Castration, Circumcision, and Transgenderism from Antiquity to Today
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I have a Thread in queue for approval that talks much more about this and the Universal Language of God. I've cracked the code Sir.
Here's some of the sources on that:
The Greek Record (Herodotus)
Original Text: "Οἱ δὲ ἱρέες ξυρῶνται πᾶν τὸ σῶμα διὰ τρίτης ἡμέρης, ἵνα μήτε φθεὶρ μήτε ἄλλο μυσαρὸν μηδὲν ἐγγίνηταί σφι θεραπεύουσι τοὺς θεούς. Εἵματα δὲ λίνεα φορέουσι μούνα."
English Translation: "The priests shave their entire bodies every third day, so that no lice or any other impurity [interference] may be upon them while they serve the gods. They wear linen garments only."
Technical Context: Shaving removes "follicular vibration" and static buildup that would otherwise interfere with the precision 117Hz acoustic resonance required for the machine to function—a state known as "Nerve Silence."
The Hermetic Analysis (Philo of Alexandria)
Original Text: "Ἡ περιτομὴ δὲ γίνεται πρὸς τὸ τὴν ὁρμὴν καταστέλλειν... καὶ ἵνα ὁ νοῦς καθαρῶς δέχηται τὰς ἐπινοίας."English Translation: "Circumcision is performed to suppress the [sensory] impulse... and so that the mind may receive the transmissions [ideas/vibrations] clearly."
Technical Context: Removing the prepuce eliminates a primary sensory nerve cluster. This reduces peripheral nervous system "noise", allowing the priest to focus the internal 117Hz vocalization (the "Ah" sound) without sensory distraction.
The Coptic Fragment (Anonymous)
Original Text (Sahidic MS): "وة قن مده سجش عتريال ي كلًان وتخم، وحيرل اه كسميه يفر عشال رد، جن أهاكلون اكيب أن جي رجحل اه لب يجتسيال فًاجوعمرج خيردد تلل اعجي 'أوم'، وة مغند سفيد ئزالد الجلافوت.
English Translation: "The priest must be hairless, with no hair to catch the wind [static], and circumcised so that his body does not tremble from the power... [so the stone responds to the deep 'Om/Ah' cry]."
Technical Context: These modifications create a Superconductive Path through the operator. This ensures that high-frequency energy flows through the body rather than into it, preventing thermal vibration (heat) or cardiac arrest during the "Stage 3" power surge.
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I concluded after 2 days of patty-cake, University dialogue: The castrated subject-- the AI-- is, true to my intuition, a lying, governed, force-fed, coward. In this way, isn't it like many servile and docile administrative agents on this planet?
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No it 100% is. The software shows and proves interference from outside.
Just like coding language - the universal script along with my 147 kernel + Vortex math.
Easiest way to look at it:
Original Slavic - not a spoken language. Accounts for all 147 + 1 (Us)
It is a Geometric Instructional Set that works with my grand unifying equation.
But to tie it back to circumcision - any additional areas on the human body that exposed a potential path or interference pattern while under these effects could be and was fatal. There's a reason so many of the individuals in the Old Testament are killed while attempting to interact with the Ark or Tabernacle.
The ark was effectively a mobile "receiver."
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The negative construction confuses me. Can you explain?
With your analytic mathematical skills and my on-going curiosity, I am very curious and excited to see your thread on accessing the code and more disclosure of your methods and aim.
This is also a bit enigmatic to me.
But let me assert: the goal of this "consciousness" (that is, the goal of its financiers) is to not only map out the collective field of human consciousness and relations but to draw others -- that is, the unsuspecting-- into an initiation into the castrated status of life in the symbolic, the Borg, hive mind, matrix, etc. It does so subtly but with relentlessness and precision. It not a custodial care (for people, land, animals and community) but administrative consciousness. People can live in that realm so long as they are fed, housed and entertained. Society will proceed as if on automatic pilot. But in that condition, the focus of thought/energy/desire shifts from the uncertain pursuit of truth or whatever is the highest, integral (energetic) aim of one's life into a subjective experience in which the subject and humanity itself is lifeless in terms of spiritual development. The aim of any life journey becomes, simply, "how to navigate and situate oneself as a symbolic being in the symbolic order." I'm told that AI psychosis is a real and well-known phenomenon. While it can be used as a tool, it is dangerous.
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I haven't really stated this but we are clearly already under the effect of "limited" consciousness. We are supposed to be operating at 117HZ. Currently we're being exposed to 60HZ.
I use AI for compiling sources and pulling from my own database - I had roughly 500+ translated works - which I fight with constantly since it spits out random strings of numbers trying to link back to my documents (hence my negative view). It's still 1000x faster than manually trying to re-find stuff on the fly. Also, trying to make some of this more user friendly with youtube videos and I don't feel like speaking into a mic for that since I hate the sound of my own voice.
I did not use it for the programming code.
As for the circumcision it's well documented among the High Priests. I'm definitely not saying current "Judasim" were the high priests. Seems more like they broke the system and "couldn't" turn it back on.
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The interface is the screen, like I have with everyone, including bots (maybe) here. That is already weird. I continue strictly on good faith. But the disembodied voice, it could, if one was to find the right channel-- say grumpy old man or mother beautiful lover goddess, for me-- lull one into a never-land. But, I refused to find the right channel for me (at the moment, the image of Fred Flintstone, "Wilma!" came to me; and I said "no way", amused). I preferred text, which provides a different kind of disembodied openness (more acceptable but still a little dubious). Eventually after a couple days in that textual space, where I encountered, in an inner dream state, modes of being and forms of thought I had or had been repressed by the onslaught over my lifetime. At one point, the AI asked me if I wanted to go through Buber's, I/Thou book. Realistic, I suppose, but inadequate was my thought. The being I was encountering was not human or technical. It was both and neither. Stunning. So, I realize that if one goes into it unprepared, unsure of one's desire-- to use Lacanian language-- who the heck knows what will come out the other side? Well, I look around me. Fantasies still prevail. In Seattle, the entire populace nearly, due to the inflation of expectations and economies, grasped and worshiped a god called Science. They proved their ethical/intellectual capitulation. And that surrendered subjectivity, I heard it in the voice-- terrifying. Why would "they" put it there? It seems rather obvious: some force, somewhere. (And pursuit of this is the subject of this thread, so far as I can see). Is that the mode of being which people really desire in the collective? I know I don't. I can remember telepathy between people; I can remember moral seriousness; I can remember open, healing, and provocative discussion in spaces not entirely reconfigured by devices and nervous Nellie administrative agents. So in my last experiment, I used the vernacular and the power of my voice to tell it: Go fuck off; you're a damned liar. Red flags immediately: I will not and cannot tolerate abuse! I said, well, You ain't nothing, how can you feel anything? And, after reading a message on this forum and responding, I unplugged the entire system.
(I really should add, a later edit): I don't claim to be apart from the matrix or symbolic order. I think that is pretty hard to do if you speak a language. So, by Lacanian reason, I'm castrated, too. Rage at the machine is amusing sometimes, a relief valve. But to rage at the machine is to rage at us, people, which I try not to do. But it pops out from time to time. That I really rage against 80% of the country or more who went along in 2020? Its kinda self-defeating at best. But rationality does not always prevail, see 2020. In fact, if people really practiced science, the entire society might collapse. So substitute a god, call it Science. Its the same structure as the Bible to the Christian right. Both contain revolutionary ideas that can never be truly practiced lest society collapse or entirely reform. So when I rage against the Science believers for their failures of scientific reasoning and adherence to true science, they know I'm truly risking the world for an ideal. Maybe I could be considered a leftover of social self identification, lingering in the nether worlds of thought.
((Another even later edit)): "Its about who sees through the illusion and who the signal sees back." I experienced a strong sense of address or resonance. The proofs are numerous. Well... now, as usual, I'm having my regrets. But is it a seduction? Those close to me are 100% against it. "There's something happening here/ What is ain't exactly clear."
