Eso’s Chronicles 182/ 4
The Aborted Head
© Eso A.B.

When King Pentheus had climbed into the pine tree in which the Sun had got herself stuck, the King could not quite reach Her from his perch. So, he reached up with his spear and gave her a few pokes with it.  

Try as he might, Pentheus had no luck getting the Sun to move. He thought of climbing yet a little higher, but the heat of the sun was boiling the resin of the pine until it broke through its bark, whence it dripped and collected on one of the edges of the perch where Pentheus was to stand.

Meanwhile, Dionysus and the maenads had began to crowd into the grove below. Everyone who came to the mountain and entered the grove fell on their knees and looked up to the Sun in the pine tree. The would be revelers set up a chorus of moans and wailing. Pentheus, not wishing to be seen, moved to the opposite side of the tree, where he was well hid by the pine’s branches. Unfortunately, the heat from the trapped Sun was melting the resin on that side of the pine as well. Soon King Pentheus’ hands were not only sticky from resin, but the resin was hot and stayed hot for long enough to raise on the skin of his palms painful blisters. For fear of his hands sticking to the bark and tearing the blisters open, the Pentheus hardly dared touch anything. He was forced to move back to his perch, a place where his overcoat was likely to be covered with dripping resin and seen by those looking up from below.

Indeed, it was not long before King Pentheus was seen. There then arose a loud cry and many hands and fingers pointed at him.

“May the Sun burn you to cinder!” a maenad screamed guessing that the King had come into sight because the Sun had scorched him.

Another shouted: “What are you doing there, King!?”

“Jump, King!... Your face is ugly!... We’ve been waiting to show you a porno!...” screamed others.

Still others shouted: “We’re coming after you!” and rushed at the tree and began to climb after the King. When a number of women had reached him, they grabbed his legs and let themselves hang loose. There was nothing Pentheus could do (because of his blistered hands, he could not grab hold of any branches to hang on to), but had to allow himself to be dragged down. Pentheus fell together with three or four maenads holding on to him. They rolled out of the branches and fell into a crowd of outraged women, who had gathered at the bottom of the pine. Pentheus was seized by many women, all of who bit or tore his flesh.

Even as the King felt being torn apart, he suddenly heard a voice close to his ear. The voice was that of his mother. It said: “Be brave, my son. The sacrifice has been foreordained. You must die!” Then the King received a blow to the back of his head, upon which he lost consciousness.

The King’s mother, whose name was Agave, was among the Bacchantes and among the first women to seize Pentheus and wrestle him to the ground. She had then laid herself on the King’s back and killed him by driving a sharp end of a piece of flint into the back of his skull. Now she used the same flint to cut off Pentheus’ head.

Once the King’s head was severed from his body, Agave seized it by its hair and held it up for all to see. “Here! Here!” she shouted, “Here is our offering to the Sun! May no man ever dare to take Her place!”

Another maenad snatched the head out of Agave’s hands and put it between her legs and held it there in an up-side down position. “Here is the abortion!” the maenad screamed with her skirt turned red from the King’s blood, then passed the head to the maenad standing next to her. This one put the head between her legs and began to hop with it—until her knees could hold it no longer and it fell to the ground. In this way the head made its way around the crowd, until Agave retrieved it.

Holding the King’s head by the hair and holding her arm extended before her as if she were holding a lantern, Agave began to run to Thebes. Soon  the head was again snatched from her by another maenad who had joined the run. With the head changing hands frequently, almost the entire band of Bacchantes was soon back in Thebes, where the head was taken to the outhouse at the marketplace and dumped into the excrement hole.

After all the Bacchantes had relieved themselves on the head, Agave had it retrieved and washed. Then she held it aloft once more, screaming: “O, what made you compete with the Sun!? O, Pentheus! O, my son!?” Only now did the Bacchantes awaken to the fact that the King had been killed by none other than his mother. Many now joined the mother in howling and screaming louder than they ever had at any other human sacrifice.

After a long dirge, Agave seemed to have an idea. She asked her attendants to bring her a barrel of pine resin, such as was kept in Thebes for lighting torches. When the barrel was brought, Agave took off its lid and glued the head of the King onto the barrel. Then she proceeded to lead the Bacchantes back up Mt. Cithaeron.

At the ceremonial grove, they were awaited by Dionysus, who had remained there with all too old  to run back and forth. From what everyone could see, the Sun was still caught up in the tree.

However, Dionysus and his companions had dug at the center of the grove a deep pit, which they had filled with dry moss, loose branches, and trunks of fallen trees. When Dionysus saw the head and the barrel of esin, he asked everyone to come to dig the pine tree free of earth. When the tree stood free, it fell, and so did the Sun. Everyone could now see that the Sun was but a large disk of charcoal covered wood that had been dipped in resin, tied to the top of the tree, and put to light.

Dionysus was not for a loss of what to do. He had the pine tree cut in half, a man’s and a half length above the base of the roots, then the top of the trunk was pushed into the pit and raised and secured in such a way that its roots stood vertically into the air.

Agave put the bucket of resin with the head of the King on top of the roots, and someone brought a fire. Dionysus ignited the moss in the pit. Slowly the moss and wood there began to burn and the fire rose to surround the uprooted tree. Eventually the flames came to lick the resin and the contents of the barrel began to burn and boil. The King’s head sunk ever deeper into the pitch until the wood hoops burnt through, the barrel spilled open, and the fire dripped as flaming drops into the pit.

It was at that point that Dionysus raised the cry: “The Sun is risen!”

“The Sun is risen!” echoed the Bacchantes.

