The Midsummer New Year of Johns 2012 Yesterday, June 1st, as I was mowing the lawn in front of my house, I noticed that the acorns that had fallen off the oak trees last fall, had begun to sprout, and were announcing their birth with leaves brighter than the grass surrounding them. I left the saplings stand and will in due course transplant them.

Over the years, I have written quite a bit on the Midsummer’s New Year of Johns. Of all the holy days of our ancient forebears, the Latvians are the only ones, whose tradition still has the New Year of Johns on the calendar. Just like the New Year’s Eve of our times, the New Year of Johns is also celebrated on the Eve of Johns day, i.e., it is called Johns Eve. Alas! Over the years this Holy day has been much repressed and, therefore, let pervert into a celebration of forgetting tradition through an overuse of alcohol and silly tales of heroic teens jumping naked over bonfires and getting their pubic hair singed.

This is not to say that this writer cannot play along: after all, the explanation that most people’s pubic hair ir curly because of the high flames of Johns fires has a poetic element about it.

One of the more profound writers regarding the New Year of Johns or Midsummer was and remains the English poet from Wales, Robert Graves. Here is a quote from his study of early European deities, re “The White Goddess” (1946), Chapter 10, The Tree Alphabet,  D for Druis:

“”The month [June], which takes its name from Jupiter the oak-god, begins on June 10th and ends on July 7th. Midway comes St.John’s Day, June 24th, the day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned alive.. The Celtic year was divided into two halves with the second half beginning in July, apparently after a seven-day wake, or funeral feast, in the oak=king’s honour.”

I will here add that in ancient days the year had 13, not 12 months. I also write the ‘New Year of Johns’ without an apostrophe in the name of Johns—because the Latvians, risking excommunication by the Christians, have insisted in retaining the name in its plural form. After all, once upon a time the Johns were many, though it is true that the last of Johns was St. John the Annointer [not Baptist]. More about this “last” at the end of this series.

Robert Graves goes on to write:

“Sir James Frazer, like Gwion [an ancient writer, ? pronounced ‘John’, has pointed out the similarity of ‘door’ words in all Indo-European languages and shown Janus to be a ‘a stout guardian of the door’ with his head pointing in both directions. As usual, however, he does not press his argument far enough. Duir, as the god of the oak month, looks both ways because his post is at the turn of the year; which identifies him with the Oak-god Hercules who became the door-keeper of the Gods after his death. He is probably also to be identified with the British god Llyr of Lludd… for according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the grave of Llyr at Leicester was in a vault built in honor of Janus. Geoffrey writes:

‘Cordelia obtaining the government of the Kingdom buried her father in a certain vault which she ordered to be made for him under the river Sore in Leicester (Leicestre) and which had been built originally under the ground in honour of the god Janus. And here all the workmen of the city, upon the anniversary solemnity of that festival, used to begin their yearly labours.’

“Since Llyr was a pre-Roman God this amounts to saying that he was two-headed, like Janus, and the patron of the New Year, but the Celtic year began in the summer, not in the winter. Geoffrey does not date the mourning festival but it is likely to have originally taken place at the end of June.”

While Robert Graves had his troubles with his critics [“…no expert in ancient Irish or Welch has offered me the least help in refining my argument…. But it is only fair to warn readers that this remains a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired, or rigidly scientific mind….”], the history of “Latvian religion” has it worse. While the British may well accept the argument that Llyr or Janus was a pre-Roman God, go tell a rigid Latvian that Jahnis (John) preexisted the New Testament’s ‘baptist’—though there cannot be any doubt about his repression in the past as well as its continuation today—because to recognize the preexistence of Johns obviously means the Resurrection of Jesus as John.

Today, June 2nd, the Latvian Celebration of Johns Eve (June 23rd) is but three weeks or 21 days before us. [/color]

Blog 2 Midsummer, New Year on Johns Eve 2012

Just as Christianity ‘old style’ was replaced by Christianity ‘new style’, so New Years of Johns Eve ‘old style’ has been replaced by ‘Midsummer what?’ (new style).

Latvians may ask themselves how come they always manage to adopt the ‘new style’, while the ‘old style’ is sent on with a 100 grams of “one for the road”.  Unfortunately, the 100 grams is topped off with yet another 100 grams, until the ‘old style’ no longer feels any pain, and falls into a road-side ditch.

There is a story or explanation to this ‘happening’, though Latvians have few if any historians, sociologues, or philosophers to tell about it. As in the previous blog, where I began to quote from the poet’s book “The White Goddess”—and coming from Wales, Robert Graves, the good poet that he is, Graves has not forgot the “historical grammar of poetic myth” as Latvians have. Here is Graves on the destruction of the hawthorn (vilkābele)  in Ireland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus:

“The destruction of an ancient hawthorn tree is in Ireland attended with the greatest peril. Two nineteenth century instances are quoted in E.M. Hull’s ‘Folklore of the British Isles’.  The effect is the death of one’s cattle and children and loss of all one’s money. In his well documented study, ‘Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles’, Mr. Vaughn Cornish writes of the sacred hawthorns growing over wells in Goidelic provinces. He quotes the case of ‘St. Patrick’s Thorn’ at Tin’ahely in County Wicklow: ‘Devotees attended on the 4th of May, rounds were duly made about the well, and shreds torn off their garments and hung on the thorns.’ He adds: “This is St. Monica’s Day but I do not know of any association (my underline).” Plainly, since St. Monica’s Day, New Style, corresponds with May 15th, Old Style, this was a ceremony in honor of the Hawthorn month, which had just begun. The rags were torn from the devotees’ clothes as a sign of mourning and propitiation.”

Mourning and propitiation was on behalf of the coming sacrifice of one John on Midsummer Eve.

Interestingly, using my method of conflation of new-old-styles, the month of hawthorn (hawthorn also known as Common Hawthorn C. monogyna), monogyna translates as ‘single Žēņa’ or ‘abstinent John’. This meaning takes us back to the month of May, which in the Old Style was the month for sweeping out the temples in preparation of the Midsummer New Year of Johns.

Robert Graves quotes the poet Ovid from his work “Fasti”:

“…an oracle given him [Ovid] by the priestess of Juppiter about the marriage of his daughter—‘Until the Ides of June [the middle of the month] there is no luck for brides and their husbands. Until the sweepings from the Temple of Vesta have been carried down in the sea by the yellow Tiber I must myself not comb my locks which I have out in sign of mourning, nor pare my nails, nor cohabit with my husband though he is the Priest of Juppiter. Be not in haste. Your daughter will have better luck in marriage when Vesta’s fire turns on a cleanthed hearth.’

“The unlucky days came to an end on June 15. In Greece the unlucky month began and ended a little earlier. According to Sozomen of Gaza, the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian, the Terebinth Fair at Hebron was celebrated at the same time and with the same taboos on new clothes and sexuality, and with the same object—the washing and cleansing of the holy images.”

