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Why play OC rather than straight Chess, why the wish for complication over a system whose lineage proves its veracity and infinite playability; what more do you desire?

 Variant by name variant by nature!

Variants in Chess are nothing new many are several centuries or decades old and even what we now call just Chess was a product of a series of variants. It’s interesting to note the transition from the limited ‘Grand Vizier’ a sort of diagonal only King as far as his move goes, to the all powerful Queen the supreme matriarch and ruler of the game! Why was the feminine given power over the masculine and conversely why was the King given power in the endgame when the Queen was gone and only lived in the lowly Percivals (Pawns) dreams to retrieve the goddess (grail) and bring her back to the board (world), after the perilous quest to the boards (worlds) end. Restoring power to the wounded King; is the King ever wounded? Is his old consort the Grand Vizier revealed in his immortality. The mythological and psychoanalytical metaphors spring up again and again in Chess and they have been well commented, but why the variants in the first place?

Break the Game or it will break you!

The eternal wheel turns around us and the grand chess game is the common metaphor for a world of people that believe they are pawns in a cosmic game, with only a hazy and fading dream of promotion to hope for. Science gives us the rules, but the older overtones of social protocol give us politics which compromises the position in power and amelioration to the point that the game disappears into the realm of myth,imagination and finally derision whilst the great ‘players’ surround us. We are remediated into positions that give us less power unless we see through the game or are gifted in its execution, but that gift is a double edged sword, an example being Bobby Fischer.

Give up all you have and come persecute me; only this way will you truly live!

Ever since such documents as  ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and throughout history the thought of the grand players haunts our paranoia like a cancer and breaks out in race hatred, anti-Semitism etc. etc. to satisfy our craving to be enlightened enough to see the ‘Grand Master’ who in reality will be able to be challenged and fought, and like some grotesque Star Wars parody, revealed as our own Father who we can finally checkmate – the King is Dead long live the Son! [ I’ll mention but not go there the puzzle of why less women have historically played Chess than men ] This is the true endgame in chess and the endgame for Bobby Fischer, his invention of 960 Chess was not enough to save him from the hollow victory of mate, the game could not be disrupted enough to delay, stop or dull down that revelatory pain that the King would live on and the player fail, condemned to wander in exile, bitter and wailing against the supposed ‘rulers’ or ‘Grand Masters’ of the world [in Fishers case the Jews] who were the real adversaries, the gross image of the ‘Father’ of the world. The 960 variant was a chink in Fischer’s nature that revealed the variant in him, the possibility of the rule change or an ultimate move that could ‘break’ the game and reveal finally the underlying beauty of the unknowable ultimate game!

In the next installment we will examine the OC game and examine its metaphors and map its keys to unlocking the game that some view as just a game whilst others are finding something…but what?

Originally posted 2010-02-24 16:25:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Finally we are moving closer to some sort of ‘roundup’ of this psychoanalytic examination of the rise of  the Chess Queen and the metaphorical shadow in the psycho-social history of Europe. I’m going to briefly have a look at the modern Roman Catholic Church its internal political structure and the elevation of the ‘virgin’ to co-redemptrix and beyond! First we will follow Marilyn Yalom; “The Birth of the Chess Queen” with regard to the identification of the cult of the Virgin and the Chess Queen.

Queen of the All

Yalom was drawn to write her book by seeing a ‘chess piece’ of the Queen as Madonna and Child from Scandinavia dated as 14th C. CE. Initially she wondered whether this was indeed a chess piece and this led to her speculating that if this were indeed a Queen what must the other pieces have been? The following from her book P.109 gave her an image of this and in our quest it tells us that at least one medieval writer was paralleling religion and chess.

“…from a short poem in the Bodlean Library in Oxford…The world seemed to him to resemble a chessboard with its kings, aufins, rooks, and knights. The black pieces belong to the Devil, the white ones to God. Our first ancestor, called Adam, was like  a great king on the board. He played against the Devil, who defeated him in three moves. When God saw that Adam had been checkmated, he started the game over again, this time with Jesus as the white King, and the Virgin Mary at his side in the place of the Queen. The Rooks were Apostles sent out to preach in groups of four. The aufins were the ‘confessors’ (Bishops), and we humans are the Pawns. This fable of the fall of man and redemption through the birth of Jesus was spelled out in terms of Chess…”

This extract has common themes of conflict, good against evil, but also of the rise of the King and His consort the Queen, who originally would have remained at his side but now was destined to achieve autonomy as the most powerful piece in ‘the game’ and to be ‘idolised’ as a chess piece and also as Queen of Heaven, an ‘unapproachable’ ‘idol’ of womanhood – supreme in power but controlled by her ‘deceivers’ [the term appears in some medieval MSS] the Bishops!