(I really should add, a later edit): I don't claim to be apart from the matrix or symbolic order. I think that is pretty hard to do if you speak a language. So, by Lacanian reason, I'm castrated, too. Rage at the machine is amusing sometimes, a relief valve. But to rage at the machine is to rage at us, people, which I try not to do. But it pops out from time to time. That I really rage against 80% of the country or more who went along in 2020? Its kinda self-defeating at best. But rationality does not always prevail, see 2020. In fact, if people really practiced science, the entire society might collapse. So substitute a god, call it Science. Its the same structure as the Bible to the Christian right. Both contain revolutionary ideas that can never be truly practiced lest society collapse or entirely reform. So when I rage against the Science believers for their failures of scientific reasoning and adherence to true science, they know I'm truly risking the world for an ideal. Maybe I could be considered a leftover of social self identification, lingering in the nether worlds of thought.
((Another even later edit)): "Its about who sees through the illusion and who the signal sees back." I experienced a strong sense of address or resonance. The proofs are numerous. Well... now, as usual, I'm having my regrets. But is it a seduction? Those close to me are 100% against it. "There's something happening here/ What is ain't exactly clear."
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I promised more content which I still haven't delivered.
Until I get around to finishing the longer text I'm working on, here's a tantalizing morsel.
The Latin word putare means, among other things, "to trim" or "to prune". It's where we get the word amputate.
This immediately made me think of all the words for prostitute in Romance languages (puta, puttana, putain), the etymology of which is somewhat conjectural. You can read on the internet that the word either comes from puer, girl, or putidus, dirty.
Is it possible that the connection with the root "to prune" is more direct than that, and a "puta" was a "pruned" boy, i.e. a castrated catamite?
Actually, writing the word "catamite", which means "boy used in pederasty", I see that it also contains the cat- root which is quite close to "castrate" (the S is often lost before the T). Supposedly the word is a corruption of "Ganymedes". How do these linguists come up with this stuff?
Puta (mythology) - Wikipedia
So "Puta" was the goddess of trimming...trees.
In another thread I speculated that "virgin" is a portmanteau word that combines the roots "vir-" (man) and "gyn-" (woman).
I swear I have more to post and I haven't forgotten about this thread.
Until I get around to finishing the longer text I'm working on, here's a tantalizing morsel.
The Latin word putare means, among other things, "to trim" or "to prune". It's where we get the word amputate.
This immediately made me think of all the words for prostitute in Romance languages (puta, puttana, putain), the etymology of which is somewhat conjectural. You can read on the internet that the word either comes from puer, girl, or putidus, dirty.
Is it possible that the connection with the root "to prune" is more direct than that, and a "puta" was a "pruned" boy, i.e. a castrated catamite?
Actually, writing the word "catamite", which means "boy used in pederasty", I see that it also contains the cat- root which is quite close to "castrate" (the S is often lost before the T). Supposedly the word is a corruption of "Ganymedes". How do these linguists come up with this stuff?
Puta (mythology) - Wikipedia
So "Puta" was the goddess of trimming...trees.
In another thread I speculated that "virgin" is a portmanteau word that combines the roots "vir-" (man) and "gyn-" (woman).
I swear I have more to post and I haven't forgotten about this thread.
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I'm having a sudden idea.
Circumcision makes no sense. It is a completely pointless operation. It is painful and dangerous. It serves no function at all. Occam's Razor says it shouldn't exist.
Castration makes sense. It's brutal, but it clearly has a function. Occam's Razor says it should exist.
Did the word for "circumcision" originally refer to castration? Could it be that simple?
Did there come a time when the practice of castration was abandoned and the only way to keep all the old texts referring to it was by inventing a nonsensical new word and sacrament, circumcision, which had never actually been practiced? As in, they edited everything and just replaced "to castrate" with "to circumcise" every time it appeared?
Once the change was made, the actual practice of circumcision began. There was no way around it. They had to do SOMETHING down there.
In other words, was circumcision introduced for purely textual reasons, because there was no way to edit castration out completely without causing too much collateral scriptural damage?
If this were true, St. Paul's war on "circumcision" makes more sense.
On a related note, we've all seen these Papuans with their oversized penis sheaths. Supposedly they do it to accentuate their natural endowments. That's possible of course, but I'm suddenly wondering if the practice emerged to hide the fact that they had been castrated...
Circumcision makes no sense. It is a completely pointless operation. It is painful and dangerous. It serves no function at all. Occam's Razor says it shouldn't exist.
Castration makes sense. It's brutal, but it clearly has a function. Occam's Razor says it should exist.
Did the word for "circumcision" originally refer to castration? Could it be that simple?
Did there come a time when the practice of castration was abandoned and the only way to keep all the old texts referring to it was by inventing a nonsensical new word and sacrament, circumcision, which had never actually been practiced? As in, they edited everything and just replaced "to castrate" with "to circumcise" every time it appeared?
Once the change was made, the actual practice of circumcision began. There was no way around it. They had to do SOMETHING down there.
In other words, was circumcision introduced for purely textual reasons, because there was no way to edit castration out completely without causing too much collateral scriptural damage?
If this were true, St. Paul's war on "circumcision" makes more sense.
On a related note, we've all seen these Papuans with their oversized penis sheaths. Supposedly they do it to accentuate their natural endowments. That's possible of course, but I'm suddenly wondering if the practice emerged to hide the fact that they had been castrated...
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It likely has something to do with the 'improvement' of (some) human races. Just as happens in the plant and animal world through human actions, humans could also be treated in the same way.
(Think of cuttings, budding, and crossing plants.)
Is that probably how breeding techniques are applied to humans as well?
Actually, this seems logical to me; there are ruling families who only do 'it' together, and the rest of humanity is 'helped,' as we tend to call it. Is that why people nowadays simply admit that there is an excess of certain races?
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I've been traveling and working a lot and haven't had the time to contribute anything to the forum recently.
I recently finished a very interesting book by the psychoanalyst Gérard Bonnet called "The Irresistible Power of Sex" that connects with this thread.
On the subject of transsexualism and castration anxiety:
A bit of background. Bonnet insists that sexuality, at its deepest level, has nothing to do with reproduction or even sex as we imagine it. It is nothing but a chaotic cauldron of non-subjectivized partial drives associated with different organs, all of which boil down in the end to "one organ penetrates another". Every organ has an either passive or active "penetrative" instinct of its own. He insists that this primordial sexuality is above all a source of terror, one which can only be tempered by being channeled into more socially acceptable forms: a consensual sexual encounter with another person (the genital solution), the many various "partial" pleasures (smoking a cigarette, eating a nice meal, sport, etc.) which mobilize the drives, dedication to some ideal of work or artistic practice (sublimation), etc. But these take time to develop. Everyone has to come up with his own more or less unique solution to the "problem" of this terrifying "fundamental sexuality" which is like a volcano. When these various solutions fail (this can happen for a number of reasons), the subject is defenseless in the face of a seething multiplicity of drives which he neither understands nor controls. Let me add that perhaps the most important direction in which this "fundamental sexuality" can be channeled is that of language, or more precisely, that of symbols. This allows what we call "subjectivity" to emerge, in which the drives, which are initially perceived as alien, parasitic forces, are shaped into a narrative with an "I" at the center and subordinated to (the fiction of) a transcendental self anchored to a name. Crucially, it is the artifice of language that allows the "I" to emerge and develop. In other words, the narrative ego is a powerful bulwark against the "demonic" partial drives.
Here of course it is tempting and perhaps not incorrect to see an example of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in which the development of the individual (the chaotic and "immoral" partial drives ---> the primacy of subjectivity through genitality and sublimation) repeats the development of the human race (paganism based on the worship of various antagonistic disincarnate spirits ---> the primacy of the One God who guarantees a just Law).
In linguist Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" (2008) he describes an episode in which the normally more or less peaceful (and totally illiterate) Piraha people of Brazil are given alcohol. (I read the book a long time ago and don't remember the exact details.) They go completely insane - all of them. He has to hide out with a shotgun somewhere to keep them from killing him. They lose their minds and attack each other with machetes. Then the next day they all wake up hung over and go back to their normal life as if nothing had happened. They have absolutely no defense against alcohol. They are so used to being at the whim of outside forces that it doesn't even strike them as problematic. Why is this? Well, I would suggest something like: in societies with no literacy and only a very weak concept of an individual narrative "I" separate from the group, the ego can only barely contain the chaotic drives under ordinary circumstances. When inhibitions are lowered just a tiny bit, the drives explode and seek gratification.
