Blog 16 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012[/color]

What was unique about the conversion of Vladimir of Rus was that according to Matthew Raphael Johnson in his book “The Third Rome” http://reasonradionetwork.com/programs/the-orthodox-nationalist, it set into motion a juridicial version of the boyars desire to override “ethnic nationalism under a universal canonical structure [an institution, which] is something particularly Byzantine, and the Orthodox Churches, self governing but still holding to an identical canonical and dogmatic structure, [remains] to this day.”
Dismissed by neo-liberal free traders and federalists, who would unify (Europe, for example) into one centralized power ruled from Brussels. The model of the “Byzantine Commonwealth” was, and remains to this day in the mindset of the West, an example of a militarily weak government.

Be that as it may, the strength of this Commonwealth was in the fact that it was also a stable government if military violence was kept under control and the saints were not slaughtered en masse and otherwise intimidated.

How does one keep violence under control?

In our time, it appears to be a silly and ridiculous question, because we cannot imagine living in a not-violent habitat.

Nevertheless, a not-violent habitat is not only imaginable, but actually existed before the forced conversion of Vladimir to the boyar way of thinking.

This is to say that the unrest and conflict in the days of Vladimir is suspect of being the result of a rebellion against the king by the boyars. What the boyars had in mind was what today is known as a Parliamentary democracy. That is, a democracy that is limited to a select group of people, whether they be princes, boyars, or parliamentarians as a result of ‘democratic’ elections in which the majority does not shares in equal rights. This movement of the boyars-princes began in the West or, specifically, in the European northwest.

We may now see, how direct democracy and egalitarian economics, as practiced in a forest environment (where one’s material wealth was determined not by money, but was the direct result of the labour one put into building himself and hisn a hut, or house, or barn, or a woodshed) differs from private property accumulated by rent and interest. If the latter resulted in a surplus, the same was to be, over a period of time, incorporate into a corporate individual, who then quite literally become a ‘giant’. The rest of human kind remained of course less equal than the giant.

The evolution of ‘parliamentary democracy’ did not spring in one gigantic leap from a brutish countryside boyar to a member of the Bilderberger group http://www.jeremiahproject.com/newworldorder/nworder04.html , whose members, though not directly involved with governance, nevertheless use their money to influence politics to the benefit of their pseudo aristocratic members.

Cynical realists may argue that given the pro-pseudo-‘democratic’ trend, which has lasted and ‘prospered’ for about a millennium, must be let run its course. It is, of course, doing just that; no one can quite tell when the movement will run out of momentum. Except for one thing:

More and more people are noting that the ‘wealth gap’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16545898 between the income of the 99% of the population (it not includes the middle class, not only the ‘lowly’ workers) and the members of pseudo-democratic parliament is increasing. Few people today are naïve enough to think it a mystery why. It is also apparent that the trend, while yet continuing, is running out of momentum, which must increasingly be artificially rescusciated by threats, deeds of war, and secret agreements such as Trans Pacific Partnership http://greyenigma.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/treaty-threatens-global-government-run-by-giant-corporations-tpp-democracy-now/ being formulated in the interest of private corporations.

Over the last thousand years, the ‘giant’ has grown into a ‘corporate giant’, who is juridically protected by a quasi Constitution. “Big John Christian” (too big to go bankrupt) will not sacrifice itself for the sake of the local or localized culture whence it may originally have arisen. John Giant is compelled to grow and to becoming more gigantic yet. So mighty has John become, that he even allows himself to be humoured by the adjective “Bad” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO0dO6pcTAU added to his name. Protected by laws, Big Bad John has reserved the right of all violence for himself, whether the violence be merely that of the police or military.

Blog 17 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Following up on the real meaning of ‘Parliamentary democracy’ and ‘corporate individuals’, and taking into consideration the thousand year long evolution of this theme—through relentless attacks by parliamentarian democrats on egalitarian democrats, one cannot but conclude that the so-called modern era and its ‘developed nations’ are a consequence of the attempt to destroy the self-sacrificial meme that permits the individual to development a transindividual community.

