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Eating earth.

WARNING. The following writing contains content, that is of an adult nature.

 

I am a fan of the movie Pan’s Labyrinth, and for those of you who don’t know it, here is a link to its trailer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVZRnnVSQ8k

It is a haunting movie, that is both childlike in its fantasy, and extremely adult, in the bleakness of its reality, and a warning should be given, as the content of the movie is at times brutal. It is one of over 700 movies I watched after 9 11, as I gave up watching TV, after that event. No doubt a little inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth I started to or tried to recently, read up on Basque folk law, and disappointingly, I found not much of anything, except a description of a female deity’s influence over the weather. This lack of easily accessible recorded history of Basque folk law, seemed to me to be a shame, and as always and not surprisingly, there was a reference to the Church as to why it did not survive. Strangely it was backed up in the wiki entry, that the deities name helped acclimatized the Basque people to the church.

As the story would go, or have it, the deity and her lover would influence the weather based on their actions. And it seemed like they had the upmost power, as they influenced life and or death. They had control over water, fire, earth and the sun, which I presume would have been the main influences on man and woman, pre-Basque conversion to Christianity.

 

Did the Spanish experience of the Basque, effect the spread of Spanish Catholicism? Was it a contributary factor in the failure of Catholicism to extinguish tribal, native or indigenous spirituality in its entirety. Had this event in Basque country, effected the tribes and cultures of the Spanish new world? With the official university narrative, (and if you don’t know, a narrative, is a story). The story is that it was the church, as in the Catholic church, had caused as part of colonialism the genocide of indigenous religions, and or peoples. And it must be stated here, before l go on, that they did play a significant role in colonisation. And at times that colonisation was brutal. The destruction of Chthonic religions, or their history was a loss. The loss of our belief systems based on as the Greeks would say of the earth or soil. But this article or consideration is not about loss. In this extension of my diary entry, I celebrate the failure of the Catholics. Yes, I celebrate, that pretty much everywhere they went, when it came to cultural genocide, that despite the best attempts by some groups to implement the act in its totality, if there was a significant Catholic influence it had failed.

What had happened in Basque country? Why had it failed to happen in other places? What made it so that it, cultural genocide had not happened, in other societies around the world? What happened where the Church, or to be more specific Catholicism had miraculously failed to exterminate, folk law, and the indigenous spiritualities and or religions, in their entirety. Had the Basques surrendered part of themselves and effected the world? Maybe they didn’t surrender anything at all, because that does not seem like a Basque quality. Maybe the entropy of their pre-Christianity existence pushed back, on the thing that influenced them. And maybe that event had altered at least in part, that vector of change forever.

 

My respect is just not lip service, as once, when l was presented with an extremely difficult situation, someone suggested I smells the earth, as it was. I thought they were referencing that I would be joining it soon. I doubled down, on what I presume was and ancient saying, and process, one that I presume had been tested repeatedly. One of acclimatization as to where I would hopefully rest. Like most humans one way or another do. An event, like everyone, except those that cast their bodies from the Earth into space will experience.

 

These considerations of death, and or genocide, led me to study it in the arts. As a result, of that intellectual journey, I found myself talking to an Australian Aboriginal woman at university, we talked about Truganini. This wonderful person informed me, that Truganini had wanted to be burnt after her death or to be cremated. We spoke a little more about her. We spoke about her corpse exhibited like a taxidermized animal, cursed to be gazed upon. We discussed the topic a little, and I expressed, that what she had asked to have done, would have been a very heavy spiritual thing to do. She would spread through the air, through the water, then back into the earth, and her entropy would affect everything. And everything would react to her entropy for ever. To me, it seemed like she would never rest, and I wept a little, in front of my new friend. I wept a little, as the thought of eternal work is not, and never should be taken lightly. I wondered, I wondered about the people who would do such a thing, and how she, Truganini would, or could, have been condemned to have her imaged used as a spectacle, for what must seem like an eternity. It appeared to me that even without burning her body, she had hexed those through her fate. A karma of sorts, not for her, but for those that did not consider her human enough to be left alone after death. All that would look at her, or upon her, would suffer a fate. She had cast a spell on those that gazed on her, to look a little into themselves, changing something in all who saw her. And despite the offer to look at her, it was a visual, I never wanted, or want to see. I said to her, my confidant of the briefest time, that “...Some things should not be looked at….”

And soon after, instead of smelling the earth, I tasted it.

 

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Uploaded on May 18, 2023
Taken on May 19, 2023