Word: paganism
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...hips of Zeus and between the legs of his throne, executed by Panaeus, nephew and assistant of Phidias. Scholars have hinted that the figure owed its fame to these entertaining adornments, but Roman writers commented on the power, at once placid and stern, a sort of deep pagan content, that lived in the head. Here was no irritable Roman Jove, waiting at the least vexation to scatter thunderbolts in all directions like sparklers, but a Grecian gentleman, portentous as a hill, poised serenely as a wave...
Cardinal Vaini, passing his 80th year among a gardenful of hobbling rabbits and the brilliant pagan writers of the new century, at his sequestered villa on the Janiculum, is an object of fear and reverence to the Vatican, of warmest affection to the Cabala. As a brilliant young theologian, he shocked his teachers by burying himself in China, a missionary with a pigtail. He built a cathedral and by sheer force of statistics won first a mitre, then the Hat. A pistol bullet fired near him by ecstatic Mile, de Morfontaine puts him in mind of how the faith...
...books and teaching out of them become burdensome. At young ladies' seminaries and colleges, undergraduates then have dreams and ideas more mature than the oldest wight on earth, and their greying mistresses are stirred by impulses of an age with the buds outside the window. Wherefore an old pagan custom is then revived, its original nature made innocent by thousands of springs. The Maypole is erected. Virgins dance in white fluttering things. A Queen of the May or of Beauty is crowned with a garland. Or a play of long ago is acted out in some bower where...
...Pagan Temples interest...
...usual little blurb that finds its way into every catalogue, Maillol is described as the Swinburne of stone. He is said to have recaptured the simple purity of the Greeks and to have infused into it a pagan breath of strength and wild disorder. Which serves very well as blurb, and which, strangely enough, is very true. There is none of of the unfinished effect of Rodin, none of the power created by blocks of chaotic stone, but a curious similarity, none the less, in treatment. The little terra cotta statuettes are worth much more than a passing glance...