In contrast to the teachings of Confucius, as well as schools of philosophy such as Stoicism and religions from Vedanta Hinduism to Zen Buddhism, solutions to problems in contemporary society, as advocated by “progressives” (the most Western element of Western society in relation to non-Western societies) focus on the external. Racism is to be solved, according to this mindset, by focussing on race, not character or essential qualities that transcend race. While this is often portrayed as criticizing “the system,” it inevitably props it up in reality by reinforcing its essential assumptions.

Meditation on death: Forest Whitaker as modern day Ronin, Ghost Dog.

“The superior man thinks of virtue; the ordinary man thinks of comfort,” Confucius also tells us. Yet since the First World War (and especially since the Second World War), Western man has increasingly thought of comfort, not virtue. Instead of wanting to teach logic, reasoning and debate, certain speech is criminalized, at least in Europe — because it’s “offensive,” and so that people don’t have to and, indeed, because they no longer have the capacity to, argue against it. We don’t want to teach restraint and responsibility in regard to gun ownership, we want to prohibit gun ownership, even as guns can now be created using 3d printers in anyone’s garage or apartment).

Laws are introduced after events and changes in society. In today’s world, with the fast pace of change in technology, migration, etc., the law won’t be able to keep up. The attempt to create societal harmony through prosecution, and the threat of prosecution, has created, and will create, only disharmony and the splitting of society into factions. That’s great for advocates of micromanaging society; bad for everyone else.

Consider the issues of religion and gay rights. For Christianity and Islam in particular, homosexuality is seen as a grave sin against God. If a Christian or Muslim were to condemn homosexuality, in Europe, though, he could be prosecuted for committing a “hate crime” (against gay people). But, if a gay man or woman in Europe were to condemn Christianity or Islam on this basis, he too would be committing a “hate crime” (against one of these religions). I don’t point this out to advocate for one side or the other, but merely to point out the inherent contradiction of the “progressive” worldview as advocated in Europe (and catching on in America), and, by extension, the essential problem of micromanaging people and society.

Among ice and high mountains: Yukio Mishima as Samurai.

Bourgeois spirituality

The problem, though, isn’t about “organized religion” per se. Left-wing (self-described “communist”) maverick and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek has observed that modern, Western spirituality and “Western Buddhism” enables the practitioner to continue to participate in “capitalism” while comforting himself that he is really above it. The practitioner can become a cog in the wheel, a rat in the rat race, while telling himself — in Western spiritual-speak — that it’s really all an “illusion.” Despite usually seeing itself as opposed to it, to a large degree, this spirituality is the descendent of modern, Protestant Christianity — with its “Protestant work ethic,” “equality before the Lord,” and so on. (Or it might be regarded as a fusion of Protestantism and therapy/psychology, given the veneer of non-Western religion.)

“Capitalism” is an interesting phenomenon. As Zizek himself has observed, it can, and does, absorb anti-capitalism. You can, if you wish, buy not just a tee-shirt of the face of Marxist guerilla Che Guevara but you can also buy Che bubble bath and Cherry Guevara ice cream for the really revolutionary night in. Zizek would undoubtedly say that capitalism makes use of anti-capitalism to further itself. And this is, to a large extent true. Take Simple Mobile. It ran a campaign in 2012 with the slogan “more for the people, less for the man.” Consumers were encouraged, not very subtly, to buy this mobile plan on the basis that they were getting one over on big business. Was that an accurate presentation of the facts? Obviously not.

But while Right-wingers (including the Christian Right) often promote “the free market” (by which they often mean big capitalism), they — and many anti-capitalists — seem absolutely oblivious to the fact that people are freely buying into the values and ideas mainstream “Right-wingers” oppose: anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, etc. Target and many other “freer marketeers” — from the Right-wing perspective — have advocated for Gay marriage or “marriage equality.” Zizek is correct that “Western spirituality” enables people to participate in “capitalism,” but, paradoxically, capitalism itself enables Westerners to participate in “anti-capitalism” — it’s the pose of revolution while remaining part of, and even a support for, the contemporary, dominant micromanagement worldview.

I accept, therefore I am

What spirituality in modernity has not cultivated is independence of thought, spirit, etc. Instead it has enabled the spiritualization of “the system,” with political parties providing the exoteric doctrines. This is the perennial temptation of modernity, and one that Rightist Julius Evola fell into when he took the late nineteenth century forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a spiritual text. The Leftist makes no less a mistake when adopts political correctness as his spiritual orientation or doctrine.

While contemporary ersatz spirituality requires the practitioner or believer to identify himself with, and to adopt unquestioningly, political truths du jour, authentic spirituality demands the discovery of timeless values and virtues (courage, integrity, patience, self-reliance, perseverance, hope, generosity, etc.), to discover the Truth. This requires risk. For Nietzsche, it meant “living voluntarily among ice and high mountains.” For us today it will mean cultivating an equally demanding inner strength and independence.

After the Hajj: Malcolm X sees hope for a colorblind society after meeting White Muslims.

Return to integral virtues

Associated with old fashioned types of behavior, “virtue” isn’t a very popular word today. The earliest concept, though, was quite different. The ancient Roman Virtus (the root of the contemporary term) referred to what were regarded as the essential masculine virtues: courage, character, etc.

Modern spirituality (and, to a certain extent, Protestant Christianity as well) has created a worldview that excludes the virtues that permeate and give meaning to most religions and all civilizations. Yet, it is only here that the micromanaging of progressivism and the intolerance inherent in group identity can be transcended. Radical Black nationalist Malcolm X found hope for a colorblind society only after going on the Hajj (the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca), where he met with, and was treated as an equal and a friend and brother by, White Muslims, as well as Muslims of other races. For X, Islam — often a much stricter and harsher religion than Christianity, Buddhism or Vedanta Hinduism, etc. — offered a way of transcending color. It offered an identity that transcended race, yes, but that identity was brought about and sustained by the integral values and rituals of Islam, as its practitioners saw it.

Again, despite being — or, rather, precisely because he was — a Japanese nationalist, Yukio Mishima, Japan’s most famous author and playwright, was inspired by ancient Greek culture, and took up bodybuilding to acquire the physique of the ancient Greek ideal and the then contemporary American ideal. But, for Mishima, the physical was a mere expression of the inner, of integral values common to East and West.

Can radical spirituality end racism? Yes.

Today, conservatives frequently claim that capitalism is better at creating equality than socialism. This isn’t so surprising, perhaps, since capitalism and communism share the essential worldview that the economy is primary. Only when looking from outside so these allegedly opposite world views appear almost identical. So, too, do many of the allegedly opposite world views of Western man today. As British, Left-wing author Nick Cohen has noted, contemporary progressives have in many cases allied themselves to the most Right-wing Islamists imaginable, and have even defended such inequality as they would otherwise find intolerable. This is the logical conclusion of politics.

The solution is the return to integral values — and, as such, away from the excesses of modern, “pick ‘n’ mix” “Western spirituality” to authentic spirituality. It means rejecting the perception of man as an underling — an inferior, a victim, a loser — to be micromanaged, and ensuring the meeting of the (Confucian) “superior man” with “superior man,” regardless of his race, religion, and so on. It means forming deep, integral connections, not based on group identity, and the management thereof, but the transcending of identity through being, virtue, and the recognition of brothers who have transcended the mundane and the mediocre.

The virtues of the civilizations and religions are similar: the Roman virtus – valor, manliness, excellence, courage, and character. The Hindu Bhagavad Gita (16. 2-3) tells us that “Fearlessness, purity of heart… generosity, self-control, nonviolence… candor… integrity… dignity… courage, a benevolent, loving heart — these are the qualities of men born with divine traits…” The real question isn’t whether radical spirituality can end racism? It’s can we give up the privilege of micromanaging, and put these timeless, transcendent virtues into practice?

