Angkor Wat

In the beginning, darkness covered the deep. The snake was coiled and spiraled and interwoven with itself and it was big – bigger than God, for God lay asleep, pillowed on the snake’s muscled body floating in the dark. And as God slept, God dreamed and a flower grew from His navel and inside the flower was God Who created the universe.

Anthony climbed the tilted and worn and uneven, steep steps and passed under the great stone lintel. The building was like a maze – cool stone passageways barely wider than Anthony’s shoulders, courtyards baked by the tropical Sun, a stunning three-dimensional experience of awe.

Looking up through the holes in the fallen stone roof Anthony saw the central stupa-like tower, its placid, unearthly faces gazing into infinity, and, all around that great pointed dome, flew a hundred dragonflies, their wings a yellow flash against the dark stone.

Further he wound into the building – climbing over fallen stone, skirting around closed passageways and trees forcing their way through the rock – to the chamber beneath that central tower: the holy of holies, the garbha griha, the womb chamber, the innermost sanctum.

‘Coniunctio’ the alchemists call it, the mysterious conjunction of Sol and Luna, the chemical wedding, the union of opposites in ecstasy – Lord Shiva lost always in blissful trance; Shakti, the dynamic, active divine feminine creative power always in ecstatic motion. Between ‘the uncarved block’ and ‘the ten-thousand things’ there was the yin and the yang, thrusting, commingling, spinning.

There, in the small chamber: the abstract and aniconic representation of all those things in solid stone and silence.

But the chamber was only small from wall to wall. Above, the room soared aloft into a giant narrowing chimney formed inside the tower. And in a thousand years of collapse the very capstone had tumbled and that great, dark, hibernal space was pierced through from top to bottom by a shaft of falling, blinding light.

It was the sound that alerted Anthony first – a faint stirring, a tiny twitter.

The dark walls of the vault were black with tiny bats – they clung to the rocky surface, they crawled over and around each other, they chittered.

Three launched themselves off from the wall and whirled and fluttered down to land further down on the opposite wall, transformed to translucent white angels as they flew through the shaft of sunlight.


Dhiraja