One can’t help thinking of Damian Williams again: “’I was just caught up in the rapture.” The hope and joy and rapture that flooded the romantic soul of the English observer is the stuff of the primitive sacred. The time was ripe for a sacred charade. Robespierre, at this point little more than a tool of the mob violence, obliged as well as he could. Wells writes:
[Robespierre] induced the Convention to decree that France believed in a Supreme Being … In June he celebrated a great festival, the festival of his Supreme Being. There was a procession to the Champ de Mars, which he headed, brilliantly arrayed, bearing a great bunch of flowers and wheat-ears. Figures of inflammatory material, which represented Atheism and Vice, were solemnly burnt; then, by an ingenious mechanism, and with some slight creakings, an incombustible statue of Wisdom rose in their place.[17]
Perhaps we can let the reference to “some slight creakings” serve to remind us how contrived and inevitably futile was Robespierre’s blatant attempt to bring into the cultural life of Christian France one of the gods whose long absence Nietzsche was later to lament.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Love Fest, Death Fest
With the progressive, neo-pagan, glittering brouhaha going on in Denver, note well this splendid quote from Gil Bailie's "Two Thousand Years and No New Gods:"
The observer of the Democratic National Convention would do well to recall these cautionary words of Bailie. The orgiastic love-feast seeks new victims under the banner of "Change". But the least victims continue to be murdered in abortuaries across the land because of the Democrats strong support of Roe v. Wade. [Thanks to brother Aramis for his research]
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