In other words, by restraining and eliminating self-sacrifice and letting violence determine ‘progress’ much has been achieved. At the same time, the price of the achievement has been the destruction of the planet’s ecology and ‘democracy’ in an egalitarian sense.

When Basil (the Bogomil) was incinerated in the fire-pit at the Hippodrome of Constantinople…

[As for: “Basil, since he was their leader of the Bogomils and showed no sign whatever of remorse [over being a Chrisiian of the East], the members of the Holy Synod, the chief monks, as well as the patriarch of that time (Nicolas) unanimously decided that he must be burn”... ],

…a corporate democracy had already claimed the day. This we know from the New Testament, which tells us that (?John) Basil was replaced by a Jesus fabricated of the compromise the princes and boyars had forced on the terrorized Christian Church of the East. The Big Compromise that seemingly healed the Great Schism went something like this:

We (Western Catholics) will let you preach your religion, if you stop backing it up with self-sacrificial acts and, indeed, cease supporting such acts other than passive acknowledgement, which some ‘unbalanced’ minds may be moved to perform in the future.

This is why today the governments of the West do not fear accusing citizens of their own countries as ‘terrorists’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism . Certainly, the Christians of the East, who dissented from the princeling-led Western Catholic Christianity would today be called ‘terrorists’, re the U.S. and NATO countries.

Such boxing-in of self-sacrifice increasingly privatized aggression, which given an unchecked reign would have led society to develop in the direction of the ancient social curse known as anarcho-capitalism or the vendetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalist_symbolism . To prevent the development of anarcho-capitalism (a libertarian version of egalitarian democracy), the privatization of aggression and its potential to develop into violence had to be checked. This was done through the hierarchical principle using wealth and seniority as measuring devices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seniority.

However, no legal device is, in and of itself, able to prevent the development of corporations that may not ultimately threaten the law-makers. In our time, such corporations are known as “too big to fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail ”. If and when there develops a crisis that threatens an entire society, it is the corporate interests that prevail over the public interest. At such times, the corporate interest must be faced down by an opposition willing to use self-sacrifice as the determining principle of leadership. If the government is unable for whatever reason to muster the energy to resist, the corporations may take over government itself.

As the secrecy of the Trans Pacific Partnership (for TPP see blog 16) negotiations indicates, many governments are at the stage, where corporate power and wealth is demanding them to yield their power to a corpor4ation led parliamentary democracy, the constituent elements of which are not political parties, but private moneyed interests in which private wealth is the predominant interest and determines future developments.

It ought, therefore, be of interest to us that at this time, when Eastern Christianity is practically nonexistent in the mind’s eye of the West, and Western Christianity survives by corrupt machinations of its finances, a Slovenian atheist philosopher Slavoy Zizek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_Žižek  should propound at atheist’s answer to the loss of self-sacrificial motivation in theological circles. Writes Zizek (in “The Monstrosity of Christ”) in a paraphrase of the English writer Chesterton: “…when people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings because they ‘are frightened of four words: He was made Man.’ What really frightens them is that they will lose… God as the hidden master pulling strings—instead of this, we get a God who abandons this transcendent position and throws himself into his own creation, fully engaging in it up to dying….”

Blog 18 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

In an attempt to illustrate the far reaching consequences that issued from the attempt to repress the traditions of self-sacrifice, which repression culminated in the human sacrifice by burning at the Hippodrome in Istanbul of Basil, later rewritten as the Passion of one Jesus Christ, I have wandered rather far from the Midsummer Festival of Johns in Latvia 2012.

It is perhaps time to steer our story into a wind that blows us back to Latvia.

