NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
11 The Unmaking of Jesus 1

Jesus’s name was and sometimes is still pronounced and written as Isa, Esa, Yesa, and comes in innumerable variants. The famous epic known as Ramayana, for example, translates as the journey (or is it pilgrimage?) of one Rama. Since the name Rama is related to the place name Rome, the one meaning “God like”, the other to “a stronghold”, Ramayana may be translated as “the pilgrimage of life” or even “the pilgrimage of Christ”. It is the same with Basil, a name that means “king” in Greek (for interesting associations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil ). Basil’s self-sacrifice in defense of self-sacrifice served as the basis for the story of Jesus the Crucified. Indeed, Basil the Burnt is Jesus the Crucified, with the crucifixion replacing a pit of fire to remove the event to a time that would not be associated with a practices of the time (early middle ages and the Inquisition).

The name John (Ian, Yan) was once closely associated with the Sumerian Sun Goddess Iananna or Inanna. A similar story with a mother-and-son relationship at its nucleus is the story of the Egyptian Goddess Isis and Jesus or Osiris. Of course, the myths that have come down to us no longer speak of Iananna or Isis as Sun Goddesses, but present them as Goddesses of Love, Fertility, and War. At some point in history male insecurity transmuted itself into a dictatorship and replaced the mother-son unit with that of a single male, who imagined himself as creating the world by masturbation. In our own time, a similar male insecurity prompted the psychologist Freud to suggest that women suffered from “penis envy”.

The masculinization of the Sun is a process associated with the creative process—albeit a negative one. The process of masculinization forces non-violence to suffer belittlement and lies, which in turn results in a perception that non-violence is unnatural. Thus, non-violence needs the reinforcement of “faith”, which is of course unnecessary. Nevertheless, in this way, lies lift violence into prominence, whence it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and creates a violent civilization. The profanation of femaleness does its crude work even in our own day—as a number of fundamentalist sects illustrate. http://tinyurl.com/chc8q6

The refusal to accept non-violence as part of the natural and given order (now become accepted as a tradition beyond disputing) grounds itself in several phenomena:

1. It grounds in the animal kingdom, where nature has evolved life forms, which survive eating other animals—even though the animals would be happy to eat carrion if it were available;
2. It grounds in exponential or unconscious (unchecked and uncheckable) enthusiasm of life for life;
3. It grounds in the envy of male consciousness over female creativity and the unspent energy that after copulation does not result in death (as in the world of insects, for example);
4. It grounds in the failure of conscious intelligence (whether female or male) to realize and actualize male castration;
5. It grounds in a) willful identification of castration with violence; and b) replacement of the charisma of self-sacrifice by the violence of the sword.

Society is mostly concerned with above points 4. and 5. However, these points did not exist in a matriarchal order, when the social order acknowledges female superiority in the realm of the biosphere. The latter has ample evidence in past religious orders, where males practiced self-castration. http://tinyurl.com/cjvsye

To rediscover the old myths, we need to return to the role of the son in a social order set by the mother. This may be achieved by way of deconstructing our contemporary versions of the myth. While the story of Iananna and her myth comes garbled, the existing version provides enough evidence to put forward a myth that is not as contorted.

We will advance in our deconstruction if we note that the name of the Goddess (and numerous names of those associated with her) begin with the consonant Y, thus, Inanna = Yanna; An = Yan; En = Yen; Nan = Yan; Enki = Yenki; and Dumuzi = Yunuzi, probably all endearing terms. A close modern parallel may be found in such male endearments as Ivanjka (Russian); Yanchuks (Latvian); Yannuchka (Hebrew); etc. http://tinyurl.com/d6t8uj

We ought to note that in the adulterated Sumerian myths that have been passed to us, Iananna is no longer the Sun Goddess. Instead, the Sun God is her brother Utu.

Our reconstruction will also be helped if we realize that Iananna is the daughter of the moon Goddess Nanna (Yanna?). How the Sun is born of the Moon or Iananna from Nanna, that is for another day, except to say that in ancient days the Moon was understood to be an aide in surviving the night. Incidentally, the Moon, too, became masculinized and survival has been heightened by male rhetoric and now spells “terror”.

