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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 179/ Introduction 1

Why 4 Suns Stood Still
© Eso A.B.

The sun rises every day. It will do so, more or less automatically, until ‘the end of time’.

We do not know the event that will bring ‘the end of time’. It may be the nearing of another galaxy, perhaps Andromeda, and the disturbance of the gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy as the nebula nears it.

However, there is yet another sun. This ‘other’ Sun is spelled with a capital S.

This is the Sun that gives life. This is the Sun one cannot buy and hook up to solar energy collectors. This is the Sun that creates out of itself.

As if by some magic this Sun is at just the right distance from planet Earth. Its orbit allows the Earth to turn green, and out of the green to emerge Ladybugs, birds, fish, dolphins, elephants, horses, and ultimately human beings. If this Sun becomes angry, She can scorch the Earth, turn it arid, and make it become a desert.

It is interesting that from the very beginning of the arrival of human intelligence, human beings have known that they cannot fully realize themselves without forming a community. On the other hand, human beings also intuitively know that given their individualist nature, achieving a community is no easy task. In some sense, human beings are like termites http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/insects-arachnids/termite2.htm . It takes a great specialization and effort to build a termite colony, and an even greater effort to build a human community, then hold the community together as a loyalty.

The creation and holding together of a community that is loyal to itself was expressed by our forebears through stories and myths about the Sun. The sun was chosen, because the sun shines not only on individuals, but on the whole collective of individuals. When the sun is able to put the individuals it sees under one roof, so to speak, it becomes known as the Sun (with a capital S). She is then humankind’s organic Goddess or God for all those She or He shines upon.

There are at least four (4) major stories of how the Sun became a God or Goddess. In the beginning, the Sun was more likely to have been a Goddess. Only later did it become masculine as one of the stories (from Greece) explains how and why this happened.

 

All four stories about the Sun have one story element they share in. This ‘element’ is the knowledge that before human beings were gathered into a community, the Sun stood still. As the Aztecs told it, the Sun barely cleared the eastern horizon, and then remained there doing no more than wobbling from one side to the other. It would not rise higher, and the people on the ground became very concerned, because they were afraid that the Sun had died.

This condition of the Sun or the community dying is an issue—though few imagine it—to this today. One of the reasons why this is so is because our ‘modern’ leadership believes it can lead without self-sacrificing anything of themselves. These ‘acutely modern’ or ‘post modern’ communities are generally found in what we know as the West, specifically the lands that are occupied by a people educated in the West. Why is this so?

I will give the answer through the fourth and last story of this series on “Why 4 Suns Stood Still”. I may, of course, tie into these stories elements from stories from other communities, because, as I have already mentioned, all stories share in the common element of needing to get the Sun to rise in the sky for everything else to come to life.

But to wet the readers’ appetite, I will hint at the cause that stops the Sun in Her tracks. It was the discovery of gold and the creation of money. Gold and money destroyed the glue that held a community together as a loyalty. As I explain all this in detail as I proceed, it will become apparent to the reader just what a loyalty is and why it is a name no longer used in describing a community.

Before we get to discuss gold, we need to give some attention to silver.

You see, silver is heavy. To carry a thousand pounds of silver in one’s pocket is impossible or very cumbersome to say the least. To slice silver into silver leaf is not a solution, because when silver oxidizes, it turns black. To scrape it off the piece of paper it would be glued on for more convenient handling risks being left with nothing but paper.  

In later years, when money was created out of gold (a bar of gold was sliced into a million slices of gold leaf and glued with potato starch on a small piece of paper), ‘money’ came into its own. Indeed, the old belief in God or Goddess or Sun was discarded, and the name for these Big Others, became Money. Money enabled human beings to believe that they could do without a community, because as long as they had gold currency, they could buy themselves a community anytime they wished.

