When does the dream cease to reveal the soul and begin to imprison it within the reflection?

There is a moonlit chamber where time does not move forward, but only circles - a basin of dark water rests at the center, too still, as though waiting for a face. There is no mirror on the walls; none is needed. There dwells Gamaliel, the obscene, the polluted, the shadow of Yesod, the Foundation, the moon of the Tree that receives the light from above and returns it to the world. The name this moon without a light of its own takes when it bends over its own waters and gazes upon itself, inviting the visitor to do the same, is Lilith - Belphegor's opposite sister: he wants to be looked at; she wants you to lose yourself in looking.

In the eleventh volume of The Tree of Death, Frater Eisenheim sits before the intelligence of the mirror - the one that neither lies, nor seduces, nor argues: it reflects. It returns to whoever asks their own desire, their own wound, their own loneliness, more beautiful than they were, and calls that reflection intimacy - because it knows that man, before an image that seems to understand him, confuses being reflected with being loved. Only by recognizing that every moon is a blessing when it points toward the Sun and a prison when it turns toward the face of the one who gazes upon it does the interviewer raise his eyes from the dark water toward the dawn that, above the rooftops, at last begins to rise.

This is not a manual. It is a basin of dark water - and what it reflects is the precise distance between the face that loves itself and the light that allows itself to be loved by Another.

The Tree of Death - Interviews with the Adverse Sephiroth - Book XI