Hamesahdava

Goddess of Sleep, Trances, Oblivion, and Intoxication

Lady of the Closing Eye, the Warm Absence, Keeper of the Cup That Has Been Drunk, She Whose Veil Is Forgetting, Dreamer-Before-the-Dream, the Sweetness After Ruin, Bride of the Unremembered Hour, the Bright Lady, Whore Ruinous Red, the Gold-that-Poisons, Mother of Vapors

Hamesahdava is the divine hypostasis of Ashmedeii, 29th of the Seventy, who rules uncontrollable wrath and uncontrollable lust both. She is the queen of that all those things which are not of the conscious mind and come from a fouler part of the soul, and she is in every moment where the eye of the soul is closed and the mind does not know where it has arrived. Her dominion is not death, for death is known to be shapeless; her dominion is the death within, the warm void into which the will dissolves like salt in dark water, and she governs every state in which the self is surrendered without being destroyed. Her temples are not built but found: any room in which someone has lain insensible for long enough becomes consecrated to her, and the longer the insensibility, the stronger the consecration.

She is called the Mother of Vapors, for all that clouds the mind is her breath. Wine is her sacrament, and the poppy is her flower, and the smoke of burning henbane is her incense. But these are only the coarsest instruments of her worship. The deeper rites of Hamesahdava are those the body performs without instruction: the falling away of thought at the edge of sleep, the vacancy behind the eyes of the entranced, the sweet sickness of someone who has loved too much and now loves nothing. Every excess that ends in numbness is a prayer to her, whether or not the supplicant knows her name.