On the map of the world, Latvia is but a dot made tinier by the small number of individuals who make up its population. Even this small remnant of a population—that once occupied territories that stretched from the Volga River basin in Russia to Old Prussia on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea—
is in a state of demographic decline or, more accurately, in a state of demographic catastrophe. When speaking of culture, Latvia is of no significance whatever. Except for one curious remnant of the culture that prevailed on this planet about a thousand years ago, in the days when Russia, one of the largest countries in the world today, was just beginning to form itself around the small nucleus of nobles, who gathered around its first ruler, one St. Vladimir of Kiev.

Some of my preceding blogs give a rough outline of why and how the early leadership of Kievan Rus came to be from out of the defeat of an early version of Christianity by the Crusading princes of the West. Forced to cede their spiritual understanding of how the human community came to emerge out of a long tradition of self-sacrifice, the Russian people, along with the Balts, joined what we call today “the capitalist tradition”. This joining of the East to the West was and remains a torturous and violent event, made especially difficult by the breakdown of what was once a forest and nature based community as a result of the pressures brought against it by the ‘privatization’ of our planet. The last event of resistance by egalitarian democrats against parliamentarian democrats resulted in vast slaughter of most everyone who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Though the Cromwellian http://historyonthenet.com/Civil_War/oliver_cromwell.htm Stalin took pityless advantage of the deeply burning resentment of the people of the Holy land of Russia, the bloody purification rites did not take hold of the land and failed to inspire resonance elsewhere. In the end, the West won the day once more, and in a fury of energy devoured what remained of nature in but a few decades. I read these decades as the period between 1990 (the demise of the Soviet Union) and 2008 (the beginning of the demise of neo-capitalism in the Western Europe and the U.S.).

At the time of this writing, the people of the West (Latvia including) are gripped by disbelief that the wealth financed propaganda (advertisement for one’s self) of several centuries duration has proved to be an empty cornucopia.
The disbelief is best illustrated by the futile marches of the so-called masses in the main cities the world over; and the continued “faith” of the leaders of a Latvian remnant that “it cannot be” that their dreams of freedom have ended in their and their people’s enslavement to Scandinavian banks; not to mention the seemingly “new power” of a capitalist China a crumbling wreck before it has completed its first full step.

In the present atmosphere of spiritual confusion and crumbling economies, disbelief and misdirection are the norm of the day. In Latvia, the history of the Festival of Johns remains a mystery, and the media, screwed to the floor by the Catholicism of capitalism and advertisers, raise no questions and deny all populist tendencies appearing among the Latvian public. One hears the argument that it is “way too soon” to speak of the collapse of the West, never mind a return of Johns as a political force.

And yet! In Greece, the country that may indeed have authored the playwright Sophocles, who wrote the political tragedy known as “Oedipus Rex” (not more than two thousand years ago as academicians continue to insist, but more likely at the time of the incineration of John Basil) about a thousand years ago, two elderly men, have offered themselves as self-sacrificial protestors against the vacuity of the current Greek leadership.

Can Latvia be far behind—what with 10 to 20% of its population driven from the land by an untoucheable and unpunisheable kleptocrat elite, which has seized the Parliament and is now ensconced in the Saeima?

Blog 19 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The ideological consequences of the Great Schism and the near (never quite) victory of the West over the East.(the East saved the rhetoric of its spiritual teaching, but had to abandon its application in practice), are best captured by the Greek playwright Sophocles (sophist par excellance http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/) in his famous tragedy “Oedipus Rex” or Oedipus the King.

The link informs that the early sophists were itinerant teachers, which makes them close kin to, if not necessarily identical with, the itinerant Johns, their Baltic, Slavic, Latin and other wandering brethren.

Itinerancy derives from the sense of freedom that living in the forest, or plain, on the farm brings to young men who are born to it. Even today, I have had the privilege of meeting two such would be wanderers at my countryside home. A young man, of Ukrainian descent, a ne’er-do-well at school and kept behind in his class several times running, visited me looking for work. I know the youth to be of hard working parents and a hard worker himself when with a scythe in hand or in a tractor. Unfortunately—with the destruction of the Latvian countryside culture by the Latvian city folk, and no way of recovering a culture in a demoralized state and deliberately kept that way by a Jesuitical (it never looks the other way) criminal police* headquartered at the regional capital—I could not help the young man. He advised me that once he and a friend had reached the age of eighteen, they would go to England. Since both speak Russian, I ventured to suggest that they travel East instead and try to find a job on the rail line the Chinese plan to built from the Far East to the Far West, or go to the Amur region of Russia, where many Latvian deportees (1949) make their home still.

