There are several problems with the interpretation of Latvian Dainas or folksongs/ verses. The most obvious difficulty is that they have not only been frozen into the Archives (which is fine), but that there are people who believe that no words in a daina may be changed and must be frozen in place like the literalists do with the words of the Bible. That kind of approach, unfortunately, mummifies the song/ verse and turns it into dogma.

One of the mummified words in tautas dziesmas is “Dievs”, God. As far as I can tell, this is in imitation of Lord God among neo-Christians. It appears that Latvians do not wish to be bested by neo-Christians, and so they created Dievs. Of course, I can understand a poor peasant doing this to avoid the anger of his parish minister or priest who did the baron’s bidding and probably was among the people who collected folksongs/ verses. But it makes no sense to do so today, when so much more research has been done, material gathered, and doubt over history cast.

In an above post, I mentioned that “The origin of “Dievs”…is not be sought in the monotheistic Dievs, but in the Sanscrit word “div” or “dyu”, which means “to shine” and to “give light”…. When used as a noun, these words come to mean “sky” and “day”, from which the Latvians derive “diena”=day…. When the word gets personified, as in the Rig-Veda, where div becomes God Dyaus… the brightness of day, this does not mean that Dyaus turns into God the Father of the monotheists….”

The following tautas dziesma is the lead on the Dievturu site at http://www.marasloks.com

Dedziniet gaišu guni,
Laidiet Dievu istabā;
Dieviņš brauca pār kalniņu,
Sudrabotu mētelīti.

I believe that the Dievturu community reads the verse literally: “Light a bright light, let God come into the room. God drives over the mountain in a coat bright as silver”. Here is how—given the above explanation for the linguistic origin of daylight and sky—I read it (prose translation): “Open the door wide, the God of daylight (Dieviņš) has arrived. As he comes over the hilltop, his mantle shines like bright silver.” Incidentally, I use the word for “door” deliberately as a reminder that the nigh forgotten God Jānis, too, is about.

Lyrically, the folk poem/verse is of course much more delicate than my translation. Nevertheless, the use of the word Dievs/God is, at least to me, an unwelcome intrusion by monotheism and implicitly rejects arch-Christianity (best illustrated by the image of a cross thrown upon the waters by Mother Sun) as its forerunner.

Sniks: your query about Jānis as the Father of the Dead is answered at the below address. Velns was/is the “father” of the dead, but he is no longer mentioned, because neo-Christianity has turned him into the Devil and Satan. Thus, there now is only the Mother of the Dead left, re: Veļu māte). Note that the way Jānis came to the Netherworld was by taking from Velns his boots and pulling them on his own feet.
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:zsnBreDbKs4J:www.ailab.lv/pasakas/gr02/0200619.htm+velns+un+Jānis&hl=lv&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=lv

Velns, God of the Dead or Veļu tēvs is succinctly sketched at this discussion site (second item from top):
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:CTdr_EzSXlMJ:netgames.apollo.lv/forums/index.php?showtopic=30457&view=old+velns+un+veļi&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8

In 1665 the French playwright Moliere wrote a play called Don Juan. Some critics believe that he wrote the play to say “sorry” to the neo-Christian diehards who had forced Tartuffe, his play showing up the hypocrisy of a falsely religious man, off the stage the year before. But Don Juan did not fare better. It was censured and did not see the original text restored until 1813, one hundred fifty years after it was written.

The reason for mentioning Moliere’s play is because Juan is the English name for John and the Latvian name for Jānis. Another way of writing “Don Juan” is “Don Jon”, which when run together and written as one word, i.e., “donjon”, signifies the central tower, the strongest point of a castle. While the German name for such a tower is “Bergfried”, it was first called “Wohnturm”. Though the name “Wohnung” means residence today, it is easy to see that originally “Wohn” was “John”. It is not a little ironic that Martin Luther’s hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (1529), which became the hymn of the Reformation, would have reminded not a few singers of the arch-Christian God—Juan-John-Wohn (re Wotan)-Jānis.

That the name of Don Juan retains its original connection to royalty, we may see at http://www.ctspanish.com/legends/king/king.jpg
while the popular mind sees him, more or less, as this http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindamcinerney/624139690/in/set-72157600483290362/
though Juan originally was a God whose head was served up to the pleasure of Salome-Elvira for perhaps taking himself too seriously http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_32.100.81.jpg

It is easy to see why a critic, who is not familiar with the association of the name Juan with that of a God, would have thought that Moliere’s intent in writing the play was to apologize. After all, Don Juan is presented as an unscrupulous seducer of young women, one who gets one to even leave the convent, but then after marrying her, abandoning her and seeking to seduce others. Though Moliere makes no apologies for Don Juan’s seductions, he does—in the end—have a spectre take him by the hand, whereupon he is swallowed up in a fiery pit that unexpectedly opens under his feet. Justly deserved punishment, eh? But wait. His valet Sganarelle is not impressed, and the play ends with the poor man more worried over his lost wages than God’s punishment of his master.

