At a time when it seems that our world is going ‘to the devil’, when systems and borders are collapsing, families are being separated, even nature is running wild…, it is wise to look back and reverently study the lessons of our ancestors who have experienced a similar transition. The transition from the old to the new world.
So I’m re-reading Baptism on the Savica, a Slovene epic from poet France Prešeren, which I was asked about during the oral part of the graduation exam in Slovenian, but at that time I obviously hadn’t absorbed the whole message yet. 🙂 An additional explanation is offered by the literary discussions of Professor of World Literature Janez Vrečko. In my student days, he forced me to devote myself especially thoroughly to Kafka and his book The Trial during the summer, instead of lounging with romances or drinking with a friend. He showed that he was an excellent intuitive teacher, for the question of incomprehensible guilt had plagued me all my life.
This time I return to his analysis of Homer’s Iliad – a literary work on which European literature is based and represents the foundation of European culture, and a comparison with the Slovenian or Prešeren epic The Baptism on the Savica.
As Joseph Campbell puts it, mythology is: the song of the universe—music so deeply embedded in the collective unconscious that we dance to it, even if we can’t call it a melody. It is a song of imagination, inspired by the energy of the body. In other words, we unconsciously respond (i.e., ‘dance’) to the collective patterns hidden in mythological stories.
The following text is a summary of a much more elaborate article: Vrečko, Janez (2001). Javno in zasebno v Iliadi in Krstu pri Savici. Primerjalna književnost, letnik 24, pos., str. 71-94., online: https://www.dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-B6XGLHRQ
I will not write specifically about the content of the Iliad and the Baptism on the Savica, most of us have already discussed the topic in elementary and high school, and the summary can be found on wikipedia. I only want to shed light on the individual parts that relate to the experience of the world, woman and man, love, life and death…
The world of the public
Both mythological heroes, Achilles in the Iliad and Črtomir in The Baptism, stand on the border of two worlds:
»… where, on a mighty superior basis, the common and the public stand out with the clear epic outlines of a true heroic hero completely committed to a heroic code of ethics. Their world was at first a world full of meaning, where there was still “no interior”, because there was no outside = otherness for the soul.
When such an epic hero embarks on an adventure, the pain of searching and the danger of being found are unknown to him, because he does not know that he can get lost, and he does not think that he must find himself. This is the world age of the epic, where the hero knew only the answers, but no questions, only the solutions, but not the riddles – the Greek had the answers before the questions. The world of meaning was accessible and transparent, it was just a matter of everyone finding a place in it that was destined for them.
It was a world where honor and glory were still united, and where it was worth putting one’s life on the line to achieve both… So it was a world of heroic deeds without a shadow of a doubt, a world of full meaning, a world of beginnings and peaks of national history, a world of fathers and forefathers, a world of ‘first’ and best’.”
That’s how the world was for Achilles until the abduction of Briseis, and such was the position of Črtomir until the defeat of the pagan army, as shown in the Introduction to Baptism, a text that depicts heroism and people struggling to preserve a social community, the self-rule of a free people.
A world of privacy
By forcibly taking away Briseis, Agamemnon imposed a shattered image of the world on Achilles, forcing him to step out of his epic integrity into the realm of privacy. He had retreated there out of anger, sorrow, despair, loneliness, for he had been deprived of the beautiful Briseis—his life. Man is connected with death, woman is associated with life. He knew he wouldn’t survive without her. With this act, the heroic world of fathers and forefathers collapsed – the world of the ‘firsts’ and ‘the best’.
There were other women on the scene, however, the action between Achilles and Diomede takes place in a confined space, in the intimate interior of a tent, and only as a chase of boredom, while the prolific and fertile love with Briseis at the beginning of the epic was public and in plain sight. For he had won this beauty in a just fight, backed by a heroic code. If it were possible, Achilles would have remained with her in the realm of the public, loud and visible, and without her, he had to go into silence and inconspicuousness. Into solitude, which was occasionally illuminated to him only by the beautiful Diomede as an object of pleasure and futility.
The absence of the feminine element in the Iliad thus brought the absence of a contradictory understanding of life and death. It has changed love into mere sexual love, food and drink into devouring, and human life into a sweet life on this side of death and into complete darkness beyond it.
However, the retreat into private life was necessary, for it was there that Achilles questioned honor and glory – both short and glorious as well as long and inglorious life. Everything has become null and void – with the exception of mortality and contemplation of it.
Everything in the world can be acquired, but immortality. Whereupon “a wild beast awoke in him, without ethical principles, without faith in gods.”
After a long separation, the lovers meet again in the last song of the Iliad, but their love affair is now hidden from the eyes in the realm of privacy. On his return, Achilles received what had been taken from him, but he no longer showed it off publicly, but hid deep inside the tent with his loved one.
