Castration, Circumcision, and Transgenderism from Antiquity to Today

[AntiSoof]

it is a penis eed

This is a brilliant recapitulation and testament to the import of this thread.

Some reflections:




I wish I could underscore this operation, this sentence, a hundred times.

2020-- it is as if it didn't happen. Life goes on. Some of us, however, got our final proof. The Liberal Establishment is daft and cowardly. An impotent, castrated father.

What is lost in the repeated castrations of American intellectual life? The capacity to both experience separation anxiety and longing and nonetheless push forward without forgetting the unity? Isn't there honor in that consciousness? It is deeper than ideology, deeper than DNA; for ultimately, we only have clues but no composite. We don't know who we are, but here we are? And, from that, the questions never cease.

As in the Dao De Jing,

故常無欲，以觀其妙
常有欲，以觀其徼
此兩者，同出而異名

Anciently and without common desire, we see wonder.
Often and with desire, we see borders (the forms).
From both modes simultaneously, the shared origin of all named things appears. (my translation)




How much drama! And comedy! The structure is present in every relationship I've known.

Is it very difficult for a goddess to reflect on this pattern? Any evidence from the stories? Is this impossibility a difference between the gods and us?

If possible and via this reflection, can maturity occur and people act without recourse to Kantian-style maxims and prescribed identity patterns?

What is the cost of that? Loss of innocence, familiar patterns, safety and the ease of artifice?

A new field can emerge. I seem to believe in this-- contrary to the preponderance of evidence.

"I wish I could underscore this operation, this sentence, a hundred times.".

I wonder which word processor does not tolerate the word "penis"? Can anyone name that word processor?

 

[Frostychud]

I wonder which word processor does not tolerate the word "penis"? Can anyone name that word processor?

It was Gmail.

I'm in the middle of writing a long and somewhat confused post in which I investigate the religion of Osiris and the identity of the "Persians" in light of the castration hypothesis. But in the meantime, I ran across a very interesting article in the "Cahiers Jungiens de Psychanalyse" by Marie-Laure Colonna about the hermaphrodite as an unconscious symbol.

"On this point, Jung is categorical: in dreams, images of the androgyne are never symbols of the Self as a goal...far from being a symbol of the objective to be attained, they express a transition, a stage of psychic fusion-confusion, a mix of opposites, a dangerous interpenetration of the conscious and the unconscious."

"It seems to me that images of the androgyne in dreams...signify moments of crisis, disorientation, or dissociation that accompany the painful encounter with the lower functions."

She goes on to cite several passages in which Jung insists that the hermaphrodite is not a forward-looking or "liberating" fantasy image, but rather something monstrous and terrifying that points backwards, towards a dangerous state of psychic confusion.

"If I had such a vision [Jung is commenting on the dream of a patient in which a hermaphrodite appears], I would be horrified. It would shake me violently and grab me by the guts."

Jung is clear: there is no "freedom" to be found in the symbol of the hermaphrodite. On the contrary, the hermaphrodite must be separated into its constituent parts in order for the subject to pass from a state of pre-symbolic confusion of opposites to a "higher", properly dialectical conjunction of opposites.

 

[ProjectFlammarion]

I'm not sure what the exact line on this forum between the connections between history and modern events is, but I do think this topic ties directly to @Frostychud 's research into castration.

I've been seeing the connection between various known faces for TPTB and them funding Testosterone Replacement Therapy. The argument being that after the chemical castration that caused men's testosterone to half over the past 50 years, there is a need to complete the castration process using Testosterone Replacement Therapy. TRT replaces the body's natural testosterone production, essentially making the level of castration complete yet variable based on the TPTB's needs. The final goal being a class of eunuch warriors, that are castrated until the government needs them to fight and they turn on the TRT faucet.

