In the Mirunga tribe, they cover the initiate's eyes with a hand or cloth before revealing the truth about the afterlife and the gods. As soon as he tells the secret, the sorcerer hits the young student with a hammer to knock out his incisor.
It is just one of the many forms of violent initiation of boys. Some tribes cut their penises, others have farces, others tattoo sacred symbols. I don't know why the nobles are upset, but from a distance I'll try to throw in a simple explanation - physical pain is a good memory chip.
That's probably why it is said among the people, you will see your god, when you want to dismember someone with a beating. Abstract concepts, therefore, are the easiest to fix with bloody glue.
What you call politics in Montenegro and the region today was received in the early nineties through the trauma of war. The healer approached, revealed democracy to the people as a higher state of heaven, but at the same moment struck him in the middle of the jaw with a hammer.
All that people have received through such teaching, all that they call politics, has never been able to move from that initial shock.
The bad seeds of the nineties not only did not rot, but are transplanted, GMO tested, mutated and germinated in new forms. The main characteristic of that seed is the aggressive denial of the opponent, a war model of thinking in which, as serators say, truth is the first to suffer.
The defense mechanism of such communities is the leader. Societies in crisis are looking for a messiah, actually a super being who will solve their problems. Someone with a cloak and magical powers. At least Montenegro has a textbook example of such a party-archy-strengthened attitude towards the government. Everything that was political was always tried to be compressed into one man.
There are also examples from the margins. When that powerless banker DK was a guest on local television, in the middle of his media rise, viewers asked him about all the things that bother them, about layoffs, salaries, compensations, they brought up many troubles, fears, all local and global injustices. It was more like a fortune teller session than a news show.
Or the news about the death of the painter Tošković, who, rejected during his lifetime, suddenly becomes a superman with a higher right to freedom, someone who carried all human sins on himself and was quote, "one of the best cartoonists of all time". Only in this unskilfully intoned sentence is shown all the irrationality of the messianic complex in post-war communities, all the need to compensate for cultural inferiority through one man and a myth.
The problem-solving superbeing model is deeply rooted in shamanism, where the village medicine man is actually a mediator and negotiator with the gods. Power is always at an unattainable point, and it is reached through respect for hierarchy. Bring an eye of grain and slaughter a kid, if you want me to intercede for you with the heavenly father.
That model of thinking is very difficult to change, it is something that is being phased out gradually. It hasn't even started to change in Montenegro. Because when the President of the Assembly publicly kisses an open casket, and the Prime Minister swallows the communion spoon in the middle of a pandemic, the game rises to a higher level. The door is opened to the ritual concept of power.
There is a trade in the political power of religious symbols. It is a very effective tool for consolidating power, because you cannot limit magical practice with a rule and a call to responsibility, it has already been determined and abolished by the ritual.
Thus, according to the Clinical Center, fakirs and fortune-tellers are a normal phenomenon, or something completely in line with what is happening in an orthodox democracy. It has become logical that political decisions are strengthened by spiritual rebuses from the cells, so no one is surprised that a certain bishop gives himself the right to issue a proclamation before the vote on the law on the State Prosecutor, and an arms smuggler works for Nikšić.
What is happening in Montenegro is not a change of government, but a change of symbols and a trade in land. One group of middle-aged men suppressed another group of middle-aged men, and now, on the same basis of party and family sectarianism, they are building a new system of symbols, through which they will establish power.
The political fascination with the cross, the crescent or the rolling pin, however, is a feature of authoritarian communities. These communities are always on the verge of violent surrender of symbols of power. Leaders lightly hold up shrines as pleasure toys, or training sticks. They are driven mainly by hidden fears, greed or a higher value complex that passes for national pride.
All that clerical-political brotherhood of stalls, lives from the human intimacy that suddenly found itself on the stage. The one who only fervently prays to God for health or peace of soul, now gets chips in this worldly game as well.
And when you let political impulses into the space of man's need to believe, everything becomes permissible. The two worlds are united in pragma, scheming and scheming. And we are just waiting for a strong leader, dead or alive, local or from the neighborhood, someone to whom the people will worship when they mention God.
Jesus raised his voice against that, and for that he paid with his head. Never forget that, it was the popes who killed him, not the Romans.
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