The Politics of Removal

Four-square

Unmitigated drivel about public art, architecture and monuments make up a large percentage of LoS posts. From time to time we've talked about the destruction of past monuments to reflect changing aesthetics, political ideologies, practical urban renewal, etc. The erasure of the past for political reasons was common enough in ancient Rome and Egypt, where sometimes an emperor or pharaoh would efface inscriptions on monuments in order to diminish the achievements of a rival or to sully the name of a predecessor.

A few days ago, the New Orleans City Council voted for an ordinance that will lead to the removal of four monuments in that city which honor Confederate heroes.  The Atlantic says:

This decision constitutes the most sweeping removal of Confederate iconography since the lowering of the Confederate battle flag in Columbia, South Carolina, this past summer, and offers the clearest evidence yet that the Lost Cause view of the Civil War has finally lost.

It is in the larger historical context that we view this news. New Orleans feels confident it can remove four big monuments and in no way be culturally diminished, a definitive sign of the changing of the guard.

Louisiana's governor even stepped into the fray and tried to block their removal, not because of the history they represent, but because they represent history.  In an interesting twist, however, the Governor isn't some disgruntled old white dude.  He's young, conservative and of Indian heritage -- Bobby Jindal.

I have no confusion over why people want these to come down. Hard to swallow walking past some tax-supported public art erected to glorify a man who fought a war to keep your people enslaved.

The removal is said to be temporary; the goal being to put them together in some kind of park or memorial where they can be re-contextualized. I always get a bit disconcerted by attempts to alter history, something Winston Smith-y about it, but if done correctly, I suppose the monuments can be preserved in a way that doesn't insult the large black population of the city.

One thing that stood out was that the monuments were brought down for being a "public nuisance." You'd think any nuisance would be a result of the actions of people, not inert marble and bronze. Also curious is that an anonymous donor is footing the bill; what are the donor's motives? Get rid of these things ASAP....or to protect them from destruction by attaching the condition that they'll foot the bill only if they are preserved?

Apparently there's a U.S. place names bureau that periodically changes official place names from time to time. This has included eliminating offensive racial epithets from creeks, mountains, towns, etc. Battle Creek, Oklahoma, for example, was known as Nigger Creek.  Until 1990!  The conundrum came up recently in France for a town called Mort aux Juifs: "Death to Jews" (residents voted to retain the name).  In Spain, Arabs can't be too happy in Matamoros: Kill Moors.  

I'm not against periodically updating place names to reflect changing attitudes, but I do wonder where removing monuments will stop.  (A question which sadly puts me in the company of some serious assholes; where it does stop will be debated for a long time to come, but taking Confederate symbols from state flags, for example, is a start about which I have no doubts whatsoever....)

A mental flash: as of 2016 the World Fantasy Award will no longer feature the likeness of H.P. Lovecraft because of his virulent racism; attitudes which even by the standards of his time were pretty harsh.  This pissed off Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who said he returned his two WFAs and urged a boycott of future ceremonies.  Like Jindal, Joshi is Indian, demonstrating that this issue is not just black and white....

Nor do I oppose taking out the Confederate flag from state flags, which were only added in the 50's as a middle finger to Washington de-segregationists.  By removing these Confederate flags, it's not an attack on Southern heritage or Confederate dead, but an attack on Jim Crow. 

I don't have any strong feelings against removing these four monuments in New Orleans, despite the money and manpower expended on such endeavors.  But I'm uncomfortable with the destruction of historical monuments and buildings in general.  And I wonder....Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, so will they eventually become targets? Because that's a totally different scale altogether, as improbable as it is unfeasible.  It's like the debates in literature about Céline or Ezra Pound; do we refuse to acknowledge their place in the canon because they happened to be anti-Semites or fascist sympathizers?

I would propose that the answer doesn't lie in removing these monuments, but perhaps adding context, whether in the form of interpretive signs and markers, or some kind of counterbalance, a monument to show that there is the will to spend as much time and energy on honoring another person and ideology as there is on what's currently there.

This is all part and parcel of Art History.  And this subject certainly merits close attention.  I'd like to see a survey of what has been destroyed and removed instead of what's been created and installed.  Who and what we honor, and how, are living polemics.  The struggle over symbols is in this case also a struggle over urban space.  As something tangible it is easier to quantify, to actually do something on a monumental scale that will alter the city-scape.  One could call it the Politics of Removal. 

I've always wondered when they'll go after that Pike statue in DC.... (8/15: The mayor, more than half of the D.C. Council, and the D.C. attorney general have joined activists in calling for the removal of a statue of a Confederate general from federal land in Judiciary Square.)

Removing four statues seems appropriate if you're aiming to re-orient a map -- one for each cardinal direction.  The statues represent Gen. Robert E. Lee (1884), Pres. Jefferson Davis, Gen. Gustave Toutant Beauregard (also a Freemason) and the Crescent City White League (1891).  