So with the US government declaring it'll offer testosterone testing and TRT to members of the military, this thread is very relevant to modern events.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w3In-tjINE

 

[Frostychud]

I mentioned that I am working on a longer post in which I try to connect all this with the religion of Osiris. There are so many threads to weave together and my knowledge of classical historical texts is not sufficient for me to make really educated arguments. So as always, take everything I write with a grain of salt. I will keep hammering away in any case.

The "Persians" are a big theme in both Herodotus and the Bible. This empire has always seemed fishy to me, but of course that might simply be due to the fact that I am not well-read enough. Philippe Wajdenbaum argues, in "Argonauts of the Desert", that the Old Testament was based on Greek mythology, and that the Bible was written as a kind of backdated "prequel" to the Histories of Herodotus, which is why the Bible ends more or less where Herodotus begins, with the Persian Empire. Wajdenbaum is not a chronological revisionist, but again, I am working from the paradigm that all these texts were written no more than five hundred years ago and maybe much more recently.

I mentioned Roger Sabbah, who argues that the Pentateuch was composed by the Greek Ptolemies after conquering Egypt in order to write the original Jewish/Egyptian religion out of existence and replace it with a corrupted version which they controlled (the Septuagint) via their fictional character, Moses, and their new God, Kyrios. These two theories fit together.

Here is where I am going. Were the "Persians" and the "Pharisees" (Pharisians) one and the same? Was the Persian empire not a land empire based in today's Iran, but one of the names of the original merchant network that controlled the ancient world? Was this the "medieval empire of the Israelites" that Grishin and Melamed describe, the one that practiced castration, the one that was defeated and replaced by the Greek, Roman, and Ottoman empires?

I can't develop this idea (which I encountered on the website of Didier Lacapelle) completely here without going too far afield. But I would like to tarry with it a bit. It simplifies (perhaps oversimplifies) a lot of things. The principal language of the Persian Empire in its trade dealings was Imperial Aramaic, which is basically proto-Hebrew.

The word "Pharisee" in English comes from the Hebrew root PRS(h) which means "set apart" in the sense of a priestly class set apart from ordinary people. "Persian" and "Pharisian" are more or less the same word. Was the Persian Empire simply the empire of eunuch priests? While considering this idea, it struck me that the distinction between the set-apart PRSns and the masses still exists in the English language. I am talking about the words PERSON and PEOPLE. They come from two unrelated Latin words, persona and populus, the first referring to a kind of mask (which is itself curious) and the second referring to humans considered as an animal mass. No one knows how these roots entered Latin, however. The French peuple and the German Pöbel still both suggest the helot classes. Is this a linguistic relic of a time when the Persians, i.e. Templars/Jews/eunuchs, still ran the global trade empire?

In Jewish tradition, a boy receives a name when he is circumcised. Historically, one's name day was considered more important than one's birthday, because this was the moment a baby passed from the "animal" realm to the properly "human" one. Was the name "bought" at the expense of the genitals? Was castration what transformed someone from a nameless "people" into a "person" with the right to a name?

Cyrus the Great, a Persian, is the only non-Jewish Messiah in the Bible. Roger Sabbah argues pretty convincingly that the Bible was written by the Greek Ptolemies with the goal of substituting their fabricated God, Kyrios, for the original Egyptian/Jewish God, Osiris. Well, "Kyrios" looks an awful lot like "Kyros", which is how Cyrus is written in Greek. Hypothesis: the fake character Cyrus was a first attempt on the part of the Greek Empire to "hack" the Jewish/Egyptian/Persian Empire by inventing a universalist Messiah and inserting him into their rewrite of the Jewish (Egyptian) religion. Is "Kyrios" a mix of "Kyros" and "Darios"? Was he written into the Septuagint after the (real) destruction of the first Temple in order to Hellenize the Jews/Persians? Was Cyrus a first Jesus?

Claude:

Ezra the scribe, the founding figure of the Torah-centered Judaism from which Pharisaism descends, operates under explicit Persian royal authorization. The Persians funded the rebuilding of the Temple, authorized Jewish legal autonomy, and actively promoted Torah observance among the returning exiles.

