Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/ + Forum Home + Open Forum – The 4th Awakening. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/, http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/, http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

11 Jahni, Bless Latvia

Not long ago (in blog 7), I mentioned that saying “Labdien, Jahni!” or “Labdien, Žane!”(Good day, John; Good day, Jane) was to address dear God, dear Sun, dear Johns, dear Death, and dear Others, all of them dear at the same time. Wow!

The evolution of such inclusiveness in a word, however, is natural enough. It occurred because the individual who came toward you on the country road could be any of the mentioned. You greeted all who came toward you in a way that none would feel slighted. You said: “Hello, John!” with a certain inflection, with certain background information stored in your mind. A friendly greeting was as obligatory (for your personal safety’s sake) as it was a ritual. Though you hoped that the John coming toward you was not the Father of the Dead (veļi), perhaps you wished it was Laima, the Goddess that gave birth to lady Luck, or a piece of chocolate as the modern Latvians have been taught by advertising to know her.

What is it about John that makes the word so embracing and powerful?

One student and historian of religions, John Allegro, opined that the U sound was ancient and sacred. It makes one think of the Tibetan mantra, the Oum. While at the beginning of writing only consonants were written, the absence of written vowels gave the readers a certain freedoms of how to pronounce the words. Thus, the consonant J, pronounced as Y in many languages, could also be pronounced as J in Jazz, or G in General, or even D in Don or P in Pan. For example, the subject of the word janissary could be a gendarme or a general.  In the course of time this led to considerable confusion of names and meanings.

Let us take, for example the name of Don Juan. There are probably not many people who know that the name of the famous lover, Don Juan, actually means John’s John or, yes, Ghengis Khan. It all depended on which vowel the consonant J or Y or G best lent itself to in your native language--if only the vowels could be written! They could be preceded by a soft or strong J(Y). Thus, “Y(J)a”, “Y(J)e”, “Yi”, “Yu”, “Yo” or why Gengis = Jengis + Khan = Gengis Kjan.

The Latvians have a saying: “Jāņi nāk ar joni”, “the Johns are coming upon us a-jonsing (fast)”. The second time the word Johns is pronounced, it appears as “joni” (yoni). The word “joni” declares that the Johns event (Jāņi) is coming on fast, time is a-racing. The O is pronounced as the O in O la la. No, it is not the female sexual organ in Sanskrit, but it may be the origin of “judze” (mile) if we allow that “fast” translates itself into distance covered.

John, the word, is as flexible as it is numinous. It comes with deep down associations lost to conscious memory. John is to be met as Jahnji, Jean, Johan, Huan, Ivan, Ion, Dion, Dionysius, Don, Xian, Yanki, and more. The name “Yank” comes, by way of “yank”, meaning to pull off the table fast, take away, steal, which was how the Dutch thought of some Americans. I am not sure whether the word started in Amsterdam, Holland or New Amsterdam, i.e., New York.

The versatility of the name John is also notable because it presents itself every time that Latvians sing the Latvian anthem: “Dievs, svētī Latviju!” (God, Bless Latvia!) I do not mean that we sing the name “John” consciously, contrary to the official version. However, if one remembers that God was once addressed as “John”—“Yahnis” in Latvian—in the deep chambers of the brain you could well be singing “Jahni, svehtih Latviju!” (John bless Latvia!) The other name that Latvians could address in their national anthem is the Sun, Saulīte. “Saulīt, svētī Latviju!” (Dear Sun, bless Latvia!)

The versatility and fluidity of the name “Ion”, permits it to metamorphose into many names—zhandarmes, gentlemen,  zhenchina. The cloned human beings of tomorrow will also be heirs of a “gene” (or John, or Jahni). Ion has a unique ubiquity about itself. Here it is Daddy God, here a village drunk, here a saint, here a whore.

Baumanu Kahrlis, the artist who drew the first picture representation of John of Latvia as a priest (memorialized in the “Lihgo” flag), nevertheless, tripped on his way to the composing table and instead of “John, bless Latvia” wrote: “Dievs, svētī Latviju!” How could this contradiction within the poet’s self happen?

Well, historically, the time that the first flag and the national anthem were composed is about the time that the Latvian Herrnhuters and Lutherans were filling the draws of Latvian folk collector Krisjahnis Barons with folk songs in which the addressee is not necessarily the same one as in earlier times, but God replaced Dieviņš, Mara replaces Laima, Peter replaces Perkons, John became Son of God instead Son of the Sun, and some Gods were forgot altogether.

However, deep in the subjective self of a Latvian the word (John, Sun, etc.) has not yet been erased. Thus, it is not all that uncommon (though no investigation of the phenomenon exists) for a Latvian to hear him or herself sing: “Saulīt, svēti Latviju!” (Dear Sun, bless Latvia!). I do not believe that I am the only one who has ever replaced the official words with words that make up the undertow of officialize. The phenomenon first came to my attention a long time ago, when Displaced Persons camps in post-WW2 Europe were the homes of a good many Latvians. I am not saying that such memes of past practices floated up to the listening ear often, let alone were considered an alternative to the official version of the text. However, I am saying that for many Latvians such an overlap of names comes naturally.

Incidentally, the word “saulīte” means “dear sun”. While the “Sun” has lost her divinity status due to the media’s overuse of her name, when spoken as “saulīte” (“dear sun”), it retains its meaning as a term of endearment and a term of address, both.

These days the Latvian Johns Festival is often called “saulgrieži" (solstice) or “lihgo”, the last name being the one sown with a needle and thread across the first Latvian flag. Why is the name of Johns absent?

