Zones of the Spirit: A Book of ThoughtsStrindberg, August
Religion
Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts
Strindberg, August
Swedish literature
=The Fear of Heaven.=--The pupil said: "The astronomy or
uranology of the astronomers has ceased to make any progress since
it has become godless. They have given up observing the sky. They sit
there and calculate, with the express purpose of calculating God's
existence away. Seven years ago I met a teacher of astronomy. He did
not know that the equator of the sky passes through the belt of Orion,
and could not point out the ecliptic. He boasted of not knowing the
constellations, saying it was no science to know them. Our nearest
neighbour the moon has been ignored for a long time. And yet in 1866 it
was noticed that changes had taken place there, and that the crater of
Linnæus was on the point of disappearing. On the other hand, they are
trying to signal to Mars. If man, who lately in his folly thinks he has
solved the riddle of the universe without God, only knew how the 'gods'
are to us, and if he understood the signals which they send to us daily
and hourly, he would go out like Peter and weep that he had denied his
Lord or behaved as though he knew Him not."
=The Goat-god Pan and the Fear of the Pan-pipe.=--The teacher
said: "Like all lower classes the apelings regard themselves as
supermen, who march at the head of all movements and can regulate
developments. Their god is the shaggy Pan, who had been a goat and
became a half-man, and later the Evil One, Satan, or God's opponent.
But they must be ashamed of their god, for they call themselves
atheists. Their religion is that of the Satanists. When they hear of
any good action they snort. They delight in persecuting and tormenting
anyone in whom there is any good visible, and call him a hypocrite.
Their children learn to lie as soon as they learn to talk. The greatest
poet of the apelings has written a lament over the 'Decay of lying'
and an heroic poem in six cantos in praise of unnatural vice. They
are all perverse, mostly in secret, but they betray themselves in
their writers, who write in the name of woman, and from the woman's
point of view, against man. For by confusion of sex they have lost all
distinction of sex; they have ceased to think and to feel as men. They
run like dogs with their noses on the track of the white man, in order
to bite him, that he may become like one of them.
"There are white men who have been seduced by the females of the
apelings. The children are bastards, and their lives are a perpetual
conflict against the Satanic inheritance they have received from their
mothers. Some fight in vain; others find the Helper. There is only
One--Jesus Christ, the Exorciser of demons. You know that I was such a
bastard and fought the battle, which is not yet concluded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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