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  

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.

  

Eso’s Chronicles 177
How War Began (1)
© Eso A.B.

The religious nonsense propagated by the Vatican and allied religious organizations was initially concocted in Paris by an agency that served a goal similar to the one that the NSA http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining  and CIA http://consciouslifenews.com/dark-thirty-review-glenn-greenwald-cia-hagiography-pernicious-propaganda/1146532/ serve in Washington and Brussels today.

Of course, the name of the proto-Vatican agency, originating most likely in an office in the Court of Charlemagne, is long lost (deliberately erased), transferred to peripheral areas to attract less attention, and become Potemkin village-like facades overgrown with several layers of moss. The topic of how to transform mere ‘surveillance’ (spying) to ‘heretical’ and counterproductive ‘activism’ is well illustrated in the stepping stones that led to the tinkering with spirituality (the fiasco of modern ‘art’), to 9/11, and to the recent ‘Boston Marathon Massacre’. What is yet missing, but what we may expect to appear shortly, is a CIA financed armed neo-Christian revival. The Christian mercenaries fighting in Syria have been but a prelude, a sort of trial run.

As we learned in the previous blog (176), the argument the Vatican uses in defending God, ‘religion’ and “life”, came by way of its mouthpiece, re: Cardinal Ravasi. Ravasi claims that "Religion celebrates life, but here [in the figurine of St. Death] you have death." Ravasi’s statement acts as an opening salvo in the Vatican’s call for a ‘New Evangelization’ campaign http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/new-evangelization-you-must-be-kidding , which will be financed, just as the Polish Pope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II , was financed by you know who.

The first and foremost rebuttal to Ravasi is that his ‘religion’ of life, has nothing to do with God, who is a creation of the community, the ‘One Big Roof’ or 'Big Other' the community needs to stay bonded in brother-sisterhood. The ‘life’ that Ravasi describes as the initiator of his religion, has nothing to do with Ravasi’s or any one of our ‘lives’, which are all singularities that came into the world with the birth of each one of us.” The phenomenon of ‘Life’ is well enough explained by the physicist Erwin Schroedinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F.

It is interesting that the Vatican’s emphasis on ‘life’ and not the community. This coincides perfectly with the interests of the novus ordo seculorum headquartered in Washington.

Since this blogger has been advocating the displacement of the ‘Vatican story’ of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, with the story of JesusTheBogomil in Byzantium (Tsargrad or Constantinople), the future promises us an interesting literary tussle between the West and East.

The challenge of the East to the West may begin with the East pointing out that the ‘Vatican story’ or version of the New Testament is a False Flag, a story rewritten by the Vatican from a Christianity [Cross + Road] of much earlier days than the Vatican allows. I discuss the two different versions of the story in my Jesusthebogomil.blogspot.

As for the Vatican (re)evangelization campaign:

If we study old creation myths, most of them mention a Creator God or Goddess, Who sacrifices Him or Herself to realize or make real His-Her creation. The theology contained in old myths has little to do with ‘saving’ individuals, but everything to do with regenerating the community. [The NSA and CIA are of course interested in weakening such a community in favor of rule by Washington.]

Let us take an old Aztec myth. Incidentally, the Aztecs were well known for making human sacrifices, which inspired great fear and terror in the witnesses. I take my quotes from a book by David Carrasco, “City of Sacrifice”, Beacon Press, pgs. 73-87. The Aztecs had a special word: “…regeneration was called teomiqui, to die divinely or ‘dying like a god dies.” In other words, we may interpret from this that at the beginning of time the old Gods of the region later conquered by the Aztecs, sacrificed themselves. There is no mention that the old Gods of the Toltec nations of earlier generations made human sacrifices. Human sacrifice was a later invention of the Aztec conquerors.

The Aztec conquerors did not feel secure in their conquest of the old indigenous Toltec tribes round about today’s Mexico City, but ruled over them with great violence. The Aztecs are said to have originated from a wandering people from the north, who went West (they held the South to be on their left) and then turned south http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/46981/Aztec . As the invaders settled into a more sedentary way of life, they began to ritualize their violence.