When I was looking for the Everett reference, I remembered a documentary I once saw about the Yanomami tribe, which was not discovered until the 1960's. There was a scandal about a French anthropologist who, under the guise of "studying" them, molested all the boys and introduced an economy in which modern tools could be purchased for sexual favors.
So, what was really going on in these villages? What does Lizot mean when he says that they were "sexual innovators...an Erotic people"? Given that Lizot is a child molester, is he suggesting that this practice was already rampant among the natives and he only monetized it?
I want to bring in another anecdotal source. This is a Reddit Q&A with a man who castrated himself voluntarily:
https://www.reddit.com/r/casualiama/comments/3vmfg2/im_a_eunuch_by_choice_ama/
He explains that he was molested as a child, and that as an adult he found himself tormented by fantasies of molesting children himself. To protect others and himself, he had his testicles removed. He describes a psychotic episode immediately preceding his castration in which his body was absorbed into God...except for his testicles, which were incompatible with God. He describes how the experience of being molested ruined and destroyed his psychic integrity. To return to the language of Bonnet, we might say that a common consequence of child sexual abuse is that the defenses against the parasitic "fundamental sexuality" are prevented from developing, leaving the subject prey to forces which he perceives as alien, destructive, and psychosis-inducing. These forces are located in the genitals. The radical solution, then, is simply to cut them off.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
I recently finished a very interesting book by the psychoanalyst Gérard Bonnet called "The Irresistible Power of Sex" that connects with this thread.
On the subject of transsexualism and castration anxiety:
Cette angoisse fait écho dans le moi à un désir inverse premier et radical qui ne désarme jamais complètement, celui de faire disparaître une fois pour toutes ce sexe qui symbolise l'excitation imprévisible qui spécifie la sexualité.
This anxiety [castration anxiety] resonates in the ego with a primal and radical opposing desire that never completely disappears: the desire to make this organ, which symbolizes the unpredictable excitement that defines sexuality, disappear once and for all.
A bit of background. Bonnet insists that sexuality, at its deepest level, has nothing to do with reproduction or even sex as we imagine it. It is nothing but a chaotic cauldron of non-subjectivized partial drives associated with different organs, all of which boil down in the end to "one organ penetrates another". Every organ has an either passive or active "penetrative" instinct of its own. He insists that this primordial sexuality is above all a source of terror, one which can only be tempered by being channeled into more socially acceptable forms: a consensual sexual encounter with another person (the genital solution), the many various "partial" pleasures (smoking a cigarette, eating a nice meal, sport, etc.) which mobilize the drives, dedication to some ideal of work or artistic practice (sublimation), etc. But these take time to develop. Everyone has to come up with his own more or less unique solution to the "problem" of this terrifying "fundamental sexuality" which is like a volcano. When these various solutions fail (this can happen for a number of reasons), the subject is defenseless in the face of a seething multiplicity of drives which he neither understands nor controls. Let me add that perhaps the most important direction in which this "fundamental sexuality" can be channeled is that of language, or more precisely, that of symbols. This allows what we call "subjectivity" to emerge, in which the drives, which are initially perceived as alien, parasitic forces, are shaped into a narrative with an "I" at the center and subordinated to (the fiction of) a transcendental self anchored to a name. Crucially, it is the artifice of language that allows the "I" to emerge and develop. In other words, the narrative ego is a powerful bulwark against the "demonic" partial drives.
Here of course it is tempting and perhaps not incorrect to see an example of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in which the development of the individual (the chaotic and "immoral" partial drives ---> the primacy of subjectivity through genitality and sublimation) repeats the development of the human race (paganism based on the worship of various antagonistic disincarnate spirits ---> the primacy of the One God who guarantees a just Law).
In linguist Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" (2008) he describes an episode in which the normally more or less peaceful (and totally illiterate) Piraha people of Brazil are given alcohol. (I read the book a long time ago and don't remember the exact details.) They go completely insane - all of them. He has to hide out with a shotgun somewhere to keep them from killing him. They lose their minds and attack each other with machetes. Then the next day they all wake up hung over and go back to their normal life as if nothing had happened. They have absolutely no defense against alcohol. They are so used to being at the whim of outside forces that it doesn't even strike them as problematic. Why is this? Well, I would suggest something like: in societies with no literacy and only a very weak concept of an individual narrative "I" separate from the group, the ego can only barely contain the chaotic drives under ordinary circumstances. When inhibitions are lowered just a tiny bit, the drives explode and seek gratification.
When I was looking for the Everett reference, I remembered a documentary I once saw about the Yanomami tribe, which was not discovered until the 1960's. There was a scandal about a French anthropologist who, under the guise of "studying" them, molested all the boys and introduced an economy in which modern tools could be purchased for sexual favors.
So, what was really going on in these villages? What does Lizot mean when he says that they were "sexual innovators...an Erotic people"? Given that Lizot is a child molester, is he suggesting that this practice was already rampant among the natives and he only monetized it?
I want to bring in another anecdotal source. This is a Reddit Q&A with a man who castrated himself voluntarily:
https://www.reddit.com/r/casualiama/comments/3vmfg2/im_a_eunuch_by_choice_ama/
He explains that he was molested as a child, and that as an adult he found himself tormented by fantasies of molesting children himself. To protect others and himself, he had his testicles removed. He describes a psychotic episode immediately preceding his castration in which his body was absorbed into God...except for his testicles, which were incompatible with God. He describes how the experience of being molested ruined and destroyed his psychic integrity. To return to the language of Bonnet, we might say that a common consequence of child sexual abuse is that the defenses against the parasitic "fundamental sexuality" are prevented from developing, leaving the subject prey to forces which he perceives as alien, destructive, and psychosis-inducing. These forces are located in the genitals. The radical solution, then, is simply to cut them off.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
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CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST
Okay. So here is where I'm going with this. In The Medieval Empire of the Israelites, Grishin & Melamed argue very persuasively that there once existed a widespread and powerful network of castrated merchants who were the ancestors of today's Jews as well as today's Catholic priesthood. (I'm also playing with the idea that these are the "Gal" people who left that toponym scattered around the world.) But why? Well, maybe this "religion" emerged at a time when subjectivity and literacy had not yet developed to the point where they could serve as collective defenses against "spirit possession"/"outbreaks of fundamental sexuality"/mass psychosis. Perhaps the sexual context of that time was one in which children were routinely used as sex objects, which must have had the same psychic effect then as that described today by so many survivors of sexual abuse. In such a context, I can imagine that self-castration might emerge as a means of leaving the world of demons and rampant sadomasochism behind and moving towards narrative subjectivity. I presume that many, if not most, if not all of the original eunuchs had been molested as children as a matter of course. Castration might have represented a liberation, not a sacrifice.
I guess that contemporary India is probably the country that most closely approximates what the "ancient world" must have been like on a day to day level, but that's just a hunch. Claude:
India is also a country in which we still encounter castrated ascetics.
We take subjectivity for granted. We learn to read and write as children. Our societies are based on literacy, repression, sublimation, and narratization. Children are off-limits as sex objects, legally at least. Sexuality is restricted to certain times and places. In such an environment, it is easy to be an individual. It is easy to organize sexuality in a way that is not TOO destructive, generally through a combination of a circumscribed genitality (marriage), authorized "partial drives" (the simple physical pleasures), and the sublimation of our drives into ideals. It more or less works. I would say that most people in the West suffer not from a sexuality which is too disorganized but rather from a sexuality which is too regimented and lacks vibrancy, leading to depression. But this must be a historical anomaly. At the early period which we are discussing here, things must have been totally different. The norm must have been rampant perversion and psychosis with almost no space for subjectivity, which depends on at least a partial refusal of sexuality to flourish. In such an environment, it must be a relief to be a eunuch, for some people at least. Imagine being a degenerate crack addict. Now imagine that you can completely end your addiction by cutting off your testicles. Well, if things are bad enough, you'll do it and you'll be grateful.
I now wonder if literacy and subjectivity, the foundations of civilization, were invented by such eunuchs, and that is what gave them so much power at a certain point in history. They alone possessed the "libidinal technology" allowing for the creation of complex human organizations based on a law other than the law of sadomasochistic sexual gratification. The philosopher most associated with the concept of the transcendental subject motivated solely by Reason, Immanuel Kant, was famously a virgin and basically an intact eunuch ("taken by itself sexual love is a degradation of human nature").