In this oversimplified version of things, there were only two real rival empires at the "beginning" of history, the Jewish/Persian/Templar and the Greek. The Elephantine Papyri are intact papyrus documents found in Egypt and written in Demotic, Greek, and Aramaic that are supposedly 2500 years old. I originally assumed they were forgeries, but once we take into account that "Ancient Egyptian" history is no more than a few hundred years old, the idea of papyrus letters surviving in the desert is no longer so unrealistic. They show that "Jews" did not have the Torah yet, worshiped multiple gods, and had multiple temples. In one of the letters, the invading "Persians" are accused of destroying their temples.

Going back to the theme of this thread, it occurs to me that every representation of Egyptian workers we have shows beardless men. Supposedly these slaves were shaving their beards every day with bronze razors before heading off to work themselves to death in the fields...no way. The entire Egyptian religion, in which the rulers and the people were supposedly united happily and harmoniously through the worship of Osiris and the institution of Maat, or divinely ordained justice administered by benevolent priests, sounds like an early version of Stalinist propaganda to me. My guess is that "Maat" was more like the equivalent of North Korean "Juche". Egypt was the first industrial farm and perhaps the place where castration- and religion-based brainwash techniques were perfected in order to maximize output. Forget about the pyramids and temples for a moment. The Nile Delta is a perfect natural farm, and this is why it was so important in the past. Mainstream history considers Egypt to be the place where commodity farming, in which surplus is produced and sold at profit, was invented. No wonder every empire (Persian, Greek, Roman) not only wanted to conquer it, but wanted to export its culture. Were "Maat" and "Osiris" and castration the key to transforming primitive communities around the world into slave colonies? I like this theory because it offers us a hard, material explanation for why Egypt was so important: the geography of the Nile Delta, which made it a perfect natural commodity farm and established the template for imperial extractive sharecropping operations around the world.

I will go into more detail in my next post.

 

[ProjectFlammarion]

The word "Pharisee" in English comes from the Hebrew root PRS(h) which means "set apart" in the sense of a priestly class set apart from ordinary people. "Persian" and "Pharisian" are more or less the same word. Was the Persian Empire simply the empire of eunuch priests? While considering this idea, it struck me that the distinction between the set-apart PRSns and the masses still exists in the English language. I am talking about the words PERSON and PEOPLE. They come from two unrelated Latin words, persona and populus, the first referring to a kind of mask (which is itself curious) and the second referring to humans considered as an animal mass. No one knows how these roots entered Latin, however. The French peuple and the German Pöbel still both suggest the underclasses. Is this a linguistic relic of a time when the Persians, i.e. Templars/Jews/eunuchs, still ran the global trade empire?

Cyrus the Great, a Persian, is the only non-Jewish Messiah in the Bible. Roger Sabbah argues pretty convincingly that the Bible was written by the Greek Ptolemies with the goal of substituting their fabricated God, Kyrios, for the original Egyptian/Jewish God, Osiris. Well, "Kyrios" looks an awful lot like "Kyros", which is how Cyrus is written in Greek. Hypothesis: the fake character Cyrus was a first attempt on the part of the Greek Empire to "hack" the Jewish/Egyptian/Persian Empire by inventing a universalist God/Messiah and inserting him into their rewrite of the Jewish holy books. Is "Kyrios" a mix of "Kyros" and "Darios"? Was he written into the Septuagint after the (real) destruction of the first Temple in order to Hellenize the Jews/Persians? Was Cyrus a first Jesus?

The words Pharisee and Persian are almost identical in Arabic as well. Persian is pronounced Farsi. Interestingly, Knight (faris) is also very close to Pharisee (farisy) and Persian (farsi). I don't know if the knight comment helps.

 

[Frostychud]

The words Pharisee and Persian are almost identical in Arabic as well. Persian is pronounced Farsi. Interestingly, Knight (faris) is also very close to Pharisee (farisy) and Persian (farsi).