Someone brought up a donkey cart that held a cask of wine. A wild dance of maenads began around the fire pit. The dance lasted until the trunk and roots of the pine had burnt and the bony burnt skull of the King had been retrieved as a holy relic. Thereupon the pit was dug shut. When the ground was level, and it was clear to everyone that the Sun had traveled its course and was almost to set, a new sapling of a pine tree was planted on top of this now invisible altar.

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Esis's Chronicles 172

Origin of The Midsummer Fire
© Eso A.B.

This blog a ‘break’ in the regular series.

Johns Eve or the Midsummer Festival in Latvia is only weeks away. Here are some reflections on the significance of the festival by one who many years ago became an afficianado of the festival and has never been able to let go of an interest in it..

The sad truth about the demise of the Latvian Midsummer Festival is that it is not the result of Soviet repression (as many allege, but a consequence of the Latvian intelegentsia smothering its own communal roots by surrendering to the neo-Christian propaganda about God being a Being out of nature.

The smothering of this ‘day of the community’ has other sources as well. One cause is an overly tight hugging of Johns as a purely Latvian festival with no relation to anyone else. I remember the poet Imants Ziedonis, recently deceased, telling me that Latvians can be proud of being the only ones who wear oak leaf wreaths on their heads. I was surprised to hear this, because a wreath of leaves or flowers is an old tradition if one remembers the laurel wreath of the Greeks and Romans and poet ‘laureates’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_wreath .

Recently, while rereading Euripedes “The Bacchae” another image and potential source for the Festival came to mind.

When Dionysus (Yahnis in Latvian) comes to Thebes, many of the city’s inhabitants, apparently mostly women (once inhabitants of the wood, now starved for nature by the desert regime that is the city), join him in a bacchanal that winds up Mt. Cithaeron to a holy communal gathering place there. The name ‘bacchae’ originates in Bacchus, who is the Roman God of wine; however, Bacchus is a late replacement for the name of the Greek God Ion

The Bacchae are behaving orgiastically and apparently lewdly. Word of this gets to King Pentheus, who (also starved for nature) imagines the event as a pornography show. To better see what the women are up to, Pentheus climbs a tall pine that grows close to the grounds where the ritual is to take place. Unfortunately, the Bacchae see him, and climb the tree to pull the King down to earth.

When the King is down, the Bacchae fall on him and tear him into bloody pieces. Then everybody rushes back to Thebes, with an elderly lady leading the runners. The lady holds in her hand by the hair the head of King Pentheus. Only when the Bacchae reach the marketplace of Thebes, does the lady awaken to the fact that she is none other than the mother of the King.

The Bacchae, realize that a great tragedy has happened, and a great communal wailing ensues. Incidentally, the word ‘tragedy’ has its origin in the greek name tragōidia, “billy-goat-song”. Taking the behavior of King Pentheus into account, he may have been thought to be impersonating a billy goat. The Latvians have a folk poem, it goes: “Kaza kāpa debesīs, Dievam sūdzēt….” (The billy goat climbed up to heave to complain to God…) There is an ancient statue of gold that shows a goat on its hind legs chewing the leaves of a small tree. http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/312/flashcards/134312/jpg/c9iwf00z1316047577614.jpg

Then the Bacchae hit upon a brilliant idea. Some of them rush back to Mt. Cithaeron, and go to the pine tree which had hid King Pentheus. The Bacchae dig around the pine until they have loosed its roots. Then they fell the tree, strip it of its branches, shorten the trunk somewhat, and carry the rest of the trunk back to Thebes.

Meanwhile, the Bacchae who have remained in Thebes have dug a deep hole in the ground. This is where the top of the tree is now placed, and the tree, with the aid of pulleys and pichforks, it is pushed and pulled until it is with its roots in the air, and stands in a vertical position. A ladder is then brought to the tree. The crevices of the roots are filled with tar and resin, and to the roots is secured the head of the King. (In later years the head of the king is replaced by the head of a sacrificial goat,) The roots are then put to a flame.

One may imagine that it is in this ceremony that we must seek the origin of the image of the head of the Medusa http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/images/gal_mosaic_head_medusa.jpg and/or the Latvian Midsummer wreath http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/61207000/jpg/_61207060_man_oak_wreaths_afp624x351.jpg .

Eso’s Chronicles 164

The Forgotten Christians of Tibet (7-3)
© Eso A.B.

One may argue that the Civil War in the West has already begun. One of the screens that divert the eye from focusing on it properly is the sham war that the West is waging against the Muslims in the name of pseudo-Democracy, even while a hundred Tibetan Christians have immolated themselves to protest the destruction of their culture by a pseudo-communist Chinese government.

Unfortunately, the self-immolations of Tibetans are not backed by a clearly defined political agenda or, for that matter, on an understanding of the history of human sacrifice—either self-sacrifice or that of children and soldiers. One suspects that the reason is the universal ‘lock down’ of thought regarding evaluatinon of tactics for survival which are not convenient to governments based on capitalism.

