"Ancient hypocrisy" and "modern hypocrisy": the mask and the "daimon"

Nine glosses (and an appendix) on the intimate meaning of “hypocrisy”, on the mask as a form of sacred discipline, on the personification of Yeats's “daimon” or anti-self; and again on the Rite, on the “Fall”, and on Love.


di Daniele Capuano
image: tragic mask from ancient Greece


Ipocrisy comes from the Greek verb hypocrinein, “Enter the dialogue on the stage”, “play a part”. In its archè hypocrisy is therefore the simulation, the response to the events of those who enter the dialectic of culture, of feeling [1], is the acting as a mediated expression of one's own typos: mediated, however, by the feeling itself, by its ability to respond to circumstances, to echo them, to imitate them or to make them resonate mimetically in the gesture, in the cultural staging.

It is necessary to discern between this hypocrisy - which I would call thearchetypal hypocrisy - and the one cursed by Jesus, and further distinguish the latter from commonly understood hypocrisy. Jesus did not preach in Greek, but the Gospels are written in the koine of the first centuries of the Common Era, and the word hypokrites, mainly used in violent tirades against the perushim (Pharisees), to the classical reader he will end up suggesting the religious "comedian", the eternal caricature of the man who manipulates or undergoes the splitting inherent in an imperfect spiritual practice.

But this meaning is best conveyed by the corresponding Hebrew term: in a famous passage from the Talmudic treatise Sotah (22b) it is said that one should not fear the Pharisees or non-Pharisees, but "the hypocrites who mimic the Pharisees, because their acts are those of Zimri but they expect a reward like that of Pinchas" [2]. The word translated with hypocrites is tzevuʻin, literally “the paintings”, “the colored ones”: here the image is not taken from the sphere of theater and oratory, but from that of dyeing and cosmetics.

As we can see, these are two very different "hypocrisies": the one cursed by Jesus is the hypocrisy of a sacred order as a whole, a collective and above all unconscious hypocrisy, while the hypocrisy of popular imagination and the Talmudic passage is above all conscious, even if most of the time it is a broken, dimidiated, compressed consciousness [3]. In both cases, however, monotheism seems bound to see in trickster mercurial, in the trickster of fables and myths, only a filthy manipulator and profaner, and in the actor, the transvestite, the Dionysian declaimer and interpreter only a "clanging cymbal" - and a hypocrite

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Epictetus teaches that our duties are commensurate with relationships (tois schesi), however caught in their archetypal transparency: "" But mine is a bad father! " By the nature of things have you been placed in relationship with a good father? No: simply with a father "(Inch. 30). You must therefore treat it like a father - like the Father.

One of the "knights" of Eranos, Henry Corbin, a brilliant rediscoverer of Iranian Islam, indicated in the idea of ʻĀlam al-mithāl the way to bring the archetypes back into the terrestrial experience, to bring the gods back among us: la direct way of archetypal psychologythat ʻĀlam al-mithāl, which he translated with the Latin expression mundus imaginalis, the ontological plane that mediates between the supra-formal spiritual and the material one - the plane of the soul - is a world of images precisely as a "world of similitude", a world of as if [4].

In 1978 James Hillman wrote that "images mean nothing" (they are not the coating of concepts, they are not paths leading to further or higher meaning) and quoted Edward S. Casey: the picture is not what you see, but the way in which I see [5]. These expressions, so well in tune with the spirit of the best twentieth-century thought, suggest that the archetypes are style of behavior, not the “what”, the content of the image, which is abstracted from the image itself, but the “how”, the image in the behavior and the behavior in the image.

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Man's task is to embody the archetype, to give it (in the language of Ibn ʻArabī) a manifest, an "epiphanic receptacle", a place, a where for its manifestation. For this it must first do and then to listen (and to think), according to the great word of Sinai: "All that the Lord has said, we will do and we will listen" (Es 24,7).

