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.