The link at Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_independence_movement , while touching on the history of Tibet and interest groups sympathetic to the Tibetan struggle for independence and/or autonomy, has not deduced from the sacrifice and struggle goals that would touch on the interests of other people. After all, the Tibetans are not the only ones whose interests have been transgressed by the wanton self-interest of government cliques. Such self-interests include

1.    disregard for environmental interests and culture of life in nature;
2.    disregard of rights for a community to determine whether it desires to inherit, maintain, and further a culture that pre-existed the arrival of capitalist novus ordo;
3.    denial to a given community of rights to economic improvement across all social groups simultaneously and so as for improvements to endure and be lasting;
4.    denial of resources for studies and conferences which develop well thought out programs toward an improved culture of life;
5.    denial of presenting a sustainable program of economic equality, its example set by the domestic culture of life styles among the leadership and their families;
6.    rejection of solutions which deny war as one such by retooling the means of resistance consistent with principles of self-sacrifice (self-caused-death);
7.    rejection of disciplinary systems (not exclusionary of a painless death penalty) which continue to disregard items 5. and 6.

While at this point of planetary emergency, my interests span all points above, I am most interested in re-thinking the place of self-caused-death as a tool in avoiding death of others as part of a solution. At this point in our culture of death, it is essential that the slide into chaos is arrested and sectarian secular terror (which includes secularism acting as a religion of which neo-Christianity is a prime example) is be shown as the anarchy it is and brings. As mentioned in my previous blog, the criticism may begin with a look at the Chinese government, which charges me and those like me with murder, re: anyone aiding immolations will be charged with murder. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22290746 (see next to last paragraph of link) Generally speaking, ‘aiding’ is tied to the word ‘abetting’, which in American law means “aiding and abetting a criminal” http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/aiding-and-abetting/ . Is resisting oppression a criminal act? No doubt, for a slave-owner it is so.

What about the U.S. governmeant? http://rt.com/news/guantanamo-prison-torture-un-677/  UN human rights office says that force feeding prisoners constitutes ‘torture’. If the UN speaks true, then a U.S. government sponsored culture of terror (at least for those who become its prisoners) is opposed and fought by a culture of not-violent-terror practiced by ‘enemy combatants’. This is certainly contrary to U.S. projections of itself. Surely then anyone who supports Tibetans who have in the past and may in the future self-sacrifice themselves is along with the immolators to be considered an ‘enemy combatant’. Yes?

A murder charge and being for that reason on the receiving end of torture for harming no life but taking charge of one’s own cannot be other than motivated by the desire of the Chinese and U.S. governments to impose on everyone a sterile and deadly superego created (machine style) out its own super-self for the future ad infinitum.

Such dreams of perpetual power are nothing new. These begin in ancient times, when cultural heroes such as Gilgamesh and Enkidu of the kingdom of Uruk (on the territory of today’s Iraq) went on journeys to find the ‘plant of immortality’.

That journey, however, resembles the expeditions of the marauding Vikings: the adventures include rape, theft, violence, and death. The King of Uruk and his companion foretold, in their own way, the future.

The ancient story begins with, first, with king, Gilgamesh, presenting an animal herder, Enkidu, of the country side with a temple prostitute. When Enkidu discovers that a prostitute’s favors and his pleasure of them have no lasting power, i.e., cannot give him with eternal life, he and Gilgamesh share in the same intelligence and become fast friends. They agree to go and try find the plant of immortality no matter where the search takes them. When they arrive in Lebanon, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, apparently in the belief that the secret of immortality is hid in trees, begin to ax the country’s cedars. A giantess named Hum-baba (?Great mother), guardian of the cedar forests, comes to defend the trees, but is soon mortally wounded and dies.

Humbaba is an unmistakable prototype for what later, in another story, becomes the Sphinx. The killer of the Sphinx is prince Oedipus, who is in fleeing death by amorality. By the time the epic of Gilgamesh reaches Greece, it has grown in sophistication: the search for the plant of immortality leads not only to the death of the forest, but Oedipus’ sexual adventures with his mother go beyond the pleasures of sex by seeking immortality by replanting one’s self, so to speak, in her womb. What Oedipus learns is that none of the children born to Iocaste are his replicas, but individuals in their own right. When Oedipus’ wishes fail to materialize, the city of Thebes and the wood, at the centre of which once stood the Temple of the Sphinx, turn to desert http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com

Still, literary critics continue to divert the attention of theatre goers from the fact that for playwright Sophocles’, the main theme (though the background is obscured by the actions in the foreground) is the role of death, and how its importance is ignored by those who seek power. The play ends in tragedy, the nature of which is not understood to this day.

Sophocle’s gives the riddle of his play an implicit resolution by allowing Oedipus’ daughter Ismene to escape death (evidently to later tell what really happened). But because Sophocles gives Ismene a minor role in the play proper, so do our critics give her no mind. Our mindset, kept in a hypnotized state by secular Christianity (in its Lenin-Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Nixon-Regan masks), cannot shake off the False Flag of the Christian lamella or, if you will, saran wrap. While the Chinese Government’s plan for the Tibetans is seen by the latter as a death trap, and the bravest of them are offering their lives in non-violent sacrifice to save their community, the Chinese leadership, obsessed with immortality clings to power through the barrel of the gun.

Eso’s Chronicles 153
The Thumbsucker’s War for Human Rights (2)
© Eso A.B.

Air Brush

If one is to take seriously what J.D. Salinger wrote and what Mark Chapman read to the court as the statement why he assassinated John Lennon, re: “…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids….” (see end of previous blog), and if one is to understand the text literally and has ever seen a real field of rye http://static5.depositphotos.com/1003699/523/i/950/depositphotos_5237387-Country-road-through-rye-fieldcountry-road-through-rye-field.jpg , it makes for either an absurd picture or a scene of vandals on the loose.

A farmer coming to a field of trampled rye would swear that the next time he will come with a shotgun to punish the culprits by spraying buckshot at their legs.

