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Updated: May 10, 2025
The next moment I was chained to my chair again, the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung; my feet were scorched to a cinder, my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather, the bones of my leg hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze; it ascended, caught my hair, I was crowned with fire, my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets: I opened my mouth, it drank fire, I closed it, the fire was within, and still the bells rang on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility and priesthood looked on, and we burned and burned!
When the choir sang it was set to a plain chant melody, bellowed by the gong of a bass to which the sharp fife of the boys made answer; but during Rosary month, on every day except Thursday the task of singing it was entrusted to young ladies; then in the evening round a wheezy old harmonium, a troup of young and old geese, made Our Lady run round on her litanies as on hobby horses to the music of a fair.
It was needful that there should be no delay, so the Cardinal promptly repeated the Credo in an undertone, "Credo in unum Deum " "Amen," responded Don Vigilio, who, after the prayers of the ritual, stammered the Litanies in order that Heaven might take pity on the wretched man who was about to appear before God, if God by a prodigy did not spare him.
Martene lib. 4, c. 28. In the Ordo Romanus also De Benedictione Ecclesiæ these invocations are found. The question however concerning their antiquity in the litanies is of minor importance.
"See," he went on, "how close is the concordance between the epithets in the sentences and the quality assigned to the gems. "Does not the emerald, which in this sequence is emblematical of incorruptible purity, reflect in the sparkling mirror of its water the Mater Purissima of the Litanies to the Virgin? Is not the chrysolite, the symbol of wisdom, a very exact image of the Sedes Sapientiae?
If, moreover, I find the Worship of Human Nobleness abolished in any country, and a new astonishing Phallus-Worship, with universal Balzac-Sand melodies and litanies in treble and in bass, established in its stead, what can I compute but that Nature, in horrible throes, will repugn against such substitution, that, in short, the astonishing new Phallus-Worship, with its finer sensibilities of the heart, and 'great satisfying loves, with its sacred kiss of peace for scoundrel and hero alike, with its all-embracing Brotherhood, and universal Sacrament of Divorce, will have to take itself away again!"
With faltering voice she doled out the last terrible warning that speaks so eloquently from the bed of death. Whilst the aged priest recited the Litanies she raised her last, dying looks towards heaven, and whispered loud enough to be heard, "O Mary! pray for my children." Madeleine was no more.
It is the scene of a perennial feast of lanterns, and the worshipful enter silently with burnt-offerings and meat-offerings and drink-offerings, which they spread before the altar under the feet of some colossal god; then, with repeated genuflections, they retire. The thundering gong or the screaming pipes startle us at intervals, and white-robed priests pass in and out, droning their litanies.
"Oh! queen of glory!" cried one; "Holy Moses!" exclaimed another; "Blessed rosary!" said a third. I turned my head from side to side, listening; and excited by the excitement I caused, I recited several scraps of litanies in good Latinity, There was first an universal silence, then an universal shout, and a general cry of "A miracle! a miracle!"
Even as for centuries in Europe, Christian churches echoed with that prayer in the litanies: "From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us," so, along large parts of the deserted coasts of Chinese Asia, the wretched inhabitants besought their gods to avenge them against the "Wojen."
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