The reason that “John” or “Johns” are not mentioned is because the tsar forbade the use of a name that was so encompassing in meaning. The neo-Christians agreed with the tsar. “John” was a politically sensitive word; best leave him unmentioned, “Lihgo!” will do. However, when the book was published, even “lihgo” was too closely associated with Johns Songs [Did the Herrnhuters at first use “lihgo” instead of “halleluia”?], and the tsar ordered the books burnt. Only a few copies of it have survived.

Lai līgo lepna dziesma! [Let a proud song lihgo!]

Lai ar Joni Latvija zeļ! [Let Johns bless Latvia!]

Asterisks & Links of Interest

Posted by Jaņdžs at 2:57 AM 0 comments

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/ + Forum Home + Open Forum – The 4th Awakening. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/, http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/, http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

The 4^th Awakening

10 The Devaluation of Latvos

The reduction of the Children of Johns to pa-Yanhood (now generally called “paganhood”) is evidence of what a violent, aggressive, and persecuting ego does. Such an ego belonged to forces of the West, which is not to say that it belonged to the Order of Teutonic Knights only.

The persecution began long before the Teutonic Knights came on the scene in Livonia. It was part of the movement of the princes of the world to shatter the hegemony of the old kingdom under the sacred king and capture a piece of its land for themselves. In the English speaking world, the famous moment of power transfer is the Magna Carta (1215). Joan of Arc (1431) saved the French king from his feudal aristocracy, which remained under his control, more or less. However, the feudal aristocracy fell with King Louis XVI’s head (1793) in the French Revolution. More about this paradigm shift in a future blog.

We may effectively translate the persecutions initiated by the West by perceiving them as the pursuit of positivism. The persecution advanced (openly, but pretending invisibility) on the king’s castle stealthily—as the story of the moving forest in Shakespeare maintains. The killed (cut down) forest hid Neo-Christian missionaries, who were sneaking up to the king and his people with the “good news”.

[The people of Livonia received the good news several times over. The first time probably was the attack of the Teutonic Knights under the flag of Neo-Christianity on Jersika in 1209. There are several contour maps of such forced conversions available. One is sketched right here by these blogs of course. There is also the so-called “Bloodlands” (click on ‘audio' version.

In 1209, Bishop Albert of Riga, attacked Jersika (Vis=All; valdis=ruler). The bishop defeated Visvaldis, brought him to Riga, humiliated him before the public, took away most of his land, and sacked him beyond recovery when he tried to rise a few years later.

The attack on Visvaldis coincides with the crusade of the Pope Innocent III against the Albigensians in southern France in the same year, 1209. While it is unlikely that seven hundred years later we will discover a label with “proof” written on it, it is equally unlikely that the date of attack was an accident.

1209 was a fateful for the Latuous or Latvos. The land Jersika was heir to was seized by a neo-Christian crusading order, the Teutonic Knights, and added to territory called Livonia. This land has remained out of reach of its natives to this day if one includes among the natives the common people. The Commons or Populists were and are kept in the dark. One but has to note that the founding event of modern Latvia (1918) had only one photograph of it made public, and the future president was not in attendance at the founding event. Like the “Lihgo” flag, the avoidance of mention of these details obscures the fact that the Constitution of Latvia (Satversme) was never designed to facilitate greater hegemony.

In any event, 1209 was a time when Livonia was covered by forests (today Latvia has no original primal forest left), and the Jersikans had no problem disappearing among the trees. Pursuit was difficult if nigh impossible, because in those days there were no roads or bridges, only waterways.

Before the attack from Riga, king Visvaldis had been in a strategically advantageous position. His kingdom of Jersika straddled the River Daugava, and he taxed all the boats and ships passing through. Indeed, if the reader takes a closer look at the map, he-she will note that access to Riga and the bay to the people of Jersika is cut off as if it has been taken from it. In other words, Riga most likely was not founded on unoccupied land or over a fishermen’s village, but was taken from a people, many of whom lived far inland. Indeed, because of the higher water level in those days, Riga was located further inland, closer to what the map shows to have been the likely territory of Jersika.

We may guess that the inhabitants of Riga (or Līga) before its occupation were—as most heads or deltas of navigable rivers tend to be—cosmopolitan, mixed blood, livs, ests, semigalians, latgalians, slavs, and so on. They do not appear to have left much evidence of their times. However, if they were living in wood shacks (at that time the forest engulfed, indeed was identified with the land), they probably lived along the banks of the Daugava River.

The theses of what happened to the inhabitants of Jersika or the Jersiks leaves us entertain the idea that the descendants remained in the same geographical area. The Livs were effectively wiped out only by the Great Northern War (1700-1721). Very likely some Livs were among the Herrnhuters who wrote Ludwig those nice letters about identifying so much and sincerely with the blood of Jesus.

The landscape of Livonia began to change dramatically only after the 16^th century. The Latvians today like to call themselves a peasant (zemkopju) nation. Nevertheless, the time the Latvos could legitimately call themselves “single farm” (viensēta) dwellers did not arrive until about the 16th century or later. It was about this time that the barons (they owned about 70% of forests in Livonia) cut down most of the trees about their manors and sold them to Swedish and other builders.

In due course, the Latvos were forced to become farmers and abandon their forest traditions  forest traditions. As a people deprived of a say over the fate of their forests, the Latvos became exposed and vulnerable to attacks by military drill formations, which on open field had the advantage. There was no longer sufficient forest left behind which a Latvos could hide and be on roughly equal terms with the enemy.

Had similar deforestation occurred in fledgling America, Paul Revere's famous ride would have ended in a New England ditch rather than New England farmers beginning a successful Revolution against the British and their redcoats. Interestingly, Paul Revere was the son of a French Hugenot. The name Herrnhuter and their activities in Livonia may not have been unfamiliar to him.

Asterisks & Links of Interest

Posted by Jaņdžs at 2:57 AM 0 comments