NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
13 The Unmaking of Jesus (cont.)

The story of the murder of the Bogomil leader Basil by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I is a story well known in the 12th century when it took place. It is not so today. Today many people are likely to be shocked to hear that what happened to Basil is a story that parallels closely to what happened to Jesus. There is a reason and explanation for this.

The story of Jesus was created around the story of Basil. The dreadful events that overtook Basil provided a ready available armature for the story for then emerging neo-Christian church founded by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I. Of course, the new story is reaches us not only inverted in the reasons for it happening, but the main cathartic events were changed from burning to being nailed to a cross. The reasons for these changes, too, are founded on the need to divert the public’s attention from what really happened.

Most likely these events happened under the rule of the Byzantine empire’s Emperor Alexius I. The Emperor felt compelled to change the story and found a new church and a new religion, for two main reasons.

1. The arch-Christian church, what we today derogatorily call the cult of “pagans”—of which Alexius his predecessors and I had been the sacred kings—had for many years felt alienated from their king. The people had once called their kings “the sacred king”. However, something increasingly unacceptable happened. For several consecutive generations the sacred king began to fail to fulfill his sacred function—which was to act the role of the kingdom’s founding father—by reenacting the founding violent moment by self-sacrificing himself. Since time immemorial, the founding moment (of death and miraculous rebirth) was celebrated during the annual solstice festivals. The festivals, one in winter and one in summer, generally went by their local name, but for the most part retained the root name of the sacred being: John, Yan. We see this practice in such names as Ivan Kapusta, John the Baptist, Yannukah, Hunnapu, Yohammad, and so on. Depending on the age of the sacred king (whether young or old), the length of his reign was determined by priests. Usually the agon, the moment of self-sacrifice, came with an obviously old age.

In any event, the sacred king of the Byzantine empire began to act increasingly as merely a king, that is to say, a man with a standing army who could and often did rob his people, his neighbors, aggrandized himself, and dictated what people should or should not do and think. In short, there occurred mutual alienation between the king’s and the people. Eventually, this alienation reached a stage, where it broke out into a civil war. As part of his war effort, the emperor needed to kill not only the Johns, the wandering priests of arch-Christendom, but also to replace their ideas with ideas of his own.

2. It is probable hat the alienation between the sacred king and the people began when the king began to use a number of the priests to the Sun, as not only his bookkeepers, but collectors of the gifts that the people donated to the temple-palace. These priests, were self-castrated devotees of the Sun, and, thus, not attracted to women for sexual reasons. This made them attentive workers and bookkeepers. Unfortunately, since the priests were such competent gift collectors, the sacred king soon discovered a way to have them collect more gifts than was customary. In time, the word “gift” came to mean “tax”.

At first, the tax was used to build grander temples, which then became the sacred king’s palaces, which of course soon no longer pretended to be temples. As the sacred king abandoned the temple for the palace, he became what today we call a temporal or secular man, an atheist as religiously devoted to materialism, as the sacred king had once been devoted to the aura of charisma that held the community under its umbrage. The temple prostitutes (women who wished to make the temple especially attractive as a place for leaving gifts) became part of the king’s harem. The “gifts” paid for a standing army, employed an increasingly large number of artists and artisans, and so on. Indeed, the king abandoned the ancient practice of self-sacrifice and began to seek ways to escape death altogether. This is what is behind the stories where kings and heroes go out on adventures to seek the magic plant (usually guarded by a serpent), the eating of which will give one immortality.

However,

3. The priests of Iananna (the Johns) learned not only how to do bookkeeping and collect taxes, they needed to invent writing to do so. And they did so. With the invention of writing, the castrates learned not only how to record old stories, but invent new ones. Some of the stories, which the priests invented, did not sit well with the king. He began to fear that they would take power away from him. This fear was the cause for discovering various ways by which to bind the priests closer to the palace and alienate them from the temple.

This is how there developed two factions of priests. One faction stayed with the people. These were the wandering preachers, the Johns. The other faction became known as “Jews”, most likely a word that was semantically connected to words for gifts and taxes. The word “jewel” comes to mind. The Jews necessarily became involved in palace intrigue, while the Johns remained of the people.

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
12 The Unmaking of Jesus (cont.)

Let us continue with the story.

It was midnight when Iananna reached Great Palace below Earth and the door of the room known as The Heart of the Dead. When Ereshkigal saw Iananna, she exclaimed: “Ha, ha! Naked bitch! Just look at you! What a sorry sight!” Her tone was full of obvious shadenfreude.