Angel Millar is an author and journalist, and the editor of People of Shambhala.

Sacred site: shrine of Hujr Ibn Adi Al Kindi before being desecrated.

Composed largely of defectors from the Syrian army, the FSA has claimed to be non-sectarian. It has also distanced itself from al-Qaeda and openly Islamist militias. However, the FSA is a loose network of fighters and groups, some of whom are known to be comprised of Sunni Jihadists.

One Muslim blog has claimed that the Wahabi Adnan ‘Arours group Liwa’ al-Islam was responsible for the attack.

Wahabism is the hardline, literalist Sunni faith of Saudi Arabia. Under King Ibn Saud, during the 192os, numerous Islamic holy sites were destroyed in the name of combating “idolatry.” This included the destruction of the tomb’s of the mother, wife, grandfather and other ancestors of Mohammed.

The Journey of a Seeker Of Sacred Knowledge blog also published several photographs of fighters standing in front of the destruction which they had apparently caused. One of the photos shows an empty hole in the ground, presumably where the body of Hujr Ibn Adi Al-Kindi was exhumed.

No respect: Militia men stand in front of the desecrated shrine of Hujr Ibn Adi Al-Kindi, in Adra, Damascus.

The attack on the shrine was condemned by Lebanese Shi’ite militia and political party Hezbollah: “What we expected and feared, and what Hezbollah Secretary General, his Eminence Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, warned of two days ago, regarding the assault on sanctums, and the violation of religious sanctities, has happened,” a statement published by al-Manar read.

“The shrine of the great companion, Hujr Ibn Adi, is one of the most important shrines for all Muslims, and violating and digging his grave in this way reveals a terrorist and criminal mentality that does not respect neither Muslim nor Christian sanctities,” Hezbollah added.

In a statement, The European Council of Jamaats said that the destruction of the shrine was “not solely a matter of grave concern for the Shi’a [but] concerns Muslims worldwide.”

I. The Story.  Herodias thus qualifies as a crisis narrative, one whose crisis is indeed extreme.  Yet Flaubert, who had traveled in the Holy Land and seen the sight, opens the tale not with a description of people in agitation or anxiety but rather with something like a visionary tableau, full of Symbolist imagery, of the great hilltop palace-fortress of Herod, called Machaerus:

The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.  There were houses piled against its base inside a circling wall which rose and fell with the uneven ground; and a zigzag road gashed in the rock linked the town to the fortress, whose ramparts were a hundred and twenty cubits high with many angles, battlements along the edge, and here and there towers, like diadems in the stone crown hung over the abyss.

The situation in Judea conspicuously lacks balance – things must set off in motion one way or another soon because they cannot remain in status quo – but Flaubert presents readers with purely static imagery of the ancient and changeless desert.  The “basalt peak,” obviously an extinct volcano, stands like the token of aboriginal creation and primeval forces; the site’s isolation behind the four valleys ambiguously protects it from assault by hostile forces while at the same time cutting it off from the outside world.  Indeed, the fortress contains Herod’s palace within, so that the Tetrarch lives doubly immured – a king safely ensconced in his keep and yet also the prisoner of his own requirement for security, beset outwardly by many enemies, both actual and potential.  The fact that Machaerus seems to perch “over the abyss,” to cite Flaubert’s phrase, emphasizes the dangerous political and religious tensions implicit in Herod’s situation.  The word “abyss,” of Semitic origin, refers to the chaos, which, in ancient Near Eastern myth and in Genesis alike, precedes the emergence of an orderly world.  The word “abyss” also points to the focus of all social and political those tensions that annoy Herod – the long-haired, wild-eyed preacher being held in the lightless prison-cell down in the foundations.  These mythic connotations thread their way through the story.

Flaubert is not finished with his visionary introduction to the tale.  He depicts Herod himself coming out on the palace balustrade in the earliest hour of the day to witness the sunrise.  Twenty-four hours later, the story will end with another sunrise.  Dawn comes in the parting of a mist like a bloody portent, “a glow of red,” which “lit up the sands… the hills, the desert, and, still further, the mountains of Judea.”  The first words spoken by any character in the story – it happens to be that they are spoken Herod himself – are “Mannaeï! Mannaeï!”  This is the name of Herod’s executioner (“for forty years he had practiced”), a zealous and excitable man whom the Tetrarch must restrain from the spontaneous, eager exercise of his craft.  At one point, Mannaeï nearly decapitates an Essene, Phanuel, who has appeared in the palace.  Mannaeï, a Samaritan, “hated the Jews,” so much so that he has engaged in vandalism of a Jewish holy place.  Flaubert tells how Mannaeï and three confederates stole into the Temple at Jerusalem “to pollute the altar with dead men’s bones.”  Mannaeï’s fellow burglars, detected in the act and made prisoners, subsequently lost their heads in payment for the outrage.  This is the first mention of punitive decapitation in a story that reaches its climax with the beheading of John the Baptist.  Mannaeï remains fascinated and provoked by the image of the Temple, “the white marble walls and sheets of gold on its roofs… a superhuman object that annihilated everything by its pride and splendour.”

The key concept is annihilation; the mere existence of the Temple seems to Mannaeï to cancel his own existence.  He hurls a curse at it while striking the air with his clenched fist.  Mannaeï’s obsession with the image of the Temple stems from his knowledge that the Samaritan temple at Gerizim, demolished by Herod’s precursor Hyrcanus, remains in ruins.  As the story unfolds, another intolerable fascination, Iaokanan’s over everyone, gradually extends its power.

Herod inquires of Mannaeï about Iaokanan – what was his status when Mannaeï last saw him?  Mannaeï replies that Iaokanan struck him as “restless… walking in a dark place” and muttering the phrase, “I must decrease that He may increase.”  Immediately hearing this, Herod, “weary of reflection” and taking the prophet’s phrase erroneously in relation to himself, suffers a grim transfiguration of his natural vision: “The mountains all around, like great waves petrified in layers, the dark chasms on the sides of the cliffs, the immense blue sky, the violent blaze of light, and the depth of the abysses troubled him.”  Flaubert writes that Herod suddenly “was seized with depression at the look of the desert, and the suggestion of fallen amphitheatres and palaces in its crumbled surface.”  Herod sees the catastrophic decrease of his world, as though Iaokanan could channel and effectuate the “eternal anger” inherent in the accumulating misfortunes of the Tetrarchic reign.  Indeed, a short while later, Herod appears aged, with “rounded shoulders” and “white hairs in his beard.”  The image of Iaokanan acts on Herod the way the image of the Temple acts on Mannaeï.

As he does in the other two tales of Three Tales, Flaubert furnishes Herodias with copious detail in every paragraph, so much so that the first-time reader will likely find himself more than a little bewildered by the mass of it.  Flaubert’s technical adroitness leaves the reader in the identical state of bewilderment that afflicts Herod himself, unfitted for “reflection” by the array of simultaneous distractions and “hoping for deliverance,” as Mannaeï has said of Iaokanan.  Herod having interrogated Mannaeï, Herodias enters, politically much savvier and much more bloodthirsty than her husband; she bears news.  One enemy, Agrippa, has disappeared from the political scene into “Tiberius’ dungeons,” where most likely, she thinks, he will perish.  (In historical fact, he survived; and in historical fact, Herod eventually fell afoul of the Romans and found himself exiled to Northern Gaul.)  Agrippa, despite his Roman name, is a Jew with a claim on Herod’s kingdom.  Herodias reveals that, while in Rome, she had schemed actively against him, even to the extent of seducing an informer who could place knowledge in her hands that she could then use against her victim.  It becomes clear during the exchange that of the two, Herod and Herodias, it is Herodias who assumes the active part, albeit behind the scenes, in the kingship.  She shows a proneness to act impetuously, as when she – not Herod – orders the executioner to behead the Essene.  It is on the occasion of the near-beheading that Flaubert gives it to Herodias to say that she regards Herod as a bungler for keeping Iaokanan alive.

