Eso’s Chronicles 328 / 4
Odds and Ends
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

THE TRAGEDY OF JOHN AND IESU (3 of 4)

In some ways John the Baptist or Christener and Jesus Christ may be one and the same person, and their basic message of love may be the same.

Still, there are some important differences between the two.

Even while the New Testament admits that John precedes Jesus and that he Baptized or Christened Jesus, there are some substantial differences. A careful reader will have noted that my two previous blogs, 326 & 327, dwell on how deliberate and politically motivated changes in the meaning of names set the stage for the Big Lie.

We discovered that the word pagan, really means pa-Yan, a word that stands for a ‘belittled’ reindeer (or other forest animals) herder in the Eurasian woods. A neighbor of mine, who was born in Siberia, reminded me that the word ‘pa-gan’ also rhymes with the Russian word for the fly-agaric (aka amanita muscaria), the famous red mushroom capped by white dots, frequently used by native shamans of the wood https://www.google.lv/#q=images+of+fly+agaric . Its Russian name spells ‘pa-gan-ka’.

It is easy to imagine how a townie alienated from nature, would in later years condescendingly call a dweller of the wood a Paganka. This name calling does not differ much from today’s city or government elite calling a marihuana smoker a ‘pothead’.

Nevertheless, John Allegro wrote a controversial book, which he called “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”, in which there are a number of images from ancient art showing the use of the mushroom for visionary purposes http://psypressuk.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/mushroom-in-christian-art.jpg . Since we live in a cultural atmosphere that accepts that the thinking process is a matter of digitization, the chemical process as a facilitator of visions has been viciously denied and repressed by do-gooder political organizations and religious organizations lobbied by secular governments. The “yes-no” process of “yes-no”, “yes-no” ad infinitum has unfortunately brought our urban desert civilization to the state of near idiocy.

The fact that both John and Jesus were men of the wood and not from Nazareth or the river Jordan, is hid by contrary statements, such as Matthew 3:4, calls the wood ‘wilderness’ and describes John wearing “a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt around his waist””; while Jesus is popularly believed to have been either a carpenter or the son of a carpenter, a belief derived from Matthew 13:55: “"Is not this the carpenter's son?”

Who but men living in the wild of nature (if not the wood) wear a garment of camel’s hair and are expert handlers of wood, that is to say, are  carpenters? While most hominids of the times of John and Jesus were not urbanites as today’s popular prejudice of churchmen encourages us to believe, they all surely knew that the wolf could imagine having eaten Little Red Ridinghood only if he had eaten a fly agaric.

And why would a wolf eat a fly agaric? Probably because he mistook it for menstrual blood. As the color red is associated with the color of blood and hence is a sacred color, and the muscaria amanita is known to lower blood pressure, it may have been used by women during their menstrual periods. Whether it was used externally, I do not know, but Red Ridinghood is not a name of an ‘innocent’ little girl wearing a red hat in the days when color red could be afforded only by royalty.

Yet, while John and Jesus both stood for enduring suffering and pain in the name of love as a human condition, there was also a distinct difference between them.

John was clearly a man of the wood. His color was green, that of vegetation coming back to life in the spring. In northern climes his month was April-May, the Beltaine Festival of Ireland (remember the clover leaf as its symbol) and Scotland come to mind http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/60147/Beltane . It was a fire festival, because it is in these months that leaf and grass as if catches fire and bursts from sleepy earth. Beltaine is also a word that consists of two words: Belt + aine. While the meaning of ‘belt’ may derive from ‘vert’, green or ‘velt’ to swell, ‘aine’ clearly rhymes with yaine or ian. In other parts of Europe this festival is celebrated in June on the Summer solstice and is known as Johns Festival. It, too, is associated with the color green and fire; it is a day when everyone in Latvia of old and of the wood wore a green-leafed wreath http://www.kasjauns.lv/Otkrito_Foto/22.06.2010/1_Glavnaja-big.jpg  or when it comes to today, wears a green spray attached to his-her garments.

As the summer solstice is the day of the Goddess Sun, the celebrants in Latvia are called “children of Johns”, however, the word ‘children’ may be a religio-political substitute for the word ‘llaudis’ (Jāņu ļaudis), People. As I pointed out in blog 326, “…the acronym INRI (Latin: Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum) should be substituted with the letter L [in place of I], in which case the acronym reads ‘Lūdaeōrum’, which means ‘King of the People’ not of Jews.” Indeed, in Latvian folk belief the Kings of the People are all named John.

Still, when Catholic Christianity arrived to substitute the Christianity that arose of itself in the wood and of ‘Lūdaeōrum’, the word was substituted by “Iūdaeōrum” or Jews (a people compelled to become tax collectors), not only was there begun a tradition of prejudice by the elite against human beings living in nature, but the nature of Christianity itself was changed for a faith imposed on the People by princes and barons. In short, the name of John was changed to Iesu, and this Iesu had no objections to either tax collectors or tax collecting.

Eso’s Chronicles 185/ 7
Will Sun Shine Again?
© Eso A.B.

If as the following link claims, Europeans share a common ancestor as recently as one thousand years ago http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350267/description/Europe_is_one_big_family then all the talk about ‘fringe’ and ‘pseudo’ history by establishmentarian historians and ecclesiasts is hog wash’, a fairy tale cooked up and preserved in an ‘academic’ pickling jar. If the ‘history’ of the parents of most Europeans does not go further back than a thousand years, then Catholic Christianity does not go back two thousand years.

