Lot and Lot’s Daughters (17)

Saw-Cross Facing East. The Wind Blows from the West.

© Eso A. B., 2012

When the men of the Ono tribe of Tierra del Fuego decided to kill their women, they petrified the minds of all women they were to take as wives in the future. At the same time, they also petrified their own minds.

To ‘petrify’ is a most unusual word, but it is not rare. In the Bible, for example, we meet it as an event that turns a human being into a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:26 tells how Lots wife, looked back (whence she had come) “and she became a pillar of salt.”
Some interpretations of the event suggest that Lots wife (incidentally a nameless woman), was caught up in some seismic event, such as a volcanic eruption. We know from excavations at Pompei where people were entrapped by the hot ashes of an eruption of Vesuviusm, and when the ashes solidified and human bodies decayed, the cavities filled with minerals. It is not difficult to imagine the minerals as being salts.

Another interpretation is that Lot’s wife was a “disobedient woman ”. This is an argument that we would likely hear today from the Ona tribesmen and contemporary mysogynists such as Rush Limbaugh in the U.S. While all the Ona tribesmen are dead now, we cannot question them. Rush Limbaugh is still alive, but his show is (by acts of a grateful public) dead as a consequence of most of the advertisers leaving the show.
 
Murder needs an explanation, no matter how flimsy or artificial it may be. This is why the reason for making war is often a created one. The instigator of war blames the other side for beginning it. It is also known as a “false flag” event.

Is it possible that Lot somehow got wind of such a “false flag” event—an attack on the city of Sodom—and had time to flee before he was entrapped by the events of his own making?

The story of  Genesis 19 tells that Lot was visited by two angels, whom Lot apparently recognizes and calls “Lord”. Who are these “angels”, and “lords”? It is possible that the name “angel” was once pronounced differently, that is, it was pronounced “Yangel” (the letter “A” pronounced with a Y preceeding it, re “YA”), a name that in our own time is a cognate of John, Ian, lvan, and Zhan, etc.?

In days past (when Earth was still covered by forests), John or Yang (Yanj) was a traveling preacher. In American folklore, he was known as JohnnyAppleseed (also John Chapman) . Interestingly, Johnny Appleseed was a preacher or angel for the “New” or Swedenborgian Church. While the meaning of the word “preacher” is better derived from the word “chap” as in Johnny Chapman, the legal name of Johnny. ‘Chapman’ and ‘preacher’ have near identical meanings, even if we are not accustomed to make that association. In other words, ‘chap’ = refers to the fleshy covering of a jaw; whence probably the name for “cheek”, “chops”, and also “jawboning”, preaching to someone until he-she is persuaded not to give “no” for an answer.


While some readers may think that equating of “Angel” with “John” is  far fetched, this was probably not the case in the Swedenborgian Church, at least not in its early days (17^th century), when the father of Swedenborg—Jasper Swedberg, was alive. Jasper “…held the unconventional belief that angels and spirits were present in everyday life”. In fact, these were days when the people of the countryside believed that a traveller walking the roads of Europe, could discover that the man or woman he-she met on the road could be God or one of the ancient Gods. These were also the days when travelling men or preachers, known as Johns, were still walking the roads of Europe.


To return to the story in the Bible, the Angels who came to visit Lot, were thought of as aliens by the people of Sodom, who came to attack Lot’s home were they had found lodgings. The Angels blinded the attackers, so they could not find the door to Lot’s house. It is at this point in the story that the Angels tell Lot to leave town, indeed, carry him out of town, then tell him to keep going and not to look back.


Lot’s wife does look back however, which act turns her into a pillar of salt. This suggests that she was petrified by what she saw. And whatever it was that she saw was, evidently, horrifying beyond words. In other words, the story of Lot tells us of a terrifying, possibly an unnatural event that also petrified the minds of the people in a manner that it lasted for generations thereafter. Moreover, the messengers of the terror were two Lords, Angels, or Johns who—for reasons unknown to us--had come to Sodom to rescue Lot and his family.


The story of Lot does not describe to us the event that so horrified his wife, but we may make a guess. Perhaps the terrific event was not connected to the violence of war orana ture cataclysm, but was all of that, plus psychological terror. After Lot leaves Sodom, the story goes on to tell us that….


