Will Durant:
"Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and-after some hesitation- the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."
The perindens is a tree in India. Its fruit is sweet throughout and exceedingly pleasant; doves delight in it and live in the tree, feeding on it. The dragon is the dove's enemy; it fears the tree and its shadow, in which the doves dwell; and it cannot approach either the tree or its shadow. If the shadow lies towards the west the dragon flees to the east, and if the shadow falls towards the east, the dragon flees to the west. If it should happen that a dove is caught out of the tree or its shadow, the dragon kills it.
An Irish Blessing
Aye and Begorrah!
There was this old Irish folktale about one of the ultimate Celtic anarchist protagonists, The Tinker of Tamalcht and his Deals with the Devil.
The Tinker rejects both God and the Devil for allowing injustice to exist in the world, but he accepts Death as the Godfather of his firstborn child, because Death does not discriminate between the rich and the poor.
Death offers The Tinker 100 extra years of life in gratitude, but he then takes advantage of this arangement, extending his natural life-span in various tricks and deals. Along the way, The Tinker exasperates the Devil by pranking him into some abuse at the tongs of a blacksmith.
By the time that The Tinker, now unnaturally aged, perhaps 1000 years old, agrees to submit to Death, neither God nor the Devil will accept him into heaven nor hell.
A compromise is reached. The Tinker of Tamalcht is re-incarnated as a Salmon swimming in the River Erne, reputedly impossible to catch by frustrated anglers.
"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture.
Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
- – Attributed to Jean Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), but likely from Paul Weiss' play Marat/Sade
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