ABOUT THE SACRED NAME OF MACEDONIA
THE DESTINY AS THE BOULDER OF SISYPHUS
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” (John 1 : 1 - 4)
Thus wrote the Bible according to John, laying before us one of the most mysterious biblical discoveries, which is the method of God’s creating the micro and macro universe by means of the energy of the Word, which is a symbol of Jesus, according to the biblical exegesis. The world, according to this discovery, was simply worded. It was created by the way of NAMING, by and with NAMES, therefore every such NAME is sacred, filled with the contents of sanctity. What was left UNNAMED, on the other hand, the elements on the Earth, was NAMED according to the command of God by Adam.
The ancient people, who we tend to underestimate in terms of their civilization progress and arrogance, did understand, far better than us, the essence of the NAME and the NAMING. To them, it was something of the most sacred. Merely the Creator was more sacred. Therefore, namely, this was kept as the most precious of things. They believed that by losing, injuring or mutilating a NAME, the path to death would be approximated. This relates to the magical secret of the two-fold NAMES such as Ana-Maria, Jean-Pierre, Jean-Paul, etc, which are nowadays particularly characteristic for the Catholic world. In the ancient of times, many archaic people, including the Slavic, did not fail to NAME their newly-born by two NAMES. One of them was false and it was used in the public communication and the other one was the real NAME only known to the family. Nobody was supposed to know it or pronounce it because it was believed that by doing so, the evil powers would learn of the person and destroy them. And the death of a NAME brought the death of its bearer. Many ancient myths and fairytales tell this story. However, the mythic hyperboles and messages, as the contemporary Macedonian case of the NAME implies, have not passed the test of time. What does this ancient mythology of the NAME teach us, the Macedonians? It teaches us that the NAME is the most sacred thing after God and the one who has been endowed with it as a divine gift should keep it as the apple of their eye because if someone takes it away or shatters it, he will also die without it. The myth, says Miodrag Pavlovik, is “news of light”, rather than “news of darkness”. Etymologically, the word birth (born, bear, etc.), when transformed into a noun, is related with the species, i.e. the tribe, or the people… Several months ago I went to my native Malesevija region and discussed with the villagers who have not stopped hearing the echo of the primeval. They would simply touch it as an open wound whose pain they feel intensely in spite of all the poverty and troubles in their living, as if they had been thrown away and forgotten by everyone at the end of the world. Yes, they have not moved from the epicenter of the NAME, which to them is the focus of their soul and consciousness… They simply disagree to replace the authentic life lived through the primeval of the NAME with the NAMELESSNESS and death for them and the entire collective.
Proving our right to the NAME is needless, since for centuries and millennia, we have borne it through our pains and we have kept it to this day, climbing our own historical Golgotha before the ever-apathic eyes of Europe. We know how and why Jesus did outlive his crucifixion. But if we agree to a crucifixion of Jesus now, we will never reach resurrection ever again. Because the new NAME that our godfathers will possibly tailor to us is nothing else than a dead man’s casket of the anthropological and ontological death of an entire people who has introduced invaluable spiritual gifts to the global and European civilization. Why does democratic Europe still hesitate to remove it from us and from her, that evil black cloud?
After the physical, linguistic and religious invention, the latest invention of the masters of death, the genocidal, is the burning of the NAMES into ashes. Here we can, in the NAME of the radical love of Jesus, make use of his own words: “God, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing”.
