A Force for “Stability” (12)

An Oak  with Its Limbs Sawn Off.

Copyright Eso A. B.

When it comes to mythology, there is nothing new about men killing women. Among other things, we have the image (familiar to almost everyone) of Perseus holding the head of Medusa Gorgon by her hair in his hand.

The ancient Greeks are famous for justifying killing women by telling tales that the women they had killed deserved death, because they were or are ugly. The story about Scythian women warriors may be an invention to justify public murder of war prisoners or innocent inhabitants of a city. The women portrayed in the link look more like street demonstrators today throwing rocks, while the truly lethal arms (bow and arrows) are in the possession of men.
Where does this desire to kill women arise from?
One answer may be provided by the failure of mimesis of one sex to project itself onto the other, because of the failure by nature or social circumstances to separate the sexes in sufficiently polarized entities. In other words, a young male, home from his first kill during a hunt of reindeer or wild boar, may imagine that if he can kill a deer and boar, he can also impose on a woman himself through an unwelcome (to her) sexual act, in other words, rape. A woman may, on the other hand, extend a successful and undiscovered lie, to realize an unfulfilled desire and do violence to trust by puting the fruit of her license in her lover’s or husband’s care.

Dislike of the other sex, may be a matter of dysfunctional genes—as in homosexual men and/or women. The image projected by the mind eye of a male does not attach itself to a woman, but a man. In other words, to use poet’s (Machado) words (blog 5): “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.” The homosexual’s eye fails to be seen back by the biological eye of the other sex, but by the secreted sex. Yet again, if a woman is not desirable to a man, he may imagine her as ugly, whereas a woman may reject an impotent man as the king of her clan or tribe.

This is a good place to remember that Sigmund Freud said that: “Male and female is the first distinction that you make when you meet another human being, and you are accustomed to making this distinction with unquestioned certainty”, Hirschfeld , a famous sexologists of the 20^th century “posits (as per link) that a human being is neither man nor woman, but at the same time man and woman in unique and therefore unrepeatable proportions.” In other words, the “unrepeatable proportion” has to find a match, which may not in all circumstances be an easy thing to do.

The failure of the mind’s eye to attach itself to the opposite sex, may, if met by social disapproval, find an escape through “racial” or some other social discrimination. That is: a woman smells bad, menstruates, looks ugly, is unfriendly, is poor, is black, is white, is red, has slanted eyes, etc. The reasons for rejection may be nthed to an unnatural degree if it has support from the leaders of society.

The same projections may be used to achieve attachment rather than rejection. For example, one may persuade the mind of someone yet biologically immature (generally young children) to attach itself to an object as determinedly as a gosling may attach its affections to a bathtub. In the West, this phenomenon was exploited by the Church to instil in small children a belief in Santa Claus. To make Santa ever more compelling, a whole series of stories about Christmas evolved. The stories are made all the more acceptable by connecting them with gift giving, followed by yet another story about Santa’s gift factory on the North Pole, which gifts are produced by dwarfs disguising child labor.

It is no news, that today even the Pope is complaining about the extent that the “gift” has been commodified and turned into money.

The knowledge of how to infect and contaminate a child (and humankind) did not arrive to humankind quickly. It had not yet become conscious knowledge among the natives of Tierra del Fuego in the days of Charles Darwin or Aztecs of Mexico in the days of Cortez.

Anthropologist notes and history show that primitives or arch-humankind tended to live in a social setting, where persuasion was a result of direct violence. If one escape becoming a sacrifice him- or herself, one was nevertheless compelled to go to the public square and watch the public murders of someone having their heart torn from his-her chest cavity or (if living in Europe) to hear the screams of one burnt to a crisp on a pile of wood.

It was in Tierra del Fuego that men of the Selk=nam tribe persuaded women and children that the masked men masquerading before them on certain Festival days were Gods. To disbelieve the men’s performance and call out “There’s Uncle Charlie!”, got one his-her brains bashed. Before the arrival of the written word and written law, violence was a way to freeze the subjective mind and reduce an individual’s thought processes to a repetition of banalities.

Aztec sacrificial violence was got used to and accepted, and became a social ritual. As nightmarish as miming violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates is, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, society becomes dependent on it. Insecurity and nightmares do not hinder the social animal, but become a force for its “stability”, one that compels it to continue its violent behavior.

