Eso’s Chronicles 193/ 3

Vikings Continued (3)
© Eso A.B.

The question of whence capitalism, is also a question of where to humankind? Even at the finish line of the demise of the Western economic system, capitalism does not appear to accept “learning from experience” as the answer, but chooses to “push the gas pedal to the floor” as the way of its reason.

The African proverb mentioned in the previous blog: “They are our enemies; we marry them”, appears the only choice that capitalism offers to those who not only disagree with them, but think of them as people who believe that being “killers” is the way of humankind.

Whence this stubborn determination to cannibalize the planet?

One possible answer is that it arises from an adventurous spirit and an inadvertent overstepping of human limitations. Such a situation may have arisen when animal herders (caribou, reindeer) in the area now known as Siberia, but anciently known as Tartary, failed to make a timely return south, and were trapped in the northern region and had to endure the winter there.

Those who survived the winter, could not return to their original homes, because their way was blocked by a sea (the Baltic), and they had no boats. The resolution to the problem was not a matter of a season or a year, but one of many years. When the herders finally had boats, they probably had also eaten the last of their reindeer and other game that was an easy catch. In short, by the time the herders discovered the solution, they had become fishermen, were destitute, desperate, and hungry.

At this point, they also had a bit of luck. The Baltic Sea in harsh winters could be crossed, but then again in milder winters it could not. The Baltic Sea is also known for having very shallow shorelines. The latter factor contributed to the fact that the Vikings built shallow boats that later proved as if made to order for navigating far up river of other countries. Since the herders and survivors were mostly men, their first use of the boats during the navigable season was to go in search of women.

Known as Vikings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings, the name these men originally called themselves was probably entirely something other. Nevertheless, the word closely parallels the English word ‘hiking’.  At the above link, under Etymology, we read that: “The word víking derives from the feminine vík, meaning ‘creek, inlet, small bay’”. If we shift our mind into paradolia mode, we can readily imagine ‘vik, creek, inlet, bay’ as words symbolic of female genitalia. Thus, to go viking or wading upriver may go back to the ancient custom of wife stealing or for the male to take for himself a woman through an act of rape.

However, when rape is no longer limited to the experience of one woman, but symbolizes the experience of many villages, the reaction to the violence of Viking raiders was not limited to a scream, but led to a series of earthshaking cultural changes. For example, what had been but herder’s switch or pole, metamorphosed into a sword and spear. When the ‘treasure house’, then the temple of the tribe, was robbed of its precious objects, the tribe felt that not only had it suffered a loss and humiliation, but its very being (a temple commemorates also one’s ancestors) had been attacked. Worse, the acquisition of a wife evolved into acquisition of slaves, even enslavement in situ, by taking the whole tribe prisoner and occupying lands that formerly had belonged to it.

Needless to say, going ‘viking’ put an end to subsistence economies and popularized enslavement and acquisitiveness. In due course this led to taxation (animal furs at first), which led to money and global dependency on  enslavement as a facilitator of human ‘development’.

One may go on to speculate that the word ‘capitalist’ derives from the name of the Capetian dynasty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capetian_dynasty, which derives its name from (in words of the link): “…the Capets, which ruled the Kingdom of France from 987 to 1328, was the most senior line of the Capetian dynasty – itself a derivative dynasty from the Robertians.” Hmm: Robertians? The source for the word “robbers”? Another hmm: “bright fame”? Yes, contradictory, but not for paradolia. Robin Hood?

The sole opposition to this materialist trendline came from the sacred: the sensibility that life and consciousness is something special, a movement which unlike that of a river can chose a path of its own. This is perhaps why water was supplanted by the wind as a symbol for spirit and soul. No matter how ephemeral, the sacred was sufficient to empower the mind to discover (imagine) the story, that everything is sacred (the past, the present, the future, all nature and humankind itself) consequent to having been  created by a Creator or a Creatrix, who upon completing the act of creation had so exhausted themselves as to be thought of as sacrifices.  This act of sacrifice necessarily put an obligation to His-Her highest creation, humankind, to learn and be able to imitate it.

Apparently this obligation is so integrated in the very being of humankind that only extreme violence and brutality may succeed in repressing it. Because repeated violence is an onerous and brutalizing endeavor of Self, the materialist powers (the latter tribal leaders, barons, and princes) began a globalizing ‘reform’ movement.

Since the story about the sacrifice of the creator Gods disturbed the Vikings and Roberts, their agents made attacks on and questioned the authority of the Sacred King, whose role was to imitate the Creator Gods. The attacks were successful: the Sacred King (often of a young age and not ready to die) felt compelled to accept the Viking ways, thus losing authority in the eyes of the people.

In a remarkable book called “Communities of Violence”, Professor David Nirenberg, describes the agonizing process that led to the creation of capitalist society http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5827.html. Though none of the reviewers of the work that at I have read emphasize ‘capitalism’ or ‘taxation’, given a perspective that does not feel obliged to fall in line with historians of the academics of the West, I take the point of view that the book nicely describes the consequences of fiscals at an early stage of the capitalist economic phenomenon.

