Eso’s Chronicles 181/ 3
Changing the Sun’s Sex
© Eso A.B.

As unusual as it may seem, the arrival of Aztec rule over the Toltecs in Meso America, resembles the rivalry of Western neo-Christianity with Eastern Christianity and ultimately the destruction of the East in Europe. While specifics differ, the general trend goes along parallel tracks.

At this time there is no direct historical evidence that either neo-Christians had come to the Toltecs earlier than the Spanish conquistador Cortez, or that the Toltecs had crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Europe as museum specimens some centuries before we are told they did, and then returned home to tell their people to expect the arrival of a God they called Quetzalcoatl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatl , also known as the plumed serpent.

The above link, if one reads it from end to end, does in fact suggest possible early contacts of the Maya people with Europe and Mediterranean cultures. For one, Quetzalcoatl was also known by the name of Kukulcan. The letter ‘c’ in Kukulcan may be replaced by the letter ‘h’, therefore, Kukulhan may have been pronounced Kukulyan, because the letter ‘h’ is either silent or because it precedes a vowel, ‘u’, which is then preceded by an unvocalized ‘i’ or ‘’j. Therefore, ‘coatl’ may also have been pronounced ‘yonatl’, which relates the word to the European Johann (German), Huan (Spanish), even Greek Dionysus. Of course, these associations are speculations, but once made, they cannot be discarded as making no sense. If ‘quet’ stands for feather and ‘zal’ stands for ‘St.’, then what we get is Feathered St. John. It takes some fancy footwork to read that.

Pareidolic leaps of fantasy indeed often justify themselves with discoveries of previously unknown variations on stories heretofore known as having only one variant. Skeptics may rail against pareidolia, but then a skeptic is hard-wired mathematician, who has no connection with poetry or the braiding of words, which use associations no less logically.

One unremembered association of the Sun over Mexico may be with an ancient Greek story, which we know through the tragedy written by the Greek playwright Euripides and know as “The Bacchae” http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/bacchae/summary.html .

Though ‘Sparknotes’ gives avery different explanation for the events than I do, on closer examination, the story as told by Euripides easily emerges as one that is both secretive and coded. My retelling of it provides a more understandable reason for why the secretiveness and what the actual event is about. There was, in fact, something in its content to keep hid.

“The Bacchae”, like the story in Mexico is a story about changes in the nature of a people’s government. The Greek tragedy differs from the Aztec story in that the Sun did not stop moving across the Greek sky because the rulers over her people had refused to self-sacrifice themselves in order to gain authority, but that the ruler refused to acknowledge the Sun as a feminine entity and were, surreptiously giving it a sex change and retroducing it as a male.

The Theban ruler Pentheus [said to be the grandson of Cadmus http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/bacchae/summary.html, who had founded Thebes, who had (perhaps) colluded with the Goddess Hera against the wishes of Zeus to replace the Goddess of Thebes, the Sun, with the rule of law.] The rule of law, as we know, requires armed men and the police to enforce it. This meant that the authority over Thebes, which heretofore had been the Sun (who once may have been the real mother of Earth or Semele), would be replaced by the Sun in the guise of a cross-dressing male.

The Sun was in profound disagreement with her separation from her creation and removal from a position of authority. She sent King Pentheus numerous warnings by sending him disturbing dreams of the consequences of the rule of law http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1780584 . In one dream King Pentheus saw himself as a shepherd over a herd that had been turned into stone. When the King tried to move one of the eves by poking her with a branch, the sheep’s stone wool turned blood red as if she had been skinned alive. When the wives of the King herd of his plans, they took to washing off their menstrual blood in the bathhouse, where the bath was used to wash sheep’s wool. When none of the warnings had any effect, the Sun sent Dionysus, a disowned son of Semele (earth), to Thebes for a visit.

Since the chronology of Western historians is entirely fanciful and generally agrees with neo-Christian prejudices, we do not know when these events in Greece took place. However, since the representations of the Sun as a golden halo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(religious_iconography)  about the heads of holy men and women continues well into the period of modern art, we may assume that the approximate age of the use of the Sun as a halo (or nimbus) is almost beyond counting.

When Dionysus came to Thebes, he was followed by many women of the wood known as maenads http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/maenad3.jpg . He was immediately recognized by the women of Thebes as a man of the wood, where the only law ever respected is that of hospitality and endearment. Because Dionysus also was a God of wine and had brought with him a wagonload of wood barrels full with it, everyone was soon drunk and ready to go and demand that King Penteus let the city of Thebes return to lawlessness it was still ruled by when still standing surrounded by trees.

Dionysus, however, persuaded the maenads to continue their feasting, but also invite the men of Thebes to join them. Moreover, Dionysus suggested that the women get the men drunk, and when they were drunk to pet them until the men emptied their scrotums of their seed. Dionysus believed that if this were done, the men would be less aggressive on the following day, and King Pentheus was more likely to give in to the women’s demands.

Thus, the orgy of drinking and sexual petting went on almost until sunrise. Dionysus invited the women to spread a rumor that the party was going to continue the next day and if the men were too tired to join, the maenads would take on all donkeys and billy goats in town. The King was told that this was something to see.

The King then sent his men to spy out the ritual grounds (the usual place such events were held) on Mt. Cithaeron and prepare for him a stand in one of the trees overlooking the clearing. The men did as told, but when they had picked out the tree, a tall pine, in which to build the King a stand, they were surprised to discover that in the same treetop the rising sun had somehow got caught in the branches and could not free herself to rise further. The Sun was stuck just above the King’s chosen perch.

The King’s men, of course, reported to King Pentheus what they had seen. The King immediately decided to act the hero and go to the Sun’s rescue. As it turned out, it was not to be as easy a rescue as Pentheus had imagined it would be.

The King had gone only a little way up the mountain from his castle, when Dionysus and all the sleeping maenads were awakened by an incessant crowing of the roosters, braying of donkeys, and bleating of billy goats. The animals had noticed, too, that something was wrong with the daylight. The rays of the Sun barely crossed the tops of trees, and the morning light continued in place as it had never done before. Dionysus and the maenads immediately started back up Mt. Cithaeron.

“Pass me my trident,” said King Pentheus to one of his guards. “I will see if I can poke that mother lose.”