Ostian Head of Mithras Pictured above I see this image and think of a quote from Jung that I have perhaps over-used. I will deliver it here concerning the sense of melancholy in the Oppermannian face:
"The head from Ostia (fontispiece of Symbols of Transformation) supposed by Cumont to be that of Mithras Tauroctonos [possibly also as Attis], wears an expression which we know all too well... as one of sentimental resignation. It is in fact worth noting that the spiritual transformation that took place in the first centuries of Christianity was accompanied by an extraordinary release of feeling, which expressed itself not only in the lofty form of charity and love of God, but also in sentimentality and infantilism. The lamb allegories of early Christian artn fallinto this category.
"Since sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart, they must be somehow typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split mindedness of the sacrificer: he wants to and yet he doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. (Paragraphs 667-668, Symbols of Transformation)
Oppermann represented the best of the heroic genius in the act of sacrificing and being sacrificed: this kind of ambivalence plays about on his own face: but it is profoundly more healthy to witness this physiognomy of split-ness than discovering resolute Straussian and Neo-Conservitive anti-thinking that Oppermann was about to do battle with in the ensuing years completing his dissertation at Harvard. At least Oppermann is capable of suffering, and has not let his capacity to suffer go... ever... even in the face of those Masters of War who encourage bland indifference to the shattered limbs of "the lamb": the fragments of a child's body whose legs have been blown to pieces in the most recent American incursion in the Iraq war.
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