Of the four, the last is quite shocking.   It doesn't honor a politician or general.  It commemorates a battle in which an army of about 5000 from the White League attempted to take over the state government in September 1874.  It was the culmination of series of violent events stemming from a disputed 1872 election, including the massacre of over 220 people, most of them black, at Colfax.  Somewhere around 30 people were killed at Coushatta.  Both of these places are between a three- or four-hour drive from New Orleans these days.

The White League was essentially an extra-legal paramilitary working on behalf of the Democratic Party to suppress the vote, harass carpetbaggers, intimidate blacks and above all regain control of the government.  Unlike the KKK, the White League worked openly, without disguises.  When the Democrats did regain control of the government a couple years later, the militants in the White League were re-absorbed into various state militias and the National Guard.  What was essentially a terrorist militia became redistributed throughout the existing legal state and national military.  The Klan was finally suppressed about this time under intense pressure from the Federal government.  But in many ways it didn't really matter; the Klan had already achieved its goals by putting Democrats in power throughout the South, where they would remain firmly ensconced until the Civil Rights Era.

 

In the 20's and 30's the Klan re-appeared; it was an entirely different organization, but it had taken to mass parades and rallies as much as night riding.  It was in this "2nd generation" that the Klan membership was historically at its highest, and perhaps most highly-influential.

This could account for why an inscription was added to the monument in 1932 stating that the Yankees "recognized white supremacy in the South" by withdrawing Federal troops after the violent exploits of the White League.  Note that the monument doesn't talk about recognizing "states' rights" or the "legitimate grievances of Southerners resulting from the punitive measures of Reconstruction" which is how defenders of the monument and the confederate flag frame the aftermath of the Civil War.  Nope, the monument celebrates Northern recognition of white supremacy.  No surprise that a city which is 60% black would vote to bring it down.

To call for the removal of this inscription is not being "politically correct".  This is not "college student crybaby safe space" stuff.  This is about repudiating a publicly-funded tribute to the openly white supremacist paramilitaries which took control of the government that established the laws defining blacks as second-class citizens for the next hundred years.

This flat-out racist monument graced New Orleans until 1989.  At that time, it was removed in order to do work on Canal Street.  City leaders probably hoped to mothball it, but some angry citizens kicked into gear and had it re-erected.  In 1993 it was moved to the spot where the battle actually took place, which had the side benefit of being somewhat out of the way, silenced to some degree.  The inscription added in 1932 was covered up and a more conciliatory inscription added. 

Where it goes now is anybody's guess.  Soon after the council's vote, various plaintiffs filed suit to block further removals: the Louisiana Landmarks Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, the Monumental Task Committee Inc. and Beauregard Camp No. 130, a New Orleans chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Of course, what happens will not be determined by questions regarding what we honor and how, but by legalities regarding who owns the land where they are situated, the fact that two of the monuments are on the National Register of Historic Places, and various laws protecting historical monuments and veterans memorials.  Laws created, in other words, exactly for this kind of situation.

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Winners writing history:

US 3rd Army blowing up swastika at the zeppelin field in Nuremberg, 1945

Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, 2001.

A "spontaneous event" stage-managed by a US Psyops team. Firdos Square, 2003

My Bologne has a first name:

L'obelisque

When I moved to Toulouse in April, 2002, I lived a few hundred yards away from this plaza and for over a year regularly frequented the restaurants and bars nearby.  My best pal Alex's office is just around the corner and the plaza provides a convenient shortcut to the hopping/happening Place St. Pierre.

Which is why it's kind of odd that I must have seen this plaza fewer times than I can count on one hand.

The few times I had been there I must have

dithered about as if in a dream, 
some kind of hapless mote 
floating through on a sunbeam

(from Burning Pizzle by J. Trenchwheat)

because I'd never really quite grokked -- done the spit-take as it were -- the fact that there's an obelisk fountain at the dead center.  And if there's anything I'd grok, it's an obelisk fountain.  This quiet, almost hidden plaza in the midst of one of Toulouse's hubbiest bubs features an obelisk and, as Prof. Freedom Williams once said, "I'd never even gone "hmmm."")

The Place de Bologne is relatively new, so it's jut another indication that the Egyptian Revival is still going strong in Toulouse  (I've written extensively about plethora of contemporary pyramid monuments in the metropolitan area).  Egypt remains a source of inspiration for architects, developers, and builders as it has since the Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans -- times when Egyptian civilization was the antiquity of what we consider our own antiquity.

Place de Bologne as seen from the LoS helicopter

Take a S.I.P.