Can it be that Moliere, knowing that the hypocritically pious still knew who Juan was originally, purposely shows him as the figure of a God degraded to a spectre, so that neo-Christians may be warned that the same thing could happen to Jesus, the God whom they had replace John (the Baptist-Svaidītājs-Kupola-etc.)?

I will end this installment with two more deconstructed folk songs. I have replaced “God” with “Jānīt”.

Zemu, zemu Saule tek,
Tik ar roku neaizsniedzu;
Jānīt, tavu likumiņu,
Ka zemē nenokrita.
LD 33 999

Translation: The Sun seems so low that I can almost touch it. John, what an order[ing of things (to your credit)] keeps it from falling.

Es redzēju zelta krustu,
Vidū gaisa grozāmies;
Jānīt tavu padomiņu,
Ka zemē nenokrita.
LD 33 780

Translation: I saw a golden cross [the Sun] turn in the middle of the air. John, what [a wonderful] meditation of yours it is that keeps it from falling.

This post is in 2 installments. Part 1 of 2.

In the above post, I discussed Moliere’s “Don Juan” as being essentially the same name as Jānis, and that Moliere was taking revenge on his attackers by saying that the same thing could happen to the neo-Christian God as what his supporters had done to Juan. Here is a brief introduction to a Latvian version of Clever John (Gudrais Jānis, i.e. a proto Don Juan) captured by a fairy-tale.
The story in Latvian at http://www.ailab.lv/pasakas/gr05/0500103.htm+saules+mate&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15

Here is a segment of the story in English (with some editing as well as interpolations on my part). [See: 3. A. 327. B. 460. A. K. Bramanis Rīgas apg. LP, V, 36 (3, 1). The story is called “A Jorney to the Netherworld” (Ceļojums uz viņu sauli). The story begins:

“A father had seven sons. The seventh son was the smartest of them all. That is why he was called Clever John.

Even while still little, Clever John went up to all his brothers and told them: “Don’t you go and get married. Wait until I grow up. Then we all ride together and look for our brides among a mother who has seven daughters.”

The brothers—as good brothers will—agree. So, when Clever John grows up, he tells his brothers: “Tomorrow is John’s Day. There will be a big celebration at the inn. It is time to get on our horses and go look for brides.”

“Yeah, Clever John,” answer his brothers, “but we don’t have seven horses.”

“No problem,” answers Clever John, “just catch me seven crickets and we’ll be on our way.”
The brothers catch seven crickets. “But what are you going to do? Feed the crickets’ Irish mushrooms or something?” the brothers ask.

Clever John laughs and says: “Let’s go to the seaside and you will see.”

At the seaside Clever John takes the crickets and starts bathing them. He bathes them until they all drown. But just when you think that it is all a joke, the drowned crickets come alive and become seven horses. Six horses are real steeds. The seventh is, well, bit of a nag, but all the horses are strong enough to carry their man.

“Just what we need!” cry the brothers. “We will have ourselves a ride to remember.” They jump on their horses, but leave the nag to the younger brother. Clever John says nothing, but gets on his horse. All ride out together, but the older brothers are soon out of sight. Clever John gets to the inn late. Indeed, when Clever John arrives, the John’s Day party is over. What with the inn belonging to the Mother of the Devil (as Clever John soon finds out), who moreover has seven daughters, it evidently was some party. Clever John’s brothers are still recuperating. They have managed however to capture six of the Mother of the Devil’s daughters as their brides. As good brothers will, they leave the oldest daughter for their youngest brother. Clever John thinks: “It’s a bummer. But you never know. I’ll take her.”

Part 2 of 2.

When the time arrives to go to bed, the older brothers leave to feed their horses. They want to ride home come morning. But Clever John stays at the inn. He and the Mother of the Devil’s oldest daughter talk a few things over. Evidently Clever John talks so much that he gets himself and the oldest daughter all worked up. He promises to build her an inn. She presents him with a silk scarf and a gold ring. Clever John puts the scarf around his neck and puts on the gold ring. Suddenly, he looks like a real gentleman.
But then Clever John remembers that he has to take care of his horse, too. So, he excuses himself from his bride and goes to the barn. He meets his brothers already coming back. “You ask her how many men have stretched her?” the brothers ask and can barely suppress laughing at their own joke. Clever John becomes angry: “You all are real, real dumb. Do you have any idea of what awaits you? The mother of the Devil will have us lay down in the hay—the brides with their wreaths on their heads in the middle, we with our hats on the outside.”