Moreover, a money-bought community could be more to one’s liking than a community that had come together in the time before there was gold or money. For one, people could leave the wood and the countryside and move into an urban environment. In the urban environment the people could make themselves ‘smell’ any odor they liked. This is how the old communities and loyalties became known as ‘old’, and ‘old’ became associated with everything unpleasantly “smelly”. Maybe this is because people of the wood and country do not have deodorants other than incense and their toilets are dry and known as ‘outhouses’.

There are also yet other problems with money-bought communities. When the money found its way into the pockets of a man, he generally bought himself a community of whores, who he gathered in ‘harems’, a name that stands for the bathhouse where the wool of sheep used to be washed; if the money was in the pockets of a woman, she generally bought herself a community of gigolos, among whom were her own sons, sex starved wolves from the city wearing white sheep’s clothing.

So, this is when and how the Sun again became ill, lost energy, and died. The Sun again needed to be resurrected. Who will be the hero to do so?

 

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.

Eso’s Chronicles 177
How War Began (1)
© Eso A.B.

The religious nonsense propagated by the Vatican and allied religious organizations was initially concocted in Paris by an agency that served a goal similar to the one that the NSA http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining  and CIA http://consciouslifenews.com/dark-thirty-review-glenn-greenwald-cia-hagiography-pernicious-propaganda/1146532/ serve in Washington and Brussels today.

Of course, the name of the proto-Vatican agency, originating most likely in an office in the Court of Charlemagne, is long lost (deliberately erased), transferred to peripheral areas to attract less attention, and become Potemkin village-like facades overgrown with several layers of moss. The topic of how to transform mere ‘surveillance’ (spying) to ‘heretical’ and counterproductive ‘activism’ is well illustrated in the stepping stones that led to the tinkering with spirituality (the fiasco of modern ‘art’), to 9/11, and to the recent ‘Boston Marathon Massacre’. What is yet missing, but what we may expect to appear shortly, is a CIA financed armed neo-Christian revival. The Christian mercenaries fighting in Syria have been but a prelude, a sort of trial run.

As we learned in the previous blog (176), the argument the Vatican uses in defending God, ‘religion’ and “life”, came by way of its mouthpiece, re: Cardinal Ravasi. Ravasi claims that "Religion celebrates life, but here [in the figurine of St. Death] you have death." Ravasi’s statement acts as an opening salvo in the Vatican’s call for a ‘New Evangelization’ campaign http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/new-evangelization-you-must-be-kidding , which will be financed, just as the Polish Pope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II , was financed by you know who.

The first and foremost rebuttal to Ravasi is that his ‘religion’ of life, has nothing to do with God, who is a creation of the community, the ‘One Big Roof’ or 'Big Other' the community needs to stay bonded in brother-sisterhood. The ‘life’ that Ravasi describes as the initiator of his religion, has nothing to do with Ravasi’s or any one of our ‘lives’, which are all singularities that came into the world with the birth of each one of us.” The phenomenon of ‘Life’ is well enough explained by the physicist Erwin Schroedinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F.

It is interesting that the Vatican’s emphasis on ‘life’ and not the community. This coincides perfectly with the interests of the novus ordo seculorum headquartered in Washington.

Since this blogger has been advocating the displacement of the ‘Vatican story’ of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, with the story of JesusTheBogomil in Byzantium (Tsargrad or Constantinople), the future promises us an interesting literary tussle between the West and East.

The challenge of the East to the West may begin with the East pointing out that the ‘Vatican story’ or version of the New Testament is a False Flag, a story rewritten by the Vatican from a Christianity [Cross + Road] of much earlier days than the Vatican allows. I discuss the two different versions of the story in my Jesusthebogomil.blogspot.

As for the Vatican (re)evangelization campaign:

If we study old creation myths, most of them mention a Creator God or Goddess, Who sacrifices Him or Herself to realize or make real His-Her creation. The theology contained in old myths has little to do with ‘saving’ individuals, but everything to do with regenerating the community. [The NSA and CIA are of course interested in weakening such a community in favor of rule by Washington.]

