Blog 20 Midsummer New Year of Johns 2012

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.

http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject

http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site

http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change

http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

http://midsummernewyearofjohns.blogspot.com/ Midsummer 2012

Three Three Days Ago Hatchlings.



The art of the lie, to escape its traitorous ethical nature, often presents itself as the art of a riddle. A riddle untold is very possibly a secret of a violent nature,; while a riddle told, never has one answer, but has answers that are open to speculation that sometimes answer true, sometimes not.

It seems that lies were invented by poets or better, by those who forced poets to lie for believing in the words they said or which came to their minds.. As I have written in previous blogs, those who forced the poets to lie were the same secularists, who forced self-sacrificial Christianity to deny its belief in the necessity of self-sacrifice. As most of us can easily guess, poets need a community, such a community being the poets’ audience. From this perspective, it is clear why the early poets were the same as priests and shamans, who knew the right words that could lay on a curse or a healing word.

As Robert Graves tells us in his “A Historical Grammar of poetic myth” (The White Goddess), the first poet was one Gwion [or John], also known as Taliesin. “Taliesin was author of the Hanes Taliesin” or “The Tale of Taliesin”, writes Graves. While Graves is difficult enough in his decipherings, even more difficulties may be piled on the riddles of ancient names.

Because the letter R was difficult to pronounce to our forebears, the current city of AmsteRdam was once called AmsteLdam. When the same difficulty is applied to the name of TaLiesin, we discover the name to be TaRiesin or, if you will, the high priest TiResias in playwright Sophocles tragedy “Oedipus Rex”. While students today are being taught that the riddle asked of passers-by by the Sphinx, it is more probable that it is being asked by the priest of the Temple of the Sphinx—[?John] Tiresias, who in the play acts as the mouthpiece of the writer Sophocles, who, too, writes a riddle.

To the descendants of Latvians today, especially those who know little or nothing of the forest or rural environment, it may come as a shock that the above mentioned “’Hanes’ of Taliesin” may also rhyme with the famed Latvian folk poems “dainas” (hainas)--if we assume that the letter H is silent and may at one time have been substituted with the latter D. Poet Graves has no doubt about such a possibility. He explains (WG, p. 49):

“In ancient times, once a god’s secret name has been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a process technically known as elicio…. ” [The first known Latvian traitor (many defend his actions) Kaupo comes to mind!] In another context Graves writes (p. 50): “The subject of this [?] myth, then, is a battle for religious mastery between the armies of Don, the people who appear in Irish legend as the Tuatha de Danaan, ‘the folk of the God whose mother is Danu…. The Tuatha de Danaan were a confederacy of tribes…. The Goddess Danu was eventually masculinized into Don, or Donnus….”

According to the Irish tradition recorded in the “Book of Invasions”, the Danaan’s were driven by an invasion of Syrians from Greece northward, eventually settling down in Denmark. Did some of the Johns people also settle in Latvia, where Dionysius became Yonysius and Jahnis? As the Latvian saying has it: “Jahņi nāk ar joni”==Johns Day comes in a hurry.  Here the pronoun Yahnis translates into a verb, yonis. If (as suggested in blog2) the month of May was celebate, then surely the arrival of June came on the wings of an impatient prayer, and John broke the spell.

One of the “destructive magics” that could be done against a people, the name of whose God had been discovered [re: who had been conquered], was to change it, for example, make John read Don, or Gwion, or Huan, or whatever.

The changing of names goes on even in our own day. The Latvians, who, for example, surrender their Midsummer Festival or Johns Day by calling it a“Lihgo” (Halleluia) Festival or try to commercialize it http://www.apollo.lv/portal/fun/articles/278180  are not doing their heritage any favors, but further surrender Latvians to wannabe neo-capitalist sponsors and irresponsible politicians. Not a whiff of the nature of the “sacred” remains.

Incidentally, the actual day of the summer solstice in Latvia happened yesterday. The small bird that laid six or seven eggs in the small basket hanging in my patio, had three of the eggs hatch. I have put a wire fence around the post the basket hangs from. I have asked my neighbour to take care of my feline cat, when the small ones start to practice flight.