There is another, younger Herodias, the daughter of the elder Herodias by her divorced husband.  This daughter bears the name of Salomé, but Flaubert discloses it only at the end of the tale when she does her famous dance.  The mother originally left the daughter in Rome, but has secretly brought her back to Judea so as to use her in a scheme against her husband – namely to bring about the death of Iaokanan.  Early in the story, Herod glimpses Salomé on a distant roof: “She was dressed like a Roman girl in a curly tunic and a peplum with emerald tassels; blue bands kept back her hair, which no doubt was too heavy for her.”  However, Flaubert does not on this occasion name her. Herodias has encountered Iaokanan catastrophically.  She tells the story to Herod, how Iaokanan “spat at me all the curses of the prophets… and those insults fell like storm-rain and froze me.”  The result psychologically for Herodias is her conviction that, “while Iaokanan lived she could not live.”  Antipas too fears Iaokanan.  He tells Phanuel, the Essene, that the prophet “asked me for an act which I could not perform, and since that time he has rent me to pieces.”  The unperformable act would be for Herod to renounce his marriage to Herodias.  In speaking of the Baptist, Herod appears, in Flaubert’s carefully chosen phrase, “lost in a vision.”  The phrase “rent to pieces” has extraordinary sacrificial connotations: It describes the most violent type of immolation, the orgiastic sparagmos.

The retinue of those who come to the palace to celebrate Herod’s birthday includes Vitellius, the Roman proconsul, and his son, Aulus, an influence-wielding playboy.  There comes also Marcellus, “the proconsul’s lieutenant” and captain of his guards.  Vitellius dislikes Herod, and makes his antipathy known, but Aulus favors him.  On a tour of the palace, Vitellius discovers the entrance to the dungeon where Herod keeps Iaokanan under arrest and demands to see the captive.  When a subaltern lifts the slab and reveals the prisoner, Iaokanan begins to prophesy.  Flaubert has obviously studied the rhetoric of prophetic denunciation.  Iaokanan’s cry echoes from the depths: “Woe unto thee, O People!  Woe to the traitors of Judah and the drunkards of Ephraim, to those who dwell in the fat valley and stagger with the fumes of wine.”  Flaubert’s calculatedly ornate passage – full of the “jackals,” the wildernesses, and the “signs in the sky” so typical of Late-Hebrew apocalyptic – ends on the declaration that, “thy dominion shall be everlasting, O Son of David,” in which readers will identify an anticipation of the Messiah whose way the prophet has come to make straight.  Iaokanan, who would already at this point in his career have identified Jesus as the Messiah, again denounces Herodias – “thou Jezebel… daughter of Babylon… abomination.”  Iaokanan’s diatribe exerts a mimetic effect.  The Pharisees and Sadducees take up his denunciation in an echoing murmur, which Antipas and Herodias overhear.  Iaokanan’s prophetic outburst qualifies as literally apocalyptic, being framed by the opening and shutting of the stone slab through which the spectators see Iaokanan and through which the prophet shouts his imprecations of the status quo.  The word apocalypse means in a literal translation, lifting off the lid.  It is a marvelous narrative brushstroke.

Something should be said about the color-symbolism of Herodias, which Flaubert manages consummately.  Readers will recall the sanguine portent of dawn at the story’s opening.  That redness of that sunrise, which is also the redness of violence and blood, permeates Flaubert’s prose.  When Phanuel, for example, makes an astrological prediction entailing the death of an important person, who might, as Herod believes, be himself, Herod seeks solace in Herodias’ apartments, where he finds “cinnamon… smoking on a porphyry basin.”  Tellingly, during this visit, Herod catches another glimpse of his step-daughter, who will ask for Iaokanan’s head.  Later, at the festal table, the many candelabra cast a “red glow” over the celebration.  Readers will recall again that in Herodias, a crisis-narrative par excellence, everyone maneuvers against everyone else always.  Now as anthropology observes, dire social crisis tends to resolve itself spontaneously in the production of a mediating victim, whose common execration by one and all discharges built-up resentments and re-solidifies the fragmented community.  To what indeed can these instances of ruddiness point except to the imminence of just such a sacrifice?  But this is only to say what the story itself says, that Iaokanan functions as the structuring figure in the drama, which, beginning in the chaos of desperate rivalries, jealousies, and passions, gradually achieves coherence around the shared demand for his death.

The talk around the table at the dinner party underscores the fact that the crisis involves not only the domestic squabbles in the palace, but the totality of disintegrative influences in the community-at-large stretching beyond the narrow borders of Judea and away to Imperial Rome.  It is not only Iaokanan who, in influence over the people, rivals Herod as leader; a certain Jesus, too, has been preaching and working miracles and attracting a congregation.  His name now and again insinuates its way into the text.

A certain Jacob, a Jew, identifies Iaokanan with the prophet Elias, reborn; and the “Nazarene,” that is, Jesus, with the Son of David and deliverer announced by the first Elias in his messianic prophecy.  Jacob’s invocation of the name Elias has a peculiar effect: It induces the crowd to a collective vision, in which they see “an old man with ravens flying overhead, an altar set on fire by lightning, and idolatrous priests being thrown into the streams.”  At the beginning of Herodias, Flaubert has inserted the line about the Pharisees being scandalized by Herod’s “idolatrous ways.”  Herod, hearing the description of the vision, fears rightly that only his death can reunify the broken community.  For who is a king in his conspicuity except a victim whose sentence has been indefinitely deferred?  And what fates have befallen two of Herod’s three brothers?  Soon enough, an actual riot erupts in the dining hall; readers can hardly tell from the text whether the outraged crowd more desires the death of Herod or the death of Iaokanan.  They want a victim now generally speaking, and it little matters to them who.  At the height of the uproar, quelling it, the younger Herodias or Salomé makes her appearance.  Obviously the elder Herodias has managed this calculated and stagey entrance.  Like a mistress of ceremonies, Herodias presages her daughter.  The mother, Flaubert writes, “Stood between the two stone monsters, similar to those in the treasure of the Atreids, which rose by the door… look[ing] like a Cybele with her lions at her side.”  As for the daughter, whom the text describes as “a young girl”:

Although her head and breast were hidden in a bluish veil the arch of her eyes, her ears like milky agates, and the whiteness of her skin could be seen through it.  A square of shot silk covered her shoulders, and was fastened to her loins with a jeweled girdle.  Her black drawers were sprigged with mandrakes, and she lazily clattered in a pair of little shoes made from the down of humming birds.

Flaubert’s prose likens Salomé in her dance to “the Nubians of the cataracts” and “the Maenads of Lydia.”  The latter is especially significant, as we shall see in Part II.  The dance becomes lascivious.  “Salomé opened her legs and, keeping her knees rigid,” as Flaubert writes, “bent so low that her chin touched the floor; and the desert-dwellers schooled in abstinence, the Roman soldiers expert in debauchery, the greedy publicans and old priests embittered by disputes all panted greedily, with their nostrils dilated.”  Salomé’s dance so enflames Herod that he impetuously offers her “half [his] kingdom.”  Herodias instructs Salomé who, returning to Herod, disdains kingdoms and asks for “the head of Iaokanan.”  When Mannaeï goes to fetch back the head, he sees in a vision “the Great Angel of the Samaritans” barring the way and he cannot fulfill his errand.  Mannaeï’s failure provokes Herodias and the Tetrarch to spitting indignation.  Mannaeï now goes to complete his task in shame and returns with the head, which he displays to the VIPs.  When Herod sees it, “tears flowed down [his] cheeks.”  The guests leave.  Only Phanuel remains, in prayer.  In the brief epilogue, Phanuel and the two followers of Iaokanan leave the palace “towards Galilee,” carrying the head with them like a talisman.

