Remembrances for April - 2024

Before we get to the Southerners of the past whom we normally honor and pray for, we must take a moment to pray for those Southrons who died in the Nashville Christian school shooting in 2023 on March 27^th.  Here are their names:

Evelyn

Hallie

William

Cynthia

Katherine

Mike

Audrey

The addition of the shooter is not an accident.  St Silouan the Athonite (+1938), echoing our Lord, stresses that one who does not love his enemies does not have true love for God, has not acquired the Grace of the Holy Ghost, and will not find peace:

https://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/siluan_e.htm

May God grant all of them forgiveness of sins and rest where the righteous repose.

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Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

April 1^st

Ellis Marsalis, Jr

One of New Orleans’s great jazz musicians.

https://selu.libguides.com/BlackHistorySELA/marsalis

April 2^nd

Gen A. P. (Ambrose Powell) Hill

Amongst the best generals serving under Lee.  Both Jackson and Lee called upon him as they stepped into the life beyond death.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hill-a-p-1825-1865/

April 3^rd

Richard Weaver

Perhaps the greatest defender of Southern ways to be born in Dixie.

https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/weaver-richard-malcolm-jr

April 6^th

Gen Albert Sidney Johnston

One of Dixie’s leaders during the War, killed at the Battle of Shiloh.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/albert-sidney-johnston

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/4334/albert-sidney-johnston

April 7^th

Judge Jackson

He helped the Southern folk-art of shape-note singing to blossom.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-colored-sacred-harp/

April 9^th

Appomattox Day

If you have time, please pray for the South on April 9^th, Appomattox Day, the beginning of our sojourn in captivity.  Do some fasting as well if you can:  The Holy Fathers tell us and show us over and over again that humility attracts the Grace of God.

April 11^th

Caroline Gordon

One of the South’s best writers of novels and short stories.

https://www.visitclarksvilletn.com/plan/clarksville-connections/literature-and-journalism/caroline-gordon/

April 11^th

Gen Wade Hampton III

A fine calvary officer in the War; he was chosen to succeed JEB Stuart as the leader of that department after he was killed in battle.  After the war he served his State of South Carolina in political office.  A more dedicated man to the cause of Southern independence would be hard to find.

https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/wade-hampton-iii-1818-1902/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/439/wade-hampton/photo

April 12^th

Gen Richard Taylor

He lived and fought in Louisiana before and during the turbulent War years and was buried there after he died.

http://www.la-cemeteries.com/Notables/Civil%20War/Taylor,%20Richard/Taylor,Richard.shtml

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fta31

April 13^th

Col Edmund Rucker

A leader under General Forrest in the War; lost his left arm at the Battle of Nashville.  After the war, he led the industrial development of Birmingham, Al.

https://www.geni.com/people/Col-Edmund-W-Rucker-CSA/6000000017376848156

April 22^nd

Fr Abram Ryan

An eloquent poet and priest beloved of people across the South.

https://catholicism.org/priest-poet-patriot-father-abram-j-ryan.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7494769/abram-joseph-ryan

https://www.docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/ryan/ryan.html

April 22^nd

Alabama Confederate Memorial Day

April 25^th

Donald Davidson

Another outstanding 20^th century defender of the South and an excellent writer of poems, non-fiction prose, and ballads.

https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/donald-davidson/

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/philosopher-poet-donald-davidson-agrarian-south.html

April 26^th

Don Andrés Almonaster

A wealthy Spanish civil servant who lived in New Orleans during Spanish rule of Louisiana.  He gave very generously to rebuild the city after the Great Fire of 1788.  Two of his notable benefactions are what would become Charity Hospital and the St Louis Cathedral in which he is buried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Almonaster_y_Rojas

April 26^th

Florida Confederate Memorial Day

April 28^th

Jack Hinson

A family man in Tennessee trying to stay neutral in the War.  When Yankees murdered two of his sons in cold blood and mutilated their corpses, he became one of their deadliest enemies as a sniper.

https://www.gunsandammo.com/editorial/the-story-of-civil-war-sniper-jack-hinson-and-his-rifle/247860

