Blog-end Adlib: [IV] Tiresias’ Revenge (28)

Deconstruction of Thebes in Progress; early March, 2012.

© Eso A. B., 2012

 The riddle of the Sphinx was so simple that any child should have been able to answer it. Instead, it was pretended that the answer would take a “hero” to answer.


When the passing traveller could not answer the Sphinx’s simple question, we are told that he-she was killed and then eaten.
So why would anyone ever walk the road that led past the Sphinx?


The answer to these questions and doubts is that “the riddle” was part of a profound and ancient ritual, that ritual being the sacrifice of children.


The answer to the Sphinx riddle, just in case someone does not remember it, was “man”. At the start of life, he-she crawls on all fours, while grown men and women walk on two legs, but when old walk with the aid of a walking stick.


One may, however, also wonder if “man” is the answer that quite suits the occasion. Since I ‘rewrote’ Sophocles play, I have always believed that the answer should have been “everyman, everywoman” or simply “I”, or if the Sphinx heard “I do not know”, he-she would bellow with a roar: “YOU!”


On the other hand, how can one answer a riddle with an “I” or “you”? The riddle as stated by Sophocles does not answer to either of the above answers.
To arrive at the answers “I” or “you” takes a riddle that is more complex than the one that appears in Oedipus Rex. Indeed, my answer is that it takes the whole play, the entire plot, to arrive at “you”.


So, with such a riddle in mind, this is how I have ‘rewrote’ Oedipus Rex Rewritten:
There was an ancient custom that if a King wished to pass on the kingship to his son, he had to expose his son to the elements, when but a few days old, for the length of a night on top of a mountain. In King Laius case, the mountain was called Mt. Citheron.
King Laius wife, Queen Iocaste, however, objected to the custom. She was shocked over the ‘inhuman’ (to use terminology of our times) idea of exposing her infant son to the risk of death. When the King insisted, the Queen pretended to go along, but instead of exposing her son, Oedipus, to the elements and ‘wild things’, she had a trusted person, a shepherd, deliver Oedipus to her sister Meirope, who was Queen in Corinth, a neighbouring kingdom. Iocaste had her servants find an aborted or  still-born baby, the dead body of which, she took up Mt. Citheron. The next day, she used this baby as evidence that her child had not survived the night; that the Gods had not chosen to protect him. Thereafter, Queen Iocaste bore no other children, or if she did become pregnant, aborted them (with an atheist’s matter of factness) in favour of her son Oedipus at Corinth.


Of course, Queen Iocaste still wanted to see her son Oedipus on the throne of Thebes. To accomplish this, she had a plan: 1] Prince Oedipus would be persuaded to seek his fortune beyond the confines of Corinth; 2] he would discover his father, King Laius, buying a wagonload of children to be sacrificed; 3] in self-righteous fury, he would kill his father; 4] he would then kill the child-eating Sphinx; 5] he could do the former only with the connivance of Tiresias, the high priest of the Sphinx’ Temple; 6] Tiresias told Oedipus of the one weakness, the ‘Ahilees heel’, of the Sphinx, after exacting from Oedipus a promise that with the end of children’s sacrifices, he would become a sacrifice himself (to himself); 7] Oedipus rewards Tiresias for his demand by burning out the priest’s eyes with fire brands; 8] Oedipus arrives at Thebes a hero of the people; 9] Oedipus marries Iocaste, his mother and becomes King of Thebes; 10] he forgets all about his promise to Tiresias to sacrifice himself.


11] As a result of Oedipus not keeping his promise or making arrangements with Tiresias as to when he would sacrifice himself to himself, Thebes begins to suffer a plague. The plague is a curious one: though he is King, Oedipus is lacking a king’s authority. While everyone in the kingdom defers to him, no one is persuaded quite trust him. Perhaps the best example of the lack of trust is Creon, Queen Iocaste’s brother, who with every passing day—and with Oedipus’s cooperation--becomes an ever mightier oligarch.


12] Tiresias uses Creon’s greed as his tool of revenge. When it becomes generally perceived that Creon will not be stopped from becoming ever wealthier, the entire court of Thebes begins to plot a power grab, each for him and herself. The community of Thebes increasingly suffers from the plague of distrust, and with each passing day fall increasingly apart.


13] When matters have gone from bad to worse, Tiresias arrives at the court of Thebes and reveals to King Oedipus that it is he who is guilty for the social disintegration, and that only his self-sacrifice will save Thebes. Upon hearing the truth, King Oedipus puts out his eyes. For making the truth known, Tiresias is killed by Queen Iocaste.


14] In the end, the only survivors of the holocaust at the Theban court are Princess Ismene, King Oedipus’ youngest daughter, nanny of King Oedipus’s children Iananna, and King Oedipus himself. It is at this point that King Oedipus resolves, to fulfil his pledge to Tiresias, by asking his daughter Ismene to take him to the top of Mt. Citheron.


15] After King Oedipus dies on the mountain, and frightened Ismene runs down the hill with the news, the community of Thebes is freed from the curse of having no one of authority over them. It is there and then Princess Ismene promises the community of Thebes that she is resolved to die at the age of eighty-one (9x9), and the Thebans install her as their ruler.

Apostle Obama. (23)

The Moon Goddess.

© Eso A. B., 2012

The separation of religion from secular and state power in Western societies can be traced to secular atrocities against religion, which—to this writer’s mind—had its beginning with the incineration of St. Basil on the Hippodrome in Constantinople-Istanbul.


According to Russian historian and mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, severe critic of the Scaligerian chronology promoted by the Catholic Church, the auto-da-fe (act of faith) of Basil-Christ occured in the 12^th century. The last openly Christian human sacrifice occurred in 1802 in Spain.


