Kataboles. Kataboles.

It was the beginning of payments. It was the cessation of payments. It was consciousness and rest. There was new man and old man.

Old man was strong, but new man was clever. While old man grunted and groaned and fucked and took his tear, and warred and rumbled and held sacred his hair; new man plotted and scribbled and drew and in so doing thought himself a new.

The old way of the old man, brawn and buck and stew, and hunch and wander all day long, fighting three for two.

The new man rode on the shoulders of these giants, standing ever tall. Mushroom hungry, mixing barley, fire-stare-ers, all. Around the blaze, in dancing haze, a terror did befall, his first eye-dea, an aim, an arm, and beside him, big brother, and a fall.

Now write his wrongs and cover coal and tuck and run and hide, from the face of god behind the cloth, and burn the rams fat, blood a’side. Tell all to sacrifice, to the god of shame and guilt, ritualize and sacralize and be thine house built.

“Katapauses! Katapauses!” cry Cain to Seth’s God. “Kataboles. Kataboles. Forever must we trod.” “It was you who killed old Abel, Osiris did he rise, and ‘strength to strength’ as you heave and hoe, but work won’t make you wise. Gnash! Gnash! whip and bow and give the devil his due, and Caesar his, and the priestly ours, skinned penance to garments, blue.”

Acting always we wakened ones, indeed “all the world’s a stage.” And thus we strive, and striven, we, and bottled up our rage.

To he who hath, more and more, from our trodden working beggar Cain, and finally maddened, like the days of old, a letter shorter fell his name.

But Israel! Israel! for stories outlast men, and distance makes for blurried books says a trickster with the pen.

“Lápiz philosophorum boys, hunt it down and bring it nigh!” Discovering nothing, sadness fell them, blind eyes of peeking pride.

Kingdom of god on camel’s back through sand and stream and strife, rode the secret of the one true god, the secret of the mind.

But sand kicked up a spirit as the wanderer trod home, through darkened Jacob’s desert echo whispers: “Kataboles. Kataboles. …perhaps from even Rome.”

cf. Hebrews 4:3, Matthew 13:36

— the ramblings below are my trying to explicate the ideas I’ve conveyed in metaphor above— “As above, so below.” —Jesus of Nazareth (and for 13,000 years before him, all of Egypt)

For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said,
“As I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest,”
although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.

Hebrews 4:3

These are the antonyms of each other:

of the word for ‘Rest,’ (Katapauses) used by Christ to describe Both the ‘laying down’ of the original foundational pattern of man—man forever at ‘payments’ (Kataboles) of his attention, his work, and to the world in exchange for his existence in it, his penance symbolizing his ‘place,’ despite his curse being to have none—as the coyote, the trickster on the road, the wandering Jew; and paid via god’s people, of course; and to describe the laying down, the rest, the Katapauses of the cursed wanderer and his burden.

Paul, writing to the HEBREWS is saying, hey Jews, I am one of you, I have converted, know me as Paul instead of Saul, that’s how serious I am about Jesus’ insight and his fulfillment of the prophecies:

For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said,

Paul

Christ believers will have a ceasing of the burden of consciousness upon our deaths (duh.)

As I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest,

Jesus

In my godalmightiness, speaking for the great ancestors and our god, non-believers in the new way —the use of fore-giveness in place of monetary sacrifice as tokenized and ritualized acknowledgment of the original murder, the instincts of which remain in us even unto this present day, and for whose past, present, and future malfunctionings in the face of ever increasing regulation by the letter of the law and cultural binding, we are disposed toward acknowledging and paying for both in penance and tax, an automated penance— these people shall be forever cursed to consciousness, hell being to live forever under the system of payments so compounded and laden with owing, by what our ancestors have overcome, and in sorrowful acknowledgement of the impossibility of restoring something that never was in the first place —consciousness ‘with’ god, god being a product of consciousness; these people will never find rest from that guilt and sin tax. Consciousness was a real curse to primitives. They avoided ‘thinking’ as you and I think of it as a matter of course. It lead to disruption of the tribe, new, dangerous tools, and social upheaval of a strictly taboo’d and ritualized balance that kept collective tribal possession by the daemons of mimetic violence and our animalic instincts toward resource competition (for sex and food), at bay. So ritual and more ritual, and taboo for peace. Else we must sacrifice a scapegoat or go to war—else, war within.

