Cupid,
and Bacchus, my saints are
May drink, and Love, still
reign,
with Wine, I wash away
my cares,
And then to Cunt
again.
--John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester
While
many writers are justifiably slamming the
so-called “Religion of Peace” for its current
terror crimes against the infidels of humanity,
it’s far from time to let the so-called “Religion
of Love” off the hook, my little friends.
As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s recent A Moral
Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the
Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair
has more than amply demonstrated, even after 1,940
years of crusades, persecution, murder, war,
inquisition, genocide, pogroms, forced
assimilation, censorship, torture and todying up
to tyrants, the Religion of Love was all too
willing to cuddle up to Hitler and his henchmen in
order to rid Europe of the specter of Judaism.
The Catholic Church anti-Semitic? Who the hell do
you think invented anti-Semitism?
But of all the crimes that can be laid on the
doorstep of dogmatic Christianity, none has had
more of a profound effect on human behavior than
the Church’s stern, moral shackling of sexuality.
What? Do you mean that human beings haven’t
always been manacled into marriage, monogamy and
heterosexuality out of fear for their immortal
souls and a good tax break? Do you mean that
human beings acted differently before that nice
Jewish boy got himself nailed to a cross for
claiming he was the Son of God?
Exactly.
The linking of sex to morality is the greatest
metaphysical control mechanism ever created by the
mind of man. Imagine handing over the power to
control your pleasure to men in funny suits who
like to molest altar boys because their religion
demands they remain celibate. And their so-called
morality demands that your pleasure remain
shackled as well.
For as Nietzsche argued in The Genealogy of
Morals, what morality does is say NO! to
life. Morality is authority’s best instrument of
power, their most powerful instrument of control.
We say NO! because they want us to see God “as
some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind
the great captious web of causality.” Caught in
their web, we live, we die, never suspecting that
the world once offered other alternatives.
This was brought home to me on a recent trip to
Naples, Italy, where I went to visit the National
Archaeological Museum--and the infamous Secret
Cabinet of Erotic Artifacts.
You haven’t experienced anarchy in action until
you’ve been to Naples. Scooters, cars,
motorcycles and buses whizzing and zooming up and
down the streets, drivers ignoring traffic lights,
pedestrians and the very concept of lanes.
Look out! Most of the city, especially the
centro storico, is one gigantic festering
labyrinth of noise, dirt, mobs of people and
crumbling buildings. There isn’t a tourist in
sight. I loved it.
The National Archaeological Museum houses all the
artifacts hauled out of Pompeii and Herculaneum
over the last two hundred and fifty years or so.
Statues, wall and floor mosaics, jewelry, cool
miniature portraits painted on glass (like
passport photos), silverware, plates, glasses,
cooking utensils, all in remarkable condition due
to those two cities being buried under rivers of
lava by the eruption of Mount Etna in AD 79.
But the artifacts I’d come here to see had been
locked behind iron gates for more than 200 years.
For as the Quick Guide to the Museum reminds us,
“the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the
mid 18th century brought to light a
large amount of new material, revealing the true
extent of this aspect [i.e. the sexual aspect of
the ancient world] and causing no little
embarrassment.”
No doubt.
If you visit Pompeii today (just down the bay from
Naples) what you will see is a whitewashed version
of history, a well-preserved Roman town gutted and
transformed into a safe tourist destination, in
much the same way that seedy, semen-stained Times
Square in New York was cleaned up for the MTV
generation.
The proof is behind those iron gates back at the
Museum.
Imagine Ma and Pa Midwest walking into Pompeii and
encountering erect stone penises on nearly every
street corner; bakeries and shops decorated with
cock-and-ball signs for good fortune; statues of
satyrs fucking goats, hermaphrodites, well-hung
dwarfs and copulating couples; wall and floor
mosaics of African pygmy orgies, Roman gods
molesting Roman mortals, and courtesans
demonstrating their favored sexual positions;
drinking cups and wine jars painted with scenes of
homosexual penetration; penis-shaped oil lamps and
wind chimes; not to mention over 400 brothels in a
town of 40,000 inhabitants.
This was the real ancient Rome, my little friends,
a place where it was acceptable to mix your dinner
party with an orgy; where it was acceptable to
have sex with your host’s servants while your host
served you wine; where homosexuality (a 19th
century invention of German psychology) did not
exist--but only the concept of active and passive
sex; where the erect penis was considered a sign
of good fortune and fertility (and not the taboo
signifier of evil postmodern phallocentrism or the
result of postmodern pharmaceutical chemistry);
where sexuality was not segregated from daily life
into the ghetto of marriage, morality, advertising
and the internet; where Eros reigned supreme,
without guilt and without dishonor.
Think of that the next time you visit an Internet
café and have to suffer the lean, hungry looks of
the sexually starved surfing the web for porn.
If you don’t believe me, just visit the Secret
Cabinet of Erotic Artifacts. It’s now open after
200 years of censorship and darkness. But don’t
forget to make a reservation downstairs in the
ticket office, because you can’t just walk in
unsupervised. And it’s not even listed on the
museum’s official website.
Afterwards, wander off into the centro storico
of Naples (keeping an eye out for thieves buzzing
by on scooters) find a small pizzeria, sit down,
order a pizza margherita and a Peroni and dream
about what Pompeii must have really looked like,
before the moral vultures got to it. Dream of the
look on Ma and Pa Midwest’s faces as they step
into the real Pompeii, before it was purged of its
characteristic sexuality. And dream of what the
world would have been like without the bureaucracy
of control called The Religion of Love.
As Marco, the young worker in the Museum’s
bookshop said to me when I bought my Quick Guide,
“we really missed out.”
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