Fire, god-given into my blending of the blendings in me, the first of the fire in me, ēu ēia eē; water of water, the first of the water in me, ōōō aaa eee;

The prayer is assembling a body. Spirit, fire, water — each element of the world is claimed twice, as the cosmic thing and as “the first of the fire in me,” until the initiate is no longer a man among things but a small cosmos made of the same four powers. The word for it is krâsis, the “blending” — the same term a doctor used for the mix of humours that made a temperament, here raised to the mixing that makes a god. What is being tempered is the reciter himself. And again the elements are not described but sounded. Fire gets ēu ēia eē; water gets the long ōōō aaa eee. These are not words to be understood but vowels to be held in the breath — the reader is meant to hear the rite, not read it. This is what a plain translation silently deletes: the fire in the prayer is a run of sounds a body makes, and to give it back its vowels is to give back the incantation itself.