Therefore, the sexual abstinence in the month of May is not only a kind of fast in honor of the Goddesses at the Temple, but a preparation for the sexual orgies came the Midsummer New Year of Johns.

Last, but not least, one reason why John at “The Temple of Black Johns” at Braslava is ‘black’ is not only because John, old style, was cremated [the manner he died was likely left for him to decide, because our forebears the proto-Latvians knew of herbs and halucigens that would induce self-sacrificial death (incidentally, an ethical form of violence, or as I have called it elsewhere “a not-violent form of terror”) that benefitted the community by way of the charisma created on behalf of the community].

Blog 3 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

One of the favorite bug-a-boos of fascist Latvian politicians is language. Not that I have objections to fascism when and if it is not violent or militaristic. As I have argued in other blogs, I see fascism as the natural identification of a community when it is, indeed, a cohesive community, which is an evolutionary outgrowth of the individual understanding that there is safety in numbers, that is, a community. Indeed, there is also an element of religion in healthy fascism. It uses this religious feeling in creating a communal imagination, while repressing Pop individualism, which leads to the atomization of a community. Unfortunately, both bolshevist and neo-capitalist rule encourages the fragmentation of a community to better allow the party apparatchiks to become the future dictators or oligarchs.

However, as the experience of other people proves, speaking the language of a larger community does not necessarily destroy one’s native culture, granted that the latter is cohesive enough to maintain itself as a self-conscious entity. As the following clip from Wales proves, the Welch language may have little to to with the welchness of the Welch, even though no doubt, language played an essential and even existential role in getting the Welch communithy started, re http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPYkYfi_IiM

Given that now only 1/6th of the three million Welch speak Welch, it is worth considering how Wales (with2.5 million of them speaking English) manage to remain a cohesive community http://wales.gov.uk/topics/housingandcommunity/communitycohesion/?lang=en without the word ‘fascist’ ever creeping up.

The next question to arise is what makes for Welch identity? The following link makes a strong case for language. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120529111428AAlVhhz Be that as it may, I believe that a strong case may also be made for community identities that go beyond narrow or self-limiting efforts. In other words, I believe that a kind of peaceful evangelism of identity may serve in strengthening not only self-identity, but in enlarging such identify to include inter-community identity.

The Welch, too, have their Midsummer Festival: http://www.astrologycom.com/midsummer.html  , which they celebrate in honor of St. John, the tanist (twin) of Jesus. Take note how the herb of St. Johns Eve (note the Latvian use of ‘Johns’ in its plural form), re St. John’s Wort http://www.flickr.com/photos/37818240@N03/3657234939/ , may be the same as the Latvian Balderjānis (Balder John). Unfortunately, I can find no photo of the Latvian herb on the internet. It may also be, that the Latvian folk saying of the countryside speaks how on the Eve of St. Johns “all the grasses are GOOD”. Meaning that Midsummers New Year Eve is when flowering plants reach their ripeness. I have used the saying to support the use of cannabis, because I find it difficult to imagine that St. Johns, whom the Catholic Christians, along with travelling Cathars and Jews came to call “travelling heretics”, had travelled the world and had not learned of and brought with them the seeds and blooms of this beneficial herb. Incidentally, the Johns are not likely to have smoked, but drank a mixture of Johns Grass buds set to soak in cream and then brought to a boil.

Because St. John was also the tanist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanistry  (literally ‘twin’) of Jesus, it should be clear to even the most devout of Christians of Catholic heritage, that St. Johns had long preceded the last member of their fraternity. Writes Robert Graves: “the holly being the tree of the tanist, who killed the oak-king at mifsummer”. The alternating ‘killing’ of the twins of each other, is reflected in the Irish “Romance of Gawain and the Green Knight”. Again Graves: “The Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is a holly bush. He and Sir Gawain, who appears in the Irish version [there is also an English version] as Cuchulain… make a compact to behead one another at alternate New Years—meaning midsummer and midwinter—but, in effect, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight”.

As I suggested in Blog 1, more about the sparing of the Oak Knight by Jesus in a later blog.

I will close today’s (June 3) blog and evangel on the importance of St. Johns to the Latvian community by pointing out that ‘Gawain’ is but another name for John/Jahnis [given that G may be pronounced as J or Y, and W as U, re Gwion, as in German W may once have been pronounced as a Y or J, re ‘wohn’ as in ‘Wohnung’—the place where one lives, the sacred place in one’s heart.] As for the holly tree.it is not native to Latvia to my knowledge, but the oak-tree remains prolific though no longer is thought as sacred.

Blog 4 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Yesterday, June 4, a sentence in the 2nd paragraph Blog 3), stated that: “Indeed, there is an element of religion in healthy fascism. Fascism [it] uses this religious feeling in creating a communal imagination, while repressing Pop individualism, and not allowing a surreal community.”

For some readers, the statement may seem like an outrage, what with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco not yet a hundred years gone.

Nevertheless, I have held this view for some time, provided that fascism comes sans violence and militarism, which, I believe, has in ancient times was done and accomplished.

I believe that the denial of fascism today is an urban conceit, because fascism (as a dictatorship) in a forest environment is inconceivable, even as a community with close bonds is a natural to it. It is urban conceit (call it unhappiness over the way things are) that gives birth to fascism, even as a democracy (re Parliamentary democracy) becomes a utopian dream. Unfortunately, poets cornered by urban conceits will oppose fascism by supporting extreme individualism as, both, an alternative and a human right.

The charisma that adheres to urban fascism is of course a religious invocation, which is a function of poetry, but, alas! in an environment of vulgar concrete, it will solicit violence to be believed human.

As Robert Graves writes about ‘old style’ poets and their loyalty to the White Goddess [Latvian Laima, goddess of fate, sister of Moonlight, Mēnesnihca]: “’Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery…; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.”

Describing his own leanings, Robert Graves continues: “Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush. I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contacts with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine….”

To such people as Graves identifies, fascism is the alternative to a democracy, which may exist only in a forest, but no longer is, because the forests are deforested.

Perhaps I have diverged from this blog’s main theme, that of Midsummer, New Year of Johns Eve 2012. On the other hand, I have sketched more thoroughly the background against which present-day Latvians enact their Holy day of Johns and why the Holy Day of Johns ends up in binge drinking.

Another poet. Sophocles, who when forced to ‘rewrite’ his analysis of our “novus ordo sculorum” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novus_ordo_seclorum , then did indeed rewrite his critique of modern society by stuffing all of his writ into an overly simplistic riddle: “Who at the beginning of his life walks on four, in the middle of his life on two, but at the end of his life on three legs?” The answer: “Man”, however comes nowhere near the playwright’s intent, re http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ , which is to say, the correct answer to the riddle is “man, the masturbator and homosexual”.

