As a child I lived in France and traveled Europe for a year. During that time I visited the Catacombs under Paris, in which I was suitably impressed with the arrangements of bones of the dead. I misunderstood much I thought I learned from that experience, primarily that the Paris Catacombs were unique, the only place where this was done. That is not even remotely true.
There are myriad Christian sites where similar, and even far more impressive use of corpses in art is made. There are many questions that arise from this revelation for me. The narrator in the above video well notes that if you were to use corpses to produce artwork you'd be considered monstrous, another Geoffrey Dahmer or Tony Podesta (there's an interesting contrast). Walmart could not do this and sell tickets to tourists to view their art, but hundreds of churches do. One thing that occurs to me is that Native people objecting to such use of their remains is not unreasonable.
History is a lie agreed upon by genocidal conquerors.
The video is ~50 minutes, but it significantly challenged the basal beliefs my indoctrination provided me. There are questions I cannot answer because the questions themselves have been hidden from me by the cartoonish history I was taught as a child. Question everything, because much of what we have been told are lies. As a child I could not consider the catacombs of Paris with any context, and that context of myriad catacombs hasn't been well considered by me previously. It is sobering, to say the least, particularly when modern remains are shown to be used in such art, and this practice isn't merely something monks in the dark ages undertook.
Neither is this only a Christian practice, as the image below of a skull from Tibet reveals.
IMG source - AtlasObscura.com - Sedlec Ossuary
What does using the bones of the dead, possibly vanquished enemies - or groveling minions (or are they the same thing?), as a chandelier mean? What of the prehistoric practice of using the skulls of vanquished foes as drinking cups Are these practices a continuation of that primordial symbol of conquest? What does this mean for we mortals today? It certainly suggests we are a crop, like flowers grown to cut and display in vases, such as in 'Predator', the movie that treats inhumanity and human remains collected as trophies by inhumane monsters.
Whom truly rules the world?