Each discipline is the creation of Abit, of habits: through actions you enter the aura, in the style of the archetype you want to personify and let it go deeper and deeper, embodying it. Full, complete inner adhesion occurs when one discovers that a preliminary adhesion has already been given, that one has already given consent, that the only way to overcome the conflicts of will and thought is to let oneself be shaped by a destiny marked, engraved, rooted in a pragma, in an organism of significant actions - that is, in a myth, a culture, an archetypal link.

Here there is no "freedom of choice": we will do, and we will listen. The Koran also speaks of a "covenant" (mithaq) pre-existential, in which all creatures have given their assent to divine lordship (answering "Yes" to Allah's question: "Don't I manifest myself as your lord?" [6]). In perhaps the most intensely autobiographical pages of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy makes his Kostya Levin return to the "maternal" faith, which precedes every question, every problem, which founds and supports everything in her silent permanence [7]. To put it in Chesterton's words, there is in man "a loyalty that comes well before any admiration" [8].

On this level the choice is hairesis, heresy. Instead, one of the key terms of Epictetus is proairesis, which we could translate as "preliminary decision, commitment, vote". Voting and choice are far from synonymous: they are not even two logical opposites, but their relationship seems that of a dialectical opposition. The vote is a will that precedes and embraces the will, which gives it a context. The vote is container, not contained: it is a great one setting therapeutic that (like every setting) seems to contract life and instead welcomes and shapes it [9]. It implies that everything - every "choice" and every "fatality" of existence - is referred to its priority, to its concrete beforehand: therefore it should not be said alone tu es priests in aeternum, but also you are pater, magister, maritus etc. in aeternum.

Marriage is a rather impressive example of a vow, and it shows us how two conflicting readings can be made about the vow. On the one hand, the vote like oath: Jesus teaches not to swear (Mt 5,34), because we do not possess ourselves, the content of life, which is contingency, God's will; on the other the vote as a commitment, as container of life: through it we remain faithful to the contingency of necessity, we ritualize life, we live it in the presence of archai, in the light of archaisubspecies aeternitatis.

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Desires, aspirations, cannot wait for fullness from the world, from others: this is impossible, and the rhetoric in Michelstaedter's sense, it is neurosis, the non-initiation of infantile eros, which in the adult is poisoned and poisoned: initiation, persuasion it will be precisely to overturn the perspective, to die, to make embryonic present what was expected from the future and from hypocrisy malignant of intentions, of inner splitting, of anguished free will; in this way one becomes fruitful, one creates, one is present atarchè, in the beginning.

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In the beginning it was action (Goethe), or the ritual action (Wittgenstein) [10]: the rite calms the anguish precisely because it stops its unlimited oscillation, it is childhood's redemption from its uncontrolled passions ("if you do not become like children ", not" if you don't become children "), the recovery of a childhood passed through the crucible of death [11].

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For years now I have been convinced that our culture, based on sincerity and self-realization, makes us meek and passive. and that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to base their culture on the imitation of Christ or a classical hero. San Francesco and Cesare Borgia managed to become dominant and creative personalities by passing from the mirror to meditating on a mask.

If we cannot imagine ourselves different from what we are and assume that second self, we cannot discipline ourselves., although we can accept one from others. Active virtue, which is different from passive acceptance of a rule, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, it is wearing a mask. Wordsworth, however great as a poet, is so often flat and tedious also because his moral sense - a discipline that he did not create himself, but is simple obedience - has no theatrical element. [12].

The modern claim of "authenticity" is most often a claim of the ego, therefore of the identity falsified by passions: it is the (anguished) affirmation of the right to passion ("I can't help it", "it's my nature", "when it takes, it takes"). The rite, on the other hand, is mediation, è vidyāmāyā, illusion as the substratum of knowledge and therefore of truth: in the rite there is no egoic restlessness of "choice", it is already in dance and dancing, it is one status which is supposed to be founded by a word, by an archetypal order and which is given to repeat-renew as vote, initiation.

As Nietzsche prophesied, the separation-opposition between truth and appearance, between authenticity and fiction, has led the West to fall into nihilism, which is the experience of nothingness. Yeats reiterates what is both a paradox and a truism (like all good paradoxes and good truisms): authenticity is an illusion, the essence of life is artistic. One is not oneself if not wearing a mask: and for Yeats the mask is above all a anti-self, an anti-self or second self, a self placed in front of the self.

