"...Dawyd knelt to light a candle before a niche. The shrine held a metal disc, half gold and half black with a bridge between the Yang and Yin of immemorial antiquity." (pp. 562-563)
A disc half gold and half black sounds like Yin and Yang but what is the bridge?
Dawyd explains the elaborate symbolism in the designs on a bronze and tooled leather chair. The Burning Wheel is the sun, all suns, time and thermodynamic irreversibility. Interwoven vines which bloom during hay-gathering also mean time which destroys and regenerates. Leather from wild areas recalls Night Faces, the other side of Day Faces. Bronze, man-made, says that man embodies meaning and structure. However, that same bronze, by turning green as it corrodes, says that all structures vanish into new life. Trying to summarize, I have omitted references to two Aspects of God, the Green Boy and the autumnal Huntress.
Too elaborate? Gwydiona psychology has constructed complicated structures to control its own "Night Faces," supposedly acknowledged but in fact suppressed most of the time.
The Buddhist monastery visited by our meditation group displays detailed images of both historical and mythological figures but the images are intended to elucidate, not to conceal, and the meditation practice is focused on inner reflection facing a blank wall, not on visualization. (Visualization is used in another tradition. Everyone finds the practice that helps them.)
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