'shine with brightness.' The section
ends with God telling the speaker to prophecy to the empty wind.
In Section 3, the speaker climbs the stairs and looks back on his past temptations of
self-deceit, despair, and lust. 'At the first turning of the second stair,' he leaves the
devil and the past 'twisting, turning below,' and enters darkness. Then he makes a
direct appeal to God to 'Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still.' The
section ends with a couplet taken directly from 'Ave Maria' in the Anglo-Catholic
version of the Rosary; 'Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death/ Pray for
us now and at the hour of our death.'
In Section 4, the speaker pays homage to a vision of the Lady, 'in white and blue, in
Mary's colour' that stresses both her ignorance and her knowledge, as well as her
ability to make things firm. She walks in a realm 'between sleep and waking' as a
vision of light, veiled and silent among the yews, where birds reveal the vision of
transcendence, of 'the higher dream.'

17. In Section 5, the speaker questions if the Lady will pray for 'those who walk in
darkness' in the world with all its terror and denial.
In Section 6, the speaker moves from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, the day
commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus, and the final day of Lent. The first stanza
repeats the opening stanza of the poem, changing the word 'Because' to 'Although, '
while the fourth stanza cautions us, once again, not to be distracted by worldly things.
Then the speaker reveals the Lady, the Mary figure, as a reincarnation of the Holy
Spirit and directs to her his earlier plea to God to 'Teach us to care and not to care/
Teach us to sit still.'
The poem ends with a prayer from the Psalms: 'And let my cry come into thee' (Psalm
102:1)
Analysis
In Section 1, although the speaker is set to reject all worldly things, it is an act of
despair. He 'rejoices' only because he rejects the beauty in a 'blessèd face' and 'voice,'
in the sensuality of the world. He believes that the world as he knows it is all that
exists. But, this belief and the despair it brings is what prepares him for salvation,
because only from his weakness, can his 'wings (that) are no longer wings to fly' be
made whole; and only from his spiritual death will come something 'Upon which to
rejoice.'
In Section 2, as the leopards of death eat away at his organs of his desire, and his pure
white bones sing their praises of the Lady, the speaker gives his love to the desert of
loss so he can forget the world and all its darkness and despair. Then God tells him to
prophecy to the empty wind of his spiritual barrenness, evoking the knowledge that,
ironically, his spiritual inheritance is in this desert realm of death and re-birth.