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Il daimon he does not visit what is similar to him but goes in search of his own opposite because man and the daimon they feed craving in each other's hearts. The ghost is simple, the heterogeneous man is confused, and therefore they only come together when the man finds a mask whose features allow him to express all that he does not have (which is perhaps what he fears most) and only that. .

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If I think of life as a struggle with the daimon, who would always like us to dedicate ourselves to the most difficult work among those that are not impossible, I understand the reason for the deep enmity between man and his own destiny and why man loves only his own destiny. And then my imagination goes from the daimon to the beloved, and I perceive an analogy that escapes the intellect. I think of the ancient Greeks who invited us to look for the primary stars, which govern both enmity and love, among those about to set, in the seventh house, the astrologers would say; and that perhaps "sexual love" which "is based on spiritual hatred" is an image of the conflict that exists between man and daimon; and I even wonder if there isn't a secret communion, a murmur in the dark between dI intend to and the beloved [13].

Il daimon, who is more us than ourselves, is met by putting on the face the masks of the ancestors: the imagine Roman, funeral masks of the larger worn by descendants in solemn ceremonies. We have to "become" the soul, the daimon that we are", and therefore become history, the past, but only and always in the suspension of the "as if", in mundus imaginalisAlways for speculum in aenigmate, always in a theatrical, hypocritical way.

It is the ontological statute of daimon - a median and mediator statute - to impose artistic hypocrisy, because we, strictly speaking, are not "the soul and the daimon: tension and waste are unavoidable. We know ourselves, according to the Delphic and therefore Apollonian precept, only in the Dionysian alterity of the image, of the mask which, like the daimon, it's us-not us, ours-not ours.

Yeats rightly speaks of the struggle between us and the daimon, and compares it to that with the beloved: what is closest to us forbids any indiscreet intimacy, any vulgar immediacy. THElove fati è like love for a woman, which is often its vehicle: the courage necessary to embrace shadow and otherness is not the monolithic, one-sided one of the solitary self, but a continuous exchange, a game of parts, true because hypocritical, an escape on the crossroads and the trivi of Hermes which are also the crosses and crosses of the tragic opposition, of Apollo and Dionysus. 

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The mask is the face of the rite: the identity as dramatis person, as a character in the play. It is the Dionysian identity: the tragic hero is consumed in his daimon, which is not a human identity, an ego, on the contrary it is in tension with the ego, it is a mediating power, a manifestation of the god.

The noble, tragic destiny is consumed through theananka, it is initiation into one's eternal face; ordinary, comic destiny melts into the mere spectacle of type. In the morning the mask cries, the mouth bent under the yoke of individuation: in the evening it laughs [14], human labor in impersonating archetypes becomes liberating laughter (Dionysus Lysios) by gravity, the archetypes are caught in the buffoonish and even more initiatory contingency of their incarnation (the tearful Fall becomes grotesque tumble, culata).

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Whoever wrote these short glosses is also a character, a typosdramatis person required by the dialogue of thought, from its dialectic, one hypokrites which responds to the demands of the Antagonist: and even his mask is a anti-self, because only a modern obsessed with authenticity, distressed by the party, uprooted by the rite, could dissolve a hymn of praise to the sacrosanct hypocrisy.

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Tragic mask, Pompeii.

Note:

[1] The feeling function is (with the thought function) one of the functions rational, as it is linked to evaluation. In the classical symbolic system it could correspond to the solar heart as the thought function to the lunar brain: it would therefore be, so to speak, the sun of the soul or of the person. In it the opposition between authenticity and fiction (and therefore between theoretical, ethical and aesthetic) is reconciled, because the feeling perceives the will have cultural, the significant plot of situations, no connections of objects and even less isolated objects: it is interiority and community together.

