Introduction
Continuing from last time, we will recount some small history of Pastoureau’s The Bear. The book in its entirety deals with cultural techniques employed by institutions. Every institution is a discipline (or practice, or sadhana) of a certain type (or goal or orientation). Here, we see the various referents typified to the Bear; then the Christian campaign to destroy it. We actually won’t really be touching on the particular processes Christianity used, as I don’t think it is necessary. Rather, we will be referring to the various ways certain figures have been used as divinization procedures. These are orientated to what we’ve outlined in Foundations. Most importantly, is the relationship between the king and the Divine; this is another complexity to what we described previously as the asymmetrical speaker-hearer. As we go through the article we will illustrate different organizations and how they’ve influenced these loves and unions.
Michel Pastoureau’s The Bear: A History of a Fallen King
Almost everywhere, from the Alps to the Baltic, the bear stood as a rival to Christ. The Church thought it appropriate to declare war on the bear, to fight him by all means possible, and to bring him down from his throne and his altars.
Cultural History
The past, particularly the distant past, cannot be understood—and even less judged—by the yardstick of the sensibilities, values, and knowledge of the present. In this area, what is “scientifically correct” is not only deplorable but also the source of many errors, confusions and absurdities. Natural and biological sciences cannot and should not impose their convictions on the social sciences. Besides, what is natural history but a form of cultural history of a particular type?
The laws of the sciences, while prescient, have no hold over the cultural and more primal forces of the previous sheaths. In fact, if anything, they are a therapy, what are the scientificisms of modern man if not overextended into the realm of anthropology and humanisms? These institutions are dedicated, purely, to the preservation of the relative through faithful practices—we continually test the relative to see if it has any hidden, transcendent, motives behind it. Even the “cultural” is just another “scienticism” of a different type; where the people who are benefactors of “the cultural” faithfully test it through time, exactly in the same methods the scientists do. Really, what we mean is that it is only through the disciplining of the relative through an orientation to the transcendent that leads to intelligibility.
While this may seem a critique of Pastoureau it is in fact the opposite. Wrongful practice of the sciences and their encroaching, blindly, upon the other disciplines (without any accepting their own “internal scienticisms”) is exactly what he is pointing out. I think his emphasis on the cultural is a necessary consequence here.
Three Bear Motifs Mythologically
We will discuss in short the three major bear mythological motifs, and then draw a common theme between them. Much like “cultural history” we will be focusing on the sadhana of the bear and the various injection sites it appears:
[…] Iphigenia [was] sacrificed by her father Agamemnon when the fleet preparing to sail for Troy was becalmed at Aulis. […] Artemis was holding back the winds, and the seerer Calchas had explained to Agamemnon […] he had to sacrifice his daughter to her. [U]nder pressure from his brother Menelaus, he sent for Iphigenia on the pretext of betrothing her to Achilles; then led her to the altar of the goddess, not to marry her but to immolate her. Artemis […] changed her into a she-bear, and in that form she escaped from the priest's knife and disappeared. Artemis […] made her into her principle priestess, until [her] brother Orestes one day came to free his sister.
In Pastoureau’s remarks it is implied, and suggested, that seer Calchas, while he can discern that Artemis is behind the scenes of the current tempest, he was mistaken in the sacrifice. The idea, is that in order for Artemis to prolong her bene-factory—the maintenance of her presence as good—an offering must be made. Artemis is said to have then taken pity on Iphigenia, perhaps because of this. The bear is used as a metamorphosis and the powers are not, exactly, used for destruction, but the opposite. It not only protects her from the potential of burning at the stake, but also the avoidance of man’s explicit destructive technologies.
It is a long standing tradition for fire to be made a purifying motion, one that transmutes the lower forms into a kind of energy—a life force emblematic of a higher sheath—and then discards what is just simply debris. What is interesting, it that this would be symbolic of the transference to a higher ring, while discarding the lower, but the bear transformation keeps all levels and rings of the being. It is the “becoming-Artemis” or occupying the center. Remember this, because this is a common theme.