II. The Analysis.  Herodias belongs to Flaubert’s Three Tales, his last completed work.  Only Bouvard and Pécuchet, never completed, came after.  Each of the Three Tales has a religious theme and each ends with a reference of one sort or another to the Holy Spirit, the aspect of the Christian Trinity that advocates on behalf of victims.  Thus at the end of The Legend of Julian the Hospitaller, the repellent leper reveals himself as and transforms himself into an ascending Christ as Julian embraces him.  Thus again in A Simple Heart, Félicité on her death-bed sees a vision of her stuffed parrot transformed into the Holy Spirit itself, whose charity receives her soul.  Finally in Herodias, John the Baptist, the provocative, involuntarily order-generating figure of the story, supervises the ceremony, namely baptism, over which the Holy Spirit presides.  Baptism, being rebirth, functions as a regenerative or re-creative rite, as well as a purifying one.  The idea of baptism communicates with the idea of the abyss, the primal waters out of which orderly creation arises when the Spirit of God bids it so.  He who undergoes baptism returns symbolically to the moment of creation.  The young girl Virginie in A Simple Heart undergoes baptism, with Félicité in attendance.  The legend associates Saint Julian with water, in his role as ferryman on a river.  The river Jordan, where John conducts his baptisms, figures in Herodias.  The three stories therefore share a set of symbols between them, including baptism, although each has its own separate and proper symbols.

The three stories additionally exhibit an obvious chronological order: A Simple Heart belongs to modernity, Saint Julian more or less to the medieval period, and Herodias to antiquity.  The reader who takes them in sequence follows a regression through history from the attenuated, early nineteenth-century Christianity of A Simple Heart to the Jewish heterodoxy and first-century proto-Christian apocalypse of Herodias, with its many allusions to the New Testament.

The unity of the three tales implies the thesis, among many others, that the historical past decisively shapes and informs the present – indeed that certain decisive historical events have provoked differentiations of consciousness, which enable higher degrees of self-awareness and moral acuity, particularly as these relate to social violence.  The reference to consciousness requires a digression.  Flaubert, in writing as he did so frequently and rigorously about bêtise or stupidity, necessarily also wrote about the opposite of that state, for which the word consciousness – taken as the active combination of perceptual acuity and moral self-awareness – well serves.  As for perception, it takes in the natural and the social worlds, the social world being the more important of two because the cognition of what the subject perceives concerning human nature stimulates his development of self-awareness and moral freedom from the crowd.  Cognition progressively informs perception; the thoughtful see more clearly than the thoughtless.  One can speak of consciousness in relation both to the individual and to the community.  Profoundly intuitive individuals impart their self-awareness to the community as teaching and the community, assimilating the lesson, passes it along to each cohort of the young as formal education.  Of course, that is only the ideal.  Insight may be lost as well as gained, and history can provide instances.  It is thus possible to speak, not only of increases, but also of decreases in consciousness.

A Simple Heart takes for its setting a provincial village in Normandy in which the general level of education runs quite low and the phenomenon of moral self-awareness is almost non-existent.  The people of Pont-l’Évêque, so many gossips and snobs, act almost entirely on resentment stemming from insubstantial differences related to a paltry hierarchy of social status.  Félicité herself, both an orphan and a jilted fiancée, has grown up in extreme poverty both material and spiritual; she lacks education, is barely articulate, and clings in simplicity to her mistress, Madame Aubain.  Félicité’s intellectually deprived condition ironically protects her, as does her undeveloped self-awareness.  Resentment seems to lie beyond her capacity for experience.  Nevertheless, Félicité constitutes an object of resentment.  Flaubert tells his readers in the first sentence of the story that, “Félicité was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l’Évêque for half a century.”  Other people, who surround Félicité, such as her in-laws, behave crudely out of avarice and jealousy; they filch and steal from Madame Aubain’s ratty household, and “ransack” it after her death, taking advantage of the housemaid’s perpetual distraction and timidity.  Félicité only later in life and even then quite slowly rises towards self-awareness.  And yet she remains self-effacing, a truly saintly person.  The story ascribes the development to the action of the Holy Spirit, an image of which she glimpses in the stained glass of the local church while chaperoning Madame Aubain’s daughter during catechism.  Flaubert represents Félicité’s death, which is her conscious birth, as her reception into heaven by the Holy Spirit.

Herod lives in a mountaintop fortress in the Judean desert at the beginning of the First Century.  Julian’s parents, in The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, also live in a mountaintop castle at the beginning of the First Century.  Flaubert remarks that traders from the Levant, “Amalekites,” once sold weapons of their country to Julian’s father, thereby linking not only one place, but also one story, with another.  Historically, as mentioned previously, Herod was later exiled by the Romans to Northern Gaul.  Flaubert, borrowing from the medieval tale of the holy man, with its many anachronisms (Christianity miraculously exists before it exists, as do the Saracens), invokes in his Legend a world seemingly at peace that actually teeters on the verge of crisis, being liable on the tiniest provocation to burst forth in mayhem.  The wild-eyed gypsy who appears to Julian’s father just before Julian’s birth resembles in mien and speech the formidable Prophet of Herodias.  The haggard man speaks of “blood in plenty” and “fame in plenty” in connection with the imminent parturition.  Julian’s temper indeed runs to annoyance and violence; his very existence destabilizes.  Flaubert’s representation of Julian as obsessed by a mouse that enters the church during the mass suggests psychopathology, as does the staggering toll of prey in Julian’s later hunting expeditions.  The stag’s curse on Julian, at the height of the latter’s demoniac venery, that he shall one day murder his father and mother, amounts to no more than a tautology.  A man who unleashes such violence will finally bring violence down even on those whom he presumes to protect.  Only Julian’s conversion can bring the tempest of bloodletting to a stop, which is to say that only the conversion of individuals can quell or prevent recurrent social crisis.  The “blue spaces” into which Julian and the leper arise at the end of the tale correspond to the “azure,” the heavens, at the end of A Simple Heart.

The abrupt insights belong to the characters in the story, but no less to Flaubert, as author, even though he hardly qualifies as a professing Christian or a believer of any type.  The insights also belong to humanity seen in its historical aspect as the instance at any given point in time of the World Spirit ascending through the stages of its differentiating consciousness.  The locus of this development is the text, whether it is myth, Scripture, or fiction.  Naturally then Flaubert’s characters cannot undergo a differentiation of the inner life unless the author himself has already done so, in some way; one might say that Flaubert believes in the differentiation of consciousness, while taking no position on the ontological status of such things as God, grace, or the Holy Spirit.  There is an elegant minimalism in Flaubert’s authorial distance from his subject matter.

Conversion is as thematically central to Herodias as it is to A Simple Heart or The Legend of Saint Julian.  Now a convincing “theory of conversion” would obviously be of assistance in understanding Herodias.  A powerfully coherent one is fortunately at hand.  In his monumental study of philosophical anthropology and comparative religion Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1977; English translation, 1987), the critic René Girard writes the following in respect of religious metanoia in a literary context:

The conversion experience of the truly great writer, however strictly determined as to content, always retains the form of the great religious experiences.  These can be shown to be all alike, whatever religion provides their framework.  The experience can be picked up in the sacrificial network of primitive religious institutions, where it forms what we refer to as initiation.  It is always a question of breaking out of mimetic desire with its perpetual states of crisis, a question of escaping from the violence of doubles and the exasperating illusion of subjective difference in order to reach (through a kind of identification with the deity, particularly with his power of intercession) an ordered world defined in terms of a lesser violence, even if that is a sacrificial violence.