Let us take an old Aztec myth. Incidentally, the Aztecs were well known for making human sacrifices, which inspired great fear and terror in the witnesses. I take my quotes from a book by David Carrasco, “City of Sacrifice”, Beacon Press, pgs. 73-87. The Aztecs had a special word: “…regeneration was called teomiqui, to die divinely or ‘dying like a god dies.” In other words, we may interpret from this that at the beginning of time the old Gods of the region later conquered by the Aztecs, sacrificed themselves. There is no mention that the old Gods of the Toltec nations of earlier generations made human sacrifices. Human sacrifice was a later invention of the Aztec conquerors.

The Aztec conquerors did not feel secure in their conquest of the old indigenous Toltec tribes round about today’s Mexico City, but ruled over them with great violence. The Aztecs are said to have originated from a wandering people from the north, who went West (they held the South to be on their left) and then turned south http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/46981/Aztec . As the invaders settled into a more sedentary way of life, they began to ritualize their violence.

Accustomed to getting their way by killing their opponents, but having come to a land where such violence was not common practice (see above: regeneration,  teomiqui, self-sacrifice), the Aztecs gave the old tradition their own violent interpretation: they substituted the self-sacrifice of former Gods-rulers with human sacrifice. To have humans to sacrifice (finding no volunteers among their own community), they waged war on their neighbors to capture prisoners, who were then brought back to Tenochtitlán , where they were sacrifice on top of Templo Mayor, the great temple at the heart of the Azted capital city.

The ritualization of violence by the Aztecs was a development that paralleled the rebuilding of the shrine to the Aztec God Huitzilopochtli by the Aztec king Moctezuma http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/275172/Huitzilopochtli . The reconstructed shrine was then rededicated as the Templo Mayor. However, not all of the conquered people were happy to collaborate with the Moctezuma in the rebuilding of the temple of a God, who claimed to have killed all of the four hundred previous Gods.

Writes Carrasco: “… the independent community of Chalco refused to participate, and was declared in rebellion of the Aztecs. A ferocious war was launched and eventually the Chalcans were defeated. Their captured warriors were brought to the Templo Mayor and, along with other prisoners of war, sacrificed at its rededication. This pattern of celebrating the expansion of the Great Temple with warfare and the sacrifice of enemy warriors was followed by subsequent Aztec kings who increased the sacrificial festival as a means of controlling resistance and peripheral territories.”

On one occasion as many as 2300 warriors were sacrificed at Temple Mayor. It is unlikely that this pretentious ‘sacrifice’, so similar to the pretentious (hubristic) killing of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in our day by those who would globalize human culture on our common planet under their aegis is anything but a manifestation of spiritual failure and an attempt to institutionalize a hollow God.

The self-sacrifice of the original Gods and rulers of the Toltec people is best illustrated by the story of how Nanauatzin (the Pimply Populist) threw himself into a fiery pit to encourage and ensure the birth of the “Fifth Sun”.

Eso’s Chronicles 176
The Moneytheist Commons (VII)
© Eso A.B.

I am among those who believe that God is not a particle, but a wave. To apply the Heisenberg solution to the God problem, enables one to view God as both a wave and a particle, but to prove that He-She is one or both, one has to make the ‘quantum jump’ and jump over an awesome crevice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZJJ99jETLI . That is to say, one has to die to find out.

Because nature knows that this test is inevitable may be one of the reasons why it causes one to age. After all, only when one is old (enough) and has seen what life has to offer, physical exhaustion may make one even eager to see what comes next—even if it is no more than a look into the face of Emptiness https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg73QPQLTJIvHL6e0MymkUyP_o8-7ECrj0wDlzJI0ks5URdriVVi-XIryCjijdlrdct7ZHu1jHuy9fzdsojSQhyeYK0JT6YwcgdT8rNrAOGHriiw8P3yy3mlflzERKqmlsdXoDpUZjScac/s400/picture-15.png .