It also takes place on that of an altar, the betraying of trust. Had their words, the affliction of their being and sheaths, been in harmony, then the betrothal would have taken place. Her, married and happy. However, it is because of an impurity, or the drama between spoken and reality, imposed on the hearer, that requires a forceful metamorphosis on the hearer’s part.
[Artemis’s] priestess were sometimes called “little she-bears” (arktoi).
[L]ittle girls younger than ten were dressed in yellow and white, acted as priestesses, and participated in the great festivals preformed in honor of the goddess. The ceremonies concluded with the sacrifice of a she-bear. It is probable that this was a toned-down form of an older ritual in which these same girls were perhaps violated and sacrificed. The legend explained that the sanctuary at Brauron had been created to appease the anger of Artemis after the inhabitants of the village had killed a bear that had devoured a female child. The goddess had let it be known through an oracle that she demanded that the villagers ritually devote their daughters to her, first as immolated victims, later as devoted priestesses.
Euripedes, moreover, asserts that Iphigenia herself […] established the sanctuary at Brauron […]
The two events are clearly connected to the same mythos, or upholding of speaker-hearer relations. All that was included in the beginning, the drama of the loving union and the betrayal of the ushers—those that guide you to the place in which transformative creation of a new identity can occur, in love and harmony—is what begets the descent of the exact destructions this misapprehension caused. Again, if all words were true and the speaker truly was a speaker—not one who took his power in vain, the lost-in-translation telephone game of ignorant half-baked conclusions—the perhaps, these older customs wouldn’t have felt appropriate.
Perhaps, if they had intuited Artemis’ grace in the holding back of the winds, and the marriage of Achilles, properly, then the senseless reactive, violent forces wouldn’t have had to have been turned inward and used against these miscreants.
Then we have this myth, much more happy, but still tragic:
Paris [was] the youngest son of King Priam of Troy.
Before [Paris’] birth, his mother Hecuba had dreamed that she would give birth not to a child but to a kind of flaming torch that would set fire to the entire city—a premonitory dream foretelling the destruction of Troy. Terrified, Priam decided to get rid of the newborn child and ordered one of his servants to kill him in the forest. […] [T]he servant […] exposed him alive on Mount Ida, where he came close to dying […] A she-bear discovered him, warmed, nursed, and cared for him.
Here we see the she-bear enter as a family caretaker. Eventually, Paris is stewarded to a good folk localized on Mount Ida, but first, and primarily, the bear returns. The bear, which connotatively and associatively, has been linked to strength and destruction seems to be false, here. There is a gentleness. As a protective force and as a way of honoring the servants disobeying such a flagrantly destructive act (Paris was not killed in the womb, but was already born, his sheath established), even from the sovereign, the bear enters again. This is similarly identical to the previous myth, where the transformation or substitution of the like-human Divinely-ordained, the bear, acts as a protective force against ignorant cruel humanisms.
It is said in the beginning of the book that the bear and its location in caves was said to have been an intermediator between the earthly and the Divine. As we begin to see, these myths are ways in which we can encounter “modernized” process as bears-as-intermediators.
One day […] tending his flock on Mount Ida, Hermes [asks] [Paris] […] to judge the beauty of three goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, each of whom claimed to be the most beautiful. Paris was to give the one he chose a golden apple. Each of the goddesses sought to seduce him and promised him a particular gift: Hera, rule over all Asia; Athena, victory in all battles; and Aphrodite, the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris choose Aphrodite and gave her the apple, thereby incurring the enmity of the two other goddesses.
He then returned to Troy and was recognized and celebrated by his parents and brothers. He soon went off to the Peloponnesus, met the beautiful Helen, fell violently in love, seduced her, and carried her off. Thus began the Trojan War.