Accustomed to getting their way by killing their opponents, but having come to a land where such violence was not common practice (see above: regeneration,  teomiqui, self-sacrifice), the Aztecs gave the old tradition their own violent interpretation: they substituted the self-sacrifice of former Gods-rulers with human sacrifice. To have humans to sacrifice (finding no volunteers among their own community), they waged war on their neighbors to capture prisoners, who were then brought back to Tenochtitlán , where they were sacrifice on top of Templo Mayor, the great temple at the heart of the Azted capital city.

The ritualization of violence by the Aztecs was a development that paralleled the rebuilding of the shrine to the Aztec God Huitzilopochtli by the Aztec king Moctezuma http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/275172/Huitzilopochtli . The reconstructed shrine was then rededicated as the Templo Mayor. However, not all of the conquered people were happy to collaborate with the Moctezuma in the rebuilding of the temple of a God, who claimed to have killed all of the four hundred previous Gods.

Writes Carrasco: “… the independent community of Chalco refused to participate, and was declared in rebellion of the Aztecs. A ferocious war was launched and eventually the Chalcans were defeated. Their captured warriors were brought to the Templo Mayor and, along with other prisoners of war, sacrificed at its rededication. This pattern of celebrating the expansion of the Great Temple with warfare and the sacrifice of enemy warriors was followed by subsequent Aztec kings who increased the sacrificial festival as a means of controlling resistance and peripheral territories.”

On one occasion as many as 2300 warriors were sacrificed at Temple Mayor. It is unlikely that this pretentious ‘sacrifice’, so similar to the pretentious (hubristic) killing of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in our day by those who would globalize human culture on our common planet under their aegis is anything but a manifestation of spiritual failure and an attempt to institutionalize a hollow God.

The self-sacrifice of the original Gods and rulers of the Toltec people is best illustrated by the story of how Nanauatzin (the Pimply Populist) threw himself into a fiery pit to encourage and ensure the birth of the “Fifth Sun”.

Eso’s Chronicles 176
The Moneytheist Commons (VII)
© Eso A.B.

I am among those who believe that God is not a particle, but a wave. To apply the Heisenberg solution to the God problem, enables one to view God as both a wave and a particle, but to prove that He-She is one or both, one has to make the ‘quantum jump’ and jump over an awesome crevice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZJJ99jETLI . That is to say, one has to die to find out.

Because nature knows that this test is inevitable may be one of the reasons why it causes one to age. After all, only when one is old (enough) and has seen what life has to offer, physical exhaustion may make one even eager to see what comes next—even if it is no more than a look into the face of Emptiness https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg73QPQLTJIvHL6e0MymkUyP_o8-7ECrj0wDlzJI0ks5URdriVVi-XIryCjijdlrdct7ZHu1jHuy9fzdsojSQhyeYK0JT6YwcgdT8rNrAOGHriiw8P3yy3mlflzERKqmlsdXoDpUZjScac/s400/picture-15.png .

The neo-Christian Church is vociferously opposed to such a perspective. In the following link, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Ravasi http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181, tells that worshipping Santa Muerte (blog 175) is a "degeneration of religion".... Cardinal Ravasi said the practice was "anti-religious". "Religion celebrates life, but here you have death," he said. "It's not religion just because it's dressed up like religion; it's a blasphemy against religion", the Cardinal continued.

Whose ‘religion’ is Ravasi talking about? His own, no doubt. He hits the nail on the head if at the back of his head, he allies his ‘religion’ with  capitalism, which is whence its chief support, ever since Charlemagne decided to remove the spiritual centre from the East and move it to the West, comes from.  Catholicism (and its offshoots), which stand for the exclusivity of human rights for the wealthy (originally the French Princes), which have ever since tried to fool the poor and uneducated that it is their ‘right’ also. The last is a peculiar assertion, given that historically the Vatican has but choreographed empty ceremonies. How did this ‘religion’ become the ruling ideology? “By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed,” says one philosopher”.* There is no shortage of those who are fooled.