“Oh, yeah,” say the brothers, “and then what happens?” But Clever John goes on:  “Get real. That is not all. After our brides are snoring, we must put on their crowns and go lie in the middle, while we put on our caps on their heads and push them to sleep on the outside.”

“That’s too much jumping around even for us, Clever John,” say the brothers.

Clever John then whispers something to them only they can hear. After the brothers hear the full story, they do as Clever John bids them. It seems the wise thing to do. And sure enough, just a few minutes after midnight there comes the mother of the Devil herself with a big ax in hand and starts loping off all heads that have a hat on. The oldest daughter of the mother of the Devil too loses her head. But all the brothers, including Clever John, jump on their horses and gallop home.

Half-way home though, the brothers have a disagreement. The oldest brothers all want to go home, but Clever John says that he has yet to ride and ask the Sun, why she has stopped shining for seven days in a row. “You’ve not enough mind to fill a fingernail black. We just barely got away from the mother of the Devil herself. If you don’t much care for your life ride on. We’re riding home.”

Clever John waves his brothers goodbye and rides on. At the end of his first day, he rides past the king’s garden and sees a raven sitting in a tree as if tied to it. He also sees a fish tied to the sea. At last he comes to a river and sees that the eldest daughter of the Mother of the Devil is filling no end of buckets with water and pouring them out again. Clever John asks: “What are you doing here?” (Remember, Clever John let the Mother of the Devil kill her eldest daughter who saved his life and had good reason to think he was going to take her to be his wife.)

To make a long story short (and of course there is more), Clever John gets his punishment. In fact, the mother of the Devil and her oldest daughter, both, get their revenge. The Mother of the Devil sees to it that Clever John gets to marry the king’s daughter (not such great fun as it may at first seem), while the eldest daughter of the Mother of the Devil gets into bed with him in spite of the fact that he is married, thus forcing the issue and having Clever John becomes the Father of the Dead. More of this story at another time and place.

Hopefully, the entire scenario will witness daylight come John’s Eve.

A book on Latvia by Hebe Spaull, an English woman, 1931:
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:wCqiNSBAN64J:www.roots-saknes.lv/Country/what_one_could_read_about_latvia.htm+history+of+forest+in+Latvia&hl=lv&ct=clnk&cd=96&gl=lv The book, a superficial impression of Latvia, nevertheless, describes how quite a few Latvians speak (with minor variations) about their ancestors’ beliefs as well. Chapter V of the above book contains this description of Jānis Day festival:

“The chief Latvian holiday is St. John’s Eve, June 23, or Lihgo’s Day, as it is also called. Lihgo was a pagan goddess whose festival was celebrated at midsummer, when she was worshipped by the Latvians before they became Christians. When Christianity was introduced, the name of St. John was substituted for that of Lihgo, but although no one knows anything about Lihgo or how she was worshipped, songs are still sung in her honor as they were sung, probably, thousands of years ago….There are innumerable verses to this song, but even so more will be improvised to make it last longer. When at last the farmer and his wife appear at the door of their house songs are sung in their praise, extolling the generosity and the good food they expect from them. Wreaths are then piled on their heads, and the more popular the master, the greater will be the number of wreaths. The wreaths are afterwards dried and kept for the winter as food for the cows. For it is an old Latvian superstition that flowers and herbs picked on St. John’s Eve possess miraculous powers.”

No wonder that listening to outsiders tell them about their Jānis Eve celebrations, the Latvians are confused. But all too often this is a fault of their own making. Latvians allot little funds to cultural anthropology, which is why it is no surprise that the people know almost nothing about their history. The confusion was first brought about when the Latvians were denied their Gods, and even mentioning one could get one a whipping, sometimes even a drowning or a burning. Here is a picture of how arch-Christian heretics were tried in the Middle Ages by the spiritual princes who were the brothers and other close relatives of the secular princes bearing arms: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Pedro_Berruguete_-_Saint_Dominic_Presiding_over_an_Auto-da-fe_(1475).jpg Here is how neo-Christians pursued their advantage over arch-Christians: http://www.inquisition.pp.ru/eng/kazn01.htm

Jānis has been belittled, made the butt of jokes, lied about, and forced to wear many masks. Indeed, we can no longer take these masks away from Jānis, except we accept that all his children return to what they were originally—the sons and daughters of the Sun taking the road that life has put before them and shed “big” religion and “big” government the best we can.