[2] In Num 25 the Israelites encamp in Shittim, where they transgress their norms of sexual and marital purity by joining together with foreign women and practicing with them the worship of Ba'al-Peʻor (the Beelphegor of the Greek translation). This Zimri introduces a Midianite lover into her tent: Pinchas, the High Priest, follows them and pierces them both with a single stroke of a spear, tearing the woman's "lower belly" (probable meaning of qavatah): thus the "plague" that decimated Israel was arrested. The Talmudic passage therefore means that the hypocrite, while acting like Zimri, the dissolute idolater, expects the reward destined for zealous (we would say fanatics) like the priest Pinchas. 

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[3] I would call the first "tragic" or "apocalyptic" hypocrisy and the second "moral hypocrisy".

[4] The intuition methodological of the "as-if" should be studied in its complex genealogy, which from the refined revision of Hillman goes back, through Adler, to the original Kantian exegesis of Hans Vaihinger, author of the fundamental text Philosophie des Als Ob (1911). Beyond the pragmatic-constructivist ideas, amply developed by the philosophy of the twentieth century, it seems to us that the Kantian matrix of the concept remains unsurpassable (with all its scope of dualism between thing in itself and phenomenon, between unattainable truth and inconsistent appearance) until we recover a realistic and platonic look at the same time: like that of Niccolò Cusano, who defines conjectures positive human knowledge insofar as they participate in the truth in otherness, or in theimage, and that of Aristotle's Neoplatonic commentators such as Simplicius, who reconciled the Stagirite and the Eleats by assigning to the propositions of physics (i.e. concerning the world of becoming) a statute of likelihood, today we would say of model or hypothesis.

[5] Both quotations in J. Hillman, Encyclopedia of the twentieth century, voice "Archetypal Psychology", Treccani, Milan, 1981.

[6] Sura 7 - The heights (al-Aʻrāf) - v.172: "When your Lord took from the loins of the sons of Adam all their descendants and made them testify about themselves (lit. on their souls):" Am I not your Lord? (alastu bi-rabbikum) ", And they replied:" Yes, we testify (balā shahidnā) "".

[7] See LN Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 8, chap. 12-13. It is a sort of "mother tongue" of the soul: therefore nothing literally innate or instinctive, but a sort of primary layer of acculturation - prior to paternal initiation, but already characterized, as such, by a differentiation which is the very operation of rooting, of accessing the community. This maternal language, this maternal faith, cannot properly be lost and perhaps not even denied: nevertheless it can be distorted, camouflaged, shattered and so on. It is obviously not a guarantee of salvation or even stability: indeed, precisely for this reason paternal intervention is essential, which contracts and ritualizes the primary rite (thus placing itself in an initially secondary, derived position) - the threats of the lullaby are brought to a stage that is both broader and narrower, more illusory and more transforming, more rigidly fixed and more open to comment. It is no coincidence that Jesus dies invoking the absent Father with a text of his dead fathers (a psalm of David) sung in the mother tongue, Aramaic. As if to say that the maternal faith is nothing but the background against which the crucifying initiation takes place: not a safety net, but precisely8 the tomb - which cannot be felt and cannot be felt as a uterus (just as in the uterus one is not felt birth as birth), but precisely as emptiness and negation and precisely at the very moment in which it emerges to the lips, to the memory, to the body in the form of song.

[8] GK Chesterton, orthodoxy, c. V, my translation. In another chapter (IV) Chesterton offers a koan which is a key to the hypocrisy of faith: commenting on the fairy tale of the Beauty and the Beasthe observes: “One thing must be loved before purchasing, that it is lovable ".

[9] Or let's say: it really contracts it, but in the sense that it redeems it from its chaotic indeterminacy, from its presumed and morbid “spontaneity”.

[10] Only for the modern mind are Goethe's Action and the Word of the Johannine Gospel (and of the book of Genesis) distinct and indeed incompatible: for the ancient mind and especially for the biblical man, lawsuit it is both the word-order and the action-thing pronounced-ordered.

[11] Even if in traditional cultures, rituals, it is perhaps a sweeter death, because the sense of individual loneliness is less developed, each individual is an embryo that swims in the uterus of the community and of the cosmos and is accompanied by its maturity, the tragic perception of the world is on the one hand stronger precisely because the eye is trained in the ritual, the show, the acting, but on the other hand it is less distressing, less exhausting, less desperate, precisely because that eye, that gaze, preserves the individual from the senselessness, from the laceration that accompanies the loss of the ritual.

