the Exultet and the Lumen Christi. The intimate connection between divine breath and divine fire appears in its most visually arresting form during the benediction of the font, in which, according to most orders, the candle is dipped in the font while the priest declares the power of the Holy Spirit to have descended into the water: the sufflation of the font in most cases directly precedes or accompanies the immersion of the candle. Their close association can again be illustrated from Wulfstan's baptismal homilies: "By the breath that the priest breathes into the font when he blesses it, the devil is straightway driven out from it. And when the priest dips the consecrated candle in the water, then that water forthwith becomes imbued with the Holy Ghost." Similar considerations bind sufflation closely to imagery of light and darkness, specifically of the movement of the baptizand from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light (a very common theme), and to the sign of the cross (a very common action), among others that could be mentioned. John the Deacon uses light-dark imagery to explain exsufflation in exorcism as a transition: The exsufflated person is exorcised so that ... having been delivered from the power of darkness, he might be translated into the kingdom ... of God. So also Augustine ("The church exsufflates and exorcises [infants] that the power of darkness might be cast out from them"), and Isidore ("The power of the devil is ... exsufflated in them, so that ... being delivered from the power of darkness, [they] might be translated unto the kingdom of their Lord"). And as regards signation (the sign of the cross), in Western texts from as early as the Gelasian Sacramentary, the one gesture almost always precedes (or precedes and follows) the other, and their significance is often complementary if not identical. In Raban Maur's discussion of the baptismal liturgy, for example, the exsufflation is said to expel the devil, the signing to keep him from coming back. The two signs are frequently combined, the blowing done in the form of a cross, e.g. in the Syriac Rite described by James of Edessa, in the modern Coptic rite, in the late 9th-century Ordo Romanus XXXI, in Wulfstan's Anglo-Saxon homilies and their Continental sources, in the 10th-century Ambrosian rites for catechumen and font, in the 11th-century North Italian catechumenal rites, in the 12th- through