Sophistry probably has its origin in ancient bards and shamans, who, when threatened by the ecclesiasts of Westernized Christianity in-hire-of-princes, forced them to start writing their oral knowledge in a riddling style, which in the course of time the orthodoxy of court poets and university academicians garbled beyond recognition. The poet Robert Graves, whose poetic muse follows us throughout this series of blogs, mused in his preface to “The White Goddess” that: “…the ancient language [of myth] survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors, it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition, it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century….” The date coincides with the time when, too, the remains of Eastern Christianity “flickered out” in Latvia

However, let us return to the poet and playwright Sophocles and his famous tragedy. The secret code used by Sophocles involved substituting the just issued edict (taboo) against self-sacrifice, by camouflaging self-sacrifice inside the preoccupation of Western Christianity (inventor—with the help of the prince-oligarch—of the urban environment and nuclear family) with the incest taboo. The mother, Iocaste, who in the story saves her son Oedipus (Yodi or Yoni) from risking death by exposure to the elements and/or wild beasts, but loses thereby the throne of the King of Thebes for him, attempts to regain the throne through incest. The psychologist Freud, for all his genius, did not see through the sophistication of the Sophoclean riddle—probably because in the secret corners of his mind, he continued to be preoccupied with incest.

The original intent of Sophocles in writing his play was an attempt to preserve the tradition of self-sacrifice as a factor that determined whether a ruling authority http://www.cpjustice.org/node/920 or authorities indeed had the authority to rule.

In our day self-sacrifice is said to have been replaced by reason http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4107-the-social-authority-of-reason.aspx. However, reason has in our time been subject to unrelenting authority (silnaya ruka) of violence reserved for the exclusive use of so-called ‘democratic’ authorities. The presumption of authority by governmental violence is an unethical device to the core, especially when the core of the authority (presidents, ministers, members of senates, etc.) goes unpunished and is free to expect for itself a perpetual future.

*Jesuitical criminal police—in a country as economically hard up as Latvia, the duty of the police is to help guarantee the survival of “the people”, because in the best sense of the word, the police, the gendarmerie, jannisery are of the people.

Blog 20 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The art of the lie, to escape its traitorous ethical nature, often presents itself as the art of a riddle. A riddle untold is very possibly a secret of a violent nature,; while a riddle told, never has one answer, but has answers that are open to speculation that sometimes answer true, sometimes not.
It seems that lies were invented by poets or better, by those who forced poets to lie for believing in the words they said or which came to their minds.. As I have written in previous blogs, those who forced the poets to lie were the same secularists, who forced self-sacrificial Christianity to deny its belief in the necessity of self-sacrifice. As most of us can easily guess, poets need a community, such a community being the poets’ audience. From this perspective, it is clear why the early poets were the same as priests and shamans, who knew the right words that could lay on a curse or a healing word.

As Robert Graves tells us in his “A Historical Grammar of poetic myth” (The White Goddess), the first poet was one Gwion [or John], also known as Taliesin. “Taliesin was author of the Hanes Taliesin” or “The Tale of Taliesin”, writes Graves. While Graves is difficult enough in his decipherings, even more difficulties may be piled on the riddles of ancient names.

Because the letter R was difficult to pronounce to our forebears, the current city of AmsteRdam was once called AmsteLdam. When the same difficulty is applied to the name of TaLiesin, we discover the name to be TaRiesin or, if you will, the high priest TiResias in playwright Sophocles tragedy “Oedipus Rex”. While students today are being taught that the riddle asked of passers-by by the Sphinx, it is more probable that it is being asked by the priest of the Temple of the Sphinx—[?John] Tiresias, who in the play acts as the mouthpiece of the writer Sophocles, who, too, writes a riddle.