I found this item in a history book on the Balts (Māris Linde, Balti, LPPLiepa, Liepāja, 2007. 448. lpp.), in which the author reprints a story from “Simon Grunava chronicle of Prussia”, Chapter 5, 3rd paragraph: „...ķēniņš Vudevuds… un arī kirvaits Brutens, viņa brālis… [pēc tam, kad viņi iesāk uzrunu lieciniekiem un tos uzrunājot: ‘Mīļie bērni!’...] paņēma viens otru pie rokas, un dziedot devās ugunī un sadega.... visā Prūsijā daudzās vietās uzstādīja viņus kā dievus.” Sauksim šos Dievus par Jāņiem. Te arī redzam, ka Jānis var kļūt ne tikai par vienu, bet vairākiem Dieviem pie vienas reizes.

Translation: „...king Vudevuds… and the priest Brutens, his brother… [after addressing those present as witnesses with a speech that began ‘Dear children!...] took each other by the hand, and with a song on their lips went into the fire and were burnt.... In all of Prussia [the Prussia of the Balts in those days] many places held them to be Gods.”

But we know that those who thought so were coerced to forget them, and that cows are saved the herbs gathered on John’s Eve because it is the cows which need the miraculous powers of the herbs. For all that, Jānis Eve (Midsummer’s eve) celebration is the only celebration in all of Europe which clings to the name that gave the celebration its most focused meaning. One hopes that as the Balts regain self-possession and emerge from centuries of forced labor in heaven (so to speak), they will remember the unique contribution that they (and other now forgotten people) made to religion: it is not the logos alone that binds, but the logos accompanied by the charisma of self-sacrifice. Without the latter, the former has little or no power of persuasion to create and maintain a living community.

We need to look at what the efforts to create homogeneity among nations and super-nations have cost humanity. Homogeneous nations at whatever level are largely the result of “demicide”. [“Demicide” is a word coined by R.D. Rommel, an American political scientist.] Demicide is when a centralized bureaucracy turns against the people who have been gathered under its wing and homogenizes them with the help of repression. Super-nations or, better, superpowers have achieved hegemony over their people through unspeakable atrocities and deaths beyond counting. While we tend to put forth the Soviet Union and Communist China as the most rustles and bloody examples of homogenization in action, in reality there are many such examples. Indeed, no nations are free of skeletons in their closets.

While the origins of the trend toward centralization are hid in the distant past, the idea is well expressed in the image of One overarching God. It is likely that the idea was first set into motion by the overturn of a matriarchal social system by a patriarchal and militaristic one. Paradoxically, the change splintered a people living in the light of one Sun by causing them to live under a multitude of military leaders. The reasons for the change were many, among which deforestation, agriculture, desertification, increase in male power, increase of human sacrifices by means of corrupt military rather than temple authorities—all and more played a role. We may catch a glimpse of the change in an image that is ubiquitous in its day and comes from Constantinople.

Before the Sun became male gender and a halo at the back of the head of a militant patriarch http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/images/bush_halo_a.jpg , the sense of the sacred was incarnate in wandering holy men such as the sadhus of India. In every sense of the word, these men are the sons of the Sun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMQlPJcrHLM&feature=related
The transition from wandering holy men, whether called sadhus, Jāņi, John, or Jesus is visible in the figure of the sanitized Pantocrator (John renamed Jesus Christ), re http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/alexey/Pantocrator.GIF ). The guardian angels dressed in black represent the secular arms that stand behind the consolidation of religious sensibility into one bureaucratic religion.

Today the neo-Christian Pantocrator is a figure still to be found in Greek and Russian orthodox churches, while the public at large knows it from pictures seen in museums or antique shops. Western throwbacks to the holy men are of course the American style ‘country preachers’, except that the institutionalization of supernaturalism makes them the repetitious ‘preacher’ rather than a man or woman in search of divinity. One such figure is Pat Robinson, who is in the forefront of the movement to institute One neo-Christian God over the entire world. (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/02/pat-robertsons-new-year_n_79311.html --scroll down to see the video).

Latvians have but recently reemerged from Soviet occupation and this is partly the reason why they know little that is in-depth about of their history. Even before the Soviets there was not much time to do research on what influences formed the people’s psyche. This is why many Latvians then and now call themselves “pagans”. The term is loosely applied, but at the same time, the users seem unaware that “pagan” means peasant and the name was used by the princes of neo-Christendom to belittle their opponents and dismiss arch-Christendom.

Arch-Christendom, incidentally, is a far less structured belief system, but in no way can it be waved off as insignificant. One may liken the many Gods of the Balts to the Hindu system. While neo-Christians claim to have invented Christianity, the fact remains that our forebears knew themselves by such names as Krustjānis, from which Krišjāns, Kristaps, Kristians, and, yes, Christian.

Neither the Latvians nor the West have paid much attention to the idea presented by the Russian mathematician and historian A. Fomenko, that Jesus was crucified in the year 1186 (some think 1086) in Constantinople and that the discrepancy in chronology of over 1000 years is the result of the young neo-Christian (then Catholic) church being in a hurry to accumulate age in order to gain credibility. The lack of attention to a differing version of history is understandable, because it subjects the linear world that we are used to to doubt.

