Eso’s Chronicles 182/ 4
The Aborted Head
© Eso A.B.

When King Pentheus had climbed into the pine tree in which the Sun had got herself stuck, the King could not quite reach Her from his perch. So, he reached up with his spear and gave her a few pokes with it.  

Try as he might, Pentheus had no luck getting the Sun to move. He thought of climbing yet a little higher, but the heat of the sun was boiling the resin of the pine until it broke through its bark, whence it dripped and collected on one of the edges of the perch where Pentheus was to stand.

Meanwhile, Dionysus and the maenads had began to crowd into the grove below. Everyone who came to the mountain and entered the grove fell on their knees and looked up to the Sun in the pine tree. The would be revelers set up a chorus of moans and wailing. Pentheus, not wishing to be seen, moved to the opposite side of the tree, where he was well hid by the pine’s branches. Unfortunately, the heat from the trapped Sun was melting the resin on that side of the pine as well. Soon King Pentheus’ hands were not only sticky from resin, but the resin was hot and stayed hot for long enough to raise on the skin of his palms painful blisters. For fear of his hands sticking to the bark and tearing the blisters open, the Pentheus hardly dared touch anything. He was forced to move back to his perch, a place where his overcoat was likely to be covered with dripping resin and seen by those looking up from below.

Indeed, it was not long before King Pentheus was seen. There then arose a loud cry and many hands and fingers pointed at him.

“May the Sun burn you to cinder!” a maenad screamed guessing that the King had come into sight because the Sun had scorched him.

Another shouted: “What are you doing there, King!?”

“Jump, King!... Your face is ugly!... We’ve been waiting to show you a porno!...” screamed others.

Still others shouted: “We’re coming after you!” and rushed at the tree and began to climb after the King. When a number of women had reached him, they grabbed his legs and let themselves hang loose. There was nothing Pentheus could do (because of his blistered hands, he could not grab hold of any branches to hang on to), but had to allow himself to be dragged down. Pentheus fell together with three or four maenads holding on to him. They rolled out of the branches and fell into a crowd of outraged women, who had gathered at the bottom of the pine. Pentheus was seized by many women, all of who bit or tore his flesh.

Even as the King felt being torn apart, he suddenly heard a voice close to his ear. The voice was that of his mother. It said: “Be brave, my son. The sacrifice has been foreordained. You must die!” Then the King received a blow to the back of his head, upon which he lost consciousness.

The King’s mother, whose name was Agave, was among the Bacchantes and among the first women to seize Pentheus and wrestle him to the ground. She had then laid herself on the King’s back and killed him by driving a sharp end of a piece of flint into the back of his skull. Now she used the same flint to cut off Pentheus’ head.

Once the King’s head was severed from his body, Agave seized it by its hair and held it up for all to see. “Here! Here!” she shouted, “Here is our offering to the Sun! May no man ever dare to take Her place!”

Another maenad snatched the head out of Agave’s hands and put it between her legs and held it there in an up-side down position. “Here is the abortion!” the maenad screamed with her skirt turned red from the King’s blood, then passed the head to the maenad standing next to her. This one put the head between her legs and began to hop with it—until her knees could hold it no longer and it fell to the ground. In this way the head made its way around the crowd, until Agave retrieved it.

Holding the King’s head by the hair and holding her arm extended before her as if she were holding a lantern, Agave began to run to Thebes. Soon  the head was again snatched from her by another maenad who had joined the run. With the head changing hands frequently, almost the entire band of Bacchantes was soon back in Thebes, where the head was taken to the outhouse at the marketplace and dumped into the excrement hole.

After all the Bacchantes had relieved themselves on the head, Agave had it retrieved and washed. Then she held it aloft once more, screaming: “O, what made you compete with the Sun!? O, Pentheus! O, my son!?” Only now did the Bacchantes awaken to the fact that the King had been killed by none other than his mother. Many now joined the mother in howling and screaming louder than they ever had at any other human sacrifice.