There was some truth in what Ereshkigal said. Iananna stood not only naked, but also seemingly burnt out. What had been firm and pointed breasts in the morning, were now hanging long and spent. Moreover, Ereshkigal was dressed in Iananna’s attire. Though Ianannas clothes had lost their color and turned grey, Ereshkigal looked like a queen in them. “Did the Earth get you down during your travels, sister? Here, have a glass of Black John wine. You will feel better.”

Iananna drankthe wine and started for her room, but Ereshkigal blocked her way. “If you please, sister, I would like you to sleep in the barn with the geese tonight,” she said. “Tonight I am having a ball in the great hall of your apartment. All the great stars of the night will be there.”

Iananna was about to ask why Ereshkigal had not invited her, too, when she felt faint (the poison in the wine had taken effect) and she fell.

Ereshkigal’s servants dragged Iananna to the barn, tied her jaws shut as if she were dead, cut off her long braids, tied them as a rope around her waist, and then hung her corpse by this belt on the horns of an old moon. “Sweet dreams, sister,” said Erishkigal with a grin on her face. Then she left for Iananna’s apartment to join the revels of the stars.

When the morning came, the Sun did not rise. John, Iananna’s son, awoke in his earthly home, but when he did not see the Sun, he imagined that he had woken up too early and went back to sleep again. Thus, John slept the whole of the next day. Indeed, he had a strange dream. He dreamt that he awoke in a hole in the ground. He and his mother Iananna lay side by side. He lay with his face up and could see the night sky filled with stars. Iananna, his mother, lay (Oh horror of horrors!) beside him and—in an apparent reversal of roles—suckled on his nipple.

John awoke and understood that his mother was in trouble. However, what was he to do? There was not a sliver of light anywhere. John felt about to see if perhaps his mother really lay beside him, but his hands found nothing to touch. Great fear and anxiety overcame him. However, John was smart enough to take a deep breath. This allowed him to get his bearings and understand he should rise up, no matter how dark the hour, and try find his mother. After all, it was Iananna, who, if he, John, died, would rejuvenate him by giving birth to him again.

Meanwhile, in the barn with the sleeping geese, Iananna slid off the horns of the old Moon. She floated as if dead for three days through the abyss before she was then caught on the horns of the new Moon. As the new Moon rose, Iananna was bathed by the dew and came to life again.

Iananna rose into the sky and a song that resembled a roar greeted her. It was a shout of joy. During the three days of Iananna’s absence, her creation had taken fright. Everyone remembered the three days of darkness as days that sent chills to the bone and stuck in the eyes like glue. The was like a flower opening. People drew a knife across their palms, then pressed the palms against their door as a sign of how much the Sun, Iananna, had been missed and how much she was loved.

Iananna rose more quickly to the zenith that day or so it seemed. She was anxious to see her son John. Like him, she had dreamt a strange dream. In it, she had come to the gates of a cemetery and discovered John to be its gatekeeper. When she wanted to enter, he had blocked her way. “This is no place for you, mother,” he had said. “Not for a thousand lives.”

“By what right do you keep me from passing?” she had asked.

“That of my life,” John replied.

“But don’t you want to live?”

“Of course, I want to live, but if you die there will be no sunrises.”

Iananna had not understood and had tried go past John. John had raised his hands, his palms facing her. They were stained with blood.

Iananna awoke from her dream her heart pounding. She raced up the night sky toward the dawn and then higher toward the zenith from where she could overlook everything on Earth. it was too late. John had died. Though Iananna lifted her skirt and touched John’s crotch, John’s rooster did not crow.

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
11 The Unmaking of Jesus 1

Jesus’s name was and sometimes is still pronounced and written as Isa, Esa, Yesa, and comes in innumerable variants. The famous epic known as Ramayana, for example, translates as the journey (or is it pilgrimage?) of one Rama. Since the name Rama is related to the place name Rome, the one meaning “God like”, the other to “a stronghold”, Ramayana may be translated as “the pilgrimage of life” or even “the pilgrimage of Christ”. It is the same with Basil, a name that means “king” in Greek (for interesting associations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil ). Basil’s self-sacrifice in defense of self-sacrifice served as the basis for the story of Jesus the Crucified. Indeed, Basil the Burnt is Jesus the Crucified, with the crucifixion replacing a pit of fire to remove the event to a time that would not be associated with a practices of the time (early middle ages and the Inquisition).

