Eso’s Chronicles 251/ 37
Addend 11—Kleptocrat Democracies
© Eso A.B.

I have never been comfortable with the term ‘democracy’ as it is used today, let alone with the assertion that it began in Athens of classical Greece, which probably never was except as the ‘dream-land’ of the princely dictators of the West. For the life of me, I cannot imagine a ‘democracy’ beginning in a city, every one of which has a slaughterhouse for animals and several ‘special’ houses for ‘special’ people. Thus, to be sure, this ‘democracy’ does not include animal rights or allow human communities to develop as biocentric political democracies. Instead, we have a ‘humanist’ institution, though that term did not arise until some centuries later during the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

It happens that I feel more comfortable with ‘democracy’ as an institution when we human beings still lived in the wood and there was no priesthood which could insist (it needs an enforcer) that there is only one God and that religion is an institution for disembodied monotheists (for whom circumcision is their 2^nd birth). They say, that Judaism is founded on “monotheism” and—wouldn’t you know it—the institution of law that assures that there is no other God before Thee but One; Who detaches one from one’s mother’s breast by the meme gene brought to us as an unforgettable dream through circumcision*.

So, this is how we came to the uniquely modern One institution known as ‘democratic’ dictatorship, the unelected European government known as the Parliament of the European Union sitting in Strasburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament and a U.S. Congress detached from the American people by AIPAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee . While these ‘kleptocracies’ of ‘democracy’ claim to be among the largest democratic institutions of the world (read the link), in fact, they are such only by presuming for themselves the right to declare themselves such when out of reach of a direct vote by the people. In other words, the EU Parliament, the U.S. government, and the Israeli Zionist led government consist of political delegates elected by parties rather than by the people from a Populist midst.

Let us see how this ‘democracy’ came to be. In an interesting but outdated book called “The Cathars”, author Malcolm Lambert, writes in the first paragraph of the Introduction:

“The rise and fall of the Cathar heresy from the twelfth to the early fourteenth century was a major event in Western European history. The reaction which Catharism provoked led directly to the Albigensian Crusade, to the ending of the possibility of a trans-Pyrenean Occitanian state http://www.midi-france.info/1905_occitania.htm and the effective incorporation of the South under a dynamic French monarchy. Catharism rose just as other heresies did in the twelfth century….”

What is out of date about this assertion is that what happened between the 12^th and 14^th centuries in Western Europe (not only in Occitania) was the destruction not of heresy, but early Christianity which preceded Catholic (Globalizing) Christianity. What happened in those centuries was the murder of an earlier European democratic civilization, which was still largely domiciled in the wood.

This civilization of the wood, where human dwellings were but small cleared lots that included beside the dwelling a garden and an orchard,  held our planet as a Commons. It was the civilization of Abel, who was slain (12^th - 14^th centuries) by Cain. Incidentally Abel is a name derived from the name for ‘apple tree’ (apple=abol=Abel=abolish), and we should not be surprised that one of Anton Chekov’s most famous plays is called the The Cherry Orchard, the cherry being a twin of the apple tree in the garden of and in the wood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLPqISJFK-E&list=PL8A96EE7248015A3B . The ‘dynamic French’, too, were—before they turned French==known as Franks, who before that were known as Vikings, who about that time were kicked out of what today is Romania and resettled in the northwest of Europe to begin a tirelessly violent effort to deliver our planet of dawn or, if you will, the East**.

What we have today is little more than a repetition of that awful past, except that what is happening today is a lot more awful than it was a millennium ago and not-violent nature is beginning to fight back because it has been destroyed by turning the wood into the deserts of the city.

The West is a graveyard, and it blames the murder of Cain on Abel. Do you need proof that the city is a synonym for violence and that it has run out of graveyard space and needs to vacate the homeless from caves? http://rt.com/news/spain-granada-caves-eviction-204/ and, soon, subway tunnels?

*An essential element of the rite of circumcision is the presence of a ‘mohel’ (originally meaning mother), who licks the blood off the wound. The ‘dream image’ meme or ‘knowledge’ ensures that the child will for ever after subliminally visualize the mouth as the birthplace, thus giving the word or law preeminence over the womb.

 

**It is possible that the Aztecs, forebears of Mexico, originated from out of the refugees from Occitania; and their famous ‘sunrise’ ritual reflects a reassertion of the catastrophe taking place in Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanahuatzin .

