Eso’s Chronicles 261/ 1
21—Nowhere to Run
© Eso A.B.

Once upon a time there lived Ra-Zhanna. She was a witch. People called her a witch because they were jealous of her. They were jealous of her for several reasons.

The first reason people were jealous of her was because her name, Ra-Zhanna, meant: Ra=the Sun; Zhanna=bountiful (in Russian=Zhenshchina —woman https://www.google.lv/#q=translate+woman+into+russian ). In antiquity Ra-Zhanna clearly used to be a Sun priestess. Then the Christians of the West came and wanted off with her. The Swedes then changed her name to Ragna the conjurer, but the Latvians and Lithuanians changed her name from Ra-Zhanna (a woman of means and more) to Ragana (a witch, a healer, a herder, a woman who eats fly agaric, a filthy payan when all is said and done).

Along with her duties as a priestess of the Sun, Ra-Zhanna served also as a judge of her people. This job was divided in two parts. The first part was that of a midwife: She was present when most children of her tribe were born. Her presence guaranteed that the children had the Sun’s blessing.

The second part of what she did was to perform the role of a judge. This gave her power to decide whether one would live or die. It was said that Ra-Zhanna was merciless. When she said that someone should lose their head, they always did. This was in the days before the written law.

When writing came along, probably invented by castrated men, it dismissed the Goddess. They could not cope with her subjective mindset, which after all could change its mind. If there was a death sentence, it was likely carried out within an hour of the decision, and before second thoughts could set in. The so-called ‘scul-rack’ or Tzompantli http://tcmam.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/tzompantli-and-basic-nahuatl/  of the Aztecs provides evidence of what happened. The decapitated heads were lined up next to each other on a rack. Maybe the accountant’s aid, the abacus, was derived from some such device on the Eurasian continent. There is surely a similarity between the two. But the tradition of the destruction of memorabilia in the West has old roots, and as ‘truthers’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthers continue to insist, history gets rewritten before our very eyes to this day.

I have no idea what Ra-Zhenna did with the bodies, but myth tells us that the Egyptian God Osiris was dismembered in 14 parts and these were scattered throughout ancient Egypt to ensure fertility of the land and a bountiful harvest.

It happened that Ra-Zhanna was on her way to the village of Vilz, when the mobile phone began to hum in her pocket, and she put it to her ear. It was raining hard enough, so that the witch also pulled the hood of her jacket over her head. There was no one on the other end of the phone, but instead a message appeared on the screen. It read: “If one believes in wonders, they come. If one has to wait for wonders they arrive.  If one shares in wonders, it brings happiness. Happy Christmas.” The message was unsigned.

Ra-Zhanna scribbled a response:

“This morning the sun rose in a sky full of red clouds and wrapped the moon in a pink scarf. The wonderful thing about wonders and hope is that if someone joins one in expecting them, waiting passes quickly and the sharing of the wish creates an adventure for two.”

She was about to send the message, when she had an idea. She typed: “I am speaking of the Old and New Year. If you tell me what your New Year’s wish is, I may join you in it.” Then she pressed the ‘send’ button.

Ra-Zhanna went on her way. Usually anonymous messages came from people who lived in the big cities and whom she had met while visiting there on a lecture tour. She herself lived in the countryside. It was a matter of principle that she avoided cities. While she recognized their usefulness, she also thought of cities as cancerous growths on the body of the greater community. To her mind, by our time cities had become like tarantulas.  Cities not only devoured the countryside and excreted concrete, but frequently overextended themselves and had to make war and kill hundreds of thousands of innocents in order not to collapse.

Again the mobile telephone hummed. This time the message read: “Hi! I am a hacker at NSA. A drone with a New Year’s present is on the way!”

Ra-Zhanna threw her mobile phone as far away as she could and began to run. She turned left, turned right, turned back, and then ran forward again. There was not a tree around where to hide. There was no Sun in the sky and it was full of cloudy. She wished she were already dead.