The light is like a materialisation of the "ungraspable’, the intersection of transcendence and the visual. It is the very symbol of the Spiritual through antinomy to the Material. The light is truth, its domain of clarity is also that of transparence and the aerial. It is opposed to conceal- ment and creeping. It is honesty and deprivation. The light should therefore induce only knowledge, its symbolism should be that of analysis, of description, and of the look ... but there again the worlds mix, the illusions superim- pose one on the other, the end achieved is in contradiction with the appearance conveyed by the invocation. Light and dazzle of sunset Rays of light similar to shafts, crossing the bodies and destroying them, beams of radiations disin- tegrating the flesh. The mystic aspires to be only ‘pure spirit”, to free himself from the corporeal.    "The Ecstasy of St Teresa” by Bernini (1598 – 1680): the light is sharp, made from golden metal. The saint, in an ecstatic state close to fainting, has half – closed eyes (the detail is important) ... it is like a voluptuous agony, the prolonging and the translation of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The marble, ghastly pale, sets the body in a specific moment, between flesh and crystal, just before the tangible disappears and the soul flies away. The illumi- nation, in the literal and mystical sense of the term. Extreme pallour of the death desired as the passage to immortality. Coldness of the renouncement of the palpable, anticipation of the infinite, timeless, absolute and fixed. But what is it internally, what is the reality behind the glazed image? The sunset burns with its last flames. Light/warmth, star energy, echo in the internal fire of emotions, the ecstasy is a fire devouring the being, and seeming to con- sume it literally. Interior and exterior lose all signification, the body sublimating its substance, becoming gradually transparent, is consumed in harmony with the illumination. The Mystic touched by the light feels he himself becomes immaterial radiation; but that subjective transmutation operates from the interior, at the source of illusions. It finds its origin in the depths of the being, it springs from the secret imperiousness of desires, of which it is only the symbolic resurgence.    It appears then, that the aim of the mystic in his search for the light is not so much as to be dazzled. That dazzling blindness is the triumphal way, although diverted, of a descent to hell. (The eyes which close indicate the withdrawal to the interior of oneself, introspection, self– spelaeology). The difference between the blinding of the black nights and the white blindness of the illumination is minute ... The Mystic abandons the exterior look in order to see better within himself, to be no more than Vision. His call to the elevation of the soul is a return to the primitive essence; is desire to be freed from pleasures of the flesh only opens the way to an intellectual orgasm embracing the whole body and not the sex alone.    That desire to escape the body and valorize the spirit does not lead to an analytical knowledge but to another more intense and more animal. Mysticism is the universe of illusion par excellence, of the opposition between the said and the experienced. It is not that animal that in us, at the moment, is destroyed, but on the contrary the “I”, the spectator and the critic. Chastity and asceticism are not the negation of desire but rather one of the means of transcending pleasure and rendering it avowable. The light is a way to invoke the darkness of the “self”. Esoterism was right to state that what is above is like what is below ... to adore God would be only to sanctify the strength that one feels in oneself, a fervent homage to the uncon- scious, to the interior double that one forebodes as so much more consistent.    Religiousness, beliefs, are only the dregs justifying a dionysiac behaviour. A new exaltation, in some way puri- fied, can be born and developed. Departing from less illusory bases, the atheistic Mysticism will produce new emotions, widening thus the spectre of ecstasy.    Georges BATAILLE, exploring the territories of trans- gression, as Sade before him, and some others, indicated one of the ways, but it would be boring to limit it to that. Certainly, pornography and intellectual violence permit interesting excesses, but the modern world conceals equally a quantity of experiences of which we don’t yet perceive the whole oneiric and symbolic interest. At the heart of daily punishment and sufferings, in the very wheels of encroaching mediocrity, are found both the keys and the doors to inner worlds. Modern symbolism finds the