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French Christians forced to pay for their own mockery
How do you plan to celebrate Halloween this week? Even a man as obsessively uncanny as Tim Burton will probably be content to stick a candle in a pumpkin, or hand out free Haribo to Trick-or-Treating schoolchildren.
Authorities in the French city of Toulouse, however, decided to go one further by staging an entire festival of what some critics deemed to be public Devil-worship – sorry, an open-air “urban opera” – called “The Gates of Darkness” over the pre-Halloween weekend of October 25-27.
The main presiding Hell-beast in attendance was the Demon-Queen Lilith, an age-old Middle Eastern entity, the supposed true first wife of Adam before Eve, once held responsible for the deaths of babies during childbirth. In an increasingly post-Christian West which celebrates abortion as a kind of new secular sacrament, Lilith has since been reclaimed as a goddess of “feminist” liberation from such now oh-so-outdated civilisational chains as motherhood and marriage, and appeared in Toulouse in the form of a gigantic mechanical puppet, taller than many buildings.
An imposing creation, Lilith manifested with a naked bronze torso, her breasts on open display, culminating in a human head with curved ram’s horns and a skull on her brow. Below the waist, she adopted the form of a motorised scorpion, complete with gigantic tail-stinger. All in all, an even more fearsome vision of unfettered female emancipation than EU chieftainess Ursula von der Leyen – and equally as well-maintained by public money, whether the public like it or not.
In the name of encouraging tourists, Lilith’s emergence from the nearest yawning EU Hell-Mouth was directly funded by Toulouse’s city council: which is just another way of saying by the local taxpayer. And, as some of said taxpayers just happened to be Christians, some were not very happy. Although the opera was not truly actively encouraging Satanism at all – it was supposed to be about the victory of other gigantic mechanical mythological figures, like the Minotaur, over the forces of darkness, as represented by Lilith – this was not the way the event was interpreted by all.

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Hell’s belle
Lilith was originally developed for the Hellfest heavy metal festival, held every year in Brittany, where entrance for under-12s is free, thus allowing kids to be easily exposed to more genuinely and deliberately anti-Christian iconography like an undead skeleton bishop dressed in black robes, a bloodstained crucified zombie, and a demonically possessed Jesus Christ making the classic heavy metal “devil horns” sign with his fingers. Hellfest too was once funded by the French State, to the tune of 15,000 Euros per edition, until a pressure group got the money stopped, arguing the whole thing had become a taxpayer-subsidised “incitement to hatred” against believers.
At least visitors had to make a specific choice to attend the Hellfest, though; nobody bussed elderly parishioners in to give them all heart attacks by force. With this week’s Toulouse “urban opera” for Halloween, things were fundamentally different, critics argued. Around a million visitors were expected, and the parade of Lilith took placeright throughout the town centre, not in a specific, walled-off concert arena, with streets having large, explicitly blasphemous symbols like inverted crosses and the Seal of Lucifer projected all over them. This was done more with the specific aim of providing a spooky and sinister atmosphere than of intentionally offending the religious, but it did offend some such observers, nonetheless.
As the priest of Saint-Étienne Cathedral, Father Simon d’Artigue, complained, “Sunday morning is [now being] marked by the Beast, the day Catholics gather for Mass.” Father d’Artigue first realised something was amiss when he came across advertising posters for the opera depicting Toulouse’s Catholic churches in flames, accompanied by images of gleeful demons.
The problem was not that such an event was taking place per se, that’s just free speech (or free performance, or whatever you want to call it), but where and how it was being staged. Personally, I thought the whole thing looked fairly harmless, yet there are definitely people out there who don’t want to see such things, and, as with contemporary gay parades, they were essentially having it shoved down their throats, nonetheless.
As Father d’Artigue’s superior, Archbishop Guy de Kérimel, accurately observed, “There are people who enjoy watching horror movies, but note that you have to pay to access them.” Yet, this pre-Halloween, Toulouse’s Christians “just have to hide in our homes if we don't want to attend all this, and this for three days.”
