DEDICATION

Tacitus, Book I Tiberius used to say original: "dicebat Tiberius" that a mind of such great mass was not only capable of the task, but greater than it. How exactly and prudently you have conformed the administration of the empire committed to you according to the precise rule amussim: a carpenter's rule or level used to ensure perfect alignment of this Noachic Archetype referring to the Ark of Noah as a model of divinely-guided governance and preservation, and with what great faith and wisdom you have steered this ship amidst so many waves and storms, the world knows and admires. For what person—even one nourished in the densest hiding places of wild beasts or the innermost enclosures of inaccessible mountains—could now remain ignorant of either your virtue or the nefarious counsels of others? These were dangers unheard of in any age, by which your sacrosanct head—and with you, the very life of the entire Austrian House The House of Habsburg—was attacked through the highest wickedness. What place could be so cut off from our world by the intervals of lands and seas that the fame of your name and the sweetest breeze of your piety has not reached it? What corner of the world is so alienated from all humanity, what nation so uncultivated, that it did not shudder at the machination of those most foul monsters? By these, your safety—nay, ours, and that of all good men, for whom you are the life and salvation—was endangered.

O, the infamy of these times and morals! O, the tartarean hellish ferment of our most polluted age! O, the most stinking cancers of an ulcerated world, portents of a failing earth, plagues of the human race, infernal vipers—I say, the detestable Catilines referring to Lucius Sergius Catilina, the archetypal Roman conspirator of the empire! These men, whether drunk on the philter of blind ambition or driven mad by the fury of a haughty mind, sought to build their own Tower of Babel—that is, a tower of confusion—in the airy spaces of a most vain imagination. They did so by mixing the highest with the lowest and the sacred with the profane through truculent villainy. They sought to erect thrones for themselves without a foundation, while trampling those truly erected by God. They believed they could achieve this by no better—nay, by a worse—plan than if they were to utterly overturn, through the hidden techniques of their machinations, that sacred fabric of the empire destined for you by divine providence, which has been supported original: "succollatam," literally carried on the neck or shoulders with the greatest majesty through the course of so many centuries by the Austrian Atlases The Habsburg rulers, compared to the Titan Atlas who held up the heavens, intending to fashion a new empire for themselves from its ruins. They seemed like new Caligulas resurrected from the lower world; just as he wished the Roman people had but a single neck so that he might strike down the head of the world with a single blow to more abundantly satisfy his most bloody thirst, so these men, of far more foul wickedness and madness...