EXCERPT ‘I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man’s name was Galli Mathias. I ate him’ (Oswald). Born in 1797 into a family of wine merchants and producers in Burgundy, like his older sister, mother superior of an Amazonian Jesuit mission, and like his brother, Louis the Sixth, an industrial wine missionary in the New World, Galli Mathias, a professor of political science with the Elder Sons of the Church, was serving a grand mission of love: to open up a major diplomatic negotiation between the peoples of the Earth and the Moderns who, like him and his young friends, were finally trying to give a good account of themselves. Repentant Westerners who would be quite willing to confess that they have never been modern, that they had never stopped practising the same religion as other peoples, from the China seas to the Yucatan, from the Inuits to the Tasmanian aborigines, the same tinkering with idols and sacred objects, even if they did it differently, because the same thing can be done in different ways—and theirs, the Catho-Burgundian way, is not uninteresting…come and see for yourself!…