Why Killing Women May Make You Wealthy (11)

White Plastic Chair, Green Plastic Plant, and A Wood Pile.

Copyright Eso A. B.

The Serpent Mountain that serves as a home of Mother Earth is a dangerous place. The most obvious danger for whoever visits there is snakebite.

There are also less obvious dangerous elements than snakes about Mother Earth, too, which is why we must pay attention to the descriptions of what She wears, how She looks, and what She does. For example, Mother Earth is said to be a Lady with the Serpent Skirt, which is to say, She is also the flayed or, more accurately, the self-flaying one. Like a chameleon, she may metamorphose into a human being.

A serpent is a snake, and a snake is noted for shedding its skin. This is what causes us to find her as having similarities with the waxing and waning moon. This permits us to say that the moon, too, wears a serpent’s skirt. If the moon is associated with a woman, we are certain that once a month she also sheds blood.

Women sacrifices at Templo Mayor (now Mexico City) were often flayed, and the flayed skin was worn by the high priests. One may argue that such a sacrifice is an all too literal presumption on the part of the priest and the society that he serves. The all too great literalness and directness is what may cause us to forget about the symbolic aspects of the ritual. It is this that causes the sacrifice to become suspect of being overdone, therefore a possible fake, and despite the charisma of the cruelty, suggestive—over a period of time—of overreaction because of a fundamental lack of faith in the action by the sacrificer.

Over a period of time, the resentment by the public over priestly overbearingness is likely to demand that the ritual cruelty is redressed, or the priests themselves may become sickened by it and desist from fulfilling all the demands of the ritual. Writes David Carrasco (“City of Sacrifice”, p. 77): “While many city-states were securely integrated [by means of war and terrifying sacrificial rituals thereafter] into the Aztes sphere, some were alienated to the direction of other kingdoms, and the capacity for rebellion increased. So, when the Spaniards came, Indian allies were not hard to find, and, in fact, played vigorous roles in the conquest of Tenochtitlan.” Indeed, the foregoing may equally describe the story of the Sphinx (re Sophocles ”Oedipus Rex", where in this writer’s opinion children were sacrificed, and Oedipus is the hero who rescues the City of Thebes from this sacrificial ritual).
As discussed in earlier blogs, Coatlique or Mother Earth is identified with the underground of Earth, the world of black dirt, worms,  and the dead. For this reason, when Mother Earth conceives Huitzilopochtli, a warrior God engendered from the moon-shadow of an imaginary penis, (possibly visualized as a feather falling from the sky), Earth conceives him as an armed male—a symbolic manner that replicates an erection. When born, Huitzilopochtli’s birth-appearance as an armed child outrages the Gods of the South, the realm of the Sun. These Gods (four hundred in number), incited by Earth’s eldest daughter, Coyolxauhqui, all agree to go kill Hitzilopochtli, the phantasm of violence.

If we think at the symbolism of a feather, we may see it as a result of a dream, possibly a nightmare, the latter especially, because it falls from the sky at night time and drifts and enters the deepest chambers within Mother Earth. In short, if we stay with the idea (blog 9) that the art of war and violence is learned at night by a full Moon, a ball of black feathers (Quetzalcoatl disguised as wind and the shadow of the moon) may be imagined as symbolizing men on a surprise night time raid—penetrating the camp of their enemy, they may have taunted as womanish and, thus,  learned to despise it. Even today, it is not uncommon for bullies to taunt their opponents as being weaklings and womanish in behavior.

Be that as it may, the siblings of Hitzilopochtli stand no chance against his violence. After Huitzilopochtli is born, he commences with killing his mother and all his siblings. The act establishes violence and war as what the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung called “a permanent Revolution”, except in ancient Mexico, the “permanent Revolution” manifests itself in rituals of permanent human sacrifice. This suggests that violence is taught and learned, in the same manner that a young boy is taught to overcome “buck fever http://www.buckfever.com/ ” by being urged not to fear to shoot to kill, then skin the game, and as was custom at the Norman court, presend the rectum of the stag to the king or some other high ranked lord.

It is thus how by killing a harmless creature, one steels one’s self. And killing—of game and men (or women and children), becomes ever easier to accomplish, and the slaughter of millions but increases the glory of some CIC (Commander in Chief). When thus trained men are bunched together in a ball of feathers, they form a military company able to put fear into other men, the womanish kind, who have not gone through such a barbaric training schedule.