The myth: Iananna the Sun Goddess—born of darkness and the cold light of the Moon, who in her death-like sleep patiently spins the formula that turns cold into heat—rose over the mountaintops and created the day. At noon, she hung motionlessly at zenith and cast no shadow. Those who stood immediately under her disk knew they lived, but because there was no shadow, they could not tell if they were real or not. After about an hour of thus rfeminding creation in her power, Iananna began a long walk down the Afternoon Road that led to Evening Shadows, the name of the home of her son John. There Iananna helped John milk the cows, after which she started out again, this time for her apartment at her sister Ereshkigal’s (Ereš = queen, lady; Ki = earth, Gal = great) kingdom, also known as the Great Palace Below Earth.

As soon as Iananna went below the horizon, she had to give up a piece of her clothing. She passed through seven gates before arriving at Ereshkigal’s kingdom. At each gate, she left a piece of her clothing. After Iananna went through the last gate, she stood in her apartment utterly naked. http://tinyurl.com/cg4d5n

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
10 The Intelligence of Persecution

The sense of self-betrayal that afflicts the Latvian people’s psyche and contributes to reducing Latvia to a state administered by strangers from Brussels or, for that matter, by their own leaders’ in-your-face corruption is not only a problem for Latvians, but afflicts people in the United States of America, Russia, China, and other nations great and small. I have in mind the sense of self-betrayal that results from the abandonment of the principle of self-sacrifice, which is the result of the imposition on the people of the dogma of “original sin”. This theological crime, a psychic violence perpetrated in the name of a ruling secular class, not only cripples the mind of society with brain lock, but also enables violence to rule in the name of social order almost indefinitely.

Because of centuries of rehearsal, every politician who today runs for an office in whatever country has a set of phrases that center around “sacrifice for country”. The clichés and phrases are drummed into schoolchildren and the electorate. We only need to remember the often cited phrase by the late American president John F. Kennedy: “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. Since society takes its cue for action from its leaders, and since no leader as a leader ever sacrifices (except as an exceptional and accidental circumstance), society turns into stone. Even schoolchildren know that saying so does not make it so, but that doing does. All the same, self-sacrifice denies itself to go about and set itself to doing.

Why is the dogma of “original sin”—today perhaps no longer known by that name, but deeply ingrained in social make-up nevertheless—so advantageous to the ruling classes?

Simply put, self-sacrifice exposes liars. Self-sacrifice (what some sociologists and anthropologists call “the founding violence”) puts lies to a test these cannot survive. In our own day, we may call these tests tests of transparency, because self-sacrifice is usually the result of independent thought. Self-sacrifice encourages independence of action, and such action escapes the control of whoever would rule after having taught us that self-sacrifice is an act of violence against Creation, i.e., original sin. Therefore, groups that wish to dominate continuously, continue to persecute self-sacrifice as a heretical practice.

Many centuries of rehersal have taught the rulers that political transparency escapes becoming a reality when the body politic is agitated in such a way that the agitation divides it, but not to the point where agitation causes open violence. Under such circumstances, it is possible to block direct access to the truth by means of a rhetoric that obscures. For example, when in place of the word “self-sacrifice” the authorities use the word “suicide”.

Once the desired level of obscurity is achieved, professional (paid) agitators are sent among the public to demand from it “faith”—trust beyond evidence and logical arguments. In short, the public is to have faith in the rhetoric of the irrationalism of the ruling class.

As the origins of the word “terror” indicate (see Chapter 1), the original meaning of the word was not connected to persecution and murder, but signified “a fight for survival”, i.e., the necessity to get one’s will up for survival in an Earth environment that is not hostile, though it may certainly be demanding in the extreme. The Earth’s demanding-ness asks us to be on the alert, to have our guard up. Moreover, mortality makes human beings vulnerable to death even when we have not reached the age when the body has naturally worn down. We see this vulnerability when Yitzhak-John (see previous blogs) went to defend himself and his flock against thieves with a determination that the thieves did not expect.

While overreaction by human beings to a given situation cannot always be avoided and may lead to deadly consequences, early cultures did all that was possible to minimize violence. For example, two tribes who had a dispute, often squared off one against another, but send only one “hero” from each tribe to wrestle with each other. There have also been occasions when female elders have engaged in sex in the middle ground between the groups to ease the tensions.

Unfortunately, “sacred books” such as the Bible and Qur’an, institute violence by its mention in their beginning chapters, re Genesis 4:9-16 and Qur’an 5:27-31. http://www.cyberstars.com/cain_&_abel.jpg This is not to deny the possibility that two human beings may kill each other upon meeting, however, Cain and Abel are the sons of Adam and Eve, and their a priori antagonism (an editorial fiat) sends signals that violence is a trait that can never be repressed to the point that it rears its head not later, but always sooner.

