Holy terror

The void of immortality-substance that would be left by the absolute abandonment of the leader is evidently too painful to support, especially if the leader has possessed striking mana or has summed up in himself some great heroic project that carried the people on. One can't help musing about how one of the most advanced scientific sicieties of the 20th century resorted to improvements on ancient Egyptian mummification techniques to embalm the leader of their revolution. It seems as though the Russians could not let go of Lenin even in death and so have entombed him as a permanent immortality-symbol. Here is a supposedly "secular" society that holds pilgrimages to a tomb and that buries heroic figures in the "sacred wall" of the Kremlin, a "hallowed" place. No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader of a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man's terror is always "holy terror" - which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.

E. Becker

Подобные мысли приходили на ум вчера, во время просмотра российского фильма о Гагарине. Что может сильнее символизировать противостоние человека силам природы (и смерти в том числе), чем фигура покорителя космоса?