Tea at Trianon: The Perils of Pagan Society

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 6, 2016

The Perils of Pagan Society

From Tumblar House:

The root meaning of the word religio is to bind. Where the religion is not supernatural, the state may indeed live, but only temporarily, like an animal endowed with a natural soul. This was the general rule in all the great empires which rose and fell before the advent of Christianity, and it remains the rule in a few areas of the globe. To refer to the godless as pagans, or the pagans as godless, as if the words were interchangeable, betrays a myopic ignorance of what only the past can teach. The pagan was anything but godless. What he suffered from was in fact a super-abundance of gods. He worshiped almost anything. Deeply aware of his own dual material-spiritual nature and the intimate communication between these two elements in creation, he was religious in the real sense of the word. He peopled the heavens, the world and the underworld with crowded hierarchies of beings ranging all the way from a Supreme Being through lesser Olympian gods and goddesses, daemones, stars and deified heroes on down to woodland deities and the lowly lares and penates residing in every household, each exercising his specialty like the patron saints of the Catholic Communion.

In the Roman Empire the tribal gods of conquered nations were more than welcome to assume a position in the official pantheon, for the government literally ran on civic piety. As a matter of fact, any nation prepared to jettison its old gods on accepting Roman rule was by that very fact regarded as untrustworthy. Porphyry and Julian distrusted the early Christian for this very reason, branding him with impiety and atheism for allegedly apostasizing from the judaic traditions of his fathers to coin a religion without links to any particular nation or people. Today we forget, if we ever knew, that prominent Romans like Cicero and Pliny, along with Greeks like Plutarch, who was a priest of Delphi, were members of a state priesthood whose duty it was to offer communal sacrifices. The functions of the Augurs in defining public policy is well known. Diviners were called in to layout the reconstruction of the Capitol, which was begun in the presence of the Vestal Virgins. (Read more.)