Girard adds that: “Even in the investigation of nature, which does not put the same barriers in the way of developing awareness as humans do, the great minds who have [effectuated] the most decisive intellectual breakthroughs have always apparently passed from one mental universe to another – something that subsequent observers, who cannot understand how and why it happens, regularly describe as ‘mystical.’”  Girard’s theoretical view illuminates the visionary aspect of Flaubert’s Herodias, to which the précis of the text in Section I of the present essay has already drawn attention.  Take, for example, Herod’s distressing vision early in the story of the desert landscape as a vista of ruins.  Herod, contemplating his situation, “was seized,” as Flaubert writes, “with depression at the look of the desert, and the suggestion of fallen amphitheatres and palaces in its crumbled surface.”  Just what is Herod’s situation?  First of all, he is a Tetrarch, one of four kings chosen by the Romans to rule over quarter-shares of what was once a single kingdom.  The four kings were brothers.  One is dead, another in exile; a third is the nominal ruler of an adjacent polity.

Herod has been in the grip of what Girard calls mimetic desire – and elsewhere mimetic rivalry – since ascending to his kingship, or rather since ascending to his humiliating one-fourth of a kingship.  Herod’s struggle against his brothers has been a struggle to recover the whole kingdom; and this desire to reconstitute and possess the whole undoubtedly finds its reflection in all the frustrations of all the other subject-parties locked in the conflict.  The brother-kings have become rival-doubles in a classic breakdown of differences.  Indeed, one of Herod’s brothers is also named Herod.  Although Flaubert never mentions this, the fact belongs to the historical background of the tale.  An element of Herod’s mind grasps the vanity of the ambition – hence the prophetic vision of a ruined city, reminiscent of similar bleak visions in Isaiah and Jeremiah.  As Jeremiah (51: 37) would have it: “Babylon will be a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and scorn, a place where no one lives.”

Herod will ultimately balk at the emerging insight; he will never muster the conviction that would extricate him from the fractious rivalries that beset his reign and guarantee the ruination that he preternaturally foresees.

It is not only the structural impossibility of the Tetrarchy that vexes Herod.  As monarch of his fourth part, he finds himself embroiled in disputes with the priesthood, who have disputes with the laity; religious schism and cultic strife also moreover beset Herod’s realm.  In Iaokanan, who fearlessly denounces the elites, blaming bad times on their corruption, the social crisis has generated a potential rebel-leader whose glamour threatens to eclipse whatever of authority Herod himself retains.  Finally, Herod’s marriage, tricky to begin with, appears broken.  The situation being stereotypical – conforming to the progressive dissolution of differences attested everywhere in myth – points towards its own predictable climax in the designation and immolation of a scapegoat.  It might mitigate somewhat that Herod, otherwise so unsavory a character, hesitates to make a martyr of Iaokanan.  Herod also restrains Mannaeï from killing Phanuel, the Essene, whose serenity contrasts so markedly with everyone else’s angry volatility.  In Herodias, however, Flaubert gives readers a person who not only sees the potential instrumental value in Iaokanan-as-scapegoat, but fixates on it, as though struck by a debilitating scandal.  Herodias plans to settle the many conflicts in the kingdom and insure her own ambitions by concentrating the array of resentments on a single target, the selfsame Iaokanan, whose public execution will reconcile hostile parties and restore (an always temporary) stability in Judea.

Readers must nevertheless not mistake Herodias’ palace-politics-acuity for clarity of consciousness.  Quite to the contrary, even more than Herod, Herodias seems confined to a purely ritualistic conception of social relations.  As much as Herod, she recognizes the peril in the status quo, but she suffers from no ambivalence or hesitation in addressing it.  Having once encountered Iaokanan, she remains completely obsessed by him, locked in a contest whose zero-sum denouement is being-in-itself.  Herodias remembers to Herod how in Iaokanan’s visage “his eyes flamed,” how in execrating her “his voice roared,” and how in the same accusing act “he raised his arms as though to pluck the thunder out of heaven.”  In Herodias’ vision, Iaokanan resembles at once a godlike apparition and a loathsome propagator of deadly contagion.  (Readers will recall the contagious leper in Saint Julian.)  As Herodias says, “the discourses which [Iaokanan] cried aloud to crowds had spread abroad, and were circulating.”  Later in the story, Flaubert associates Herodias with animals – as when he likens her to Cybele flanked by the sacred lions.  Iaokanan plagues Herodias; and she tells Herod in so many words that the prophet is a pestilence in the kingdom, but this is pure bêtise.  It is not at all coincidental that in the image of Herodias as Cybele, Flaubert invokes the lions rampant of “Treasure of the Atreids,” a monument antedating the year Anno Domine 33 by more than a millennium-and-a-half, and which is connected in myth with a cycle of retributive violence that begins in a fraternal rivalry (Atreus versus Thyestes) and ends in the massive destruction of the Trojan War.

Two paragraphs back from this one, the suggestion emerged that, “It might mitigate somewhat that Herod, otherwise so unsavory a character, hesitates to make a martyr of Iaokanan.”  Now if one were to measure by ethical triangulation whether Herod stood closer to Herodias or to Phanuel, the answer would be that, in his moments of hesitation, he stands closer to Phanuel, who says that the prophet is a “son” of “the Most High,” and that if Herod were to “use him cruelly,” God would punish Herod.  Herod responds to Phanuel as though “lost in a vision.”  He tells Phanuel concerning Iaokanan, that “his power is mighty… I love him in spite of myself.”  In light of the transfigurations at the end of A Simple Heart and Saint Julian, where protagonist achieves moral enlightenment and a general intensification of consciousness in a response to the solicitation of the Holy Spirit, one could say that in his elliptical confession, Herod too has undergone a Paracletic moment, imperfectly.  We recall that the Paraclete stands as advocate for the unjustly accused, proclaiming the victim’s innocence, and that this advocacy quickens the moral conscience in those receptive to its appeal.  Herod’s love of Iaokanan in spite of himself resembles (or anticipates) Julian’s response to the leper, just as the leper, in being outcast and repulsive, resembles Iaokanan.  Herod’s access of conscience, however, although powerful in its moment, will not effectively “take”; the Tetrarch will relapse into the same archaic thought-patterns as his wife.

In Things Hidden Girard writes: “There is an absolute separation between the only true deity and all the deities of violence, who have been radically demystified by the Gospels alone.  But this should not prevent us from recognizing in the religions of violence, which are always in search of peace, anyway, the methods that initially helped humanity to leave the animal state behind and then to elevate itself to unprecedented possibilities, though they are combined with the most extreme stages.”  Moreover, in Girard’s words, “At each of these stages, especially at the more advanced stages like our own, humankind could choose a path different from that of violence and rejection, and could reach the god of non-violence.”  Girard’s insights apply to Flaubert’s Herodias because of the link between the idea of God and the level of consciousness.  The references to idolatry in Herodias establish the level of prevailing consciousness in the setting.  Idols stand for divinities that thirst for blood and take sides in feuds; of course, such divinities do not exist – they are projections of the mentality of those who practice violence and maintain social order ritually through sacrifice.  “The High One,” to whom Phanuel refers, represents by contrast a new conception of deity, one requiring no propitiation, who beckons worshippers to love rather than to kill and to see the irrationality, the automaticity, of the sacred.

In The Scapegoat (1982; English translation, 1986), Girard has commented, not directly on Flaubert’s Herodias, which oddly he dismisses as mere “orientalia,” but rather on the John-the-Baptist narrative in the Gospels, particularly in Mark.  Noting that “rite is the reenactment of mimetic crisis in a spirit of voluntary religious and social collaboration,” Girard goes on to remind his readers that, “even the most weakened ritual institutions are inclined toward sacrifice.”  Thus, “a crowd stuffed with food and drink wants something extraordinary, a spectacle of eroticism or violence, preferably both at the same time.”  This will be especially the case in so a tense a situation as prevails at the birthday affair for Herod in the place-fortress at Machaerus.  In his theological commentary, Girard has made much of Jesus’ utterance from the Cross that the Father should forgive the Son’s persecutors because they, the persecutors, “know not what they do.”  The perpetrators of sacrifice “know not what they do.”  They act, rather, as though under compulsion, which, in a way, is the case.  It is this essential observation about the unconsciousness of ritual activity that enables Girard to equate revelation with consciousness and to see Hebrew prophecy and the Gospel narrative as increases of consciousness or rungs on the ladder of human self-knowledge.

