(#3) “And when my ashes scatter me with my memories to the wind
What endures beyond the silent edge is the essence found within
Have we forgotten truly who we are and what our living means?
Our purpose lies in others’ eyes and the realities that we bring”

(#5) “All that I am, and all that I dream
Lives somewhere beyond your image of me
And who I become, and what I will be
Is not yours to decide; it comes only from me”

There’s the paradox. Our memories can’t survive us, so only others’ memories can preserve what we were. But much of what we were, others never knew — it stayed inside our hearts and minds, not to held by the world. Is all that then lost forever?

Rogue resolves the quandary by answering: what you give to love will never die.

As near as I can tell, Crüxshadows is the first musical group to turn Gnostic theology into wildly popular music since the Provençal troubadours followed the Cathars and Albigensians into oblivion in the 13th century.

How many rock songs have spoken bridges as “slight” as the (possibly angelic) musing in “Sophia”?

“The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty. If you wish to find that which becomes the dividing line between mankind and other biological classifications, it rests not in brain size, dominance, or even emotional capability. It lies within the innate capacity for human beings to reflect on their actions, and show regret. It is most certainly the ability to empathize that gives them their position. All mammals understand love and affection, but only man shows a propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life-form. Losing this capability, among individuals of the species, reduces them below their much heralded position, and readies the climate for the likely fall of man. A fall from grace.”

(Note that the *sung* lyrics of that song build on this premise, with the Gnostic Sophia, Light of the World, becoming the avatar for the listener to adopt compassion and self-sacrifice as a code of knightlike honor.)