Imagine how geeked out I got when after seeing the obelisk I took a look at the office doors facing it and saw a triangle logo for home builder (an outfit called S.I.P.)  I have explored the links between Freemasonry, the Egyptian Revival(s), the triangle and/or pyramid logo, and the French real estate and construction industries.  In this case I was doubly geeked:  facing this first S.I.P. was another be-triangled business:  Groupe Osiris (!) is a developer and real estate manager.

Osiris has the cool-for-us title of the "Lord of Silence" -- but he was also known as the "Lord of the Dead" and the "King of the Living".  Interesting -- perhaps the Groupe seeks to evoke the importance of urban planning and lodging as a controlling force in our lives.  Haussmann certainly understood the relationship between urban geography and political liberty when he designed wide boulevards favorable to army forces and cannon at the expense of the narrow streets favorable to building blockades and defending the poor quarters with rusty rifles and kitchen knives.

King of the Living Room

When Toulouse performed the same kind of "remodeling" (at about the same as Haussmann), the city's motivations were probably less strategic than practical in terms of everyday traffic.  In any event, if an urban zone is defined by the constant reconstitution of its component parts (to paraphrase T.A. Wilson), a city is in a constant state of degeneration, regeneration, and transformation.
Osiris worship was in essence a cult of regeneration and rebirth, and a city it essentially an entity which is dying and re-birthing itself at every second of every day.  The city is its own mother, father, and child, a family coiled-up into a convoluted relationship which at its mutating center is a kind of cosmic incest.  (If in fact we can speak of a center at all; perhaps it's less inaccurate to speak of something so folded up in upon itself that it's all periphery.

Given the increasingly restrictive circles in which the elite travel, and -- like boolean ovals -- intersect through various boards, clubs, business groups, Lodges -- tighter and tighter as we head towards the tip of the pyramid -- it's no small wonder these increasingly reduced and therefore intimate business bedfellows move with ease within the nomenclature of this incestuous Egyptian genealogy: Horus, Osiris, Cheops....

One of the many challenges facing urban planners is how to move a city forward without totally destroying its past.  One can't forbid any and all new construction in an historic city or we end up stunting a city's dynamism.  We have a static showpiece where we can't even put in a new skylight because it doesn't mesh with the surrounding 19th century character, for instance.

That said, I'm a firm believer in taking the time and spending whatever is necessary to properly investigate new construction sites and thinking long and hard about what we're destroying.  When in the 19th century the city of Toulouse plowed through the medieval warren of the centre ville to create a logically straight pair of central axes, they did indeed facilitate movement through the center of town; they also forever destroyed  its medieval character.  The neighborhoods around these axes remain today among Toulouse's most beautiful streets.  Imagine what has been lost.

In my own time, during the renovation and construction of the new Palais de Justice, the remains of the palace of the Counts of Toulouse were found; minimal archaeological investigation was carried out and what we might have learned from it has probably been lost forever.
  

Not so far from there, the destruction of a building attached to the Church of the Dalbade revealed a medieval cemetery underneath.  This was also investigated, but then, poof, a new building appeared and the cemetery was lost forever.

The Place de Bologne is another such place, which "represents in an edifying manner the problems posed by a certain kind of urbanism" (here).  Some of the buildings were renovated for use in the current plaza, but some very old buildings, in one of the oldest parts of Toulouse, were simply destroyed.  If we were dealing with some run-of-the-mill urban building, we could shrug it off as acceptable change.  "Urban Renewal" has been used to put lipstick on the pig of various corrupt and disruptive schemes dreamed up by developers eager to squeeze every last coin from every last square foot, but if we look past the abuse of this doctrine, we'll find it's a necessary and even positive part of urban evolution.  Without renewal, there is no urban stasis, only decay.

But the ruins here were in fact the last vestiges of the palace of the Visigoth kings of Toulouse, before various depredations obliged them to remove to Toledo (Spain, not Klinger's hometown).

This is an important and relatively under-known period of the city's history:  the Dark Ages, the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages -- the Visigoths being one of the tribes who brought that about -- in the epicenter of Gallo-Roman France.  The Visigoths had sacked Delphi and Rome and legend has it that they made off with the spoils of Solomon's Temple.  They built the first Church of the Daurade in an octagonal, Byzantine style, so-named for its golden mosaics.  Their kingdom extended from Andalusia to the Loire and Toulouse was their capital; Place de Bologne was the epicenter.

The worst part is what they destroyed it all for; the architecture is unremarkable and the entrances to the plaza are gated, giving the impression of a private rather than a public space.  Indeed, all the buildings on the plaza are a tightly controlled development, not really an organic residential zone but operated by one of the powerful developers which have had so much power in determining the ever fluid urban and suburban landscapes of French cities and villages

As one site puts it "the result of these errors makes this place close, cold, without life.  With a century of history destroyed beneath our feet."  Interesting now that I think of it.  Another one of these "dead zones" is Compans Caffarrelli, which, incidentally, is another big plaza surrounded by high-rises, a public space privatized, basically, but with a cold and inert feeling despite the fact that several hundred people probably live there.