Briseis, however, retained her purity, and thus “remained within the horizon of the original meaning of a female virgin who, with her bosom, had the ability to constantly transform the world”; and to the same horizon belonged the heroic honor of Achilles, which had lost all meaning and significance in the new world.
At the beginning of the epic, Achilles had not yet discovered his own finitude, but in the end, despite the return of his beloved, he could no longer forget her. Thus the reunion is all the time in the shadow of death, where the question of honor and virginity no longer had any meaning. Therefore, the truce between the Greeks and the Trojans lasted only 12 days, and on the thirteenth day, it continued to ‘save’ another important woman – Helen. Which, however, Achilles didn’t experience.
Although the Iliad does not mention it, many scholars agree that he was executed by Paris (Helen’s husband, Priam’s second son, and Hector’s brother) with the help of a poisoned arrow guided to the only vulnerable spot on Achilles’ body – his heel – by the god Apollo.
The name Apollo means destroyer, but also deterrent of misfortunes; he was the son of Zeus and Leta, and the twin brother of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and the moon; he is the god of archery, music and dance, truth and prophecy, healing and disease, sun and light, poetry; He was one of the most important and complex Greek gods, and is considered the most beautiful and ‘greek’ of all the gods.
Achilles, therefore, turned to the private realm when his honor was taken away, while when in Črtomir, the faith of his fathers and paganism were broken, the thought of his beloved woman took their place, which at a certain point prevented him from committing suicide.
“It was the woman who was able to bring him back to life almost from the realm of death, and that was because she had previously made the same journey herself. Not on the battlefield, but in her intimate world, when she began to wonder intensely how it would be possible to make a fleeting earthly love permanent and eternal with the dawn of a new faith.”
Briseis could not help but devalue her virginity because the Homeric religion did not yet know the solutions that the Judeo-Christian spirit would bring to Europe.
“When, however, the Bogomila was deprived of her pagan soils, when the key of the sanctuary of the goddess Ziva was taken from her, and the temple itself was destroyed, and when at the same time the Christian conception of the transience of earthly happiness was imposed on her, she was able to resort quite sovereignly to a new religion, where ‘God is called the god of love‘.
For this reason, her tendency to convert cannot have an ideological-religious basis, but springs from her deepest feminine essence, which at every moment seeks the possibility of survival and eternal permanence. Its reversal, then, is not ideologically but cosmically grounded… In Baptism, it is the Bogomila who has everything in her hands, so that even within the Christian cosmos belonging to history, the woman seeks and also discovers for herself and for her partner the possibility of lasting survival of their relationship…”
Both epic poems describe the journey of first happy lovers, who were separated from the very beginning of their love, experienced many sufferings, and in the end, found each other again and could enjoy their love happiness, but it was not given to them. On the surface, the ending was at the beginning, but there’s no going back, there’s no going back to the dead past, which was perfectly clear to both women.
After the lost battle, it also became clear to Črtomir that the past of his fathers and forefathers had collapsed, and he was left alone and abandoned in a changed world. The only area he hopes to remain unchanged is the realm of love, and that’s where he tries to find the lost epicness.
The problem is not the doubt in the gods – he accepts them as idols invented by the people themselves and he has respect for them only out of respect for the religion of his ancestors – but the cruel way with the cost of the death of all those who did not agree with the coming world and were not ready to accept it. The hearty and courageous fighters of the old faith were not paid, but were left without honor and glory, two fundamental heroic values that were awarded to the victorious foreigners, the people of the new age.
He, too, had to renounce the public—military, collective—the only possible way was to withdraw to privacy, to the realm of love and personal family happiness that he could otherwise experience in plain sight during paganism with Bogomila. In place of old, outdated values, the thought of a beloved woman prevented his suicide.
“It was the woman who was able to bring him back to life, and before that it was clear to him that, by establishing the distinction between heroic death and suicide, he had already unwittingly and unwittingly consented to a new understanding of the time established by the triumphant Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. And only within this world will he still be able to find his Bogomila alive. He therefore had to renounce both: a heroic death in the name of the faith of his fathers and suicide in the name of new values.
Bogomila overcame this same despair alone in the intimate world of her soul when Christianity forced her to wonder how, in the new conditions, the once eternally cyclical love could be taken away from earthly transience and made imperishable and permanent again. Therefore, it seems that in the history and linearity of time belonging to Christianity, it is the woman who seeks and discovers for herself and for everyone around her the possibility of lasting survival.”
There are no more epic tasks for the epic hero, and therefore he publicly exchanges everything for the embrace of the beloved woman, for intimate happiness with her. Thus, now Črtomir surrenders to the most private and hidden from the public emotion of love, as he previously surrendered to public – heroic and chivalric ideals, as well as public love.
