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. Rather, 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 and intended consequences; history-- such as circumcision-- repeats; some people don't care and others mistake their beliefs for reality, etc.

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.

(Please note, I was writing as @Frostychud previous post appeared. Please consider this response a footnote....)

 

[Frostychud]

I brought up David Ayalon's "Eunuchs, Caliphs, and Sultans" in my last post. Ayalon is an Israeli historian, so calibrate accordingly. It's a fascinating read. I'm only about sixty pages in and I have already found enough material to fill another post. Ayalon's thesis appears to be that the Mamluk phenomenon and the eunuch phenomenon were two sides of the same coin. While he does not go as far as to say that eunuchs were the power behind the throne, that is the thesis that emerges from between the lines. Judge for yourself.

Mamluk or mamaluk (/ˈmæmluːk/; Arabic: مملوك, romanized: mamlūk (singular), مماليك, mamālīk (plural);[2] translated as "one who is owned",[5] meaning "slave")[7] were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Mongol, Eastern and Southeastern European)[8] enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties in the Muslim world.[11] They were purchased as military slaves, converted to Islam, and trained in martial and courtly skills. Upon completion of their training they were freed, but remained part of the ruling military caste, forming elite regiments and, in some periods and regions, rising to sovereign power.

So eunuchs were freer to move around than their patrons, were in charge of money and property, and ran the prisons.

"The impact of the eunuch on him was overwhelming. Neither did that impact cease after his graduation." We see here that the eunuchs essentially created and trained the Mamluks.

Ayalon insists on the importance of the eunuch class in shaping the sexuality of the young Mamluks.

"A constant and dominant element"

Of course this begs the question: were the eunuchs pulling the strings even after the rulers became adults?

Eunuch supervisors.

This is of particular interest. What this suggests to me is that the Mamluk (and therefore the eunuch) phenomenon was real, and the rest of Islamic military history was forged during the great falsification enterprise.

"So many first ranking military commanders". This confirms one of my intuitions, namely that the Muslim Warrior phenomenon has to be articulated with the eunuch commander phenomenon. Eunuchs were the brains whereas Mamluks were the muscle. If I may paraphrase Ayalon in more straightforward language, he shows that the Mamluk armies, which were the backbone of Muslim military power, were slave-soldiers kidnapped as children and subjected to trauma-based mind-control by eunuchs throughout their initiation and training. Could we really expect such people to attain psychic sovereignty upon reaching adulthood, or would they essentially all function as brainwashed "Manchurian Candidates" puppeteered by the discreet eunuch brotherhood?

If that sounds extreme, read the book yourself, I am not exaggerating Ayalon's thesis, just formulating it a bit more sensationalistically than he does. Looking forward to reading further and sharing here.

 

[Frostychud]

I know that I am spamming this thread with different theories in rapid succession, but I have time to research at the moment and the ideas keep coming.

I think I have a good one today.

The cult of Mithras remains a mystery. We have no surviving written documents describing the Mithraic religion. What we do have is a lot of frescoes depicing the tauroctony, the central ritual of Mithraism. Here is a description:

The Tauroctony

Mithraism - Wikipedia

Mithraism was based in Rome.

The oldest known representative of the tauroctony scene is CIMRM 593 from Rome, 2 a dedication of a certain Alcimus, slave steward/bailiff (servus vilicus) of T. Claudius Livianus, who is identified with T. Iulius Aquilinus Castricius Saturninus Claudius Livianus, the praetorian prefect under Trajan. ​

Check out the bolded name of that prefect - CASTRicius. I think you can probably guess where I am going with this.

Look at the image. Look where the bull is sitting in relation to Mithras. His head is at crotch level.

1. Andrey Pustogarov argues pretty persuasively that bull worship was the religion of the original world empire which radiated outwards from Spain in the 16th century (in particular to Asia Minor), and that the tradition of bullfighting that still exists in Spain is a direct relic of this religion. Moses was originally depicted with horns to identify him with the bull. The circular and semi-circular theaters that we find around the rim of the Mediterranean were not built to perform plays by Aristophanes. They were built for bullfights. According to this theory, the word "church" comes from the original circle of the arena.​

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2. Grishin and Melamed argue that the original merchant empire was run by eunuchs, as I have mentioned several times already in this thread.​

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3. Flavio Barbiero argues that the Mithraic cult was the esoteric version of Christianity reserved for high-level initiates, and later became Freemasonry.​

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4. Mr. E argues that the biggest secret of Freemasonry and other such secret societies is elite gender inversion.​

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So here's my idea. It's very simple. The bull has always been a symbol of uncontrolled virility. This requires no complex explanation.