One must also consider the chilling effect of all this not only on street life, but free speech.  Consider this anecdote from a few years ago:

Taking pictures of this pyramid and architecture, Daurade was approached by a squat little security guard, a little nervous and scowling, who informed him that taking pictures is forbidden. So there you have it. On the city streets one is free to photograph what one wants. But as all this public space is enclosed and privatized, public inquiry and expression are somewhat less free. In fact, taking a photo is forbidden. Whatever the reason for this, security probably, it still doesn’t eclipse the fact that in this new world order everything will be for sale, and those with money to buy are welcome. As long as the money keeps flowing in the right direction: up towards the pinnacle.

The fountain isn't remarkable:  an obelisk in an octagonal basin, accessed by three steps which form the octagonal base.  The plaza itself is paved in the same form.  I suppose one could read something into the three steps in terms of Freemasonry, but that may be pushing it!  It occurs to me that this is the second thing in this post described as octagonal; it's possible the form of the plaza is a reference to the original Church of the Daurade which sat in roughly the equivalent position at the other end of the Quai Lucien Lombard.

I've already mentioned in a few posts how the Count of Montalambert called Toulouse the "home of vandalism".  Part that vandalism isn't just the destruction of history, but replacing what has been destroyed by shite architecture.  Toulouse has recently been obliging people on the outskirts to sell their homes so they can be razed and big dumpy apartment blocks put in their place.  The whole quasi-rural character of vast tracts close to the dead center of Toulouse have been sucked into a cold and sterile, inorganic mess of character-less, undifferentiated buildings.

So, I was attracted by the Egyptian obelisk and, sniffing around for anything vaguely Masonic, came across the two developers using triangles -- a subject to which I've already dedicated both a post and a Picasa album -- one of these developers specifically evokes Osiris.  A curious choice, given the theme of death and rebirth.  They certainly killed something off here -- a piece of history which could furnish much-needed detail about the Visigoth period of Toulouse -- but whether something worthwhile has been born from this remains to be seen.

A renovated rose by any other name is still a renovated column, dagger, mark, monolith, monument, needle, pillar, pylon, shaft or tower

This here's a photo of the entrance to Toulouse's Terre Cabade municipal cemetery, a small necropolis atop the Jolimont at the dead end of the aptly named Avenue du cimitière.  Opened in 1840, the gate reflects the Egyptomania which gained renewed impetus in France after Napoleon's scientific/military adventures in Egypt some 40 years prior, a fascination with far-reaching manifestations in Western culture.  Some of these were physical signs: architecture, interior design, jewelry, women's make-up, funerary monuments.  Some of these were born into the realm of ideas:  large swaths of the Western esoteric tradition are widely (sombunall) regarded as having emerged out of the syncretic crucible of that was ancient Alexandria; Hermeticism is the namesake of Hermes Trismegistus, an apocryphal personage who was perhaps a blend of Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.  They are both scribes, messengers....deities of magic.

To make a long story short, the "Egyptian Revival" is kind of a misnomer; I think several basic components of Egyptian thought and art never left us and indeed, in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Martin Bernal proposes that Greek civilization did not arise from Indo-European sources as much as it derived from Egyptian and especially Phoenician colonization.  I've not read Bernal's book but I have often pondered the link between Phoenicia and Greece.  A relative dearth of material about the Phoenicians has led antiquarians to approach the topic carefully, but we can say for sure that their influence was wide-reaching, as they are known to have traveled beyond the straights of Gibraltar, likely up to Ireland, carrying their goods and their culture along with them.  Phoenicia, more a confederation of city-states than an empire, was passed back and forth like a football for centuries, too weak to fight off their powerful neighbors -- Egypt, Persia, Assyria and the like -- but too wily and important to merit obliteration.  We do know that their skill as builders was widely admired and when Solomon needed to build the Temple, he turned to his neighbors in what is now Lebanon and got it done.

The two pillars that marked the entrance, Jachin and Boaz, were long part of Phoenician religious architecture and probably derives from the Egyptian practice of marking the entrance to temples with obelisks.  But I've written about all of this before; it does however bring us neatly back to the photo which started this post; the Terre Cabade entrance.  Basically, what drew me to snap a photo again was the fact that one of the two administrations in the Capitole since I first photographed it decided to re-point the bricks and cap the obelisks with a golden -- gilt aka "dorada" aka "daurade" -- pyramidion, or at least a golden pyramidion sheath.  At first I just thought they'd capped the rotten tooth so to speak and re-did the mortar in the bricks, but it appears the wall has also had a new roughcast and a coat of the tan paint so liberally used in Toulouse.

