When Augustus rearranged the Roman world into an empire, the happy and humane eroticism of the Greeks turned into a frightened melancholy. It did not take more than thirty years for this transformation (from the year 18 BC to 14 AD), but nonetheless it still rules us and controls our desires. Christianity was only the result of this transformation. Christianity adopted that eroticism almost as well as the Roman officials who created it in Augustus's empire, in an atmosphere of excessive complacency and obedience.
The faces of the women filled with fear became staring sideways into a dead corner. There is nothing between men and women but ripping apart. Civil society is nothing but a thin veil over ferocious brutality and the propensity to eat raw human flesh, and civilized customs and arts are nothing but plucked, ever-growing claws. The mother preys on her son, and it returns through the blood to the body of the one who brought him out. This is the bloody ecstasy that forms the basis of human societies, as every mother delivers her son, when he leaves her, to death.
As for the motive for writing this book, Pascal Kinnear explains: “What prompted me, during all these years, to write this book?
The faces of the women filled with fear became staring sideways into a dead corner. There is nothing between men and women but ripping apart. Civil society is nothing but a thin veil over ferocious brutality and the propensity to eat raw human flesh, and civilized customs and arts are nothing but plucked, ever-growing claws. The mother preys on her son, and it returns through the blood to the body of the one who brought him out. This is the bloody ecstasy that forms the basis of human societies, as every mother delivers her son, when he leaves her, to death.
As for the motive for writing this book, Pascal Kinnear explains: “What prompted me, during all these years, to write this book?
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