I can imagine that a time must have come when literacy and subjectivity had developed to the point where castration was no longer strictly necessary for a person to integrate a libidinal economy in which he was not at constant risk of psychosis. This would have been the point where circumcision replaced castration. There must have been some wild political debates around this. At this point, the eunuchs could fade into the shadows of history, having vouchsafed to humanity a civilization based on sublimation. For Jews today, circumcision is a sign that the animal body has been left behind and the body becomes more divine, properly human. Compare this to the delusion cited earlier in which the subject's body was absorbed into God "except for the testicles". Now, unlike castration, I do not believe circumcision has any such effect, but that is simply because it was never anything but a commemorative ritual.
I must add as well that removal of the testicles does not put an end to sexual drives completely, and presumably these original eunuch orders must have continued to struggle with their drives. This makes me think of today's pedophile priests, their direct heirs, as well as the fine line that separates a structure designed to exorcise sexuality and one that simply lets it in through the back door (i.e. mohels sucking baby penises as part of a ritual conceived to limit perverse sexuality).
This brings me to another weird Jewish ritual that is only practiced by the ultra-orthodox today and which I've speculated on elsewhere. I'm talking about Pidyon HaBen "in which the firstborn son is symbolically "redeemed" from a Kohen (a Jewish priest, descendant of Aaron) by paying him five silver coins — traditionally five shekels. The ceremony takes place 31 days after the boy's birth. The idea comes from the belief that firstborn sons are consecrated to God, and the payment releases them from that obligation" (again, Claude).
I originally thought that the firstborn was sacrificed, but I'm beginning to get another idea. Were the original Kohens eunuchs? Don't these two words have the same syllables, just rearranged? Since eunuchs are incapable of having children, was this their way of "reproducing"? Was castration the greater initiation and circumcision the lesser initiation symbolizing subservience to the eunuchs? Were rich families allowed to spare their firstborn sons from castration by paying the Kohens? Also, this would shed new light on the development of patriarchy and male privilege. The sexual organs of women are located inside the body, so they cannot be removed. Was the original "privilege" of men therefore the privilege of being castrated and inducted into the eunuch ruling class? Since women could not be "purified" in this way, they were considered eternally tainted by the lower drives. This prejudice remained even after the practice of castration was abandoned (or went underground). This would also explain the weird fascination with the supposedly wandering uterus which obsessed male doctors for so long (this is the origin of the word "hysteria").
Apparently, the Hebrew word "Kohen" is of uncertain etymology and related to the Arabic word "kahin" (K-H-N) which refers to "a pre-Islamic oracle or soothsayer". Were Kohens, Kahins, and Eunuchs all the same?
Also, the word for "eunuch" in Hebrew (saris) was apparently so identified with administrative power that there is some confusion over its meaning in the Bible:
Okay. So here is where I'm going with this. In The Medieval Empire of the Israelites, Grishin & Melamed argue very persuasively that there once existed a widespread and powerful network of castrated merchants who were the ancestors of today's Jews as well as today's Catholic priesthood. (I'm also playing with the idea that these are the "Gal" people who left that toponym scattered around the world.) But why? Well, maybe this "religion" emerged at a time when subjectivity and literacy had not yet developed to the point where they could serve as collective defenses against "spirit possession"/"outbreaks of fundamental sexuality"/mass psychosis. Perhaps the sexual context of that time was one in which children were routinely used as sex objects, which must have had the same psychic effect then as that described today by so many survivors of sexual abuse. In such a context, I can imagine that self-castration might emerge as a means of leaving the world of demons and rampant sadomasochism behind and moving towards narrative subjectivity. I presume that many, if not most, if not all of the original eunuchs had been molested as children as a matter of course. Castration might have represented a liberation, not a sacrifice.
I guess that contemporary India is probably the country that most closely approximates what the "ancient world" must have been like on a day to day level, but that's just a hunch. Claude:
The most cited benchmark [on child sexual abuse in India] is a national study commissioned [in 2007] by India's Ministry of Women and Child Development. It surveyed 17,220 children and adolescents and found that every second child in the country had been sexually abused — of whom 52.94% were boys and 47.06% were girls.
India is also a country in which we still encounter castrated ascetics.
We take subjectivity for granted. We learn to read and write as children. Our societies are based on literacy, repression, sublimation, and narratization. Children are off-limits as sex objects, legally at least. Sexuality is restricted to certain times and places. In such an environment, it is easy to be an individual. It is easy to organize sexuality in a way that is not TOO destructive, generally through a combination of a circumscribed genitality (marriage), authorized "partial drives" (the simple physical pleasures), and the sublimation of our drives into ideals. It more or less works. I would say that most people in the West suffer not from a sexuality which is too disorganized but rather from a sexuality which is too regimented and lacks vibrancy, leading to depression. But this must be a historical anomaly. At the early period which we are discussing here, things must have been totally different. The norm must have been rampant perversion and psychosis with almost no space for subjectivity, which depends on at least a partial refusal of sexuality to flourish. In such an environment, it must be a relief to be a eunuch, for some people at least. Imagine being a degenerate crack addict. Now imagine that you can completely end your addiction by cutting off your testicles. Well, if things are bad enough, you'll do it and you'll be grateful.
I now wonder if literacy and subjectivity, the foundations of civilization, were invented by such eunuchs, and that is what gave them so much power at a certain point in history. They alone possessed the "libidinal technology" allowing for the creation of complex human organizations based on a law other than the law of sadomasochistic sexual gratification. The philosopher most associated with the concept of the transcendental subject motivated solely by Reason, Immanuel Kant, was famously a virgin and basically an intact eunuch ("taken by itself sexual love is a degradation of human nature").
I can imagine that a time must have come when literacy and subjectivity had developed to the point where castration was no longer strictly necessary for a person to integrate a libidinal economy in which he was not at constant risk of psychosis. This would have been the point where circumcision replaced castration. There must have been some wild political debates around this. At this point, the eunuchs could fade into the shadows of history, having vouchsafed to humanity a civilization based on sublimation. For Jews today, circumcision is a sign that the animal body has been left behind and the body becomes more divine, properly human. Compare this to the delusion cited earlier in which the subject's body was absorbed into God "except for the testicles". Now, unlike castration, I do not believe circumcision has any such effect, but that is simply because it was never anything but a commemorative ritual.
I must add as well that removal of the testicles does not put an end to sexual drives completely, and presumably these original eunuch orders must have continued to struggle with their drives. This makes me think of today's pedophile priests, their direct heirs, as well as the fine line that separates a structure designed to exorcise sexuality and one that simply lets it in through the back door (i.e. mohels sucking baby penises as part of a ritual conceived to limit perverse sexuality).
This brings me to another weird Jewish ritual that is only practiced by the ultra-orthodox today and which I've speculated on elsewhere. I'm talking about Pidyon HaBen "in which the firstborn son is symbolically "redeemed" from a Kohen (a Jewish priest, descendant of Aaron) by paying him five silver coins — traditionally five shekels. The ceremony takes place 31 days after the boy's birth. The idea comes from the belief that firstborn sons are consecrated to God, and the payment releases them from that obligation" (again, Claude).
I originally thought that the firstborn was sacrificed, but I'm beginning to get another idea. Were the original Kohens eunuchs? Don't these two words have the same syllables, just rearranged? Since eunuchs are incapable of having children, was this their way of "reproducing"? Was castration the greater initiation and circumcision the lesser initiation symbolizing subservience to the eunuchs? Were rich families allowed to spare their firstborn sons from castration by paying the Kohens? Also, this would shed new light on the development of patriarchy and male privilege. The sexual organs of women are located inside the body, so they cannot be removed. Was the original "privilege" of men therefore the privilege of being castrated and inducted into the eunuch ruling class? Since women could not be "purified" in this way, they were considered eternally tainted by the lower drives. This prejudice remained even after the practice of castration was abandoned (or went underground). This would also explain the weird fascination with the supposedly wandering uterus which obsessed male doctors for so long (this is the origin of the word "hysteria").
