The Red Cap of Hermetics

Louis XVI was mocked with the "Red Cap of Liberty" which is now displayed at the Paris Olympics. From Daily Sabah:

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Louis XVI, the last king of France, was depicted in many paintings with a "Bonnet Rouge" (Red Cap) on his head. However, what is the story of this red cap with its long apex bent over to the front, and why was it placed the head of the French constitutional monarch before he was executed?

[...]

In ancient Rome, freed slaves were dressed in a white cap called a pileus. Brutus, who betrayed Caesar, chose this cap, which symbolizes freedom, as an expression of Rome's return to the republic, and engraved it on the coin he minted. But this fez, which looks like the white cap worn by Albanians today, actually had nothing to do with the red Phrygian cap.

With the American Revolution, the pileus became an omen of revolutionaries, anarchists, and republicans. It resurfaced with the protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 when Britain imposed a direct stamped paper tax on the British colonies in America.

In particular, a figure of British parliamentarian John Wilkes – nicknamed the "Devil," and known for his support of the American rebels – with this cap became very popular among the rebels known as the "Sons of Liberty."

French anarchists, who inherited this symbol from the American Revolution, preferred the Phrygian cap instead of the pileus. Thus, this red hermetic cap became the symbol of the French revolutionaries and freedom from 1789 onwards. For example, in a sculpture made by French artist Joseph Chinard in 1794, representing the revolution and the republic, a Phrygian cap was placed on the head of a woman in Roman attire. (Read more.)

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America Built USAID to Win the Cold War — It Turned on America Instead

 From Tierney's Real News:

While USAID has performed genuine humanitarian work, its core strategic role was as a tool for regime change and “color revolutions” abroad. It did this by systematically building interconnected networks of NGOs that create the preconditions and execution capability for political transitions aligned with Western liberalism.

DataRepublican outlined five interlocking pillars that, when funded together over years in a target country, create a self-reinforcing “political operating system:”

1. Media — Independent outlets, social media, journalism training, and funding to amplify Western-aligned narratives.

2. Legal infrastructure — Lawyers, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform to challenge governments legally and shape institutions.

3. Election monitoring and fraud — Observer training, voter rolls, and especially parallel vote tabulation (PVT) to contest official results with “independent” data.

4. Activist training — Youth leadership, civic engagement, protest organization, media comms, and “nonviolent” discipline training.

5. Governance data — Anti-corruption monitoring, budget transparency, FOIA-style tools to generate evidence for the other pillars.

“None of these looks like regime change in isolation. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other.”

The 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia is the textbook case. Notably, in Latin America, after Trump cut USAID funding, right-wing candidates won in multiple countries — clear evidence of the network’s impact.

These same five pillars now operate inside the United States, funded by private foundations such as Open Society, Knight, MacArthur, and Arabella Advisors.

The language is softer — “civic engagement,” “democracy defense” — but the functions are identical. (Read more.)

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The Sainthood of Sarah Miles

 From Word of Fire:

As we read Greene’s novel, we discover that the new love pursuing Sarah is not a would-be adulterer but a hound of heaven. We learn that in a moment of desperation—namely, when she thought her beloved Bendrix dead in a bombing raid—Sarah uncharacteristically prays to God, offering that she will end her affair if only the Lord will spare her lover’s life. When the bloodied Bendrix appears in her doorway moments later, alive and unmaimed, Sarah finds herself in the startling position of trying to keep a promise to a God she didn’t know she believed in, unmoored from the only man she loves. Like so many of us, she finds herself navigating a sometimes confusing and uncertain call to holiness amid her own very human pain and weakness. 

And yet she slowly, imperfectly, allows God’s grace to work in her life, albeit in a state of earthly suffering. As Katy Carl tells us, “We find in Sarah that rarest of literary creatures: the believable saint—a character whose authentic holiness feels real to us, in part because we have also seen her at her lowest.” 

