Insegnami...

I am called the Lie-smith, and I will play with your devotion to mere appearances and your own misguided assumptions as if they were my toys, until you can remove them beyond my reach or destroy them entirely. I will teach you that truth is entirely a matter of perspective, and that there is no fiction nor falsehood that is worth compromising yourself. I will make you understand the real nature of the world, beginning with your own heart, mind, and soul. Otherwise, nothing else I have to say to you, false or not, will have any meaning at all.

I expect nothing less than that you understand yourself utterly, whatever else you may choose to show or tell others. If you cannot see your real nature clearly, you cannot lie without binding yourself in your own snares – nor will your honesty have any worth, when the time comes to be honest. Without self-knowledge, you will not be able to wear the form or appearance of another without dimming the flame at your own center, and you will never realize that these things are only masks, to be put on or taken off at will or whim rather than out of habit or weakness. If there is only one person in all the Nine Worlds to whom you never lie, let that one be yourself.

I can teach you to cover your tracks and conceal your destination, but I cannot show you how unless you first come to me stripped bare of all the flattery, abuse, illusion, and fantasy with which you have shielded your real self from yourself. There is no way to teach you how to stretch the truth if your whole existence is already a lie. You will not learn how to blur the line between falsehood and reality if you are not certain on which side of the line you already stand. And I will not be gentle when the time comes for you to discover all this.

I will rip the veils of deception from your eyes and make you look upon those parts of your innermost self of which you are most fearful or ashamed. I will hold up a mirror that will show you, in every minute detail, the real shape of your weaknesses as well as your strengths. I will say to you all the things you have never dared to say to yourself, and make you repeat them after me. I will burn away every ounce of arrogance, self-indulgence, or denial from your soul, no matter how much it hurts. You may curse me, you may even hate me, but you will not be allowed to say no to me. And I will wait patiently – oh yes, I can be patient – for you to understand, too, that you must accept yourself as you are before you can change yourself, or other people’s minds, or the world. I have done all three, and I speak from experience.

I may even show you your unwelcome reality, whether you’re making an effort or not. I have done it when it cost me that which I held most dear, when those I counted as friends and kinsmen turned against me and cried that I was forsworn because they would not see. I have done it knowing all the while that to act otherwise would be to really become the liar I was accused of being. I have been more honest in my deceit than many have been in what they consider complete truthfulness, because no matter how much I may lie to others, I do not lie to myself, and I will not allow you to continue lying to yourself, so long as we are acquainted.

I have been other than what I seemed, and seemed other than what I am. I have told the truth as if it were a lie, and lied so convincingly that it was taken for the truth. I may dazzle and conceal, flatter and omit, but there are no blinders around my own eyes, no pretty, insubstantial words in my own ears. I know why I have acted as I have acted and spoken what I have spoken, even when I have taken pains never to let those reasons become known. In doing this, I have accepted the punishments as well as the rewards, the pain as well as the satisfaction. And I will demand nothing more of you than I have been willing to endure myself. Otherwise, you will not get very far, and I will laugh when the curtain comes up and your costume is still only half on.(First published in The Jotunbok: Working with the Giants of the Northern Tradition,by Raven Kaldera, Asphodel Press, 2007)