By making violence “natural” and inevitable, it becomes possible to propose that only “faith” will enable society to escape “original sin”. However, what is “faith” if not a will to believe in something for which there is no proof?

If non-violence is natural and violence a provocation (as this author claims), the dogma of the rulers to the contrary, that it is violence that is natural, it becomes necessary that society be converted to non-violence through “faith”—even if it means persecuting society in order to force it to such a “faith”. Those who resist the simplistic dogma, because they understand its implications—that a violent group wishes to determine say over what is violence—they may end up the losers. By transferring non-violence from natural habit to a habitat of “faith”, the rulers of the “faithful” are able to impose on society an order that holds that a non-violent social order needs to kill those who believe that a non-violent order may only be established through the founding violence of self-sacrifice.

The example of Cain and Abel in the Bible and Qur’an are part of the the dogma that establishes for violence a preeminent position. The said “sacred” documents—established as “sacred” by a caste of secular priests disguised as religious—prejudice society in favor of believing violence to be an unavoidable part of human nature.

“God” did not deliver either the Bible or the Qur’an from a printing house in heaven, but through men who were so used to violence that non-violent behavior was beyond their imagination. This fact suggests that by the time the “sacred” works were written (some scholars—Anatoly Fomenko, for example—claim that this happened no earlier than Middle Ages), self-sacrifice as a tool employed in avoidance of communal violence was already repressed.

Today society has developed and “grown” to the point that it needs violence to maintain what has been constructed by violence.

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
9 The Death of Yitzhak 2

The following fragments or parenthesis within the panorama of the greater story is to restate some of the themes of these blogs.

* * *

I ] Because Yitzhak died defending the goats of a small community of which Abraham was an elder, the community came to know itself as the tribe of Yitzhak. One might say that the tribe identified itself with Yitzhak, and through his spirited defense of the community’s herd of goats came to know itself.

However, seeing that Yitzhak is a cognate of John, and Ivan, Juan, Isa, Jesus, etc., we may expect a similar story to have developed throughout the world.

The necessity for a similar story is the result of but one reason: every community needs a similar event to establish itself as a self-consciousness, moreover a consciousness that founds itself on non-violence. One of the base themes of the story is how one individual (though sometimes many—like in the Japanese story known as “Chushingura”) employs consciousness to sacrifice his-her life so that the community may—through heightened self-consciousness—achieve greater cohesion. Only through acts of self-sacrifice may a community coax from itself achievements impossible for a passive intelligence. http://tinyurl.com/nhccaa

The inspiration for the stories of self-conscious sacrifice is in the nature of consciousness. If fifty million years ago weaver ants evolved to a point where they were able to structure their behavior in such a way that they would make their livelihood as agriculturalist (and give evidence of intelligence at work), momentous as their achievement may be, they have not moved on to become individuated creatures.

In other words, an ant colony regardless of its social achievements continues to act as one organism, its “workers” dedicating their bodies to the bio-mass of a single queen. The ants remain bound to an unconscious life form (and in a profound state of mind inhibition), because a sudden rise in individual consciousness would result in an immediate and chaotic dissolution of their community.

The break-through to individual consciousness was destined for tree-dwelling apes. After lightning ignited the forest (after a disastrous drought), the apes were forced to flee onto the plain. On the plain, as mentioned in an earlier blog, they were shocked to have to face their shit (which they had been able to do while living in trees) and the red of their rear ends. The mental shock to a nascent consciousness apparently was profound enough to cause them to try walking upright and teaching themselves toilet training.

* * *

II ] Among the Indo-European tribes the name John was ubiquitous. Undoubtedly, this phenomenon has everything to do with the importance of self-sacrifice and the appearance of the name in a story such as the one of John-Yitzhak and Abraham.

Another knot that binds the stories of self-sacrifice is one’s loss of head. This may be due to a long ago recognition of the head as the seat of thought. Also, the appearance of the severed head may be a thread that leads to some now long forgotten original version.

Beside the decapitation of John the Healer (Baptist), another well known decapitation occurs at King Arthur’s court during the Winter Solstice or Yule celebrations. As the story tells it, the celebration arrives at a point where everyone has had a little too much to drink and the women are becoming increasingly more tempting. Suddenly, the door to the banquet hall springs open and in rides the Green Knight (another name for John). John challenges the merrymakers to chop off his head.