So in Arabic, Persians, knights, and Pharisees are all basically the same...very interesting.

I don't know if the knight comment helps.

Yes, it does, very much, because of the connection between knights and the chaste devotion to the Lady (...Cybele, Isis) which they are supposed to embody (chaste comes from "castrate"). We've explored at length the possible connection of the phoneme GAL with castration and I think it is no coincidence that the knight who finds the Grail in the most well-known version of the legend is named Sir GALahad and succeeds because of his "purity". In John Boorman's Excalibur, one of my favorite films, the first symbol of royal power is the sword Excalibur (an obvious phallic reference), but its indiscriminate use leads Camelot to ruin via the sexual excess of Lancelot, at which point the knights must begin searching for its "antidote", the Grail (an obvious symbol of the vagina, or perhaps of castration). The whole thing has the structure of an initiatic journey.

In Boorman's version, the knight who finds the Grail is not Galahad, but Perceval. Look at that again: PERSeval. What are the odds that the two knights most known for their purity and chastity happen to have names built from precisely the two phonemes we've singled out?

Note as well that Perceval is only able to find the Grail after he refuses to drink the cup offered by Morgana, who lives in a state of incestuous sexual union with her son.

"Faris" also kind of resembles the Hebrew word for eunuch, which is "Saris" (it also means court official, hmm). Faris also connects with Pharaoh, which I will talk about in my next post.

It occurs to me that this may also be where we get the word pure, which in Latin is PURUS. There is no commonly accepted Indo-European antecedent for this word. I suspect it comes from the Aramaic root discussed in my previous post.

So:

Persian - Pharisee - Pharaoh - Faris - Person - Purus

What other words fit in here?

I guess this is where the city of Paris gets its name as well.

Also, the Trojan War begins when "Paris" steals "Helen"...aren't those the two names of the rival empires, the Persian and the Hellenic?

ADDED: Guess what the Hebrew word for "knight" is?

פָּרָשׁ

 PARASH

So Persians = Knights = Pharisees. These were the elite "persons" ruling over the slaves.

 

[Jef Demolder]

On the association GAL
Flavius Josephus, War of the Jews (translation William Whiston), IV,9,10.
On the different types of rebel groups that where active in Jerusalem.

For these Galileans had advanced this John, and made him very potent, who made them suitable requital from the authority he had obtained by their means; for he permitted them to do all things that any of them desired to do, while their inclination to plunder was insatiable, as was their zeal in searching the houses of the rich; and for the murdering of the men, and abusing of the women, it was sport to them. They also devoured what spoils they had taken, together with their blood, and indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, without any disturbance, till they were satiated therewith; while they decked their hair, and put on women's garments, and were besmeared over with ointments; and that they might appear very comely, they had paints under their eyes, and imitated not only the ornaments, but also the lusts of women, and were guilty of such intolerable uncleanness, that they invented unlawful pleasures of that sort. And thus did they roll themselves up and down the city, as in a brothel-house, and defiled it entirely with their impure actions; nay, while their faces looked like the faces of women, they killed with their right hands; and when their gait was effeminate, they presently attacked men, and became warriors, and drew their swords from under their finely dyed cloaks, and ran every body through whom they alighted upon.

 

[Frostychud]

Jef, good catch, thanks. This passage sounds like pure fantasy until you realize that people were doing the exact same thing as recently as thirty years ago in Liberia. Here's that quote from Joshua Blahyi, AKA "General Butt Naked" again:

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people — so many I lost count.​

Notice that Josephus' Galileans drink blood, just like Blahyi.

These Galileans definitely appear to be uncastrated. We are squarely in the realm of the enigmatic psychic phenomenon discussed at length above, in which men spontaneously identify with the Goddess as they engage in rape, murder, and plunder. If mass castration were indeed something that occurred in the ancient world, it was probably precisely to stop behavior such as this. Roger Sabbah claims that for Jews, the foreskin represents "other gods", "impurity", "mud", "the seed of the primordial serpent", "the foreign part in man", "the reminder of the violent struggle between Horus and Seth", etc. This "foreign part" must be cut off. It seems obvious to me that the foreskin, which is no more "evil" than an earlobe, is an innocent stand-in for the testicles, which really do function as the "foreign part in man" which is in direct contact with "other gods". There is no way that one was not exchanged for the other at some point, as Freud believed.