But he suffers another defeat because Bogomila rejects his earthly love. While the lonely pagan Achilles without a woman turns into a war criminal who is horrified even by the gods, Črtomir already knows the essential commandments of the new world: love of neighbor, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
After the defeat of his army and friends, he also heroically endured Bogomila’s rejection – she had pledged herself to the new God – even though he could only belong to her, who made sense of his past, present, and future life. He consented to be baptized in order to prove his devotion to her, which therefore did not mean a sacramental act, but an extreme act of love, of his total commitment to the Divine.
“It was the only way he could stay in permanent spiritual contact with her even here on earth, which Črtomir understood as his only home anyway. As long as Črtomir and Bogomila were together, they experienced their love as life and death in their constant change, when they were separated, it was no longer life or death for them, but only a life that wanted death. What was once firmly together has now broken into two, body and spirit, earthly and heavenly…”
To the Bogomila, the former priestess of the goddess of love and fertility, the goddess of Living, everything now seems fleeting, even the pagan mother Earth is only a ‘cold green and tempting place’, and the real home is ‘high heaven’, because with the acceptance and assertion of a new personal, distant god, she had to necessarily neglect her pagan attitude towards nature, and thus the eternal cyclical change of everything, So also love. Since such love was to come true only in the eternal expanse of heaven, it renounced all earthly things.
Realizing that they will not be able to live together in this world, Črtomir turns into a silent man – at the moment when the Word is central to Christianity, because the Jewish god, unlike the mythical gods, revealed himself to man through the Word.
Črtomir’s silence confirms his inner division into body and spirit, which he did not know until now, testifies to his insecurity and loneliness, alienation, ignorance of heroic ethics, but also that he did not yet know the new language spoken by Christianity.
A proper answer to Bogomila’s virginity could only be the monasticism of Črtomir, and their children were converted children of God, freed from pagan errors. This leads to an age-old gravity where the world is self-conceived with virgin goddesses without the presence of the male element; and the Christian god is also self-conceived in the Virgin Mary. “Virginity thus became the light that enlightens the elect and … it leads a mystical march all the way to the end.”
This realm of mysticism was revealed to Črtomir at the moment of final separation from his beloved, when he saw Bogomila as a pagan woman-goddess just before his baptism in the strain of the rainbow. In the rainbow, the great Mother Nature returned for a moment, no longer ‘cold green’, but became warm and soaked in sun and rainbow light.
“Under the rainbow arch, everyone present at the Savica Waterfall felt like they were in the ‘home’ because the rainbow testifies to the direct connection between man and the gods, man and nature…
With the appearance of the rainbow, Črtomir found in a mystical vision contact with Christianity and thus with Bogomila’s otherworldly love. His undestined bride revealed herself to him for the last time in her eternal earthly beauty of the celestial rainbow, which in itself is a part of the phenomenal existence to which man in Christianity has lost all relationship. Nature and man have completely separated, and due to the lost contact with nature, death has emerged from life as an independent entity…
In the rainbow it was revealed to him that his desire for Bogomila, once a priestess of the goddess Ziva, and now committed with equal holiness to the Virgin Mary, was unrealistic, since she belonged to the whole communion and not to him alone. Bogomila’s physicality here escaped the notion of property, which is completely alien to mystical experience. The rainbow divinity of Bogomila, therefore, deprived her of her earthly weight and transformed her into divine love, into perfection, where all possibility of possession and possession was eliminated. An untouchable, dazzling image of a woman appeared in front of Črtomir, who only happened to dwell in the flesh of a fleeting creature. Pagan beauty and Christian virginity merged for a moment into one…
… in the light of the new faith, Črtomir transcended national boundaries and gave “life to all nations”. In this immense expansion of living space and thus of being, he finally recognized himself in the role of a lonely, but not tragic individual, because the mystical experience of a beloved being opened the door to non-verbal communication with her and with everything already living here on earth. In this new role, he has taken on his former knightly honors and heroic stance and therefore has the necessity of persevering to the end. He remained true to himself to the last, because only in this way could he remain faithful to his Bogomila…”
If a new world had not opened up to him through a mystical experience, and he had remained only in accepting the faith of the Virgin Mary and the baptism associated with it, the only hope would have been the happiness of the afterlife. Only after death would he be able to see his woman again and reunite with her.
The rediscovery of the world as a home took place through a woman and with her help and encouragement.
“A man who, as a pagan, had no need to agree to otherworldly solutions, was prevented by his deepest love for woman from binding himself to her by force, and was forced to resort to nature as his only ally from pagan times, and to see in her a woman in a new way.
