The earliest fixed use of j was in Spain. Here, soon after printing’s arrival in the 1470s, we find the shape j for the consonant and the shape i for the vowel, in all lowercase uses in the Spanish language. Thus, with no change of pronunciation, the holy name Iesus (“Hay-soos” in Spanish) came to be spelled as Jesus. The word iusticia (hoos-tee-see-a) became justicia. Modern Spanish still uses J to mean the sound “h,” Spanish H being silent.
“It’s your baby,” she said, coldly, “and ain’t no way in the world to get around that. And it ain’t been so very long ago, right here in this very room, when looked to me like a life of sin was all you was ready for.”
“Yes’” he answered, rising, and turning away, “Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.”
“You be careful,” said Esther, “how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by a holy man, neither.”
The void of immortality-substance that would be left by the absolute abandonment of the leader is evidently too painful to support, especially if the leader has possessed striking mana or has summed up in himself some great heroic project that carried the people on. One can’t help musing about how one of the most advanced scientific societies of the 20th century resorted to improvements on ancient Egyptian mummification techniques to embalm the leader of their revolution. It seems as though the Russians could not let go of Lenin even in death and so have entombed him as a permanent immortality-symbol. Here is a supposedly “secular” society that holds pilgrimages to a tomb and that buries heroic figures in the “sacred wall” of the Kremlin, a “hallowed” place. No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man’s terror is always “holy terror”—which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.