Everyone sits dumbfounded. No one takes up the challenge. At last, King Arthur himself rises. After all, the challenge is a challenge to the legitimacy of his kingdom. However, just as the king rises, his right hand man, Sir Gawain (Yawain, another variant on the name of John) says he will do it. Gawain then walks up to the intruder and cuts off his head.

The Green Knight picks up his head, puts it under his arm, and the head then addresses Gawain and the merrymakers thus: “I see that you and the king’s court are brave men. Continue your feast. However, you, Gawain, come next Yule must come to my castle and offer me your head. I did not mind giving you mine [for you have proven yourself worthy of it], but I expect you to reciprocate. If not, the day may come when the heads of everyone here will swing in a tree as an ill wind’s apples.”

* * *

III ] While almost everyone today thinks of Sophocles play “Oedipus Rex” as a story of a son’s sexual affair with his mother (and vice versa), it actually is a story of what happens when a king fails to offer himself as a self-sacrifice to his community. If one reads the play from a perspective that is different from a Christian-Jewish and Freudian view, one will discover that because of Oedipus’ failure, altogether ten people lose their lives. [For a rewrite of the play see “Tiresias’ Revenge” at http://www.blogger.com/home ] Oedipus is none other than an unconscious traitor vis a vis the community.

Among Latvians, the celebrants of Midsummer Eve know themselves by tradition as Children of John (Jāņu bērni). Today no one remembers who John or the Children of John were. Nevertheless, there lingers a subconscious memory of a time when John suffered betrayal. Indeed, the Latvian John (Jānis) suffered betrayed a number of times. Not that all betrayals are known. John was often killed, but no memory of the event remains, because either he was no longer agreeable to the mind of westernized Latvian intellectuals or his supporters were killed with him.

The intellectual betrayal of John occurs in the years between 1873 and 1888, a twelve year span. In 1873, a number of Latvian intellectuals in Berlin design the first Latvian flag. The flag shows John as a priest of the Festival of Johns officiating at an altar on Midsummer Eve. In 1888, Pumpurs, a Latvian poet residing in tsarist Russia, writes a pseudo Latvian epic, which replaces Johns with a Superman-like character called Bear-Jawbreaker (Lāčplēsis). In 1905, seventeen years later, Rainis, another Latvian poet, seconds Pumpurs in his choice by featuring Lāčplēsis as the main hero in his play “Uguns un Nakts” (Fire and Night). It is obvious that the neo-Christian church plays a role. By early 20th century, the Latvian Jānis disappears as a religious-political figure from the public mindset.

Johns betrayal by Latvian intellectuals and artists turned the native spirit into wormwood. The consequences of the betrayal became glaring in 1940, when the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union revealed to just what an extent the political leadership and citizenry of “modern” Latvia had abandoned the spirit of self-sacrifice. The Latvian dictator, K. Ulmanis, refused to offer resistance, not even a symbolic one (with himself substituting for the nation), and Latvians woke up to mass deportations by the Soviets. This was soon followed by “liberation” by the Nazis, who took advantage of the helpless rage of the people over their surrender to the Soviets by Ulmanis. Without intellectual and political leadership of their own, a large number of Latvians joined SS divisions created especially for them by the Nazis.

The failure to give public acknowledgement to the several betrayals of their culture and history has resulted in a tragic passivity in the face of the collapse of the Latvian community.

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
8 The Death of Yitzhak 1

When Yitzhak did not come home, Abraham called: “Yi-ii-i-ii-caak! Yi-ii-i-ii-caak! Yi-ii-i-ii-caak!” There came no answer.

We do not know if this story about Yitzhak and Billy happened before or after speech was invented. Certain things can happen before the arrival language; for example, the art of gardening by Weaver Ants, perhaps the herding of animals by humans. However, Abraham’s need to communicate his deepest fear was pressing. Whether the call went “Yi-ii-i-ii-caak!” or “Yaaa-n!” we cannot tell, but Abraham’s voice was loud and desponding.

That night Abraham went without sleep. So did Sarah, the mother of Yitzhak. The parents churned in their heads the same question: Why had Abraham told Yitzhak to take the goat to the mountains yesterday? Why did he not do it the day before or today? Why had Sarah not stopped him? Neither Sarah nor Abraham could recall seeing any signs that would hint at what was coming. The sun had risen and set as it had every day—the day had begun no different from any other day.

