Eso’s Chronicles 332 / 8
Odds and Ends  
© Eso A.B.
 All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

THE PRIESTHOOD OF KILL (2)

A ‘selfie’ is a photograph taken of ourselves by ourselves. Generally a ‘selfie’ is also an arms length close-up.

But if a ‘selfie’ was to be taken by an aborigine, who believes that a photograph takes away some of his spirit or, better, dilutes the spirit, then a ‘selfie’ becomes a little bit of a ‘suicide’. Were John or Jesus alive today would they take a ‘selfie’ photograph of themselves?

I believe that ‘No’ they would not.

Again, from the perspective of an aborigine, a photograph of him (or ourselves) is a frightening and self-denying thing. We can best see this when we see an aborigine who paints his face and body http://www.veniceclayartists.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2860915373_09e1131ac9.jpg , and compare it to a selfie photograph http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/07/oscars-selfie-most-retweeted-ever .

The difference between an image of an aborigine of himself and a ‘selfie’ is that the first projects his inner or subjective being himself, while the ‘selfie’ projects him- and ‘others’ as a bunch of smiling undead, whereas when given to a pop artist, the image tends to be projected as a corpse https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipmVSEq8Ac7ocHuieC8Hm0XhB04GAh4jkn99d2OizUa07cfBaRhbxv15jBCjE22sXFIS8oCMt2lQhgJqWSRAxQWrVIytka3S_1UAZqL7a0NIwF33jetigmwXo2sSKSVk8qhgfUEGn2aGw/s1600/IMG_0655.PNG .

The images provided by the links above show us how the images differ if we project 1) from inside ourselves, 2) how we look from the outside through the ‘dead eye’ of a camera, and 3) through the eye of ‘another’, who sees ¹⁾ and ²⁾ as a joke or, if you will, a kind of and sort of undead.

The difference in the images gives us an insight into the politics of the past and present.

In the past, when most humans lived in the wood and were surrounded by trees and other life, humankind projected itself from within.

Today the artist attempts, consciously or unconsciously, to take the perspective of the government, which he-she believes to be the real ‘artist’ (good, bad, or indifferent) behind the shaping of the people who populate our planet today.

The difference in perception of ‘reality’ is radically different.

Let us imagine that the ‘artist’ is a ‘psychologist’ in the hire of government. The very fact of being hired by the government turns the psychologist into sort of a potter at a potter’s wheel.

In some sense the ‘potter’ also becomes something of a political scientist, who given the facts that 1) is dead and gone, and 2) is a game of children, becomes 3) a new fangled creature [¹⁾⁺³⁾], no longer lives in the wood, but the urban desert. The potter-artist attempts to manipulate the 1) or subjective self of the rest of us through becoming an agent working for the NAS, CIA, FBI, or becoming a government mercenary. The inescapable ‘creative’ result is is not an agnostic, but an ‘atheist’.

A consequence of inverting the wood into an urban desert projects as an image of Jacob wrestling with an angel http://uploads8.wikipaintings.org/images/gustave-dore/the-wrestle-of-jacob-1855.jpg . Jacob succeeds  in ‘pinning’ the angel to the floor, and thereby becomes an anticipant of the atheist.

In real life, this event happened thrice.

1)    When King John or John Basil (aka the Bogomil) was picked a fight with by Emperor Alexis I of Byzantium.  The Emperor built a burning pyre and forced John Basil to stand next to it. In his defense, Basil began to “[talk] marvels and boasting that he would be seen unharmed in the middle of the fire, [while] they [the mercenaries of the Emperor] took his cloak and said, ‘Now let us see whether the fire will touch your garments’, and they threw it right into the middle of the pyre. But Basil was so uplifted by the demon that was deluding him that he said, ‘Look my cloak floating up to the sky!’ Then they… pushed him [Basil], clothes, shoes and all, into the middle of the pyre….”

The other story tells of the death of Jesus, who was substituted for Basil:

2)    The story is at Matthew 27:32-56: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+27%3A32-56

The two stories differ little from each other, except in the version told of Jesus, a) Jesus acknowledged taxation, while John Basil never does. Also, b) the disbelief of Jesus as the Son of God is corrected by the rending of the curtain in the temple and the soldiers exlaiming: “Surely he was the Son of God!”

There is, however, one more story, a lie, that tells the difference between John Basil of the People and Jesus of the Jews: the Bogomils believed that John was the eldest Son of God, whom the inventors of Jesus renamed John by changing and rewriting his name from Saint Ian to Sant-[Y]aniel, the Devil.

*Most of the information in this blog taken from Dmitri Obolensky’s “The Bogomils”. 1948, Cambridge U. Press.