With her veil she also shields lovers, and her darkness keeps ward over all caresses, all charms hidden and revealed. Her protection is enjoyed by the un-happy and persecuted as well as by the cunning, whom her ambivalent shadows offer a thousand devices and contrivances. The weary she wraps in slumber, delivers from care, and she causes dreams to play about their souls. Who can protect him, guide him aright, give him good counsel? The spirit of Night itself, the genius of its kindliness, its enchantment, its resourcefulness, and its profound wisdom. Out of the dark jaws of the night which gape beside the traveller, any moment a robber may emerge without warning, or some eerie terror, or the uneasy ghost of a dead man - who knows what may once have happened at that very spot? Perhaps mischievous apparitions of the fog seek to entice him from the right path into the desert where horror dwells, where wanton witches dance their rounds which no man ever leaves alive.

The encounter suddenly confronts us, as if by a miracle: What is the thing we suddenly see - an enchanted bride, a monster, or merely a log? Everything teases the traveller, puts on a familiar face and the next moment is utterly strange, suddenly terrifies with awful gestures and immediately resumes a familiar and harmless posture.ĭanger lurks everywhere.

What the day brings on and makes recognizable gradually, emerges out of the dark with no intermediary stages. There is no longer a distinction between the lifeless and the living, everything is animate and soulless, vigilant and asleep at once. There is a strangeness about what is intimate and dear, and a seductive charm about the frightening. Our feelings too are peculiarly ambiguous. There are whispers and sounds, and we do not know where or what they are.

Nighness vanishes, and with it distance everything is equally far and near, close by us and yet mysteriously remote. “A man who is awake in the open field at night or who wanders over silent paths experiences the world differently than by day.

Dionysus by Walter F. Otto