The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil: Chapter VIII
The Path from Grounds to Gleam
The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil is a mythopoetic journey through the silence between worlds.
In The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil, symbolism is turned on its head. This is not a metaphysical realm—it is a poetic one. Here, Aphrodite does not symbolize a saint; she bears her. As the Rose-Bearer, Aphrodite heralds the saint who is the Rose. As the Aegis-Bearer, Athena heralds the saint who is the aegis. And Hera, radiant and veiled, is not a goddess of mythology, but the poetic expression of Divine Order itself.
This is not sentimentalism or the imagination of subjective consciousness. It is not theology or philosophy. It is the Nameless Man’s story of hypostatic remembrance-in-the-world—told in myth, rooted in mystery. His is a journey from the Grey-Beneath to the Highlands of Majesty, through rose and flame, shield and crown.
While the narrative, initial drafts, and cosmology are entirely my own, I gratefully used ChatGPT to help refine language, structure poetic phrasing, and shape stylistic coherence.
From the Nameless Man’s Chronicles of the Sky-Veil1
There are moments in the Sky-Veil when a path does not appear before us, but as a shimmering nearness2 within us. It does not unfold in space but as a clearing in our being where the past, future, and present merge into a single meaning. One does not merely walk such a path—they embrace it, not with the feet, but with the heart. For this is the trail of another drawing you to themselves, one who walked long before, across fire and shadow, through fields never seen yet never forgotten.
I came upon such a path not through vision but through resonance.3 The saint’s footsteps were faint at first—barely perceptible across the veils of time and story. But I sensed them. And in sensing, I began to follow. Not by knowing where I was going, but by allowing her way of going to shape the ground beneath my own.
It was Aphrodite who first awakened this nearness of the saint in me. She whispered through the rose-blown wind of remembrance,4 not of facts but of forms—of a presence,5 soft yet unyielding, that longed to be traced. Through her gentle guidance, I did not learn where to go—I learned how to yearn toward that going.
But it was not enough to sense. To truly follow across the Sky-Veil, one must yield—not only to the shape and direction of the path, but to the soil from which it rises—its grounding. It was Athena who taught me this. She led me into the grounds of the saint drawing me—the deep reasons, the elemental forces, the flame-lit inner chambers of thought that gave rise to the path’s form. I was to learn not simply where my hidden guide went, but why she went there. I was to retrace her steps from grounds to glittering gleam, from first intuition to final surrender.
For her part, Athena did not demand imitation; she was the resonance of the one drawing me, not the one herself. Through Athena’s light of heraldry,6 I entered the internal horizon of the saint I followed—not as scholar or seer, but as a fellow traveler willing to be gripped. For one must be bested by the grounds of another before one can trace their conclusions. And if not bested, then freed—but only by first walking through.
There was an order to this mystery. I traced the path through a kingdom beyond mere imagination, beyond a plot of my own. Hera stood nearby in silence, her crown radiant above the hills of remembrance. She revealed to me that this was no mere path of insight in my consciousness, but of self-giving loyalty—of dynasty. To trace another across the Veil was not only to understand them but to become kin in the realm they served, to become royal family. Hera did not teach me about my saint. She taught me how to belong to her, and with her, to the kingdom.
And thus, through the harmonized nearness of these three, the Sky-Veil disclosed what I had once called empathic devotion—being drawn through the grounds another traveled with hearts and minds united. But it was no longer an idea or concept. It was the very nearness of Being in the world with my saint. It was the mysterious correspondence of hearts across the threshold. A union not bound by time, nor by logical deduction, but by shared Being—softly unveiled and fiercely guarded.
In that luminous tracing, I followed my veiled saint to the pearl of great price. Not by force, but by fidelity and the sparkling heraldry of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera. Not by reason alone, but by resonance. The path is not one we forge, but one we remember. And those who follow it do not do so alone—for the Sky-Veil weaves the footsteps of the past and those to come into the breath of now.
Enjoy Queen Hera (Thrones in the Mist) from my album The Sky-Veil, available on my music site.
Lyrics ©Walter Emerson Adams. Music and vocals by Suno ©Walter Emerson Adams.
