EC 516

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

25 Of Sinking Ships, Cabbages, 

and Knyazs

The age of trubadours began in what is now the French province of Languedoc after the Catholic Church exterminated what it called heretics, the Cathars. Today it is commonly thought—as a consequence of that extermination and the propaganda of justification that followed the Albigensian Crusade—that the Cathars were late arrivals, a kind of infection that pounced out of nowhere on the Christian faith. But what if the Cathars (artisans, specifically makers of chairs) had been in Ocetan (later Languedoc) long before the arrival of the Catholics?

If we accept that Christianity has little to do with Catholicism (and that Catholicism is an infection the Christian faith suffers from), we may come to see how the replacement of Christian egalitarianism (a source of peace on Earth) with coercive taxation designed to impose on humankind a secular government* has resulted in the mess wrought upon  us and times by governments.

*I submit that by a long process of wars, a government that initially consisted of a war lord, has evolved through a series of steps into a two tier social system: government and a full-employment bureaucracy VS the rest of humankind, consisting of outcasts, exploited by the first for whatever is left on Earth to exploit.

One of the results of the murder of the Cathars was the rise (some say ‘rebirth’) of sexuality. The troubadours were among the agents of that rise. However, before the phenomenon burst into its present bloom of red algae, it was (as per the above Wikipedia link) associated with

“… Mariology that most strongly influenced the development of the troubadour genre. Specifically, the emphasis on religious and spiritual love, disinterestedness, mysticism, and devotion to Mary would explain "courtly love". The emphasis of the reforming Robert of Arbrissel on "matronage" to achieve his ends can explain the troubadour attitude towards women.”

One may argue that ‘mariology’ is a resistasance movement that arose of the ashes of incinerated Cathars. Of course, the victor, the Pope, soon claimed the movement for his own. Thereafter the movement ‘progressed’ as a result of a combination of factors, re: i) gloss of propaganda (to cover up earlier crimes); ii) diversion of attention from crimes by replacing noble songs with bawdy stuff that celebrated cannibalistic sexuality; and iii) was wily compromise by allowing the losers to keep up a sense of hope that some small element of their ‘beaten up’ beliefs may survive.

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That the crimes of the Catholic Church have not been forgotten is testified to by the so-called miracle at Fatima (1916) and the miracle of Lourdes (1858). While Fatima is located in Portugal, and Lourdes in Occitania, France, the latter event clearly is influenced by the first.

The ‘miracle’ of Fatima—the appearance of Virgin Mary to three small children—consists of a series of prophecies told by Virgin Mary to the children. The first two prophecies referred to immediate times and were immediately revealed, while the third prophecy, passed on to the Vatican, was to be revealed in 1960. However, came 1960, the Vatican refused to reveal it. This makes any future release of the ‘prophecy’ subject to suspicions of being a lie, and the crime—abandonment by Catholic Christianity of humankind to the dictates of secular government—not only a foregone conclusion, but confirmation that some such is what the content of the message of Third miracle is about.

The march of events from the time of the sacking (1209) of the Cathars at Carcassonne (and Jersika) have predictably led to an orgy of violence and pornography in our time (2016). Arguably the hymn of the orgiasts is a song of our times, re: “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones.

To stop the licentious behavior of his son (the way he attracted to himself women to sleep with and the consequences he then tried to evade) grandfather warned father that his job as editor was at stake. At the same time he offered his bastard granddaughter’s grandmother a settlement. It was to be a house on the coast of the Riga Gulf.

Grandfather then compelled his son to also find himself a wife. His youngest daughter’s marriage to the son of the President of Latvija was to play a role in her discovery.

Not all stories have money at the end of their rainbows. Being a young and poor country, Latvija had few wealthy and educated people of breadth and experience. Thus, the problem:--where is a wealthy man to find his children suitable partners in marriage on a social level equal to his ambitions and does not return his progeny to the rough of the Commons? Male children were generally left to their devices. Girl children, raised in an atmosphere of virtual reality that was overtly repressive, offered challenges and exercised a wealthy man’s ingenuity.

Grandfather had wittingly or unwittingly lucked out when his youngest daughter found herself the son of the President as a partner. It is said that my father introduced them to each other. For his other daughter, grandfather found a military man who served as military advisor to the second Latvijan President (Kviesis). To find a marriage partner for his renegade son, he turned his attention to the diplomatic world. At this point, it was my father’s sister’s turn to come to his aid.

Familiar with the private lives of the Latvian political elite, my aunt Marta was aware that the family of the Latvian ambassador to Russia had among its members a daughter of marriageable age. Manya—a Russian language endearment for Maria—was a handsome young woman and sixteen years younger than my father. Because beauty was a valuable ‘thing’ in itself, Manya had neglected her studies. While her sister had finished music school and was earning her living as a piano teacher, Manya was waiting for the world to come to her.

Manya’s father, the ambassador, was more than pleased to bring the world to his daughter. An ambitious man and son of an ambitious farming family*, Karlis Ozols was more than pleased to hear that one of the richest men in Latvija was seeking for his son a partner in marriage.

*The family came from a patriotic and self-assertive region of Latvija (where the Herrnhuters had once been very active). Kārlis brother, had become a lawyer, while he, the younger, worked as a surveyor. As such, Kārlis found a job surveying land in Russia near the southern tier of the Ural Mountains, where Russia was to build the Trans Siberian Railroad.