To the descendants of Latvians today, especially those who know little or nothing of the forest or rural environment, it may come as a shock that the above mentioned “’Hanes’ of Taliesin” may also rhyme with the famed Latvian folk poems “dainas” (hainas)—if we assume that the letter H is silent and may at one time have been substituted with the latter D. Poet Graves has no doubt about such a possibility. He explains (WG, p. 49):

“In ancient times, once a god’s secret name has been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a process technically known as elicio…. ” [The first known Latvian traitor (many defend his actions) Kaupo comes to mind!] In another context Graves writes (p. 50): “The subject of this [?] myth, then, is a battle for religious mastery between the armies of Don, the people who appear in Irish legend as the Tuatha de Danaan, ‘the folk of the God whose mother is Danu…. The Tuatha de Danaan were a confederacy of tribes…. The Goddess Danu was eventually masculinized into Don, or Donnus….”

According to the Irish tradition recorded in the “Book of Invasions”, the Danaan’s were driven by an invasion of Syrians from Greece northward, eventually settling down in Denmark. Did some of the Johns people also settle in Latvia, where Dionysius became Yonysius and Jahnis? As the Latvian saying has it: “Jahņi nāk ar joni”==Johns Day comes in a hurry.  Here the pronoun Yahnis translates into a verb, yonis. If (as suggested in blog2) the month of May was celebate, then surely the arrival of June came on the wings of an impatient prayer, and John broke the spell.

One of the “destructive magics” that could be done against a people, the name of whose God had been discovered [re: who had been conquered], was to change it, for example, make John read Don, or Gwion, or Huan, or whatever.

The changing of names goes on even in our own day. The Latvians, who, for example, surrender their Midsummer Festival or Johns Day by calling it a“Lihgo” (Halleluia) Festival or try to commercialize it http://www.apollo.lv/portal/fun/articles/278180  are not doing their heritage any favors, but further surrender Latvians to wannabe neo-capitalist sponsors and irresponsible politicians. Not a whiff of the nature of the “sacred” remains.

Incidentally, the actual day of the summer solstice in Latvia happened yesterday. The small bird that laid six or seven eggs in the small basket hanging in my patio, had three of the eggs hatch. I have put a wire fence around the post the basket hangs from. I have asked my neighbour to take care of my feline cat, when the small ones start to practice flight.

Eyes truly amused by your crap. I am sorry to say, my dear city-dweller in absentia, that jonis is not a verb and comes from an very different language group. Get thee back to the gods.

Terrible festival.

And the solstice happens to happen when it happens, toilet milk or not.

Līgo!

/P

No Orthodoxy necessary, Dog Ma.

/P

Blog 21 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Johns Days are an interesting time to cast a panoramic eye over the landscape—both in Latvia and the rest of the world—and observe what the Latvian media projects concerning the condition of Latvian identity.

From a cynic’s point of view, what you see is what you get. And what you get is what advertisers wish you to see. The Police advertise caution and self-control when it comes to the use of alcohol. The beer companies intensify their advertising campaigns to increase beer consumption.

The Riga City Gallery opens a show of Baltic women’s head pieces, crowns, but offers no explanation of the significance of this object—as if women in the European East wore these every day. Indeed, the crowns are likely representations of how Baltic women once visualized their chief Goddesses: Saule, Laima, Mara, and Dekla. Of the four, nothing is known about Dekla. Except for the Sun Goddess, the names of the other Goddesses cannot be translated into English, but may mean, in a collective sense, “Dearest Goddess” http://www.apollo.lv/portal/fun/articles/278529  Given that Dekla is forgotten, one may venture to guess that her name is related to the Latvian words: dēka, dēkotājs—an adventure, an adventurer. Perhaps Dekla was a proto-Latvian Crazy Jane, who also could not stay put, and, more than likely, was involved in witchcraft and eating Fly Agaric http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Fly_Agaric_(Amanita_muscaria).jpg , the mushroom that urbanites not knowing it to be lethal would like to eat because it is “pretty”.