[…] the male bear is the principal animal attracted by women; bears abduct and have intercourse with women, who then give birth to creatures that are half-human half-bear. The tragic story of Paris thereby seems to be associated with an ursine myth from deep in the past involving the coupling of woman and wild animal, beauty and the beast. It is the oldest document version of the many stories of thieving and raping bears appearing in tales and legends throughout Europe, from Antiquity to the present time.
While we encounter visages of the previous myth in this one, this is quite emblematic of the secondary aspect. Humans building sanctuaries, ones in some kind of stagnation and un-open-ness to the divine, where the he-bear engages. Thieving their goods, their appetites, then their sexual partners; a descent and stealing-as-reclaiming to bring about the primacy of the Divine. Rather than the embassy of other-humans it is the Divine-mediators that begin, this time. Only, because of the first, almost spiritual death and resignation to the a stagnant ignorance.
It is the fear of the death and destruction that leads to its actuality. Had the people of Troy, that of the royalty, been divinely ordained, then the premonitory collapse and its attribution to their newborn, may not have been terrifying. Instead, it is. And they, rather than reclaim the destructive powers and restore the commune—therein, much like the bears and their protective-forces who do not fear the acts of destruction—then it is likely the dream would never have had to happened in the first place. This exact process we will expound on later.
What we can say now, is that maybe the lesson here is for the people of their time to realize the undivine nature of their current royalty.
Take this last myth:
[…] Polyphonte, another girl who had taken a vow of chastity in honor of Artemis […] irritated Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who saw it as a kind of challenge. She tempted Polyphonte in countless ways, gave her magnificent gifts, and when she met resistance from the girl, became vindictively angry, finally causing her to conceive a monstrous passion for a bear. Polyphonte gave birth to two sons, Agrios (Savage) and Oreios (Mountain Man), prodigiously strong creatures who feared neither men nor gods.
Zeus came to loathe them and ordered Hermes to kill them. Hermes did not have the time to act; the god Ares, grandfather to Polyphonte, took pity on the mother and her two sons and changed all three of them into birds; but they were fearsome birds, an owl and two vultures.
The transformation technics of the gods, and the creating of tributes, is used constantly here. It is only when confronted by the avatar of her honored god, Artemis (remember the “becoming-Artemis” was used as a kind of protective measure, here), that Polyphonte can then be submitted—through which the sexual primal urges only ever accept their divinization through Artemis. We see a transforming of a blind-devotion through chastity (the obviation of a more primal sphere, to Aphrodite) into a wholistic unity through the competitive testing through Aphrodite. It is because there is an implicit degree of morality in this—that those who write this off as petty jealousy cannot understand—that her two sons are both savage and immutable, with grand powers and fears of nothing on earth or heaven. Let it be known, it is not Aphrodite who summons and loathes these creatures. They likely were glorious to her.
The chastity vow is only really the perpetuation of old history and creates nothing new. What this new transformation, the monstrous passion for the divine-intermediator, the bear, creates is something with exactly no fear for man or divine. Of course, they, now a family of intermediators are deserving of the protective forces the bear usually provides. Since the original bear-lover is presumably just a stupid bear, we see the intermediator of the ring of the family’s divine counterpart, in fact, Polyphonte’s grandfather Ares (god of war), continue the protection of the bear in the stead of the stupidity of the father-bear; this transformation to the birds still carries the fearsome destruction artistry of the bears. It is exactly an artistry because it introduces a transcendent reaction to purely profane actions; ones done without love.
The love persists in the caring of the young, the increasing powers of the innocent against the harms of the undivine, the transference of stagnant sheaths into a dynamic unity—that is to say, it is a transformation, of relativistic rat-races into more literally transcendent modalities. Whether that be of kin, of the teaching, of the fighting, and sins of the world. The bear never engages for no reason at all; it is always a progression, a metamorphosis.
Bears as Kings
The bear occupied a symbolic position of the first rank among the ancient Celts […] it seemed to have been less frequently associated with the idea of strength, war, or violence and more with the idea of power and sovereignty.