If we compare Črtomir’s statement about “forest as his home” with Bogomila’s statement about Earth being only “cold green soil”, we can easily see how much difference there is between someone who has already seen the world completely divided and, like Bogomila, has agreed to this discord, and someone who did not want it, and therefore found refuge in the pagan Mother Nature, which was not yet dead to him …
Despite Briseida’s return, for Achilles, all living remained in the shadow of mortality and death. However, when Bogomila ‘surrendered’ herself to Črtomir as God’s bride, he did not see himself in his own finitude, but tried to restore the sacral status of nature and everything that lives within the framework of early Christian mysticism. He tried to comprehend nature in its autonomous subjectivity, and accordingly he did not understand women as just an object that could be possessed …
Thus Cristomir could not follow the new religion, which in its abstractness was alien to his pagan conception of the world, he easily accepted the Christian mystical conception of the world, which was not in conflict with his pagan worldview. But he could only enter it through a mystical experience connected with a beloved being – just as St. Teresa already knew that passionate lovers are certainly mystics…
After all that has been said, can Črtomir still be seen as someone who has given in to resignation and fatalistic despair, as most interpreters see him? If we were to look for Črtomir among the first Christians, we would certainly not find him among the newly-faith clergymen, but among the first mystics and hermits, where he was able to realize his immense and unspoken love without having to renounce the phenomenal existence of the physical and the earthly. It is well known that early Christian mysticism still allowed the coexistence of body and spirit…
After his enlightenment, which was followed by his baptism, Črtomir was no longer a military defeatist, nor a lone convert, nor a resigned lover, but a man in whom “all former hopes had to die” in order to inhabit a new power of love and total devotion to the dweller. Thus he went among his brethren and “farther beyond their frontiers,” for it was his mystical revelation that made it possible for him to transcend the national-mythical, which could not land on any boundaries. Črtomir’s mysticism, therefore, did not mean his retreat from the world, and therefore not a betrayal of his own people, but the embodiment of his love in all beings, thereby definitively destroying himself as an epic hero and, indirectly, epic poetry as the fundamental space of national identity. To him, God was no longer an escape. He was finally freed for freedom…”
Today, as more and more events move from the private to the public, we are in a new period of transition from the old world of separation to the new world of connection. Although world events largely reflect the complete chaos with which we are bombarded daily on all possible levels, there are already corners and people who live ‘heaven on earth’ – they explore their own divinity, in the coexistence of body and spirit, earth and sky, the coexistence of mysticism and science, when scientists interpret what was once considered mystical …
We live in a wonderful world that our ancestors from the period of the Iliad or the Baptism at Savica, as well as from the time of Prešeren, only dreamed of. At a time when you are connected to the world in your privacy (via the Internet), communicating with people on the other side of the world without delay, which once took years or decades, is now achievable in a matter of hours; More and more people accept animals and other elements of nature as equal members of the Earth family, there are more and more communicators with animals, plants and other invisible beings who master the language of the universe, the language of nature (non-verbal communication), transmit messages and teach others about it … More and more custodians (and not owners!) of the land cooperate with it, listen to it and hear it, see it, understand it, appreciate it and respect it, and want to help to improve fertility, not ignore its needs, exploit it and poison it for greedy, never satiated purposes… (And I believe that just as man treats nature, he also treats himself and other people). More and more individuals have already found their wholeness and then physically reunited with their ‘soul mate’ – without the desire to possess, only in love, support and the knowledge that separation is no longer necessary, because duality brings great power (says the professor of Slovene lnaguage that has also dual, so I already know 🙂 ), and the world currently needs just that, a strong connection between the previously separated male and female principle …
So don’t worry, the world isn’t going ‘to the devil’, or maybe – depending on how you look at the devil. 🙂 When I finished the second draft of this writing (the first one pulled me out of the darkest part of the ‘night of the soul’ by the Dragonja River seven years ago – today I would say from night of the ego) and went for a long walk in the woods with Tara, we were caught by a concrete downpour that washed us concretely. So we immediately experienced a practical demonstration of baptism in nature. 🙂 So much for the power of words. And the powers of nature. 🙂 I was thankful that I was ‘just’ soaked to my underpants, 🙂 for I read afterward that this same storm had broken branches and knocked trees elsewhere.
No matter how scary and hopeless the current events seem, the new world of coexistence is already here, only for now it is still waiting in the background. Much like in a classroom where ‘problematic’ individuals, those who are essentially most in need of love, demand all the attention of the teacher for themselves and the rest hold the space in the background, it is currently the noisier ones on the world stage who are destroying the old, no longer functional cosmos of being. It must die in order to live and grow a new consciousness, but this is by resisting, without knowing the true nature of life and death, without contact with ourselves, with nature, with the roots and the sky, in the prison of the ‘reptilian’ brain that craves and sees only survival … not easy, enjoyable, or quick to do.
And by the way, ‘scrolling’ also belongs to the old world, to the energy of mere survival, as opposed to the energy of abundance. So if you just ran through this text, go backwards and slow … sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph… 😉
