>>40704093
Keys function to let us in or out, to lock or unlock everything from storerooms of provisions to houses, prisons, hospital wards, diaries, caskets of jewels, drawers of old letters, knowledge, memories and hidden or forbidden dimensions| of psyche. Pandora's legendary box of worldly woes
Pould seem to need permanent
locking, but, like most locked things, provokes us to use the keys at hand. Likewise, the "locked room" of many fairy tales, reflecting psyche's defended spaces, nevertheless bids one to key in to what it conceals of possibility, and also danger. Unlocked, such rooms reveal treasure, secrets, dismembered bodies, demons, captives or nothing at all. Sacred realms of death, rebirth and transformation have often been regarded as locked regions, protected by deities that possess the keys, or their priests and priestesses who mediate the initiate's entry into divine mysteries. Keys belonging to the mythic witch Hecate secure the Greek under world of Hades. In the Book of Revelation, an angel holds the keys to the abyss where the devil is chained. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar bears the keys that open the locks of heaven. Her counterpart Cybele locks up the earth each winter and opens it to growth and flowering every spring. Keys evoke the tension between seeking and finding, restricting and releasing, withholding and giving, prohibiting and admitting. The individual with the “key" momentarily becomes threshold guardian and opener of the way, Human consciousness perpetually searches for the key that will give it access to the object of its longing self-discovery, peace of mind, the enigmatic heart of the beloved.