[UA] And what rough beast

[Tatterdemalion]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hammons, Jade" <jade.hammons at attws.com>

<snip>

>So I was thinking. If you add Christian flavor crystals to your
>UA campaign, wouldn't it make the second-coming a terrible thing?
>Assuming that in that cave Joshua of Bethlehem ascended to The Prophet,
>the Martyr, The messiah, Coffee-Drinking man, whatever the archetype
>was, the only way for him to 'return' would be for someone to take his
>place.  Which would bring him back embodying the very opposite of the
>principals that put him there. Instead of love and acceptance he'd be
>all about hate and intolerance... fantacism instead of faith...  

<snip>

You're not the first one to have that idea:

---

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all convictions, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know 
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

      -W. B. Yeats

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--Alice