This is not to say that sometimes the tribe had not stopped in its tracks to take notice of the moment. There was the time when someone had stopped in his walk and done something weird. Well, perhaps not so weird, because as soon as others in the village had taken note of his doing, they had done the same. All turned four full turns to the left and then four turns to the right. After they had done so once, they could not stop. They had done the strange dance all morning long. There was the time when a fight had broken out between two men and the women had rushed in to separate them. To restore calm, old Sarah and Abraham had lifted their skirts and shown how hairy they were.

Now neither Abraham nor Sarah could stop remembering the event that had caused them to send Yitzhak, Billy, and the herd of goats into the mountains. Sarah blamed it all on herself. She had stroked Yitzhak from an early age. When the boy had slept with her and started crying, she had stroked his thigh to calm him. Abraham remembered how fascinated Yitzhak had been with his penis and how he had obliged the boy and shown it to him, first soft, then hard. That is how Yitzhak probably got the idea of stroking the goat.


The habit of touching anything and everything was probably why the women knew how to masturbate men. They knew how to do and be done by. They could get men to stick their tongues in their honey troughs, and when a man had them flowing, they knew how to scream and cream him off without entering them. If in the 21st century such an act may seem out of a pornographic film, 21,000 years ago masturbation separated humans from other animals. Masturbation was another thing humankind became obsessed with after it had been forced out of trees. With no more branches to hold on to, the hands became freed “to do the devil’s work” as some might say. Women, though they still carried their newborn with them, became sexually more active and capable of getting greater pleasure from sex than men. A man soon became sexually exhausted (Casanova, who claimed to have had fourteen orgasms in one night, was an exception). In any case, women made it a habit of controlling aggressive men by stroking them and then not letting go until the man could do little but not jump. Their own preference was to do it slowly, to set the mood. This is why to this day women like to do it by candlelight.

But on that long ago day it was different. Yitzhak had disappeared. “Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai! Yi-ii-i-ii-caak! Yi-ii-i-ii-caak!”

Abraham and the entire village went up the mountain at daylight. They could see the goats above them in a meadow, but there was no sign of Yitzhak. Old Abraham, for all his age, led the climbers. As he came within shouting distance of the herd, he called again, but not for Yitzhak, but for Billy: “Brr-aa-vo, brr-aa-vo!”

Billy answered and came running. The goats lifted their heads and watched. Abraham lassoed Billy and gave the rope to someone else to hold. His eyes then searched the meadow once more. Then he saw Yitzhak’s body. It lay by a large rock. When the villagers reached the body, they could see a run of congealed blood from the nose and ears smeared Yitzhak’s tunic. His sling with a rock still in its pocket lay beside him.

Everyone reported some of their goats missing. Everyone had lost a goat or two. It was then that they understood that Yitzhak had died defending the herd from thieves. Still, who were the thieves? Because no one knew, everyone looked at Abraham and pointed at Billy. Was not the goat the one who had led to this unhappy event? Shall we kill him? http://tinyurl.com/qjlza6

Abraham shook his head and swept his arm across the entire flock of goats. It was as if to say: Is Billy alone the guilty one? The gesture made everyone think. If they sacrificed Billy and their own goats, the act of the day would not be the discovery of the murder of Yitzhak, but a slaughter of goats. Would that not be sacrilege against Yitzhak? Abraham went to Billy and untied him.

Many years later, a traveler walking from one end of the world to the other asked for directions to Yitzhakville. He had heard of a temple dedicated to a goat and a boy there. A story told that it was there that a people called Yitzhaks had their origin. The traveler asked a villager of Yitzhakville to explain. This is what the villager told the traveler:

“The goats the boy was guarding in the mountains were our shadows. We did not know it at first, but we learned of it after Yitzhak was dead and our goats stolen. Everyone felt something was different, that something was missing. We did not know what it was until Abraham told us that Yitzhak had defended not only our goats, but also our shadows. He was right. That is why we hold our goats to be sacred and never slay them but for old age.”

“What do you mean that the goats are your shadows?”

“Before Yitzhak was killed, we did not know that goats were our shadows. This is perhaps because goats are white. After Yitzhak died, we began to understand that he was not guarding only our goats, but also us. He made us see ourselves through our shadows. This is why on Yitzhak Day we dye our goats blue.”