As Stephen Curl points out in The Egyptian Revival, "Egyptianism" was intimately linked to Freemasonry.  Jachin and Boaz are an important element of any Masonic Lodge, which is itself a schematic representation of Solomon's Temple.  The central myth of Freemasonry turns on the story of the Temple's construction and of chief architect Hiram Abiff.  "Egyptian" Masonic rites date back to Napoleon's expansion into Egypt and were later stimulated by discoveries such as the Rosetta Stone which allowed for the decryption of hieroglyphs; this pursuit had become something of an international obsession and the biggest breakthroughs were made by a Frenchman from Figeac named Champollion, who published his findings in the 1820's.  The French still regard Champollion as a national hero.

So voici a little context behind this renovation I came across a couple of months ago during one of my periodic dérives through the streets of Toulouse.  For more of the history and symbolism behind the funerary architecture of the Terre Cabade, please refer to my earlier article.

I'd here like to drop in an interesting bit of history I'm not entirely sure what to make of.  I'm finishing up Robert Crease's World in the Balance about the search for an absolute system of measurement and naturally a good part of the narrative is taken up by the invention and progress of the metric system, another topic I've dealt with quite a bit on LoS.  I was quite chuffed to see that he linked the success of the metric system to some historical developments I have identified as being in philosophical harmony with this most rational of measurement systems:  the diffusion of the scientific method, the rise of capitalism and the emergence of the modern nation state.  I have also (insufficiently) discussed how the metric system was used during the French Revolution as a tool to overthrow the old feudal order, or ancien régime, with its patchwork of aristocratic and churchly fiefs.  But this idea of the metric system as a revolutionary tool is not confined to France.  Crease points out that in Africa, for example, the adoption of the metric system by newly independent states in the wake of the Second World War was a decision made as part of the decolonization process, reducing the influence of British culture, including their measurement system, which is, after all, known as "imperial" measurement.

 

I think this is neatly summed up in the "macaron" of the BIPM, the international agency responsible for maintaining metric standards and overseeing further inquiry into metrology.  My post about that seal is worth a look-see if only for a summary of the seal's concise visual statement about the revolutionary value of the metric system, as well as its celebration of commerce, scientific rationalism and representative democracy.  One principal figure in the seal is our friend Hermes, who in addition to being a god of magic is a god of weights and measures.

What I really want to mention here is a story in Crease's book about the origin of the idea that the Great Pyramid at Giza is in fact a metrological monument; this idea is today so widespread I can't do the subject justice here, but the whole genre of sacred geometry/metrology with regards to the Great Pyramid appears to have started with an anti-metric book entitled The Battle Of The Standards: The Ancient, Of Four Thousand Years, Against The Modern, Of The Last Fifty Years, The Less Perfect Of The Two, by John Taylor (1864).  Taylor's first pyramid book had appeared in 1859 and was enormously popular in its day; his second book develops his ideas and bears a title bound to grab the attention of anyone versed in English Masonic history.

Taylor wrote that it was probably Noah who'd overseen the construction of the Great Pyramid following the instruction of the "Great Architect"  -- the Masonic name for God.  Freemasons honor Noah as a builder and as a reservoir of antediluvian wisdom, and symbols associated with him form the foundation of several relatively auxiliary Masonic degrees.  Without going into details, Taylor proposed that the Pyramid was built to provide "the measure of the earth" from which sacred measurement standards could be derived.  As Crease says, the "battle" in the title of his book was "whether to use the ancient, sacred and natural measurement system or the modern, artificial metric one."

Not having read the book, I can only speculate on what follows, but my gut tells me the book is linked to a conflict in English Freemasonry.  English Freemasonry was marked in the fifty years preceding publication of Taylor's book by the unification of two rival Grand Lodges to form the United Grand Lodge of England in 1813.  What makes this seem a little less far-fetched is that the two rival factions were known as the Ancients and the Moderns.  I wonder if the battle of the standards in the title was also a battle between rival interpretations of Freemasonry's tenets?  Was this an important subtext to the book, or is it merely coincidence?  Or was Taylor just playing with the double sense, taking a dig at the "Moderns" within Freemasonry?  As "building" is the central metaphor of Masonry, reflected in the Fraternity's very name, it would seem likely that someone of an esoteric bent such as Taylor would express to some degree Masonic ideals in a book about measurement, especially given Freemasonry's link with "Egyptianism".  

Taylor's work, though influential in the esoteric tradition, was not well-received by the scientific community, even though his predecessors were of an impeccable scientific pedigree.  His formulation of the "pyramid inch" was based upon no less a personage than Sir Isaac Newton's formulation of the "sacred cubit", something he was inspired to do upon reading mathematician John Greaves' book entitled Pyramidographia (1646) (source)  Needless to say, Newton's work was partially derived from close readings of Scripture and analysis of its description of Solomon's Temple and Noah's Ark.  These interests have led many writers to speculate that Newton was a Freemason, but despite the intersection of interests, there's no evidence that this is the case.

