Tea at Trianon: Pagans and "Magical" Writing

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, March 4, 2024

Pagans and "Magical" Writing

Writing was seen as being a means of "magical" power for most ancient pagan cultures. From The Collector:

The cuneiform script itself was subjected to many phases and styles due to the diverse uses it took on. Under the Sumerians, it was notably pictographic and the symbols shared overt connections to the word they were portraying, for example, the sign for a ruler was a man with a headdress. The Babylonians and Assyrians adapted the pictograms into a more complex script and created texts that now had to be read by specialists. In these later variations, the signs could represent syllables or letters which could be joined to make words independent of their original denotations. Those trained to read and write cuneiform were mainly scribes or priests which to the mainly illiterate populations must have seemed mysterious.

The spoken name of a magical or religious entity had long been equated to the conjuring of that being. Thus, the invention of cuneiform swiftly inspired the notion of written prayers to the gods as well as curses and spells that appeared on objects from bowls to amulets. Written curses have been found in multiple graves including a famous curse inscribed on the walls of the tomb of Queen Yaba, wife of King Tiglath-Pileser III, which stated anyone who desecrated it would receive no offerings in the afterlife and remain “restless for all eternity”.

Egyptian hieroglyphic script is thought to have developed independently from the Sumerian cuneiform around the same time in the fourth millennium BCE. Over time, the logograms progressed into greater abstract characters that no longer looked like the object or idea they represented. These scripts, called Hieratic and Demotic, were however more easily transcribed. The original decorative hieroglyphs were still used under ceremonial or cultic circumstances far later than they were used for legal documentation or other practical uses. Whilst Egypt may have lost some political influence towards the end of the New Kingdom due to a host of new competitive empires, namely the Assyrians, it was able to continue significant cultic and cultural influence. (Read more.)