Secret_History

Chapter 5: Whose world is it, anyway? 141
crops. Ask a peasant, he will tell you that “the earth is dying”, that seasons are
disturbed, the climate modified. Every growing thing lacks sap and resistance.
Plants wither and prove unable to react against the invasion of parasitic insects or
the attack of diseases. 63
In Le Probleme des centaures, Georges Dumezil studies and discusses the
scenario of the end and beginning according to a large selection of material
derived from the Indo-European world including Slavs, Iranians, Indians and
Greco-Romans. He noted several elements from initiation ceremonies that have
been preserved in more or less corrupt form in mythology and folklore. Another
examination of the myths and rites of Germanic secret societies by Otto Hofler
brought out similar relationships. Both of these researches point up the importance
of the twelve intercalary days, and especially New Year’s Day.
...We shall recall only a few characteristic facts:
(1) the twelve intermediate days prefigure the twelve months of the year;
(2) during the twelve corresponding nights, the dead come in procession to visit
their families;
(3) it is at this period that fires are extinguished and rekindled;
(4) this is the moment of initiations, one of whose essential elements is precisely
this extinction and rekindling of fire;
(5) ritual combats between two opposing groups; and
(6) presence of erotic elements, marriage, orgies.
Each of these mythico-ritual motifs testifies to the wholly exceptional character of
the days that precede and follow the first day of the year, although the eschatocosmological
function of the New Year (abolition of time and repetition of
creation) is not explicitly stated... Nevertheless, this function can be shown to be
implicit in all the rest of these mythico-ritual motifs. How could the invasion by the
souls of the dead, for example, be anything but the sign of a suspension of profane
time, the paradoxical realization of a coexistence of ‘past’ and ‘present’? This
coexistence is never so complete as at a period of chaos when all modalities
coincide. The last days of the past year can be identified with the pre-Creation
chaos, both through this invasion of the dead — which annuls the law of time —
and through the sexual excesses which commonly mark the occasion. 64
Take particular note of the ideas of “exhaustion of physical resources, invasion
by the souls of the dead, and sexual excess” as being indicative of the suspension
of time. These are significant in our present time wherein it seems there is a
veritable “invasion“ of “otherworldly” visitors masquerading as “aliens” as well as
a rapid descent of morality into greater and greater sexual excesses; a veritable
frenzied “return to chaos”, as it were!
63 Fulcanelli, op. cit., p. 504.
64 Eliade, op. cit., pp. 67-68.