So, I intended this post to be a sentence or two saying "oh looky they've renovated the obelisks!"  It was hard to keep it simple because Egyptian architecture has long been a source of fascination within (and apart from) the esoteric tradition and you simply can't study one without eventually coming across the other.  Sacred geometry, divine revelation and numerology are inexorably linked with the exoteric knowledge and artifacts of science and architecture; domains we see as apposed to magical thinking today were anything but to people such as Newton and Taylor.

I think Taylor was a Freemason judging from his works and associations -- but I can't positively identify him as having been a member.  The same is true for Taylor's chief disciple Charles Piazzi Smyth, one-time "Astronomer Royal for Scotland" and a scientist with a great deal of mainstream credibility.  Smyth elaborated on Taylor's ideas, doing some damage to his reputation in the process.  Despite the eventual disproving of the existence of a "pyramid inch" by William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Smyth had made some valuable contributions to Egyptology after becoming engrossed in Taylor's work; he was the first to photograph the interior of the Great Pyramid and his measurements, which had been the most accurate to date, led him to produce numerous valuable designs and drawings.  A British Israelite (basically the idea that Western Europeans, especially Britons, were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel), Smyth claimed that the "pyramid inch" had been handed down to history by Noah's son Shem and that the Hebrews had built the Great Pyramid under Melchizedek.  Melchizedek, incidentally, has been interpreted by some to be one and the same as the aforementioned Shem and a prototype of the Messiah.  Hebrews 7:1-21 quotes Psalm 110:4 in calling Jesus "a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek".  Not only was it a divine revelation, but it could be used to tell the future; the Great Pyramid was thus a "repository of prophecies."

Dig this:

Smyth's theories on pyramid prophecy were then integrated into the works and prophecies of Charles Taze Russell (such as his Studies in the Scriptures), who founded the Bible Student movement (most visible today in the Jehovah's Witnesses....)

I have already spoken quite a bit about the connection between the Jehovah's Witnesses and Freemasonry, as well as Moorish Science.  Russell, if anything, was a bit cagey and cryptic as to whether he was himself a Freemason or not.  What continues to fascinate me about the JW's is that given the Witnesses declared abhorrence of all thing occult-related, their founder was steeped in occultism, pyramidology, quasi-Masonic ruminations and ongoing revelation from God on high.  Check out Smyth's  tomb (left) and that of Russell (right) :

OK, being something like a broad but shallow river, I leave off with the task of determining if Taylor and Smyth were Freemasons and looking into the oceans full of virtual ink spilled about the "occult/Masonic conspiracy" filter through which the Internets seem to view Smyth and Russell's relationship.  Recall that despite his dubious ideas about the construction and metrology of the Great Pyramid, Smyth was a genuine and accomplished, much like Newton, whose own  spiritual beliefs we would today consider quite eccentric, but in the day didn't seem to give him any pause regarding their compatibility with science.

Not a bad dip into the river for something that began as a kind of OCD-like reflex to document whatever small changes occur to monuments I've written about!

Further reading:

Here's an interesting review of an episode of America Unearthed about another pseudo-scientific attempt at applying a newly-discovered metrological standard -- the "megalithic yard" -- to the layout of Washington D.C. in an attempt to prove that the city is a giant monument to Goddess Worship: Review of America Unearthed S02E07 "Secret Blueprint of America".  The review is rightfully skeptical, but  it covers some of what I've touched on here and demonstrates that the kind of thinking that motivated Taylor and Smyth is alive and well -- and still finding an appreciative audience....

There and back again: A week in Italy and Provence

I spent three years in Italy as a child, in the late-Seventies (the "years of lead", so-called because of all the political violence) and had studied there for a Summer back in 1990, so I was excited to be heading back for the first time as a family.  My wife went to Naples and Sicily, where she has roots, two years ago, but the kids and I stayed home for that one and felt jealous.

Our destination was Apricale, named one of Italy's most beautiful villages, which is saying something.  And it was indeed a beautiful old town, perched upon a small mountain, built for defense, a reminder of the time when "Italy" didn't exist, but a collection of small feuding states, some of them merely cities.  It's still a hard place to govern, which is partly by design; as a re-constituted republic (1946) recovering from Fascism, the constitution created a weak executive.  Governing Italy requires creating and then leading coalitions.  In a parliament with many small parties, this leads to political instability.  If one small party leaves a coalition, the government can fall and a new one needs to be put together.  Which has happened around 60 times since 1946.  But for the most part, the country "works".

