keyholez: Yom Kippur!
Reminder: this holiday is mainly about pushing a goat off a cliff, to serve the demon god Azazel. From Leviticus 16:
Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the LORD…
This reminds me of a passage from my bible, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat by Paul Lendvai:
It was not only blind advocates of Magyar superiority who aggravated the national conflicts, but noble idealists labouring under delusions played an unwitting and tragic part too. As a result of the historical strokes of fate described in earlier chapters, anxiety complexes always existed which, in both literature and politices, influenced national attitudes to Vienna and the nationalities. Szechenyi wrote: ‘Many people think that if they see an animal with two horns in Vienna it is the devil, though it is only an ox.’ In other words, it was not always ill-will, but also stupidity and inefficiency, which in the pre-revolutionary period of 1848 shaped the policies of the Court toward Hungary.
The double anxiety about Vienna and the numerically superior but culturally inferior nationalities was the reverse side of a power psychosis nurtured by romantic nationalism….