 

Eso’s Chronicles 180/ 2
The Sun Over Temixtetlan
© Eso A.B.

If myth is to be real, it tells the story of a religion, and not just an ‘ideology’ as some anthropologists, reflecting secular prejudices, now have come to call it. Myth and religion are synonymous and are to be respected in the same way as so-called bona fide pseudo ‘religion’ is.

For the Mexican people of the 15^th-16^th centuries, their sacred stories were no less interpretable than the Bible or Koran texts are for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reinterpretation can move forward and backward. Either way, there were many omens that did not bode well for the capital of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlan. One of the omens was that the Aztecs were not universally admired and had enemies among the other nations in the area that we know today as Mexico.

While the following link tells an interesting story of the siege of Tenochtitlan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Tenochtitlan and represents an academic consensus of sorts, I have taken an oppositional point of view. The divide in the point of views occurs that the victor tells a story grossly distorted from the original, and has little to do with what actually happened. Nevertheless, the ‘victor’s’ viewpoint becomes ingrained. After the passing of some years, a different version becomes difficult to reconstruct because the evidence has been removed to conform with and validate the victor’s story.

One major factor that contributed to the fall of Tenochtitlan, but one that became known only many years after the city had fallen into Spanish hands, was the role of an outbreak of a plague of small pox. Another as yet unnamed factor may be the probability that the populace had reached the state of imminent revolt. Here and there appear signs that if a revolt had broken out, it could have turned into a Revolution. Why?

I broadly cover the subject of a potential Revolution against the Aztecs in a blog (EsosChronicles 178) outside of this series. I based my argument on the thesis that teomiqui, self-sacrifice, the way of death by the Gods practiced during the Toltec civilization, was compromised by the conquering Aztecs, who replaced it with human sacrifice, to which end they made wars against surrounding nations, took prisoners its warriors, then sacrificed them on the temple platforms at Tenochtitlan. This was done because the Aztecs themselves were too cowardly to rule through the charisma of self-sacrifice.

I realize that for most anthropologists teomiqui simply means human sacrifice. One may ascertain this by searching the internet. However, such an interpretation is profoundly influenced by neo-Christian prejudice against self-sacrifice, which—one may argue—is the very reason why neo-Christianity was created. Though neo-Christian Catholicism insists that in the early years neo-Christians did sacrifice their lives in order to establish Catholicism, the sacrifice was sooner of Christian ‘heretics’ by the Catholic Inquisition financed by secular kings and prices. Thus, neo-Christianity did all it could to deny the credibility of self-sacrifice, which it did by proposing resurrection as a solution to a purported fear of death.

My early contact with the word teomiqui came through “City of Sacrifice” (p73) by David Carrasco: “it was believed that the human body was the vulnerable nexus of vital cosmic forces and was filled with divine essences that needed periodic regeneration. One means to this regeneration was called teomiqui, to die divinely or ‘dying like a god dies’, which meant human sacrifice.”

In our time other perspectives have taken hold: “Without resurrection, there can never be any final reconciliation. But in the absence of reconciliation, or of hope for that, neither can there be any morality;” so claims Professor John Milbank http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/004-the-ethics-of-self-sacrifice-20 speaking on behalf of neo-Christianity and therewith as if closing the book on further discussions about the meaning of death and morality. As I understand it, to the professor a ‘final reconciliation’ means reconciliation with both death and life.

But what if the arrival of ‘life’ in a material universe does not ask for such ‘reconciliation’? What if for life its emergence from matter is both natural and organic? What if for life the achievement of consciousness is implicit in its being? If so, then surely consciousness and death are preordained, and resistance to life as organic phenomenon (and an insistence that it be converted to a supernatural event), means a replacement of organic reality with a questionable virtualism or para-reality. The ‘reconciled’ neo-Christian realizes ‘reconciliation’ by agreeing to replace an organic Paradise with an urban environment.

For the ‘old world’ of Christianity, however, the reconciliation with reality of death occurred when its leaders enabled and maintained a community by self-sacrificing their lives to free the Sun from the arrest of death. The ‘reconciliation’ occurred through self-sacrificial death, which enabled a) the Sun to rise; b) the community under the Sun to share in a fearlessness of death like that of its leaders; and c) for the community to reconcile to the idea that its individuals share in a sufficiently like nature to constitute as a singularity the community, not the individual.

Before the Aztecs seized power over the territory formerly governed by the Great Tolan, the Holy of Holies of the Toltec civilization was located at Teotihuacan (‘The abode of the Gods’).