If one wishes to take the sentiments of Mark Chapman as signifying more than a literal interpretation of the text, one has to re-imagine that in place of the ‘rye’ there is a wood, and that the wood stands for the Sphinx in Sophocle’s well known play “King Oedipus”. The thousand ‘little kids’ then become the sacrifices the Thebans bring to the wood to appease their near uncontrollable desire to go hedonistically ‘wild’ after spending a life time of living in a city. The pain and suffering caused by the loss of their children to the Sphinx, keeps the City of Thebes a relatively orderly city inspite of everyone being unhappy.

As some readers may already suspect, Prince Oedipus, who is fleeing the home that he has imagined as that of his parents (in the kingdom of Cithaeron), comes to a wood, better, a sacred grove—the maw of the Sphinx, so to speak—and discovers that children are wandering aimlessly and lost until they die of hunger or cold, or fall down a deep chasm that bisects the grove. The chasm is known as the “Cithaeron chasm”.

At the edge of the chasm stands a temple dedicated to the Sphinx (who stands for the mystery of the wood). When any of the lost children happen to come upon the temple, they are greeted by the priest Tiresias. Tiresias offers each child an apple. After the apple has been eaten, Tiresias gives each child two bird feathers, leads them to a platform at the edge of the chasm, stands them close to the edge of the platform, and asks them to start swinging their arms as if they are the wings of a bird. Tiresias also asks the children to close their eyes and imagine that they are flying. When the children do as Tiresias suggests, he gives each child a push, and the child loses balance and falls into the chasm.

It happens that Prince Oedipus (impersonated by Mark Chapman) comes to the wood and the temple at just the right moment. As Chapman walks up the temple path, he sees Tiresias push a child over the edge of the cliff. He hears the child (all are boy children) scream, then he sees Tiresias walk back to the temple, where he is awaited by Mark’s father—John Lennon, a well known entertainer in the city of Thebes.

Lennon is Marks father from a liaison he had as a teenager with a young woman older than he. The young woman was so taken by the teenager’s voice, that after the concert, she invited the young singer to her bedroom.

When the young woman discovered herself pregnant, her young lover was on a concert tour, and though she wrote him several letters, her letters got lost among the fan mail. Because pregnancy was not something the young woman expected, and because she came from a strict Catholic family, she sold the new born infant to a family of gypsies, who were raising children for the purposes of human sacrifice practiced by another religion in a far away kingdom on the other side of a mountain ridge known as Cithaeron Mountains.

All would have gone well, except the young woman gave her young son a name, Mark. She never forgot the name.

There is a strange word about; it is little known; and it is also not wholly understood. The word is known among linguists and artists as ‘pareidolia’. Pareidolic associations are associations most commonly found in words and images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia . What is not so well known is that pareidolia may also happen as an event or a series of events.

It happened that the young woman was forced by circumstances to earn her living as a prostitute. This is how she met Charles. Charles happened to be the king of France. Charles fell in love with Joan and wished to marry her. Because he was also a Catholic, Charles had to ask the priests of his court what they thought about the idea. When the priests asked Charles why he had to marry this particular young woman, one with a reputation for being a sinner besides, Charles could not think of a good answer.

What King Charles eventually said was: “Because her name is Joan.”

“So, what in the hell makes Joan so different from other such?” the Council of priests wanted to know.

“You see,” answered King Charles, “Joan comes from Arc. It is said that all Frenchmen are descended from the Johns of Arc. Joan says that she knows we are in a civil war with the Burgundian English, who say that their Johns are better than our French Johns. She claims that when the French Johns hear that the Queen of France is called Joan, they all will get a rise, and I, King Charles, will win the war as a result.”

The Catholic priests had a long discussion among themselves. It was not so long ago that they had suppressed the French Johns and driven them from the wood where most of them had resided. The French priests needed to cut down the wood to fire the bricks they needed to build their cathedrals. On the other hand, it was true that the Burgundies (and English) were getting the upper hand in the civil war, and the French would soon have to ask the Germans to come help. The Germans were known to be materialists and would agree to help. But this would cost the French king many of France’s eastern provinces, and the French would be squeezed between the Germans and the English more than ever. In the end, the Catholic priests agreed that king Charles and Joan of Arc could marry.

After she was married to King Charles, Queen Joan found in the royal mail a letter from the kingdom of Cithaeron, which kingdom was on the other side of the Cithaeron Mountains. The letter offered to sell to King Charles a dozen gypsy children for the sacrificial needs of the court. Joan noticed that one of the children had a name. It was—Mark.

Queen Joan of Arc immediately suspected that Mark was her son by John Lennon, who besides being an entertainer, had invested in the lucrative business of selling children for sacrificial purposes. John was an excellent salesman, because most of his songs were not only entertaining (re: “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXmBy1_qOQ ), but proselytized for peace. Everyone knew there could not be peace without sacrifice of life.

It is a long story of how it all worked out. There remains the story of how Queen Joan persuaded Mark to leave his home at Cithaeron Beach by telling him he was destined to marry his mother and kill his father. A rewritten version of the antique version is at http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com . However, if we want to learn about the adventures of Mark, we must—without further ado—explain that just as Tiresias was offered a wagonload of smutty children (all of who had been promised a trip to see ‘a sky filled with diamonds’), one of them shouted: “My name is Mark, and I don’t want to die. There are no diamonds in the sky! Those are only stars!”

At that instant, Mark realized that (for some pareidolic reason) he himself could be that boy. Mark instantly went into an attack mode. He managed to shoot Lennon dead in no time. As for Tiresias, Mark tied him up, and ordered him to order the temple staff to find all the children who were wandering lost in the wood. After the children were on the road and marching to Thebes, Mark took a large branch out of the bonfire and stuck and ground the burning end of the branch into both of Tiresias’ eyes.

