"There's No Mystery Left"

While drenched in sensuality, our society is nevertheless experiencing the death of romance. Why do so many Americans need pills in order to do what should come naturally? Camille Paglia explores the question, saying:

The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?

....In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

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Catawba Cut

Here is a short story by Southern writer and poetess Mattie Quesenberry Smith. Darkly haunting, it explores the heart of poverty and desperation in the face of bourgeois hypocrisy. Share

Monarchy is Not Tyranny

Contrary to what many people seem to think. Share

Heresy and Courtly Love

"...Even the songs of the troubadours have become quite heavy-handed against marriage. Some of them say that true love cannot exist in marriage, but only outside of it.” ~ from The Night's Dark Shade by Elena Maria Vidal

 
Reading up on the past helps to put the present in perspective. Dr. Zmirak wonders, as I have before, if courtly love had some roots in Catharism. To quote:

If you're feeling blue, read up sometime on the Albigensians, who revived the ancient Gnostic idea that the material world was the product of an evil, lesser god -- who blocked our access to the higher, holy, purely spiritual God. (The young Augustine believed this creed in his Manichean period.) The creator-demon enslaved us through all the passions of our bodies (that's how they read St. Paul's disparaging references to "the flesh"), which we must overcome via extreme asceticism, and finally defeat through the triumph of universal celibacy: we should "trap" no more celestial spirits in the cage of suffering flesh. Failing that -- and since this heresy arose in sunny southern France, most did -- believers at least should attempt to prevent conception, or abort their infants. Marriage was held to be blasphemy, adultery innocent, and suicide a sacrament. This heresy claimed to be the true and primitive Christianity, which corrupt clerics had hidden beneath the Church's veneer of ritual and hierarchy.

Troubadour poets encoded Albigensian catechisms in their songs about "mysterious" and unattainable love, helping it spread widely through society's rich and well-armed elites. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the Western idea of passionate, all-conquering (and often tragic) romantic love was invented by these lyrical heretics. Meanwhile, gaunt and earnest mendicants preached this new faith to the common people. So popular did this new religion prove that St. Dominic founded the Order of Preachers to combat it by peaceful means, fielding an army of equally fervent ascetics who insisted on the goodness of Creation, the holiness of marriage, and the power of the sacraments to infuse the lumpy imperfections of grossly material life with eternal spiritual meaning. But the heresy was so deeply entrenched, and its followers posed such a revolutionary threat to the social order -- think of them as 13th-century Bolsheviks -- that in the end it took a bitter, international crusade to stop it from spreading. The cruelty of that crusade was not one of Christendom's finest moments, but perhaps the viciousness Catholics were willing to use in stomping out this heresy stemmed from the ugliness and the insidious appeal of its creed.

Its appeal? Why, yes. There isn't much spiritual or intellectual benefit to be had in reading about the heresies of the past unless we try to understand what it was that attracted men to them. Temptation offers people satisfaction with one hand, while it steals away joy with the other -- or else it wouldn't work, would it?

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Dangerous Liaisons of Childhood

The aim of public education is an impersonal society. (Via The New Beginning) Share

Summer at the Conciergerie

As we revisit the palace turned prison we remember the prisoners who suffered there, including Marie-Antoinette. Share

Napoleon's Egyptomania

Egyptian fashions in France. Share

The Palais Royal

“And what are you writing in your memoirs, my dear?” asked the Duc d’Orléans of Madame de Genlis.

They had just finished an intimate supper in a secluded, upper chamber of the Palais Royal.  From an open window came sounds of merriment regardless of the season of Passiontide.  The cafés and theaters of the Duc d’Orléans’ palace courtyard were teaming with soldiers, streetwalkers, forgers, pickpockets, artisans and aristocrats.  A footman and a  waiting‑woman were quietly clearing away the crystal and porcelain from the linen-draped table, above which floated a chandelier shaped like Montgolfier’s balloon.  The Duc lounged in a brocaded chair; on the wall behind him hung a life-size portrait of himself in the full regalia of a Knight of the Holy Spirit, complete with velvet mantle, diamond cross, and powdered wig.  The man who sat beneath the painting, sipping cognac from a crystal snifter, his wig hanging over the back of the chair, was a study in contrasts with his own image.  With untied cravat, wrinkled, partially unbuttoned shirt, and tousled sandy hair, he looked breezy and unkempt in spite of his striped vest, yellow coat of oriental silk, and high English riding boots.  Only his aquiline Bourbon nose gave a certain doubtful dignity to his acne-scarred face, lined with self-indulgence.

~from Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

A post by Melanie about the palace that was the hub of social life and revolutionary activity in Paris.

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The Sufis and the Cathars

I have been asked if there was a connection between the Sufis and the Cathars. It seems that there was, at least according to Mystagogue (a New Age site):

Of course I could not miss the fact that to the Sufi, the term baraka was symbolised by a boat and itself became fused with the symbol of the dove. The dove itself was the Christian and Gnostic symbol of the word or spirit of the Lord and hence it was the baraka. The later Gnostic Christian Heretics, the Cathars took this symbol and with their own links within Islam fused the two devices together:

“… One important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of ‘peace’ or, more accurately the more subtle concept of ‘grace’, that state of being in God’s love. After the first crusades, when the European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked iconographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, which also means ‘grace’ and with the idea that a person can be a ‘vessel of grace’… In some instance, the Cathar dove flying with its wings outstretched was rendered in an artistic motif very similar to the stylised ship meaning baraka in Sufi calligraphy, with the feathers of the dove and the oars of the vessel alike representing the flight and freedom of the soul.” [5]

Orthodox Christianity could not allow these ancient esoteric truths to be spread abroad as it had built its power base upon the literalism’s of the Bible and so they persecuted the Cathars and burnt them out of sight. However it does seem that these Cathars did hold the secret of the Temple of Solomon. They were the ‘perfecti’ who protected the esoteric wisdom of the Ark, for they were the Western version of the Eastern Sufi who themselves protected the ba-ra-ka. The only ‘vessel’ that they spirited away from their ill-fated Montsegur was the vessel of grace – knowledge. 

Once again it is demonstrated how Catharism was much closer to paganism, the occult and even to Islam than it was to anything remotely Christian, except for the Christian symbols which they appropriated. Share