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New edition covers the strange rituals of this Midspring — the ‘sainting’ of two popes, an actual human sacrifice, and then Beltane — with a discussion of the virtues of selfsex
The word “Sacrifice” means to offer up – an item, a plant, an animal or a human life and kill it as an offering to a god or Deity. To do so as a ritual means to have intention behind the actions. We also use the word “sacrifice” to mean giving up something smaller for something greater, or for a higher purpose. This can be something small as some of our time donated to a good cause, to something as big as a life to save another. In its origins, the word means “to make Sacred”.
If the circumstances of Clayton Lawton’s death can bring about the end of the death penalty in the US, that would be a powerful (and very welcomed) outcome indeed and can perhaps bring us a step closer to honoring the sacredness of Life, all lives.
The lives of the ferry victims were offered up to the god of greed and money albeit indirectly, however in this case the sacrifice will most likely ruin the ferry company. A company that is so thoughtless about the lives of the people they are supposedly serving does not deserve to continue.
Sadly, we have a very long ways to go before we as a collective relinquish the insane and deadly dance of valuing profit over Life – human or otherwise.
re: Beltane… my favorite Beltane ritual is the image of the lighting of the sacred fires, from one hilltop to the next to show the unity between the people and the land. Sacred fires are at the core of many Beltane rituals as a way of blessing and purifying – the land, the livestock and the people. May All Beings be Blessed at this special time.
Odessa Massacre Pushes Ukraine to the Edge. Towards a Larger Destructive Conflict?
http://journal-neo.org/2014/05/03/odessa-massacre-pushes-ukraine-to-the-edge/
Western headlines have attempted to spin into ambiguity the death of over 30 anti-fascist Ukrainian protesters cornered and burned to death in the Trade Unions House in the southern port city of Odessa. The arson was carried out by Neo-Nazi mobs loyal to the unelected regime now occupying Kiev.
Both the London Guardian and the BBC attempted in their coverage to make the perpetrators and circumstances as ambiguous as possible before revealing paragraphs down that pro-regime mobs had indeed torched the building. And even still, the Western press has attempted to omit the presence of Right Sector, the militant wing of the current regime charged with carrying out political intimidation and violence against Kiev’s opponents.
Odessa, north of pro-Russian Crimea, and far west of where clashes are now taking place in eastern Ukraine, has also been a point of contention between Kiev and Ukrainians who refuse to recognize the unelected regime’s authority.
Right Sector, a Neo-Nazi militant group who spearheaded the so-called “Euromaidan” protests, has been visibly operating in Odessa in recent weeks. It’s primary role has been to attack and intimidate political opponents planning to run in upcoming elections. It was therefore already present an well established in Odessa ahead of the attack on the Trade Unions House resulting in dozens of deaths in a single day, and as part of a wider campaign to put down multiplying unrest erupting across the country.
Right Sector can be identified by its members openly wearing Nazi insignia, as well as carrying crimson and black banners. Mobs supporting the Svoboda party are also present among recent clashes, wearing yellow armbands with the Nazi wolfangel symbol upon them.
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With the West not only covering up the atrocities being carried out by the regime in Kiev, but in fact aiding and abetting them, the violence will only escalate further. Beyond Odessa, helicopter gunships, armored columns, and special forces have been sent by Kiev into eastern Ukraine and are attempting to overrun and occupy towns and cities that refuse to recognize the unelected regime. This includes the city of Slavyansk where deaths have been reported on both sides and military aircraft have been shot down.
Clayton Lockett may well turn into the Poster Child for ending state-sanctioned murder. As the latest victim of some chemical mix the state keeps secret (could be Drano for all we know) the public — who, praise God/dess, gives every indication that they’re growing in sensitivity and compassion — is newly aware of how archaic all this seems. This particular fiasco is accompanied by news that studies show 1 in 25 people on death row to be innocent.
Our need to snuff these people is, indeed, revenge, masquerading as justice. This is the same mentality that requires every citizen to have at least one gun under the bed and one tucked in their belt, to “stop the bad guys.” As Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmos) tells us, it isn’t the planet we’re killing — it’s the human species.
Eugene Robinson wrote an excellent piece on this topic, including this line: ” … revenge is not the same thing as justice, and karmic retribution is not a power I trust government to exercise.” Boy, ain’t it the truth!