Sophocle’s analysis, reaches into the ancient past of Egypt, one of the first places where man established an urban environment and a city. The playwright’s analysis—as I see it—is, briefly, as follows:

When the Queen of Thebes (in Greece) gave birth to a son, Oedipus, her husband, the King of Thebes, Laius, wished to test whether the newborn was believed by the gods fit for the role of future king. This ‘testing’ entailed leaving the infant exposed for one or several nights on the peak of Mt. Citheron. When Queen Iocaste realized what Laius was up to, she revolted. She was not about to risk sacrificing the life of her son—even if the test were to result in the infant’s survival, proof that he is fit to become the next king of Thebes.

When Queen Iocaste learned of the King’s intent, she yelled at the King: “You superstitious urban sob! You really think that the Egyptian god Atum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_creation_myths  created Thebes by masturbating? You think that you are done with me and want to masturbate into being, my son, as your successor?”

Crude as Iocaste’s words may be, it is no less true that virtualism is the consequence of masturbatory activity, and homosexuality is primarily born of the city.

Blog 5 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

June 6.  ~~~~~-^^^^^^^^^^-~~~~~ Beginning today, the ‘Johns Bottom’ pond at Temple to Black John is beginning to construct, for lack of a better name, John Brow’s Leviathan Body. Approximately a seven metre (21 ft) oak rump, nearly a metre in diameter is receiving its zigs and zags http://quiltindex.kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/81/140/51-8C-565-235-WyomingQuiltProject-a0a5u0-a_12118.jpg . Yesterday, Volodya Saimesjānis (Simjanovs), my neighbor from Abrene, skinned the bark off the rump. The latter, when dry, will make excellent material to get the fire started come again the fall and winter.

After John Brown has received his ‘teeth’, we will drag and then roll him into the Johns Bottom Pond, where he is likely to swim with his teeth cutting the pond’s surface, until he get waterlogged and sinks to the bottom. John Brown, will, most likely, be the last of my “invisible sculptures”, a series of works which I began a long time ago in Boston, when I lived at 327 Columbus Avenue, a stone’s throw from Back Bay Station and Copley Square. The zigs and zags, ^^^^^^ stand for movement out of sight. In my early days, these were hid in a box that either had a door or a lid; in the case of John Brown Levithan, he will be hid by and in the water.

The ~^^^^^^~ sculpture is but a physical representation of a truly invisible force that courses the human brain. As pointed out in a previous blog, my grandfather called it his Devil, I prefer to think of it as my imagination, best expressing itself as a contrarian’s contribution. An in-depth analysis would likely show the nature of this force to be homosexual (though in sexual matters, I remain strictly dedicated to women).  This is not to say that I am interested in stressing sexuality, but that, in fact, I believe that homosexuality when brought under an organizational roof reduces the sexual act to a sanction to hear it happen in a shack made of tin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKrDEn9cdDghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKrDEn9cdDg .

As already mentioned in blog 4, the ancient Egyptians were the first to note the homosexual nature of civilization, with the gods Atum and Ptah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah getting credit for being among its first creators.

This is not to say that I think homosexuality to be an altogether urban phenomenon, except that it is in the urban environment that homosexuality begins to demand for itself “equal rights”. This may be, because so much of a city’s population consists of johhny’s come lately from the countryside.While in the countryside homosexuality manifests itself as my serrated oak log sunk to the lake bottom, in the city that same log turns into a tin shed and gets a license from the city government to hear itself perform, with an amused public standing around the shack, listening to all the noises and rattles, and waiting to see a hand drop from a small window a wet condom. Indeed, the condom may be evidence of a heterosexual act, because in my way of explaining it, it is the voyeurs who are the real homosexuals.

Writes poet Robert Graves in his book (“The White Goddess”) on the historical grammar of poetic myth: “The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonal observation of life in the fields. Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called Platonic love, the philosopher’s escape from the power of the Goddess into intellectual homosexuality, was really Socratic love…. Though the Goddess [Diotima] as Cybele and Ishtar tolerated sodomy even in her own temple courts, ideal homosexuality was a far more serious moral aberrancy—it was the male intellect trying to make itself spiritually self-sufficient.”

The Latvian Johns, who generally left their countryside homes as young men only to return home so much wiser when middle aged or near to that age, and almost always still single, were most likely—having seen what no eye at home had seen—a smart and tolerant crew.

As part of their tolerance, the Latvian Johns were likely opponents to the stay-at-home boyars, the males lacking poetic imagination, but with overheated imaginations salivating after both flesh and wealth. Thus, it was the Latvians’ own homosexuals from whom today’s oligarchs evolved, and who, like in the days of yore, sodomize not only John, but Latvian countryside-forest culture as a whole.

...healthy fascism...

This just keeps getting more stiflingly boring. Let’s mix ersatz neopaganism with misprised suburban prejudices and flamboyant ahistorical fancies, adding a piquant dash of visceral homophobia. You’d have made a great little pot-bellied brownshirt in the 1930s, man.

/P

Blog 6 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

While there are innumerable historians and economists who date the beginnings of capitalism to the Low Countries, re Netherlands, Holland, there are others who still argue about the question. Since the original times are long past, the origins of capitalism may always be a guessing game.

As for myself, I place the beginnings of capitalism at a much earlier and prehistoric time, indeed, when somebody now unknown and anonymous cut down not only a tree, which went into making a swift boat or canoe, but the whole forest that had guaranteed the forest dwellers an egalitarian society. In Latvia this probably happened with the appearance of the first boyars, who, taking a lesson or two from the Viking marauders, who came by the sea, or inventing marauding themselves organized into a brotherhood of the viscious and lazy.

No doubt, it was the boyars, who seized the sacred groves, where the forest people had their temples, and then turned the temples into forts. It become a logical thing, that the next step was to surround the temple with a wall, and a corona of a treeless lawn, which the boyars often decked with hundreds of Ts, which, as it were, put on exhibit the captured ‘wild men’ of the forest.

It was their relative inexperience with violence (killing game for meat is a step of necessity, not necessarily violence) that caused the capture of the forest people. When they protested and attacked the fortresses of the boyars, they were captured and left to meet their death by leaving them hang and dry tied on the Tau. The Tau looks like the capital letter T, and, very likely, is at the root of the word ‘tyrant’.

In our day, many mystical associations surround the Tau. However, originally it is a cut down tree; its top, known as ‘a tree top’, short circuited by a beam, which—along with the trunk severed from its roots—simbolizes cessure, a stop to growth, death. While the T in our days is often identified with the cross ‘t’, the small projection on top of the t having come to represents either a human head or the inscription placed above the head of crucified Jesus—INRI. Again, there are a lot of mystifications about the written meaning of this http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_meaning_of_INRI_on_the_cross_above_Jesus’_head. But if our thought is not saturated with sticky tape, it reads: YanRa, or John, Son of the Sun. Of course, one may argue why the letter I is read as Ya and then alternately as A, but most of us know that in older times everything that was written was written without a vowel, which means that all vowels are a later addition, therefore, a matter of political imposition.