A passage toward the end of Herodias suggests how close Flaubert’s view of the story is to Girard’s view.  The apparition of the angel (another case perhaps of abortive conscience) having thwarted Mannaeï’s first attempt in beheading the prisoner, the ensemble of guests and hosts including Herod but excluding Phanuel suddenly becomes a single monster with one voice: “Herodias let loose her fury in a coarse and biting stream of insults…  [T]he two carved lions seemed to be gnawing her shoulders and roaring like her.”  Next despite himself, Flaubert writes, “Antipas followed her lead, as did the priests, Pharisees, and soldiers, one and all demanding their revenge, while the [others] of the company were indignant at having their pleasure postponed.”  Earlier in the story, readers will recall, Flaubert likened Herodias to a Maenad, a term with a collective rather than an individual connotation, linked in myth to the murder and decapitation of Orpheus and Pentheus.  The detail about the two stone lions is especially telling.  The metaphor suggests reversion to lower level of consciousness – what Flaubert calls bêtise.  In the moment when Mannaeï returned with the trophy, as Flaubert writes, Herod instinctively “drew back to avoid seeing the head.”

A moment later, circumstances having forced Herod’s gaze to encompass the gruesome token, “tears flowed down the Tetrarch’s cheeks.”  The tears signify remorse, but they are too tardy by far; the fell deed is accomplished.

III. The Analysis Continued.  The narrative of Herodias finds its cynosure of meaning in Herod’s abortive rapprochement with the Paraclete – his failure to sustain the breakthrough in consciousness that the Baptist of the Jordan inspires in him temporarily, as he struggles with the tangled crises of his realm.  Flaubert will have expected his readers to know the rest of the story.  Herod plays a role in the Passion, where he shows himself entirely unaffected by the hiccough of moral insight that Flaubert attributes to him in the third of the Three Tales.  He hands over Jesus to Pontius Pilate who then executes the man whom he knows to be innocent.  As Girard has noted, the episode of John the Baptist prefigures the narrative of the Passion.  Not only that; the story of John the Baptist is “identical to the Passion in the mechanisms it employs and in the relationships among the participants.”  Girard puts it this way in a formula: “Although it is not lengthy, this text brings into astonishing focus the mimetic desires, followed by mimetic rivalries, [which] result in the final scapegoat effect.”   Girard’s two terms mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry have an equivalent term in Flaubert’s narrative – the abyss – and an instantiation in the animal-like bellowing of the crowd when Mannaeï at first fails to produce the prophet’s head.  The crowd can only assert its collective bloodthirstiness to the degree that the individuals who constitute it forfeit their individuality, insofar as they previously possessed any.

Just how is the story of John the Baptist the same as the story of the Passion?  In the Passion, Herod once again has an opportunity to spare an innocent victim and set to right those who persecute him; in the Passion, Herod is still at odds with the Romans – the Gospels mention his contretemps with Pontius Pilate.  The Pharisees are again angry at everyone, from Herod to Pilate and especially at Jesus.  Once more in the Passion the crowd carries the day, reconciling all differences in unanimous hostility against the victim, whose death suspends all other enmities so that, for example, in its aftermath, Herod and Pilate could find renewed amity.  Girard writes that, “The fact that mimeticism inevitably becomes unanimous is what interests the Gospels.”  The same could be said of Flaubert’s culturally Christian text.  The roster of Herod’s guests bears on this point.  Among those howling in animal rage for the head of the prophet are the Roman official and his son, no doubt Epicureans; Marcellus, a devotee of Mithras; Ammonius, “a pupil of Philo the Platonist”; “a merchant from Aphaka”; and “a German… from the Scandinavian promontory.”  In other words: The whole world – with its array of convictions from the barbarous to the philosophical.

Flaubert makes exception only for Phanuel and his two Essene companions, who alone resist fusion with the crowd.  The epilogue of Herodias takes place “at the moment when the sun rose,” or twenty-four hours exactly after the sunrise at the beginning of the tale.  The second sunrise fulfills a purpose, however, not merely structural, but also allusive.  Flaubert plausibly alludes to a non-Christian text, Plato’s Symposium, whose protagonist Socrates prefigures Jesus almost as much as John the Baptist does.  Symposium too ends at sunrise when Socrates alone has resisted drunkenness and leaves the debauchery to seek purification in the baths.  As everyone else at Agathon’s drinking party lies comatose in alcoholic stupor, Socrates becomes in the tableau the living embodiment of consciousness.  More importantly, Flaubert’s sunrise alludes by way of anticipation to the Resurrection, reminding readers that they are participating in an account of the roots of Christianity.

One of the Essenes says to Phanuel, referring to the murdered prophet, “He has gone down to the dead to proclaim the Christ.”  The phrase is somewhat ambiguous.  “Gone down to the dead” means to have died; “to proclaim the Christ” means necessarily also to proclaim the Holy Spirit hence again to proclaim the innocence of victims and the nullity, to borrow a phrase from The Scapegoat, of “the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies.”  Girard also writes, “What the martyrs say has little importance because they are witnesses, not of a determined belief, as is imagined, but of man’s terrible propensity, in a group, to spill innocent blood in order to restore the unity of their community.”  In the moment in the text when the three Essenes, as Flaubert writes, between them “took the head of Iaokanan and went away towards Galilee,” the three of them also began walking into the future – into the displaced medieval world of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, which historically was contemporary with them, and into the early nineteenth-century world of provincial life in Normandy of A Simple Heart.  Herodias comes last in the sequence of Three Tales, but it comes first in the book’s historical chronology.

Without the events in Judea whether narrated or implied by the prose of Herodias, the heightened and differentiated consciousness of later periods would presumably not exist.  There would be no stained-glass image of the Holy Spirit in the village church to excite Félicité out of her illiterate dullness; there would be no spiritual lore to wean Julian from demonic venery to ascetic sainthood; there would be no Golden Legend to inspire Flaubert’s revisitation of the story of the saintly Hospitaller.

The Three Tales are deceptive in their superficial naivety.  Far from being disconnected from one another, the stories on close inspection reveal their intimate unity in the thematic and historical dimensions; they also communicate with other aspects of Flaubert’s creativity, with The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), for example, and Salammbô (1862).  The latter, set in ancient Carthage during the wars with Rome, includes a sacrificial holocaust of the first-born in order to curry the favor of the civic deity, Moloch, during a time of acute social and military crisis.  The experience of the title-character shows similarity with that of Herod in Herodias.  Salammbô, like Herod, has moral insights concerning ritual sacrifice and victims, but she cannot integrate them.  She remains trapped in the abyss of ritual behavior.  The Three Tales also belong to Flaubert’s sustained critique of non-thinking or bêtise and his concomitant sub rosa admonition against the original sin, so to speak, of avoiding reflection by submitting to ritual patterns of behavior.  Readers will recall that at the beginning of Herodias, Flaubert writes how Herod was “weary of reflection.”  Whole eras have been “weary of reflection,” not least modernity, afflicted as it has been by “the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies.”  The Three Tales affirm the central role that literature, including first of all the literature that we call Scripture, has played in the constitution of self-awareness and in the awakening of the human spirit to its own base tendencies.  The action of the literary text in forming humanity is in continuity with the action of the Holy Spirit.