The neo-Christian Church is vociferously opposed to such a perspective. In the following link, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Ravasi http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181, tells that worshipping Santa Muerte (blog 175) is a "degeneration of religion".... Cardinal Ravasi said the practice was "anti-religious". "Religion celebrates life, but here you have death," he said. "It's not religion just because it's dressed up like religion; it's a blasphemy against religion", the Cardinal continued.

Whose ‘religion’ is Ravasi talking about? His own, no doubt. He hits the nail on the head if at the back of his head, he allies his ‘religion’ with  capitalism, which is whence its chief support, ever since Charlemagne decided to remove the spiritual centre from the East and move it to the West, comes from.  Catholicism (and its offshoots), which stand for the exclusivity of human rights for the wealthy (originally the French Princes), which have ever since tried to fool the poor and uneducated that it is their ‘right’ also. The last is a peculiar assertion, given that historically the Vatican has but choreographed empty ceremonies. How did this ‘religion’ become the ruling ideology? “By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed,” says one philosopher”.* There is no shortage of those who are fooled.

The claim by Cardinal Ravasi that religion celebrates life is simply untrue. At least it was never true before Catholicism tried through yet another Cardinal, one named Peter to impose such a ‘truth cum lie’ on behalf of the wealthy on the poor http://i.qkme.me/3p345z.jpg . To understand the nature of this ‘truth’, we have to take another look at the ritual known as the Last Supper, in which the elders of a given community share in a sacred pie within which is hid a piece of the ‘body of the Gods’, a piece of coal. It was Jesus’ fate to draw this piece, whereby he became a Sacred King.

It was this archaic ritual that ensured (the Last Supper occurred before Jesus arrived in Jerusalem) that their community was ruled in the most ‘democratic’ way possible. Because no one is free of mistakes, knows this, and is prepared to pay for any trespass with one’s life, the community is ever forgiving. This commitment was the reason why the secular lords wished to seize and kill the Chosen One. They could stop the tradition only if they discovered who had drawn the sacred piece of coal before the people learned of it. This is why they arranged with Peter, who acted as the purser of the traveling court of the Sacred King, that he would pay Judas, one of the twelve who acted as Basil’s servants, thirty pieces of silver to kiss Jesus, and indicate through the kiss who had drawn the St. Death card. Foreknowledge gave the authorities time to fabricate a crime with which to blame Jesus. For example, the two ‘thieves’, later said to have been crucified on either side of the heretic ‘King’, were important ‘witnesses’ to the crime. This is what makes it likely that it was the thieves who were taken down from the cross early and recovered, not Jesus), whom they tortured and made beg for his life to escape the pain.

Before the arrival of neo-Christianity, religion used to manifest itself through a Festival celebrated by the whole COMMUNITY. Catholic Christianity succeeded in toppling the Festivals by imposing on people the meme of hubris through the dogma of individual immortality. In this way, the ruling clique succeeded in fracturing communal solidarity by kaleidoscoping into one the ritual of self-sacrifice and the ritual of public execution, and topping it with a promise of immortality. The meme of immortality has been in the ‘works’ for over two thousand years by our time, and has replaced the yeast that raised the dough of the old commons with a community bonded by no more than waterproofed paper Money.

Needless to say, the Bible has little to say about the community. “Bear one another's burdens, and… fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) is about as close as it gets.

Yet there are few oligarchs who have given away their possessions or taken on another’s burdens. The reason is simple:  the ‘others’ are the poor, and the burdens of poverty are hard to bear. This is illustrated by the sharp drop in prices (halving them) for the services of immigrant prostitutes in London http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22106546 , while their opposite, the neo-native American presidential penis galore swears innocence before an audience he does not have to make eye contact with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs , then uses his notoriety to make money http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bill_clinton_paid_for_minute_speech_YVpCd5lHlDc290PUeU64zN , hand over dick, so to speak. It’s a strange, strange world, Mr. Jack Klinton! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0WvXpyufT8 Is it not?

