The Sun Dude Jarillo wants a virgin.

 

For years I have thought I understood what it was about but really, I was on the periphery.  That did not stop me from waxing ridiculous when I started this blog.  On I went about Le Sacre in 2006 but I wrote from the sheer emotional crush of it- the spiritual entanglement that befalls many of us lay people. To hell with the academics.  

And so I count my blessings to have been connected with Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer.  I have learned a lot about the ballet from them and also how to remain inclusive with it, never condescending.  Because everyone who comes at it , comes from their own direction and there we all meet anyway.  Doesn’t matter if a person is short on facts or the only one who has them, we all turn our toes in the same.

Am I going to emo-blog here?  
Nicholas Roerich.  Yes, I knew who he was but I did not know what he did.  He was, as Doctor Archer explains in this little disastrously amateur video I have thrown together, the “father of the ballet”.  Without his word, Nijinsky wasn’t budging on the choreography.  Which I think Stravinsky may have borrowed for his own but no matter how you slice this, they are mad Russians in the end. 


Also dead.  They are dead Russians.

There is a lot of online stuff liking Roerich to Rasputin and I am like “hey, I am already sold”.  You don’t need to sweeten it up with darkness. Well, anymore than we already have here.

So Kenneth Archer tells the tale and I butcher it all into a video. Look! Here it is now!

The tribe depends on the sun god Jarilo to warm the earth thereupon they must immediately stomp the energies into the earth.  The crops will grow, the animals will flourish and the year will be plentiful.  

There is no free lunch with Jarilo.  He wants  to be paid and – what a shocker – he wants a virgin.  But he is a sick god and he wants her to commit suicide. This is one sick little marriage.

Being a virgin in Roerich’s Pagan Russia was such a known liability so why not take the chance on being a slut? I mean, I did it in 1981 and I survived.  Of course, the stakes were different…anyway…

Here’s borsht in your eye,

Fatova