[12] WB Yeats, For a friend silentia lunae, edited by G. Scatasta, SE, Milan, 2009.

[13] Ibid.

[14] In the context of the Great Dionysia, tragedies were performed in the morning, comedies in the evening.


Richard Baxter - Narcisus and Echo
Richard Baxter, "Narcisus and Echo".

Appendix: Still on "hypocrisy",
on the Fall and on Love

«Love is not a feeling. Love is tested, pain is not. Nobody says, "That wasn't a real pain, or it wouldn't have ended so soon." "(Wittgenstein)

A sort of gloss to Dante's "due love", which for moderns is one contradictio in adiectoTherefore love is free, while the "feeling" (not in Jung's sense), the mental and emotional "state", is not. The Fall makes authenticity impossible, or to put it better, it transfers it beyond the last horizon, into the Day that reveals his true name to each one.

Rilke sensed that the myth of Narcissus deserves a different reading from the usually negative one - moralistic, neoplatonic, psychoanalytic. Loving the reflected image Narcissus truly loves another, and at the same time himself: but in the erotic ecstasy, in the leap of birth-death, identity is forgotten, lost, offered, and rises again like the numb aroma of a flower. To become fruit, Narcissus in addition toEros should experience obedience, the hypakoe. Obedience is the supreme hypocrisy: it overcomes the erotic spell of the eye - at the level of which hypocrisy is "painting", superficial makeup - with the depth of listening (hyp-akoe) all reaching out to the Word.

At the beginning man experiences it as duplicity: the Word is a double-edged sword that separates the soul from the spirit, but as in Genesis, to give the chaos of the false immediacy (the immediacy of the fall) the direction of kosmos, in which internal and external correspond harmoniously (as the prayer of Socrates prophesies in Phaedrus, culmination of erotic revelation). Thus one is as simple as doves - aimed at one telos that unifies everything, spiritually monogamous - and astute as snakes - capable of homeopathically circumventing the duplicity of the Snake with the cut made in us by obedience.

In the fallen creature the identity reveals itself infinitely not only and not so much through others, but negli others and like the others. You will love your neighbor like yourself: it is not a simile, which separates, but the lived intuition of a bond that unifies without dissolving. We are all guilty of everything in front of everyone, Zosima's brother said karamazov: the unity of purgatory which is already intimately paradisiacal. The Torah does not begin with the first letter, the alef, but with the second, the beth, which as a preposition ("in, through") indicates inherence, locality, mediation - relationship.

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Hypocrisy is theimitation Some in the intermediate time of waiting: the Law cannot be observed because man's will is chained and his inner eye clouded, but living in the light of the commandment, devoted to the commandment, one receives the grace to incarnate it, to no longer be outside the commandment, but its manifestation in the world. The perfect expression of messianic hypocrisy in dialectical and powerful contrast with the hypocrisy of the established sacred order (Mt 6, 16-18):

“When you fast, do not become dark in the face like the hypocrites, for they annihilate their faces so that it is manifest to the men who are fasting: amen, I tell you, they have already received their wages. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that it is not manifest to men that you fast, but to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. "

The "religious" hypocrite is in tristitia tristis: manifests on the face the sadness of fasting, mourning, exile, makes the face a mask of exile interiority, of lacerating expectation. The hypocrite who annihilates his own face is biblically annihilating his own heart, and thus is duly attuned to the spirit of nostalgia for exile; but the exile brought to his face has concluded his parable, his dynamism has been arrested, men see him, imitate him and already have their wages, the ritual consolation of experiencing the closeness to Shekhinah divine exiled.

Just why tearing, waiting asks man to be in tristitia hilaris: the face is festive, therefore also the heart, as far as possible; the banquet of the Kingdom is hypocritically anticipated, and the pain is there, like a dark earth, a humus trampled - where only God, the true actor of the exile, can see him, that is, take him into himself. Thus the Father apodosei soi, it will give you the reward you have already started impersonate, to manifest: that is, according to the first meaning of truth apodidomas, "Return", will give you back yourself, your first and last identity, as well as duplicity and authenticity.    

