The Madonna sat in state for nine days in the Capital of the World, then descended among the people. Her coming was a ripple of emotion that moved through the world like a cougar through a wheat field. Ontogeny-Among-The-Lilies trembled before Her numinous head, tenebrous Oast on the winedark sea opened wide sleep-heavy eyes in Her presence, and even Albion, magician’s city Albion that was canny and cautious in the presence of gods, even Albion trembled and shook beneath Her dandelion step.

She was a vortex of sexuality, prime, fertile, and dangerous; the signal for riot and carnival and spring, and wherever She was there was revel. In easternmost Cush the fields burst sudden and green into fruit and men and women ran maddened through the streets in blissful license; in the unnamed necromancers’s city those sober and unspeaking monks drew shaking breaths and found their every mystery and secret struck blind and dumb. She walked the length of the unnavigable Cunt, and from those untracked wilds shot forth new and confounding wonders. Invention and discovery blossomed behind Her, and when, after six months sojourning in the lowlands, She returned pacifically to the high mountains, the world mourned and conceived.