Italy is an ancient place, rich in traditions which lend a continuity to daily life one might not expect if only the number of governments is considered.  And for all the differences between the north and south, as soon as you cross the border you know you're in Italy.  Nice was until relatively recently part of Italy.  I've never spent time there, but I can imagine that like Toulouse is France's "Spanish city", Nice's is France's "Italian city".  Which is to say that although you can feel the Spanish vibe in Toulouse, it is first and foremost French.  Likewise, I'm sure, with Nice.  Borders may be the result of history's vagaries, maybe somewhat arbitrary, but they do generally conform to natural boundaries more ancient than human:  the Pyrenées in the Southwest and the southernmost peaks of the Alps in the Southeast.  Despite very strong regional attachments, Italy does have a strong national identity and in Apricale, a few kilometers across the border, you feel its heart beating just as strongly as if you were in Florence, Naples or Rome.

Our route led us due east to Narbonne, then along the coast past Sète, Montpellier, Nîmes, Arles, Marseille, Cannes, Nice, Monaco and then in Italy, Ventimiglia.  A short jog north and you're in the canyon over which Apricale and a handful of other small towns are perched.  The older parts of these towns are small warrens of alleys that are not only formed by two buildings, but are often cut right through one of them.  It's as if you are both inside and outside at the same time.  You'd be hard-pressed to get an army far enough into the town to get to the top; possible, of course, but a hard slog.  I'm sure in some of these towns the streets ran with blood on at least one occasion.

It's kind of hard to imagine though, because these towns are very friendly places.  Each of them has a lower part built along the river and if you kept to the main road and didn't stop, park and venture across the necessary bridge, you'd see a town built choc-a-bloc upon the hillside, but unless you already knew the local architecture, you wouldn't expect such a labyrinthine series of alleys, some leading into pitch blackness, other upwards towards the light, others covered by white-washed groin vaults with doors leading into houses, shoppes and bars.  There are fountains and piazze, of course, usually before the church and city hall, which are, as in France, often on the same plaza and more often than not, include a café.  This area was rather touristy, not in a tacky way at all, so maybe that explains why there seem to be far more cafés in an Italian village than in a French village of approximately the same size.  Aucamville has about 1000 residents and there is only one café.   Isolabona, where our campground is to be found, has 716 residents and at least two cafés, in addition to a restaurant.  The people seemed much more sociable than in our village; on our last night we strolled through town and the cafés were bustling with old men playing cards, teenagers looking on, some small families.  On the stoops and benches sat groups of women, young and old, chatting, peaceful and animated, in the deepening dusk, a fountain echoing softly off the walls, a small electric candle glowing in an iron mesh-covered niche with flowers, ex-votos and a statue of the virgin.  But in these towns, it didn't seem likely that people had yards and who wants to stay inside all the time?

This is an interesting theory, come to think of it; the characteristics of the people, the everyday sociability, the nightly ritual of coming together to gossip and joke, to talk, etc. is in these towns determined by the urban design.  I'd hesitate to use the word planning, the towns feel more organic than planned, but no one's the worse off for it.  In Dolceacqua, a larger village but more or less the same urban pattern, I'd marveled that the buildings and balconies are connected and reinforced (recall that we're on a rather steep small mountain) with numerous small "bridges".  Perhaps they are flying buttresses in this case, I'm not sure if the term here is accurate, but the effect is the same, each building is connected at several point to the one above it, so that what would in a flat city be an alley, open to the sky, is here part alley, part tunnel.  The effect is a kind of perpetual dusk, gloomy but without the negative sense of the word; they're rather lively places, but not prone to echoes and an abrasive hurdy-gurdy of sound.  Thus, pleasant places to chat, where you can raise your voice and not pollute the atmosphere.  The women chatting were grouped around the piazza and the roads/alleys leading up to it, relatively open spaces, where you get out of the gloom and as the sun sets, see some stars.  Farther from the church, the stoops were empty and the only sounds we heard were tin-can sounds of someone's radio playing some kind of mellow soccer game, the sound of cutlery and dishes being shifted, a mewling cat.

In these parts of town, one can often catch a whiff of the old sewers.  Nothing overpowering or rancid, but not exactly pleasant either.  Centuries of humidity and cloaca leave their traces, impregnate the cut stones.  There’s no disguising it.  This is what leads a lot of Americans to call these old towns “dirty” but they’re actually pretty clean.  We’re talking about places whose origins lie in the Bronze Age, if not earlier.  Give Sacramento a few more years, especially after their water is in such short-supply they’ll have to flush it all away with grey water.  Then it’ll really merit the moniker “Excremento”.

I had the opportunity to see an old amphitheater, the top of which must have made for a structure of considerable height.  Not these days, as the top now sits a few meters below street level.  When one digs a new basement or parking garage in a city like Ventimiglia, the shovel isn’t removing gravel, but cut stones and brick.  One doesn’t dig into the earth, but through the stratified remains of millennia.  In Cortona, Tuscany, my last (three-month) home in Italy, the city walls were layered like a cake:  topped by Renaissance construction, built upon medieval brick, in turn Roman and finally, when the earth was low enough to permit it, Etruscan foundations.  I swear, one day I came across a stone so ancient it would destroy a medium’s mind like the Russian villainess in the Crystal Skull film and there, in faded Enochian letters were the words “Adam + Eve 4ever” scratched crudely within a rough-hewn heart.  (Full disclosure:  I’m lying).

