Tea at Trianon: Crushing the Head of the Ouroboros

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 2, 2025

Crushing the Head of the Ouroboros

From El Antiguo:

The circumpunct resembles the Ouroboros, that self-eating wyrm that symbolizes the perennialist philosophy, the eternal return of the same, or the cycle of death and rebirth, depending on who you ask. It is always spinning in a circle, eating its own tail, never decaying or dying, but merely subsisting on itself in a closed loop or Möbius strip; an inescapable infinitude of illusive motion. It is placid, self-congratulatory, self-consuming.
I don’t believe that the concordance between occult symbolism and progressive ethical structures is merely coincidental. Besides the historical roots of liberalism in occult and perennials thought (which we will explore in later posts), there is also something more archetypical at play. The Ouroboros, the circumpunct, the swastika…they are cynical as well as cyclical. They propose a sort of meaninglessness to action, an infinite recursion, a closed loop. Moral concern simply becomes a province of the Infinite Self in its (non)encounter with the Infinite Other. Nothing actually happens. All interaction is cast as a journey of the Self towards perfect compassion for the Other-as-Self. The only journey to be made is around.
So why is the heat map diagramming the liberals so disturbingly narrow?
The heat map simply diagrams something that we already know—liberals place their care about “the world” higher than their concern for their families and communities. Or, perhaps—to be more charitable—their concern reaches farther and encompasses more, giving them a more “cosmopolitan,” less “bigoted” worldview. (Read more.)