Was the Mithraic rite simply...castration?

Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and others have suggested that the Mithraic rite enacted the symbolic murder of the "lower self" governed by instincts, represented by the bull, and the emergence of a "higher self" governed by reason, represented by Mithras.

Note in the depictions of the tauroctony that the scorpion attacks the genitals of the bull.

There is another striking detail here, namely the two torch-bearers, Cautes and Cautopates. One holds his torch up, and the other holds his torch down. Supposedly they represent the sunrise and the sunset, or the spring and fall equinoxes.

I think they also represent the phallus in its erect and flaccid states.

Supposedly the word "cauterize", which means to seal an amputation wound with a hot iron, comes from the Greek word "to burn", kaiein. That looks like a stretch to me. Where do the U and the T come from? Do the names "Cautes" and "Cautopates" represent the initiate before and after castration and cauterization? Note as well the resemblance of those two words. Is the torch they hold the instrument with which the wound was cauterized?

There were supposedly seven degrees of Mithraic initiation. Was the seventh degree full physical self-castration?

The initiation ritual of Skull & Bones involves the initiate being forced to lie in a coffin and masturbate as he recounts all of his sexual misdeeds to his future brothers. Isn't this a first "castration", in which sexuality is explicitly associated with death?

Mithraism as an institution was intimately associated with the Roman officer corps, which immediately connects us to the information I presented in my previous post about the role of eunuchs in the training and commanding of the Mamluk armies.

(By the way, Roman forts and military camps were called "castra" (!). Just a coincidence, nothing to see here, these were never gelding centers, move along!)

Was the bullfight the means by which the eunuch rulers illustrated their religion and ideology to the uncastrated masses? Look at a bullfight today. The bullfighter's strength comes from his discipline, his courage, and his ability to out-think the bull. He is smaller and weaker than his adversary, but in the end the bull's physical strength is no match for the torero's science and self-mastery.

Were the original bullfighters eunuchs? Was this how the lesson of the necessity of instinctual sublimation was driven home to the people the eunuchs were attempting to "civilize" (transform into docile workers)?

I may be stretching here, but isn't the impossible love between a woman and a torero also a recurring motif in Spanish lore?

From the website linked to above:

The literary and epigraphic sources for the taurobolium have been collected by Duthoy.6 None of them make any reference to Mithras. The ritual is associated with the cult of the Great Mother, the Magna Mater, Cybele. (...) Franz Cumont...suggested that the cults of Cybele and Mithras were associated. ​

This is getting even more interesting.

Cybele - Wikipedia

Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood, the Galli.[3] Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention.​

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The festival date coincided, more or less, with events of the Roman agricultural calendar (around April 12) when farmers were advised to dig their vineyards, break up the soil, sow millet, "and – curiously apposite, given the nature of the Mother's priests – castrate cattle and other animals."​

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Rome's strictures against castration and citizen participation in Magna Mater's cult limited both the number and kind of her initiates. From the 160s AD, citizens who sought initiation to her mysteries could offer either of two forms of bloody animal sacrifice – and sometimes both – as lawful substitutes for self-castration. The Taurobolium sacrificed a bull, the most potent and costly victim in Roman religion; the Criobolium used a lesser victim, usually a ram.​

It is no exaggeration to say that the cult of Cybele centered on castration. Here we rejoin the more psychoanalytic themes discussed above of the Great Mother archetype (I am currently reading Neumann's excellent "The Great Mother" and hope to discuss it here).

Lastly, I think there may be a connection between these "Galli" and all the (mostly coastal) -gal places we find around the world (Galicia, Wales, Portugal, Galway, etc.). Joshua had his soldiers circumcised at "Galgal". The exoteric Mithras stand-in Jesus Christ was from Galilee. The Galata neighborhood of Istanbul was founded by Genoese merchants and historically associated with Jews and foreigners. If someone else wants to pursue this angle, I would be very grateful.

I think I'm really hovering over the target here if I may say so myself.