Blog 18 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Vine of Life on a Saw Cross

In an attempt to illustrate the far reaching consequences that issued from the attempt to repress the traditions of self-sacrifice, which repression culminated in the human sacrifice by burning at the Hippodrome in Istanbul of Basil, later rewritten as the Passion of one Jesus Christ, I have wandered rather far from the Midsummer Festival of Johns in Latvia 2012.

It is perhaps time to steer our story into a wind that blows us back to Latvia.

On the map of the world, Latvia is but a dot made tinier by the small number of individuals who make up its population. Even this small remnant of a population—that once occupied territories that stretched from the Volga River basin in Russia to Old Prussia on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea—is in a state of demographic decline or, more accurately, in a state of demographic catastrophe. When speaking of culture, Latvia is of no significance whatever. Except for one curious remnant of the culture that prevailed on this planet about a thousand years ago, in the days when Russia, one of the largest countries in the world today, was just beginning to form itself around  the small nucleus of nobles, who gathered around its first ruler, one St. Vladimir of Kiev.

Some of my preceding blogs give a rough outline of why and how the early leadership of Kievan Rus came to be from out of the defeat of an early version of Christianity by the Crusading princes of the West. Forced to cede their spiritual understanding of how the human community came to emerge out of a long tradition of self-sacrifice, the Russian people, along with the Balts, joined what we call today “the capitalist tradition”. This joining of the East to the West was and remains a torturous and violent event, made especially difficult by the breakdown of what was once a forest and nature based community as a result of the pressures brought against it  by the ‘privatization’ of our planet. The last event of resistance by egalitarian democrats against parliamentarian democrats resulted in vast slaughter of most everyone who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Though the Cromwellian http://historyonthenet.com/Civil_War/oliver_cromwell.htm Stalin took pityless advantage of the deeply burning resentment of the people of the Holy land of Russia, the bloody purification rites did not take hold of the land and failed to inspire resonance elsewhere. In the end, the West won the day once more, and in a fury of energy devoured what remained of nature in but a few decades. I read these decades as the period between 1990 (the demise of the Soviet Union) and 2008 (the beginning of the demise of neo-capitalism in the Western Europe and the U.S.).

At the time of this writing, the people of the West (Latvia including) are gripped by disbelief that the wealth financed propaganda (advertisement for one’s self) of several centuries duration has proved to be an empty cornucopia.

The disbelief is best illustrated by the futile marches of the so-called masses in the main cities the world over; and the continued “faith” of the leaders of a Latvian remnant that “it cannot be” that their dreams of freedom have ended in their and their people’s enslavement to Scandinavian banks; not to mention the seemingly “new power” of a capitalist China a crumbling wreck before it has completed its first full step.

In the present atmosphere of spiritual confusion and crumbling economies, disbelief and misdirection are the norm of the day. In Latvia, the history of the Festival of Johns remains a mystery, and the media, screwed to the floor by the Catholicism of capitalism and advertisers, raise no questions and deny all populist tendencies appearing among the Latvian public. One hears the argument that it is “way too soon” to speak of the collapse of the West, never mind a return of Johns as a political force.

And yet! In Greece, the country that may indeed have authored the playwright Sophocles, who wrote the political tragedy known as “Oedipus Rex” (not more than two thousand years ago as academicians continue to insist, but more likely at the time of the incineration of John Basil) about a thousand years ago, two elderly men, have offered themselves as self-sacrificial protestors against the vacuity of the current Greek leadership.

Can Latvia be far behind—what with 10 to 20% of its population driven from the land by an untoucheable and unpunisheable kleptocrat elite, which has seized the Parliament and is now ensconced in the Saeima?