Apparently, the Hebrew word "Kohen" is of uncertain etymology and related to the Arabic word "kahin" (K-H-N) which refers to "a pre-Islamic oracle or soothsayer". Were Kohens, Kahins, and Eunuchs all the same?
Also, the word for "eunuch" in Hebrew (saris) was apparently so identified with administrative power that there is some confusion over its meaning in the Bible:
Hebrew: סָרִיס (saris)
This word appears in the Hebrew Bible and is interesting because it almost certainly is a loanword, probably from Akkadian ša rēši meaning "he who is at the head" — referring to a high court official. This is a good example of how the institution came from Mesopotamia and the word came with it. Notably, saris in the Bible sometimes refers to castrated men and sometimes just to court officials generally, suggesting the word's meaning shifted or was ambiguous, possibly because not all such officials were actually castrated.
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As always, I'm grateful for your contributions. They are brilliant and provocative. It is a multifaceted challenge to reply, which gives me great pleasure.
I was always suspicious of recovery ethnographies-- such as those written about the Yanomami tribe. There was a big market for and a University (in the Lacanian sense) discursive orientation to understand ourselves through an imagined past.
My mentor-- a real lighthouse in an institution of increasing darkness-- said something to me like this: the Yanomami never bought in; they were always outsiders. (He would know. He was part of such an ethnographic detail in the early 70s. He wrote about customs, family structure and trade networks; his wife wrote about Nestle replacing nursing).
Based on his thoughts, my experiences, and the study of Stolen History, I think of these groups as survivors and outsiders. Something big went down. (I tend to agree with @Jef Demolder that that occurred in the 14th century). People were scattered. In many regions cities, fried or buried, became no-go zones. (To this day, I've yet to meet a Blackfeet who knows that there was something here prior to the arrival of white-people, despite the photographic and common-sense forensic evidence. I reckon the blackout was that total). After the calamity, these people had no central frequency to tune to. They started to hear, feel and follow the spirits of nature-- a predilection which may indicate why they survived in the first place.
To speculate on libidinal energy-- that (dark and crude, like oil) psychic energy at the heart of economic life in this world of ours (see, Eyes Wide Shut, 1999)-- based on ethnographic observation is pretty dubious. We live in strongly regulated discursive and physical containment fields. Therefore, our own fields of perception and re-cognition are limited; meanwhile, we transmit signals of our own. These signals are mixed; tribes-- this is well known-- mimic, and so do we; ethnographies were produced; and to be understood, they had to speak, for or against, in an approved University discourse. (Thus, the zany and dangerous spiritual and physical wars described in many ethnographies: frequency patterns had become mixed and unmanageable at the local level; people were disturbed; improvisational patterns gave way to violence and resignation). By the mid 19th century, this re-encroachment of a reborn civilization was coming with the speed of recovered railways; the force of a growing archive of laws and theories; the intelligibility of pre-fab imaginary frameworks; the physical finality of fences and guns.
Before the white-people found Oz out here, I can easily imagine living in a condition where sexual energy was not the central preoccupation. One could walk out of the village or encampment and commune with all sorts of energies, different frequency patterns. Rivers, elk, badgers, mice, winds, bitter-root, bees, trout-- all speaking. A buzzing confusion? Perhaps. But there was an order to things, call it Nature. The people, yet able to speak, could code the information and transmit it to each over time. Time, as we understand it, was not a concern. Nature tells people, in strong and subtle tones what to do and when. Sexual energies may or not have been strictly proscribed. My guess is that a certain laxity and, yes, creativity could prevail. But-- when sexual energy is not the supreme concern of control, there is no deviance. Thus, there is no seduction of transgression; no need to either enforce or f-with a prevailing Symbolic order. Why should there be? There was-- and still is-- an abundance of energy patterns to engage and contemplate.
There was a permeability of life forces and information. I don't want too be romantic. Life had to have been difficult. It always has been. For this reason alone there had to be communal order. Here I'll turn, with some trepidation, to the subject of childhood sexuality. Somewhere, Freud caustically commented on the adult refusal to acknowledge childhood sexuality. And so? When I was a child I was accosted by sexually aggressive young girls. They were years ahead of me in bodily and emotional maturity. But we knew-- we all knew-- everything was permitted, so long as parents didn't hear of it. We didn't want to disturb the communal order. So we were cautious. Parents, in turn, probably knew, but didn't want hear about it. And I can write as a parent: "hop on pop" ended in my household when I was suddenly hit by acute anxiety. Under that anxiety was a thought: this play is about to transform in ways that are not beneficial for all parties. Similarly, my mom wouldn't allow me to "crawl into bed with her" after about 6 years of age. In each case, an unspoken prohibition was put in place. A certain loss-- call it a loss of innocence-- occurred. Kids could roam around and play pretty freely until the mid-1990s or so. Then, a quiet hysteria gripped communal life in America and certainly Asia (and no doubt elsewhere). We, in our quietly held norms, had become prey.
From where did the original norms arise? Perhaps partly from Northern European ideas. But that doesn't explain it sufficiently for me. Norms and definitions vary, of course. So, too, do terminologies and frames of reference. But I think there is more. The Socrates of Plato offered that people are born with, as an inheritance from prior lives, the capacity to re-collection. There are truths that we bring into this life, and we know-- if we are paying attention-- when we violate them. Sex with one's kids seems to me to be one. This doesn't prove Socrates correct. My best proof for that came from pianist Bill Evans who intimated in an interview that he performed with the belief that there is a universal musical good. He didn't try to define it. He simply said you know it when you hear it. Despite his great genius, he was limited like every musician. He wrote and performed under those limitations with something in mind that can't be defined. And I and millions of others can hear it, too.
I really doubt that tribal people couldn’t hear or recollect this type of knowledge. One facet of many “pre-modern” (in quotes because we are all contemporaneous) cultures that proves it for me is the practice of trading women. This may seem perverse or even hysterical; for it seems to favor patriarchy. Perhaps it does. But as a father, I can attest that girls can be real trouble. They need to move out and slowly create and take control of their own households. I really doubt that a father could trade off his daughter if he had abused her sexually. The senior women in the counter-party would sense it. For they have sharp senses, deep intuition, and – I would argue-- an a priori notion of what a genuine and very valuable female addition to any community should be.
This brings me to eunuchs. It seems to me that to be truly tuned to the artifice of the prevailing social order, a huge problem is one’s sexual drives and the fallout from their exercise. Ritual and repetition replace flows of energies-- unless those energies and flows are aligned with the prevailing order. Circumcision appears to be a sign of allegiance to that regulatory order, which people have been conditioned to reproduce as natural. Are people troubled by it? Probably not. It would take some digging and “instruction”-- in the Socratic sense-- to get people to admit to it. As Socrates also notes, most people do go and live happily because they are in tune with the hive.
I was always suspicious of recovery ethnographies-- such as those written about the Yanomami tribe. There was a big market for and a University (in the Lacanian sense) discursive orientation to understand ourselves through an imagined past.
My mentor-- a real lighthouse in an institution of increasing darkness-- said something to me like this: the Yanomami never bought in; they were always outsiders. (He would know. He was part of such an ethnographic detail in the early 70s. He wrote about customs, family structure and trade networks; his wife wrote about Nestle replacing nursing).
Based on his thoughts, my experiences, and the study of Stolen History, I think of these groups as survivors and outsiders. Something big went down. (I tend to agree with @Jef Demolder that that occurred in the 14th century). People were scattered. In many regions cities, fried or buried, became no-go zones. (To this day, I've yet to meet a Blackfeet who knows that there was something here prior to the arrival of white-people, despite the photographic and common-sense forensic evidence. I reckon the blackout was that total). After the calamity, these people had no central frequency to tune to. They started to hear, feel and follow the spirits of nature-- a predilection which may indicate why they survived in the first place.