The story would have ended there and then (as it would have if Joan had not given her son a name), except that Mark did not understand that even though he became a hero to the Thebans for putting an end to child sacrifices, he could stay a hero only if he replaced the sacrifices of children with the sacrifice of himself.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, a.k.a. Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
76 Climbing Mt. Citheron (IX)

There is yet a thirteenth death in “Tiresias’ Revenge”. It is the death of the Sphinx, the chimera of child sacrifice child sacrifice that has been haunting Thebes.

When fleeing Corinth—in order to escape the prediction that he is about to kill his father and marry his mother—and on his way to Thebes, Oedipus meets and kills his father. Sophocles presents the scene as if it is a fated accident. We are told that King Laius and Oedipus meet on the road, but neither of the parties identify themselves, and both try to push each other off the road. The fight over who has the right of way escalates into a deadly fight. In the melee, the captain of Prince Oedipus’ bodyguard kills Laius, the king of Thebes.

After the “victory”, Oedipus continues his journey until he reaches the temple of the Sphinx. The temple is not far from Thebes. The Sphinx, we are told, is plaguing the city of Thebes. The Sphinx will continue to plague Thebes, that is, demand the city to sacrifice its young for its dinner, until someone is brave enough to come before it and answer its ridiculously simple riddle: Who walks in the morning on four, at noon on two, and in the evening on three legs? The answer is “man”, at least this is the answer that everyone in the last two thousand years plus (according to Scaligeri’s chronology) has accepted as being the right answer.

One may accept the given answer as the correct one. On the other hand, we should not forget that the third leg, which is not a nature made instrument, but an instrument made by man, may be presumed to be other than a cane. After a crawl on all fours and learning to stand upright, the hands may hold more than a stick. This is to say that after learning to walk, one may support himself on a spear, a sword, or a rifle. The instrument need not be associated with the physiological nature of man. It may be an instrument that is typical to a cultural ethos.

In any event, Oedipus and his father do not meet each other by accident as Sophocles misleads us to believe. To the contrary, the meeting has been prearranged by Queen Iocaste, the wife of King Laius and mother of Prince Oedipus. The Queen knows that on a certain morning the King is to go and pick up a wagon full of children he has bought from some traders for sacrifice to the Sphinx. The purchase is in lieu of having to sacrifice the children of Thebes.

The Queen arranges an as if accidental meeting by conspiring with her sister, Queen Merope of Corinth. [The history of the two sisters is discussed in greater detail in “Tiresias’ Revenge” (blog 47)]. The captain of the guard which accompanies Prince Oedipus’ flight from Corinth is informed of King Laius’ upcoming transaction, and is to take advantage of the circumstances and kill the king.

In terms of the story, we need to understand that Prince Oedipus’ journey to the temple is not so much the next episode of the play as it is a continuation of action that began at the crossroad where the exchange of the children for payment took place. In short, the death of King Laius is to be identified with the death of the Sphinx. This identification need not be made by anyone else but Queen Iocaste, because it is she who starts the story of Oedipus by refusing to expose him to the elements on Mt. Citheron, which will put him at risk of becoming a sacrifice to the Gods of Fate. Since the Sphinx has wings, we may imagine that he-she could fly from the temple to Mt. Cytheron and snatch the royal child exposed there and deny him life and the right to become part of the royal retinue. Queen Iocaste has a plan that may outwit the Sphinx.

There is no need here to tell the details of the original plot of Sophocles. What we know is sufficient to understand that Sophocles wrote a riddling play from which a number of essential elements of plot have been removed or have been so abstracted as to make the play a riddle. The most likely reason for creating the riddle is political repression. Since the political repression may be for the purpose of ridding society of self-sacrifice by identifying it with the sacrifice of children, the censure and repressive force can only come from a hierarchical society in which self-sacrifice—from the point of view of its elite—is undesirable. Self-sacrifice is an individualistic act in that it is unpredictable (subject to the subjectivity of the individual) and may cast doubt on the authority of those at the top of the pyramid, especially if those at the top have no intention of doing self-sacrifice themselves. Rather than submit their lives to fate, they rather enjoy the “pleasures of life”, albeit a diminished life in that it asks for itself no more than a leisurely drift to Hades via a river called Yana, G(Y)anges, D(Y)on, D(Y)onava, or D(Y)au(n)gava.

As mentioned in earlier blogs, other than sacrifices made during the violent times of Latvia’s founding, Latvia had two distinct opportunities for self-sacrifice in the twentieth century. One was in 1940, when the President Karlis Ulmanis could have (but did not) self-sacrifice himself in the face of the ultimatum to the nation by the Soviet Union, because Latvia had no chance of winning a fight against the aggressor, except make it a symbolic act. The other was in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the post-Soviet Latvian government was on its way to becoming so corrupted that it was obvious (though not necessarily noticed) to most people outside the government, and one Adolfs Bukhis (1993). The latter attempted to redeem the government’s failure by protesting the direction the government by sacrificing his life. His effort was denied recognition by both the post-Soviet Latvian government and its media.