Exactly as we outlined before, the bear poses a threat if it becomes something as simple as a destruction-vehicle, but when it becomes an artistry and translator of love, is it truly a symbol of the bear.
As fiery as they might be, Celtic warriors never attained the intermediate state between human and ursine nature, a state several German researchers designated by two highly unusual and practically untranslatable words: Bärenhaftigkeit, “bearhood,” and Barenfähigkeit, “capacity to become a bear.”
That is to say, the capacity-to-metamorphosize and the capacity-to-intermediate between sheaths of being.
But unlike the bear of the Germans and the Vikings, the Celtic bear is more of a lord than a warrior. It is often a king and sometimes even a god. In the last chapter, I referred to several Celtic goddesses related to the Greek Artemis who had names directly linked to the bear: Artio, Arduina, and Andarta. […] His origins are unquestionably Celtic and his name was identical to that of the bear, art in Irish, artos in Gaulish, arth in Welsh, and arzh in Breton. In Welsh and Irish mythology, the original Arthur seems to have been a bear-king, perhaps even, like the goddess Artio, an ursine divinity who was later transformed into a legendary monarch and then gradually lost most of his original nature.
In this I will just simply remark, that the Celts may have just became conscious of the one aspect of the bear-as-metamorphosis procedure; that is, those that command the change are always linked to bears. As we go through the generative anthropology portions of this paper, we will expand on that. This will be the foundation and differences between a Christian love that ignores the in-coming or in-action bear—the occupied center.
[There is] an episode connected to the death of the king, recounted in several romances, notably in the most famous, La Mort le roi Artu, a remarkable work by an anonymous author written around 1220—it is the finest romance of the Middle Ages written in French.
[…] the king is lying down, severely wounded; one of his faithful companions, Lucan the Butler, approaches, in tears, to say a final farewell. Arthur stands up to embrace him, “holding him so tightly against his chest that he smothers him, crushes his heart and kills him.”
This, while a kind of sacrifice, is emblematic of the bear-nature. Both as nurturer and inverter of destruction of the higher-minded-ness and Divine through artistry in actions.
For instance, at Aix-la-Chapelle, among the various antique objects related to authority was a large bronze she-bear, probably brought from Gaul during the reign of Charles the Bald. The bear remained a royal animal in the ninth century, despite the war that Charlemagne and the Church had waged against it. And it remained loyal for more than three centuries.
During the last centuries of the Roman Empire and throughout the High Middle Ages, defeating a bear was always consider an exploit worth of a king.
For the time being […] killing [a bear] in single combat remained an act of bravery and characteristic of a chief or a hero. Kings, as I have noted, were obliged to accomplish the deed. But that was not enough: they also had to surround themselves with a menagerie containing one or more bears, necessary symbols of power. By doing so, they perpetuated the practices of the barbarian chiefs and Roman emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries, who liked to exhibit bears and watch them fight against other animals.
It is because the bear is so close to use in nature, and the brown bear, which is the theme of The Bear, that made these shamanic and angelic transformations possible. It was also inevitable that the sovereign—who must execute and define the existence of the why for his subjects to complete his commands—be linked to this being. Former king of the animal kingdom it is through the superior bear-nature-as-intermediator of the Divine that he gives the most embedded and abstract representation of his royalty. That others may say, through these acts, “Yes, he is our king. Have you not heard the tales?”
“Have you not heard of his divinisation?”
“Maybe you were unaware, we don’t do that basic shit around here. You prove your worth. We have ceremonies for these things, you see.”
The king is the plenary example of the Divine if he exhibits the characteristics and is head of his localized command structures. He creates a new awareness of agency that actually proliferates and mobilizes his subjects, not that they are devoid of free will, quite the opposite. It is precisely what allows them to engage in human disciplinary orderings. Organizations in the fullest sense of the word. This is the asymmetrical love to ones king and how we can keep orders of men being their manly nature and women their owns under one “kingdom under the divine”. It is the necessary advancement and collective intentions to becoming another emblem and avatar of a higher principle, not a regression into unconsciousness as many moderns seem to think.