We had about 11 events on our list, and I was not doing a retrospective this week (I will get to that). I was covering what was immediate and what illustrated my point. I mentioned Flight 370 because that is what began the sequence of events, by my reckoning.
I so agree with you about the ferry tragedy in South Korea, Green-Star-gazer, at times I find it too painful to think about, and I thank you for the thorough account of it that you give here.
However, condemning Clayton Lockett’s terrible death doesn’t detract from the awfulness of the ferry tragedy in any way, Planet Waves edition is a weekly that deals with the current week’s news.
Twisted Cross: Neo-Nazis Marching in Ukraine
On April 27, 2014, neo-Nazi marchers in the eastern Ukraine city of Lviv commemorated the April 28, 1943 birth of the Waffen-SS Galizien division, whose members had fought in collaboration with the Nazi Germans in World War II.
The neo-Nazi marchers chanted “City of Bandera”, “glory of Ukraine, glory to the heroes”, “glory of the nation, death to the enemies”, and “Galicia, Division of Heroes”.
Video of the march shows an older gentleman insulting the provocateurs because the neo-Nazi Svoboda party and Right Sector militants had agreed to cease such marches in order to avoid presenting a negative image of Ukrainian nationalists to the international press.
But what was the Waffen-SS Galizien?
A British film documentary on “The SS in Ukraine” tells the brutal history:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guziIIutKEE
Before World War II, many Ukrainians in Galicia regarded Hitler’s Third Reich as the only force capable of facilitating the establishment of an independent Ukraine in Galicia, in other words, a state free of Soviet or Polish rule. These particular Galician Ukrainians were virulently anti-Soviet and saw the Nazis as possible liberators from what they regarded as the Soviet yoke. When war broke out in 1939 and the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland (including Polish-occupied western Ukraine), various Ukrainian nationalist groups set up military units to fight the Soviet Red Army.
One such nationalist unit was the Nachtingal brigade which took part in a three-day massacre of the Jewish population of Lvov (now Lviv) from 30 June 1941. Roman Shukhevych was the commander of the Nachtingal and later, in 1943, became commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the “Banderivtsy”, or UPA/UIA), armed henchmen of the fascist Stepan Bandera, who after the war pretended that they had fought both Nazis and Communists.
In early 1943, when the Nazis were suffering growing losses in the war with the USSR, the German Governor of occupied Galicia, Dr. Otto von Wächter, gave the formal order to create a Galician Waffen-SS division to take part in regular combat on the Eastern Front.
The 14th Voluntary Waffen-SS Galizien Division was announced on 28 April 1943. It was organized by the Ukrainian Central Committee, headed by Volodymyr Kubiyovych, a Ukrainian nationalist and ethnographer, with the active involvement of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
Finding volunteers was easy: it was formed from among 80,000 Ukrainian-Rusyn volunteers from Galicia. Christian (mostly Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox) chaplains were assigned pastoral roles in the units. The division was commanded by German and Ukrainian officers, many being veterans of the Ukrainian Galician Army. The Commander-in-Chief was Major General Fritz Freitag.
The historian Robert Conquest has written: “The Ukrainian, 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division (also known as the Halychyna Division), was created in May 1943. In his call to Ukrainians to join it, Kubiyovych, the head of the Nazi-authorized Ukrainian Central Committee, declared: ‘The long-awaited moment has arrived when the Ukrainian people again have the opportunity to come out with guns to give battle with its most grievous foe – Muscovite-Jewish Bolshevism. The Fuehrer of the Great German Reich has agreed to the formation of a separate Ukrainian volunteer military unit.’ ”
The Waffen-SS Galizien division was sent to the front in early 1944, going to the Brody area to strengthen six Nazi infantry divisions facing heavy combat. Units of the Waffen SS Galizien have often been accused (separately by Soviet and Polish post-war authorities and by the Simon Wiesenthal centre) of wartime atrocities, including actions by its 4th police regiment in Galicia and its 5th police regiment in Lubelszczyzna: specifically of rounding up and murdering Jews in Brody.
In February 1944, units of Waffen-SS Galizien were ordered into action against Soviet and Polish partisans.