Closer to our time and, therefore, more familiar is the separation of religion from secular politics in America, stipulated by the 1^st Amendment of the Constitution (1787).
As part of a continuing attempt to turn “secularism” into a “religion”, the separation continues to be maintained by the  U.S. Supreme Court, which maintains an “absolute” separation between its “law-making” and those opposed to secular absolutism.
In short, while the courts assert that “religion” today is “free”, the body of separated “religion” itself is kept in a kind of zip-bag the police carry around for dead. The phrase “separation of church and state”, goes back to a letter of Thomas Jefferson, in which he uses the phrase: "wall of separation between church and state".
Given that over two hundred years have passed since church and state
 have been more or less separated, it is clear by now (to those interested in such matters) that the wonder of the secular state (democracy) is none other than a “lawful” secular dictatorship.


Alas, the “new” religion is every bit as gruesome as rolling enemy corpses down the steps of the Aztec Templo Mayor. Of course, in our day the “act” of sacrifice lacks the presence of a priest offering the victim to kiss a crucifix. The death of the sacrifice usually occurs at some distance from the executioner—perhaps a hundred yards from him—by bullet. Sometimes, a pro forma religious ritual may take place afterward in places where “religion” retains its charismatic hold on the common people and they retain a subjectivity individuated by their religion and poverty., when compared to the subjectivity of, say, a “modern artist” who has surrendered his-her subjectivity to the state”, aka a museum. No doubt, there are occasions, when an artist is naïve of the political process by which his and her subjectivity is conjoined to and becomes identical with that of the state, which on a superficial level, they may indeed reject. The tool of this take-over of the subjectivity of the artist and his audience is (did you forget?) money and the status it buys for itself  as a God not yet put in doubt.


The discovery that artistic integrity and subjectivity may be compromised has caused (2012) money and those who have it, to take on projects, which aim to change the “old” subjectivity of humankind utterly. Of course, those who do so have no way of telling what the ultimate consequences will be. The project is provocatively cynical, because it is determined entirely by the interests of money and those behind it.


However, the project is not so well hidden as its perpetrators presume, if only because money is a virus that infects every human brain, even one that that has no idea of the difference between an individual’s subjectivity and the state’s alleged objectivity. The first crack in what the moneyed wish to keep hid, appeared when an establishmentarian news agency, CNN, and its reporter Lou Dobbs, a career journalist, who dared to bring up some of the plans of “The Money Establishment” (ThME, aka banks) during prime time news. The report concerns NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement, an agreement that would link Canada, America, and Mexico into one governmental entity known as North American Union.


Apparently the subjective mind of the majority of Americans is not as receptive to the idea (no doubt, many psychologists and polls helped analyze the nature of America’s subjectivity). Therefore, the individuals who constituted the subjective mind of ThME, said by some to be TheBilderbergGroup, which membership consists of some of the more wealthy and powerful individuals of our time in the Western World, pulled a “white rabbit” out of the hat: Barak Obama, a U.S. senator from the state of Illinois.
At the time, there were many speculations, why it was Obama over Hillary Clinton, the latter a sure shoe in—it it came to Hillary actually running for the U.S. Presidency and people voting, because apparently her subjective orientation was close to that of a majority of Americans.


Instead of Hillary, America was offered a candidate with roots that reached more into the subjectivity of America’s black population, one who was ambitious for himself without commitments to anything that could not be covered by the fogs of advertisement, with a subjectivity cynical in the extreme (as sentimental democrats found out soon after the election was over), and backed by wealthy  Saudi Arabians
While the outward appearance of presidential candidates may be considered froth of cynical politics, a more profound subversion by the ThME forces surfaces in the plot sd told by a Russian television story, which is certainly worth paying attention to.
Most everyone knows that the Money Virus is not new, but has been shaping the World Order in a very direct manner (i.e., with the direct aid of violence) for over two hundred years, at least from early 18^th century on. The age of Enlightenment began from about 1700 on and does not yet presume itself to have come to an end—even if its end is envisaged by groups such as the Bilderbergs.


What stands in the way of TheME (The Money Enterprise) are the subjectivities of “old” religions, 1) that of the Israelis; 2) that of the Christians, and 3) last, but not least, that of the Muslims.


I The Israeli nation, under the control of  Zionist politicians, with a strong Zionist led lobby (AIPAC) effecting the interests of American oligarchs, does not serve ThME’s interests in the North American Nation.


II The Christians, under the control of U.S. Fundamentalists, though in fact helpful to the cause of ThME, is, nevertheless, a long-term obstacle, because it hides (now in the deepest part of its closet) the notion (of Jesus Basil) that human kind is essentially an egalitarian entity and, therefore, Christianity will never be sufficiently cynical to suit TheME rule on planet Easrth over the long term.


III The Muslim oligarchs, with their control of Oil Money, have as great an interest in securing for the Muslim world a secure a place on our planet as the Chinese, Russians, and Americans appear to have.


In sum, a cynical individual, a weak Muslim, and an ungrounded American fits the current interests of ThME, the Money Virus, most,  because Obama’s ambition blinds him no less that the ambition of Oedipus once blinded him to the fact that (in the end) he is a patsy and scapegoat of his mother.


Though the interests and power of the moneyed and VIPs are not to be belittled, their goal of attaining for themselves a planet that is “globalized” under their aegis, is full of great risks, not least of which is Armageddon for humankind as a whole. In short, the demand of the Environbmentalists and Greens for an Earth that has no more than a billion or two people, may well be on the reverse side of the ThME coin.


We may speculate that the survivors of the catastrophe that is likely to follow on the heels of a failed WW3, will demand that any future government is led by a self-sacrificial leader, who through committing and conjoining life and service may gains for himself the subjective  authority that will  speak to and for all.