The Russian Orthodox Church as The Church of Ivans/Johns. (8)

Tree tops of a once forest  in the morning from my window.

© Eso A. B., 2012

Only a forest environment guarantees democracy and equality to a greater than lesser extent. Democracy, as per Athens, is bogus. Athens a democracy in an artificial urban environment, is a construct of ideological hubris. The link above may be correct in that Athenian democracy was more direct than today’s representative or parliamentary democracy. The latter is, of course, little more than a variant on the bogus democracy known as the Magna Carta meant for elites, their oligarch half brothers, and other close cousins.

Simon Schama, a well known British historian, and author of “Landscape and Memory”, writes (p.144): “The greenwood [of England] then, was not an imaginary utopia, it was a vigorous working society.” Unfortunately, it was just its vigor, that was so tempting to the then rising oligarchic class, the violent kings and princess’s: “And it was just because the English woods were home to all this busy social and economic activity that the imposition of the Norman concept (Williamn the Conqueror, 1028-1087) of the forest seemed so brutal. For even given the exaggerations of medieval chroniclers, there is no doubt that, institutionally, the imposition of the forest law was a violent shock. Its fundamental principle, originating in Frankish custom, was the creation of huge areas of special jurisdiction, policed at the king’s pleasure….” (p. 144). 

It was from about this time—though clearly by this time, the process had become a custom among nobles—that the murder of the trees began and continues with little sense of guilt to our day.

Most people know that this ideological hubris was nthed with the arrival of so-called Enlightenment also known as The Age of Reason. Deforestation accelerated, because by that time, the oligarchs had perceived that along with deforestation the forest dwelling egalitarians, deprived of the protection of trees of the immense selva oscura (darkling forest) as Dante (1265-1321; irreversibly infected with “the wealth virus”) verbally degraded the natural landscape of our planet.

Without the protection of forests, which acted as a shield against the violence of Viking marauders (whence the origins of nobility in northern Europe), democracy became subject to being eliminated as a real (as opposed to virtual and idealized) political force. Democracy, which is entirely dependent on staying “true” to one’s community (its collective subjectivity acceptable and not perceived as stultifying, therefore, not exposed to capricious rebellion of urbanite individualism), became the loser when confronted by prolonged Enlightened encouraged violence.

Unfortunately, today the connection between democracy, egalitarianism, and the forests is not perceived by any of the organizations (Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc.) claiming protection of the forests as their primary goal.

For how long do we have to wait before the communities of today realize the essentialness of forests to there being a community that is more than ‘virtual’ and an empty word?

It may seem curious to many a defender of virtual “democracy” that forest conditions favourable to democracy prevailed longest in what we today know as Russia. This is one of the reasons why Russia was one of the last countries to organize effective military resistance to the Romanized West, where one of the last effective resistances against Roman secularism was the battle of the TeutenburgForest led by the German warrior Arminius.

When the Romans (probably an invention of Western historians, who need to mythologize their local violent leaders or ‘nobles’) discovered that the forest dwellers could be brought under the control of disciplined armies by deforestation, and through the resulting penury force a formerly free people into tax paying peasantry, democracy as as an egalitarian political instution ended.

Satellite surveys of the surface of planet Earth show that deforestation has reached levels, which encourage our planet to turn enormous patches of its surface into a desert. As the link shows, “reason” backed by powerful lobbies of the timber industry, its shareholders, all just about all who are infected by “the Wealth Virus”, causes one to expect these forces will continue to turn Earth into a grey, bleak bleak, and cold planet.

The argument, that the Age of Enlightenment has led our civilization to “an end of history” and a permanent state of democracy has—with the aid of lies disseminated by popular media—persuaded the “masses” to accept the destructive tactics of fascist elites as progressive and creative. The myth of “human rights” is only beginning to be perceived as a myth that it is. The Russian people, their early subsistence economies and local rule by the Church of Johns (now known as the Russian Orthodox Church) destroyed by the “communism” of money and Romanized German bureaucrats, are becoming destructive of their own land.

This is not to argue that this author wishes to turn the clock of history back a thousand years, but an argument that urbanization (or virtualization of community) must cease, and the return of the people to the countryside must be accompanied by reforestation of the planet without further delay.

The failure of historians to connect democracy with the forest is one of the great crimes of the 20^th century academia and appears that it may be a no lesser crime in the 21^st.

* * *

The case for calling the Russian Orthodox Church as the Church of Johns is, no doubt, a controversial one. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that early Russian tsars were mostly called Ivan (a cognate of John). The name John was also popular among leaders in the West. For example, the Magna Carta was imposed on one King John of England. Readers may remember that the people of France rallied around Joan of Arc, Joan being a feminine cognate of Jana (Yana), Zhena, Ivan, John, etc. If historians wish to discover the real history that has led to our social and economic chaos, they have much work ahead of them.

In blog 4, I suggested that the name of Odin also may be related to John. There are a number of ways to arrive at the conclusion that these names are cognates. My own method involves the perception that any name that begins with a vowel, such as Odin, Ivan, Agnus, etc., may be pronounced with a Y sound preceeding the vowel, re, a, e, i, o, u. Thus, Yodin, Yivan, Yagnus. Moreover, the consonant Y is often written as a J, which may again be confused with the consonant G. The consonant H as in Huan, is silent, whence Huan = Juan, and Hans = Yans; and Xian from the Chinese language may also be pronounced as Yian.

Whether all mentioned names are cognates, awaits more profound scholarship than this author can offer. Nevertheless, they show how widespread the name was and remains, and that its roots are to be sought for in prehistory and the history of religion.