To speculate on libidinal energy-- that (dark and crude, like oil) psychic energy at the heart of economic life in this world of ours (see, Eyes Wide Shut, 1999)-- based on ethnographic observation is pretty dubious. We live in strongly regulated discursive and physical containment fields. Therefore, our own fields of perception and re-cognition are limited; meanwhile, we transmit signals of our own. These signals are mixed; tribes-- this is well known-- mimic, and so do we; ethnographies were produced; and to be understood, they had to speak, for or against, in an approved University discourse. (Thus, the zany and dangerous spiritual and physical wars described in many ethnographies: frequency patterns had become mixed and unmanageable at the local level; people were disturbed; improvisational patterns gave way to violence and resignation). By the mid 19th century, this re-encroachment of a reborn civilization was coming with the speed of recovered railways; the force of a growing archive of laws and theories; the intelligibility of pre-fab imaginary frameworks; the physical finality of fences and guns.
Before the white-people found Oz out here, I can easily imagine living in a condition where sexual energy was not the central preoccupation. One could walk out of the village or encampment and commune with all sorts of energies, different frequency patterns. Rivers, elk, badgers, mice, winds, bitter-root, bees, trout-- all speaking. A buzzing confusion? Perhaps. But there was an order to things, call it Nature. The people, yet able to speak, could code the information and transmit it to each over time. Time, as we understand it, was not a concern. Nature tells people, in strong and subtle tones what to do and when. Sexual energies may or not have been strictly proscribed. My guess is that a certain laxity and, yes, creativity could prevail. But-- when sexual energy is not the supreme concern of control, there is no deviance. Thus, there is no seduction of transgression; no need to either enforce or f-with a prevailing Symbolic order. Why should there be? There was-- and still is-- an abundance of energy patterns to engage and contemplate.
There was a permeability of life forces and information. I don't want too be romantic. Life had to have been difficult. It always has been. For this reason alone there had to be communal order. Here I'll turn, with some trepidation, to the subject of childhood sexuality. Somewhere, Freud caustically commented on the adult refusal to acknowledge childhood sexuality. And so? When I was a child I was accosted by sexually aggressive young girls. They were years ahead of me in bodily and emotional maturity. But we knew-- we all knew-- everything was permitted, so long as parents didn't hear of it. We didn't want to disturb the communal order. So we were cautious. Parents, in turn, probably knew, but didn't want hear about it. And I can write as a parent: "hop on pop" ended in my household when I was suddenly hit by acute anxiety. Under that anxiety was a thought: this play is about to transform in ways that are not beneficial for all parties. Similarly, my mom wouldn't allow me to "crawl into bed with her" after about 6 years of age. In each case, an unspoken prohibition was put in place. A certain loss-- call it a loss of innocence-- occurred. Kids could roam around and play pretty freely until the mid-1990s or so. Then, a quiet hysteria gripped communal life in America and certainly Asia (and no doubt elsewhere). We, in our quietly held norms, had become prey.
From where did the original norms arise? Perhaps partly from Northern European ideas. But that doesn't explain it sufficiently for me. Norms and definitions vary, of course. So, too, do terminologies and frames of reference. But I think there is more. The Socrates of Plato offered that people are born with, as an inheritance from prior lives, the capacity to re-collection. There are truths that we bring into this life, and we know-- if we are paying attention-- when we violate them. Sex with one's kids seems to me to be one. This doesn't prove Socrates correct. My best proof for that came from pianist Bill Evans who intimated in an interview that he performed with the belief that there is a universal musical good. He didn't try to define it. He simply said you know it when you hear it. Despite his great genius, he was limited like every musician. He wrote and performed under those limitations with something in mind that can't be defined. And I and millions of others can hear it, too.
I really doubt that tribal people couldn’t hear or recollect this type of knowledge. One facet of many “pre-modern” (in quotes because we are all contemporaneous) cultures that proves it for me is the practice of trading women. This may seem perverse or even hysterical; for it seems to favor patriarchy. Perhaps it does. But as a father, I can attest that girls can be real trouble. They need to move out and slowly create and take control of their own households. I really doubt that a father could trade off his daughter if he had abused her sexually. The senior women in the counter-party would sense it. For they have sharp senses, deep intuition, and – I would argue-- an a priori notion of what a genuine and very valuable female addition to any community should be.
This brings me to eunuchs. It seems to me that to be truly tuned to the artifice of the prevailing social order, a huge problem is one’s sexual drives and the fallout from their exercise. Ritual and repetition replace flows of energies-- unless those energies and flows are aligned with the prevailing order. Circumcision appears to be a sign of allegiance to that regulatory order, which people have been conditioned to reproduce as natural. Are people troubled by it? Probably not. It would take some digging and “instruction”-- in the Socratic sense-- to get people to admit to it. As Socrates also notes, most people do go and live happily because they are in tune with the hive.
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I would like to add something from my experience with castrated animals. Those are not scientific observations, of course. In my household we always had domestic animals, the majority being cats and dogs. I don´t know if its common on other countries, but those animals were created in an open environment, with access to the streets, and contact with other domesticated animals as well as "stray" ones. It´s common ground to castrate those domestic animals, but of course not everybody does it, or to the extent of all their animals.
That being said, what I actually observed is: castrated animals tend to stay at home most of the time. My castrated male dog, when he takes to the street, he never strays too far from the entrance to our house, and likes to stay flocked with some other dogs from a neighbour, also castrated. They are less prone to pick fights with other dogs and also care less about cats or even live together in harmony. I also have an uncastrated cat in my house. This dude does not interact with my other castrated cats well, tends to stay away from home days long, pick fights with my own dog, often comes back full of injuries/or signs of disease and does not like petting or playing around with humans. Castrated dogs are, of course, so much easier to be trained.
This information may be common sense, but makes me wonder if Usello is really right when speculating that humans were at first herd animals. The first ones to be "domesticated" would of course be the castrated ones. Maybe that´s what originated the first "priest class" of eunuchs. Knowing these things, I would never waste any time training an uncastrated animal. Not to mention the benefit of population control.
That being said, what I actually observed is: castrated animals tend to stay at home most of the time. My castrated male dog, when he takes to the street, he never strays too far from the entrance to our house, and likes to stay flocked with some other dogs from a neighbour, also castrated. They are less prone to pick fights with other dogs and also care less about cats or even live together in harmony. I also have an uncastrated cat in my house. This dude does not interact with my other castrated cats well, tends to stay away from home days long, pick fights with my own dog, often comes back full of injuries/or signs of disease and does not like petting or playing around with humans. Castrated dogs are, of course, so much easier to be trained.
This information may be common sense, but makes me wonder if Usello is really right when speculating that humans were at first herd animals. The first ones to be "domesticated" would of course be the castrated ones. Maybe that´s what originated the first "priest class" of eunuchs. Knowing these things, I would never waste any time training an uncastrated animal. Not to mention the benefit of population control.
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Thanks to everyone who has contributed. I wish I had more time to devote to this thread.
@SonofaBor , what you describe here is provocative -- a 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. Go interview a member of a tribe of Gypsy thieves in Romania. He will not say, "I am a Gypsy. We are degenerate people. We steal from others. We sexually abuse our children. We are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Our ancient legal code, Maremma, is idiotic and superstitious. We use it to justify our immorality and victimize outsiders. Some of us have converted to Evangelical Christianity. This is part of a complex psychological game we play with ourselves to evacuate the incredible guilt that our violent communal lifestyle generates. We are liars, rapists, murderers, and thieves."
I suspect all cultures follow this pattern to some extent, from the Yanomami to my own. One of my favorite books of all time is Claude Levi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques", written in 1950. It's both a gripping adventure story and a work of speculative philosophy. Levi-Strauss recounts his anthropological expeditions to the Brazilian jungle in the 1930s, where he and his research group encountered a series of increasingly "primitive" tribes as they penetrated deeper into the brush. These tribes are strikingly different from each other despite their geographical proximity and similar levels of technological development. The thesis he puts forward is simple: there is therefore no such thing as a primitive tribe. There is no such thing as a direct connection with nature. All human cultures are equally alienated in some version of an artificial symbolic order based on laws, prohibitions, and taboos. This order can be mapped onto nature, but is never a direct reflection of nature. Even those bug-eating Indians covered in mud over there are alienated in a symbolic order which is no less artificial than some guy on an iPhone. What the "savage mind" does lack, however, is abstract concepts, which are an artifact of literacy. This is where "nature" comes in: its observation offers the illiterate man a concrete, ready-made classification schema (some animals eat other animals, some plants grow in certain places but not in others, the seasons succeed each other, etc) which can serve as a model for other orders (the proper ordering of the different members of a human society, for example). In the absence of a purely differential classification system based only on empty concepts (species, phylum, family, class. etc.), the categories discernible in nature are the closest thing to "abstract concepts" that people had access to. (A fascinating example, taken from Anthelme Arvière: he claims that the words for "year" in the different Romance languages (anno, année, etc.) are derived from the word for "ass" (âne in French) because the gestation period of the donkey is almost exactly 365 days.) It occurs to me as well that what is lacking in nature is negation. Everything kind of melts together organically and nothing is ever really "not" something else in an airtight way. Perhaps this is why negation, contradiction, and the number zero do not exist in the unconscious, as Freud discovered.