The village of Huta Pieniacka (near Lviv) was a major Polish resistance center fighting against Nazi forces and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (which itself was anti-Polish and anti-Soviet and even, some apologists now argue, anti-Nazi). On 23-28 February, when a 500-strong unit of the Waffen SS Galizien Division’s 4th police regiment went there to look for Polish Armia Krajowa partisans, two SS Galizien members were killed. An official funeral was organised by the SS and the village was razed, killing about 800 inhabitants.
Again in July 1944, as revenge for the killing of an SS officer, members of Waffen-SS Galizien killed 44 civilians in Chłaniów and nearby Władysławin, and burned both villages.
Throughout the summer of 1944, Soviet forces under Marshal Konev comprehensively defeated the combined German and Ukrainian forces in fierce fighting, and remnants of the division were driven into Poland. The Nazis rebuilt the Waffen-SS Galizien division over subsequent months.
Units of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion that had taken part in the pacification of Warsaw after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were incorporated into Waffen-SS Galizien in October 1944. The division was sent to Slovakia to put down an uprising. Then in January 1945, it went to Slovenia to fight Tito’s partisans.
In March 1945, Ukrainian émigrés established the Ukrainian National Committee to represent Ukrainian interests in the Third Reich. Simultaneously, the Ukrainian National Army was created with the intention of combining all Ukrainians fighting on Germany’s side, the first being the SS Galizien Division. The C-in-C was General Pavlo Shandruk [Pawlo Szandruk], a decorated former colonel in the Polish army. He was assigned command of the Galizien division (which he renamed as “1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army” so as to remove the SS association).
From April 1945 until the end of the war, the division, with a strength of 14,000 combat troops plus 8,000 soldiers in training and reserves, fought against the Red Army in the region of Graz in Austria. Among the division’s units were regiments used for policing civilian populations and actions against partisans.
On 7 May 1945, the division capitulated to British and American forces and its members were interned in Italy. The renaming of the division, the fact that its members had been until 1939 de facto citizens of interwar Poland and the intervention of the Vatican all combined to save its members from deportation to the USSR.
Following its surrender, 176 members of the division joined General Anders’ Polish army. In 1947, former members of the Waffen SS Galizien Division were allowed to emigrate to Canada and to Britain, where they worked on farms.
This explains how former members of a Waffen SS division turned up in British refugee camps in 1947, to mingle and live together with Polish refugees who had been mobilised into the army originally formed by General Anders in the USSR (to fight on the side of British and US allies against the Nazis in Italy).
So long as the relevant authorities had no direct evidence that would stand up in a criminal trial to prove that these Ukrainians had carried out criminal activities during the war, they were allowed to settle in Great Britain and Canada. Attempts were made to prosecute some of them in the 1990s and later, after the collapse of communism, by taking testimony from aged witnesses, but many of these were mysteriously beaten up or killed after talking to Scotland Yard detectives.
Apologists for the Waffen-SS Galizien division continue to deny accusations of atrocities.
That’s a really interesting quote from Hillman.
The converse of the glorification of war may perhaps be seen in the correspondence for the Seven of Wands card – also Venus operating in Fire – the Lord of Valour, which Dion Fortune said reveals the true beauty of Venus as a principle. This speaks of facing every situation thrown at one with bravery, and for me would seem to be expressed by Amanda’s lovely piece on Beltane; courage is required for many of us to face the concept of direct communion with nature in this way. And Mars also works through those who stand up to governments that lack human compassion, and are over-enthusiastic with the greed.
Venus in Aries, soon to be traversing the Grand Cardinal Cross, implores us to reflect on humanity’s “terrible love” of war, the ultimate ritual of human sacrifice.
We live in an era of perpetual war. Witness the ready willingness to sacrifice human lives and rights in the service of war, to accept the mass killing of soldiers, to permit the mass targeting and killing of civilians, to thoughtlessly sanction the mass destruction of property and the mass devastation of our natural environment.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman speaks of the “sacred violence” of Ares, the supernaturally powerful, brutal god of war. Hillman describes the field of battle as a “place of sacrifice; participation in a sacrament. The whole bloody business reveals a god, therewith placing war among the authentic phenomena of religion. And that is why war is so terrible, so loved, and so hard to understand.” (James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, p. 83. Penguin Press, New York, 2004)
Collectively, the call is to precisely understand this “Mars Effect”.
