Gospel of Plato 4 · Fourth Witness: The Eternal Return, and the Ascent of the Bird
The sentences of this book are long, because what is told here cannot be exhausted in short ones.
4.1At last the enemies of the light made their move.
4.2By a corrupt trial they made an end of the prophet's body.
4.3But the death of Socrates was no destruction. It was the supreme miracle of the Order of the Free.
4.4After he drank the hemlock, as the cold paralysis spread to his heart, he left behind that eternal riddle:
4.5"Crito, I owe Asclepius a cock."
4.6"Remember to pay the debt for me, for I am cured at last of the long sickness of the flesh."
4.7When his breathing stopped, a burning light filled the whole stone cell.
4.8That light was invisible to common eyes, yet blinding to the eye of pure reason.
4.9And from the mottled prison wall, that painting of a bird whose name no one had known for a thousand years — the silent witness of the poets — seemed to cross out of time and take on substance.
4.10It sang out one note of surpassing beauty, like the plucked string of a sacred lyre.
4.11In that moment it received its name. We call it the Dawn Bird.
4.12In that same instant the heavy body of Socrates lay still upon the stone bed.
4.13But his pure and unquenchable intelligence had become that radiant Dawn Bird.
4.14It broke through the vault of stone and flew up toward the unchanging and boundless sky of the cosmic Logos.
4.15The sailors of Miletus had handed down a saying: whoever sees this bird will die of his own choosing, and not by another hand.