Thomas F. Bertonneau earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Califonia at Los Angeles in 1990. He has taught at a variety of institutions, and has been a member of the English Faculty at SUNY Oswego since 2001. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on literature, art, music, religion, anthropology, film, and politics. He is a frequent contributor to Anthropoetics, the ISI quarterlies, and others.

A prolific author and cultural maverick, Rudolf Steiner is, nevertheless, best-known for founding the spiritual movement of Anthroposophy, and for his numerous books on the subject. However, Steiner was a much broader thinker. He designed his own educational curriculum and theory, and established the “Steiner schools” that are still operating today.

The Supernatural wine label (note the portrait of Rudolf Steiner top-right).

Steiner also developed the theory of “Biodynamics,” which is likewise still influential in organic farming. A “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture,” Biodynamics believes the farmer should see the environment as a single organic being, of which the soil, wildlife, atmosphere, etc., were all integral parts.

Perhaps, it’s for this reason that Steiner’s portrait is included on the label. Produced in Hawke’s Bay, the grapes are organically grown, and the wine is vinified naturally by And Co Ltd.’s owner and winemaker Gabrielle Simmers.

About 4,000 cases of The Supernatural are produced annually. Building on the first release of the wine, which was a 2009 vintage, the current release is a 2010. The Supernatural is now available from retailers in the USA, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, and several other countries.

According to Amnesty International, al-Nimr, is an “outspoken critic of the policies and practices of the Saudi Arabian authorities affecting the Shi’a community, including detentions without charge or trial, and excessive use of force against protesters.” Following the death of Saudi Prince Naif, the former Minister of the Interior, al-Nimr allegedly mused: “Can’t we be happy for the death of those who kill our sons? We can’t be happy for the death of those who detain our sons? We can’t be happy for the death of those who make us live in horror and fear?”

Described as an “instigator of sedition” by the Saudi authorities, the arrest of the cleric was reportedly linked to the above comment. This, however, was probably little more than an excuse to arrest an outspoken cleric, critical of the Saudi authorities, and popular with Shi’a youth. Al-Nimr was kept under arrest for at least a month, in 2012, before being charged.

Since his arrest, prominent Shi’a voices have accused the Saudi authorities of fearing the rise of pro-democratic and populist movements in the Arab world, and of targeting the already discriminated against Shi’a minority to shift the focus away from human rights, and to convince the public of the need for the rule and strong arm tactics of the Saudi monarch. “The Saudi government is under pressure of reform,” Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi has said, ”because people are awakened and their awareness increased and insist on establishing democracy which is their right. We see in other Islamic countries, spring of Islamic Awakening come to existence and dictatorships are destroyed one after another.”

A petition has been set up on Change.org, calling for the release of al-Nimr. The petition says that ”discrimination [against the Shi'a in Saudi Arabia] has presented itself in many forms including economic, academic, physical and psychological. They have no positions in cabinet or government and they are discriminated against in schools. Religious police even mandate the smallest things that the Shi’a community partakes in. Not only will they now oppress this brave cleric on account of his political views but intentions are to punish him for what they describe as ‘blasphemous’ religious views.” The petition says that the signatories are standing against this latest injustice by the Saudi authorities, “in the name of humanity [and] will not tolerate any group of any religious belief, race, sex or political inclination to be oppressed due to their belonging to their respective groups.”

According to the petitioners, al-Nimr has been charged with “blasphemy.” However, the AhluBayt News Agency reports the authorities have leveled a number of other charges against the cleric, including incitement in the governorate of Qatif, and “draw[ing] foreign intervention and support of the uprising in Bahrain.”

The Ahl al-Bayt [People of the House] World Assembly has urged “international bodies and human rights organizations around the world to take prompt and effective actions to save the lives of ‘Sheikh Al-Nimr’, ‘Allamah al-Amer’ and all political prisoners in Saudi Arabia, and to pressure the Al Saud regime to meet the basic human rights and freedom of Shiites and grant them the right to participate in their own fate.” Considering the length of time al-Nimr was kept in detention without charge, the accusations against this cleric, known for his outspoken defense of human rights, are highly suspicious.

You can view and sign the petition against the execution of Ayatollah Nimr Baqr al-Nimr here.

See also:
Hezbollah condemns arrest of Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia

“We have appealed through the UN that Hindus in Pakistan should be allowed to live with dignity,” VHP spokesman Vinod Bansal said, ”and those who have left the country due to atrocities must be given proper rights wherever they are. Those who have arrived in India must be given citizenship because they are part of the country.”

Rajiv Gupta told News Track India that the organization had submitted a memorandum to the UN, requesting the body to ”provide relief to the Pakistani Hindus as they are being attacked and tortured there.”

Hindus make up approximately 2.5 percent of the population of Pakistan, which is officially a Sunni Muslim state. However, Hindus, as well as those of other minority faiths — including Christian, Ahmadiyya, and Shi’ite Muslims — face serious discrimination and violence. Shi’a Muslims are regularly attacked by militants, and are especially vulnerable when traveling on pilgrimages. In March, in one of the worst attacks on the Shi’a minority, Sunni militants detonated explosive devices, killing at least 45 and wounding over 150.

Pakistan’s Hindus, who live mainly in the province of Sindh, are subject to routine harassment, discrimination, kidnappings for ransom and violence. In the latter case, Hindu girls and women have been frequently targeted for rape and conversion. Many of these have been documented by the Asian Human RIghts Commission, which claims that “around 20 to 25 forced conversions [of Hindu girls to Islam] take place every month in Sindh.” However, violence against Hindus and other minorities is often overlooked by the police authorities.

“Our women are being raped there, our children are being converted to Islam forcefully. Pakistan is like hell. I will commit suicide here but never return,” Veer Das, a farmer from Hyderabad, Sindh, and one of the protesters at the UN, told News Track India on Wednesday. Another protester, Bani Devi, 48, also said that the nearly 500 Hindu refugees would ”not leave [India] our motherland … we cannot live with any dignity in Pakistan … at least we will die with some [dignity] here. We all will commit suicide.”

The Aesthetik’s head designer, Stacy Williams, began her career in fashion working for high-end labels such as Anna Sui, and Susana Monaco, before founding her own label. Known as a womenswear label with attitude – inspired by subculture, individuality, independence, and the ethics of creativity and sustainability – The Aesthetik has been featured in Time Out New York and Blinc Magazine among others.

Women in black: designs by The Aesthetik.

All of the label’s work is made in New York, with its seasonal line using American-made and natural/eco-friendly fabric. And, while continuing to develop The Aesthetik’s ready-to-wear collection, the label is now offering limited edition and one-off upcycled jewelry and clothing for those who want something truly unique in their wardrobe.

Alternative but timeless, The Aesthetik’s design never seems to go out of date. “Strong minimalist lines and bold detailing give The Aesthetik a decadent feel,” says Williams, who describes the label’s customer as “a strong individual with a sense of style that inspires wardrobe envy.” Among those wearing The Aesthetik are members of post-punk bands the Casandra Complex and That Petrol Motion, while Jazz singer, Queen Esther, wears the label’s upcycled jewelry.

The Aesthetik will be showing previously unseen limited edition garments and accessories – including dresses, hats, gloves, and purses – as well as more than 50 pieces of handmade, upcycled antique jewelry and multi-media pieces during the sample sale, which will run from Thursday, May 16, through Sunday, May 19, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM each day. (And Stacy’s multimedia art and photography will also be exhibited at the event.)

The Aesthetik Spring/Summer womenswear show will be held on Saturday, May 18, at 2:00 PM, and will be available to buyers for order, as well as to event goers for pre-order. Both events will take place at Studio 34, located at 34-01 38th Ave, Suite 426, Long Island City, NY 11101.

You can check out The Aesthetik here.

PoS: When did you first start painting, and when did you know that it was really your calling?

