Posted on 08/15/2008 4:54:34 PM PDT by mojito
Sigmund Freud thought that everything was about sex, and he was half right. Rarely is love so spiritual that it does not also stir the loins, for human beings are creatures not only of soul but of body. Although it is thought rude to say so nowadays, different kinds of love belong to different kinds of sex. Not even Hell can resist divine love, J W Goethe showed in the funniest vignette in all literature: his devil, Mephistopheles, is disabled by an obsessive lust for the cherubs sent to claim the soul of Faust in the dramas penultimate scene. Heavenly beauty, that is, reduces the crafty demon to a pathetic old pervert, in a tableau not fit for a family newspaper.[1]
Goethes creepily convincing portrait of a pederastic devil in Faust (1832) drew on the poets earlier study of Persian love poetry of the High Middle Ages,[2] where as a rule, the beloved is not a woman, but a young man, according to the leading Persian historian Ehsan Yar-Shater. Islamic mysticism (Sufism) of the High Middle Ages is the only case in which a mainstream current of a major world religion preached pederasty as a path to spiritual enlightenment. A vast literature documents this, and a great deal of it is available online.
Sufi adoration of pre-pubescent boys persisted in many Islamic countries until very recent times, according to the Orientalist Helmut Ritter.[3]....Sufism has a reputation in Western pop culture as a kinder and gentler branch of Islam. It is not a different kind of Islam, but rather Islams mystical practice, to which the adage applies, by their fruits shall ye know them.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
What an elegant writer the author is.
This is a particularly complex and interesting article by Spengler. It's well worth reading.
Interesting. We used to call that narcisism meditating on your navel or your “ennymeeny.”
I thought this was going to be an article about the Democrat Convention.
Boy-oh-boy, does he go on about this.
This reminds me of many hard-core environmentalists. They don't worship the biblical God, and so they don't have the ambition or purpose of serving Him. To try to make their lives seem meaningful, they instead try to save the earth and create a heaven on earth. They, in essence, get to play God. Fits in well with much New-Age thought.
Dissolution of the ego is not exactly a playground for narcissists.
I agree. Whoever he really is, he's got a level of erudition and a gift for prose that's far above average.
Ping to a *really* interesting article. Try the link in Post #10, and then use the “Complete Spengler” choice on the right-hand side of the page to select the article with this title. I don’t know what’s up with the link the Original Poster gave.
(Persian relevance, sionnsar.)
Fascinating article!!!!!
Lovely prose!
for later.
Spengler bump
Omar Sharif plays a French Muslim in the recent French film Monsieur Ibrahim, where they show a scene of Sufi men dancing in ecstasy in a mosque.
Isn’t it? Spengler always has an original viewpoint and interesting information.
Ping
...It is a measure of the inherent good-heartedness of Americans that they evince a low threshold of horror. ...That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.
...but the basic case is as original as this article, and one hopes, similarly wrong-headed.
As far as pederasty being an expression of love for an idealized self, it is an interesting model, and it explains to a degree the frequent callous disregard of the real humanity of the junior partner in that relationship. What genuine human being could live up to someone's idealized self-image?
It isn't every author that can work Sufi Islam, Persian poetry, Goethe's Faust, and rampant buggery into the same article quite so seamlessly. For some reason I find that vaguely disturbing. Nevertheless, I'd love to hear a reply from a genuine Sufi - the printable parts, that is. (And yes, I read the dirty bits of Faust some years ago and knew exactly what Goethe was implying. How he knew what he was implying is quite another matter, but I doubt it had a great deal to do with Sufism.)
A fine, erudite, thought-provoking essay, IMHO, with whose conclusions I'll have to reserve judgment. There may be a mystic, cosmic element to it, but to paraphrase Freud, sometimes buggery is only buggery. ;-)
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