The claim by Cardinal Ravasi that religion celebrates life is simply untrue. At least it was never true before Catholicism tried through yet another Cardinal, one named Peter to impose such a ‘truth cum lie’ on behalf of the wealthy on the poor http://i.qkme.me/3p345z.jpg . To understand the nature of this ‘truth’, we have to take another look at the ritual known as the Last Supper, in which the elders of a given community share in a sacred pie within which is hid a piece of the ‘body of the Gods’, a piece of coal. It was Jesus’ fate to draw this piece, whereby he became a Sacred King.

It was this archaic ritual that ensured (the Last Supper occurred before Jesus arrived in Jerusalem) that their community was ruled in the most ‘democratic’ way possible. Because no one is free of mistakes, knows this, and is prepared to pay for any trespass with one’s life, the community is ever forgiving. This commitment was the reason why the secular lords wished to seize and kill the Chosen One. They could stop the tradition only if they discovered who had drawn the sacred piece of coal before the people learned of it. This is why they arranged with Peter, who acted as the purser of the traveling court of the Sacred King, that he would pay Judas, one of the twelve who acted as Basil’s servants, thirty pieces of silver to kiss Jesus, and indicate through the kiss who had drawn the St. Death card. Foreknowledge gave the authorities time to fabricate a crime with which to blame Jesus. For example, the two ‘thieves’, later said to have been crucified on either side of the heretic ‘King’, were important ‘witnesses’ to the crime. This is what makes it likely that it was the thieves who were taken down from the cross early and recovered, not Jesus), whom they tortured and made beg for his life to escape the pain.

Before the arrival of neo-Christianity, religion used to manifest itself through a Festival celebrated by the whole COMMUNITY. Catholic Christianity succeeded in toppling the Festivals by imposing on people the meme of hubris through the dogma of individual immortality. In this way, the ruling clique succeeded in fracturing communal solidarity by kaleidoscoping into one the ritual of self-sacrifice and the ritual of public execution, and topping it with a promise of immortality. The meme of immortality has been in the ‘works’ for over two thousand years by our time, and has replaced the yeast that raised the dough of the old commons with a community bonded by no more than waterproofed paper Money.

Needless to say, the Bible has little to say about the community. “Bear one another's burdens, and… fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) is about as close as it gets.

Yet there are few oligarchs who have given away their possessions or taken on another’s burdens. The reason is simple:  the ‘others’ are the poor, and the burdens of poverty are hard to bear. This is illustrated by the sharp drop in prices (halving them) for the services of immigrant prostitutes in London http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22106546 , while their opposite, the neo-native American presidential penis galore swears innocence before an audience he does not have to make eye contact with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs , then uses his notoriety to make money http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bill_clinton_paid_for_minute_speech_YVpCd5lHlDc290PUeU64zN , hand over dick, so to speak. It’s a strange, strange world, Mr. Jack Klinton! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0WvXpyufT8 Is it not?

A reader of my blogs has communicated to me that he believes that God has little to do with life, death, or community, but that the issue is rather one of monotheism vs polytheism. When I was introduced to this perspective, I was compelled to imagine God as a persona suffering from an incurable multi-personality disorder.

A God suffering from a multi-personality disorder makes sense if we remember that the Magna Charta (1209) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/magna_01.shtml was written on behalf of princes and barons in revolt against the authority of the King, aka the Monarch. To the extent that the office of King had abandoned all pretexts to be a self-sacrificial office on behalf of the community, the revolt of the princes was legitimate. However, it is no secret, that England’s princes were not ‘reformers’ of abandoned ancient traditions of government, but forerunners to neo-capitalist anarchism achieved at the price of turning Olympus into a bank for polymorphous currencies.

Money is a flexible tool of exchange: it can be gold, silver, or paper, and it can be broken down into small change, which can be inflated or deflated according to whoever is in charge of the money printing office. In our day, the individual in charge of U.S. Moneytheism is Cardinal Bernank. Moneytheism rhymes easily with monotheism, and blends centralized power into the structure of a pyramid without difficulties.

A Moneytheistic God stands for centralized government over which those who find themselves on the periphery have little to say. In our day, the only people who are consulted from the periphery is a group known [curiously, but tellingly, as the Bilderbergs, i.e., Picturemounts of Iconic wealthy individuals].

