[11] Darkness Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (8)

A mysterious ritual in Latvia. What is it about?

One of the most harmful assumptions of modern society is the idea that human communities form without any particular effort on the part of humans. In other words, society is the result of a natural drive to cluster together and, lo! we are a tribe, a kingdom, a nation, a city, whatever.

In the Western tradition, the seeds for spontaneous genesis of the community begin with the Bible. God creates Adam out of a clump of clay, then creates Eve from Adam’s rib, after which he is forced to chase both out of Paradise for allowing themselves to be tricked by a snake to eat an apple.

Having eaten the apple gives the human male and female their sex drive, they couple, and as a result of the coupling children are born. When the children are grown, they do as their parents did. As for the community, it springs from the descendants of the first human pair, all intuiting that they are related. In effect, how can related beings not come together in an intimate crowd of their own?

While the Bible leads to conclude that the community forms as spontaneously as suggested above, the background noise leaves evidence that those who wrote the Bible were not altogether convinced that all is all that simple. No sooner are the first children born, when the brothers, Cain and Abel, become jealous of each other, and Cain kills Abel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel .

A Latvian warlock leads the dance until it comes out right.

The traditional and biblical interpretation for this jealousy between the brothers is that the offering at the altar of one of the brother is more pleasing to God than that of the other.

A second guess, however, will inevitably suggest incest as a more likely motivating force for the jealousy. Of course, cultivators of naïve societies and proponents of spontaneous community formation have resisted acknowledging this possibility. Even so, times change, and what was rejected yesterday is permissible  today. Thus, it is possible that the real reason for the brotherly conflict was not the acceptability of the offering of one over that of the other, but jealousy arising out of a society where incest (even political incest) was still the norm.

If this is so, the first socially significant act after the murder of Abel is the institution of the so-called incest taboo. The purpose of the taboo is not to eliminate incestuous desires (which cannot be done), but to keep the next pair of brothers from getting into a deadly fight over a woman again.

It is possible to interpolate from the above that the incest taboo is a step necessary in community building if the community is to be a lasting and long lived one. The taboo does not eliminate murder altogether, but it certainly makes a great effort to eliminate what is perceived as one of its main causes.



Subsequent steps in community creation were the ten commandments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments . One may perceive the commandments as an elaboration of the incest taboo. Unfortunately, today many people under the influence of the ideology of liberal democracy ridicule the commandments by viewing them as just another list of “don’ts” imposed by authoritarian governments.

Black John, symbol of maimed forest, gives his blessing.

Be that as it may, even with the Ten Commandments, the killing has not stopped. Modern man has to but look around him- and herself and see that the whole of modern society—what we like to think of as a community—\has been built on a foundation of war.

Let us return here to our doubts that the human community is a matter of sponteneous creation. If our doubts are on mark, is the condemnation of the murder of Abel by Cain the first act in community building?



The Latvian miracle:
Over the murdered body of an apple tree new leaves unfold even in the fall.



If we answer in the positive, we may argue that the jealousy between the brothers, Cain and Abel, is one of the first signs of human consciousness.

Which raises the question: Is the arousal of jealousy then what distinguishes a human being from an animal?

Many anthropologists today (though not all) argue that consciousness is imbedded in acts of mimesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis . Indeed, every child learns by imitating his-her parents and other adults about them. One may go so far as to say that the children who learn quickest are the most jealous to be like their parents. As anthropologist Michael Taussig puts it: “I… am taken in by mimesis precisely because, as the sensate skin of the real, it is that moment of knowing which, in steeping itself in its object, to quote Hegel, ‘…breaks down and supercedes fixed and determinate thoughts’”.

In other words, a “fixed and determinate thought” is incest and violence.

Now, as I have argued before, the current Latvian government is (by design or circumstance) an incestuous institution. Though its object of desire is not a woman in the conventional sense, the deputies of the government (its elected and unelected officials) all desire to possess Latvia without sharing it with others. The result is a victimization of Latvia, that is, a creation of unstable coalitions, frequent betrayals of trust, and rape of the country, including the possibility of its demise.

At this point in time, there is no way for Latvia to escape being victimized by the government’s incestuous desires but one. To break free of what have become “fixed and determinate thoughts” of its leadership,  the community of Latvia  must go through an event, a sacrifice in the real, without permitting itself physical violence.

What is to be done?

I have suggested in a number of blogs, and I suggest here, that the “sacrifice in the real” may be satisfied by the resignation of the current President of Latvia, Andris Berzins.



Youths and children embrace Black John. In the background the straw man with the chainsaw burns in envy.



Though Berzins election to office appears to be juridicially pure, given his past service to foreign banking interests, and absent a winnowing process such as the American election primaries, the subjective consciousness of the nation is sent signals that its leadership seeks contact with it for the sake of an orgasm for itself, while denying similar pleasure to Latvia by treating like a rubber doll.

This afternoon President Berzins asks the PM Dombrovskis (author of a book favoring the policies of Swedish banks) to form a coalition to lead the Latvian government .