EC 477 Hiermalgamated History
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The Russian Tragedy 1

Hieros Gamos means Holy Marriage, and ‘hiermalgamy’ means a forced or unholy marriage by secular authorities of people to governments through the act of taxation or other violent and unnatural join-tings or divorces.

When my aunt Emma, the youngest sister of my paternal grandmother, kneaded dough for the bread which she baked in a brick oven made especially for baking bread (long fagots of wood were burned in the maw of the oven for several hours to bring the heat of the bricks to proper temperature), she never failed to extract from the risen dough a small amount—about the size of a softball—which she shaped into a small loaf, and after the rest of the dough was turned into loaves or were still baking deep in the maw of the oven, placed at the bottom of the ‘abra’.

The abra was a solid wooden vessel, was made to be carried, and was held to be near sacred. It is a synonym of the ‘ark ’, because bread was held to be the staff and maintainer of life and community (saime). The residue of the dough was the ‘starter’ or the yeast that made raise the dough for next week’s bread. This ‘starter’ seemed to have an endless life. It was the Divine tablet. It stood for continuity. It was not uncommon to hear stories that it originated in the abra of ‘saimnieces’ (mother of the community of saime) parents, even grandparents.

The story of the loss of the abra and the starter loaf is synonymous with the replacement of history with negahistory. This loss took a long time and was a long process, beginning sometime in the Byzantine era, which perverted itself from a self-sustaining economic system supported by ‘gifts’ of the wood (berries, mushrooms, roots, plants, nuts, wild apples, fish, crayfish, etc.) to a system of taxation imposed on the population by a violent ruling class. Step by step, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, the ruling class transformed itself through ever greater ‘democracy’ to where it increasingly exploited (was forced to exploit by its ‘humanitarian’ pretensions) the gifts of nature (among which it came to hold nature bound humans, whom it turned, first, into serfs, then slaves and mine workers, then peasants), until it turned the green of grass and leaves into cement and human being became an artifice of eternity made no longer of red soft clay, but concrete with iron bars for ribs.

For Russia, at first limited to the west side of the Ural mountains, the full brunt of this tragedy arrived with Tsar Peter 1, who, as the link explains, expanded Russia beyond the Urals, westernized it, and killed the sacred content of the Russian ark (творило-tvorilo) so it no longer could yeast history for a new day, but brought a negahistory that mirrored a punk’s intelligence. If traditions remained alive in the countryside, Peter’s ‘reforms’ translated the upper classes and those below it into a class unto itself. For all practical purposes, Russia and all of Europe came under the rule of a class that marked itself—as certain Hindu castes still do--with a red dot (here, here,  and here ) on the forehead and preferred to live in cities.

The ‘reformation’ of the Russian upper classes by Peter 1, did not readily percolate down to the common people, who held on to the ‘ark’ of tradition. This tradition was abetted by the Russian Orthodox Church, which while forced by the Great Schism to adopt the Catholic interpretation of Christianity, had done so reluctantly. Indeed, in many localities on the fringes of Imperial Russia, catholization was avoided altogether.

Stalin, who had been aided in his education by Eastern orthodox clerics, was informed of their avoidance of modernity. He was of two minds about it. On the one hand, while responsible for the death of thousands and thousands of Russian Orthodox monks and clerics, he was extraordinarily kind and supportive of a few, and did not appear to hold their beliefs against them.