A reader of my blogs has communicated to me that he believes that God has little to do with life, death, or community, but that the issue is rather one of monotheism vs polytheism. When I was introduced to this perspective, I was compelled to imagine God as a persona suffering from an incurable multi-personality disorder.

A God suffering from a multi-personality disorder makes sense if we remember that the Magna Charta (1209) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/magna_01.shtml was written on behalf of princes and barons in revolt against the authority of the King, aka the Monarch. To the extent that the office of King had abandoned all pretexts to be a self-sacrificial office on behalf of the community, the revolt of the princes was legitimate. However, it is no secret, that England’s princes were not ‘reformers’ of abandoned ancient traditions of government, but forerunners to neo-capitalist anarchism achieved at the price of turning Olympus into a bank for polymorphous currencies.

Money is a flexible tool of exchange: it can be gold, silver, or paper, and it can be broken down into small change, which can be inflated or deflated according to whoever is in charge of the money printing office. In our day, the individual in charge of U.S. Moneytheism is Cardinal Bernank. Moneytheism rhymes easily with monotheism, and blends centralized power into the structure of a pyramid without difficulties.

A Moneytheistic God stands for centralized government over which those who find themselves on the periphery have little to say. In our day, the only people who are consulted from the periphery is a group known [curiously, but tellingly, as the Bilderbergs, i.e., Picturemounts of Iconic wealthy individuals].

A similar problem with regard to actualizing democracy was faced by our forebears. They solved the problem by remodeling the peak of the gold leafed pyramid into an office that symbolized self-sacrifice. Thus, the sacred oath of the Sacred King was that he would give his life. His face thereafter was portrayed as shining in gold leaf.

Unfortunately, a copy of the disciple Peter, the purse carrier of the Sacred King’s sacred Court, is today embodied by someone known as Cardinal Bernank. Cardinal Bernank has passed the kiss on to President Obama, who (in imitation of Stalin’s reaction to the kiss received from Lenin) washes his hands and passes his sacred responsibilities on to a technocratic State bureaucracy.

This buck passing gives the President the ‘legal’ right—if I insist that money today is of paper, while he insists it is of gold—to fly up to my window with a drone helicopter and fire a rocket.

Uncritical surrender to Moneytheism encourages individualism to climb and reach previously unimaginable levels of incoherence—which is where urban society of today locates us. Though the opposition to the present structure of society may be great, there is no mention of this opposition in the Moneytheistic media which has been bought up by the oligarchy.

*Slavoy Zizek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p. 153.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 175 
Saint Death (VI)
© Eso A.B.

The bonding mechanism of the community is not violence as we are taught to believe (by ‘hard nosed’ realism), but self-sacrifice and awe induced by other methods than violence. However, the desire to give, which is part of the desire to sacrifice for the good of another, is ‘theologically’, sabotaged from the word go by numerous political organizations of which the ‘religion’ of the West is one.

Our civilization suffers from at least a thousand years of propaganda supportive of military and violent intrusions into the gift giving process, by which every human attempts to transfer onto another something of his or her substance or being. Once upon a time, this mysterious substance was called ‘soul’, until the soul was unsubstantiated by capitalist realism, which made a ‘gift’ matter only if it was Money borrowed from a bank for one’s personal needs.

Though primal violence is based in hunger and survival—as when a lion chases, catches, and seizes a zebra by its throat; post-primal violence is based on a doctrine of premeditated attack on an unsuspecting ‘other’. While the tactics of projecting post-primal violence are many, exemplary examples of it in our time are the secretive campaign of the neo-Christian Church (Catholic, Lutheran, etc.) against native religious practices, Hitler’s campaign against peaceful and unsuspecting Jews, and the attacks by American drones guided by technicians of limited education and intelligence and attacking ‘out of the blue’ any native people (or ‘home country’ people) going about their business in their countryside locations. The American government has. moreover, learned to make its attacks not on the basis of ‘intelligent information’, but makes its decisions to kill on written instructions and ‘need to show’ results by showing a ‘body count’.