Accusing the ancient religious law of hypocrisy for its attitude towards sexuality, for example what is now hastily called homosexuality and is the sexual expression of homoeroticism, the appropriate word is said without understanding its proper meaning, as Caiaphas in Sanhedrin. The concept of homosexuality could not have been born in the "hypocritical" ancient world: in fact it was born in the sentimental and brutal modern world, in the positivist and subtly sadian nineteenth century (the "irrepressible nature" alternatively blamed or justified).

Religious law prohibited certain acts: because human existence is a rite, and the rite is a Temenos, a circumscribed space that cuts, a choice among all possible acts. It will be objected that condemning some acts is equivalent to condemning the individuality that performs them, the inner structure that manifests itself in them: but even in this case it is a judgment that is much more suited to our age and its cult of authenticity and of the individual.

The ancient community did not rule out any feeling, because they knew that the feeling is not in our power, and in its root is God's creation: forbade the act, not because this is really in our power in an abstract, Pelagian sense, but because the prohibition of the act is a limit, a horizon, a form for the soul's itinerary. The feeling, the profound need was not only not denied, but it was addressed to a very rich and articulated sphere of expressions: it was blessed like every creature. JM Langer observes that the Jewish spiritual life has been held for centuries on the balance between theEros paideutic that binds teachers and pupils and pupils to each other and the great mystique of nuptial union: deep affection between people of the same sex was called to a common path of sanctification, provided that the sexual act remained reserved for the domestic priesthood, bridal.

This is hypocrisy: but hypocrisy which instead of mutilating plasma. Today love between people of the same sex, besieged by the omnipresent rhetoric of authenticity, of rights, of status natural, it is mutilated like all loves, condemned to be a marginalized variant (therefore alternately shameful and proud, like the poor and all the other "minorities") of the large capitalist market for feelings, an inessential option in existence as a slave ofhomo economicus.

The attitude of the religious of our times towards the homosexual is characterized by that unconscious and tragic hypocrisy that has always and forever accompanied the permanence of the sacred order. The religious hardly ever seems to realize that modern "homosexualism" is the other side of a "heterosexualism" mostly unknown to our larger: the idea that sexual love between man and woman is "normal". On this point, the distance between believers and non-believers is not essential: most of the time both ignore that it is a horribly new wine, the spirit of the time, in the tragically old wineskins of marriage or of the passion stolen from the rite, from the square. , to the community. When we feel that something is justified, rather than suspended from God's blessing mercy, we have already received our wages, the wine that comforts for a while on the march of exile. But the hypocrisy of faith is stupid with astonishment at the rite to which it submits; it does not judge: it stages, celebrates, and waits.

The "in my opinion" of the moderns is one of those redundancies that betray the character of an era.  In the discussion, in the dialectic, as Florensky teaches, one takes shape dramatis person, a type, a character, does not express "themselves". The multidimensional complexity of the person cannot express itself and be known directly and conclusively, just as God cannot be known in himself, in the essence of him.

The hypocrite is a being hanging by the thread: his ego, the aggregate of bodily and mental states, is a wooden puppet moved by the Puppeteer who is in the skies. To become a son of flesh he must know that, at this very moment, he is nothing more than a Pinocchio, a puppet, thauma, according to the pregnant Platonic word.

At the end of the journey the hero arrives in front of a door, infernal and celestial, which must cross. His knockers are the pairs of opposites: to enter the hero must be in tristitia hilaris e in hilaritate tristis, to hope in despair and to despair of everything in hope. The hero crosses the threshold "without asking permission", as the Talmud says, he knows it's his birthright, but he can't be sure: his is also a bluffin addition to the simplicity of his courage, it will be necessary for him to show the duplicity of hypocrisy, to circumvent the guardian "with soft speeches", according to the expression of Parmenides.

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“Isle of the Dead”, izzi3bootz, via DeviantArt.

 

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