News of the removal and destruction of South American pagan idols from a church in Rome by a group of ultra-conservative Catholic militants obviously caught my attention ...
To be fair, whilst the police are treating this as a theft (and possible hate crime), I think those responsible for throwing the figurines into the River Tiber have a religiously valid case for so doing.
For what might appear to the innocent eye to simply be a wooden statue of a pregnant indigenous woman, is, of course, a representation of Pachamama, the fertility goddess who, in Inca mythology, presides over planting and harvesting and sustains life (even if she also has the power to cause earthquakes).
Placing it alongside other pagan artefacts inside a church just round the corner from St. Peter's is, therefore, a provocative and sacreligious act. There's even a commandment covering the matter and, if I'm not mistaken, members of all three Abrahamic religions, take idolatry or the worship of false gods extremely seriously.
So, whilst I'm not a Catholic, I can sympathise. And, if I were a Catholic, I'd find the presence of an Amazonian Earth Mother squatting in the place where one might reasonably expect to find the Virgin Mary kneeling at prayer, pretty outrageous too. The fact that the Vatican approves of this kind of thing would only serve to infuriate me still further.
To be fair, whilst the police are treating this as a theft (and possible hate crime), I think those responsible for throwing the figurines into the River Tiber have a religiously valid case for so doing.
For what might appear to the innocent eye to simply be a wooden statue of a pregnant indigenous woman, is, of course, a representation of Pachamama, the fertility goddess who, in Inca mythology, presides over planting and harvesting and sustains life (even if she also has the power to cause earthquakes).
Placing it alongside other pagan artefacts inside a church just round the corner from St. Peter's is, therefore, a provocative and sacreligious act. There's even a commandment covering the matter and, if I'm not mistaken, members of all three Abrahamic religions, take idolatry or the worship of false gods extremely seriously.
So, whilst I'm not a Catholic, I can sympathise. And, if I were a Catholic, I'd find the presence of an Amazonian Earth Mother squatting in the place where one might reasonably expect to find the Virgin Mary kneeling at prayer, pretty outrageous too. The fact that the Vatican approves of this kind of thing would only serve to infuriate me still further.
However, as I say, I'm not a Catholic. In fact, as a Nietzschean, my love and loyalty very much lies elsewhere. So the above story made me smile rather than gnash my teeth in rage. It also made me think of a scene in Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent, in which Ramón and the men of Quetzalcoatl remove the holy images from the church at Sayula and replace them with their own neopagan bits and pieces as part of their coup d'état and revaluation of all values.
Ramón has assured the local bishop that this is an act of reverence; as is the destruction of the Christian relics. But the fact that it's carried out by armed soldiers led by the demoniacal little fellow Cipriano with his black inhuman eyes and goatee surely gives us pause for thought ... Even the Nazi book burning was regarded by those responsible as an auto-da-fé and a necessary cleansing of the spirit.
See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapters XVII and XVIII.