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/jack-hinsons-one-man-war/

April 29^th

Mississippi Confederate Memorial Day

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of April from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow these links on over:

https://southernorthodox.org/orthodox-saints-for-dixie-april/

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/05/happy-feast-for-saints-of-april.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Layers of Meaning in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”’

 

The connection between monkeys and men is full of meaning.  This is true not only for the scientific age in which we live, in which Darwin’s theory of evolution still has a great deal of influence, but also for the religious stories of the distant past.  The 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a re-boot of the 1960s film series about primates that have surpassed humans in intelligence, morality, etc., is a modern elaboration of this connection, adding its own layers of meaning to this age-old link.

I.  The Re-Telling of an Old Myth

Jay Dyer and others have been telling us for years that Hollywood, through its movies, is giving mankind a new mythology to believe in.  Rise is an exceptionally good illustration of this.  It follows closely the Chinese myth of the Monkey King, whose name is Sun Wukong, but changes it in some small but significant ways.

In both stories, no reference is made to any kind of divinity (except for dishonorable use in Rise); it is due purely to natural forces that super intelligent apes appear.  Sun Wukong is birthed from Yin and Yang:

According to Journey to the West, the Monkey King is born from a strong magic stone that sits atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit. This stone is no ordinary stone, however, because it receives the nurture of heaven (yang), which possesses a positive nature, and earth (yin), which possesses a negative nature, and thus is able to produce living beings (according to Taoist philosophies). The stone develops a magic womb, which bursts open one day to produce a stone egg about the size of a ball. When the wind blows on the egg, it turns into a stone monkey that can already crawl and walk.

In Rise, the gifted chimp Caesar is born in a similar manner.  The heavenly yang is represented by an experimental Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, given to Caesar’s mother, Bright Eyes.  Bright Eyes herself represents the earthly yin element (mother = matter = earth).

Sun Wukong’s eyes draw attention to him in the old myth:  ‘As his eyes move, two beams of golden light shoot toward the Jade palace and startle the Jade Emperor.’  In the new story, Caesar’s eyes are also evidence of his advancement – his irises turn green after treatment with the drug, as noticed by this story’s Jade Emperor, the young, wise, and virtuous Dr. Will Rodman.

Sun Wukong has a marked effect on other monkeys when he associates with them:  ‘On the mountain, the monkey joins a group of other wild monkeys. After playing, the monkeys regularly bathe in a stream.’  The same happens when Caesar is placed with other primates in a shelter after a mishap with Rodman’s neighbor:  He not only teaches those in captivity with him, but exposes them to an upgraded version of the Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-113, which grants them the same super intelligence that he has.

There is an antagonist in both stories that must be confronted.  In the old legend this is the Demon King:  ‘After the Monkey King returns, he learns that a demon called the Demon King of Confusion is kidnapping the monkeys of the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit to use as slaves. He subsequently kills the demon and his minions, saving the kidnapped monkeys.’  In Rise, the Demon King is Steven Jacobs, one of the supervisors of Gen-Sys, the maker of the Alzheimer’s drugs and other pharmaceuticals, who brings chimps and other primates to the Gen-Sys lab to test experimental medicines on them.  At the end of the film, Jacobs and the police team he calls upon to exterminate the gifted monkeys meet their demise at the hands of Caesar and his companions.

The Monkey King and his followers find a home in the Chinese myth:  ‘He finds a large iron bridge over rushing water, across which is a cave. He persuades the other monkeys to jump in also, and they make it into their home.’  Likewise, Caesar and his host make their home in a dense forest that they can only enter by crossing a similar large metal bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, upon which they have their battle with Jacobs and the police.

After these events, the stories of Sun Wukong and Caesar unfold further in other myths and movies. 

