EC 593 at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Of Cities and Citybred Monsters

By © E. Antons Benjamiņš, 2017

Of

Cities

and Citybred

Monsters

The city is our weapon, its monster is our spirit.

By © E. A. Benjamins, 2017

Foreword

Something happened. Nobody quite knows what. But it happened, and the consequences of it are wreaking devastating results to our own days. This short book attempts to explain what it was that ‘happened’.

Unless human beings originated on planets beyond planet Earth, which this author is not sure about, human beings most likely originated in the warm climate of Africa, whence they spread outward to occupy the planet.

While we dwelt in warm climates, we walked mostly naked, or used dry grasses or salvaged animal pelts for dress. Our dress came from the animal herds we herded for the sake of milk and cheese, which we supplemented with roots, berries, fruit, and mushrooms, which we had learned to pick at an earlier time. Later, during the summer time, when we drove our herds north to the tundra, we learned to become meat eaters, and used animal furs more extensively. Indeed, we we were “herders and gatherers”, not “hunters and gatherers” as today’s city bred anthropologists are trying to tell us.

As the young men, sometimes accompanied by their girl friends drove the herds of their homesteads to pasture in spring and returned “home” in the fall, our “home”, initially no more than a hut in a tree, or a cave, or a dwelling made of bamboo by the river bank, became more substantial, increased in number, and formed a cluster, which setting was to become a village city, and later still, a city with a temple at its center.

As the dispersal of early humans and their animal herds gained humans experience and ever increasing confidence in themselves, the city became of ever increasing importance as “home”. However, to remain a “home”, the city had to be a friendly and welcoming place. Else, the herders might not come home, but what with their wifes and children turning into ‘camp followers’ stay in parts unknown, become alienated, and perhaps even enemies .of the stay-at-homes.

To maintain themselves as ‘friendly places’, early cities could not afford to become the impersonal piles of glass and concrete, run by direct, parliamentary, or pseudo ‘democratic’ governments, they have become today. Thus, the early governors of cities were sacred kings, who gave their lives to maintain the necessarily friendly ‘morphic field’ that resonated far and wide and enticed the herders to come back home.

It is this attraction of home as temple why, in the early days of history (according to Anatoly Fomenko*), the name Jerusalem was generic for all cities.

*On Jerusalem, re Anatoly Fomenko, “Hidtory: Fiction or Science”. Vol. 1.

The Sphinx as an Extraterrestrial

When I began to rewrite the story of King Oedipus, I did not yet have the answer for the riddle of the Sphinx. I continued to be  beholden to verbal trickery implicit in the Sphinx’s question: ‘Who stands first on four, then two, then three legs?’ Artistic renditions showed that the Sphinx stood on four, Prince Oedipus on two legs. Who stood on three?

School had taught me to accept the orthodox answer “an old man” with a cane. But this answer seemed too obvious and, therefore, suspect. Only later did it occur to me that the problem is with the questioner, who was not necessarily Oedipus. If so, then the Sphinx, too, is not necessarily as portrayed by convention.

For plague ravaged Thebes (or New York, London, Brussels, Moscow, Riga, or Beijing), the relevant question is not the one that issues out of the mouth of the Sphinx, but that of its city-zens, i.e.: “What plagues us, what plagues Thebes?”

Today Oedipus’s answer to the City or citizens of Thebes is: “Your mindset;” which as anthropologists insist also means: our environment.

Just look at the mindset of the Monster that has ensconced itself in the Forbidden City of Beijing or in the Trump Tower in New York City. Tnis is not to say the present occupants of said places (Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump) have any idea of the consequences of their thoughts or that they imagine themselves in any way guilty of the consequences of their limitations. Like King Oedipus, they and thousands of government officials like them kill without giving the act a thought. They kill without knowing  what they do, and go unrecognized for who they are by their fellow city-zens or courts of law.

This is not to say that I am against cities. But I am against the overbuilding of cities by citizens (city-zens=cityjohns) who are building they know not what to know not what end.

Incidentally, the biologist (in the link) who puts the blame for extinction of life on fossil fuels or companies who produce them is no less guilty of being a killer than those he blames, as he is no less a city dweller than those who use fossil fuels the most. This is not to say that city people are knowingly killers, but to suggest that they know not what the consequences are of what they do. For that matter, they also know not what they think, because they live in a world that has little to do with the real world..

In short, Sophocles play “Oedipus the King” is, next to the Biblical story (Gen. 19) of Sodom and Gomorrah, among the first documents that put the blame for the attempt to destroy God’s Creation on city dwellers and city governments. One ought not to be surprised that the first city is built by Cain who killed his brother Abel.

When Prince Oedipus approaches Thebes and meets the Sphinx in the wood just outside of the city gates, he does not realize that the Sphinx is an para-projection of what used to be the Soul of Thebes, and that he, Oedipus, is the mirror image of the Sphinx, the misfortune of Thebes.