Lot’s two daughters, who apparently do not look back as their mother did,  survived the event. These same daughters later decide to sleep with their father, so that he may have male descendants. This suggests that Lot’s wife’s fault was not to have born Lot sons. Whoever told and recorded the story, must have believed that in the event a woman fails to bring into the world sons, her husband is justified in engaging in incest with his daughters.


Because incest is a nigh universal taboo, perhaps Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt in hindsight, that is, because Lot forced his daughters to sleep with him. Here we have to ask why the taboo against incest? Come to think of it, incest is not against nature; rather it is rather natural and common in the animal kingdom.


There is an interpretation, however, that suggests that the reason incest is taboo is to prevent two males (two sons, or father and son, coming to fight over a daughter or sister). This interpretation brings us back to the story of Cain and Abel, which stops at the grave of Abel. When Cain, the first born, is discovered to be the murderer, God himself marks Cain in a manner that warns anyone against attacking him to revenge Abel’s death. Why did God do this? Did he think that it was the right of the first born son to sleep with his sisters, but which act is forbidden to the younger sons?


In other words, Cain is to be spared attacks from any of his future brothers, because if such attacks are to take place, then fratricidal violence becomes ‘natural’ to a community.


We are on confusing grounds here. Does not God’s mark on Cain also condone Cain’s act? Does this not perpetuate fear of Cain and, therefore, cause the human brain to lock up in fear at the sight of the man?


No doubt, it does do so. The only escape from a fear locked mind set, therefore, is a) the passing of a long period of time, or b) the replacement of Cain, a mere man, with a man born as a divinity? Christians will, of course, argue that the latter man is Jesus Christ. This is not an uncommon belief today. One theologian (John Milbank) says, for example, “…perfect human autonomy is attained only through a sharing in the most absolute degree of heteronomy imaginable—namely, the paradoxical circumstance that the only true human being who ever lived was not in fact a human person at all, but a divine one.”


If so, what is the kind of “heteronomy” that human beings will subject themselves to peacefully and without violent opposition? Milbank surely cannot be speaking of “heteronomy” as imposed by a secular government, which in case of the U.S. argues that it has a legal right to assassinate its own citizens or that Europeans must submit to NATO or that its present secretary general AndersRasmussen  is somehow a divinity?
The sight of NATO commander surely turns many a European into a pillar of salt. So what is Milbank talking about? Is this divinity perhaps an oligarch filled with liberal capitalist idealism? Or were the two angels who visited with Lot such divinities?

If we permit ourselves to think of these ‘lords’-angels as divine, then Lot’s wife must have seen something else. Perhaps she did see the angels as suitors come to ask for the hand of her daughters, but that her husband Lot grew jealous and killed them.
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Hid Behind A False Name and Chronology. (16)

The forest and winter behind my house.

© Eso A. B., 2012

To tie men to a T was once common punishment. Thus tied, men and women were often killed by stoning, arrows, spears, fire, or garrot.

When the time arrived that T or Tau became an instrument of death not only for common men and women, but to which VIPs were tied also, it necessitated that it become an symbol elevated above the mundane, and was therefore embelished with an overhead inscription. The more titled the victim, the more the words on the inscription. This was the time when the T was extended along its vertical axis. The most important inscription of which we know is Jesus’s INRI, or “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”.

Whether the King of the Jews was Jezus of Nazareth is not as sure a certainty as orethodox believers would like everyone to think. There remain many questions where Jesus came from and wherefrom his name. Could the name have come by way of a pareidolic intercession from the name Basil? That is, from Basil to Vasil< Vazil< Yazil< Yezu? It may be that the bloodshed that was to come later as if on Basil’s behalf, was a consequence of an attempt to impose on the public mind another name, the original of which name may have been John or one of John’s innumerable cognates, such as Yan, Ian, Ivan, Van (Vanyka). Jon, Johann, Hans, Huan, Wotan (Yon-tan/ Jonathan), etc.

Readers who are not committed to standarticized and  ethicized orthodox beliefs may not find it so strange to discover that John, also known as John the Baptist or John the Anointer (Healer, because once in Egypt an Embalmer of corpses), not only may have preceded Jesus, but may have been displaced by Jesus. The latter would have happened because the numinosity of Jesus’s  name may have given him a great hold over the imagination of the people. Since Jesus is said to have been a carpenter, the name—by way of anomatopeia—may have triggered  an association with a saw, such as Jee-zus, Jee-zus. Since the name of John is also associated with rejuvenation, as in the winter and suummer solstice of January (according to the old 13 month calendar) and June, a replacement of his name with that of another, was enough to replace the name of the arch-Christian John  altogether.