Many people of our day, unfamiliar with the ways of either the oral or written tradition, have taken the given as God’s word. Perhaps the Christian habit of Christening their children has advanced such negligence of human invention. However, the name, especially the naming of human beings is a complex matter. As Robert Graves, whose grammar on poetic myth follows us throughout these blogs, writes: “It was Janus, ‘the stout guardian of the oak door’, who kept out Cardea [the White Goddess] and her witches, for Janus was really the oak god Dianus who, was incarnate in the king of Rome and afterwards in the Flamen Dialis [divine flame], his spiritual successor; and his wife Jana and Diana (Dione) the goddess of the woods and of the moon. Janus and Jana were in fact a rustic form of Juppiter and Juno. The reduplicated p in Juppiter represents an elided n: he was Jan-pater—father Dianus.”

The politics of this series of blogs suggest to the reader that the name of John, Jahnis, Johann, Don, Dion, Dionysisus, Ian, Ivan, Huan, Gwion, etc. all signify one and the same man or a group of men, re John and Johns, some of who (when came the time for the two annual solstices) volunteered to be tied to the T and let be dried there by the elements until dead and the crows and ravens came to clean the skeleton. Drying out on the Tau was a form of burial known as excarnation. Of course, to be tied to a T and left alone meant an excruciatingly painful death, which is why in the crucifixion scene of Jesus, we read of a sponge being passed up to him to drink. Very likely, the sponge was saturated not with vinegar, but with urine that had processed the juices of amanita muscaria, said to not only be a halusigen, but to give enormous strength and endurance.

Blog 7 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Unlike today, when certain Latvian capitalists are suggesting that the retirement age ought not come before one is eighty years old http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/266330/?comm_page=51 ; in the days when proto-Latvians still lived in the forest and were ruled by the rules of a subsistence economy and worshipped the Light of the Moon Goddess (Mēnesnīca) , up to four months of the year were enjoyed as holy days. Thus, as mentioned in blog 5, the month of May or hawthorne (vilkacis) month, was a month for spring cleaning the temple, abstinence from sex, and preparation for sacrifice of John in the middle of June, the time of the midsummer’s New Year.
authentic moral authority is no more either in Latvia or most other places today.
The freedom to enjoy time while living on the landscape, so to speak, encouraged the poetic imagination and the creation of gods and goddesses.

This freedom to create does not necessarily mean that a creation of a god or goddess made them ‘real’ in the ordinary sense of the word, but the language that developed around such creative acts became, like the Latvian language, an event for endearment. Latvians may—if they only would—endear equally a stone and any name, thus, akmentiņš (dear stone), Jānīts (dear John). Of course, once one uses a name for long enough, it starts accruing about itself a story. Thus, it is the story that becomes real, while the superstitious ones are the ones whom we today call scientists, he or she who insists that the reality of a stone must be disected for all of its constituent parts.

When one had time enough for time to become infernal (an element into which one could infer all kinds of things), one tested and tasted every root, stem, leaf, berry, blossom, and mushroom. Today, we no longer know, but once upon a time every Latvian knew when to cut and not cut a tree—all in relation to the time of the year and phases of the moon.

When the taboo on sex was broken at the beginning of seventh month of June, John was the first to enjoy a woman or, better, women, who knowing that he was a lover of Ariadne-the White Goddess http://www.comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/corona_borealis.html  or Mēnesnīca, knew his seed was fertile and a child born at the ides of March and sleeping in a cradle made of an ash tree, could (if need be) slay the time-enslaving Ceasar and not be tempted to become one.

As suggested in the previous blog, John was likely sacrificed on a Tau or T tree; and though his death was relieved by giving him a drink of sacred mushroom juice by the high priest, the scraps of his flesh leftover by the crows and ravens made a stink bad enough for the community to build a bonfire about his leftovers, while the gods translated John himself to the Aurora Borealis http://www.comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/corona_borealis.html .

Of course, by our time (2012), human flesh has been translated into cheese and blood into wine, vodka, or beer. The fact, that Midsummer New Year has become an alcoholic debouch, perhaps the last attempt by infernal man to sabotage scientific man and spit at the poet (for his helplessness to right the injustices of scientific man), suggests that the apocalypse of the community is a reality today and need to be awaited to come tomorrow.

In short, authentic moral authority is no more either in Latvia or most other places today.

As the ever inventive Americans sing: “John Brown’s body is amouldering in the grave!”; Latvians may wish to remember that “Halleluiah” rhymes with “Jā-ā-ni! Li-ī-go!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSSn3NddwFQ&feature=related

Blog 8 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

If the absence of authentic moral authority in Latvia ought make obvious the need for it, the brain-freeze that hovers over the country will not relent. To paraphrase Tariq Ali http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_Ali : “The capitalist model has encouraged an institutionalized depolitization of the [Latvian] masses.” (My insertion.)

The institutionalized de-democratization was very noticeable in yesterday evening’s television interview program called “The 100th Constitutional Regulation [re “100. Everyone has the right to freedom of speech, which includes the right to freely acquire, hold and distribute information and to express his/her own opinions. Censorship is prohibited.] Press Club”.  The program shifted the gears to the programmed depolitization agenda from the very beginning by confronting three ill informed journalists (as to economic matters) with two verbose Latvian politicians (Godmanis and Shadurskis) come to visit Latvia from the Centre-extreme dominated de-democratized European Parliament. The program was moderated by one Reders, who advertises another program which he moderates with the words: “Do you have something to say? Then speak!”

If in European countries, where the populations are large, the institutionalized depolitization and de-democratization of the public is resisted by the shier number of the population, in depopulated Latvia its sails of its ship of state catch the wind the moment the sails are unfurled.

A brazen picture of moral deauthorization of the entire Latvian population is projected by Latvian youths, who, led by the political fellowship of neo-capitalist business achieve high government posts at an ever younger age.

One of the first acts of one such officeholder was to consent to the shooting of a female bear, who smelled in the spring air the freedom of the forest, and being a female sexual deviant broke out of her cage. The minister then had the two remaining male bears castrated. Not that such hyper authority was in any way restrained or advised by the “Reform Party”, the minister’s political sponsor.

Another ‘politicized’ youth (of the eagerly expected younger generation) upon seeing how inauthentic the morals of his “reform” party, decided to do it one better and squared de-authorization, by sticking his fingers into the eyes of the party’s founder, who was then taking possession of a luxury car, presented to him by the Latvian government.

So, what does all this have to do with St. Johns Eve in Latvia, come Midsummer’s eve, June 23rd?

To quote Robert Graves again, who quotes the historian Lucian: “Men weep and bewail their lot, and curse Cadmus with many curses for introducing Tau into the family of letters…. [He (Cadmus) and his supporters] set up the erections on which men are crucified….”