So to those Christ is condemning, they are cursed to this thirst for knowledge and to the pattern of the world, to wander, and for the tribe to live forever in their ways; forever striving, forever ‘paying’ (kataboles) in cursed consciousness of their original sin—their murder and the unrelenting repression they must exert upon their still murderous instincts, and the guilt that accompanies it. He is extending the curse of the garden forever over the heads of the Jews who will inevitably inherit the earth, but the curse is in that selfsame inheritance: a curse to further labor, to labor over their knowledge and their ever-thirst of it—this is no different than the plight of Prometheus, and his liver, that piece of us that connects to the stomach along with the pancreas (pan-creas: ‘all-creation’ —creation being belief (cf. ‘creer’ in Spanish) real-ized symbol (the sema, the sign that Hermès hung in the barn as a reminder of his deeds and his ability to ‘forgo today for tomorrow’ despite his thriving ways) of sacrifice, delayed gratification — being what can be done by ‘hanging up’ the instinctual appetites (sex and hunger) to regulate Ghrellin, the chemical that governs our hunger response and drives our animalic curse: wandering as a conscious, biped, worrying its way to its next meal. (cf. https://www.yhktherapy.com/en/manage-your-liver/detail/245/the-liver-and-the-pancreas-how-they-affect-each-other)

If “in the beginning was the word…” -John 1:1, and presuming ‘the beginning’ here means the same as ‘the foundation of the world,’ —and I take both as ‘the first founding of culture itself’, then the curse (the knowledge of good and evil, from the bitten apple, the ‘bite of knowledge,’ the ‘Mortis Consciencei’ of the pursuit of further consciousness (the curse of consciousness itself, the thirst (sed, set) for more knowledge—being described by something like Neumann’s Centroversion mechanism describing the conversion of life (libidinal) energy into psychic energy, the energy of Jacob foundational of Israel in its sacrificial forgoing.); if in this beginning, the beginning pattern of procreative man, was also the motif of insemination, then Christ is implying quite clearly (for Christ) that the beginning pattern of man was established by the man ‘injected’ with the word. In-sem-inated; sem being the word for ‘name.’ Christ has said that the world, effectively, began —the pattern was set— with the thirsty for knowledge consciousness Semite, descendent of Seth, Set, Satan, Lucifer, the enlightened, the bright idea having, the thinking, speaking (silver serpent tongued) man began his journey into consciousness; the first man and his word, was the same word in ancient Egyptian for set, sed, satan, and seth, great grandfather to the Semites of Noah’s son’s tribe: “but,” said the clever third child. As for Sem, his name the word ‘nameitself. This man, the man with the word in his mouth, this man is god, just as John 1:1 tells us: “in the beginning was the word. And the word was with god, and the word was god.” To in-sem-inate is to speak the word into. Gods people are the people with the word, are they not? And if they are with the word, the word they have in their mouths is god. The foundation of the world is built in language. Understand language, understand the foundation of man’s world. The study of symbols, those images of the mind that determine just what we think of things —how we think of things— is sem-iotics.

although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.

Jesus

Although (but) god’s (man’s) works (employment) finished (arose) from (as) the foundation (the pattern of life itself which was an unstoppable foreign conclusion once Adam knew Eve: man was always destined for consciousness)

(more specifically: the pattern is the paternal pattern of insemination [injecting of the symbol or word] of the woman)

of the world (ordered chaos, the beginning of man, tribal cohesion, the instantiated cultural and religious law written to justify the unholy original murder, made holy in its violence and its product, peace, that was necessary to order society initially, and which shall nit be repeated at the cost of our society).

The deed was done when Adam came in Eve. None of this is changing. Death is death. And death is rest from life. Christ is promising nothing but that death is restful from life. The other time he mentioned the ‘foundations of the world,’ in Matthew 13:36, he announces to begin with “I will speak to you in parables.” Yea, well, no shit.