On the political front, the unexpected resignation of the Minister of Justice surprised almost everyone.
Gaidis Berziņš mentions the issue of returning private property to the Hebrew community http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/278825 as the reason for his resignation. The minister belongs to the Latvian nationalist party (Visu Latvijai), and is of the Nationalist Coalition. Contrary to Berzins’ and the Coalition’s position, the Prime Minister Dombrovskis (Vienotiba) has given instructions for the minister to draw up a list of properties to be returned. One commentator (Ozolins of “Ir” magazine) calls Berzins a minister, who has jumped aboard a train to a place called an “anti-Semitic fundamentalist zoo” by way of another “golden bridge” project by Latvian oligarchs.

Politika.lv is featuring an article http://politika.lv/article/nap-jus-padaris-bagatakus-bet-ne-laimigakus by Janis Brizga. The article reports on the goals and dreams of the NAP [National Development (attīstības) Plan]. From this blogger’s point of view, the goal of raising the growth quotient in Latvia to 5% by 2020 is not only unrealistic, but given the ecological exhaustion of our planet, capacity to overproduce by developed nations, a financial and economic crisis just at its beginning, and the abundance of workers in China who receive 40 x less income than the workers in the U.S., is frankly, absurd.

So much for the isolationist and cosmopolitan views of Latvians today. The teeth of the wheels do not mesh, but grind and squeal.

This blogger has always stood on the sidelines of the political factions, because he has not found any of them to be single minded enough to put the economic and community development in Latvia as their foremost goal. If they have thought of it, it is soon put aside, because to realize it will take sacrifice.

Of neither a capitalist, communist, technocrat, or traditional traditionalist mindset, my position has always been one to seek for ways to transform the consequences of said to create a self-sustaining community within a recovering ecological system. I have been in enough forests in my day not to believe that a plantation forest makes for “more forests in Latvia than ever in recent times”.

Among the tools to the end of achieving a recovery for the Latvian people, I perceive a n
ecessity to return to the “sacred”. I take this position in spite of the fact that the self-sacrifice of Adolfs Buķis continues to go unacknowledged. All the same, 1993 marks the year when the government of Latvia turned away from any notions of self-sacrifice, thus keeping religion and politics divided as per the crusading notions of princeling fascists a la West.]

Because the origin of the Festival of Johns is from the realm of the sacred, as well as a celebration of nature, which is diametrically opposed to the plague of our times—urbanist naiveté, I prefer to live among the trees of a forest rather than little boxes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs made of ticky tacky.

Previous blogs accessible at: http://midsummernewyearofjohns.blogspot.com/

Of neither a capitalist, communist, technocrat, or traditional traditionalist mindset, my position has always been one to seek for ways to transform the consequences of said…

Hey-ho, hey-ho, “healthy fascism”—here we come.

/P

Blog 22 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The mystery for modern man, who has been put together by the “ticky tacky” of advertising lobby on behalf of not only politicians, but the powers that pay the advertisers and sponsor the politicians, is how the sacrificial rhetoric came to be such an integral part of early Christianity and then was dismissed.

Robert Hayman in his book “The Power of Sacrifice” http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Sacrifice-Christian-Discourses/product-reviews/0813214890 writes (p. 95): “Sacrifice was also an integral part of Judaism. As Jews, the earliest Christians were not unfamiliar with sacrifice since it was a constant feature of daily worship in the Jerusalem Temple. As citizens of the Roman Empire, Christians would have also been familiar with the sacrifices performed twice daily in the Temple on behalf of the emperor. As the early Christians began to reflect on the symbolic power of Jesus’ life and death, it was not surprising that their letters and narratives revealed sacrificial themes. Jesus of Nazareth was killed as a common criminal, but those who reflected on his death were able to valorize it by interpreting it with sacrificial symbolism. As the “body of Christ” on earth, Christians also began to see themselves as a “living sacrifice”.