Apparently, the Greeks and Romans found the foreskin to be aesthetic, going as far as to tie it closed during athletic events in order to keep the glans concealed (!). A circumcised penis was considered a grotesque abomination. This gives me an idea. As I have mentioned, Roger Sabbah argues that the Septuagint was the original Old Testament, and that it was commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphios as a mocking inversion of the original Egyptian religion, which was the cult of Osiris. This religion included the worship of the Apis bull as well as the worship of the Passover Lamb, which represented Horus. According to Sabbah, the Greeks forced the newly-created "Jews" (defrocked Egyptian priests of Osiris) to begin killing and eating bulls and lambs as a form of ritual humiliation. Likewise, the prohibition on representing God aimed at eradicating hieroglyphics. Priests were banished from temples and forced to attend synagogues to study the new Greek Torah. In other words, the many bizarre and quite annoying rules Jews are supposed to live by were given to them as shackles by a conqueror. This makes intuitive sense to me as it explains the strange coexistence within Judaism of a culture of domination and a culture of submission (to the Torah) which contradict each other. Well, continuing that logic, what better form of humiliation than forcing circumcision on Jews?

Here I will continue to speculate. If the Egyptian priests already practiced full castration, in some cases at least, on both themselves and their slaves, and the Greeks abhorred the practice, it makes sense that circumcision would be a compromise between the two after the Ptolemaic conquest. The Greeks could tolerate circumcision, which had the added benefit of humiliating the Jews in their eyes, whereas the Jews could retain some relic of their ancient practice.

Note that Sabbah's theory also suggests that today's Jerusalem was indeed the original Biblical Jerusalem (which is not to say that there were not other, pre-Septuagint Jerusalems such as Rome, Marseille, Paris, Moscow, Constantinople, etc.). Revisionist historians like Andrey Pustogarov correctly point out the absurdity that a city in the middle of the desert with no ocean access should be anyone's grand capital. If the demoted Jews were parked there on purpose by the Ptolemies, however, it makes much more sense. The whole "Land of Milk and Honey" thing in the Bible would therefore be a cruel joke played on the Jews by the Greeks.

My guess: the worldwide proto-Jewish Osiris empire was full of "Jerusalems" which fell one by one to rival empires, leading to all the confusion around the different cities with that name. Rome fell to the Latins, Egypt fell to the Greeks, Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, Moscow fell to the Russians, etc. The loss of the money machine that was the Nile Delta prison farm appears to have been a particularly painful pill to swallow, perhaps because Egypt really was the original home of the "Jews", or perhaps just because it was so profitable. This also lines up with Fomenko's idea that the kings of the Horde around the world were all sent "back home" to Egypt to be buried.

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

 

[Frostychud]

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST

I'd like to note a few more things about GAL and PRS.

The historic title of the Jewish exilarch (a king without a kingdom) was Resh Galvata in Aramaic ("head of exile").

Remember, the Hebrew word for "region" is galil. Was each galil associated with a different "Resh Galvata"? Notice as well the similarity between the Aramaic resh and the Latin rex, both of which mean "head" despite (supposedly) having no etymological connection. And guess what, the word region is etymologically connected with rex since both come from the root REG-, meaning "straight". This makes me think as well of the word PARISH, which links us back with the PRS cluster. Parish supposedly comes from the Greek paroikos, and that might be true, but what happened to the hard K?

So, does a REGION form around a REX/RESH, a PARISH around a PERSIAN/PHARISIAN, and a GALIL around a GALIT (or a GALLUS)?