The reader may by now recognize the method by which the absurd is imposed on the public as a sociaty-wide belief.

In this blog series, we began with the men of the Ona tribe of Fierro del Fuego, who forced their fantasy of themselves as Gods on their entire tribe by murdering their women (and possibly children). Death is not happily met with if dying is presented as a gruesome, and painful event forced on humankind in order to cause it to accept something normally percieved as absurd. Worse, once fear forces the door open and seeps into our brain matter, it may spread like a virus not only through our  organism, but mind-memes may distribute it throughout our entire society.

Such a development serves a ruling elite to keep its wealth and priviledges to itself through pseudo “laws”, which, among other things, inhibits subjective and private thoughts.

The 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries are examples of times when humankind finds itself under the influence of fear and terror. Such a state of mind causes unreason to be dominant at all social levels, the scientific and scholarly including. Though scientific achievements at this time may have been significant, the timidity of scholars and scientists in the face of fear and terror is unlikely to be more forthright with the governing bodies of the state than ordinary citizenss.

If repression of the mind in MesoAmerica began with the murder of women in Tierro del Fuego, we must also ask where and how it began on the Euro-Asian landmass? There is no easy answer, of course. However, the reason for this may not be because of difficulties of logic, but because the chronology of history of the so-called West is arbitrary and cannot be depended on.

The question of chronology of history as presented by the historians of the West is suspect not only because of the rule of fear and terror in the West, but because interests of the terrorizers have prevailed to our own time. At least, some knowledgeable minds, ever since Newton have expressed considerable doubts about the accuracy of historical chronology. We will see possibilities for alternative chronologies reflected in the subject matter of upcoming blogs.

Farts as Gods (15)

The Saw-Cross.

© Eso A. B., 2012

Cortes, a Spanish conquistador, brought with him to the New World not only advanced weapons (cannons and attack dogs), but a story that told that the dead, the sacrificed, those whom the Aztecs had torn their hearts out (prisoners, women, fhildren), would someday rise from the dead.

The Aztecs must have been amazed at the story’s daring, its unflinching make-believe, and straight-faced lie.

Of course, there is no record of what the Aztecs really thought, because the conceit of the Roman story tellers had already not only succeeded in imposing censorship on the subjective thoughts of any natives, but had persuaded themselves of the truth of their bold lie. The conquistadores or crusaders had imposed the same Truth (on penalty of death) on the people of the Near East and what we know today as Russia, Greece, etc. Their wilfull misconstruction and violation of the Arch-Christian belief (that self-sacrifice (sacrificing one’s self to God and one’s self) was the only way to create the charisma that bonded one’s community) was the cause of what became known as the “Great Schism”. Unfortunately, in the oral period of history and when books were copied by long-hand,, such a lie would was soon forgotten. Later, with the arrival of the  printing press, lies became especially creative and were preserved by multiplication and the art of copying.

If the historian who claims that today we live in days when history has ended is not quite right, he, nevertheless, is correct in so far as his claim suggests that today history has been turned into pure boredom through every day being pretty much the same as the day before and after, ‘ad infinitum’.

Today the Russian Orthodox Church, once the opposite pole of the ‘Great Schism’,  too, has let the days of its glory be ground down under the wheels of the Popemobile, and if once human life was believed to be God’s gift, then the mechanic of the contemporary Popemobile, one Žižek, has quite managed to turn faith into limp spaghetti. Which is not to say that Žižek is capable of self-sacrifice. The philosopher waves the want, but is caught as if dead by a photograph, which stops the deed of faith a fraction short of happening.

Surprisingly, the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus met with little resistance in Mexico. This was not because of the superior violent ways of the newly arrived conquistadores with which they impressed the Aztecs, but because the people of Tenochtitlan had already lived in an urban environment (implicitly violent) for some time. Though the Meso American urban environment did not manifest itself around a market place, a government building, it—like any urban environment—is artificial by nature and, ipso facto, warps the mind with numerous conceits and make-believes.