It occurs to me that this may be why astronomy was so important to humanity at one point. It was the closest thing to a purely geometrical/differential structure in nature, one that could be used as an imaginary basis upon which to construct and naturalize a human order. Remember the inscription on Kant's tombstone: Two things fill the heart with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the starry skies above, and the moral law within.
Beware of anyone who tells you that his social or moral order comes straight from the stars.
Lacan used Levi-Strauss to construct his idea of the subject alienated in a Symbolic order which eternally stood between Man and Nature.
Is this true? I don't know. It corresponds to my experience of life and describes the modern society I belong to. The structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss does not require me to posit the existence of a radically different mind, simply a different classificatory system, one in which categories interpenetrate each other rather than exclude each other. To return to the theme of this thread, I suspect that one of the "advantages" that the modern, literate, abstract, linear, disembodied Symbolic Order has over the older, non-literate, analog, concrete, embedded, and nature-based Symbolic Order is that it is better at keeping "fundamental sexuality" (see my previous posts) locked away. For this reason I theorized that this Symbolic Order, which has become familiar to us all, emerged as a result of mass castration. It occurs to me as well that Hegel's famous Dialectic of the Master and the Slave is all about castration. The slave is castrated by the Master. It is precisely this castration that leads the Slave to develop an interest in the abstract Symbolic Order, the subsequent mastery of which allows the Slave to overthrow the Master, who has never had to learn anything in his life other than the art of naked domination.
This is also the plot of "The Shawshank Redemption".
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
@SonofaBor , what you describe here is provocative -- a 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. Go interview a member of a tribe of Gypsy thieves in Romania. He will not say, "I am a Gypsy. We are degenerate people. We steal from others. We sexually abuse our children. We are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Our ancient legal code, Maremma, is idiotic and superstitious. We use it to justify our immorality and victimize outsiders. Some of us have converted to Evangelical Christianity. This is part of a complex psychological game we play with ourselves to evacuate the incredible guilt that our violent communal lifestyle generates. We are liars, rapists, murderers, and thieves."
I suspect all cultures follow this pattern to some extent, from the Yanomami to my own. One of my favorite books of all time is Claude Levi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques", written in 1950. It's both a gripping adventure story and a work of speculative philosophy. Levi-Strauss recounts his anthropological expeditions to the Brazilian jungle in the 1930s, where he and his research group encountered a series of increasingly "primitive" tribes as they penetrated deeper into the brush. These tribes are strikingly different from each other despite their geographical proximity and similar levels of technological development. The thesis he puts forward is simple: there is therefore no such thing as a primitive tribe. There is no such thing as a direct connection with nature. All human cultures are equally alienated in some version of an artificial symbolic order based on laws, prohibitions, and taboos. This order can be mapped onto nature, but is never a direct reflection of nature. Even those bug-eating Indians covered in mud over there are alienated in a symbolic order which is no less artificial than some guy on an iPhone. What the "savage mind" does lack, however, is abstract concepts, which are an artifact of literacy. This is where "nature" comes in: its observation offers the illiterate man a concrete, ready-made classification schema (some animals eat other animals, some plants grow in certain places but not in others, the seasons succeed each other, etc) which can serve as a model for other orders (the proper ordering of the different members of a human society, for example). In the absence of a purely differential classification system based only on empty concepts (species, phylum, family, class. etc.), the categories discernible in nature are the closest thing to "abstract concepts" that people had access to. (A fascinating example, taken from Anthelme Arvière: he claims that the words for "year" in the different Romance languages (anno, année, etc.) are derived from the word for "ass" (âne in French) because the gestation period of the donkey is almost exactly 365 days.) It occurs to me as well that what is lacking in nature is negation. Everything kind of melts together organically and nothing is ever really "not" something else in an airtight way. Perhaps this is why negation, contradiction, and the number zero do not exist in the unconscious, as Freud discovered.
It occurs to me that this may be why astronomy was so important to humanity at one point. It was the closest thing to a purely geometrical/differential structure in nature, one that could be used as an imaginary basis upon which to construct and naturalize a human order. Remember the inscription on Kant's tombstone: Two things fill the heart with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the starry skies above, and the moral law within.
Beware of anyone who tells you that his social or moral order comes straight from the stars.
Lacan used Levi-Strauss to construct his idea of the subject alienated in a Symbolic order which eternally stood between Man and Nature.
Is this true? I don't know. It corresponds to my experience of life and describes the modern society I belong to. The structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss does not require me to posit the existence of a radically different mind, simply a different classificatory system, one in which categories interpenetrate each other rather than exclude each other. To return to the theme of this thread, I suspect that one of the "advantages" that the modern, literate, abstract, linear, disembodied Symbolic Order has over the older, non-literate, analog, concrete, embedded, and nature-based Symbolic Order is that it is better at keeping "fundamental sexuality" (see my previous posts) locked away. For this reason I theorized that this Symbolic Order, which has become familiar to us all, emerged as a result of mass castration. It occurs to me as well that Hegel's famous Dialectic of the Master and the Slave is all about castration. The slave is castrated by the Master. It is precisely this castration that leads the Slave to develop an interest in the abstract Symbolic Order, the subsequent mastery of which allows the Slave to overthrow the Master, who has never had to learn anything in his life other than the art of naked domination.
This is also the plot of "The Shawshank Redemption".
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
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I'd like to switch gears and return to the psychoanalyst Gerard Bonnet. I've just read another of his books on perversion. There is a lot to say here. In my first few posts, I speculated on the relationship between the Goddess archetype and the weird phenomenon of transgenderism. There appears to be some deep connection between worship of the goddess (who may or may not have a penis) and castration. Well, Bonnet traces all forms of "perversion" back to a disturbed relationship with the mother, one that results in the unconscious fantasy of a devouring, destroying, omnipotent mother goddess as well as its contrary, the fantasy of a loving, kind, forgiving goddess.
The first thing that occurs to me upon reading this is that MTF transgenders, including the so-called "Illuminati Trannies" discussed earlier, as well as the Hijras of India and other such "traditional" magic transsexuals, are NOT trying to "become women". They are trying to become THE GODDESS as part of a perverse revenge fantasy directed precisely at their own mothers. Their "magical powers" would be nothing but the powers of life and death which we all unconsciously attribute to the Great Mother. Lacan noted that there is no representation of "woman" in the unconscious. There is, however, a representation of Mother.
(I've just ordered Neumann's "The Great Mother" to read for this thread.)
Bonnet argues more generally that the perverse ritual/scenario is above all a desperate attempt on the part of the subject to symbolize something that happened to him. The future perverse subject is someone whose primordial experience of childhood is that of being "raped" in some way. The human organism matures slowly. It is not ready to be exposed to adult sexuality until after puberty. When a child is confronted with something that he should not see, feel, or experience, he will absorb it as a kind of "soul rape". Crucially, the perverse ritual that later emerges is a means of staging the unspeakable in a desperate attempt to externalize (and therefore get relief from) this "scene" that haunts his unconscious. Here Bonnet reflects on the widespread practice of ritual sacrifice. His take lines up with René Girard's theory of the scapegoat. In a society made up of people who are effectively "all perverts" due to premature exposure to sex & violence, the collective sacrificial ritual is a way of getting "relief" from tormenting internal forces perceived as demonic in a way that is structured and regulated by the collective. A kind of collective orgasm followed by a temporary collective "post-nut clarity", as it were.
Let me put it more bluntly. In a society in which everyone has the psychological profile of a pedophile/rapist/murderer, it makes sense that they would get together and coordinate their perversions...