Indeed, the manipulation of the Creation story by the Franks rewrites the Basil Iahn/John story into what we now know as the story of King Jesus Christ, who contrary to the first named is accepting of tax collectors http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19%3A1-10&version=NIV and an unrestrained ‘free market’.

 
Tibet socialist villages http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23100427  

Eso’s Chronicles 192/ 2
State Dept of Religion (2)
© Eso A.B.

My disagreement with post-capitalism era capitalists is presented in the blog preceding this one. I remind the audience that we have, before our very eyes, a clear picture of the collapse of an over a thousand years old psychophisiologically misguided civilization, yet ‘capitalist radicals’ cannot think of its failure as anything but a passing spectacle. This only proves that capitalism leads to increasing levels of insanity and delusions of power.

At another blog site (http://jesusthebogomil.blogspot.com), I present the argument that the prevailing religion of our time, Christ-ian-ity, while having its origins in what is now called ‘folk art’, was deliberately destroyed in order to give birth to capitalism. In its early days the capitalist inklings were first received by what we today know as CEOs.  oligarchs, and jhenerals, but were then administrators working for the office known as the ‘sacred king’. Because their office enjoyed the authority of the sacred office, they fractured the aspect of the psycho physiological One that theoretically belonged to the Sacred King only, there arose what we today know as the human rights of the individual.

Today the fractals of the Sacred Unity in its human form embody themselves not in sacrificial princes or individuals, but in idiosyncratic individuals. A recent example are the young women of a group known as ‘Pusy Riot’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot , who invaded a temple of Christ-ian-ity in Russia. What was the reason for this act?

The punk rock group projected itself as an opposition group to Vladimir Putin, who was then running for the office of President of Russia, and who was supported by the Russian Orthodox Church. Though many consider the actions of the punk group as frivolous, their self-projection in politics, nevertheless, causes one to analyze their actions ‘with dead seriousness’ and some déjà vu.

History allows us to see the Russian Orthodox Church as a religius community which was humiliated during its clashes with the establishment of Christianity in the West by the Frank kings beginning sometime in the 8^th century (some claim earlier) of our era, when these fled the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions for the northwest of Europe. While such a flight is not recorded by Western historians, the equally sudden and surprising appearance of the Franks by the North Sea is not denied. This is not to say that their flight (and attack against the indigenous tribes in their way) may not have been influenced by the Vikings, who had for some time been known to have established themselves in the Byzantine controlled world.

In any event, the Franks attempted to consolidate the newly occupied lands by instituting their own form of Christianity. Whereas Byzantine Christianity was built on a foundation of folk religions practiced by tribes whose economy was based on animal herding, and which therefore were self-sustaining economies, which did not know taxation, the Christianity of the Franks attempted to introduce a ‘rewritten’ Christianity by which taxation was accepted as ‘normal’.

When the Franks had succeeded in establishing a Christianity that accepted taxation, it attempted to infiltrate this ‘reformed’ religion in the guise of Jesus Christ on the East during a period known as The Great Schism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism .

The Eastern Orthodox Christianity was humiliated when it was forced to replace its basic religious story about John Basil with the story of Jesus Christ. I discuss the Eastern story in my blogs on JesustheBogomil. Still, despite its humiliation, the Eastern Church retained much of its rituals (the ever present bees wax candles continue to remind of the death of John Basil by fire), and refused to unite itself into One Church by joining the West with its permissiveness toward taxation. Indeed, the separation persists to this day, and by the perspective of history known as long duree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e  was the foundation for the cause of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

To return to the conflict picked by Pussy Riot against Putin, we again must apply the long duree perspective. In short, Pussy Riot represents the anarchistic forces unleashed by the Money Economy, which was made possible by taxation (which made possible a fiscal economy), while Putin continues to represent a civilization that favors a self-sufficient or autarchic economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sufficiency and a Sacred King for its government.

In the present instance, Pussy Riot represents a post-neo-capitalism in its hour of desperation. That the desperation of the West is real is confirmed at this very time by two events. The first is the propaganda visit of the Pope to South America http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23483478, where Western Christianity continues to accept the legitimacy of taxation of individuals but not corporations. Second, the U.S. State Department http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/2013/07/26/79eeada8-f643-11e2-9434-60440856fadf_story.html  is stepping in on behalf of ‘religious freedom’ with all means of psychofiz gimmickry available to American descendants of proto-Enlightenment Franks. As professor Nirenberg states with regard to Enlightenment (on a broader basis than mere Frankishness): “…it is virtually a commonplace of post-Enlightenment political philosophy that violence and aggression are forms of association”, adding by way of clarification the African proverb: “They are our enemies; we [are forced to] marry them.”  

 

Tibet socialist villages http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23100427