The Magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral

I know that my blog posts haven't been entirely chronological, but part of that is due to the fact that I never have enough internet time to get everything posted. I thought that you might also be interested in hearing some of the tidbits that I learned while at the cathedral of Notre Dame.
First, there is a row of statue kings along the outside of Notre Dame. During the French Revolution when they were busy beheading the aristocracy, someone thought of the kings on the cathedral. They mistakenly believed that the kings were French kings, so they beheaded the statues. Come to find out later that the kings were Old Testament kings. Oops. So they made new heads for them. That just goes to show that one man’s vandalism can be another man’s history.

We learned that this relief of the baby Christ sitting in Mary’s lap is a strange way of depicting the child. In most picture and statues, the Christ child is sitting sideways on Mary’s lap and not facing out. Our guide said that this particular relief is a more pagan way of depicting things (with the baby facing out), so that is why they eventually starting putting the baby sideways on Mary's lap.

We also saw an impression of St. Dennis, the saint who allegedly carried his head for 6km after he was beheaded. Appropriately, he is shown carrying his head.

This picture is also nice. You can see on the right that there are a couple of devils leading a group of people carefully down to hell. One of the interesting things about this picture is that the group going down to hell represents all social classes—a soldier, a king, a monk, etc.

In the middle there is a devil with a set of scales to weigh everyone’s soul.