Tea at Trianon: Passage into the Underworld

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

Monday, September 21, 2020

Passage into the Underworld

From Smithsonian:

Thousands of years ago, the Neolithic residents of Scotland’s Orkney Islands came together to build a complex series of burial mounds in which they laid the deceased (including pet dogs) to rest. The largest of these cavernous, chambered tombs—a cairn called Maeshowe—is particularly impressive. Per Historic Environment Scotland, the ancients designed the structure to align with the sun, allowing light to stream into its passageways in the weeks surrounding the winter solstice.

Now, new research by Jay van der Reijden of the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute suggests Maeshowe’s architects may have planned its layout with an additional goal in mind: namely, ensuring the dead’s entry into the afterlife. As detailed in the University of Cambridge’s Archaeological Review, the tomb’s three side chambers appear to be structured as direct inverses of its main section. In other words, writes Mike Merritt for the Scottish Herald, these compartments are “stylistically upside-down.” (Read more.)