Eso’s Chronicles 329 / 5
Odds and Ends  
© Eso A.B.
 All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

THE SUPERNATURAL AND SUBJECTIVE (5 of 6)

We have read about the Resurrection, but have given little thought that in order for it to take place we need to return to superstition, a term, which was invented by the superstition of science that the mind dies with the body.

I will attempt to answer the question about the origins of ‘superstition’ in a later blog. On this occasion, I will try to stick with the Easter theme, which for the absence in our time of self-sacrifice is no longer accompanied by Resurrection—except as a meaningless word.

Easter is a time in which—so superstition tells us—Jesus rose from the dead. The creators of Easter hastened to celebrate their new Holyday before (the end of April or early May), when the Beltaines began their night and day orgy dedicated to the green fire.

While critics of literature shy away from making the connection, the Greek playwright Euripides wrote a reasonably accurate description of what went on during  “The Bacchae”. What we miss when we read the play is that King Pentheus did not lose his head due to the ‘madness’ of  his mother Agaue having eaten a basket full of fly agaric, but because the king had instituted a gender change for the Sun, which up to that particular festival had been known by her name in the feminine gender–Sonne (German and Old English), or Saule (Latvians).

For reasons of his own, that is to say, for subjective reasons, Euripedes likely believed that the old superstition of the Sun being the mother of all life on Earth (Zemele*) was so ingrained in the minds of the people of the wood that it could never be erased.

The clue of what the superstition about Saule/Sonne was is revealed in a Latvian folk poem, which tells that at Her rising and setting the rays of Sun (Saule, f.g.) shear the tree tops. We may remember here that King Pentheus had climbed to the top of a pine to better see the orgies below. When the Sun rose, her rays blinded the autistic and sex starved King, and when climbing out of the tree, for lack of sight, he lost his footing and grip and tumbled to the Earth below to be ‘devoured’ by his mother (Agaue or Zemele, take your pick).

I believe that the same “Bacchae” event was reflected in the Aztec rites of human sacrifice at the top of Templo Major in what is now Mexico City. When the corpses of the sacrificed (at the top tier of the temple) were thrown down the steep steps, these were awaited below by a two dimensional sculpture of a dismembered Earth Mother— Tlaltecuhtli http://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/images/aztec3figure1.jpg . By a curious and paradoxical twist in the story, Coatlicue (aka ‘the serpent skirt’, the Mother of the Gods and all heavenly bodies, including the Sun) had given birth to the Sun as a male. As if to make up for the error, female sacrifices were also made at the temple (probably to give the Sun feminine aspects). The difference in the story of the Aztecs and Greek Dyonysians is that the Aztecs had the Sun give birth to the male gender as if to replace Her real feminine self. Realizing her mistake, She sacrifice herself to correct herself.

There are so many versions of who the Sun is among the Aztecs http://www.aztec-history.com/aztec-sun-god.html that all those who cared were very confused. To decide whose version is right without going to war over it, the Aztec Gods called for a big get together to see which one of them was able to sacrifice him or herself in lieu of a war by jumping in a pit of fire. None of the Gods proved brave enough. As among government officials today, none of the elite wished to lose life, when there was a surplus of peons available to die in their stead.

At last a God covered by open sores of a venereal disease (to indicate that he was both a God and a human) called Nanauatzin, later renamed Tonatuih, jumped into the fire. By being consumed in a fire (almost identical to the death of John Basil in old Byzantium), Nanauatzin connects to  the fires of the Dyonisian Bacchae Festival, the People of Johns Festival among the Latvians, the Beltaine Festival of Ireland and Scotland, and not least, the death of Jesus Christ (the traitorously renamed John Basil).

Being of pure fire, the Sun demands that in times of peace she is remembered by a display of fire, but in times of war, when the continuance of life appears in doubt, she must be remembered with a self-sacrifice. As the link below tells it, if ordinary sins were confessed by the Slavs in an ordinary hole in earth, sins against life demand a hole deep enough to reach fire.

*Zemele=Semele=Mat Zemlya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat_Zemlya