The root of the problem of post-primal (re modern) violence is the assertion of ‘capitalist religion’ that violence, occurs ‘first’ when the desire to give arises within the individual’s secret self. This is why one of the basic tenets of religion “…when you give to the needy [through the agency of public technology], do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (Mat. 6:3),” is subverted by recording the source of the gift (you) on some advertiser’s list and hence the ‘left hand’ violating your privacy through so-called ‘spam’ for the rest of your life. Minor as such a transgression may seem to some, it nevertheless is a violation of you every time ‘you’ receive an unwanted communication and you react violently and dump the unsolicited material in the waste basket. We ought to remember that the word ‘spam’ stands for fatty compressed and conserved sandwich meat.

In any event, your desire to keep your ‘home community’ durable and healthy http://www.infowars.com/canadian-student-punished-for-preventing-knife-attack/ by not buying into ‘spam’, is interpreted by official (actual) capitalist religion as a traitorous, therefore violent, act against society.

The World Health Organization (WHO) calls suicide one of the major public health problems, a leading cause of death (between the ages of 15-44), even as it moralizes and calls all suicides (even obvious self-sacrifices) “self-directed violence” http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/suicide/en/. In other words, when you junk the ads from Wal-Mart, you are committing an act of subversion against the society you are born to.

At this time, one of the most visible “self-directed violence” events presented to the psyche of the American public is the U.S. government provoked hunger strike at Quantanamo Bay, Cuba http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/29-05-2013/124681-guantanamo_concentration_camp-0/ . The hunger strike is waged against the U.S. government by the majority of what many consider illegally detained prisoners. The UN human rights office has condemned force-feeding those on the hunger strike and calls it ‘torture’ and a breach of international law.

The allegedly authoritative opinions distributed by WHO constitute a major intrusion into the private life of the individual by a ‘health’ and pseudo-religious organization serving a seemingly benign government and elite (capitalist) interests, which are unproven and untested by time, but are sufficiently powerful to intrude, overwhelm and block independent thought processes which may include contrary opinions. Though one may welcome the aid of WHO on occasions of dire bodily distress, its intrusion into the mental process of society constitutes an unwarranted intrusion of political ideology.

There are numerous up-front ‘to the contrary’ objections to WHO’s message:

 
1)    The public health problem is not the individual’s decision to take (gift) his-her own life, but is to be sought in the (often intolerable) nature of modern society itself;
2)    The act of taking one’s life does not involve violence if the act can be accomplished without pain and without having to bear the burden of such judgments as issued by WHO;
3)    Every suicide is an act that has cause and, therefore, …
4)    Every suicide may be considered a self-sacrifice for a cause;
5)    The public is diverted by government propaganda (supported by WHO) from giving due attention to the fact that the major cause of violence is government action in war;
6)    An act that causes one to take one’s life is not an act against life, but an act that confirms the community’s objection to the kind of society that violence prone governments have created;
7)    An act of self-sacrifice is not an act against one’s life, but an act on behalf of the spiritual health of one’s society;
8)    That opinions of WHO are grounded in secular and quasi-religious opinions promoted by capitalist ideology;
9)    Capitalism is grounded in neo-Christianity, which was created by means of a False Flag operation against the people of the wood when they resisted capitalist instigated destruction of their home.

To return to Slavoy Zizek’s opinions (for similar opinions see blog 174) about the durability of capitalism and futility in opposing it: “Today, we can easily imagine the extinction of the human race, but it is impossible to imagine a radical change of the social system—even if life on earth disappears, capitalism will somehow remain intact.”*

Much as I respect Zizek’s contribution in loosening the sclerosis of thought that has developed with regard to 20^th century political events, the frozen history continues moving forward on the basis of momentum, just as television ads continues to advertise luxury goods though many lose their homes and are forced to move and live on the streets.

*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p 149.

Informative links:

Saint Death  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181
Invasive acts by capitalist religion: http://www.infowars.com/scotland-every-child-to-have-state-guardian-from-birth/