The sacrifice of John on Midsummer is an obvious institutionalized political act. The act was done to give death its due, and gain authentic moral authority for proto-Latvian leaders. Whether these leaders all became kings, we do not know, but collectively their name was Johns, and they were held in honor by the entire community.

As one would expect, among post-Soviet Latvian leaders there are none who has the moral authority of a proto-Latvian John. Today, the Authentic Moral Authority of Latvians (AMAL), is seconded by NATO, while St. John is forgot. In this sense, the entire Latvian government can be considered to be “birthers” http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/23/politics/birthers-arizona-iowa/index.html : “They look like Latvians, they smell like Latvians, they pretend to act as Latvians, except their anti-populist evangel cooks up orange looking post-Latvian crayfish.”

Speaking about ‘orange’: Two years ago, I put in my pond five small goldfish, which I bought at a Valmiera Zoo store. I had read that as long as the fish are not tropical, they will adjust to any environment and grow as big as the size of the pond will permit.

I now have several hundred small fish as large as the breadth of my hand swimming about. I am also about to put up a sign that reads: “Dear fishermen! These fish are not to be fished for until 2022. You will then have a chance, if you buy an Ls 20 ticket now. If you buy a ticket now, but discover that you are the only one who bought one, the inhabitants of the entire lake will display themselves before you and their eyes will be asking you: ‘Do you really need to fish us? Why, more kindly, not have just one of us give our life on Johns Eve?’

Blog 9 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

A too literate interpretation to the question that I left off with in my previous blog (8): “Why, more kindly, not have just one of us [fish] give our life on Johns Eve?’” may shock not only fishermen, but many other people too.

This is one of the paradoxes of our time: You may talk with your doctor about your terminal illness, but you may not talk with him or her about death. At least most doctors will try to answer such a query with an answer which they consider to be a positive one.

No matter how we look at it, the subject of ‘death’ cannot escape an automatic assumption that the subject matter not only concerns ‘death’, but is also a question about suicide. While the subject of ‘death’ is a difficult one, it becomes more difficult when coupled with ‘suicide’, a word that has become a synonym of euthanasia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtZekdMZwBE .

‘Suicide’ necessarily triggers associations with one’s Will. Is the ‘Will’ of me, a human being, or is it the ‘Will’ of God? Moreover, if a ‘suicide’ involves the Will of the perpetrator (who else is thereto blame?), why would one wish to ‘will’ one’s life an end?

The answer is given in an unconvincing manner in the following link by a ‘therapist’. Granted that a therapist is not a doctor, but given that most individuals are presumed by governments to be in one way or another ‘institutionalized’ individuals (citizen or non-citizens of some nation)—and a ‘therapist’ is certainly an institutionalized figure—a suicide is unavoidably presumed to be a cog in the wheel of the ‘institution’.  http://psychcentral.com/ask-the-therapist/2007/11/28/is-suicide-the-answer/ its modern synonym being ‘nation’.

Such a presumption is an old one (going back to Latin Rome), though the Godless or ‘God-absent’ nature of the nation was asserted only after Enlightenment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment . For those born in the Age of Enlightenment, the creation of Adam and Eve as told in the Bible was a fairy-tale. However, by escaping the fairy-tale, Adam and Eve and all other humans became members of an institution. While the most immediate institution is a nation (sometimes also known as “my country”), all countries today belong to a league known as the United Nations (UN). So, again, like it or not, all human beings on Earth are institutionalized beings. When one thinks of it, a city (an institution) is not all that different from a prison.

The United Nations does not recognize God, but is headed by an individual known as Secretary-General, who as head of the Secretariat http://www.un.org/en/mainbodies/secretariat/ is deemed to be the de facto leader of the UN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations . Unlike the discredited God of the pre-Enlightenment Age, the Secretary General of the UN (in spite of his credentials), does not have anywhere near the charisma that God once had.

This is just as well, because none of the members of the Security Council of the UN (the real decision makers) wish him to have charisma. They rather keep such charisma as can be had for themselves.

One of the most charismatic God-absent nations of all post-Enlightenment nations is the United States of America. The President of U.S.A., from the very beginning recognized as the Supreme Commander of American military forces, has recently—by virtue of the Homeland Security Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Security_Act —become the Supreme Commander of all Americans.

While believed to be a mortal, the President of the U.S., has nevertheless presumed for himself the charismatic role once held by God. The presumption is self-assumed (given the help of legal advisors and concurrence of the Congress) and overrides the authority of not only Americans, but any individual anywhere in the world http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tsP2hkp24s . In other worlds, the ‘citizen of the world’ has been institutionalized as subject to the U.S. President’s will.

Not unlike once deinstitutionalized Christians (the Cathars, Bogomils, Lollards, Children of Johns, etc) everyone who disputes the power of the U.S. President, becomes not only a ‘heretic’ as in the Middle Ages, but a ‘terrorist’.

If in another time and age, the only way to escape the wrath of God was to commit a preemptive act, i.e., suicide, before God had a chance to act for himself, it is not much different today. In other words, if one gets wind of being on the ‘hit list’ of the White House, one may justify suicide, both, as a pre-emptive act that blends with the act as a protest.

Blog 10 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

With more American troops committing suicide than being killed in combat, we have come to a story the main theme of which is, unavoidably, the absence of ‘authentic moral authority’ http://exposingthetruth.info/more-us-soldiers-committed-suicide-than-died-in-combat/ . 

The statistics mentioned in the link surely ought to wiggle the White House ‘human concerns’ meme, because, when all is said and done, it is the way the United States government and its NATO wing relates the citizens of America to the citizens of other countries. If what the soldiers see and experience causes them to decide to leave the human fold, there cannot be much doubt that the God of Enlightenment (born in the 16th century) must either switch back to the proto-God of the Bible, or go out look for yet another.

While this hyper-news story concerns only the ‘democratic’ Empire, there are countless smaller tragedies regarding the absence of moral authority being projected all over the world. One such is small Latvia, where the seizure of politics by former Soviet Latvia apparatchiks in 1993 could not go unnoticed—marked by a public self-sacrifice by a tool and dye maker from the region of Zemgale in front of the Freedom Monument—has by 2012 trickled down like wet urine to all those Latvians forced to live in the fictitious, nevertheless very imaginable and dank political sewer system of the country.

The corrupt Latvian political system, paradoxically a zionationalist conundrum originally almost exclusively staffed by ex-Soviet officials who ‘privatized’ (prihvatizehja) most of the formerly public property to themselves and became, overnight, oligarchs or almost oligarchs. Today, the system is somewhat diluted by politically inexperienced youths, but liberalist conversions (assuming that both capitalists and communists are liberalist ideologies) continue apace.

While the economic condition of Latvia is one that concerns everyone most, the collapse of authentic moral authority in Latvia is perhaps best noticeable in the cultural arena.

