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The sun rises every day. It will do so, more or less
automatically, until ‘the end of time’.
We do not know the event that will bring ‘the end of time’.
It may be the nearing of another galaxy, perhaps Andromeda, and the disturbance
of the gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy as the nebula nears it.
However, there is yet another sun. This ‘other’ Sun is
spelled with a capital S.
This is the Sun
that gives life. This is the Sun one cannot buy and hook up to solar energy
collectors. This is the Sun that creates out of itself.
As if by some magic this Sun is at just the right distance
from planet Earth. Its orbit allows the Earth to turn green, and out of the
green to emerge Ladybugs, birds, fish, dolphins, elephants, horses, and
ultimately human beings. If this Sun becomes angry, She can scorch the Earth,
turn it arid, and make it become a desert.
It is interesting that from the very beginning of the arrival
of human intelligence, human beings have known that they cannot fully realize
themselves without forming a community. On the other hand, human beings also intuitively
know that given their individualist nature, achieving a community is no easy
task. In some sense, human beings are like termites http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/insects-arachnids/termite2.htm
. It takes a great specialization and effort to build a termite colony, and an
even greater effort to build a human community, then hold the community
together as a loyalty.
The creation and holding together of a community that is
loyal to itself was expressed by our forebears through stories and myths about
the Sun. The sun was chosen, because the sun shines not only on individuals,
but on the whole collective of individuals. When the sun is able to put the
individuals it sees under one roof, so to speak, it becomes known as the Sun
(with a capital S). She is then humankind’s organic Goddess or God for all
those She or He shines upon.
There are at least four (4) major stories of how the Sun
became a God or Goddess. In the beginning, the Sun was more likely to have been
a Goddess. Only later did it become masculine as one of the stories (from Greece
All four stories about the Sun have one story element they
share in. This ‘element’ is the knowledge that before human beings were
gathered into a community, the Sun stood still. As the Aztecs told it, the Sun
barely cleared the eastern horizon, and then remained there doing no more than
wobbling from one side to the other. It would not rise higher, and the people
on the ground became very concerned, because they were afraid that the Sun had
died.
This condition of the Sun or the community dying is an
issue—though few imagine it—to this today. One of the reasons why this is so is
because our ‘modern’ leadership believes it can lead without self-sacrificing
anything of themselves. These ‘acutely modern’ or ‘post modern’ communities are
generally found in what we know as the West, specifically the lands that are
occupied by a people educated in the West. Why is this so?
I will give the answer through the fourth and last story of
this series on “Why 4 Suns Stood Still”. I may, of course, tie into these
stories elements from stories from other communities, because, as I have
already mentioned, all stories share in the common element of needing to get
the Sun to rise in the sky for everything else to come to life.
But to wet the readers’ appetite, I will hint at the cause that
stops the Sun in Her tracks. It was the discovery of gold and the creation of money. Gold and money destroyed the glue that
held a community together as a loyalty. As I explain all this in detail as I
proceed, it will become apparent to the reader just what a loyalty is and why it is a name no longer used in describing a
community.
Before we get to discuss gold, we need to give some attention to silver.
You see, silver is heavy. To carry a thousand pounds of
silver in one’s pocket is impossible or very cumbersome to say the least. To
slice silver into silver leaf is not a solution, because when silver oxidizes,
it turns black. To scrape it off the piece of paper it would be glued on for
more convenient handling risks being left with nothing but paper.
In later years, when money was created out of gold (a bar of
gold was sliced into a million slices of gold leaf and glued with potato starch
on a small piece of paper), ‘money’ came into its own. Indeed, the old belief
in God or Goddess or Sun was discarded, and the name for these Big Others,
became Money. Money enabled human beings to believe that they could do without
a community, because as long as they had gold currency, they could buy themselves
a community anytime they wished.
Moreover, a money-bought community could be more to one’s
liking than a community that had come together in the time before there was
gold or money. For one, people could leave the wood and the countryside and
move into an urban environment. In the urban environment the people could make
themselves ‘smell’ any odor they liked. This is how the old communities and
loyalties became known as ‘old’, and ‘old’ became associated with everything unpleasantly
“smelly”. Maybe this is because people of the wood and country do not have
deodorants other than incense and their toilets are dry and known as
‘outhouses’.
There are also yet other problems with money-bought communities.
When the money found its way into the pockets of a man, he generally bought
himself a community of whores, who he gathered in ‘harems’, a name that stands
for the bathhouse where the wool of sheep used to be washed; if the money was
in the pockets of a woman, she generally bought herself a community of gigolos,
among whom were her own sons, sex starved wolves from the city wearing white
sheep’s clothing.
So, this is when and how the Sun again became ill, lost
energy, and died. The Sun again needed to be resurrected. Who will be the hero
to do so?
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