This notion—the believable saint—is much more than simply a literary rarity. It is, in fact, a common reality, one that Pope Francis made sure to draw our attention to. In Gaudete et Exsultate, he reminds us that the communion of saints may include more than those we venerate as a Church. It “may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones.” It may include “our next-door neighbours,” patiently persevering in raising their children, in working for their families. It may include a “middle-class of holiness,” saints that “may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” This, of course, proves to be the case with Sarah Miles, as the characters in our novel find themselves witnesses to inexplicable miracles linked to her intercession after her untimely death. Mrs. Sarah Bertram Miles, with all her faults and failings, still made it to the communion of saints. (Read more.)

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Titania

From Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream:

Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats, and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices and let me rest.

(Artwork by Arthur Rackham)
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Decline of Civility

From Townhall:

Starting in the 1960s, the values that made for civility came under attack. Corporal punishment was banned. This was the time when the education establishment and liberals launched their agenda that undermined lessons children learned from their parents and the church. Sex education classes undermined family/church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passe, and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortion. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions, often with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error. The nation's liberals -- along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts -- have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what's moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good or what is or is not criminal.

We no longer condemn or shame self-destructive and rude behavior, such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies, dependency, cheating and lying. We have replaced what worked with what sounds good. The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden. This is seen by the decline in the percentage of black two-parent families. Today a little over 30 percent of black children live in an intact family, where as early as the late 1800s, over 70 percent did. Black illegitimacy in 1938 was 11 percent, and that for whites was 3 percent. Today it's respectively 73 percent and 30 percent. (Read more.)

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The Madeleine Cemetery

 From Sortir à Paris:

In the 8th arrondissement, there is a discreet garden that is nonetheless steeped in history. It now stands atop the former Madeleine Cemetery and its mass grave where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and hundreds of Revolution-era executions were originally buried, and today it houses the Expiatory Chapel.

In Paris, there are gardens that feel almost secret, yet they hide a grand history. This is one such verdant enclave with a macabre past. Nestled behind the sober façades of the 8th arrondissement, the Louis XVI Square, adjacent to the Expiatory Chapel, sits on the site of the former cimetière de la Madeleine, which during the Revolution became a burial ground for the victims of the guillotine. Behind its appearance as a small, discreet haven, this historic Parisian garden sits atop an old burial ground linked to Louis XVI, to Marie-Antoinette and to hundreds of victims of the Terror.

Originally, the cimetière de la Madeleine opened in the 18th century to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding neighborhood. But during the Revolution, its proximity to today’s Place de la Concorde—then the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine stood—made it a particularly convenient burial site for the bodies of the condemned.

Approximately 500 guillotined were laid to rest there. Among them are famous names such as Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Corday, Madame du Barry, and several Girondin deputies. King Louis XVI, executed on 21 January 1793, is buried there in an individual grave. Marie-Antoinette, executed on 16 October 1793, was also interred there. Both are said to have been covered with lime.

Following the Revolution and the Empire, Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, chose to mark the site with a commemorative monument. In 1815, the remains believed to be those of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are transferred to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, after which a chapel is erected on the site of their former burial. The project, entrusted to Pierre Fontaine, gets underway in 1816 and is completed in 1826. The monument is designed in a neoclassical style and today hosts exhibitions open to the public.

The Louis XVI Square as we know it today was laid out later, in the 19th century, when Haussmann’s renovations reshaped the district. Its white floral decorationsecho royalty and the memory of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. But what has become of the mass grave? If the supposed remains of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were moved to the royal necropolis for the kings and queens of France in Saint-Denis, a common view persists that the bodies buried on this site were relocated to the Paris Catacombs, as was the fate of other former intra-mural Paris cemeteries.

In fact, Louis XVIII reportedly insisted that no land “saturated with victims” be taken away from the site. The remains of the old cemetery were thus kept in ossuaries. In other words, even after the monarchs were moved, the place remained a necropolis of the Revolution.

The confusion seems to stem from a Catacombs plaque mentioning another “old Madeleine Cemetery,” located on Laville-Lévêque Street, whereas the cemetery on which the Expiatory Chapel was built lay on Rue d’Anjou. Archaeological surveys conducted in 2018 even confirmed the presence of bones behind the walls of the lower chapel. (Read more.)