An additional reason why an unbelievable story succeeds in imposing itself on the mind of an urban landscape, is that it is a long long distance from being an egalitarian environment. An environment that is not egalitarian is habituated to artifice, and is constructed in the shape of a pyramid of wealth. In order to keep the pyramid functioning, its cap (the abode of the elites) must keep finding new ways to mete death to the populace below its golden rim, the matter below defined by a weaponized castle wall.

The remotenes of life in a city differentiates the city from life in the forest and field. The remoteness not only makes city life more vulnerable to accepting artifice as a matter of course, but does this because it avoids the natural environment altogether.

Footwear (a basic) is a good example. In the forest, a primitive loafer may be made of wood bark such as that of a linden tree, which bark when soaked easily flexes and bends. Too, a loafer may be hand woven from straw or hemp fibre. In the city, people are likely to want to mask such a loafer’s rough appearance by either carving it out of wood or making it of leather or enclosing it in a decorative cover.

The story of the Life of Jesus, just as the story of Kirtimukhti (see blog 14) has endured many changes. Unfortunately, the changes are not always immediately apparent. Elements of older or other versions of the same story are cleverly woven into a new version. A good example of this is how the unpromising GodNanaautzin (the pimply one, suffering from venereal disease) was able to after fifty-two years of near total  night make rise the Fifth Aztec Sun.

David Carrasco: “’When no sun had shone and no dawn had broken,’ the gods gathered at Teotiahacan to create a new age. They asked: ‘Who will carry the burden? Who will take upon himself to be the sun, to bring the dawn?”

After Nanautzin had bravely dressed himself for ceremonial suicide (self-sacrifice), he and a snail approach the huge fire pit into which he and the snail are supposed to jump to cause sunrise and put the Fifth Sun into motion:

“Onward thou, O, Nanautzin! [Shout the witnessking Gods.] Take heart! [Žižek!]”

The story teller continues: “Nanautzin, daring all at once, determined-resolved-hardened his heart, and shut firmly his eyes. He had no fear, he did not stop short; he did not falter in fright; he did not turn back. [He did not take example from the snail.]

“All at once, he quickly threw and cast himself into the fire; once and for all he went. Thereupon he burnt, his body crackled and sizled….

“Then the gods sat waiting to see where Nanautzin would come to rise—he who fell first into the fire—in order that he might  shine as the sun, in order that dawn might break. When the gods had sat and been waiting for a long time, thereupon began the reddening (of the dawn;) in all directions….” [‘City of Sacrifice,’ David Carrasco, p.79.)

Of course, this is not how Jesus died. Why should we trust the canonical version of Jesus’s death, if the only reason for accepting it is fear of government violence? Indeed, is the government not of the same men as those who in the men’s ceremonial house on the on the island of Fierro del Fuego’s demanded their women and children to believe them to be their Gods?

Cutting Out the Tongue  (14)

Black John Covered by Leaves.

© Eso A. B., 2012

The mental scarring inflicted on the victims, or the witneses, or the performers of violence creates a closed system of belief out of which it is near impossible to exit. This is much like the old story about the “Face of Glory” or Kirtimurkha.

When looked at head on, Kirtimurkha’s face is almost too terrible to look at, but when looked sideways, it (also known as uroboros) is seen as a serpent biting its own tail. But if the logic of the serpent is followed through to the end, we realize that it may devour itself as far as its face or snout.

Once Kirtimurkha or Uroboros has devoured itself to its face, what then? There is but one solution: since it cannot devour itself further, its teeth or horns, the tools of its will, must continue to grow into huge incisors or horns. However, we may imagine these also as two swinging doors, doors that swing open and shut on the face of Kirtimurkha.

Once the horns or incisors are full size (whatever one’s imagination imagines this to be) , they may turn into living creatures, shear-like twins.

The book of myths is full of stories of twins who kill each other. This is what Kirtimukha does. The Greeks tell of two monster giants Otus and Ephialtes, who desire to possess the Earth Goddess Artemis. As they go hunting for the Goddess, Artemis turns into a deer. To better catch the deer, the giants separate and trap Artemis in a small forest clearing. Otus and Ephialtes, both, throw their spears at the same time, at which point Artemis vanishes, but the spears continue across the clearing. The giants spears and kills his brother.