Translational references & context

—or Καταβολες and κατάπαυσις

—or payment and requiem 

— phallus and bowl

— infection and cure

— man and woman 

— a pattern (pater) and mother (mater)

— a specific foundational plan, cast (the work of man done by paying specific attention to mimicking the pattern of the great ancestral fathers, moving forward our consciousness and our heroic undertaking of the work implied in our survival which we call god’s will) over the earth and over woman, to subdue them as he sees fit, and to call it the will of god—the god of all gods, the gods of man’s ancestors, and his totem spirits, patterns of action, all; patterns true to the masculine spirit of mankind functional enough to develop the secrets of the earth, order the chaos produced by a half conscious, half mad former beast contending his damndest to bind his animal impulses through the religion and the culture (the religious cult’s formerly taboos expanded to society at large) he finds himself in. All this a gift, consciousness, and a curse, the foreknowledge of our death, and the deeply implicit and final death, and modernity’s future tense: the death of even our instincts. A grand plan cast by man’s deepest urge, reunification with god: a plan to beg borrow or steal his way to all-consciousness; omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence; all knowing, all being, all able.

And able, who was pleasing to god, was killed, made unconscious, given reprieve, Katapausis, rest from payments, Kataboles due during life. The truth is that the old saying is ill-emphasized. It’s best understood: either death, or taxes.

We strive to be able with cain’s blood coursing our veins. And the cool handed man calmly takes his portion in place of his place, this man who has no place. The birthright without the scepter. But perhaps he’s got it all now. And all through the technology of the narrative and that of its distribution mechanisms, comes the writing oneself into the pantheon, like Hermès. I believe that Seth is Hermès in every important way. He’s the late born son, he charges at the crossroads of liminal spaces, he is favored by Yehweh as Hermès is Zeus, he tells his story from his own point of view, the theft and founding trick of violence, the tiny portion hung as ephah, sema, sign, reminder of his guilt, ritualized sacrifice as a remembrance, the acquisitive mimetic object, meat, being the contentious object causing brother on brother violence that, if not quelled, whether by a song played on the lyre or a story of guilt and shame hung round the heads of a dead man’s hopeful brow, the taxation motif that persists, and the innocence demanded of their hands while soaked in blood.

If you intend to be alive, do not. forget. to sacrifice.

The gib hanesseh is what Jacob gave up in order to found the tribe of Israel. This is the sacrifice of his animalic procreative instincts, the socket of his thigh—this is ritualized to this day in the practice of circumcising boys into the tribe as men; men of god who do not forget (gib hanesheh translates: ‘to forget’…the organ that does make one lose his head, his consciousness, his commonness with god) to make the sacrifices of animal instinct for pursuit, for their wandering.

All tricksters are wanderers. All men are tricksters. All men have bellies and cocks. We are all cursed into our last days, and then, relief: Katapauses at last.

The only way to curse a tribe forever for their evil deeds and their awakening into godlike consciousness —the curse they themselves earned— is to consider ‘forever’ in light of inheritance, generational sin, generational punishment: kataboles, payments forever. If we finally put up our animal instincts —if we became the perfected man of god— we would die of starvation and lack of procreation. To die, finally, all defendants included, to die as a people, a tribe, is the only recourse we have to join again our ancestors in final rest, peace; and we refuse final hunger and abstinence—we cannot turn away from those ‘sins that separate us from god.’ Thus, we are Cain’s god-cursed wanderers doomed to pursue a place in this world. Seth’s coverup story for our collective founding murder, and Judea’s laws are all that make our guilty lives bearable: lies and laws. Hence Christ: an acknowledgment of our sins, and a final sacrifice to emulate: “If you would have your life, give it up. Those who would keep theirs will lose it.”

Are God and Set, the enlightened tribe of Seth, forever juxtaposed against one another? Is it only the Canites’ curse? Do the tax collectors also have the curse of paying? Or is that done in that infamous curse of knowledge: the knowledge of their guilt? Perhaps each has its Pyrrhic victory: man and man’s god, his conscience, in an infinite wrestling match, Jacob and his Angel. If ‘god prevails’, and Jacob-Israel and his conscience are both god (god via a vis ‘god’s people’), then this is not a final prevailing but a continuation: life.