It is noteworthy that Hollywood is continually operating in the regions of myth, attempting to mold the human soul into a particular, usually un-Christian, shape.  Thomas Millary describes what we are exposing ourselves to in typical Hollywood films in his essay for The Ludwell Review, ‘Divining the Dream Machine: Science-Fiction, Hollywood, & the Technology of Antichrist’:

Hollywood-driven pop-culture is a series of artificially constructed dream worlds, a dissociative prison built by sadists, psychopaths, sexual deviants, criminals, and spies. A false and tortured form of immortality is as much the goal of Hollywood dissociation as it is of the Machine at large. “The creation of a surrogate reality to escape into and rule over, a matrix-womb that is a simulation of the lost maternal body, is achieved through the meticulous and painstaking assemblage of a mosaic of eidetic memory images, a celluloid (and cellular?) panopticon made up of copies of reality. A matrix.”³⁰

II.  Revelation of the Method

Michael Hoffman II continues this line of thinking.  He describes modern films as ‘ceremonial psychodrama,’ a way, as we have said, for the evil, globalist Elite to condition the mind of the deracinated, de-Christianized masses to suit their own ends.  . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/11/garlington-layers-of-meaning-in-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Pondering over “A Thanksgiving Reflection”’

 

It is very fitting to slow down and express our gratitude to God for the blessings He has poured out upon us, so we are glad to see essays like Mr. Royal Alexander’s on this subject.

We second his sentiment, and would like to add a little to it from a lengthy hymn, titled ‘Glory to God for All Things.’  It has an interesting origin:

 

Glory to God for All Things: An Akathist of Thanksgiving was written in Russia during the height of the Communistic persecution by Metropolitan Tryphon of Turkestan (Prince Boris Petrovich Turkestanov) not long before his death in 1934. The title comes from the last words of Saint John Chrysostom as he died in exile in 407. The akathist was found among the belongings of Archpriest Gregory Petroff, who died in a Soviet prison camp in 1940.

We will quote just a small sample from the hymn, but the whole work is of the same spirit:

 

+    Glory to Thee for calling me into being; glory to Thee, showing me the beauty of the universe.

 

+    Glory to Thee, spreading out before me heaven and earth, like the pages in a book of eternal wisdom.

 

+    Glory to Thee for Thine eternity in this fleeting world; glory to Thee for Thy mercies, seen and unseen.

 

+    Glory to Thee through every sigh of my sorrow; glory to Thee for every step of my life’s journey, for every moment of glory.

 

+    Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age!

If a man living under the grinding persecution of the Soviets can find a way to write such a beautiful expression of thanksgiving to God, surely we can find a few moments to express our own, we who live a much more pampered existence in the U. S.

Now then, some less pleasant business.  There are some tares among the wheat in Mr. Alexander’s essay, and we would not be fulfilling the office of a friend if we didn’t say something about them.

Part of this line we found disconcerting:

 

Our recently passed Veterans Day makes me grateful not only for our current military heroes but also for those who were grievously wounded and those 1.1 million American service men and women since the Revolutionary War to the present day who died defending America, placing on the altar of freedom that “last full measure of devotion.”

Brave military men are indeed a great gift, but this inclusion of an ‘altar of freedom’ needs to be rethought.  Altars are used in the worship of deities.  Sacrifices upon those altars are offered to those deities.  Christians, too, have an altar, upon which they offer the Bloodless Sacrifice of Christ (called appropriately enough ‘Eucharist,’ Greek for ‘thanksgiving’).  Do we really want to proclaim that our veterans’ lives were sacrificed to a god or goddess named Freedom?  This may sound like nit-picking, but worship of God is a deadly serious business.  The Holy Trinity gave us a rather clear command in this regard:  ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ (Exodus 20:3).

We shouldn’t be speaking casually about God, religion, etc., but, rather, with as much carefulness as possible.  Demons are real, and they will use anything and everything to separate us from God and bring us to destruction, spiritual and physical, including what seem like harmless little phrases and ideas like an ‘altar of freedom.’

Then we come to this point in the essay:

 

In his second Thanksgiving Day message in 1982, President Reagan said that “I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom.”

Here we must also be extraordinarily careful.  The United States are not a universal body that can accept anyone from any country with any faith and turn them into some new man.  That is the description, more or less, of Christ’s Church.  . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/11/garlington-pondering-over-a-thanksgiving-reflection/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!