Heyman, however, ads to the above a disclaimer (p. 97): “….it is not my intention to attempt to discern whether the historical Jesus considered his impending death to be a sacrifice or not.”

Through the disclaimer, Heyman abandons early Eastern Christianity, which he at first as if joins, but then gets cold feet and rushes back to the Catholic camp created by the princes and boyars, who most definitely do not wish to have anything to do with sacrifice, especially not if it is self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice carries with it, when acknowledged in the public arena, a rather awesome charisma.

Aside from this blogger’s belief that Jesus was not hung on a cross, but was thrown into a burning pit of fire, no other writer to my knowledge has explored the probability that Jesus cum John did not necessarily offer himself as a sacrifice, but was daring the authorities to make him a sacrifice. Daring is, of course, the expression of a fighter’s opposition and challenge.of the enemy.

John’s challenge is best reflected in Anna Comnena’s “The Alexiad” and her description of the behavior of John(?) Basil when he is brought before the burning pit at the Hippodrome in Constantinople. Writes Anna: “On the other side [of the burning pit] a cross had been set up and the godless fellow was given an opportunity to recant: if by some chance through dread of the fire he changed his mind and walked over to the cross, he could still escape the burning…. Far from giving way, it was obvious that he despised all punishment and threats, and while he was still some distance from the flames he laughed at them and boasted that angels would rescue him from the midst of the fire…. But when the crowd stood aside and let him see clearly the awe-inspiring sight (for even afar off he could feel the fire and saw the flames rising and shooting out fiery sparks with a noise like thunder…), then for all his boldness he seemed to flinch before the pyre. He was plainly troubled. Like a man at his wit’s end he darted his eyes now here, now there, struck his hands together and beat his thighs. And yet, affected though he was at the mere sight of it, he was still hard as steel; his iron will was not softened by the fire, nor did the messages sent by the emperor break his resolve….”

In other words, the Johns fires that are being lit these days in Latvia and elsewhere in the world as a symbolic commemoration of the solstice and for the entertainment of city youths and picnickers, was not what faced John Basil (later renamed Jesus), a man who was honoured as “King” by his followers, because of his commitment to endure death for his beliefs.

And so it came to be. The challenge offered by one John and one Jesus to the secular authorities was turned into a joke by the authorities. They took both men up on their challenge, killed them, and scared the rest of the world into silence.

Ai, Jānīti, Dieva dēls,
Tavu platu cepurīt!
Visa plata pasaulīte
Apakš tavas cepurītes.

(32909-1)

The Christian propaganda notwithstanding and taking into consideration the meaning of the third line, and Dievs an obvious addition of later times, I think the following is more correct
Ai, Jānīti, Saules dēls,
Tavu platu cepuriīti!
Visa plata pasaulīte
apakš tavas cepurītes.”

We ought to remember that the collectors of folk poems often were Christian ministers, and either had an ax to grind themselves or were doing so beholden to their superiors if students.

Ai, Jānīti, Dieva dēls,
Tavu platu cepurīt!
Visa plata pasaulīte
Apakš tavas cepurītes.

As whoever responded about my blog, over discussing the economic effects of Johns’ Grass, it belongs more properly on a thread devoted to that topic. The question is whether to give the young girls a ‘fiver’ (piecītis) at last night’s community dance in return for jerking off in the bushes my neighbor—who does not have such money to spend or listen to purists who are bailing the water IN not OUT of Latvia’s sinking economic boat.

“The question is whether to give the young girls a ‘fiver’ (piecītis) at last night’s community dance in return for jerking off in the bushes my neighbor—”

Is that a fiver ... $$ .. or a high fiver .. thank you ma’am?

Wham bam.

/P

I think the following is more correct…

Keep thinking, sinking, Vaņka. When you and your fellow “healthy fascists” find the most correct version of life, do please let us know.

/P