EP: The very earliest reasons as to why I started exploring painting and drawing is pretty much similar to why I love it so much now: that is the raw tools themselves, and the form of alchemy the materials create. The paint was so tantalizing that bare fingers [when I painted as a child] were soon replaced with brushes. Pencils were used, to my parents disdain, for wall scenes and [for drawing on] other objects such as mirrors, windows, the books found in the shelves, vinyl records, etc. But I was soon shown more proper options for my interest, with parents and relatives giving me paper, canvas, wooden boards, colored pencils, markers, acrylic, oil paint, watercolors and so on. These gave a sense of structure to my passion… I stopped destroying other people’s property.

Eric Pelka, “Different Views: Inside The Mirror Trunk Outside,” 2011.

Shortly after this I was taken to the big art museums, and I saw how paintings are creations that are admired and analyzed in our culture. And I also knew it was important to paint, and that there were multitudes of art periods and style.

PoS: How did you feel when you first came to New York? How did it affect your style?

EP: Even though I work in solitude usually, I’m still very influenced by the living energy that’s unique to wherever I may be. When I first came to live in New York from a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, it was a very specific fantasy that I was pursuing. I was 19-years-old, and favorite scenes from movies based in New York or moments from novels I’ve read  – that took place on street blocks I was now living amongst — had left strong, romantic impressions on me .

There’s the history of New York, which I find forever interesting — knowing you can have a pint under the ceiling where George Washington once slept above, or sip wine where Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller once hung out. But, even so, I think our future is more important. It’s what is happening right now that’s most important.

PoS: It’s a kind of adventure or exploration?

EP: Yes, I always wanted to be an explorer, on a ship that set sail to continuously discover new lands — I guess like Robinson Crusoe, sort of. But, since this was unrealistic, I took up painting and drawing. This has always been the most accessible, reliable and tangible form of expression for me.

Painting has become as much a part of me as a living organ in my body, except its is an act of creation that uses several parts of the body. It’s definitely about the brain but also about hands, eyes, ears, taste and so on. It has become a way to feel more comfortable in this environment of consciousness… Besides pencils and brushes, I’ve used sticks, lamb chops and birthday candles. For paint, acrylic is my favorite, but besides that, I’ve used wine, and even coffee.

PoS: Your work has a lot of women in them, and they seem to have their own characters. Who are they? Do you get inspired by people around you, or are they purely from your own mind? Are they in some sense your anima?

Eric Pelka, “Regarde moi” (detail), mixed media, 1995.

EP: With so many women influencing me since my childhood, beginning with my mother, there are many women I’ll know, and several I won’t know, that I’ll find in front of me [in the art] when I’m working on a piece.

The women have been appearing since I could barely speak a word! I remember when I was 2 or 3 years old and my aunt going to Hawaii all the time, and having books about Polynesia around the coffee table, and visiting the hula dancers at Sea World in Aurora, Ohio These were things that helped prompt me to draw endless pages of hula girls.

Some of the women over the years may be specific, but usually they aren’t. It’s about the mystery of the subject; sometimes it’s the mystery of how certain colors and forms appear with the raw materials, the paint. Even though I appreciate the sense of freedom I have to explore, certain things just happen. I find that exciting, and, often, chilling. The characters that appear are sometimes realized immediately. At other times they emerge later on.

PoS: Although very different, like Cubism, your work presents scenes that are up close to the viewer. We don’t see perspective. Although your lines and shapes are a lot soft er, there’s a sense with your work that we’re seeing everything at once. What is this telling us? Is it a reflection of modern life, with overcrowded cities, or with the world becoming smaller through the internet, and so on?

EP: I’m living in a robust city with much beautiful chaos, and [I have] high level of outside stimulation, so this affects my work. When I paint in the countryside or a different city, for that matter, it affects the piece — that’s the energy from the immediate environment.

PoS: In some of your older paintings, such as “Peeling the Grand Frown Sale,” 2007, the figures seem to form the landscapes themselves. But these landscapes always seem to reach upward, as if they’re mountains of people. Can you tell me about this?

EP: That particular painting emerged from a denser reality that was being discovered around 2002. A reality of “many realities” that were still all interconnected, and yet distinguishable from a unique origin. That created a vision among many visions, though all from a similar state of consciousness.

PoS: Your paintings since 2011 have become more colorful, I think. And they’ve taken on the quality of storytelling. They seem to have the quality of folk tales, illustrating oversized people and creatures (e.g., Birdy, from Mind Physical Works, and You’re In Here). Can you tell me about this?

EP: There are a lot of stories and tales — mysteries — within each piece of work, and I still haven’t solved most of them. Some characters reappear and are reinterpreted years later.

PoS: Can you tell me about your recent exhibitions? Where have you shown? What has been the best experience recently?

EP: My favorite so far is Japan, but I couldn’t imagine that there would really be a place on earth to not find interesting. The next showing of work will be in a group show of small works at SPACEWOMb Gallery, May 4 to 24, in Long Island City, New York.

PoS: What do you hope for in your art as you go forward?

EP: To always have the opportunity to do this every day ,and be able to share it, with all my love.

Refugees who participated in the study came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they had been exposed to years of combat, sexual assault, torture or brutality and/or forced to witness the abuse or killing of loved ones. The David Lynch Foundation (DLF) visited Africa to speak with some of the study participants, including Esperance Ndozi, a 2009 refugee.

“Everyone can benefit from Transcendental Meditation, but perhaps most especially those who have been victims of terrible trauma,” said Russell Simmons, hip-hop pioneer and longtime advocate for bringing meditation to underserved populations. “I congratulate the David Lynch Foundation for their great work in bringing relief through TM to those who need it the most in the world.”

“For too many people in the West, the suffering of Esperance and millions of other abused women and children in Africa is, sadly, just a statistic. But they are not numbers. Their suffering is real and they live a nightmare. My hope is that the dramatic results of this new study will ensure the necessary financial support to bring this meditation to everyone in need in Africa and around the world,” added David Lynch, filmmaker and founder and chair of the David Lynch Foundation.

The randomized/matched study measured the severity of posttraumatic stress (PTS) in African refugees before and after learning the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique. A total of 42 refugees took part in the study. Half were assigned to learn TM immediately, while the other half were assigned to a control group for comparison. For measurement purposes, all of the refugees were given the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL) on Day 1, Day 30 and Day 135 after TM practice.

The TM group experienced significant reductions in symptoms after 30 days with symptoms remaining low after 135 days. In contrast, PTS symptoms in the non-meditating control group increased over the four-month period.

“We anticipated improvement, but I didn’t expect this magnitude of change,” said the lead author of the study, Colonel Brian Rees M.D., M.P.H., who has completed five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The continued improvement at four months also led us to conclude that TM may be a very worthwhile intervention for anyone suffering from posttraumatic stress.”

“These findings suggest that TM may be an effective antidote to the rising incidence of PTS in the world,” said Fred Travis, Ph.D., Director for the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management (MUM) and a co-author of the study.

This study comes on the heels of the announcement in January 2013 that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is conducting a $2.4 million dollar study on TM as a form of treatment for U.S. veterans suffering from PTS. The benefits of meditation have been studied and found effective by the Harvard School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association. Meditation has been proven to reduce acute and chronic stress and stress-related disorders, decrease anxiety and depression, help individuals overcome addictions and simultaneously develop the brain and creative potential of the individual for a healthy, productive and self-sufficient life.

The study was conducted by African PTSD Relief, an independent organization dedicated to teaching Transcendental Meditation to people in Africa who suffer from posttraumatic stress, in partnership with researchers at the MUM Research Institute, who have investigated the effects of practice of TM across a wide range of clinical groups.

The study was funded by the David Lynch Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity founded by iconic filmmaker David Lynch to bring meditation to at-risk populations.