As professor Carrasco notes (p.67), for Aztecs the ability to go to war and be violent served as a tool for the accumulation of wealth.

Gifts may become a 'tribute' : “…the Templo Mayor was the symbolic gathering place of the great tribute network of the Aztec empire. Not only was [Templo Mayor[ the material expression of Aztec religious thought, it was also … a ritual container of sacred symbolic gifts from many parts of the unstable, shifting, political geography of the empire.”

Given the scenes in preceding blogs, we can now see how for the Aztecs violence became a learned compulsion. Having learned to shoot the buck, attack and kill Mother Earth, violence was henceforth taught to the rest of society through all sorts of rituals of forced mimesis. As nightmarish as violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates, society comes to depend on violence, nevertheless; and insecurity and nightmare are not hindrances that may cause one to desist. Instead, violence becomes a form of dependency on pornography.

Just as big or small game hunters cannot tolerate criticism of their bloody sport, a society habituated to watching human sacrifice, will react with shock to any suggestion that such sacrifice creates a society unable to hold together through love and self-sacrifice.

Even though sacrifice is needed to escape virtual reality, that is, virtualism must be replaced by actual reality, this necessity is misused by teaching and then practicing compulsive murder, which then ckauns to be sacrifice and, therefore, a good on behalf of love and unity.

 Murder and Moonlight (10)

A Will to Be and A Will to Live.

 Copyright Eso A. B.

Yet there remains the night, and the night may be identified with the darkness of earth below the ground, the Earth as a womb. [Writes historian of religions David Carrasco: “All [food] that comes from the Earth Mother comes from the death that produces life.”
 
And since below the ground is where the dead tend to be placed, it became identified with the dead. Thus, at night, in the womb of Mother Earth, there drifted down a few feathers, the stems of the feathers perhaps imagined as the ribs of a skeletons of the dead. The feathers or ribs then fertilized Mother Earth, and inside Earth there began to grow a babe. The child was not a physical creature, but remembering that feathers were his seed, he was a mental image of a male from before the great learning about the toll and cost of violence.

The child was not a female, but a male, a male having no predestined role in life only in a limited sense. Whereas a woman is predestined to bear children, and becomes preoccupied with bringing the children up, the male child, may roam in the darkness at will, even perform violent acts, and build in the deep of the night make-believe castles. No one threatened  by violence will question the reality of the male make-believe or confirm that it has no more lasting value than the skin of a snake or the passing of a phase of the moon.

If we may enter this world of the male-dark, we are unlikely to be sure that we have created anything that will see sunlight. To make sure that we do not lose faith in our violent creation or the result of it, we must maintain the illusion (see the link above) that what we have created is real and will last.

However, for a creation to last, it becomes necessary to be willing to sacrifice our lives (“die as Gods die”), lest the illusion proves unreal and a consequence of murder.

Instead, rather than sacrifice our lives to ourselves (as the Sun and her daughters, the stars, do, when they set below the horizon in the evening  to rise again in the morning), we demand that not we, but others sacrifice themselves in place of ourselves. When they fail to do so (because there is no reason to be persuaded by our delusional make-believe), we declare them our enemies, sneak up on them during the night, and kill them.
It is then, after the murder, that the act of killing another forces itself on us as a nightmarish reality. Moreover, we (if male) become especially concerned that our victims are women, because women have no need of and do not partake in our male make-believe. Writes historian of religions David Carrasco:

“The startling practice of the sacrifice of women is one of the major religious patterns of central Mesoamerica that anthropologist and historians of religions have often avoided in their construction of theory and approaches to ritual life. It is remarkable….” (p.192)

The sacrifice of children by the Aztecs follows the same logic: there is no sin in sacrificing children, because we believe (through violent insistence) that what we create by violence has everlasting value.

I should not forget to also mention the “blood moon”, red colored in the evening sky. In folklore, it is usually believed to be an ill omen, a sign of danger, and bloodshed. The moon in the above link is rising from out of the Atlantic; the view is from the northwest of Washington, D.C., looking over the Senate building toward Alexandria and Arlington.Using the night and moonlight, choosing especially a night when the moon is full, to attack an enemy one fears to attack in daylight, suggests that when the Earth was ruled by the Sun and her Daughters, violence was learned from and abstained from.