After a long dirge, Agave seemed to have an idea. She asked her attendants to bring her a barrel of pine resin, such as was kept in Thebes for lighting torches. When the barrel was brought, Agave took off its lid and glued the head of the King onto the barrel. Then she proceeded to lead the Bacchantes back up Mt. Cithaeron.

At the ceremonial grove, they were awaited by Dionysus, who had remained there with all too old  to run back and forth. From what everyone could see, the Sun was still caught up in the tree.

However, Dionysus and his companions had dug at the center of the grove a deep pit, which they had filled with dry moss, loose branches, and trunks of fallen trees. When Dionysus saw the head and the barrel of esin, he asked everyone to come to dig the pine tree free of earth. When the tree stood free, it fell, and so did the Sun. Everyone could now see that the Sun was but a large disk of charcoal covered wood that had been dipped in resin, tied to the top of the tree, and put to light.

Dionysus was not for a loss of what to do. He had the pine tree cut in half, a man’s and a half length above the base of the roots, then the top of the trunk was pushed into the pit and raised and secured in such a way that its roots stood vertically into the air.

Agave put the bucket of resin with the head of the King on top of the roots, and someone brought a fire. Dionysus ignited the moss in the pit. Slowly the moss and wood there began to burn and the fire rose to surround the uprooted tree. Eventually the flames came to lick the resin and the contents of the barrel began to burn and boil. The King’s head sunk ever deeper into the pitch until the wood hoops burnt through, the barrel spilled open, and the fire dripped as flaming drops into the pit.

It was at that point that Dionysus raised the cry: “The Sun is risen!”

“The Sun is risen!” echoed the Bacchantes.

Someone brought up a donkey cart that held a cask of wine. A wild dance of maenads began around the fire pit. The dance lasted until the trunk and roots of the pine had burnt and the bony burnt skull of the King had been retrieved as a holy relic. Thereupon the pit was dug shut. When the ground was level, and it was clear to everyone that the Sun had traveled its course and was almost to set, a new sapling of a pine tree was planted on top of this now invisible altar.

Eso’s Chronicles 181/ 3
Changing the Sun’s Sex
© Eso A.B.

As unusual as it may seem, the arrival of Aztec rule over the Toltecs in Meso America, resembles the rivalry of Western neo-Christianity with Eastern Christianity and ultimately the destruction of the East in Europe. While specifics differ, the general trend goes along parallel tracks.

At this time there is no direct historical evidence that either neo-Christians had come to the Toltecs earlier than the Spanish conquistador Cortez, or that the Toltecs had crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Europe as museum specimens some centuries before we are told they did, and then returned home to tell their people to expect the arrival of a God they called Quetzalcoatl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatl , also known as the plumed serpent.

The above link, if one reads it from end to end, does in fact suggest possible early contacts of the Maya people with Europe and Mediterranean cultures. For one, Quetzalcoatl was also known by the name of Kukulcan. The letter ‘c’ in Kukulcan may be replaced by the letter ‘h’, therefore, Kukulhan may have been pronounced Kukulyan, because the letter ‘h’ is either silent or because it precedes a vowel, ‘u’, which is then preceded by an unvocalized ‘i’ or ‘’j. Therefore, ‘coatl’ may also have been pronounced ‘yonatl’, which relates the word to the European Johann (German), Huan (Spanish), even Greek Dionysus. Of course, these associations are speculations, but once made, they cannot be discarded as making no sense. If ‘quet’ stands for feather and ‘zal’ stands for ‘St.’, then what we get is Feathered St. John. It takes some fancy footwork to read that.

Pareidolic leaps of fantasy indeed often justify themselves with discoveries of previously unknown variations on stories heretofore known as having only one variant. Skeptics may rail against pareidolia, but then a skeptic is hard-wired mathematician, who has no connection with poetry or the braiding of words, which use associations no less logically.

One unremembered association of the Sun over Mexico may be with an ancient Greek story, which we know through the tragedy written by the Greek playwright Euripides and know as “The Bacchae” http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/bacchae/summary.html .

Though ‘Sparknotes’ gives avery different explanation for the events than I do, on closer examination, the story as told by Euripides easily emerges as one that is both secretive and coded. My retelling of it provides a more understandable reason for why the secretiveness and what the actual event is about. There was, in fact, something in its content to keep hid.