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'Se lengsta dæg': The Anglo-Saxon Solstice

 St. John's Eve and St. John's Day were like a summery Christmas in past times. From A Clerk of Oxford:

The first comes from the Menologium, a poem composed probably in the second half of the tenth century. The Menologium catalogues the cycle of the year and the saints' feasts which occur in each month, but it's much more than just a functional list; it combines useful knowledge and Christian learning with the traditional images and language of Anglo-Saxon poetry. I translated part of the section about May, full of flowering meadows and noisy birds, in this post. The section quoted below (lines 106-119) describes the month of June - ærra Liða is the Old English name - as far as June 24th, the feast of John the Baptist and the traditional date of Midsummer Day. It follows on from the section on May - naturally! - and so begins by dating the first of June as the sixth day after the feast of St Augustine of Canterbury, May 26th.

[...]

 Ælfric's description of the sun in his homily on Rogationtide, and 'O Earendel', the Old English version of the antiphon 'O Oriens', which falls on the winter solstice. The solstices and equinoxes were intimately connected with the medieval understanding of the church year: the spring equinox was crucial for the dating of Easter (as discussed here and here), and the solstices for celebrating the birth of Christ and of his herald, þeodnes dyrling, John the Baptist. Bede explains the symbolic relationship between the two solstices in his De temporum ratione:

very many of the Church’s teachers recount... that our Lord was conceived and suffered on the 8th kalends of April [25 March], at the spring equinox, and that he was born at the winter solstice on the 8th kalends of January [25 December]. And again, that the Lord’s blessed precursor and Baptist was conceived at the autumn equinox on the 8th kalends of October [24 September] and born at the summer solstice on the 8th kalends of July [24 June]. To this they add the explanation that it was fitting that the Creator of eternal light should be conceived and born along with the increase of temporal light, and that the herald of penance, who must decrease, should be engendered and born at a time when the light is diminishing.

(Read more.)

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Courtship Etiquette for Gentlemen

From Geri Walton:

Before a gentleman could even consider courting a woman, he had to have already met her or finagled an introduction through society’s proper channels. This might be accomplished through a mutual friend. If not, then his first consideration was how to get acquainted with the young woman, and this is where a gentleman’s investigative skills came into use. He would have to ascertain where she lived and then make discreet inquiries, respecting her family and avoiding compromising her name by not even mentioning it in the course of his inquiry. Then, hopefully, he could somehow work towards an introduction.

If that proved unproductive, his only other option was to get the lady to notice him by attending places she frequented and judging for himself “without speaking to his fair conqueror, — whether his further attentions would be distasteful to her.” If his advances appeared acceptable, he could make “the first deliberate step on the Ladder of Matrimony,” by writing to the woman’s father or guardian and stating “his position in life and prospects, as well as mention his family, [and] request permission … to visit the family as a preliminary to paying his addresses to the object of his admiration.” (Read more.)

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The Lost Basilica of Saint John at Ephesus

 From Liturgical Arts Journal:

This basilica was constructed by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century over what was said to be the site of tomb of the apostle John. It replaced another, even earlier church founded on this same site, a church that was already ancient and worn down by Justinian's time. This new church was constructed in a typical Eastern Roman, Byzantine style and, according to the Greek historian Procopius, it took its design inspiration from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The actual dates for its construction are A.D. 548-565 and the construction was overseen by the local bishop of Epheuus, Hypatius. 

This basilica was cruciform in shape and included typical features such as a long, columned nave; a sanctuary surrounded by a balustrade, a ciborium covering the altar and tomb of St. John, and a synthronon located behind. There was also an octagonal baptistery attached to the basilica, as well as a forecourt. 

The interior walls of the basilica were covered in polychrome marbles, as were the columns and there was a decorative stone pavement for the basilica's floor. Mosaic work ornamented the ceiling and at some point following the main construction of the church, iconographic paintings were also added, a few of which are still extant.  

In short, it sounds like both familiar and noble, and between the basilica's imperial patronage and its connection with the Apostle John, it would go on to become one of the most important Christian sites in the region -- though one which, sadly, history would not be as generous toward. (Read more.)

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