Which still leaves us with the question, do the Latvians rather not investigate their past and continue to trace their spiritual history to Rome, or would they see whether their spiritual history connects them with Greek Constantinople? In the first instance, they will keep their virtue by the lie’s power to conceal (a practice obvious in the nation’s politics today; not so incidentally a form of economic demicide). In the second instance, they risk shattering the fragile fabric of a self-deceiving system, even as they chance being creative to better survive the future.

RE:  “Which still leaves us with the question, do the Latvians rather not investigate their past and continue to trace their spiritual history to Rome, or would they see whether their spiritual history connects them with Greek Constantinople? In the first instance, they will keep their virtue by the lie’s power to conceal (a practice obvious in the nation’s politics today; not so incidentally a form of economic demicide). In the second instance, they risk shattering the fragile fabric of a self-deceiving system, even as they chance being creative to better survive the future. “

What if the latvian spiritual history is really NOT traceable to Rome or Greece?  What then?  Will latvians not survive the future?

Originally Jānis was a God meant to short circuit violence through self-sacrifice. Which is to say, while death may seem violent to those who cannot make peace with mortality, mortality (according to one of the West’s oldest philosophers—Anaximander http://www.stenudd.com/myth/greek/images/anaximander2.jpg ) “…is according to the order of necessity.” In short, death comes, whether we like it or not. Nature has not yet invented the deathless state for any individual.

But this is not to say that mortality is to be meted out by acts of violence which are not according to nature’s order of necessity. Self-sacrifice is an exception, because in the unstable realm of human relations it creates the charisma essential for the creation of a community, something not sufficiently emphasized by anthropologists. Ancient fertility rites do not celebrate fertility as such alone, but its ability to transcend mere increase and to create the bonds necessary to form a community.

As a family gravesite is natural to a family’s sense of having roots not only in space, but also in time, so the charisma of self-sacrifice invites attachment to a community from beyond the family. If in the days when Earth belonged to everyone equally a family often buried the bones of its dead under the doorstep to keep them constantly in remembrance http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/galleries/halpern/mak133.jpg and, thus, formed bonds with its forebears even beyond personal memories, self-sacrifice may extend the individual’s emotional attachment to include more distant families and households. This enabled the formation of a culture. The community cemetery is, among other things, the result of a need to find a place for the self-sacrifices the community comes to commemorate, even as originally, the sacrifice was commemorated by the temple which housed the relic of the self-sacrifice.

The nature of charisma of self-sacrifice is observable in the fate that has visited the now purely rhetorical logos of Jesus. A self-sacrificial God originally, Jesus was denied a continuum, as a result of which he was decoupled from the memory of the living, and as a result the God has been abandoned by many. Ritual, which consists of taking the host—church assurances to the contrary--are not enough to keep the significance of the agon alive. This is why Jesus’ place has been taken by the charisma of sacrifice ordered by the military, which makes sure to call a soldier’s death “self-sacrifice”, even as it denies the right of self-sacrifice to the individual by calling it suicide. The neo-Christian church is a collaborator with secular authority in this reversal of an ancient moral order. The Latvian God Jānis has suffered a like fate. His abandonment and forgetting has been gradual and seemingly irreversible. If the Midsummer John’s Day festival http://y.delfi.lv/norm/590/19038_hOLpAr.jpeg has become the Latvian equivalent of a German Oktoberfest beer bash, Jesus fests, though prettied up by tinseled the shopping windows, are following the same route.  http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/files/images/image_13.gif

The roots of the Latvian Jānis have been torn away, first by outside forces, later by forces of demoralization within. As a result there is no story among Latvians that tells the full story of who Jānis was, and we need to search Europe and beyond to find him again. One myth—presented more thoroughly in my book “The Death of 4 European Gods: Iannus, Jesus, John, and Jānis”—suggests that the Sumerian Goddess Iananna originally was the Sun Goddess. Iannus (though now going by a different name) was her son. Perhaps Jānis was then also known as Anu (?Janu), the God of the sky, as the sky originally denoted daylight. When Iananna descends into the light of darkness, her son Iannus (Anu/Janu) sacrifices himself in order to assure the Sun rises in the morning. Once raised, Iananna assures a rebirth not only for her son Iannus, but all beings and all things green.