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
7 The Tragic Bond

Yitzhak is John the same way that Hannukah (Yannukah) is Johnsday, the latter celebrated during the Midwinter Solstice. Though neo-Christianity forced the Latvians to change the name of their midwinter solstice celebration from Jahndaal (Johnsday) to a bland “Winterfest”*, the Latvians still retain “Jāņu diena” (Johnsday) for their Summer Solstice.

[The same kind of sound shift as is noticeable in the Jewish “Hannukah” applies also the Islamic Prophet Mohamed. That is, Mohamed is from a name that originally was pronounced Johan-ed.]

But back to Yitzhak or John. A long time ago—before communities of human beings had become conscious of themselves as communities, that is to say, before people had noticed their shadow—there lived in the mountains of Anatolia a goat named Billy, a young boy named Yitzhak-John, and the boy’s father, Abraham.

The goat Billy was a buck. Yitzhak had caught him one spring day when he and his father had gone to the mountains to catch nannies with kids to milk them. When the nannies stopped to give the kids their milk, Yitzhak and Abraham lassoed them. Yitzhak had milked a whole gourd full of milk, when Billy gave Yizhak a butt from behind. It was as if to say, “Hey! You are stealing my food!”

Yitzhak caught Billy, and then allowed him to suck on the corner of the goatskin bag where his father and he had poured the milk from the gourds. After seeing there was another way getting milk than just from his mother’s teat, Billy would not leave. This is how Yitzhak came to bring Billy home to the village, a camp of yurts. When Billy’s mother, the nanny, followed them, Abraham let her come. Since Billy the goat could not depend on the milk of human kindness for long, it was best his mother came along to feed him.

At first, Yitzhak wanted to keep the goat as a pet in the yurt. Abraham, said: “No way. It is hard enough to get humans toilet trained. Do you want our tent smelling like a piss house?”

Yitzhak kept Billy and the nanny outside the yurt. Both goats, but especially Billy, accustomed themselves to human company easily. However, when Billy became older, he started to insist in wanting to join Yitzhak in the tent. Since no one would let him in, Billy went around the tent and pushed his horns under the tent sides, often pulling out the tent stakes at the same time. Not that Billy intended to annoy anyone, but, like it or not, annoy he did.

“What did you do to that goat to make him all that friendly?” Abraham asked Yitzhak. “This is not natural.”

“Nothing, father,” answered Yitzhak.

Of course, Abraham knew that it was a lie. “You take that goat back where it came from,” said Abraham. “I can see that you have jerked him off, and now he wants sex all the time. Pretty soon, he will be jumping on everyone in our yurt, your mother including.”

Yitzhak took Billy and his nanny back up into the mountains. Not to make it embarrassing for Yitzhak, Abraham persuaded the villagers that it would be a good thing if they let all their goats go into the mountains with Yitzhak and Billy. The villagers were happy to comply. So were all the goats. As Yitzhak and Billy left the camp, all the goats followed them. It was quite a large herd. http://tinyurl.com/r5nxyg

Old Abraham followed his son and the goats a way up the mountain. Sometimes he made goat like sounds to urge the herd on. The call sounded something like “Br-raa-vo!” The whole village then bleated after them: “Br-raa-vo!” It made for quite a chorus.

The story does not end here. Yitzhak could hardly know what trouble he got himself into when he become intimate with Billy. While he thought that he and Billy were playing in secret, in fact, Billy’s behavior soon gave it away. Billy was no one to keep a secret. Moreover, not only Abraham knew the truth.

A couple of village men, who were angry at Abraham over some slight that he as village elder had done them, had also noticed Billy’s behavior. They soon hit on a plan to benefit from it. The plan was a very simple one. While Yitzhak was herding the goats, they would sneak up on him when he was sleeping, bundle and bind him in a blanket, and take him to their camp. They knew that Billy would follow wherever Yitzhak was, and with Billy would come the whole herd of goats.

The men hoped to corral the goats and exchange them at a neighboring village for half the number of goatskin bags. Of course, the villagers would lose their herd, but then the mountains were full of wild goats. Come next spring, the villagers could catch themselves a new herd.

What the men did not count on was that Yitzhak would resist and defend his flock. When the men tried to seize the goatherd, the boy was awake and had been watching them. Yitzhak hit out. The robbers, suddenly fearful that the boy would discover their identities, hit back. One of them hit Yitzhak on the head.

The men immediately fled whence they had come. Billy, seeing Yitzhak lying on the ground and moaning in pain, tried to revive him by humping him. Unfortunately, the blow had caused internal bleeding, and soon Yitzhak was dead.

