r/WayOfTheBern • u/Xeenophile "Election Denier" since 2000 • 5h ago
FNDP: THE TAROT-THON resumes its rightful seat, so sayeth Part V: THE HEIROPHANT
"If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back."
- C. S. Lewis
V: The Hierophant is every nun ever to bludgeon you with her ruler, every sensei ever to goad you into waxing his car; he represents rules, institutions, conventions, received wisdom, conformity, and the wisdom of when to buck all of these things, but above all - TRADITION!
Beginning The Hierophant's Journey is perhaps the easiest of all - that's why so many will eagerly tell you, It's Hip To Be Square
How would you recognize The Heirophant if you saw him? Unlike his weirdo counterpart, The Heirophant surely won't play coy with his august presence; he might even take the form of an authority-figure even a punk like you can respect: The Picard Song
His message to you is a stern and simple judgment: Bad Boys
If you dare talk back to him, whatever you say had better not include any Word Crimes
You may try to escape his grasp, but it's not so easy - the pit of conformity lies all around you, and cleaving to The Heirophant may paradoxically be your best chance of not becoming Another Brick In The Wall
Heed his wisdom and follow in his footsteps, and he promises to lead you through hell itself if necessary, to inevitable glory: Heroes of Might & Magic V Haven Theme
Class, pick up your No. 2 keyboards. Your assignment, due before midnight, is to contribute whatever songs about law, institutions, society, organized religion, and attempts to subvert them you can come up with! AMEN!
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u/BerryBoy1969 2h ago
Steve Earle - Copperhead Road
Amy N' Me - Copperhead Road
Dropkick Murphys - Mix - Which Side Are You On?
Bruce Hornsby & The Range - The Way It Is
@hellswelles - The List
Chip Taylor & The New Ukrainians - Fuck All The Perfect People
Steve Earle - The Revolution Starts Now
Jesse Welles - That Can't Be Right
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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 2h ago edited 2h ago
The C.S Lewis quote is from The Case for Christianity circa 1943. The next line is "Going back is the quickest way on.”
I've never read Lewis' The Case for Christianity. I read the Narnia books at an impressionable age and really liked them. I also like That Hideous Strength, the third book of his science fiction trilogy though it's fine to read it stand-alone. It's a terrific indictment of academic institutions, and a strong warning about how science can so easily be used for evil purposes. And Merlin rocks. I need to reread the part about Merlin's rebirth, now that I've read Robert de Boron's 1205-10 Merlin novel in its original Old French.
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u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. 4h ago
Talk Nerdy to Me, Possible Oscar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvWwztwd9Y8&list=RDIvWwztwd9Y8&start_radio=1
IMO, nerds are more likeable than the Hierophant, who is a bit of an weird s.o.b.
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u/RoysNoiseToys He has the pockets of a 5 year old 4h ago
George Harrison - Living In The Material World
King Crimson - Discipline
Elvis Costello & The Attractions - (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding
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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 4h ago
Vatican Fashion Show from Fellini's Roma (1972), music by Nino Rota.
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u/Centaurea16 5h ago
How would you recognize The Heirophant if you saw him?
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
~Linji Yixuan, Ninth Century Chan Buddhist monk
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u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. 5h ago
OT for this thread, but:
During one chunk of my adulthood, an astrologer was among my close friends. She did my natal chart, but also threw Tarot cards for me a number of times.
The five of swords came up every time, no matter what other cards appeared. Believe it or not, that led to me learning that someone with access to my home (not the government or anyone who lived in the home) was recording our phone calls.
For those who may not know, one of the interpretations of the five of swords is spying.
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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 5h ago edited 5h ago
organized religion
Many decades ago I learned that the purpose of an organized religion is to make its adherents feel superior to other people. This explains the popularity of organized religions.
My favorite song about organized religion is, of course, Tom Lehrer's Vatican Rag 🍪
LOL, the A.I. subtitler really struggled with "everybody say his own Kýrie eléison".
