Tea at Trianon: Against Sorcery: A Guide

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, June 21, 2025

Against Sorcery: A Guide

One of the best explanations of Church teachings on various phenomena that I have ever read. Apparently there was a debate somewhere online. Puritanism, which sees the devil everywhere, is alive and well. Charles Coulombe posted the following. Brilliant. From El Antiguo:

Some readers may already feel discomfort, perhaps even alarm. But I believe this stems not from true disagreement, but confusion over terminology. The critics of what they describe as ‘occult’ sympathies (really just classical Neoplatonic Realism) within contemporary “trad” Catholicism are conflating distinct traditions and terms—Hermeticism, theurgy, natural magic, Gnosticism, symbolism, etc.—without academic, historical, or theological nuance. This only increases confusion. Worse, it leads to a kind of moral panic wherein any language of cosmic participation, hierarchy, correspondence, or symbolic efficacy is flattened into the word “magic,” and then condemned wholesale, regardless of how those words and concepts were employed by the Fathers, the Doctors of the Church, or even Christ Himself in His teaching and signs. (Read more.)

Part II, HERE.

Part III, HERE.