One may object by saying that the troubles of Thebes have little to do with the troubles of Latvia. As the saying goes: yes and no. In this writer’s opinion, we shouldremember that the story of King Oedipus is

1. not as “ancient” as we are led to believe it to be by the Scaligeri chronology (I am inclined to agree with Anatoly Fomenko’s suggestions as to the reliability of orthodox history);
2. fails to confront the interests of a secular and fundamentally laissez faire prince (government) to repress self-sacrifice;
3. substitutes self-sacrifice with a return of child sacrifice, but in place of children, places young immature men and woman, re soldiers;
4. leaves the elite occupy the summit of the power pyramid, where it never makes a sacrifice, but frequently changes chairs of office among its members to escape coming into focus of the public.

The substitution of self-sacrifice and child sacrifice with “war sacrifice” by modern government confirms that our modern orientation of rule is toward maximum, rather than minimum use of violence and terror as the tool of authority for keeping government in power. This keeps the weak bonds of community weak and under the control of the government. Invariably such power is usurped power. How long will it endure? If once the answer was “not for ever”, today it is “not for long”.

Asterisk & Notes of Interest:
On material depravation in Latvia. 
On the theme of “more-equal-than-others” George Orwell's AnimalFarm.  
A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's "1984" )  
Of great interest to me is this and like articles. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.
These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.
Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschroniclnes.blogspot.com/  

© Eso Antons Benjamins, a.k.a. Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
75 Climbing Mt. Citheron (VIII)

Let us begin the play by pretending that we are its directors.

Imagine that you are going to the theatre tonight. The play you are going to see is some author’s scandalous rewrite of the ancient and famous playwright’s Sophocles play “Oedipus the King”. The reinterpreted and rewritten version is called “Tiresias’ Revenge”. What is Tiresias revenging? Perhaps the “truth”. What is truth? Perhaps what ought to have been done and can be done still.

This is a long play, which is why some readers have compared it to Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen Der Ring Des Niebelungen cycle. No music for this one yet though. There will be a long intermission after the second act, when one may have coffee and cake. In the basement cafeteria of the theatre there will be young aides to help those interested to understand parts of the play that they did not understand. If asked, the aides will also explain what is ahead in the fourth and fifth acts. Tip the aides generously.

Imagine that the curtain of the stage is closed. It is still some minutes before the play is about to begin. The audience is in taking seats. The volunteer selling programs is still sitting in in the lobby. The balcony seats are almost filled.

There is movement from behind the stage curtain, then it parts a little, and to the front of the stage steps one of the actors. The actor is holding in his or her hand a mask to indicate that he or she is part of the production. He-she intones: “Ahem… I have an announcement to make. There are some changes in the scenery tonight. You will see one of the scenes twice. I will briefly tell you about the scene, so you know what occurs if we decide to skip through it quickly. Here it is:

“There is a temple. It stands in the mountains, indeed its rear exit stands right over the edge of a cliff. The temple is on the road from ancient Corinth to ancient Thebes. [Some directors may wish to replace the name of Thebes with that of Riga.] In the centre of the temple on a high and broad pedestal sits the Sphinx. It is a horrible beast and inspires terror the moment one sees it. However, in fact, you see nothing of the Sphinx but its Face. The face, horrible to behold, is drawn or projected on a curtain. Its features show the anxiety of life facing Death. The Sphinx is a former dragon that has devoured itself from the tail up, and the image resembles—I will let you imagine—that of your own face after you have cannibalized yourself from the tail end of yourself. The road of your rage to live has been a bloody and horror filled voyage. Now you cannot devour yourself any further. The Face cannot eat itself, but only express its terror of Death if it takes the next step towards it. Perhaps the Face looks something like the one Picasso drew in one of his last drawings, except in place of man’s tightly drawn lips, there should be teeth as horrible as the teeth of a saw.

“On the road below the temple appears a wagon drawn by four oxen. In the wagon sits a large cage, and the cage contains four to eight children. [This scene may in fact be projected on the screen behind the actor’s back as a video clip.] The driver of the wagon is Tiresias, the priest of the temple. Tiresias has not been blinded yet, but somehow he already has that “blind” look of one who has gone snow blind from having seen too much snow. On top of the cage sits a guard armed with a spear.

“Tiresias stops the wagon before the temple, opens the cage and motions one of the children to follow him. The child is dressed as if he or she has been invited to a children’s birthday party. The child and Tiresias walk toward the temple, then walk up the temple steps right up to the curtain, to the Face of the Sphinx directly in front of them. To the right and left of them in the shadows may be present some other figures. Perhaps these are the witnesses of the proceedings.

“When Tiresias has come before the large temple curtain and the face of the Sphinx, he seizes the child by the scruff of the neck, grabs the belt around his or her waist, and pushes him-her with some force through the curtain. The curtai has a tear or an opening in the middle to facilitate a quick “disappearance” of the victim. Tiresias performs the motions as if he has had lots of practice. The children do no more than cry out in surprise.”

A few moments after each child disappears behind the curtain the audience hears a thud. [Thud! x 4.] Some men may bring onto the stage four sacks of sawdust and let them drop there in a matter of fact manner, one after the other: Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!] If you want to know, yes, the remaining four children are to be saved for a later sacrifice.

“Let the  plague begin!”


Asterisk & Notes of Interest:
On material deprivation in Latvia.
On the theme of “more-equal-than-others” George Orwell's Animal Farm. 
A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's "1984"). An article to orient yourself on populism in America (and hear the echo in Latvia), Retrieving the Democrats’ Reason for Being by Sam Smith.
Of great interest to me is this and like articles. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.
These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.
Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/ + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschroniclnes.blogspot.com/  

© Eso Antons Benjamins, a.k.a. Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
74 Climbing Mt. Citheron (VII)

The response that I received over my interpretation of Sophocles’ “King Oedipus” (“Tiresias’ Revenge”) was somewhere between a statement and a question: “How is anyone to perform all those deaths in one [the last] act?.” I was taken aback. I thought that this is what directors of a play do—besides choosing a cast, they also solve problems and think of ways to do what may seem impossible to do. A stage need not have only one platform.

