Roman baths were one the most striking features of Roman civilization. After the Roman state collapsed, so did the baths, bathing, and the will to bathe. This was partly due to the destruction of the Roman hydraulic system. But it was also due to Christianism, an artificial ideology, antinomic to humanity, which the Roman emperors imposed to turn We the People into We The Sheeple. It’s high time to become reunited to elements of Middle Earth Civilization, neglected ever since Christian derangement syndrome took over.
ASICS & The Dirt On Christianism:
Early Christians tended to cultivate dirt and inaction. Individuals, male or female, achieved sainthood, just because they stayed on top of a column, for years, or just because they never washed, nor washed their clothes, nor changed increasingly dirty clothing: they just waited for dirt to flake off. Not interfering with the will of god was viewed as a high achievement.
(Part of) Grand Bains in front, proud successor of their 2,500 year old Allobroge and then Roman predecessors. Two 1,000 year old churches behind. Roman Tradition & Divine Aspirations United in a multi-millennial embrace, in the middle of the Alps. In 2017, the French government minds the ecology fiercely, in its own special way, by assassinating wolves around this village, in full tourist season, and planning dams… (In complete and direct violation of European law protecting wolves, an endangered species, thus demonstrating that, when the French government favors plutocrats, under the pretext of European law, it’s because it wants to…)
Christianism despised the world, and, in particular, the human body. What is despicable shouldn’t rule! Thus Christianism made despising We The People, into a religion, debasing the masses into submission! Taking care, either of the world, or the human body, was to be condemned, such was the mood of early imperial Christianism. That was the reason of being of imperial Christianism.
Once the Christians took over the small emirate of Granada, they closed the 3,000 public baths of this Muslim enclave. (I hope foaming at the mouth Jihadists read this before attacking modern baths; knowing history has not been their forte).
Christianism’s mood of submitting to fate, by rejecting the existence of the real world, was the exact opposite of the mood of the Roman Republic. And that was exactly Christianity’s main point: submit to fate in general, and the emperor in particular. Such is the will of god.
An important aspect of Roman mentality, ASICS: Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a healthy soul in a healthy body, was particularly repugnant to Christian fanatics. (A variant from Juvenal’s “Mens sana, in corpore sano…”) After the collapse of the Roman State, Christians would spend much efforts, in the following millennium, trying to close baths, until public hygiene became abysmal.
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The Christian anti-ASICS mood was also a completely degenerate mindset:
De-generate: what generates not, what undoes generation. What generate human beings in full was ASICS.
A portion of the exterior part of Monêtier-les-Bains Baths. Glaciers in the background High Alps are melting at a torrid pace. Entire glaciers are now fields of stones, after two decades of melting… I have computed that elevating the melt zone by 100 meters is roughly equivalent to shrinking the permafrost zone 100 kilometers to the north (or south…)
The destruction of the baths was actually progressive: early “Christian” civilization was not that “Christian”, and resisted Christianism for many centuries (Charlemagne was very Christian when Christianism was useful to conquer the Saxons and persuade them they were of an inferior moral sort, and intellectual primitives; however, in his personal life, and in his pushing of secular education and private fuming about the Pope, Charlemagne was not at all Christian, or then just Christian in a noble form…) It took many centuries for full Christian hatred of body, mind, health and world to take over. By then, even inside the “Church”, entire traditions of resistance to that sort of Christianization had risen. “Men in Black”, a sort of fanatical monks, destroyed books and libraries and intellectuals by 400 CE, but soon other monks were secretly saving around 93% of the texts of Antiquity which got preserved.
The hot, mineral laden baths have great curative properties, known probably already to Neanderthals (people used to have lots of skin disease). The destruction of bathing and basic hygiene in the Late Middle Ages, due to mass Christianization, brought massive epidemics. Proof? The nobility was often unaffected, because they bathed, and lived according to un-Christian morality, as Nietzsche, following Sade, forcefully pointed out…
Those texts were rediscovered in monasteries by the Late Middle Ages, including many by the secretary of several Popes, who detected the one and only copy of Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum, Of the Nature of Things, the only compendium of Greco-Roman science we have. Indeed the story of the Catholic Church was immensely complicated.
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Experiencing The Baths:
The Roman baths had many traditional sub-elements, such as the Tepidarium (tepid), the Frigidarium (frigid), the Calorarium (caliente! very hot). Going from the frigid bath to the super hot bath is really to be experienced: there is a variant where one walks through an even colder leg bath, before going back to warm water. One can feel nerves twinkle…
The high Alpine village of Monêtier-les-Bains has had baths, from natural hot water springs, for more than two thousand years. The Romans knew it well: the valley in which Monêtier-les-Bains sits had a major Roman road going through 150 miles of massive mountainous landscape, complete with passes above timberline and enormous canyons (in the flanks of which the Romans dug their roads, and their mines).
One becomes more fully human by experiencing more and more significantly, as long as it’s rather innocuous. Experiencing the games one’s neurology plays from just changes in water, or air, temperature or the impact of powerful jets is instructive.
Les Grands Bains du Monêtier are strangely addictive. Maybe that’s the wrong adjective: why should it be strange to feel fully human? The Romans didn’t think so. But the Christians did, and that’s why Christianism put civilization in full reverse in crucial ways, and why it had to be wiped out as a ruling cult. Ruling out Christianism is what the Enlightenment did, but it took a while: teaching the theory of evolution was forbidden in English universities for most of the Nineteenth Century (although it was allowed, in Scotland, to teach the evolutionary theories of the French research professors of the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris: Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, etc…).
I am not the only one so addicted to Les Grands Bains: although the price is above 24 dollars for the shortest visit (including going through change of clothing, shower, etc.), I had to share the baths with at least one hundred other happy souls. However, the baths are very large, so it didn’t feel crowded. Although not as large by a very long shot, than the largest baths in the Roman empire, such as Caracalla’s Baths, the present baths have absolutely mesmerizing pools, such as the one where one can enjoy underwater music, while contemplating lighted wave patterns, made by underwater lights, on the domed ceiling, far above.
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A whiff of pre-Christian religions, the religion of the baths, among others, is exactly what the doctor ordered, because it is a return to human sense, as evolved over millions of years, before the Abrahamism madness which devastated civilization, when the Middle Earth civilization nearly collapsed from a conjunction of factors where theocratic fanaticism, and rejection of reality, played an important part.
Right, it all originated from too few men having too much money, and then, power.
Nowadays, the stakes are higher: mad, yet powerful cretins play with, and brandish, thermonuclear bombs, and can throw them to the other side of the Earth. Ignore them to one’s own, and goodness’ peril. Antidote? Everyday I walk and take a long hot bath, reading in either case…
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 