Blog 19 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Last of the Johns in Latvia, called a 'Beggar' in 1929.

The ideological consequences of the Great Schism and the near (never quite) victory of the West over the East.(the East saved the rhetoric of its spiritual teaching, but had to abandon its application in practice), are best captured by the Greek playwright Sophocles (sophist par excellance http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/) in his famous tragedy “Oedipus Rex” or Oedipus the King.

The link informs that the early sophists were itinerant teachers, which makes them close kin to, if not necessarily identical with, the itinerant Johns, their Baltic, Slavic, Latin and other wandering brethren.

Itinerancy derives from the sense of freedom that living in the forest, or plain, on the farm brings to young men who are born to it. Even today, I have had the privilege of meeting two such would be wanderers at my countryside home. A young man, of Ukrainian descent, a ne’er-do-well at school and kept behind in his class several times running, visited me looking for work. I know the youth to be of hard working parents and a hard worker himself when with a scythe in hand or in a tractor. Unfortunately—with the destruction of the Latvian countryside culture by the Latvian city folk, and no way of recovering a culture in a demoralized state and deliberately kept that way by a Jesuitical (it never looks the other way) criminal police* headquartered at the regional capital—I could not help the young man. He advised me that once he and a friend had reached the age of eighteen, they would go to England. Since both speak Russian, I ventured to suggest that they travel East instead and try to find a job on the rail line the Chinese plan to built from the Far East to the Far West, or go to the Amur region of Russia, where many Latvian deportees (1949) make their home still.

Sophistry probably has its origin in ancient bards and shamans, who, when threatened by the ecclesiasts of Westernized Christianity in-hire-of-princes, forced them to start writing their oral knowledge in a riddling style, which in the course of time the orthodoxy of court poets and university academicians garbled beyond recognition. The poet Robert Graves, whose poetic muse follows us throughout this series of blogs, mused in his preface to “The White Goddess” that: “…the ancient language [of myth] survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors, it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition, it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century….” The date coincides with the time when, too, the remains of Eastern Christianity “flickered out” in Latvia

However, let us return to the poet and playwright Sophocles and his famous tragedy. The secret code used by Sophocles involved substituting the just issued edict (taboo) against self-sacrifice, by camouflaging self-sacrifice inside the preoccupation of Western Christianity (inventor—with the help of the prince-oligarch--of the urban environment and nuclear family) with the incest taboo. The mother, Iocaste, who in the story saves her son Oedipus (Yodi or Yoni) from risking death by exposure to the elements and/or wild beasts, but loses thereby the throne of the King of Thebes for him, attempts to regain the throne through incest. The psychologist Freud, for all his genius, did not see through the sophistication of the Sophoclean riddle—probably because in the secret corners of his mind, he continued to be preoccupied with incest.

The original intent of Sophocles in writing his play was an attempt to preserve the tradition of self-sacrifice as a factor that determined whether a ruling authority http://www.cpjustice.org/node/920 or authorities indeed had the authority to rule.

In our day self-sacrifice is said to have been replaced by reason http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4107-the-social-authority-of-reason.aspx. However, reason has in our time been subject to unrelenting authority (silnaya ruka) of violence reserved for the exclusive use of so-called ‘democratic’ authorities. The presumption of authority by governmental violence is an unethical device to the core, especially when the core of the authority (presidents, ministers, members of senates, etc.) goes unpunished and is free to expect for itself a perpetual future.

*Jesuitical criminal police—in a country as economically hard up as Latvia, the duty of the police is to help guarantee the survival of “the people”, because in the best sense of the word, the police, the gendarmerie, jannisery are of the people.