Nevertheless, on second thought, I could only agree that one may get the impression that death arrives as a pile up of speeding cars speeding cars. It all comes after the discovery of the facts or, if you will, the truth. Let me count the deaths.

1. First to die is the blind seer Tiresias;
2. then comes Iocaste, Oedipus’ mother and wife;
3. & 4. their two sons, Polynices and Eteocles;
5. then Antigone, their daughter;
6. Antigone’s lover Haemon, Prince Creon’s son;
7. then Prince Creon’s wife, Eridike, because Creon will not pardon Antigone for burying her brothers. No doubt, Creon also does not forgive his son for not abandoning Antigone.

This makes for a total of seven (7) deaths. However, these seven were preceded by four (4) others:

1. The infant who was substituted for Oedipus, but whose death is not declared.
2. King Laius, killed by his son Oedipus.
3. Polybus, the king of Corinth. He is killed by the Queen of Corinth, Merope, Iocaste’s sister.
4. Oedipus.

Seven plus four is eleven, quite a few deaths indeed. A dramatic denouement, not least because the central act no longer is Oedipus stabbing out his eyes as Sophocles seemingly wants to makes us believe, but the other deaths. All lose their lives as a result of the refusal by Queen Iocaste to expose for a night her son Oedipus on Mt. Cytheron and discover whether he is fated to become the king of Thebes, Greece,  or not. And then there is the “plague” itself, obviously with death lurking at the end of the road.

The reader, who knows the play according to Sophocles, will quickly notice that either Sophocles hid the motive why Oedipus was exposed to the elements, or I have added it. In Sophocles’ version of the play, at least the version that has come down to us, King Laius wishes to kill his newborn son for reasons unknown. In my rewrite or deconstruction of the plot, I propose that Laius does not wish to kill Oedipus for reasons unknown, but to test the will of the Gods. In other words, by exposing Oedipus to the elements on Mt. Citheron, Laius and all Thebes will know if the fates are agreed that he is suited to grow up to be king of Thebes. There are other additions as well, for example, Sophocles nowhere mentions that Queen Merope of Corinth is Ioacaste’s sister.

My acquaintance made no comment on my interpretation of the play or, more accurately, my resolution of the riddle posed by Sophocles. Rather than probe and embarrass myself by having to listen how perhaps my Latvian skills made reading the play difficult, I let the matter rest. Perhaps on another day would come and offer another opportunity. After all, the plague that plagues Thebes may be said to plague Riga and Latvia, and plagues do not simply disappear. King Oedipus may be renamed King John, and imagined as a descendant of the king of Jersika, King Visvaldis. [See blog 58 ff. for a discussion of the kingdom of Jersika and its king.] An interesting coincidence is the fact that the current President of Latvia is a surgeon, and the English name “surgeon” may be read as “sur-john” or Superjohn.

In any event, the several years that separate my probe into the nature of the Protestant mindset in Latvia has done little to change my impression that self-sacrifice as the cause of death is a subject too touchy to touch. It has obvious political implications. The sacrifice by Adolfs Buķis (see blogs 16, 36, 67, 68) of his life in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga and the dismissal of the event as inconsequential by the authorities and the media is ample evidence of the unwillingness of Latvia’s post-Soviet government and society to take itself “that” or so seriously as to involve self-sacrifice. The bureaucracy of the state, with self censorship its second nature—thanks to eight hundred years of self-repression—knows how evade any subject, itself including.

Mostly my disappointment was however the way the echoes of self-sacrifice rebounded on Latvian society itself. It simply had no ear for it. No doubt, the fate of Oedipus and Thebes could be imagined as in some way applicable to not only the current political situation in Latvia, but indeed to the political atmosphere the world over. Whatever the rest of the world may think or make of self-sacrifice, in Latvia it is but a clump of clay stuck to the shovel and what the shovel needs to be freed of. This is taken for evidence that everything is as it should be. Self-sacrifice as a phenomenon necessary for the creation and maintenance of a community, which makes it a political force, has not been able to find room for imagination here.

Now the act which my actor acquaintance was questioning is the last act, the fifth. (See blogs 46-47.) It is true that most of the deaths in the play (eleven +) occur or, better, are declared in this act. The entire network of relationships among those who are part of or somehow connected with King Oedipus’ court unravels here.

For the time being my probe to try discover Latvian reaction to tragedy had proven itself to be unsuccessful. As I came to interpret it, it was simply too risky to risk upsetting a Latvian audience with a play that insists in introducing such radical changes in how we have grown up to see ourselves. Latvians would rather continue to perceive the Sphinx as a mystery rather than a revelation.

However, there is a solution to the difficulty of having to present to the audience death after death after death. One solution is to tell the audience the story first or by giving it a hint of what the play is leading up to. Not all of the eleven and more deaths need to happen in the last act, but can be told in a brief introduction. In this way, the audience is given some tools with which to imagine the events in the play more easily.

Let see how this might work in the next blog.

Asterisk & Notes of Interest:

On material depravation in Latvia.
On the theme of “more-equal-than-others” Orwell's Animal Farm  
A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's "1984".) 
Of great interest to me is this and like articles. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.
These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.
Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschroniclnes.blogspot.com/

© Eso Antons Benjamins, a.k.a. Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
71 Climbing Mt. Citheron (IV)

Riddles sometimes take a long time to solve, though partial solutions may occur long before we discover the complete answer. It was thus for me with the Hindu monster known as Kirtimucha, who I first met in 1958, now over a half a century ago.