The overthrow of the Sun as Goddess signifies the rise of patriarchy and what I call homopsychic malehood that identifies with violent aggression and militarism. If a defese team turns into a military order, it soon reverses the order of sacrifice. Instead of self-sacrifice at the leadership level as the charismatic event that causes the logos to bind a given society, leadership becomes the logos with club in hand that compels the bond. It is at this time that daylight and night light (“mēnesnīca” in Latvian) http://www.thelensflare.com/large/moonlight_230.jpg ) become separated into an above and a below, a heaven and a netherworld, the latter not just below the surface of Earth, but as a dark force declaiming humankind to have been “born into sin”. The separation noticeably influenced the visual imagination of the Egyptians: http://www.hope.edu/bandstra/RTOT/CH1/COSMOS.JPG

We are, thus, unexpectedly presented with two opposing versions of a symbol. The door with a dove on both sides of it (today the white doves of lovers circling a heart) becomes the two-headed hawk or eagle http://www.collectors-society.com/images/enews/ph_0512_habsburg_eagle.jpg . At first John is thought of as a charismatic self-sacrificial being, one who unites. As such, his symbols may not pretend to be more than cow bells (re: gans=jans), which later become ceremonial bells (see Bianzhong ), which become bell tower temples http://www.lhomen.com.bt/Images/chorten-2.gif , which, among other things, may signal approaching danger. The latter still makes it no more than a symbol of defense, and suggest no more than going into hiding. See Zhong Lou http://picasaweb.google.com/steve46814/ChinaBeijing/photo#5083426366153803234

But then, suddenly, John the God that binds through self-sacrifice, appears also as John the warrior. The tower that meant to express praise to life became the tower that is the strongest point in a castle, the home of armed princes, legionnaires, janissaries, and gendarmes (all of the names rooted in the word “jan”). Click “donjon” at Google to see European fortified towers known as “Keeps” (Joan de Arc was held in one) or http://www.myhimalayas.com/ladakh_tso_moriri/images/hankar_dzong_tower.jpg

The radical marriage of violence to the charisma of self-sacrifice has been slowly corroding community bonds, the most dangerous elements being a) the growth of a community’s geographic size as a result of exercise of military power, and b) the increase of the human population to unsustainable levels due to the loss of the charismatic power of a self-sacrificial priesthood (badmouthed as darkness and evil) to suggest directions and leading by example. The corrosion has had an especially deadly effect on small communities, and death by cultural strangulation (not to mention poisoning by CO2 and the threat of nuclear war and nuclear fallout) has already overcome many. Still, as much as a divorce of the charisma of self-sacrifice from military violence is desirable, it is unlikely to be initiated by state bureaucracies.

The future is more likely to find a way out of the labyrinth of violence by cloning itself to a stem cell of proto- or arch-Christian myth of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice may then be affected by a smaller community within the administrative bureaucracy by demanding its aged not be deprived of their right to choose their own way of death. Over a period of time, the military will then lose the charisma it has gained by presuming for itself and the elites the right to make human sacrifices, and charisma will become the property of the mind at large again.

The above may seem like a quantum leap from the topics that people are used to reading in newspapers, seeing in television soaps, and chit chatting on computer sites. From another point of view, such leaps are natural for a people with a history that makes no linear sense. Indeed, now that the era of “progress” is over and history is increasingly suspect of being a lie (a straw broken into segments and thrown to the winds), the experience of space-time vertigo is in fact “natural”. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/s/spilliaert/spilliaert_vertigo.jpg Perhaps this is why holding to old stereotypes with fanaticism is also current. Yet this may be the very reason why a wedding of the two psychic extremes http://www.healinglifeenergy.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/connor_017.32590244_std.jpg has a chance of becoming a reality with the power to change reality.

If a revival of Jānis-John-Jesus receives positive response from the community, it is not history that Latvians need to turn to as much as theatre. In times past, when history was no more than personal memory, the medium that enabled the psyche to cope was the theatre—whether it reenacted myth (a form of history), or dramatized the contradictions of life by way of tragedy, or dismissed disorientation with comedy—because it is the stage of a theatre (or floor of a ritual site) where the Gods project virtual reality within a virtual reality that otherwise does not know itself from an animal. http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-12/theater-of-dionysus-eleuthereus.jpg

jandžs et al.,

Romans had a port city called Ostia.  In latvian a port is called osta.  Romans derrived the name Ostia from latvian osta.  How about that ! Osta -Ostia.

Krispus Attuks took part in the American Revolution Krispus Attuks obviously is a latvian name. A latvian took part in the Revolutionary War. How about that !

On numerous occasions you have stated that reference to “ latvian” god John have been obliterated. If there are no references, that means there is no proof about a “god John ‘ worshipped.

You should get more familiar with Logical Reasoning and Scientific Method concepts.

Your approach, at best, can be described as: “ picking up a handfull of horse sh--t throwing it against a wall and seing what will stick”.

Visu labu,

At the point that I am entering the fray ( unless I responded before and haven’t rechecked proprly ) there have been already 55 posts. But.... posts are tiresome and weary tp read, especially when they are more than a paragraph or two.