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
6 John the Awesome

Few of us would question if Ivan the Terrible (Ivan being the name for John in Russian) was truly terrible. History ascribes to Ivan terrible things, even as it does to him terrible things, not least mistranslating his name. Terrible need not be terrible if it is in fact awesome. Thus, it may be that Ivan, John in English, was not Terrible, but Awesome.

The name John has had many adventures. Here is one almost everyone knows, but in a more polite version. Here is the real story.

Most of us have heard of John the Baptist. He is one of the lead figures in the New Testament. He baptizes people by the River Jordan, among them a young man named Jesus. The king cannot tolerate John. After all, the king believes that the head of the community should be the king, not John. After all, who is John, but some camel herder taking advantage of the reputation of another herder, a goatherd, moreover one who lived long ago and went by the name of Yitzhak. Why should the people be flocking to John, when they should be coming to me, the king?.

The king does “fixes” John and fixes him good.

The king invites John to his castle on the pretext that he wishes to be baptized, too. John comes of course. However, when John arrives, he is surprised the great to do. At first, he is fed all kinds of dainties, given a drink made of camels milk steeped in Johns Grass, and then he is asked to a show. The show is a full-press porno. Naked young women who have oiled themselves with odorous spices and darkened with coal their eyes, nipples, and other orifices, come to dance in front of him.

When John protests and wishes to rise from his chair to leave, rightly suspecting a trap, alas, Johns Grass has done its thing. He has become relaxed enough to have an erection. If he rose, everyone would of course see his embarrassment and have a good laugh. Worse, this is when a beautiful young maiden kneels before him and asks him if he would baptize her by letting her suck him off. To make sure there he does not escape, two guards hold John in his seat, and just as he is spilling his seed, a third guard (mercy be!) grabs him by his hair, accuses him of insulting the king, and chops off his head. http://www.angeliska.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/salome-corinth.jpg

Not only has John lost his head, but his reputation as well. Everyone hears the story, but much changed. The king’s court releases a story of how John tried to get down on Salome and… lordy lord!

Because of the scandal, the king takes over John’s office. Which raises a question: Why was John, the camel herder, the spiritual leader of the community, but not the king?

Before we go on about the adventures of the name of Awesome John, here is important information about the name John itself. Where does the name come from? What does it mean?

As busts of important men and women eventually fall off their pediments and are covered by dust and overgrown with brambles, so with the name of John. However, instead of dust and brambles, John is buried by different pronunciations of his initial letter J.

For example, in reality, John is a cognate (that is to say, it is one and the same name) for Ivan, Ian, Jan, Janis, Janus, Jean, Johann, Hans, Han, Huan, Hunnapuh, Gion, Giovanni, Gans, Dion, Don and many many more. Similarly, John is the source of many derivative names. For example, gendarme, gene, gong, dzhong, janitor, gentleman, dungeon, wohn, zion, all have their origin in the name John. The God Wotan is another John the Awesome, in this case the name John being pronounced as Wohn, a hint of which remains in the German name for apartment, re Wohnung.

John is also closely associated with the Sun, the Sun being his mother. Unfortunately, this fact is hid either by changing the gender of the Sun to male gender [as, for example, Sonne (f. Old English)] or by telling his story in such a way as to divert attention from the original story. For example, the Sumerian Goddess Iananna was the original Sumerian Sun Goddess, while Dumuzi, her son, was no other than Awesome John. http://www.buttinger-foerster.com/galerie/2005-1428.jpg

John also appears in the most ancient of all stories, Gilgamesh, as the kings closest friend, Enkidu [Yenki, Yenkidu, Hunnapuh?]. Enkidu is described as a wild-man, though he most likely is a goatherd. A temple whore tricks Enkidu. She gets Enkidu-John to abandon his flock in the countryside and come with her to the city.

John lives to regret the move. The reason is similar to that of John the Baptist. The whore was sent to John by Gilgamesh, the king, who tricks John out of his spiritual office by compromising him with the dazzle of his worldly court.

The story about John repeats itself time after time after time. We get it as late as Molliere in his play “Don Juan”. Destined for great things, John, again, burns out sooner chasing after women and sex than become the king of his community.

