Re: Frankenstein

Kevrob wrote:

Don wrote:

>
This is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr E Michael Jones at a high-
school commencement ceremony in June, 1995. It pertains to Mary
Shelley's motivation to write _Frankenstein_.
>
        ... By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
    procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it,
    which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster,
    whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to
    answer our question about why a young lady connected with
    the cream of English society at the time, people of
    undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would
    write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives
    together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral
    order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it
    seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its
    own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
    thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos
    became an object of worship in any State, someone is going
    to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death.
    As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance
    naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The
    mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
    the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in
    some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore
    off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
    lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she
    saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
    ...
>
    ... If you carelessly bring life into the world without
    regard to the moral law (which is another definition of
    sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which
    will return and destroy not only you, but your friends
    and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.
>
    Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
    She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
    at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
    de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
    led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
    the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart
    enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were
    going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries
    like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the
    divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness."
    Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of
    treating people like machines, and as Mary must have
    understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines
    was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
    trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
    from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
    and killed.
>
    Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
    world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
    proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
    keeps getting retold because we still live in that world.
    The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment
    is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization,
    and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography
    industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates
    this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."
>
    <https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/frankenstein-10806>

      mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
      the music of

>
of what?  of whom?
>

undoubtedly thinking.....

>
Jones seems to be a nutbar.
>
[quote]
CULTURE WARS/FIDELITY PRESS
>
South Bend, Ind.
E. Michael Jones, a former hippie who says he spent his honeymoon stuck
in traffic while trying to reach the 1969 Woodstock Festival...
>
[/quote]
>
>
>
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2007/12-anti-semitic-radical-traditionalist-catholic-groups

    "a few Pedants, who, most of them, being conscious of
    their Ignorance, conceal'd it with hard Words"

    <https://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_2009_num_87_2_7676#rbph_0035-0818_2009_num_87_2_T7_0353_0000>

# # #

Note: corrections to my original post.

At long last, we finally arrive at the most interesting topic in my
post!

    Significantly, when Pentheus becomes visible sitting on
    high and the tree-thyrsus has thus taken shape, the god
    is no longer seen. Dionysus has manifested himself in
    this enormous symbol of his power, the tree-thyrsus. The
    phallic symbolism of this scene has been noted, for
    example, by William Sale, who sees the rising of the tree
    as representing "an erection, a display of the penis that
    Pentheus would not relinquish." If, however, the tree with
    Pentheus on top is seen as a thyrsus, the scene may
    represent an erection, not of Pentheus, but of the god
    himself and therefore a manifestation of his power, just as
    phalli are raised in the Dionysiac procession as symbols of
    his power of fertility. The Pentheus who had resisted and
    opposed the appeal of Dionysus is no more. He has been
    totally transformed, not just into a Bacchant but into a
    symbol of the god's power; no longer an individual, he is
    now merely the crown on an enlarged thyrsus.
        As the tree-thyrsus becomes visible, the god commands
    the maenads to take vengeance on Pentheus. Mounting a high
    rock opposite the tree, they pelt Pentheus with stones, fir
    branches, and their thyrsi, but Pentheus sits beyond the
    reach of their missiles. The maenads then do not attempt to
    knock the tree over but rather try to pry it up with impro-
    vised crowbars. When they are unsuccessful
    in their attempt, Agave calls on the other Bacchants to surround
    the tree and take hold of it. With "a thousand hands," they
    tear the tree up and out of the earth. Sale comments on the
    curiosity of the attempt to "pluck" the tree from the ground
    and sees it as Agave's castration of Pentheus, but even for a
    symbolic castration the verbs ... would seem inappropriate. It
    seems rather that the maenads, collectively, are simply raising
    the huge tree-thyrsus just as they lift up their own ivied
    thyrsi in the ecstatic worship of the god.

    (10.2307/295193)

# # #

    maenads

    maenads, in Greek and Roman religion and mythology,
    female devotees of Dionysus. They roamed mountains and
    forests, adorned with ivy and skins of animals, waving the
    thyrsus. When they danced, they often worked themselves into
    an ecstatic frenzy, during which they were capable of tearing
    wild animals to pieces with their bare hands. The maenads were
    also called (for Bacchus) bacchantes or bacchae.

    <https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/maenads>

Danke,

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