“The Bacchae”, like the story in Mexico is a story about changes in the nature of a people’s government. The Greek tragedy differs from the Aztec story in that the Sun did not stop moving across the Greek sky because the rulers over her people had refused to self-sacrifice themselves in order to gain authority, but that the ruler refused to acknowledge the Sun as a feminine entity and were, surreptiously giving it a sex change and retroducing it as a male.

The Theban ruler Pentheus [said to be the grandson of Cadmus http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/bacchae/summary.html, who had founded Thebes, who had (perhaps) colluded with the Goddess Hera against the wishes of Zeus to replace the Goddess of Thebes, the Sun, with the rule of law.] The rule of law, as we know, requires armed men and the police to enforce it. This meant that the authority over Thebes, which heretofore had been the Sun (who once may have been the real mother of Earth or Semele), would be replaced by the Sun in the guise of a cross-dressing male.

The Sun was in profound disagreement with her separation from her creation and removal from a position of authority. She sent King Pentheus numerous warnings by sending him disturbing dreams of the consequences of the rule of law http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1780584 . In one dream King Pentheus saw himself as a shepherd over a herd that had been turned into stone. When the King tried to move one of the eves by poking her with a branch, the sheep’s stone wool turned blood red as if she had been skinned alive. When the wives of the King herd of his plans, they took to washing off their menstrual blood in the bathhouse, where the bath was used to wash sheep’s wool. When none of the warnings had any effect, the Sun sent Dionysus, a disowned son of Semele (earth), to Thebes for a visit.

Since the chronology of Western historians is entirely fanciful and generally agrees with neo-Christian prejudices, we do not know when these events in Greece took place. However, since the representations of the Sun as a golden halo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(religious_iconography)  about the heads of holy men and women continues well into the period of modern art, we may assume that the approximate age of the use of the Sun as a halo (or nimbus) is almost beyond counting.

When Dionysus came to Thebes, he was followed by many women of the wood known as maenads http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/maenad3.jpg . He was immediately recognized by the women of Thebes as a man of the wood, where the only law ever respected is that of hospitality and endearment. Because Dionysus also was a God of wine and had brought with him a wagonload of wood barrels full with it, everyone was soon drunk and ready to go and demand that King Penteus let the city of Thebes return to lawlessness it was still ruled by when still standing surrounded by trees.

Dionysus, however, persuaded the maenads to continue their feasting, but also invite the men of Thebes to join them. Moreover, Dionysus suggested that the women get the men drunk, and when they were drunk to pet them until the men emptied their scrotums of their seed. Dionysus believed that if this were done, the men would be less aggressive on the following day, and King Pentheus was more likely to give in to the women’s demands.

Thus, the orgy of drinking and sexual petting went on almost until sunrise. Dionysus invited the women to spread a rumor that the party was going to continue the next day and if the men were too tired to join, the maenads would take on all donkeys and billy goats in town. The King was told that this was something to see.

The King then sent his men to spy out the ritual grounds (the usual place such events were held) on Mt. Cithaeron and prepare for him a stand in one of the trees overlooking the clearing. The men did as told, but when they had picked out the tree, a tall pine, in which to build the King a stand, they were surprised to discover that in the same treetop the rising sun had somehow got caught in the branches and could not free herself to rise further. The Sun was stuck just above the King’s chosen perch.

The King’s men, of course, reported to King Pentheus what they had seen. The King immediately decided to act the hero and go to the Sun’s rescue. As it turned out, it was not to be as easy a rescue as Pentheus had imagined it would be.

The King had gone only a little way up the mountain from his castle, when Dionysus and all the sleeping maenads were awakened by an incessant crowing of the roosters, braying of donkeys, and bleating of billy goats. The animals had noticed, too, that something was wrong with the daylight. The rays of the Sun barely crossed the tops of trees, and the morning light continued in place as it had never done before. Dionysus and the maenads immediately started back up Mt. Cithaeron.

“Pass me my trident,” said King Pentheus to one of his guards. “I will see if I can poke that mother lose.”