To get to the point: Janis is not a god, John is not a god.

Jesus is the only Lord and Saviour.

In the above entry and others before it, I have expressed doubt about history as presented by most historians in the West. My sense of their perspective is that like Christendom, they have allied themselves with the establishment so profoundly [BBC News: Blair to teach in the US on faith], that we have two bodies grown together in a way that does not reflect reality as it happens (twins are usually not born as Siamese twins), but a highly artificial and tortured political construct. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Female_Siamese_Twins_(CLXXXIIv).jpg/458px-Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Female_Siamese_Twins_(CLXXXIIv).jpg No doubt, I have been influenced by and have taken this perspective as a result of Anatoly Fomenko’s topological analysis of history and discovery that allegedly chronological events are sooner overlays of one and the same event. http://img.alibaba.com/photo/11218392/Organza_Overlays.jpg To uncouple the segments of the lie about history, we need to let doubt and time do their work on the progress of a seemingly unstoppable train, the momentum of which one academician (Fukuyama) has proclaimed changeless and, thus, “the end of history” as a way to stop us from talking about false history.

[For the skeptics, a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Washington Post, March 25, 2007: “To justify the ‘war on terror,’ the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative…. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran.” Indeed. The recent resignation (11/3/2008) of Admiral William Fallon, chief of the United States Central Command, is probably a period at the end of the page, before the page itself is writ, but the content of which we can anticipate. Something like that apparently crossed the mind of Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, when he warned (Associated Press 20-3-2008) that a war in Iran would be “a real disaster”.]

But an ahistorical time is precisely the kind of space within which our forebears lived. The fact that they believed in “fate” (as in an unpredicted turn of events in a story) is evidence of it. They had no history other than myth and what personal memories each of them held, certainly not extending beyond their grandparents if they were still alive. Thus, our forebears were walking into the future as if they were walking up a staircase without handrails http://nuevomundotours.com/inca_trail.jpg . We of course have the written word (the handrail), which makes the chronology of history as if trustworthy. But all “as ifs” are called by their true name sooner or later. It is fantasy to think that the chronology of history before the 16th century is other than fiction or guess. Indeed, the written word seems to have been invented to tell a better lie.

In a time that has no reliable history, state power attempts to hide the violent convulsions that took place during its passage through the birth canal by stuffing the same with papers from the wastepaper baskets of lawyers’ offices. Hence the neo-Christian idea that people rose out of a logos writ on paper. If such audacity was sufficient to persuade our illiterate ancestors into believing the unbelievable, poets everywhere started to fear their sanity and hence spoke between the lines. We still live in the afterglow of the audacity of the written word. But it takes ever greater threats and manipulation of news to coerce an impoverished and restless population into believing the unbelievable. The 9/11 attack on New York City http://freethoughts.org/archives/9-11-n.jpg certainly was a sensational event, but the “war on terror” that followed solicits war. The stage is set for an elitist fantasy that the public will accept enslavement to fear. This is a time when terror is not only before one’s eyes, but reaches behind the curtains of the stage. Under such conditions there is no escape, http://www.pix8.net/pro/pic.php?u=64822252c&i=775882 but to come on the stage and die http://www.mathimatiko.net/fun/cat_vs_dog.jpg in the hope that the agon holds everyone’s attention long enough to enable a return to sanity.

We remember the agon of Jesus this week because his self-sacrifice helps us gather courage to escape rapturing about a fantasy heaven at a time of great danger. In short, Jesus lived according to the tradition of John, who comes again and again, and not Paul, who (most likely an agent of the Byzantine Empire) destroyed the live theatre of non-violent direct action.

P.S. I have edited and translated some of my contributions here into Latvian, and they may be read at http://www.latvianjanis.com

What a ton of mumbo jumbo. Don’t any of you have the abilility to speak in simple understandable speach? All this reading is so tiresome, so overdone, so overwrought.  It’s much simpler than all this “discussion”. Love Jesus, Love one another. Life’s probelms solved!

The God, who exercised the power of bonding over proto-European cultures, of whom Latvian Jānis is a remnant, has been removed from the people’s consciousness with a hocus-pocus of hands and tongue and replaced by St. George http://www.st-george-church.org/ImageFiles/Icons/St_George/st_george_2.jpg (among established military societies) or Bear-Jawbreaker (among the more agrarian oriented Latvians) http://www.lacplesis.com/lacplesis011.jpg ). The dismissal of Jānis by the media and political mulch machine is almost complete. So it is also with the John’s Day Festival, now variously called Lihgo Festival, Midsummer Festival, Grass Festival, Beer Festival, Summer Festival, St. John’s Festival, and, let us not forget, Sex and Fertility Festival. A search of images at Google brought up no image of the Latvian God.