It was at Teotihuacan that the era of the Toltecs was created, that is to say, the Sun also of the Aztec era also came into being. The deed by which the proto-Toltecs energized the Sun began with the self-sacrifice of two of its Gods: Nanautzin and Tecuciztecatl. Both Gods gathered up the courage not only to sacrifice themselves, but sacrifice themselves by jumping into a pit of fire. It was the light of this fire that constituted the only light that existed before the rising of the Sun.

Since Mexico and Central America is a land of many volcanoes, we may image the pit of fire as having been the caldera of a volcano. While the Sun gave no light, it was the volcanic fire, reflected against the thighs of the Sun that gave evidence that there was indeed such a thing as the Sun.

The Sun was not however impressed with just two self-sacrifices. She merely acknowledged them. The ‘sign’ of acknowledgement has been lost by Mexican story tellers, but is still known by the Japanese, who tell that the Sun, Amaterasu, was coaxed out of the cave in which she had hid by a mirror, who the Gods claimed embodied the Sun’s replacement. When the Sun came to look, She indeed thought that her reflection belonged to another sun, then grew suspicious, and to prove that the reflection was but of herself, lifted her skirt to prove that the reflection was but of her own thighs and pubic triangle.

When the Sun was about to reenter the cave, the Gods realized that all had to take courage similar to that of Nanautzin and Tecuciztecatl. “Let us all die,” the Gods took courage and agreed. And they all took their lives by turning into hummingbirds, and then let the Wind Ecatl blow them into the fire.

Then Ecatl, the only one of the Gods to remain alive, emptied his lungs completely of breath by blowing on the Sun as hard as he could. This is how, at last, the Sun was set into motion, daylight came into being again, and human beings gathered themselves to live in a community.

Eso’s Chronicles 178
How War Ends (2)
© Eso A.B.

A major right wing ‘Revolutions in Reverse’ occurred during the 12^th-14^th centuries. This is when former sacred king’s of Europe and leaders of the ‘wandering tribes’ realized that their coming up against the Atlantic Ocean and the lack of transport to cross it, meant the end to nomadic life and the arrival of the age of forced sedentirization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism . After they no longer could move about freely, people felt insecure and believed themselves to be living within the nexus of an Apocalypse. The latter half of the 15^th century was full of expectations about its arrival http://www.ptm.org/99PT/JanFeb/Apocalypse1500.htm .

At about the 14^th and 15^th centuries the Europeans did, of course, get to cross the ocean and bring havoc to the people on the other side of it. They destroyed the Indian nomads completely (they now blame it on the ‘Americans’, but the Americans of those days were the spitting image of ‘Europeans’). The Europeans brought even greater havoc to those American tribes whose early experiments with sedentism, though abandoning teomiqui, or ‘dying like a god dies’, was nevertheless closely bound with the concept of self-sacrifice, with which Catholicism was not at all bound.

In short, had the latent and apparently newer completely quiescent Revolutionary fires against the Aztec elites by the peoples of Mexico (they constituted most of the troops of Cortez’s army) not been so culturally naïve as to believe that the European mindset was like their own, the Revolutionary fires released by Cortez’s arrival may well have reinstituted teomiqui (possible cognates: teomike, teomort, teomir) as a principle of leadership.

Instead, Cortez subverted the victorious Revolutionaries and poisoned native notions of justice by exposing them to the advantages of  ‘accusational violence’ developed by the Inquisition. In  the name of a religion of ‘love’ that had already brought death to so many European ‘heretics’, the uniquely European verbal combination of a ‘love-lie’ took advantage of Aztec perversion of human sacrifice and annihilated the native Indian theology in toto. Had the native Mexican Revolutionaries been left to their own traditions, the nature of ‘religion’ today could be very different indeed.

In Europe a similar pattern of revolt had occurred, but with tribal movements arrested and no previous experience with sedentism, the tribes soon became aggressive, when the sacred king’s former barons, grabbed land wherever it was unsecured or where occupation by violence was not yet all that costly in human lives. The Scandinavian Vikings were especially prone to learn and adopt the customs of European princes. Given the custom of the subculture of European elites, re ‘every man is a thief’ (just where and how such behavior got its toehold requires greater and more concentrated study by anthropologists), the Vikings disseminated this sub-culture over the entire face of Europe. The result was that the office of self-sacrificial sacred king lost its bonding charisma and to a culture of cynics became absurd.