Going from an economic policy best expressed by the slogan: “Push the gas pedal to the floor!” to one that screams “Push the brakes to the floor!” The cultural policy that let the orthodox and unimaginative Latvian National Opera soak up most of the funds that should have gone to the small theatres in the small Latvian countryside cities, the Cultural Ministry is now cutting the opera’s budget so drastically, that the choir and orchestra of the opera company are to receive pay commensurate with amateur status.

While this writer is very much in favor of an overhaul of the orthodox orientation of the opera, as a practical matter of how to switch gears, I made the suggestion that the opera adapt one of my works, re “Oedipus Rex Rewritten” http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/  (which received favorable responses from several professional sources) be presented sans music, but letting the choir prove its professionalism and carry the weight of the entire performance on its shoulders. Needless to say, my ‘rewrite’ reverses the orientation of this Sophoclean masterpiece from the currently favored ‘sexual incest’ theme to how to regain authentic moral authority among political leadership.

As if a catastrophy in the “high” arts were not enough!

Another cultural disaster is shaping up with regard to the Latvian Holy Day (or holiday if you prefer) of Johns Eve and Johns Day. It is not in the least surprising that with so much of property in the Latvian countryside being bought up by foreigners (the Russians and Chinese are reliably reported to be bsuying up the city of Cesis), the town famed by legend and literature, Burtnieki, on the shores of famed Lake Burtnieki, is preparing to let the Johns festival make one step further from being a community “low” arts festival to that of an ‘estrade’ spectacle led by a Norvegian DJ come to town to bathe in the politically and culturally enervated Latvian ‘paradise’.

Blog 11 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Johns Eve 2012 arrives with the Latvian government hyperventilating the rationalist approach to problem solving. To be more accurate, the spokesperson for absurdity in this instance is not the government, but an investment banker, one Girts Rungainis.

This neo-capitalist wonder, while admitting that he is not a politician and, therefore, not of the government, nevertheless lays out the truth as he sees it and, implicitly, how the government sees it the same. I.e., increase the salaries of certain select professions, but at the same time reduce the employed: http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/277498
The writer of the story (an anonymously authored reprint from LETA)  concurs by adding supportive quotes from the Prime Minister of Latvia and the head of the Bank of Latvia Ilmars Rimshevics.
All three extreme right wing personalities base their views on the presumption that these are rational conclusions. While the theology that backs up this ‘reason gone mad’ goes unmentioned, one can hardly doubt that it is sourced in the government sponsored Western Christian Church.

A timely column by Chris Hedges at Truthdig http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_street_priest_20120611/  on the Rev. Daniel Berrigan fully supports my perspective of the Western cum Latvian Church. The pertinent quote reads:

“The Rev. Daniel Berrigan…. along with other clergy, [are here] to ask Trinity Church, which is the third-largest landowner in Manhattan, to drop charges against Occupy activists, including retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, for occupying its empty lot on 6th Avenue and Canal Street on Dec. 17. The protesters, slated to go to court Monday, June 11, hoped to establish a new Liberty Square on the lot after being evicted by New York City police from Zuccotti in November. But Trinity had the demonstrators arrested. It chose to act like a real estate company [described as “a company church… miscellaneous denomination ”]http://www.manta.com/c/mr0vbww/trinity-church]”, or the corporation it has become, rather than a church.”

The head of Trinity Church is a downright copy of a Latvian politician as the following bio explains:

“Contrast Daniel Berrigan, who lives in a single room with a half dozen other retired priests in a parish house in lower Manhattan, with the imperious rector of Trinity Church, the Rev. Dr. James Cooper. Cooper earns $1.3 million a year, lives in a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, receives a church allowance to maintain his Florida condo, dips into church funds to take his family on African safaris and oversees the church’s $1 billion in Manhattan real estate holdings from which the church receives as much as $30 million a year. He spent $5 million on a public relations campaign, nearly double the $2.7 million the church gave out in grants, in one year. Ten of the church’s 22-member vestry—its board of directors—have quit over Cooper’s authoritarianism and extravagance.”

While a Latvian politician earns a significantly lower salary from his God, I am comparing Dr. Cooper’s income to ex-President Zatler’s luxury Audi and in-state President Berziņš, who receives Latvia’s highest retirement pension. The figures may not match, but the mindset is of the same theological meme.

In contrast, the Latvian divinities John and Johns (I distinguish between words ‘God’ and ‘divinity’) were confirmed egalitarians. John would have asked the above mentioned immediate resignation from their presumptions and posts. I suspect that a like demand would come from John the Baptist of New Testament fame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist The link tells us, among other things, that: “Christians believe that John the Baptist had a specific role ordained by God as forerunner or precursor of Jesus,”

Being a proto-Christian folk, the proto-Latvian Johns, sons of the Sun or the forest Goddess Mara, they were egalitarians. No doubt, this “egalitarianism” disturbs the neo-capitalist views of the Latvian rulers and most of the crypto-Latvian http://www.yourdictionary.com/crypto-prefix  elites. I use the word ‘crypto’ advisedly, in the sense of ‘not having come out’-Latvians.

As for the origin of egalitarianism among proto-Latvians, we can ascribe it to the Great Goddess Marian: once Goddess of the Sea, also of the Forests—when forests covering Earth were as the sea. Robert Graves tells a spicy anecdote, which he steals from a “Medieval Book of the Saints”. As an expression of her egalitarian nature, Marian worked her way to the Holy Land (after egalitarianism was violently subdued) by sleeping with the entire crew of the ship. Graves insists that “Robin Hood, in the ballads, always swore by Her”.

Blog 12 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

June 13, 2012. The international news services (The Guardian/ BBC- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18417952 )  announces the use in Syria of military attack helicopters and more on the way from Russia. Syria is being attacked with Western support by so-called ‘activists’ in an attempt to foment an international war.

While the West is engaged in a propaganda war against the Syrian government, its support of the ‘activists’ is no less obvious. The opposing view of events in Syria are best expressed (from this writer’s perspective) by Voltaire Network http://www.voltairenet.org/Russian-Warning-Shots . Thierry Meyssan at said link writes: “Over the past sixteen months of the destabilization of /Syria, NATO and the GCC have created a situation without exit that might well degenerate into global war.” Which says Hillary Clinton http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jun/13/syria-helicopters-russia-hillary-clinton-video : will “escalete the conflict quite dramatically.”

While Hitler invaded Russia ostensibly to guarantee Germany the space for extended ‘lebensraum’, Russia occupied the Baltic countries in the belief (it did not turn out to be true) that Marx was correct that the Revolution of Revolutions would begin in Germany and the ‘developed world’ beyond.

Might the Mother of all Revolutions be in the offing now?