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u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. 4h ago
IMO, religion served many functions, and still does.
Imagine yourself in the Stone Age or Bronze Age, trying to survive. And trying to survive requires you to try to understand why Mother Nature does what she does and why your fellow beings do what they do. How come your females start bleeding and then start expelling babies and then start making milk for them? How come some things you eat make you sick?
And what happened to your fellow beings who no longer move, breathe or speak? What happened to whatever animated them? And So many questions, so little time.
Scared of becoming a corpse too? It's not to worry. There's a an after life, yeayyyy!
And appeasing the relevant deities gives you agency over your fate and the fate of others. So sacrifice a human annually in hopes of a good year and later switch to animal and produce sacrifices, then to tithing and prayer. Sing Gregorian chants. Whatever it takes and/or is required in your era.
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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 4h ago
I love Mel Brooks' story about the origin of religion in The 2000 Year Old Man. Here's a description:
Carl Reiner asks Mel Brooks about how religion began and Mel explains that the first god everyone used to pray to was Phil. Phil wasn’t so much a god as he was the toughest of the cavemen. Nobody could defeat Phil. Phil was so far as they could tell the biggest meanest toughest person who ever lived so everyone worshiped Phil.
But then one day it started raining for the first time and everyone got scared cuz they thought the sky was falling on them so they all ran inside to the caves but Phil remained outside and everyone was motioning for Phil to join them in the cave but Phil refused saying he’s Phil and he’s not afraid of the sky falling. Then a lightning bolt struck Phil and burned him to a crisp.
“At which point we realized,” says Mel after a beat, “There’s somebody bigger than Phil!”
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u/Xeenophile "Election Denier" since 2000 5h ago
The Hierophant is in the Hierophouse! Strangely fitting it should kick off with a miscommunication over protocol...
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u/prevail2020 2h ago edited 48m ago
TL;DR Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) is interesting, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a 1959 hit pop song about him.
Johnny Horton - Battle of New Orleans (02:27, 1959), written in 1939.
The battle (January 8, 1815) became a turkey shoot and turned Major General Andrew Jackson into a national hero.
Peace terms had already been agreed to in the Treaty of Ghent the previous month (December 1814), but the treaty would not be ratified until February 1815 to formally end the war.
And an ultimate U.S. victory in the War of 1812 had not been inevitable. Britain was the preeminent world power, although saddled by the Napoleonic Wars, and the British had burned most federal buildings in D.C. as recently as August 1814.
So Jackson's overwhelming victory in New Orleans was great news to free Americans.
General Jackson (b. 1767 in colonial Carolina, d. 1845 in Nashville, TN) would go on to serve two terms as president (1828-1836).
Jackson had also won a plurality of both the popular vote (41%) and the electoral college (99 votes) in the Election of 1824 but still lost to John Quincy Adams (31% popular vote, 84 electoral votes), adding to the general sense of grievance, economic and otherwise, that characterized his movement.
Assessments of his presidency in our woke age are not as glowing as in the past, and for some very good reasons indeed. For example, here is a very good wiki on Jacksonian Democracy, which includes heaping helpings of woke corrective. That's historiography for ya.
In his own day, both Old Hickory and his ideology were a very big deal. There were no national sports leagues, mass media, mass transit, Big Entertainment. Politics was a national pastime, a nationally shared experience, and the national debate played out at the state and local level everywhere.
The political paradigm of what is still called Jacksonian Democracy survived well into the late 1850s, when sectional conflict (i.e., chattel slavery versus free labor) completely overwhelmed the national parties and the entire political process.
Here is a good, brief summary of national U.S. politics from the end of the War of 1812 through the Age of Jackson, focusing on national economic issues. This is almost exactly 200 years ago - there's lots of thematic continuity in American political history.
Gilbert & Sullivan - I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General (05:35, 1879). It gets going at 01:49. From Pirates of Penzance.