The later evolving ‘democratic’ government, though a concession to peace seeking human nature, took the shape of a pyramid in the abstract, while in the concrete it became a proto-democratic vassalage http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vassal . This was an unstable political structure, because the foundation, though extensive in breadth, stood over a psychological zone prone to frequent earthquakes.

As sacred kings lost their charisma and found they were no longer not only NOT sacred, but despised, the charisma that had once existed as a bonding force over a society they had led—expired. Right along with the disappearance of self-sacrifice, kings began to be thought of as autocrats and dictators. The more powerful councilors of the king’s Council began to conspire for power that was at least equal to what they imagined as the king’s own. These former councilors never gave a thought to having to offer themselves in self-sacrifice for the community.

It took a poor shepherd girl, Joan of Arc to know and show what France had lost. As kings contested for power among themselves and the piles of human sacrifices on the battle field grew ever larger, the councilors sought ever more power for themselves. It did not take long to discover that the form of government that best suited the elite collective of princes and barons, short of total power by coup d’état, was parliamentary democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament. The principles of this ‘democracy’ were best expressed by Machiavelli’s book, full of distrust and contempt for humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IGBKu6qM7Y, “The Prince”.

The social order, which emerged from top echelon parliamentarianism and coexists with it to this day emerged from the discreditation of sacred kingship—and continued to evolve until it emerged as our acquisitive neo-capitalist ‘democracy’. The final impetus for the evolution of this ‘democracy’ was given by the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age is of course itself an outgrowth of government created by politicians who arrive at their decisions by consensus, which unfailingly promises the electorate more than it can deliver (which is why a transparent government is a self-contradiction and impossibility), then pretends to deliver by plundering our planet of its organic and inorganic resources.

Though our planet is over four billion years old, its plunder was done and finished in two hundred years. All that remains is fiat currency, which after one final use is being flushed down the toilet. This extravagant desire to consume and gorge is what we know as the environmental catastrophe. If anyone survives it, it will leave behind it a Tibetan style temple on an icy mountain with a peripheral peasantry practicing subsistence economy. The good thing is that the wood is likely to revive as it has at quarantined Chernobyl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVv1vsZxV00.

This is not to say that people have stopped seeking a ‘pure democracy’ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pure%20democracy , a form of government in which leadership is expressed directly through the opinion and will of the people. Indeed, the quest for such a ‘democracy’ is on the increase, because instant communication through links made available by the internet makes it imaginable and possible. Unfortunately, the internet is devoid of any possibility that the results of the vote will make better critical judgment than the politicians of parliamentary ‘democracy’.

Given the absence of the wood and its replacement with the desert of the city, the impossibility of ‘pure democracy’ in the latter environment is, nevertheless, reflected in what we call ‘individualism’, ‘human rights’, and ‘consumerism’. These three hubristic possibilities realize ‘pure democracy’ as a ruling principle in that all three reflect the complete breakdown of community, responsibility, and generosity toward the spontaneous gifts of nature.

As our ‘democratic’ civilization slides toward extinction, the ever good news of ‘democratic’ politics is replaced by another ‘unspeakable’ truth. One thoughtful man defines it as: “an evil whose depth and deceit seem to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”   http://www.infowars.com/why-was-jfk-murdered/

So, where does the evil hide? As all things well hidden, it hides before our eyes. Which is to say, the ‘unspeakable’ is listened to with unbelievable intensity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKCkWUOm-b0, and the violence of the “unspeakable”, too, is on open display, because it is not murderous violence as that of a terrorist destroying himself and as many as round about by a cataclysmic explosion, but by what historian David Nirenberg calls “accusational and judicial violence” http://www.studymode.com/essays/Communities-Of-Violence-428868.html . If ‘unspeakable’ violence went for the jugular of the late President Kennedy a mere fifty years ago, the ‘accusational’ violence of today is going after every inhabitant of our planet.

Today’s governments are very much like those in the Middle Ages, when the neo-Christian Inquisition (a judicial power) used ‘accusational violence’ against everyone it decides is a ‘heretic’, i.e., a ‘terrorist’.

In the Middle Ages the ‘heretics’ [such as Jan Hus (burnt 1415), Joan of Arc (burnt 1431)] were able to fight the accusations brought against them only by surrendering themselves non-violently to state terror and use the horrors of state terror to encourage the renewal of not-violent terror once used by sacred kings toward the rebirth of an organic God and community.