Into the Lands Between The Sky-Veil’s air thinned down Its paths rose up unseen She of the Ox-Eyes and Crown “Your longing is not lost” Queen Hera, royal told Around her hills embossed Her throne in mists of gold Beyond her, sunlit pools A seat of might, cloud-bound In majesty, she rules She of the Ox-Eyes and Crown “It waits to be recalled” Queen Hera, august voiced The name and hope that’s trawled Ascending, heights rejoiced
✦ Sky-Veil - The threshold of Being in this mythopoetic cosmology, representing the veil between time and eternity, symbol and reality, longing and fulfillment. It is across the Sky-Veil that hypostatic heralds of Being—embodied symbolically by the goddesses—shimmer, and through which the soul journeys in mythic contemplation toward divine encounter. The saints dwell beyond the veil; the goddesses, as “hypostatic emergences” foreshadowing divine virtues, herald from its edge. St. Joan of Arc guides the pilgrim across the Sky-Veil of transformation in Christ to Magdalene’s contemplative grotto on the far side in the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
✦ Nearness - Not spatial proximity but a mode of disclosure—the drawing-near of Being itself in moments of unveiled significance. It conveys a presence that is not fully present, a proximity that is not measurable, but rather experienced in the heart’s intuition and the soul’s readiness.
In Heideggerian terms, nearness belongs to the mystery of Being’s self-showing (aletheia). It is the threshold where the veil stirs but does not part, where the divine does not arrive as an object but becomes luminously felt. Nearness is not what we possess but what approaches us, like the breeze that carries meaning without sound. It is the quiet shimmer before revelation—the silent resonance that moves before the Word.
In the Sky-Veil, nearness is the air the wanderer breathes when the heralds pass by, the fragrance of the rose before it is seen, the warmth of the flame before it is touched. It is the grace of Being brushing against the soul, unseizing, ungraspable, yet unmistakably there.
✦ Resonances of Being - Subtle unveilings of presence that shimmer across the landscape of experience—traceless traces where Being once passed near. These are not psychological memories or fragments of archetypal consciousness, but events of nearness, moments in which the hidden truth of one’s life quietly resounds through presence.
✦ Remembering/Remembrance - “To remember is not to recall, but to stand again in the nearness of what is.”
In the Sky-Veil, Remembering is not the retrieval of memories from a personal or collective unconscious, as in Jungian psychology. Rather, it is the unconcealing of what has always been—the letting-be of Being—in the manner of Heidegger’s Ereignis, or the event of disclosure. To remember is to dwell where Being has touched us and where the truth of one’s path begins to shine through the fog of exile.
The wanderers of the Grey-Beneath do not lack information; they lack remembrance. And when a herald (such as Caelia, Aphrodite, or Athena) calls, it is not a call to new knowledge, but to ancient presence. One does not learn the truth of the Sky-Veil; one remembers it. That is to say, one stands again in the unveiling light of what was always there, waiting.
To remember, in the Sky-Veil, is to step beyond the calculative metaphysical and into the poetic, where the world is no longer a stockpile of objects to be explained but a revealed place of meaning. It is to be gathered once more into the harmony of Flame, Chalice, and Banner.
✦ Presence - “Not a thing, but the shining nearness of what is.”
In the Sky-Veil, Presence is not a metaphysical entity or spirit, but the felt nearness of Being—the shimmer where the world reveals its depth and substance. It is the touch of Being in its most radiant clarity, not as a being among beings, but as the grounding that makes beings present at all.
Presence is the weight of meaning in a moment, the sudden stillness where the world no longer hides. It is not summoned; it arrives. It does not explain; it reveals. The goddesses of the Veil are not presences themselves, but heralds through whom Presence shines.
To encounter Presence is to stand in the clearing where the veil lifts and what-is begins to speak.
✦ Hypostatic Heralds - Figures who bear the presence of a hypostatic form. The goddesses are hypostatic heralds: they do not possess Being, but they announce it. As heralds, they invite the soul to a deeper contemplation of divine attributes. They are real in their effect and presence, though not personal subjects or metaphysical beings.