So much for the ‘morality’ of ‘religion’ in our time and the ‘spiritual’ house of cards it has built. So much for ‘literary criticism’—a fish that walks on water with its head underwater. So much for ‘deconstruction’ living with the conviction it has been imprisoned in the Eifel Tower, while the next mile high tower is already off the drawing table.

In a small country in the northeast of Europe there live a people who still have a tradition of offering to the Sun a celebration. The celebration occurs on Midsummer’s Day, which is also known as Johns Day. Traditionally, John was the son of the Sun. He does not, however, have a ‘sacred’ function anymore, because the story permitted for Latvian ears by the Catholic Church took it away, and replaced it with one where the ‘sacred’ was replaced by ‘glory alleluia!’

The story once told among Latvians of why the Sun may not rise and why it needs to be encouraged to do so is, but for the guessing, lost. Yet some little hints remain. One is a statement of fact: of all the nights of the year, Midsummer’s Night is the shortest of them all. Behind the statement of fact hides the knowledge that if you or I were to move north, the Sun would not set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhIJO0_lrGg .

Then there is another fact: there is a fire. The fire is, so to speak, to tide the Sun over the gap of darkness, while it is under the horizon. Ideally, the fire would be lit the moment the sun sets and the sacrifice makes his or her quantum leap to rebirth. Mind you, this is not a leap to resurrection, but to rebirth. In this manner, the Latvian psyche resembles that of the Tibetan Dalai Lamas: when one dies, all the monks go and search the land for a baby born at the precise moment of his predecessor’s death. The Tibetans believe in giving a life worn down to boredom another try, though ideally meditation brings them to such perfection that they need not ever be reborn.

For most of the celebrants of the Sun’s high point on summer solstice, these are anxious moments, because this is also a day when—if there is to be sacrifice—this is when it happens. The celebrants need, like it or not, contemplate death, and whether they can weather it. Many celebrants rather pass the time getting drunk, because alcohol simplifies thought. On occasion, when wannabee self-sacrifice fails, being drunk helps the executioner do his job.

In the long ago, before the days of festivals as spectacles, an explanation for the ritual was available through a story told by a poet. In our time, silly girls and boys prattle about jumping over a bonfire and the fun this is. No one believes that a day will come, probably at old age, when one may have to see one’s life in the perspective of a hologram. It is then that the Devil’s daughter may put the Devil’s boot up one’s crotch—as she does in the story below.

For over half a century, Latvian churches have been hoisting on the folk tradition of Midsummer in place of Latvia's own story, one and the same comedy, a humorous play of country life during the Midsummer festival. The evangel machine insists that Johns Day is a ‘family’ day. Some festivity organizers even propagate the notion that Midsummer need not be celebrated on Midsummer, but at any time summertime is fine. This last message results from ‘globalization’ efforts at the Vatican of politicians in Brussels and thins ever further the traditions of the past to suit the urban desert. The Sun, after all, keeps rising according to scientific theory, the stories of old myths to the contrary notwithstanding.

In one Latvian story that has to do with the Sun, seven brothers turn seven crickets into seven horses and ride to seek for themselves brides among the daughters of the Sun. Clever John gets to ride the nag and arrives at the party late, long after his brothers are already under the table. Not surprisingly, Clever John gets to choose Crazy Jane, the not so pretty Sun’s oldest daughter.

Like his brothers, Clever John also behaves in a high-handed manner. Nevertheless, when the morning nears and it is time to go to sleep, Crazy Jane—in spite of a number of rejections--whispers to John that her mother did not take a liking to the brothers and is likely to turn into a hag and when all are asleep come to cut off the heads of everyone who sleeps on the outside isle in the hayloft. Jane also offers John two pairs of her father’s (the Devil’s) boots, if John promises to take her with him when he rides home. The Devil’s boots, when put on the legs of the nag will enable Clever John to ride at double normal speed.

Clever John listens, then does as he likes. He makes for all the Sun’s daughters Valerian tea http://www.gnet.org/ease-your-worries-and-drift-off-with-valerian-root/ and arranges it so that all the daughters (including Crazy Jane) go to sleep on the outside of the isle.

After a while a hag comes to the loft with a big knife and chops off the heads of all who sleep in the outer isle. As the hag leaves, the hayloft is enveloped by a blinding darkness. Nevertheless, the brothers manage to jump from the hayloft out of a hatch. While six of the brothers are agreed that they have had enough of experiences and are ready to ride home, Clever John announces that he would rather go seek after the Devil’s own daughter and only then come home.

Clever John then puts on his nag in the Devil’s boots, and—Surprise! Surprise!—Rozinante, the nag, takes him to the Devil’s castle. The Devil tells John that he can have his daughter, but not before he brings him a pile of gold as payment.

After a series of adventures that include a flight  on the back of a raven, Clever John—Wonder of Wonders!—learns that the pile of gold is in the backyard of the Sun. Unfortunately, the Sun has set and is on the other side our planet, and to get there the raven has to fly through a landscape in perpetual dusk so great that it cannot determine in which direction the Sun is closest.

The entire story is too long to tell here, but Clever John does eventually discover the pile of gold. When he brings it to the Devil, he also discovers that the Devil’s daughter is none other than Crazy Jane, who is also the daughter of the Sun. Of course, by this time Crazy Jane has recovered from Clever John her father’s boots, which she insists both she and John wear to bed on their wedding night.