With the natural environment in a state of break-down the world over and the virtual reality of the city (St. Augustine had christened the city ‘holy’) on the rise, Kārlis was on the look-out for favorable circumstances to transition from the Latvijan ‘real’ to the ‘virtual real’ championed by America.

When in Ufa, Russia, Kārlis met the daughter of the local knyaz (in the language of Kievan Rus the name is synonymous with the British title of Prince or Lord), who upon graduating from finishing school for young women in Petrograd/ St. Petersburg, had returned home and was working on her uncle’s estate as bookkeeper and manager.

Of Tartar descent [her maternal grandfather had captured the region of Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) for the Russian Tsar], the young woman, not unlike other young people, was enamored by new ideas and new ways of doing things. This led to her falling in love with the young surveyor from Latvija*. Not surprisingly, this was not acceptable to Russian elites, especially not to her strong willed and uppity mother, who forbade the relationship. This forced grandmother to exercise her own will in the matter.

*At the time, Rīga, had a reputation of being a progressive city, on par with Stockholm, Sweden.

When the young couple decided to marry, they could find no Russian priest who would perform the ceremony for fear of being ostracized from the Russian Orthodox Church* and upper class society. Therefore, the young couple had little choice but elope to Rīga, where they found a retired Orthodox priest, who for a remuneration and contribution to his meager pension married them.

*To close the ‘great East-West Schism’, the Eastern Christians (the losers of a military conflict) were compelled to accept the Scriptures as created and doctored by the West. This is, of course, a great problem for Russia. What to do? How to return to the social concepts that ruled before it was forced to turn its Eschaton oriented religious theology for the Capitalist ideology of the West? Surely the social order of the world would be radically different today had Eastern Christianity been able to prevent the rise of the predatory capitalism of the Vikings cum West.

Following the marriage, the young surveyor, with the help of his Russian wife and her small inheritance, which she had received from her uncle (tēvocis), now had the means to enter and  graduate as an engineer from Riga University. Following graduation, he took a job at then well-known Putova factory in St. Petersburg. When WW1 broke out, he was sent by the authorities of the factory and government as a quality control engineer of railroad cars to Canada.

Kārlis wife, my maternal grandmother, burdened with three children, was left behind in St. Petersburg, where she had to fend for herself. An enterprising woman, she organized horse drawn food relief wagons from Latvija to Russian nobility of Petrograd, and proved herself an organizer and budding merchant. When the Revolution came, she fled with her three children to Ufa, Bashkortostan, the area in which her forebears’ estates were located.

Unfortunately, fortune did not follow her. The Whites were soon entrapped by the Reds. The train in which her mother, a knyazina, was fleeing along with General Kolhak  to the east, was trapped by the Red Army, and the knyazina was killed by a blow from a rifle butt near the city of Omsk.

To make a long story short, mother, being a good looking young socialite and thing with no particular interests or skills, was as if a God sent offering-in-marriage to grandfather’s sexually addicted son. Father, who had made a mess of his personal life [apparently with a materialist orientation, he had little or no sympathies for the Herrnhuter orientation toward the Eschaton (end of the World as a solution of the word’s problems), even as he was not sufficiently sophisticated to realize that materialism was dependent on lies about reality], was not helping build the reputation of the newspaper.

As for Karlis, after his return to Latvija from America (where as a founder of the Latvian Refugee Relief Organization, he had a chance to meet with President Hoover), he became (through extra ordinary luck that connected him through one of his wife’s forebears, a former knaz who supported the Reds, and his wife’s best friend who had married Tsurupa, who was to become the Soviet Union’s finance minister) Latvija’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Whatever Kārlis ambitions and early successes, his plans came nowhere near realization.

His mentor, my virtual Godfather, the Presidents of Latvija, died in 1927, and the Latvian Foreign Ministry (having got wind of Tsurupa’s and his wife’s visit to Latvia to meet with Kārlis and his wife) used the meeting as reason to fire him from his job at the ministry. Roughly a decade later the Soviet occupiers had Kārlis arrested, and he was transferred to the Llubyanka prison in Moscow, where in June, 1941, he was executed. Stalin himself may have approved his execution. Back in the 1920s, Stalin had accused the Latvian ambassador of transporting the valuables of desperate Russian nobles via diplomatic pouch to Latvia. It is rumored that the pouch held several Faberge eggs.*

*When the Soviets invaded Latvija in the summer of 1940 (likely as a preliminary step to invading the rest of Europe), Kārlis is said to have given two suitcases full of ‘valuables’ to the Swedish ambassador to Latvija to take with him to Sweden. No inventory of the contents of the suitcases was made or discovered. After WW2 the suitcases were allegedly shipped to Kārlis son, an agronomer, who was then working as a researcher in a laboratory at Cornel University. The ship carrying the suitcases of valuables to America is alleged to have foundered in a storm. If the story about the Faberge eggs is true, sinking the ship to ‘lose’ the eggs may have been more than worthwhile.

In the long term, the marriage of Manya and my father was to exact a heavy toll (material and psychological) from mother as well as her children. The marriage did not cure father’s sexual behavior (conceivably acquired while pimping for General Kolchak). Having escaped death on a ship (possibly at anchor in Odessa), father was shot for his sins and indiscretions on April 13, 1942 in Astrahan, and his bones lie buried among the sand dunes somewhere on the Volga delta.