Pistis · the puppets and the fire

What the freed prisoner sees first on turning: not the sun — a fire, a parapet "like a puppeteer's screen" (514b), and the carried artifacts whose shadows were his world. This is pistis, conviction: the station of made things and the makers you still cannot see. The turn itself carries Plato's deepest word — periagoge, the turning-about of the whole soul: education is not putting sight into blind eyes but re-aiming the instrument that already sees (518c–d). The tradition's word for exactly that motion, down to the literal sense of turning, is teshuvah. And the first honest fruit of the turn is pain: the fire dazzles, and the shadows briefly seem truer than their sources (515d).