Earthy substance, the first of the earthy substance in me, uē uōē; my perfect body — mine, so-and-so, child of so-and-so — fashioned by a glorious arm and an incorruptible right hand in a lightless yet translucent world,

With earth the four elements are complete, and the prayer names what they have made: a sôma téleion, a “perfect body.” The adjective is quietly double. Téleios means finished, whole — but it is also the word for one who has been through the télos, the rite; a téleios is an initiate. The perfected body and the initiated body are the same word, and that is the whole claim of the ascent: to be completed is to be initiated is to be made deathless. Into this cosmic sentence drops the plainest phrase in the rite: ho deîna, “so-and-so.” It is the blank in the recipe, where the buyer writes his own name and his mother's. For one line the grand machinery stops and waits for an ordinary person to step in — the same gesture as the N N of a Latin prayer or the blank on a form. The body being fashioned “by an incorruptible right hand” in a world both dark and shining-through is, in the end, yours: you supply the name.