Our 3rd albums name contains a word which is reasonably utterly unknown to most.

During the latin classes this was one of the words that our good old professor mentioned briefly as one of the obscure words of 2nd declination yet it remained stuck in my brain as a perfect word describing our species and its past, current and most likely future condition. So, what is an ergastulum?

Der kleine Pauly (1979 edition, bnd. 2, pg. 355), a well known authority in the field of encyclopaedias about antiquity and its basic terms, defines it as following:

Ergastulum. E. means a building in which those slaves that work in their chains (vincti, [vinctus = bound]) are held in custody. It also means the group of those slaves. ...

There are many other definitions, such as "a sweat shop of slaves", just google it, if you want more.


To understand what we mean by it i would like to quote one of the famous intros to a book. It says the following clear truth:

"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."

The book is called Social Contract and those words start the 1st chapter. Its an essay by Jean Jacques Rousseau from 1762 and one of the fundamental books of political and law theory concerning the management of society and the articulation of its rules of governance (constitution) that contains this truth, so true today as it was in Rousseaus times or the times before.


If we are all slaves, born free yet bounded as slaves, what else can our reality be then an ergastulum? and what else does a slave want more then to exit this ergastulum?


And try they did. Lets recall a song, sang by proud workers not so long ago yet thrown on the waste of history together with the workers pride just some 18 years ago, the Internationale:

"Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Enslaved masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all!"

And the wonderfull slovenian version of the same:
"Vstanite v suženjstvo zakleti,
ki jarem vas teži gorja.
Zdaj pravda stara v borbi sveti
vas kliče za prostost sveta.
Ta svet krivičnosti razbijmo,
do tal naj boj ga naš podre;
nato svoj novi svet zgradimo,
bili smo nič, bodimo vse!"

... but there are also other meanings to it, cause if you can separate a man into its physical (body) and spiritual (soul) entity, then the body is a building that bounds the soul, an ergastulum and the motor of the body is the heart.

/j.