In another Greek myth, the teeth of the serpent are represented by armed men. Prince Cadmus throws a stone between the teeth, and the teeth-men, believing that it was thrown by the other side, start a fight among themselves. Before too long, both armies lie dead.

There is yet possible a more strange and inverted outcome to the story. Instead of the face of Kirtimurkha growing incisors or horns, it grows two legs of a woman instead. In our times, we may call this a Lacanian inversion or the language of the unconscious. The face of Kirtimurkha is between the legs, and it is a man’s penis that comes to close the legs upon itself. Not surprisingly, this rather weird copulation results in a normal human baby.

In the case of the Aztecs, it was the unexpected arrival of the Spaniards that interrupted their magic circle. It was only when the conquistadores came, that those who dissented from the Aztec system had sufficient equivalency in violence to topple the Aztec King Moctezume. This is not to say that there was no opposition to the Aztecs earlier on. However, opposition to Aztecs never reached the critical mass, where it could defeat them. This may, of course, be said about our own times. The face of Kirtimurkha may be likened to the American War on Terror, where the American government attempts to kill its twin by assassinating its own citizens.

The method of inhibiting biologically motivated mimesis (one may call it  “theatre of life or nature theatre”), which in times past created space between those who are violent and those who are not, may also be accomplished through the castration of men, who raped (if not the killed) women, thus hastening the arrival of a “world order” instituted by violence.

When the methods by those committed to order by violence reached their present position and status of positive terror, many human beings are beginning to express surprise that our planet has managed to escape becoming a prison where terror is the rule.

Or is there something that we, the sheeple, have missed out on? After all, one may argue instead that the physical mutilation of men and women through violence, though effective, has not done a sufficiently  effective job.

Perhaps this failure of our civilization is one of the reasons why psychoanalytic theory grew so rapidly after Freud came on the stage. For all the negative consequences arising from repression and/or the power of advertising (images and words) sexing us with no satisfaction, the connection of physical and mental factors opened the doors to manipulation and experiment with human behavior at large. Perhaps this is why the sacred texts of past times were replaced by commercial advertising in the short span of a few decades, and—like it or not—constitute today’s spiritual cannon glossed over by some sexed image we cannot get any satisfaction from.

While advertising relativitizes and commodifies everything into money, the method of achieving this stage of “civilization” rests entirely on violence and the elimination of oppositionary violence. It is like a man and woman, both with only one leg, having sex.

As professor Carrasco notes: “The orientation [or social importance] of Tenochtitlan … was achieved through the city’s primary export: control.”

If Templo Mayor were to fail to control and the sacrificial victims rebelled, either the number of sacrificial victims would have to be increases or on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico there would have to appear foreign ships captained by one named Cortes.



Mind Frozen by Fright and Make-Believe (13)

Black John is danced/sung into becoming green.

 Copyright EA Benjamins

If a stick cannot be pushed into the ground by hand, it can be driven into the ground with a malet. This is an apt description of how Aztecs persuaded their society to accept sacrificial violence and through it become  a “cultured” Aztec.

When such violence becames accepted by a large group of people (best in an urban or semi-urban setting), it soon becomea a social compulsion. Another analogy of similar aculturation is that of a young man turned into a hunter. Once the young man is persuaded to release the arrow or squeeze the trigger, he is more than half-way to overcoming his trepidations, and is henceforth ready to to attack and kill Mother Earth if ordered. With ever more practice, the young man may become a master of destruction, and a teacher of other young men through games and rituals, i.e., acts of  forced mimesis, i.e. killing animals and humans.

As nightmarish as miming and/or enacting violence may be, and as insecure as a society may result from it, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, a society comes to depend on it (mind frozen by make-believe) for temporary “stability”. Generally, it may take a greater catastrophe to break the mold of the catastrophe imposed earlier on.

Once the Aztec men (Gods)—were familiar with night-time violence—they were better able to steel their emotions and accept violence as a “normal” way to influence reality on behalf of whoever was able to be more violent and unmerciful. The “greater catastrophe” for Aztec men became a reality when their earlier culture became boring or tedious to them (as ours is becoming to us), once they had accepted the catastrophe/violence as a permanent condition of "cultured" life. This is when it occurred to them to create a new God. They called the new God Huitzilopochtli.