There is apparently a belief in witchcraft that the potency of a sacrificial ritual is directly connected to the degree of innocence of the victim. Well, this makes sense if the perpetrator is staging the moment he lost his own innocence.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein theorized that the young child cannot yet understand the concept of another person who can be both "bad" and "good" at different moments. The child associates bad feelings (pain, hunger, sickness) with a "bad mother" and good feelings with a "good mother" who are two distinct figures in his unconscious. If all goes well in the developmental process, these two figures merge into one. If things do not go so well, this original psychic cleavage remains unresolved and the subject is caught between these two incompatible archetypes.
Does the evil goddess become the good goddess the moment the collective bloodlust is satisfied?
Attending the sacrifice has the secondary effect of traumatizing (or re-traumatizing) anyone who witnesses it.
So we have a kind of loose relationship between all of these themes:
- childhood trauma
- the compulsion to perform a perverse ritual in which an innocent is harmed
- killing the god/goddess
- becoming the god/goddess
- transsexualism
Castration and circumcision fit in here. In both Judaism and Islam, circumcision is a ritual which is enacted in front of an audience. In both cases an "innocent" is mutilated. Was castration also a public ritual?
Idea: castration begins as a simple farm management technique to control the human herd. It then gets caught up in the dialectic of perversion described above. At some point, a dialectical reversal takes place in which the eunuchs seize power due to the fact that they have been granted the unintentional "superpower" of being partially immune from the psychotic dominion of the alternately bloodthirsty and loving Goddess.
This is an important point. Was there a time when the success and prosperity of a kingdom depended entirely on the trained minds of the eunuch classes? It is not hard to imagine how such a situation might eventually lead to the eunuch bureaucrats simply seizing control.
We are all basically eunuchs compared to our ancestors.
Here's another possibly cherrypicked example that appears to pull some of these threads together. General Butt Naked was a warlord in the Liberian Civil War of the 90's. He's worth a long case study, but the following short excerpts are enough for us here:
General Butt Naked.
- attended human sacrifices from a young age
- performed his own sacrifices as an adult
- engaged in cross-dressing during and after ritual murder
It sounds to me like the pre-battle sacrifice of a teenager is what allowed Blahyi and his men to "draw down" the power of the Goddess, who possessed them and made them invulnerable killing machines. They honored her by dressing as Her (not as "women") during their rampages.
I am very sorry to present all this in such a disjointed form. I sense a connection between all of these phenomena but the best I can do at the moment is lay everything out side by side.
I'd like to switch gears and return to the psychoanalyst Gerard Bonnet. I've just read another of his books on perversion. There is a lot to say here. In my first few posts, I speculated on the relationship between the Goddess archetype and the weird phenomenon of transgenderism. There appears to be some deep connection between worship of the goddess (who may or may not have a penis) and castration. Well, Bonnet traces all forms of "perversion" back to a disturbed relationship with the mother, one that results in the unconscious fantasy of a devouring, destroying, omnipotent mother goddess as well as its contrary, the fantasy of a loving, kind, forgiving goddess.
To explain destructive sexual behaviors, we most often invoke today the prevailing misogyny, the contempt for women, or a dominant patriarchy. In reality, it is not women as such who are targeted, but the mother, the life force she embodies; she is the one who is attacked. Not despised or rejected, but simultaneously lauded and reduced to nothing... I have deliberately emphasized what specifies each of the three main extreme perversions: the symbolic murder of the mother in incest, the actual murder of a maternal substitute in rape, and the appropriation of primary ideals essential for psychological survival in the case of the pedophile. But in clinical practice, these three characteristics are often found or overlap, especially in the most serious assaults. In all cases, we find a settling of accounts with the birth mother, a primal conflict that has never been able to be formulated and resolved. This killing is not gratuitous; it has a precise objective: to appropriate the ideal force it embodies and represents, to make it one's own, and to experience a pleasure essential to survival. ... We lack sufficient images or words to account for them [sexual perversions]. Our ancestors attempted to do so through myths, rites, practices, and tragedies that are no longer practiced today and that also aimed to exorcise their evils.
The first thing that occurs to me upon reading this is that MTF transgenders, including the so-called "Illuminati Trannies" discussed earlier, as well as the Hijras of India and other such "traditional" magic transsexuals, are NOT trying to "become women". They are trying to become THE GODDESS as part of a perverse revenge fantasy directed precisely at their own mothers. Their "magical powers" would be nothing but the powers of life and death which we all unconsciously attribute to the Great Mother. Lacan noted that there is no representation of "woman" in the unconscious. There is, however, a representation of Mother.
(I've just ordered Neumann's "The Great Mother" to read for this thread.)
Bonnet argues more generally that the perverse ritual/scenario is above all a desperate attempt on the part of the subject to symbolize something that happened to him. The future perverse subject is someone whose primordial experience of childhood is that of being "raped" in some way. The human organism matures slowly. It is not ready to be exposed to adult sexuality until after puberty. When a child is confronted with something that he should not see, feel, or experience, he will absorb it as a kind of "soul rape". Crucially, the perverse ritual that later emerges is a means of staging the unspeakable in a desperate attempt to externalize (and therefore get relief from) this "scene" that haunts his unconscious. Here Bonnet reflects on the widespread practice of ritual sacrifice. His take lines up with René Girard's theory of the scapegoat. In a society made up of people who are effectively "all perverts" due to premature exposure to sex & violence, the collective sacrificial ritual is a way of getting "relief" from tormenting internal forces perceived as demonic in a way that is structured and regulated by the collective. A kind of collective orgasm followed by a temporary collective "post-nut clarity", as it were.
Let me put it more bluntly. In a society in which everyone has the psychological profile of a pedophile/rapist/murderer, it makes sense that they would get together and coordinate their perversions...
There is apparently a belief in witchcraft that the potency of a sacrificial ritual is directly connected to the degree of innocence of the victim. Well, this makes sense if the perpetrator is staging the moment he lost his own innocence.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein theorized that the young child cannot yet understand the concept of another person who can be both "bad" and "good" at different moments. The child associates bad feelings (pain, hunger, sickness) with a "bad mother" and good feelings with a "good mother" who are two distinct figures in his unconscious. If all goes well in the developmental process, these two figures merge into one. If things do not go so well, this original psychic cleavage remains unresolved and the subject is caught between these two incompatible archetypes.
Does the evil goddess become the good goddess the moment the collective bloodlust is satisfied?
Attending the sacrifice has the secondary effect of traumatizing (or re-traumatizing) anyone who witnesses it.
So we have a kind of loose relationship between all of these themes:
- childhood trauma
- the compulsion to perform a perverse ritual in which an innocent is harmed
- killing the god/goddess
- becoming the god/goddess
- transsexualism
Castration and circumcision fit in here. In both Judaism and Islam, circumcision is a ritual which is enacted in front of an audience. In both cases an "innocent" is mutilated. Was castration also a public ritual?
Idea: castration begins as a simple farm management technique to control the human herd. It then gets caught up in the dialectic of perversion described above. At some point, a dialectical reversal takes place in which the eunuchs seize power due to the fact that they have been granted the unintentional "superpower" of being partially immune from the psychotic dominion of the alternately bloodthirsty and loving Goddess.
This is an important point. Was there a time when the success and prosperity of a kingdom depended entirely on the trained minds of the eunuch classes? It is not hard to imagine how such a situation might eventually lead to the eunuch bureaucrats simply seizing control.
We are all basically eunuchs compared to our ancestors.
Here's another possibly cherrypicked example that appears to pull some of these threads together. General Butt Naked was a warlord in the Liberian Civil War of the 90's. He's worth a long case study, but the following short excerpts are enough for us here:
General Butt Naked.
From Wikipedia:
So Blahyi:
- attended human sacrifices from a young age
- performed his own sacrifices as an adult
- engaged in cross-dressing during and after ritual murder
It sounds to me like the pre-battle sacrifice of a teenager is what allowed Blahyi and his men to "draw down" the power of the Goddess, who possessed them and made them invulnerable killing machines. They honored her by dressing as Her (not as "women") during their rampages.
I am very sorry to present all this in such a disjointed form. I sense a connection between all of these phenomena but the best I can do at the moment is lay everything out side by side.
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