The other really huge Human sacrifice story that got no mention in this article was the sinking of the ferry Sewol in South Korea and all the (mostly young) lives lost. This tragedy was truly horrific. In preliminary reports it appears that the ship may have been retrofitted incorrectly and possibly top-heavy. Additionally, it had more than THREE times the maximum cargo for which it was rated in its holds. Then, mysteriously the Captain was literally napping when the event happened, while a 23 year old 3rd mate with no previous experience handling this vessel in that particularly difficult stretch of water was at the helm. Preliminary investigations suggest that the ship simply took a too hard turn and due to the overloaded boat, simply flipped, as can happen if a ship is not properly balanced. Sadly, the captain abandoned ship quickly leaving over 400 people to fend for themselves… most of them teenagers. The crew was totally confused though there are reports of some crew members trying their best to help evacuate the ship but for the most part, the children were told to stay put… and they dutifully obeyed, which cost them their lives. Drowning while caught inside a ship and wearing a life jacket has got to be one of the more horrible ways to die.
Greed and stupidity caused these deaths. For me, these were the real human sacrifice story of this Grand Cross time…. terrible,horrible water deaths. I am sorry that Clayton Lockett’s death was apparently botched and went badly wrong. I am against the death penalty, always have been, however it seems that he was indeed guilty of the terrible crimes which he perpetrated. These children on the ferry committed no crimes. This is a significant difference in the weight of these two stories and for me, makes their deaths more difficult to bear witness to.
My heart goes out to all who drowned, to those who survived and to those who had relatives and friends in this tragic, terrible event. My heart is so heavy with this loss. A whole generation from one school…I don’t think we can begin to imagine how devastating this is for the Korean people. We were shocked when 26 died in Sandy Hook…this is on an order of many magnitudes more. I know every life is precious, but this story just cannot be overlooked. It is very much a part of the fabric of this Grand Cross.
As is the mass abduction of nearly 300 girls in Nigeria many who have been forcibly married or possibly sold into sexual slavery.
And then there is what is happening in Ukraine. We are not out of these “Cross” woods, not by a longshot.
Those with little patience for the papacy or organized religion in general may not like the fact, but many throughout the world view the College of Cardinals and the pontiff almost as royalty. Popes indirectly govern much of the non-Catholic world. Broadcasters go along for the ride as they chronicle the attending pomp, and media coverage of big papal moments sells. Coronations, papal funerals, the elevation of a cardinal to pope–these spectacles astound and amaze. Canonization makes for colorful news and has the power to reshape Catholic thinking, arouse Catholic sentimentality, show the world a conspicuous display of papal puissance, and push thieving monsignors and sleazy cardinals off the “front pages,” so to speak. These events magically transform the Roman Catholic Church into the kinder, gentler “Bells of Saint Mary” church of yore, a church defiled by sexual predators and thieves.
– from “Why Canonizing John Paul II Is A Mistake” by Michele Madigan Somerville
http://www.indietheology.com/2013/07/why-canonizing-john-paul-ii-is-mistake.html
“masturbation is the first form of sex we can be sure is fully consensual”. Ha ha! Suddenly brought to mind Tom Waits’ intro to his lovely song Better off without a wife (not that it’s really relevant, and Tom Waits ended up with a wonderful wife):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU-sCw1xnLU
A 1962 Vatican document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli) was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outlined a policy of ‘strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatened those who spoke out with excommunication.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childprotection
Bless you, Eric. I knew I could count on you to write about the horrific botched execution, and all the horrors behind it – was waiting for Friday to come. And thank you for the wonderful Cancer horoscope, which has given me such a sense of relief. Look forward to readng (and rereading) the rest with care, over the weekend. Thanks to all of you, as ever.
Beltaine – “Beltaine” from Rockhill (2004)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43204V0p04
Primarily Irish and Breton in style, the Polish folk band Beltaine marries all types of world music with rhythmic energy and inventiveness of modern beats. Their debut album, Rockhill was the musical illustration of a Beltaine’s holyday celebrated in Ireland. Tracks consisted mostly of traditional Celtic tunes and a few original songs (such as “Beltaine”, “The Sea of Irish Dream” and “Rockhill).