In June of 1941, the Baltic countries, barely recovered from the effects of WW1 (ended only twenty years before)  and their folkloric based cultures under attack from cultural globalizers (today’s Pop culture was not anticipated then by the cultural elites in the West or East) had turned the founding generation of my parents into patrons of ballet and opera. In short, the Latvians found themselves hit by a bullet in midflight through a circus hoop tossed into the air by the Maestro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zsFpFEfYt0  of a Circus company.

June, 2012, the Baltic countries are still walking on their heads rather than feet.

Today (June 13th) the Lithuanian President Grībauskaite http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/277764 is in Latvia selling nuclear power. Or, given the above information, was she?

Being a long-time opponent to nuclear power, I heartily disagree with pro-nukers, especially, since the Balts are not assured a future existence —with or without nuclear power. As I mentioned in my previous blog (11), a Norwegian DJ has already offered to the Burtnieki township to organize Johns Day festivities. As far as I know, his offer was gently declined. But the threat to Latvian culture remains and is of a terminal nature.

For my part, I am selling a “back to the forests movement”. The Midsummer Latvian Johns Festival—what with John a twin of the English Robin Hood—happily coincides with days when Nature is at its best. Incidentally, on Jun 23rd, 14:00, Ojārs Ozoliņš of Valmiera, a knowledgeable man in local culture, and myself will discuss our separate versions of the Johns Day tradition. Guests at the Temple of Black John will be members of the Burtnieku nature protection club, and all who wish to join. If you come, bring along your ‘groziņš’.

However, to continue with the main theme of this series of blogs: Johns Day as Midsummer’s New Year 2012. Not many Latvians are familiar that in former times John’s Day or Midsummer was celebrated all over Europe and beyond—even if under some other name. If in the 19th and the 20th centuries the Latvians (still repressed by the Christian church) knew next to nothing about the origins of Jāņi (Johns), today the internet brings them information from all parts of Earth. Like it or not, Latvians cannot remain ‘know nothings’ any longer about this ancient Holy Day of their ancestors. The cornucopia of traditions cannot be repressed, but must be imaginatively utilized to our cultural advantage.

My critics will say: ‘So what! It was all superstition anyhow.’ To which I respond that with the ecology of our planet screwed up beyond fixing, but no one yet recognizing that the economy, too, is screwed beyond recoverability, the alternative—a simultaneous collapse of civilization and nature, leaves only one option: a return to Nature,and a planned economy taking responsibility for the regrowth of forests and animal life for at least five hundred years. Assuming that the period will not be one continuous war, it may be followed by reconstituted sobered-up nations —among which Latvia will not be missing.

Blog 13 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Disbelief in reality (in spite of disbelief in the existence of God) is the wonder of our times. In spite of the demonstration firings of intercontinental missiles by Russia only a week ago (see Voltaire Network, com ), the ‘all heal Glossover’ media smearing Vaseline and started churning out one obfuscation after another.

Beginning with French Foreign Minister La urent Fabius, who confirmed that Syria was at the stage of a civil war, came the French call for mandatory observation of the UN Security Council’s mediator Kofi Annan’s Syria peace plan. Also BBCs Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17356556 observes that: “Of course, in reality there is minimal chance of Russia or China allowing such a resolution to pass. But the French move is a clear signal of the increasing gravity and concern with which the crisis in Syria is being seen.”

Note the disbelief embodied in the phrase: “…increasing gravity and concern”. In other words, reality is not to believed yet, but can take a few more hits of disbelief.

Strange as this may seem to some, the decline of international relations to a level approaching a “world war” level, is nothing new.  It is, indeed, the curse of the East.

Ever since the days when secular governments first corrupted and finally destroyed (with the ‘Russian Revolution’) the unique system of governance known as the “Byzantine Commonwealth”, it has been so. Almost unknown today, this system of government included a group of nations, which “took their cultural inheritance from Constantinople, but generally ruled themselves.”

This era of the “Byzantine Commonwealth” began with the conversion of St. Vladimir in Kiev to “Christianity’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_the_Great . Indeed, it happened even before Vladimir took power. To quote from the Wikipedia link:

Though Christianity had won many converts since Olga’s rule, Vladimir had remained a thoroughgoing pagan, taking eight hundred concubines (besides numerous wives) and erecting pagan statues and shrines to gods. He may have attempted to reform Slavic paganism by establishing the thunder-god, Perun, as a supreme deity. “Although Christianity in the Kiev existed before Vladimir’s time, he had remained a pagan, accumulated about seven wives, established temples, and, it is said, taken part in idolatrous rites involving human sacrifice.”

If “idolatrous rites involving human sacrifice” is an accurate statement, then we have here one of the first confirmations or Robdert Grave’s contentions that human sacrifice in ancient England and Europe was common. No doubt, it was true also for what was then proto-Latvia just entering onto the arena of historical times through Livonia.

The link goes on to inform: “In 983, after another of his military successes, Prince Vladimir and his army thought it necessary to sacrifice human lives to the gods. A lot was cast and it fell on a youth, Ioann by name, the son of a Christian, Fyodor. His father stood firmly against his son being sacrificed to the idols. More than that, he tried to show the pagans the futility of their faith: ‘Your gods are just plain wood: “never will I give my son to the devils!’ cried Fyodor.”

It gets yet even more interesting: “An open abuse of the deities, to which most people in Rus’ bowed in reverence in those times, triggered widespread indignation. A mob killed the Christian Fyodor and his son Ioann (later, after the overall christening of Kievan Rus, people came to regard these two as the first Christian martyrs in Rus and the Orthodox Church set a day to commemorate them, July 25[I am happy to say, this is a day before my birthday).

To repeat: “…deities, to which most people in Rus’ bowed in reverence in those times.” Among such deities were Ivan, Jahnis, and evidently one “Ioann”, son of a Christian.

This is where the word “Christian” and the issue of its legitimacy becomes really interesting. The question necessarily arises why Ioann, son of a Christian, was not a Christian himself? And, yet again, was there not, at that time, another Christianity competing with the one of which Vladimir is presumed not to be one. I mean, what with eight hundred comcubines, plus many wifes—what Christian would dare himself such “too sexy for my love” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39YUXIKrOFk  to be ruler of Rus?
I will leave some of the ‘interesting’ material for the next blog.

Blog 14 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

To continue to follow through with the news of the day (not necessarily to the day), here is a worth while read from Stratfor:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/spain-debt-and-sovereignty?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20120612&utm_term=gweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=ae946eda948d4861abb0d1cc3fd9d18c
The article illustrates just how vulnerable in the Big Scheme of Things is Latvia, especially when it is governed by ‘know nothings’ and ‘no brainers’. If indeed “The European Union is built around Germany”, will Bruessels be anything but a German and EU capital, and may not Koenigsberg of Old Prussia fame become necessary to defend Latvia?