Is John that weak a character? Does the name of John do no more than buy him a ticket to a Can-can show? Does John always fall for the king’s ruse to do him out of his humanity? http://tinyurl.com/p7d7ok

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
5 Terror In The Pasture

In order to become fully conscious, a human being needs to see his and her shadow. That is to say, if you are walking along the beach on a sunny afternoon and take no notice that you have no shadow following you, it is most likely that you are not consciously aware of yourself. Oh, yes, you are there. You put your foot or paw before you and see where you are going (proof being that you avoid walking into the sea), but no matter how long your shadow, you see it no more than most animals see themselves in the mirror.

We may take the above scene and substitute for the shadow a community of human beings. The stress is on the word “community”. Let us imagine that these human beings are the first apes forced at that very moment out of the trees they have always lived in. As far as the apes can remember, they had always lived in the rain forest and in trees. Then years of drought arrived. The forest dried out, and one day, today, lightning struck a tree and started a forest fire.

Whereas they needed to eat and shit just like any other creature, because of their lives spent living in trees, these apes—soon to become human beings) had not taken note that they shat. Their excrement simply dropped to the ground and was lost there. Nor did these apes—while living in trees—need to take note of their shadows. Nor had they taken any particular note that they lived together as a tribe. This is why when they came onto the beech, they did not know—at first—that they shat, that they had a shadow, or that they were a community. To find themselves on the beach was a most awkward moment, but at the same time, it fascinated.

Of the new things to discover and take note of, our ancestors probably learned to recognize their shadows first. After all, the shadow cast by our bodies has a real shape, even though when we touch it, we touch it without touching it. It is and it is not there. Then we went about learning toiled training. We made our first skirts and draped them around our ugly red behinds (living in trees we had not taken note of this), thus becoming able to cover up also our fur—an unwelcome reminder now of the days we had lived in trees. After we had learned to do all that, only then did we discover death and through death that we live in communities.

As strange as it may seem, the first human beings had not taken much of a notice of death, because death was too much like shit. When we lived in trees and died, we simply fell to the ground and out of sight. Even getting used to toilet training—a notable advance in consciousness—was something of a paradox. By letting our excrement drop in a hole and doing our shit as solitaries, we learned manners and to be discrete. We also transferred our new orientation to the dead. In those days, when individual faces still went unrecognized, death was noticed only by its stink and the area was avoided. Now, if you stank you were buried. Because a dead body was recognized to be no ordinary turd, the entire community came together for the burial. but for a long time burial did not become any greater ceremony than that.

How did the discovery of death and how did the community come about? The answer may sound as surreal as making an effort to imagine ourselves in the sun without a shadow, but here it is: we discovered death through cattle. To help us see the connection, let us recall weaver ants. These ants live in trees in rain forests. The ants cut up leaves, string their bodies together into “bridges”, “milk” sugar from caterpillar larvae, and exhibit other intricate tricks of their species at the same time as they have limited cognitive capacity and no consciousness. See http://tinyurl.com/d4dg6r and also
http://tinyurl.com/cq6w7s
It may be that before human beings became aware of themselves as a community—though they were living in groups or tribes—they, like the weaver ants, were gardeners without too much consciousness of themselves as a community of special gifts. Except in the early days, the apes were gardeners of convenience. That is to say, after they had eaten the fruit of one garden, they moved through the trees to another garden of tree fruit.

But when the apes came out of the trees, they had to discover another kind of fruit. This is how they discovered edible roots. Then we discovered that mothers of animals gave milk, that this milk could be stolen from their young, and that the milk would keep flowing if the udder was routinely stimulated. Thus, we discovered milk could be had from goats, sheep, cows, yaks, lamas, camels, reindeer, pigs. Milk is so bound up with human food consumption and sense of well being, that in some societies even males offer babies their breast to comfort them. http://tinyurl.com/cyya8f

It should not come as a surprise to us that human beings learned to exploit animals and themselves a long time ago (almost as soon as we came out of the trees and onto the plains), and that such exploitation was not necessarily a violent one. Animals were gathered, domesticated (conditioned to accept the human environment, castrated if need be), conditioned to accept a human hand on the udder to be milked, and then taken by a herded to pastures belonging to the community. The herder kept an eye over the flock to protect it from wolves, mountain lions, and thieves from neighboring communities.

It is, thus, likely that it was a herder who was the first to die defending the interests of a community. This made the community all the more conscious of the importance of the herder. It also made the community more conscious of itself. Many of us already know this story, though it is told in a different version. For example, most of us have heard the story of Abraham and his son Yitzak. I retell the story somewhat differently. All the same, it involves a goat, its herder John, and Abraham, the community elder and father of John.