The name John (Ian, Yan) was once closely associated with the Sumerian Sun Goddess Iananna or Inanna. A similar story with a mother-and-son relationship at its nucleus is the story of the Egyptian Goddess Isis and Jesus or Osiris. Of course, the myths that have come down to us no longer speak of Iananna or Isis as Sun Goddesses, but present them as Goddesses of Love, Fertility, and War. At some point in history male insecurity transmuted itself into a dictatorship and replaced the mother-son unit with that of a single male, who imagined himself as creating the world by masturbation. In our own time, a similar male insecurity prompted the psychologist Freud to suggest that women suffered from “penis envy”.

The masculinization of the Sun is a process associated with the creative process—albeit a negative one. The process of masculinization forces non-violence to suffer belittlement and lies, which in turn results in a perception that non-violence is unnatural. Thus, non-violence needs the reinforcement of “faith”, which is of course unnecessary. Nevertheless, in this way, lies lift violence into prominence, whence it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and creates a violent civilization. The profanation of femaleness does its crude work even in our own day—as a number of fundamentalist sects illustrate. http://tinyurl.com/chc8q6

The refusal to accept non-violence as part of the natural and given order (now become accepted as a tradition beyond disputing) grounds itself in several phenomena:

1. It grounds in the animal kingdom, where nature has evolved life forms, which survive eating other animals—even though the animals would be happy to eat carrion if it were available;
2. It grounds in exponential or unconscious (unchecked and uncheckable) enthusiasm of life for life;
3. It grounds in the envy of male consciousness over female creativity and the unspent energy that after copulation does not result in death (as in the world of insects, for example);
4. It grounds in the failure of conscious intelligence (whether female or male) to realize and actualize male castration;
5. It grounds in a) willful identification of castration with violence; and b) replacement of the charisma of self-sacrifice by the violence of the sword.

Society is mostly concerned with above points 4. and 5. However, these points did not exist in a matriarchal order, when the social order acknowledges female superiority in the realm of the biosphere. The latter has ample evidence in past religious orders, where males practiced self-castration. http://tinyurl.com/cjvsye

To rediscover the old myths, we need to return to the role of the son in a social order set by the mother. This may be achieved by way of deconstructing our contemporary versions of the myth. While the story of Iananna and her myth comes garbled, the existing version provides enough evidence to put forward a myth that is not as contorted.

We will advance in our deconstruction if we note that the name of the Goddess (and numerous names of those associated with her) begin with the consonant Y, thus, Inanna = Yanna; An = Yan; En = Yen; Nan = Yan; Enki = Yenki; and Dumuzi = Yunuzi, probably all endearing terms. A close modern parallel may be found in such male endearments as Ivanjka (Russian); Yanchuks (Latvian); Yannuchka (Hebrew); etc. http://tinyurl.com/d6t8uj

We ought to note that in the adulterated Sumerian myths that have been passed to us, Iananna is no longer the Sun Goddess. Instead, the Sun God is her brother Utu.

Our reconstruction will also be helped if we realize that Iananna is the daughter of the moon Goddess Nanna (Yanna?). How the Sun is born of the Moon or Iananna from Nanna, that is for another day, except to say that in ancient days the Moon was understood to be an aide in surviving the night. Incidentally, the Moon, too, became masculinized and survival has been heightened by male rhetoric and now spells “terror”.

The myth: Iananna the Sun Goddess—born of darkness and the cold light of the Moon, who in her death-like sleep patiently spins the formula that turns cold into heat—rose over the mountaintops and created the day. At noon, she hung motionlessly at zenith and cast no shadow. Those who stood immediately under her disk knew they lived, but because there was no shadow, they could not tell if they were real or not. After about an hour of thus rfeminding creation in her power, Iananna began a long walk down the Afternoon Road that led to Evening Shadows, the name of the home of her son John. There Iananna helped John milk the cows, after which she started out again, this time for her apartment at her sister Ereshkigal’s (Ereš = queen, lady; Ki = earth, Gal = great) kingdom, also known as the Great Palace Below Earth.

As soon as Iananna went below the horizon, she had to give up a piece of her clothing. She passed through seven gates before arriving at Ereshkigal’s kingdom. At each gate, she left a piece of her clothing. After Iananna went through the last gate, she stood in her apartment utterly naked. http://tinyurl.com/cg4d5n