The author of the article, George Friedman, of Stratfor continues: “During the U.S. Civil War, the future of the Union was challenged by the secession of the South. The decisions were made on the battlefields where men were willing to die either for the Union or to break away from it. Who will die for the European Union? And what will hold it together when its decisions are unpopular? The concept of extended integration can work, but not without the passion that moves a Greek or a German to protect his and his country’s interest. Without that, the glue that holds nations together is missing in the European Union.”
Latvia’s sovereignty is, everyone knows, hawked by the Latvian boyars (known today as oligarchs) for dollars or euros. The perpetrators are they, who have compromised themselves early enough in the “Game over Latvia” to sell it, yet even more disastrously for the Latvian Commons http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Commons to gradually liquidate it.

While there are few who agree with me today, I believe that the “Latvian Commons” has much to do with the Rus of St. Vladimir. It is in Latvia’s interest to belong to a Commonwealth that insures it sovereignty.

The Latvian synonym for ‘Commons’, incidentally, is “saime”, a word at the foundation of the seat of the alleged democratic government of Latvia, re Saeima. The Latvian ‘saime’ means a bond, a group, a household, a unit that lives much as a family does, but acts as an extended economic unit within which not all members are of the same nucleus, which consists of a ‘saimnieks’ and ‘saimniece’, close symbolic kin of Adam and Eve.

What does all that have to do with St. John or plain Johns?

We need to continue with our history lesson from Wikepedia a little longer:

“Immediately after the murder of Fyodor and Ioann, early medieval Rus saw persecutions against Christians, many of whom escaped or concealed their belief.

However, Prince Vladimir mused over the incident long after, and not least for political considerations. According to the early Slavic chronicle called Tale of Bygone Years, which describes life in Kyivan Rus’ up to the year 1110, he sent his envoys throughout the civilized world to judge at first hand the major religions of the time—Islam, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Byzantine Orthodoxy. They were most impressed with their visit to Constantinople, saying, “We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth… We only know that God dwells there among the people, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”
And why should Tale of Bygone Years tell that the envoys sent by Tsar Vladimir should prefer Constantinople over all others? Was it that all Constantinoplians were drunkards (in days when vodka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodka had not likely to have been invented yet)? Or was it perhaps because the people of Rus, the allaged pa-jahns or po-ivans, felt greater religious affinity with Constantinople?

Alright, what affinity?

Re: The bonds of the Eurasian ‘saime’, which have been stolen and replaced by the state-dependent Christian ‘family’.

Can you prove such a thing?

The word ‘saime’ speaks for itself. It is known that before the enthroning of St. Vladimir over Kiev, Vladimir was a payan (the correct word for pagan), yet one who was familiar with Christianity and who, yet, sacrificed human beings not only after a victorious battle, but probably also before it—to insure that his soldiers knew among themselves a blood bond great enough to bring victory.

We can assume that in the Christianity practiced among the people from whose midst St. Vladimir himself came, human self-sacrifice was not an alien thing. We know that self-sacrifice among the Christians of the West is if not quite forbidden, closely tied to the word ‘suicide’, which was universally, recognized as a disgraceful act. In fact, suicide was condemned with a social taboo that was as strong as the one against incest.

Blog 15 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

To continue, re Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_the_Great “Immediately after the murder of Fyodor and Ioann [987], early medieval Rus saw persecutions against Christians, many of whom escaped or concealed their belief….

“However, Prince Vladimir mused over the incident long after, and not least for political considerations. According to the early Slavic chronicle called Tale of Bygone Years, which describes life in Kyivan Rus’ up to the year 1110, he sent his envoys throughout the civilized world…. They [the envoys] were most impressed with their visit to Constantinople, saying, “We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth… We only know that God dwells there among the people, and their service [Service—could this be interpreted as form of government?—blogger] is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”….

“The Primary Chronicle reports that in the year 987, as the result of a consultation with his boyars, Vladimir sent envoys to study the religions of the various neighboring nations…. Ultimately Vladimir settled on Orthodox Christianity…. 

“In 988, having taken the town of Chersonesos in Crimea, [Vladimir] boldly negotiated for the hand of the emperor Basil II’s sister, Anna. Never before had a Byzantine imperial princess, and one “born-in-the-purple” at that, married a barbarian…. Vladimir, however, was baptized at Cherson, taking the Christian name of Basil [Basil means ‘king’, which was also what the sign (an invention, imo—said obove the head of Jesus—blogger] out of compliment to his imperial brother-in-law; the sacrament was followed by his wedding with Anna. Returning to Kiev in triumph, he destroyed pagan monuments [Click: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Kievan_Rus’ and go to, re “Aftermath”] and established many churches, starting with the splendid Church of the Tithes (989) and monasteries on Mt. Athos.

“Arab sources, both Muslim and Christian, present a different story of Vladimir’s conversion. Yahya of Antioch, al-Rudhrawari, al-Makin, Al-Dimashqi, and ibn al-Athir[14] all give essentially the same account. In 987, Bardas Sclerus and Bardas Phocas revolted against the Byzantine emperor Basil II. Both rebels briefly joined forces, but then Bardas Phocas proclaimed himself emperor on 14 September 987. Basil II turned to the Kievan Rus’ for assistance, even though they were considered enemies at that time. Vladimir agreed….; he also agreed to accept Christianity as his religion and bring his people to the new faith. When the wedding arrangements were settled, Vladimir [?in memory of his new queen’s orgasm…—blogger] dispatched 6,000 troops to the Byzantine Empire and they helped to put down the revolt.[15]….
“He then formed a great council out of his boyars [988], and set his twelve sons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_life_and_children_of_Vladimir_I over his subject principalities.”

Does not this sound like the princes (aka boyars) who forced the Magna Charta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta on king John of England? Was not King John of England of ancient self-sacrificial tradition—as Tsar Vladimir?

However, why did Vladimir convert? Was it only because of Anna’s wild orgasms on wedding night? Or was he forced to convert by the boyars—as the English King John was forced by his princes to sign the Magna Carta? The Magna Carta signed in 1215 appears to have been signed over two hundred years later than Vladimir formed his great council (988)?

Have not the oligarchs determined ever since as to who writes the laws of the country?

To help solve the chronological riddle (why the great gap of years?), we must take into consideration the Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, who argues in his “History: Fiction or Science?” that the years as configured by Western historians are not to be trusted, as the dating occurred after the Catholic Council of Trent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent , which Council tried to undo not only the reforms of the Protestant Reformation, but also the trend of thought that had been liberated with it. It was the Council’s chief historian. Scaligeri, who shifted events forwards or backwards in time according to his own ideas or dictates of the prejudices of the Catholic Church. This in turn became an indirect causus belli for the Thirty Year War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Year_War  (70 years later) and resulted in the famous Peace of Westphalia (1648), a source for agreements and, yes, continuous disagreements over much of Western orientation and prejudices.

The question over the origins of Christianity is one of the unresolved investigations that the Westphalia Treaty put an end to.