I was still attending Boston University at the time. Though I hardly glanced at the books assigned for classroom reading, I often read with great interest the books that I came across in the bibliographies. When I came across the story of Kirtimukha, I was quite taken with it. It answered to a question that had not yet even occurred to me: what happens to the serpent that bites its own tail? I had heard stories in my childhood that the garter snake, known to Latvians as ‘zalkts’, which was sacred to Latvian ancestors, was sometimes seen in cemeteries, and for which farmers put out a plate of milk near the barn door (not only for the cat or the hedgehog)—that this small nonpoisonous snake was known to bite its own tail.

The story went that in ancient times there was a ‘king’ garter snake. It wore a gold crown and moved like a wheel. It could do so, because it bit into its tail and formed a ring. Some people knew to tell me that they had seen such a snake come rolling down the hill, especially on Midsummer or Johns Eve. It was the stuff of stories that put children on the alert when walking through swamps while mushroom hunting. I had a pretty good idea on what hill this could happen, though of course it never happened but in my imagination.

Here is the story of Kirtimukha. After God Shiva had been angered and had released his anger against the lesser God who had provoked it, Shiva changed his mind. That presented a problem. What should Shiva’s Wrath, which had real substance, now do? It had been created; it was still here. Shiva told Kirtimukha that it should put his and its anger to good use and devour itself. So, Kirtimukha bit into its tail and started shortening itself. Maybe this means that anger was becoming less angry. However, when anger came to the doorstep of its very face, it had to stop. It could not eat itself any further. Nevertheless, the wrath of Vishnu remained on the serpent’s face, which is why it became known as the Face of Glory or Face of Wrath.

As it happened, I was also reading Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” at the time. The play tells a story of how a mother put her son on the throne of a kingdom by marrying him. When the people of Thebes, suffering from a mysterious plague, learned the true story though, chaos broke loose in the kingdom of Thebes. Iocaste, Oedipus’ mother, killed herself; Oedipus blinded himself; and their two sons killed each other. It was the latter event that made me connect the myth of Oedipus to Kirtimukha. After I had read about the monster’s Face, I had begun to wonder if there really was no way that the serpent could put an end to itself. It was like a mathematical problem: if the flight of an arrow can be put to a stop by bending it into a circle, and the circle could be reduced to a point, the Face of Glory, how could the point be reduced to zero? The story of the two sons of Iocaste and Oedipus provided the answer. When at a Dead End and with no way out or to die, the thing to do is split into two.

Since in the case of Kirtimukha, its tools of wrath were its teeth, when the teeth had no longer anything to devour, two of them expressed themselves by growing ever longer—until they grew out of the top of the serpents face as horns. Thus, Kirtimukha became a face with two horns, at which point I remembered the events at the founding of Thebes (read third paragraph down). Cadmus, the itinerant prince, had killed a serpent guarding a sacred well. Very likely the serpent had a name that was a cognate of Kirtimukha. To kill Kirtimukha X was a major transgression against the laws of the universe, and it had to be avenged.

Cadmus was told by the Goddess Athena to sow the serpent’s teeth into the ground. When he did, the teeth sprung up as two rows of fully armed men. The Goddess Athena (or perhaps it was Artemis) had hoped that the sown-men would kill Cadmus for having killed the serpent. However, Cadmus had a quick wit. He threw a pebble between the rows of the armed men. The men believed that the pebble was thrown at them by the men in the other row, and there began a fight among them. All but five of the men killed each other. Perhaps these five men are to be equated with our ‘teeth of wisdom’. In the myth though, the five represent the five vowels of the alphabet: AEIOU, and it was with these that Cadmus founded Thebes. In other words, politically speaking, the Theban kings were not kings by accident, but kings who had been ‘chosen’, therefore were sacred, and could not just kill each other off as consonants without vowels may.

I was surprised. Was this another chronal occultation? It reminded me of yet another Greek story. There were two giants, twins, Otus and Ephialtes. The brothers went hunting one day. The object of their hunt was the Goddess Artemis. Both brothers wanted to have sex with her, but the Goddess changed into a doe, so she could better run away. Instead of then attempting to catch the doe by hand, the giants threw their spears at her at the very time that they stood opposite each other. The spears missed Artemis, but killed the twins instead.

The story’s point is telling. The reappearance of the twins in Sophocles’ play means to tell us that Oedipus has come to a dead end. There is no escape for him, but to die. This is why the image of Kirtimucha  is so popular in some cultures to this day. It looks like the living image of wrath. It reminds the onlooker of the desirability of its death—if not as a force, then as a phenomenon one has learnt how to deal with and, therefore, has been able to check it within his own self.

Indeed, this myth reflects profoundly on the politics of our days. More in Blog 72.


Asterisk & Notes of Interest:

On material depravation in Latvia.

Iceland fights back, re TheMovement. 

On the theme of “more-equal-than-others”, re Orwell's Animal Farm.

A recommended read: “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by Emmanuel Goldstein (A book within a book from George Orwell's NineteenEighty-Four). An article to orient yourself on populism in America (and hear the echo in Latvia), Retrieving the Democrats’ Reason for Being by Sam Smith.

Of great interest to me is this and like articles/. It presents some of my reasons for supporting the growing of Johns Grass in Latvia.

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum –ONLATVIANPOPULISM vs LATVIJASLABEJIE. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschroniclnes.blogspot.com/