ARIANISM begins our list:
Deniers of God's only Son.
They claimed Him but a thing betwixt
And mocked the holy Three-in-One.
Th'eponymous Heresiarch
Prepared a great triumphal train;
God hurled him down into the dark
That Athanasius' word might reign.
Now I just need to write fifty more quatrains, do twenty-six woodcuts, and find a publisher willing to take a chance on a very odd children's book.
4 comments:
My First Book of Heresies! Fabulous!
Also reminds me of John Bellairs's Higgledy-Piggledies from The Face in the Frost:
Higgledy-Piggledy
St. Athanasius
Rifled through volumes in
Unseemly haste
Trying to find out if,
Hagiographically,
John of Jerusalem
Liked almond paste
and
Higgledy Piggledy
John Cantacuzene
Swaddled in Byzantine
Pearl-seeded robes,
Put out the eyes of his
Iconophanical
Prelate for piercing his
Priestly earlobes.
-- Fafner
I loved Bellairs as a kid, but I didn't realise how weird he really was until I re-read him later. "There was a wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either."
Is that where you first encountered higgledy-piggledies? It was for me, but I didn't notice them at the time (I tend to skip the songs in Tolkien, too). They only came to conscious attention when I encountered them here, which is also why I know them as double dactyls.
That's exactly the title, by the by, and you wouldn't believe how boring Irenaeus can get when. You. Just. Need. An. X. Please!
Xenophysites!
Eeh! I match your experience on all counts. I read all the kid Bellairs books when I was little, but when I rediscovered him through the audiobook of The Face in the Frost, I realized what a weird, cheeky little cuss he'd been all along. More than half responsible for my Catholicism fetish, damn him. It tickles me sideways that you know him; never met anyone else who has. And, yeah, that was where I first discovered Higgledy-Piggledies; you'll notice when I first blogged 'em, I'd gotten the formatting all wonky. Since then, I've tried writing a few, but it's so frikkin' hard to make 'em not suck. Still, a fine format when properly massaged into shape, and a good excuse for going in search of odd words. I wooed my girl with one built around "Testudinarious", and look where it's got me! So all due thanks to Mr. Bellairs. My only regret with the audio version of the book was that the otherwise very fine narrator didn't know the tune to "Sumer Is Acumen In" when they were trying to enchant the various garden vegetables.
That was me, obviously. But I see The Compleat Bellairs has gone down! Woe! Huh. Have to settle for Bellairsia instead. :`/
-- F
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