Co-Redemptrix

Those of you who take no notice of Roman Catholic Dogma or politics may not have noticed that the Church is divided and has been since the early 1960’s publically and before that privately. The Church has issued four dogmas of the Virgin Mary (for those of you who are not aware a Dogma is an article of faith which must be adhered to if one is to stay a RC) these are:-

1…The perpetual virginity of Mary

2…Mary the Mother of God

3…Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854)

4…Assumption of Mary into Heaven (1950)

None of these Dogmas has a biblical basis but is promulgated based upon the Church’s ongoing revelation, its tradition and Papal authority. Two ‘Doctors’ of the Church; Bernard of Clairvaux and St.Thomas Aquinas objected to the third dogma and certainly would have objected to the fourth. The ‘elevation’ of this ‘idol’ continues in the Church and is propagated by a number of ‘apparitions’ of this ‘Queen of Heaven’ around the world, and to judge by her own ‘pronouncements’ this ‘Madonna’ has very little in common with the young Jewish girl who gave birth to Jesus. This is the raising of an archetype, a projection of the Psyche as powerful outside the Church (the death of Diana Princess of Wales) as within it. You can see this in Washington DC as the statue of ‘Columbia’ who must stand higher than any other statue, decreed by law. This ‘image’ of ‘Queen’ is a manifestation outwardly of a manifestation that had already occurred on the Chessboard and far from en-powering ‘woman’ had relegated the real woman to idol to be controlled in a mans game!

Back to the Church for a moment; elements within it are proposing a fifth dogma of Mary ‘co-redemptrix’ or co-redeemer so the celestial Chess game is replete with its Queen who will subsume her consorts power totally by becoming the most powerful idol the world has ever known, worshipped by both the secular and the spiritual alike, final dominion over woman, engineered by man.

Opus Dei and Focolare

The Da Vinci code puts paid to any unbiased view of Opus Dei for us. The facts are that Opus Dei is the first ‘personal prelature’ within the Church and has its own ‘extension’ to Canon Law. It is unique in answering only to the Pope once every five years and has power over Bishops (unheard of in Catholic History). Opus Dei members are not ‘albino monks’ but ordinary men and women who ‘must’ confess only to Opus Dei or Priests of the ‘Holy Cross’ (another violation). They are followers of the fastest Canonised (a legal formula for the making of a recognised Saint) ‘Saint’ in recent times, using evidence that borders on damn right lies, Monsigneur Josemaria Escriva. As one rises in ‘holiness’ and obedience, one becomes celibate and separate from ones wife or other females. Opus Dei divides the sexes rigorously to the extent that young brothers and sisters are divided. I could go on to detail Opus Dei much of it from personal experience but I want to tie this back to the ‘Grand Chessgame’. Here in Opus Dei is the subjugation of woman writ large, wives sleeping on boards whilst their husbands sleep on mattresses as just one example. At the same time of course the ‘cult of the Virgin’ is used as a model for control and adoration.

Running as a kind of ‘shadowy’ opposite to this is another equally powerful organisation within the Church, which is almost unknown to most people but extremely well known to our political leaders, particularly in the EEC. This organisation runs businesses and banks, being an exceptional arm of the Church in economics. It may be a surprise to many that control of this organisation belongs not to a man but a woman, known to most of the worlds leaders, hailed by many of the worlds universities and unknown to the worlds ‘Pawns’. Her name is Chiara Lubich and her organisations goal is:-

“The Focolare Movement is an international movement, inspired by the gospel, working for unity in all spheres of life.
For over sixty years it has drawn together people of all Christian traditions and from many of the world’s religions, alongside people with no formal faith, who share the aim of building a united world.”

[Focalare Movement Website]

Now as Opus Dei is considered the work of the Father, Focolare is considered the work of the Mother and the work of that ‘Mother’ has far more to do with the Political agenda of a New World Order than with the ‘public’ view of the agenda of the Roman Catholic Church. If there is any doubt of the operation of these ‘sects’ within the Church having anything to do with the secular society I had a bit of a revelation personally that convinced me otherwise. After the events of 911 I picked up the hard backed copy of Robert Hutchinson’s book ‘Their Kingdom Come – Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei” – first edition 1999 on the rear dust jacket I read with amazement that one of its aims was to prepare for a new Crusade against Islam. Here I was experiencing this in reality whilst this book published in 1999 was prophesying to a deaf world!

The Grand Chessboard

The Grand Chessboard is a title of a book by Zbigniew Brzezinski published in 1997/8 details many of the events that have shaken our entry into the 21st Century. I include the following quotes from the book put up on the site http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard to illustrate an agenda that was pre-existent to 2001 and which has been played out on the ‘chessboards’ of the world for centuries.

"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power."- (p. xiii)

"It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.” (p. xiv)

"How America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources." (p.31)

“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." (p.35)

“The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last." (p.209)

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." (p. 211)

I will leave the reader to mull over this direct analogy between the world as a giant Chessgame and its inhabitants as Pawns in that game. Bobby Fischer was probably far more correct than we give him credit for. Not for his appellations and invectives against ‘the Jews’ but for his incite into the game and through that an ‘awareness’ that there are ‘puppet-masters’ and strategies, as subtle and hard to read as any Chess game, and that where one falls into ‘the game’ one reveals something far deeper and sinister, something that reaches into the psyche and reveals truths that others cannot see. This manifestation of ‘Divine Queen’ on the board as well as in the world points back to the game and through that game a checkmate is manifest that paralyses the Pawns who did not even realize that they were playing!

In this series we started with Bobby Fischer and the idea that Variants are a symptom of a wish to ‘break the board’  and in the next part we will explore what the Variants are saying and where they may be headed.

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Originally posted 2010-04-05 16:44:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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