Liberté, Égalité, Blasphème
So, why were the city authorities compelling Christians to “hide in their homes” like this, and pay for the privilege through their own taxes to boot? Out of sheer anti-Christian hatred? I’m not so sure. The show’s director, François Delarozière, professed himself bemused by the “reaction from another era”, protesting that his was “a family story”, with a happy ending of light triumphing over darkness.
“I understand that the show may shock believers, but it promotes universal values,” he explained. By “universal values” here, though, what Delarozière actually means are “liberal values”, which he wrongly presumes everyone sensible these days must hold automatically. “We all have the right to say what we want and what we think, but we don’t have the right to censor or forbid,” he added, in which case I’m sure he would be only too happy to accept a future commission from the Vatican to create two giant Adam and Eve puppets and march them through central Toulouse in order to demonstrate the biologically accurate Christian belief there are only two human sexes to everyone present, even members of the local gay club.
Really, any trouble could have easily been avoided simply by staging the whole thing elsewhere than in a central area of Toulouse filled with the town’s main churches and cathedral during their chief days of services, such as in a local park or stadium, or else by simply removing the explicitly blasphemous anti-Christian symbology like inverted crosses and just presenting it all as a generic war of good against evil instead.
There is no way any other religion would be treated with similar blasé disregard, with posters of burning mosques and huge mecha-djinn stomping amok through Marseilles or the Paris banlieues like Godzilla gone wrong. Islam is different, though, as that is clearly still a living religion: the likelihood of Monsieur Delarozière being the star of an even newer and more daring parade, one in which his own severed head is carried through the streets on a big silver platter by a ranting Salafist playing the role of Salome with the head of John the Baptist, should he ever dare stage an opera mocking Islam, would be proof of that. It is the clear double standards on display here which will enrage many, more than anything else.
Toulouse the moral high ground
Yet it seems likely many of the Toulouse Halloween festival’s organisers didn’t even think they were potentially truly insulting Christianity here. Probably, they just consider the faith as a dead, fairytale kind of thing that no truly “modern” European even believes in anymore which, unlike Islam, is therefore totally safe and inoffensive to deride, like the Greek gods of Olympus or the Norse Aesir.
Archbishop Kérimel compared the situation to that of the notorious opening ceremony of this summer’s Paris Olympics, when a trans-tastic parody of The Last Supper was staged with a big blue Smurf-Dionysus standing in for Jesus Christ on the banks of the Seine. Both cases, he said, demonstrated that “Christ has been removed from the cultural world”, which “no longer wants anything to do with Christianity.”
His assistant Father d’Artigue agreed, saying that, from the Church’s perspective, “there was never any intention to ban the show”, just to have it moved, or to “accuse the artist of having bad or blasphemous intentions.” Indeed not; unlike the unthinkingly secularist organisers of the Paris Gay-Parade and the Toulouse open-air Black Mass, it could be argued that real literal full-blown Satanists are actually closer to God, as they at least believe in the existence of a Deity to subsequently repudiate.
As Archbishop Kérimel warned: “For the masses of people strolling through the streets of Toulouse, this is all just a harmless game whose ins and outs they don’t understand.” Maybe it is. But what if it isn’t?
It was another Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire, who (reputedly) came up with that great old line about how “The greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” Events this pre-Halloween in Toulouse just might have proven it.
Why does stuff like this happen in Toulouse but not in Texas?
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.
Image credit: Toulouse Metropole
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David Page commented 2024-11-05 11:15:55 +1100Steven, you neglected to add your own religious backround. I recognize that Judaism is not just a religion. But I would be curious to know what you think of Judaism, the religion?
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Steven Meyer commented 2024-11-01 12:51:54 +1100“French Christians forced to pay for their own mockery”
Kindly inform the President of France that I would be happy to mock French Christians for free.
Also French Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, philosophers, cooking or anything French really. -
Emberson Fedders commented 2024-11-01 12:50:21 +1100And aren’t atheists subsidizing religious schools?
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-11-01 02:40:24 +1100Gay couples are forced to pay for adoption services (through tax dollars) that would refuse to let them adopt. Guess we all have our burdens to bear of paying for things that we’d rather not pay for?
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David Page commented 2024-10-31 11:26:29 +1100I believe Lilith Fair predates Hell’s Belles, but don’t let me interrupt the narrative.
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