The manner of creating the “new” God of Violence was by inseminating Mother Earth (who hid inside the Serpent- or Moon-Mountain) with a ball of feathers (possibly the rib cage of a dead snake). The idea for the ball of feathers may have presented itself from seeing tumble weeds rolling across a desert landscape. The chief of the earlier proto-Aztec Gods had been Quetzalcoatl, who could also disguise himself as wind. Because wind may be imagined as a feathered serpent, his resemblance to tumble weed or a tumble of feathers stuck to a tumble of human ribs is not difficult to imagine.

When the feathered ribs germinated, Hitzilopochtli sprang from his mother’s womb and not only killed Mother Earth (probably as a result of a breech birth), but his older siblings too, all four hundred of them.

The logic of whoever practices violence does not accept rivals, be they Gods, men, women, or children. The warriors try to persuade themselves that when there is no one left to kill, and when history and violence (object and act) are seen become as one, they can make-believe that they have reached a time were history ceases—as one Harvard professor recently insisted was the nature of our own times. The place this takes place in our time is not Earth, but planet Virtual Ideal.

After his birth, Huitzilopochtli came to stand for the spirit of men, especially warriors. To keep the lofty status, the male warrior had to also learn to become an actor. The acting took place not only through the application of body paint and strutting before an audience of women and children, but through engaging in violent rituals, because only pain, violence, and death inhibit the individual from taking his-her subjective self as real and worth realizing.

Professor Michael Taussig describes how the men of Tierra del Fuego, knew of a mythical story that told, how their forebears had killed their women. The explanation why this had occurred was that the men had caught the women trying to fool them by pretending that they were Goddesses.

* * *

Though the Aztecs lived in the area that is now Mexico City and the Ona tribe lived at the far end of the South America, we cannot discount the possibility that the traditions may come by way of the same ancient root. For example, this writer was stunned when on a travel show aired on local television in Latvia, a group of travelers visiting with nomadic people east of Lake Baikal showed the nomads killing a sheep for their guests by making an incision (as four men turned the animal over and held its legs spread) in the skin near what appeared to be the urinary sack, and the butcher (the fifth man) pushed  his hand through the perforation up to the animal’s heart, and killing it by apparently squeezing shut the blood flow to the heart.

Following the murder of Ona women, it became the custom among Ona men that no women or children were allowed to enter the men’s ceremonial house, where they would see their Gods as mere men. To transgress against the custom meant death or severe punishment. One punishment (used by Amazon tribes) was gang rape of the guilty woman, another (by the Arunta in Australia) was to blind with a firestick.

The secret of the Ona or Selk’nam men was very plain: during the rites of initiation, everyone (the young initiates including) who watched  the ceremonies enacted by the initiators had to be scared to death.

Such make-believe is not surprising to “modern” man. We recently saw such belief (on pain of punishment by imprisonment) enacted by the North Koreans, during the funeral of their leader Kim Jong II. The American government, too, now claims for itself the right to arrest and assassinate any American citizen without a trial.

A Force for “Stability” (12)

An Oak  with Its Limbs Sawn Off.

Copyright Eso A. B.

When it comes to mythology, there is nothing new about men killing women. Among other things, we have the image (familiar to almost everyone) of Perseus holding the head of Medusa Gorgon by her hair in his hand.

The ancient Greeks are famous for justifying killing women by telling tales that the women they had killed deserved death, because they were or are ugly. The story about Scythian women warriors may be an invention to justify public murder of war prisoners or innocent inhabitants of a city. The women portrayed in the link look more like street demonstrators today throwing rocks, while the truly lethal arms (bow and arrows) are in the possession of men.
Where does this desire to kill women arise from?
One answer may be provided by the failure of mimesis of one sex to project itself onto the other, because of the failure by nature or social circumstances to separate the sexes in sufficiently polarized entities. In other words, a young male, home from his first kill during a hunt of reindeer or wild boar, may imagine that if he can kill a deer and boar, he can also impose on a woman himself through an unwelcome (to her) sexual act, in other words, rape. A woman may, on the other hand, extend a successful and undiscovered lie, to realize an unfulfilled desire and do violence to trust by puting the fruit of her license in her lover’s or husband’s care.

