Sunday, March 9, 2008

The Crescent, "Blond Beast" & Lamb of God

Over at Mark Gordon's Suicide of the West, he posits, 'If after 2,000 years Christ has not penetrated European man, it is our fault, and it’s past time we began asking ourselves “Why?”'

In former days, I put great stock in the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. His insights still can be helpful, as, I think, the following shows. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Jung writes the following:
The case of Nietzsche shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness, and, on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity. Nietzsche undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil ... He delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. That is the moment of Dionysian frenzy, the overwhelming manifestation of the "blond beast" ... a relapse into a pagan form of religion, so that in reality nothing new is discovered and the same story only repeats itself from the beginning ... (As such,) the ecstatic by-passes the law of his (or her) own life and behaves, from the point of view of nature, improperly.
Jung shows that Friedrich Nietzsche's life was microcosm of and served as a template for the woes of today's Europe. We cannot say that Europe, once Christendom, was ever a thorough-going homeland for the faith of Our Lord. The "blond beast" was ever there in the crowd, the mob, the accusatory, satanic gesture that distinguished the "righteous" we from the "witch", the "poisoner", the one with the "evil eye" -- all the while blessed by a Church that did not know (yet) how to follow her Lord to stay beside the least, the last, and the lost, except in her saints.

It may be that Europe, once the offspring of the the Catholic Church, must now be chastened for wanting to have worldly power with a sprinkling of sanctity, bestiality and spirituality, Christ AND Dionysus. And that chastisement comes in the form of a warlord wielding the crescent and scimitar. The biblical God has a predictable way of using the most unlikely ways and means for meting out justice.

The Old Testament prophets told God's Chosen Ones that they were not permitted to worship on the Sabbath and attend "prayer meetings" at the Ba'al shrines on Wednesday nights, so to speak. Banishment, exile and subsistence living in Babylon was the result. Is it such a stretch to say that the worshipers of "the animal psyche" will have to bow under the stern, humorless gaze of an Islamic taskmaster for penance?

The "blond beast," worship of Dionysus nee Ba'al and Molech, still has to be dealt with. Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium make sure we can still hear the words of Our Lord today:
Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned. -- John 15:6
A shame too. Mont Saint-Michel just won't look right with a crescent atop its spire.


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