Burning the heretic
Just before I visited this place... the inhabitants
were fallen into the custom of demolishing the stones, chiefly
out of covetousness of the little area of ground, each stood on.
First they dug great pits in the earth, and buried them. The
expence of digging the grave, was more than 30 years purchase of
the spot they possessed, when standing. After this, they found
out the kanck of burning them, which has made most miserable
havock of this famous temple. One Tom Robinson the
Herostratus of Abury,* is particularly eminent for
this kind of execution, and he very much glories in it. The
method is, to dig a pit by the side of the stone, till it falls
down, then to burn many loads of straw under it. They draw lines
of water along it when heated, and then with smart strokes of a
great sledge hammer, its prodigious bulk is divided into many
lesser parts. But this Atto de fe** commonly costs thirty
shillings in fire and labour, sometimes twice as much. They own
too 'tis excessive hard work, for these stones are often 18 foot
long, 13 broad, and 6 thick, that their weight crushes the stones
in pieces, which they lay under them to make them lie hollow for
burning, and for this purpose they raise them with timbers of 20
foot long, and more, by the help of twenty men, but often the
timbers were rent to pieces.
Stukeley goes on to write that a single stone could provide
enough pieces to build an ordinary house, but that because of the
nature of the stone, such a house "is always moist and dewy
in winter, which proves damp and unwholsome, and rots the
furniture. The custom of thus destroying them is so late, that I
could easily trace the
obit of every stone; who did it,
for what purpose, and when, and by what method, what house or
wall was built out of it, and the like."
*The term "auto da fe" (or
auto
de fe) means "act of faith" and refers to the
Spanish Inquisition's ritual of judging and condemning heretics.
The ceremony has generally been thought to include executions by
burning at the stake (which is no doubt what Stukeley is alluding
to), though some sources claim that the actual executions were
held separately.
**Herostratus sought to make a name for himself by setting fire
to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (Turkey) in 356 BC. He
boasted proudly of his act, so the authorities not only executed
him but decreed that his name should never be spoken again, on
penalty of death. Obviously it didn't work, and the name
"Herostratus" subsquently became associated with the
idea of seeking glory through acts of destruction or violence.
http://www.avebury-web.co.uk/the_shame.html
http://www.avebury-web.co.uk/the_shame.html
****************************
Our Lady of Fatima
The Three Secrets
The Sun Miracle
Near the entrance to the sanctuary by the rectory is a
Berlin Wall Monument,
containing a 5,732-pound chunk of the wall donated by a Portuguese
emigrant to Germany after it fell in 1989. He offered it as a memorial
of God's intervention in bringing down Communism, as promised at Fatima.
10. Berlin Wall
At the entrance of the Sanctuary, on the south side of the Rectory,
one may visit a monument of the Berlin Wall's, consisting of a concrete
segment that was part of it. (The Walls construction started during the
night between the 12th. and 13th. of August, 1961 and its demolition
began the 9th. of November, 1989) This segment was offered by means of
Virgilio Casimiro Ferreira, a Portuguese emigrant to Germany and is here
placed as a grateful memorial of God's intervention for the fall of
Communism as promised at Fatima. The segment weighs 2,600 kilos (5,732
lbs.) and measures 3.60 meters (11 ft. 9 in.) high by 1.20 meters (3 ft.
in.) wide. The present monument was designed by the architect J. Carlos
Loureiro and was inaugurated on the 13th. of August, 1994.
************
Claudio Colaguori in
Agon Culture: Competition, Conflict and the Problem of Domination.
For Colaguori, "the agon is literally the arena of competition, the
scene of contest, and the locus of adversarial conflict. The philosophy
of agonism affirms the idea that transcendence, truth, and growth are
generated from the outcome of the contest...the concept of agonism is
often understood in an affirmative sense as the generative principle of
economy, society and even natural ecology and personal growth... The
ambivalent character of agonism is that it is often seen as a mode of
transcendence, while its instrumental relation to the mode of
destruction is rarely acknowledged".
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