Dislike of the other sex, may be a matter of dysfunctional genes—as in homosexual men and/or women. The image projected by the mind eye of a male does not attach itself to a woman, but a man. In other words, to use poet’s (Machado) words (blog 5): “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.” The homosexual’s eye fails to be seen back by the biological eye of the other sex, but by the secreted sex. Yet again, if a woman is not desirable to a man, he may imagine her as ugly, whereas a woman may reject an impotent man as the king of her clan or tribe.

This is a good place to remember that Sigmund Freud said that: “Male and female is the first distinction that you make when you meet another human being, and you are accustomed to making this distinction with unquestioned certainty”, Hirschfeld , a famous sexologists of the 20^th century “posits (as per link) that a human being is neither man nor woman, but at the same time man and woman in unique and therefore unrepeatable proportions.” In other words, the “unrepeatable proportion” has to find a match, which may not in all circumstances be an easy thing to do.

The failure of the mind’s eye to attach itself to the opposite sex, may, if met by social disapproval, find an escape through “racial” or some other social discrimination. That is: a woman smells bad, menstruates, looks ugly, is unfriendly, is poor, is black, is white, is red, has slanted eyes, etc. The reasons for rejection may be nthed to an unnatural degree if it has support from the leaders of society.

The same projections may be used to achieve attachment rather than rejection. For example, one may persuade the mind of someone yet biologically immature (generally young children) to attach itself to an object as determinedly as a gosling may attach its affections to a bathtub. In the West, this phenomenon was exploited by the Church to instil in small children a belief in Santa Claus. To make Santa ever more compelling, a whole series of stories about Christmas evolved. The stories are made all the more acceptable by connecting them with gift giving, followed by yet another story about Santa’s gift factory on the North Pole, which gifts are produced by dwarfs disguising child labor.

It is no news, that today even the Pope is complaining about the extent that the “gift” has been commodified and turned into money.

The knowledge of how to infect and contaminate a child (and humankind) did not arrive to humankind quickly. It had not yet become conscious knowledge among the natives of Tierra del Fuego in the days of Charles Darwin or Aztecs of Mexico in the days of Cortez.

Anthropologist notes and history show that primitives or arch-humankind tended to live in a social setting, where persuasion was a result of direct violence. If one escape becoming a sacrifice him- or herself, one was nevertheless compelled to go to the public square and watch the public murders of someone having their heart torn from his-her chest cavity or (if living in Europe) to hear the screams of one burnt to a crisp on a pile of wood.

It was in Tierra del Fuego that men of the Selk=nam tribe persuaded women and children that the masked men masquerading before them on certain Festival days were Gods. To disbelieve the men’s performance and call out “There’s Uncle Charlie!”, got one his-her brains bashed. Before the arrival of the written word and written law, violence was a way to freeze the subjective mind and reduce an individual’s thought processes to a repetition of banalities.

Aztec sacrificial violence was got used to and accepted, and became a social ritual. As nightmarish as miming violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates is, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, society becomes dependent on it. Insecurity and nightmares do not hinder the social animal, but become a force for its “stability”, one that compels it to continue its violent behavior.

Why Killing Women May Make You Wealthy (11)

White Plastic Chair, Green Plastic Plant, and A Wood Pile.

Copyright Eso A. B.

The Serpent Mountain that serves as a home of Mother Earth is a dangerous place. The most obvious danger for whoever visits there is snakebite.

There are also less obvious dangerous elements than snakes about Mother Earth, too, which is why we must pay attention to the descriptions of what She wears, how She looks, and what She does. For example, Mother Earth is said to be a Lady with the Serpent Skirt, which is to say, She is also the flayed or, more accurately, the self-flaying one. Like a chameleon, she may metamorphose into a human being.

A serpent is a snake, and a snake is noted for shedding its skin. This is what causes us to find her as having similarities with the waxing and waning moon. This permits us to say that the moon, too, wears a serpent’s skirt. If the moon is associated with a woman, we are certain that once a month she also sheds blood.

Women sacrifices at Templo Mayor (now Mexico City) were often flayed, and the flayed skin was worn by the high priests. One may argue that such a sacrifice is an all too literal presumption on the part of the priest and the society that he serves. The all too great literalness and directness is what may cause us to forget about the symbolic aspects of the ritual. It is this that causes the sacrifice to become suspect of being overdone, therefore a possible fake, and despite the charisma of the cruelty, suggestive—over a period of time—of overreaction because of a fundamental lack of faith in the action by the sacrificer.