A similar problem with regard to actualizing democracy was faced by our forebears. They solved the problem by remodeling the peak of the gold leafed pyramid into an office that symbolized self-sacrifice. Thus, the sacred oath of the Sacred King was that he would give his life. His face thereafter was portrayed as shining in gold leaf.

Unfortunately, a copy of the disciple Peter, the purse carrier of the Sacred King’s sacred Court, is today embodied by someone known as Cardinal Bernank. Cardinal Bernank has passed the kiss on to President Obama, who (in imitation of Stalin’s reaction to the kiss received from Lenin) washes his hands and passes his sacred responsibilities on to a technocratic State bureaucracy.

This buck passing gives the President the ‘legal’ right—if I insist that money today is of paper, while he insists it is of gold—to fly up to my window with a drone helicopter and fire a rocket.

Uncritical surrender to Moneytheism encourages individualism to climb and reach previously unimaginable levels of incoherence—which is where urban society of today locates us. Though the opposition to the present structure of society may be great, there is no mention of this opposition in the Moneytheistic media which has been bought up by the oligarchy.

*Slavoy Zizek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p. 153.

 

What happened to the past in the past? [3]

This is a mini-series of blogs embedded in a greater series of blogs that concern the self-sacrificial religion known as arch-Christianity (as opposed to present-day neo-Christianity. This blog first appeared as a letter to Truthdig.com

After the Romanov coup, a succession of tsars not only destroyed much of Russian history, but began to impose on native arch-Christians a state version of religion, re neo-Christianity. The tsars followed the process developed some centuries before by the neo-Christians of the West when they eliminated the Cathars among the Albigensians. Johns Children among the Balts, and did their best to eliminate the Jews. Though the latter suffered grievous attacks, they were able to give the neo-Christians the slip because neo-Christian kings and princes were of a divided mind about Jewish expertise as tax collectors and with money.

Up to the time of the Romanovs, the Turkic and Slavic people had pretty much been practicing the same religion. Russian arch-Orthox Christians attended the mosques of Islam and Muslims attended Christian churches. It was the Romanovs who by imposing a Western chronology and exclusivist interpretation of what happened to Johns (they were turned into Jesus) that started the wars between Slav and Turk and divided the Eastern Empire even further.
What does it mean when I write “the Johns were turned into Jesus”?

Those who have been to India will no doubt have run across the sadhus, the holy men walking the dusty roads of India, bathing in the Ganges River, sitting cross legged in marketplaces, wherever. Once such men were ubiquitous not only in India, but throughout the world, Europe including. While Europe has forgotten these traveling teachers—for that is what they ultimately were—they were known in Europe by the name of John. The Irish knew their Johns as Ian, the French as Jean, Juan, Gean, the Spaniards as Huan, the Italians as Giovanni, the Germans as Johann or Hans, the Balts as Yan, the Russians as Ivan, etc. While all of these names remain popular as given names, they are also still be found in derivative names such as gendarme, genealogy, gentlemen, and so on and on. To be a sadhu or john, one did not have to be called John, one could as well be known as Bob, or Jesus, or Johammed.

But then Johns were prescribed a death sentence: you either bake in the fires of auto-da-fe, convert to Jesus—the only John who will save you—or run for your life to the swamp. Why was it desirable to eliminate the Johns? Answer: all holy men are down to the bones of their souls egalitarians. The Johns preached a message hateful to the ears of the secular princes then coming to the fore: economic equality, economic fairness if not down to the last detail, then at least commonsensical.

The first John whose death is marked in a history book was called Basil and he was thrown into a raging fire pit at Constantinople by the Byzantine king Alexius I (12th century?). The Byzantine king insisted that he knew more about divine matters than John-Basil. In the West we know this king better by the name of Herod.

The news of Alexius I outrageous act reached the ears of most European Johns and their charges. It was relatively easy task for the secular princes to take advantage of the wrath of the populace and lead a march on Constantinople-Jerusalem. Of course, the princes of the West did not have the slightest interest in Basil, except that his death gave them a pretext to attack a king of the Eastern Empire.