Castration, Circumcision, and Transgenderism from Antiquity to Today

[SonofaBor]

@SonofaBor , what you describe here is provocative -- a subtle symbolic order ruled by natural energies, frequencies, and processes to which so-called "primitive" people would be attuned.

All I can say here is that as a literate Westerner, this "natural mind", if it exists, is foreclosed to me. I can speculate on it, and I can read about it, but I cannot feel it.

Here is the thing. I am a paranoid and cynical man. What I have learned as a psychoanalyst is that people lie. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. They lie to preserve a positive vision of themselves and the societies to which they belong, all of which are based on a certain degree of hypocrisy and repression.

I didn't intend to elicit a confession, especially one that-- while not a lie-- is a bit diminutive; for I recall a reference by you to the, if not the spirits, then the natural structure outside our bubble with some wonder.

Everybody wonders. We wonder here about history. The clues are standing all around us; and, if we are willing and able to look deeper, we see patterns of fabrication-- of lies-- everywhere. I appreciate greatly your desire and capacity to think through these patterns. Stolen History reminds and provokes me to wonder about who we are; it also strangely comfort me-- insofar as I can recognize a world greater in many ways than our own and (this may seem counter-intuitive to my apparent magical naturalism) that humans can re-code this joint. Certainly Fomenko proves this, no matter what one makes of his historical reconstructions.

Because the coding has been bad, the investigation itself seems very worthy of energy/desire. Bad? I make this moral judgment because the coding has promulgated a world that negatively feeds on itself and one which refuses a reckoning that only truth can bring. That is my adult judgment. From where does that arise? Not from a vacuous moral imperative or-- despite what some of my friends might say-- from my astrologically formatted being. No. The buildings and the stories, including the lies so confusing, remind me of what I take to be most valuable and what I've always known to be most valuable. What are they? 1. The city-centers, in my youth and to today, excite me. I could and can feel the energy, the animating magic, of community life; 2. I feel depth, ontological depth, in the stone; 3. I also get a sense of moral proportion-- the Old World says depth and strength are possible in a vital world; while our word often says depth should be sacrificed for collective and individual purpose. Defacing and eliminating this energy and replacing it with the brutal but thin modern world may be an unintended consequence of post-apocalypse reprogramming or it could be a flat-out crime. It is probably both. As @ViniB notes above, there is a "dark side." As a child I also had lingering sense that I had been here before. Is this a basis for judgment or simply an impression? Perhaps both-- and I'll turn to that question in the next paragraph. As an adult, I've also witnessed moments of reckoning, of healing. In 1994 I was in Shandong, China-- the traditional heartland of what we call today China. The romantic but terribly destructive cultural liberation movements (roughly, 1937-1979) were over. The Soviet Union had just fallen. The Tienanmen counter attack against the people was well known in China. For various personal reasons, I was there. The deepest impression I got was that people just sitting and wondering: What just happened? What the heck do we do now? A moment of truth. Of course, The New World Order had an answer. But to achieve that they had to beat down, once again, the desire (or, better, yearning) of people to be together and cultivate themselves and their worlds. I wish we could see such a moment, without the intrusion of the super-colonial answer, in the United States. I'd like to see the consumerist paradigm fall and for people to open their doors, literally and figuratively, and engage each other deeply, to find wonder and joy in that, and leave behind the mono-culture world. I participate here because I believe that Stolen History is vital to any such reckoning.

While I was thinking about your rejoinder to my post above, I remembered something from our well-documented cultural history-- namely, the simultaneous appearance of psychoanalysis and impressionism around 1900. Structuralists should recognize this immediately. One without the other seems incomplete. The intense drive to puncture the lies, to untangle the knots, seems meaningless if there is not something more real and true than the web. And yet, impressionism without serious thought is without anchor. Despite his brilliant structural/scientific intentions and accomplishments, Levi Strauss knew this, too. I recall a chapter heading, "A Little Glass of Rum," his photos of natives at play, and his book-concluding connection to the consciousness of a cat. When I search for quotes online, I find this one right away:

The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

I'm glad you reminded me of this book. It broaches very elegantly, what was known in the early 19th century, as the Classical/Romantic split. He was saddened by the destruction. And yet he was part of it. The irony was well understood by him; and irony-- as a literary device-- was one of his non-scientific tools.

And here I want to turn to a perhaps more ticklish thought.

The Gospel of John begins:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Now, if I can make a great cultural leap, the Dao De Jing begins:

道可道，非常道
名[可名，非常名
無名天地之始
有名萬物之母
故常無欲，以觀其妙
常有欲，以觀其徼
此兩者，同出而異名
同謂之玄
玄之又玄，衆妙之門

The following translation seems reasonable to me:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

- Translated by Derek Linn, 2006, Chapter

These two passages are civilizationally fundamental and generally misunderstood. They both seem to say that the coding of this manifest reality goes all the way down and people are both executors and witnesses of this coding. There is a certain difference in emphasis that a structuralist would perceive immediately, too. The Christian vision seems to privilege the active, executive mode; while the Dao De Jing seems to emphasize caution and witness. Caution corrects the zealot, at least in principle. I don’t ascribe to such a reading because both texts say there is something-- God, the Dao, or a source-- beyond the manifestations and that people are both coders and witnesses. In the Christian text the life manifests as the light of people; but there is darkness that doesn't comprehend the light. The Gospels show repeatedly that the light doesn't shine in everyone-- that is, not everyone is receptive to it. The Dao De Jing repeatedly points to administrators who fail to understand the Dao and over-manage, as it were, the manifest world. In both traditions, to act against-- for lack of a better word-- source is to invite destruction.

It seems to me that if executor consciousness prevails, then things go badly. But we cannot become mere witnesses either. (And we really can't-- even music is coded). That means we have a difficult path-- we both code and evaluate, and we must do so honestly. To use the language of Russell Jay Gould, we must "stop and correct." But correct to what signal? I think this should be obvious (see my three points above), but it isn't because discourse distorts; laws and regulations have unintended consequences; some people don't care and others mistake their beliefs for reality.

A collective moment of "What the heck happened?" would be good for us. We might be able to examine the coded deliriums that have shaped our lives. We can sit with each other, smell each other, and wonder together.