FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 621 24 February 2015 BEWARE THE SIRENS’ SONG

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SIREN VOICES THAT SEEK TO LURE HUMANITY INTO DEGRADATION AND WAR MUST BE RESISTED
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‘Frank, the young must learn to resist the voice of the Sirens’, my maudit teacher, Julius Evola, used to say. A splendid Roman mosaic I saw last week in Tunis’ Bardo Museum reminded me of the Master’s ever-topical warning.

The haunting story of the Sirens’ Song is in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens are sexy temptresses, female creatures whose melodious singing, impossible to ignore, lures mariners to their death. But Circe, a friendly enchantress, instructs Odysseus how to elude them. As his ship nears the Sirens’ island, the hero plugs the sailors’ ears with beeswax. Still, Odysseus is avid for knowledge, no matter how dangerous. He commands his men to tie him to the mast and to refuse all entreaties to untie him. So the ship sails close to a luscious meadow – one strewn with the rotting corpses and whitened bones of shipwrecked sailors who have succumbed to the Sirens’ voices. On hearing the song Odysseus almost goes mad. He furiously screams to be released but the companions tie him even tighter. At last they row safely past and away from the deadly seducers.

Homer, the supreme Bard of the Occident, conveys a perennial message, humanity’s battle with lethal though irresistible temptations. True of all people and ages but youths are especially vulnerable. Drugs and promiscuity are obvious candidates – yawn… Actually, it goes much deeper. ‘Self-harm among teenage boys has reached epidemic proportions’, writes The Times. Thing is, depression, suicide and folly paradoxically also draw. They evince a flight towards negativity, darkness and non-being. Why? The more sensitive young perceive that hedonism, the pleasure-cult, fails to satisfy them. They then flee in the opposite direction, towards self-harm and self-destruction. Malignant Siren voices that in an adrift, atheism-infested culture perversely appeal.

At the moment the media are piously dwelling on three teenage Muslim girls run away to join the Caliphate rapists and head-choppers in the Levant. British bien-pensant liberals are horrified that girls like that should forsake the trendy cacophonies of Rihanna, Beyoncé or One Direction for the raucous rigmaroles of Jihadism. Another case of Sirens’ Song? I wonder. Maybe wishing to dwell in a land where ‘the laws of Allah’ obtain, however harsh and incomprehensible to Western mentality, is a meaningful aspiration. It is for Muslims to say. Anyway, the risks, perils, the seductions besetting most British youths lie not in the Middle East. They are here, at home…

Historian Svetonius relates how Emperor Tiberius enjoyed spending time asking idle questions like: ‘What was the song the Sirens sang?’ Impossible to know but Homer discloses the essential. First, the words or melody were immediately understood – whatever inhuman lingo the beautiful creatures spoke – as the unfortunate victims belonged to all races or nationalities. Second, their voices took the hearers over, like an enchantment, so that their willpower was overridden. Third, the Song was mortally dangerous. The remains of mariners littering the island witnessed to that.

How do you withstand the sirens’ spell? The Christian Church constitutes the best bulwark against the lures of stupidity and evil, the appeal of the irrational, the mad temptation of self-destruction. The chief one right now being perhaps the invoking of a WWIII. This is no fantasy or rhetoric. Too many militaristic voices, like that of NATO General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, are beating the war drums against Russia. The General raves of ‘an existential threat to our whole being’. Amazing he does not urge an immediate nuking of Moscow – yet! By contrast, the heartfelt sentiments of Pope Francis convey the vital necessity in Eastern Europe for sanity, diplomacy and reconciliation. Addressing Ukrainian bishops in Rome last week, Francis condemned words like ‘victory’ of ‘defeat’ in the context of Ukraine’s civil war. The only right word is ‘peace’, the Holy Father said. And he deplored a fratricidal warfare between Christians. Thus he told off the warmongering NATO Sirens. Spoken
like a true Christian leader. Bravo! Bully to him!

Even the feeble, fast-fading Church of England occasionally bleats the right noises. Archbishop Welby angered the mindless ‘patriots’ of this country when, preaching in the Dresden Cathedral on the 70th anniversary of the criminal massacre of innocent civilians by British and American bombers, he voiced ‘regret and deep sorrow’. So he stood in the true Gospel tradition of the great Bishop George Bell, who in the House of Lords during WWII bravely condemned the policy of indiscriminate obliteration bombing. The least Welby could say, I suppose, but still the Christian thing to do. Bravo to you too, Justin, for implicitly telling scoundrelly Western sabre-rattlers where to get off!

But what is Homer’s Odyssey about, really? Beyond its wonders it is a simple story. The moving tale of a hero who for years undergoes tremendous tests and trials, combats monsters and cannibals, survives the Sirens’ Song with one overwhelming desire constant throughout: to get back to his wife, his son, his beloved island, his home. Odysseus is Ithaca’s King but he is also a man. A human being like all others. He is indeed Everyman. What he wants, what he craves, is a universal desire. He yearns for his family. His wife Penelope. His son Telemachus. And his home. Nothing hedonistic or phoney about that. Just natural. The siren voices of our culture seek to destroy the family but they can’t. Because the family is a divine institution.

Blessed is the person who has a family.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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