(I considered deleting the preceding paragraph because it is so fantastical and unsupported by evidence but maybe there is a nugget of truth somewhere in there.)

I would like to hit one more GAL connection that opens another line of inquiry. In French, la gale refers to a skin condition, today considered to be scabies or mange. However, the word galeux came to function as a stand-in for social outcasts and partially overlapped with the concept of leprosy. As I explored in another thread, when you look at old texts, "lepers" were clearly much more than just people suffering from a horrible disease. They were seen as a politically organized parallel society that posed a threat to Christendom. Please read these two posts:

Was the temple of King Salomo in Spain, Part 03
Was the temple of King Salomo in Spain, Part 03

Jacques Barzilay:

It was not the Jews who were the first minority to be systematically accused of well poisoning, but the lepers of France and Aragon, who were attacked much more often than Jews in 1321. (...) "These lepers would put poison in fountains and wells, so that Christians who drink or otherwise consume the water would die an early death [NOTE: suggesting lepers are by definition not Christians]." (...) The place of lepers in medieval culture was ambiguous: on the one hand, they were entitled to protection and charity; on the other, their disease was described as particularly vile and impure. This ambiguity stemmed from the idea that leprosy was not an ordinary disease, but one that carried symbolic, and even religious, meanings.

The word "leprosy" appears to have a pretty straightforward etymology, from the Greek "lepos", meaning "scaly". But I can't help but see that PRS in there. In modern French, LE PERSE, "The Persian", looks and sounds very similar to some version of leper. One proposed etymology of the French word galeux traces it back to a "Judeo-French" root from the 13th century, gallos, the meaning of which is uncertain. I was actually able to find an online scan of the manuscript in which the word appears, but there is no translation, so all I can do is stare at the Hebrew letters.

I am now going to advance a really wild idea. In the Book of Leviticus, we get a long, bizarre passage about skin rashes and their treatment. In Talking With God, Roger Isaacs argues that the Ark was a communication device, and that it was powered by radioactive elements, which caused radiation burns on the skin of the Israelites, hence all the detailed precautions about handling the Ark and ritually purifying the skin (which involved quarantining oneself from the Ark). Radios are not THAT complicated, so the idea does not strike me as completely far-out.

My really wacky idea is the following: if the original Jewish exiles, the Galut, were regularly afflicted with skin rashes caused by proximity to radioactive Arks which they used to communicate with each other, all these associations make sense. In French the resemblances are striking: is a lépreux just a l'hébreu? Is a galeux just a galut?

- There is a merchant network spread across the ancient world
- This network has a special connection with the world's first industrial farm, the Nile Delta (lower Egypt), as well as, perhaps, the similar Rhone Delta in France (upper Egypt)
- This network practices a form of social management that involves castration, circumcision, and ritual transgenderism
- This network also possesses a technology, the Ark, which allows them to communicate over great distances
- The Ark causes them to have rashy skin
- They refer to themselves by the phonemes GAL and PRS, which in Aramaic mean "exile" and "set-apart"
- These phonemes come to be associated with BOTH rashy skin and castration/circumcision by outsiders
- Were these lepers/Jews poisoning wells with radioactive material from their Arks?

Let me stress again how wildly speculative this idea is.

(Also, let's add PRESIDENT and PRIEST to our list of words with that PRS connection.)

One more weird detail before I wrap up. In esoteric Judaism, the Ark of the Covenant contained the relics of Joseph, the man who invented stock market manipulation, the first man to enslave a nation to the financier class. Joseph is considered the "phallus of God" (?), which connects us back to the Japanese ritual discussed earlier in which priests parade around a Mikoshi (= an Ark) as well as a sculpture of a severed phallus. It also links back to Osiris. I will talk about Joseph, Jacob, and Osiris in another post. Jacob received a "thigh wound" during his fight with the angel, meaning that he was castrated (the thigh wound = castration equivalence is an attested trope). Noah was also castrated by his grandson, Canaan.

Why are all these patriarchs castrated?