Lord Anpu gleams with His pure gold and silver and copper, robust and noble beneath His celestial crown of crescent moon and crystal stars. He thrusts the sun-touched lunar disk into a sky of real lapis lazuli, beheld by the Wedjat Eyes of the Other World glinting with holy gold and warm copper. Surrounded by genuine amethyst and a host of other semi-precious pigments, the Lord of the Sacred Land gives resurrection and restoration to the dead and slumbering souls, and the renewal of life to the shrouded body of His Father Ausir.

Everywhere the signs of life abound in this icon, but so too does the truth of sacrifice and suffering, of purple-black midnight darkness, and the loneliness of death. The imy-uwt fetish spills its blood behind the striding feet of the God, Who appears before the Mount of the West upon which the tomb of His Father has been raised. This is a moment where life and death claim in equal measure, where suffering and liberation are given equal dues, where human mortality breaks through into that numinous state of divine immortality. This is an icon containing the magic of death, which is the mother and father of all created things.

Lord Anpu came to me when I asked Him to, and He gave me an image of Him to give to the world; not painless or joyful, easy or ecstatic, but rather in a veil of divine terror that leads the heart through all the dark places of the world. This is a world where we see that in our beginning sprouts the makings of our own end; but this ending is not all there is, for everything created that is destroyed takes on new form, and it is this process of regeneration that is opened by Lord Anpu, Who Himself is the Opener of the Ways. He did not promise me an easy path when I petitioned Him for an image, but showed me a vision of terror and triumph that would require a sacrifice of my own to make it complete. With suffering can come knowledge, and with knowledge power, a power that initiates the mind of all pilgrims into the higher reality of the Sacred, the most dangerous reality in creation.