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.