I also made an impulsive stop in Dolceacqua to visit the municipal cemetery which was much like the French style, with a mix of small above-ground tombs and quite grand mausoleums.  Two or three especially caught my eye because they showed that in this small and rather obscure town the Egyptian revival had made an impact on local funerary architecture.  One had a pyramid, another featured obelisks and a third had ornaments on the corners of the roof inspired by Egyptian models, such as those previously discussed on LoS with regard to Toulouse’s Terre Cabade Cemetery and the parish church at Ondes.  You can see these on the pyramid-roofed mausoleum as well.  I still don't know what this element is called, so if anyone out there has an idea....Also, being a fool, I neglected to note the dates.   If we compare with the examples in Ondes, Terre Cabade and Lisbon, I'd wager they date to the first half of the 19th century, probably sometime between 1830 and 1850.  The Egyptian revival was especially strong in Italy, or at least early.  In France it was kicked off in earnest after Napoleon's colonialist adventures in Egypt, whereas the Italians had been erecting obelisks since the days of the Roman Empire.  An obelisk was transferred to Rome by Caligula in 37 CE and placed in its current location in 1586; Bernini later designed St. Peter's Square so that the obelisk stood at it's center.  Bernini also put an obelisk at the center of his design for the Piazza Navona; it sits atop the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651).  Both obelisks evoke the axis mundi; Eden was said to lie at the center of four great rivers, at the very center of the world, hence the quattro fiumi, or "four rivers".

I came across another LoSian topic in Isolabona inside a church dedicated to Nostra Signora delle Grazie, in the form of a statue of Santa Lucia, the Sicilian saint whose eyes were plucked out.  She is depicted gore-free with closed eyes, holding the orbs on a plate in front her.  Seeing her there, so serene, made me think of how I grimace and groan at the slightest of aches.  Of course, no one who's had their eyes plucked out could be so calm, but it was rather humbling nonetheless.  The Gid and I have discussed Lucia in connection with Saint Agatha, another Sicilian saint, a virgin martyr, who, having dedicated herself to Christ, was brutally murdered for refusing the advances of a pagan suitor.  Agatha, however, had her breasts shorn off.  Gid first started an investigation into the link between the imagery of breasts and eyes in this little post, coming across a section of a book entitled Before the Milk of the Word: Eye Nipples by N. Hilton.  This is a fascinating essay and instead of summarizing it here, I encourage you to read it.  I was also intrigued to see a boat hanging from the ceiling of the nave;  I can only imagine that the name of this sanctuary, "Our Lady of Thanks" refers (in part) to the answered prayers of those who had husbands, sons or fathers set out to sea; Isolabona, is, after all, only minutes from the Mediterranean.  I've seen this in Spain (Tossa del Mar) and in such land-locked places as Rocamadour (with several model boats suspended from the ceiling) and Montaigut, in the form of a votive painting.

Tossa, Rocamadour and Montaigut all have what can be called Black Virgins and I'd hoped to see two more exemplars on our return trip.  I missed the one at St. Paul because I'd been expecting to stay nearby in Tourettes-sur-Loup, making it possible to pop out during our stay and have a look.  but alas!  Our real destinations was Tourettes, an hour away.  We didn't turn back.  Another watches over the cemetery at the town of St. Jean-Cap- Ferrat (I Googled it and it's about four humans tall!) but somehow, concentrating on a map perhaps, we blew right past it.  This town is between Nice and Monaco, you could almost smell the money in the air.  The French Riviera may be fabled and storied but you know, it is damn beautiful.  The town of Menton, between Monaco and the Italian border is, coming at it from the east, particularly impressive.  The Virgin at St. Jean also has an association with Cocteau, who wrote "There is a mysterious youth in the oldest stones of St. Jean."  So, if you're ever out that way....

Dolceacqua also featured a shrine to Mary where she was placed in a grotto.  This may be a reference to Lourdes, or could be a native tradition.  Mary associated with a cave also appears in Spain, at Covadonga (from Cueva Doña, I believe), which is also, like Lourdes noted for its healing waters.

Our two nights in Provence were spent drinking and chatting and really......a lot of drinking.  In the daytime, it was hours by the pool.  No mysteries, history, culture or anything worth reporting from an LoS standpoint.  But have no fear.  I'm off to Morocco in a month and I can already feel something Burroughsian and Gysinian in the wind....

Coming soon:  Photo-essay of my collection of Argentine folks saints (all four of 'em!) and an interview with original Discordian Hope Springs.