However, to the extent that the festival still is called John’s Day, John (though as a children’s’ name it is among the least popular) still has a ghost of a shape; he still is a shadow of himself. What does this shadow look like? A writer from India once described the shadow of her country thus: a dismembered figure of something made of flesh, but lying in a roadside ditch, somehow still alive, emitting deep moans. Perhaps that body was that of a cow, once a sacred symbol in India. While for appearances sake the cow in India is still sacred, today it looks more like an animal waiting to be skinned by the tanners. http://www.petaindia.com/feat/images/L10.jpg So it is with John. When people eat caraway seeded cheese on John’s Eve, it is no longer John’s sacrament, the “līgo” refrain is coming from a recording, the tourist industry is waiting to cash in by making it a beer bash in June,

I have deliberately drawn this painful picture so that it etches itself into our memories as a still-life painting of a moment on the stage of a theatre http://info.detnews.com/dn/history/louis/images/kaput.gif . If such a picture fails to show what happens next, it is because a “next” may take several centuries or even millennia to manifest itself. Thus, while “capitalism” has its roots in the death of an egalitarian way of life, which occurs after the end of hunter-gatherer societies, and begins to take root with the enslavement of agrarian societies by warrior princes, its true potential comes fore only after the arrival of the industrial age. Assuming the latter to begin about 1830, we are near two hundred years waiting to see the results of its making http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fv1DqIen28&feature=related It should not surprise us that it is ending on a note of “war against terror”, the Big Eye of the Big Brother ready to accuse everyone on behalf of the “haves” of breaking the “law”, a synonym of private property, and take them to the basement of the court house for the waterboard test. Of course, this is not to say that there ought not to be respect for private property, but simply that there is no more of it to go around.

The unfinished moment gets stuck in the camera, because it does not know where to go next. So, it waits until someone of sufficient stature or some unexpected shock comes along to provoke the “photograph” to move into the next frame. This happens from time to time. India’s Mahatma Gandhi, a lawyer, set the people of India into motion by challenging the British Raj. The theatre of non-violent direct action directed by Gandhi took its act over the whole of the Indian subcontinent.  A. Fomenko, who is a mathematician and a historian disputes the chronology of history observed by orthodox historians and provokes the BBC to censure the advertisement for his books. Is it possible to revive the Jānis festival in Latvia? The highway police have their own point of view of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Moa8hDzrk

Nevertheless, if Latvians were to turn their Midsummer Festival back a few centuries and rename it John’s Day Festival as it was originally called and convince themselves to stay with the name, and local amateur theatre groups were to take on the theme of John (as here argued or as they themselves see it), it might be possible to move off the space that has been trashed by ashes of bonfires mixed with half-burnt foil lined plastic cartons of junk food, and by some radical leap of the imagination stir the dead to life yet. A theatre performance certainly is not an end all, but it may manage to keep open a space for sacred ground that is so necessary for a proper celebration of this ancient festival.

Many people are coming to realize that our civilization is out of touch with reality, which circumstance passes the advantages to a reality that lies cannot cover up. In this context we should note that the recent violence in Iraq was directed against the poorest of poor in Basra, the very ones who have nothing to lose if they lose Earth itself. http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/03_03/Iraq02AFP_468x307.jpg Besides those in Basra, there are some 4.5 billion poor in like situation the world over.

Strange as it may sound, this is an insurmountable advantage the poor have against the haves, because despite all the killing the “volunteer” armies of the haves may do, it is either killing a hydra’s head or shooting itself in the foot—or doing both. In other words, official lies are now countered by the West’s own zamizdat literature, the so-called blogs and ubiquitous videos of YouTube and other sites. The go-betweens (priest, publishing house, government, et al) have lost power to interfere with direct communication, even if these elements have not given up trying.

The impossibility of waging a war for oil (or coal, or diamonds, or water, or whatever) or “against terrorism” must dawn on the powers soon enough. Indeed, except for being stuck with stereotypical thinking and not knowing how to break out of it, they are ready to break with the past all the same. See Al Gore’s campaign against global warming at http://wecansolveit.org/invitealliance . The breaking off of ice shelves http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v55T_BhmlA&feature=related is further evidence of our civilization in a corner, from which at least some of humankind wishes to survive and therefore will act in a manner consistent with human reaction to a catastrophe. (See Ch2 of my book at my home site.)

The days of politics as usual are over. The last hurrah of “democracy” as a political fetish is about to go the way of President Bush, because “democracy” has soiled itself with so much empty rhetoric (positivist political scientists to the contrary), that at least the 4.5 billion poor, promised to become 6.2 billion by 2050 http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:iv7Yj9TIuVAJ:www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17605186/+9.5+billion+people&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5 –have no longer any faith in it. The shepherd has