In the beginning, there were seven kings

One created a kingdom of earth and became suffused with it.
One created a kingdom of one and hid himself in it.
One created a kingdom of love and filled it with two and a challenge to entice them.
One created a kingdom without number and became lost in it.
One created a hole and pondered in it.
One created a throne and a castle but rarely dwelled there.
One created a kingdom of mystery of awe and of wonder, and an ocean of tears all about it.
One created a kingdom of sorrow and filled it with souls of all manner of complexion and humour.

Between the kingdoms, there were seven paths.

One path led around a hill, and its passage could not be described.
One path was covered with water.
One path was hidden under earth and mountain.
One path was painted with letters, sygils, and symbols, mostly forgotten.
One path was so broad it was easily mistaken.
One path was too narrow, and surrounded by demons.
One path led back upon itself for those walking forward without their head turned backward.

with apologies to Tolkien, a riff on his “Verse on the Rings of Power”, this was inspired by some thoughts after reading Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess on the transcendent and imminent aspects of divinity.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Seven Kings” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.