Over a period of time, the resentment by the public over priestly overbearingness is likely to demand that the ritual cruelty is redressed, or the priests themselves may become sickened by it and desist from fulfilling all the demands of the ritual. Writes David Carrasco (“City of Sacrifice”, p. 77): “While many city-states were securely integrated [by means of war and terrifying sacrificial rituals thereafter] into the Aztes sphere, some were alienated to the direction of other kingdoms, and the capacity for rebellion increased. So, when the Spaniards came, Indian allies were not hard to find, and, in fact, played vigorous roles in the conquest of Tenochtitlan.” Indeed, the foregoing may equally describe the story of the Sphinx (re Sophocles ”Oedipus Rex", where in this writer’s opinion children were sacrificed, and Oedipus is the hero who rescues the City of Thebes from this sacrificial ritual).
As discussed in earlier blogs, Coatlique or Mother Earth is identified with the underground of Earth, the world of black dirt, worms,  and the dead. For this reason, when Mother Earth conceives Huitzilopochtli, a warrior God engendered from the moon-shadow of an imaginary penis, (possibly visualized as a feather falling from the sky), Earth conceives him as an armed male—a symbolic manner that replicates an erection. When born, Huitzilopochtli’s birth-appearance as an armed child outrages the Gods of the South, the realm of the Sun. These Gods (four hundred in number), incited by Earth’s eldest daughter, Coyolxauhqui, all agree to go kill Hitzilopochtli, the phantasm of violence.

If we think at the symbolism of a feather, we may see it as a result of a dream, possibly a nightmare, the latter especially, because it falls from the sky at night time and drifts and enters the deepest chambers within Mother Earth. In short, if we stay with the idea (blog 9) that the art of war and violence is learned at night by a full Moon, a ball of black feathers (Quetzalcoatl disguised as wind and the shadow of the moon) may be imagined as symbolizing men on a surprise night time raid—penetrating the camp of their enemy, they may have taunted as womanish and, thus,  learned to despise it. Even today, it is not uncommon for bullies to taunt their opponents as being weaklings and womanish in behavior.

Be that as it may, the siblings of Hitzilopochtli stand no chance against his violence. After Huitzilopochtli is born, he commences with killing his mother and all his siblings. The act establishes violence and war as what the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung called “a permanent Revolution”, except in ancient Mexico, the “permanent Revolution” manifests itself in rituals of permanent human sacrifice. This suggests that violence is taught and learned, in the same manner that a young boy is taught to overcome “buck fever http://www.buckfever.com/ ” by being urged not to fear to shoot to kill, then skin the game, and as was custom at the Norman court, presend the rectum of the stag to the king or some other high ranked lord.

It is thus how by killing a harmless creature, one steels one’s self. And killing—of game and men (or women and children), becomes ever easier to accomplish, and the slaughter of millions but increases the glory of some CIC (Commander in Chief). When thus trained men are bunched together in a ball of feathers, they form a military company able to put fear into other men, the womanish kind, who have not gone through such a barbaric training schedule.

As professor Carrasco notes (p.67), for Aztecs the ability to go to war and be violent served as a tool for the accumulation of wealth.

Gifts may become a 'tribute' : “…the Templo Mayor was the symbolic gathering place of the great tribute network of the Aztec empire. Not only was [Templo Mayor[ the material expression of Aztec religious thought, it was also … a ritual container of sacred symbolic gifts from many parts of the unstable, shifting, political geography of the empire.”

Given the scenes in preceding blogs, we can now see how for the Aztecs violence became a learned compulsion. Having learned to shoot the buck, attack and kill Mother Earth, violence was henceforth taught to the rest of society through all sorts of rituals of forced mimesis. As nightmarish as violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates, society comes to depend on violence, nevertheless; and insecurity and nightmare are not hindrances that may cause one to desist. Instead, violence becomes a form of dependency on pornography.

Just as big or small game hunters cannot tolerate criticism of their bloody sport, a society habituated to watching human sacrifice, will react with shock to any suggestion that such sacrifice creates a society unable to hold together through love and self-sacrifice.

Even though sacrifice is needed to escape virtual reality, that is, virtualism must be replaced by actual reality, this necessity is misused by teaching and then practicing compulsive murder, which then ckauns to be sacrifice and, therefore, a good on behalf of love and unity.