Giveon stands on the platform, dressed in sleek but humble attire; much like he’s going to Sunday worship.
“I’m so proud of you. I-I- I’m so proud of you I-I feel sick […],” what sounds like a message from his mother plays. She says this all feels as if it is all a dream and that she’ll tell him about it when she wakes up.
Giveon enters and the motherly recording leaves,
“Let me know or let me go.”
“Back and forth I’m exhausted, girl you know I got options.”
“[…] unless if you love me,” rebounds throughout the whole song, right before the title lyrics ‘Let me know or let me go’.
That recording enters, again, assuring,
“People make mistakes, people don’t always agree with each other. Keep that in mind.. Giveon.”
Generative Anthropology
Here we will recount the varying political methodologies of kingly love and what romanticism and what the purposeful forgetting of asymmetrical-differential love can be are based upon.
Market Capillarism
The traditionalist opposes abstraction in the name of full embedment, but the possibility of rejecting abstraction disappeared with the rise of divine kingship a few millennia ago. By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded. The question is, in what form will abstraction proceed? Or, what kinds of mobilizations are necessary? If the market operates within the capillaries of the system of supervision, then abstractions should contribute to that system. The paradox of power is that the more central the authority, the more authority depends upon the widest distribution of the means to recognize authority; to put it in grammatical terms, the paradox of power is the paradox of the most unequivocal imperative leaving the largest scope of implementation of that imperative.
The noble and upper-class which rightfully tested its resolve and honor through duals and athletic sporting was one way in which they had donated their embedment. They were born in an asymmetry to the rest of us, a higher-born. In healthier times they were honest about this and worked to help advance and keep clear the boundaries and differences in abilities. If he is commanding the army, who are the army men? One does not exist without the other and form a brother band that loves in both directions. Top to bottom and bottom to top; doing the work that is called upon, that they know is already here.
This is the process of “de-skilling,” with its ultimate telos being automation, that labor theorists have known of for a very long time. An absolutist mode of abstraction, meanwhile, would make ever finer distinctions between skills, competencies and forms of authority within disciplinary spaces. In this way, abstraction carries with it its own form of re-embedment.
Liberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision is what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant of those actors which have merely been provided some leeway. This situation produces destructive delusions, because the presumably free agents are nevertheless aware of their utter dependence upon their “servants.”
This is true to the bear-telos of destruction artistry. The bear is only a destroyer as much as it is a protector of the forgotten. It is an integral motion. The liberal order that privileges the “slave-morality” is one that prides the servants needs over the intelligibility of the “master”. The irony is not the truth value of this, of course this is a good thing! But, the hyper fixation on “workers rights” isn’t a communication between the center and the periphery, it is the senseless defense of the forgetting that we ever had anyone in charge to begin with.
On Love Resentment and the Early Chronicles:
[L]ove, in fact, precedes and makes possible resentment (and that, furthermore, this is a distinguishing feature of GA as opposed to Girard’s mimetic theory).
There has been no replacement for the publicly expressed love of one’s monarch in the modern world, which is predicated upon abolishing any such sentiment. It’s hard to imagine Gans conceiving of, much less endorsing, such an asymmetrical love (which of course includes reciprocal expressions of love from the monarch toward his subjects).
[I]f there is some other Other to which both parties can refer [t]hen we might think of a love for the center in a dialectical relation to our resentment of “usurpations” of the center […]
[I]f our only reaction to any occupancy of the center is unremitting resentment—well, that way lies madness, does it not?
Madness from which no private love can even extricate itself, much less save us.
Focusing this rhetoric on the “destruction artistry” of the bear, as I’ve been talking about, this becomes the locus for consciousness of resentment. When we become intentional about our resentment—not merely fools much like Calchas, that seer who suggests the immolation and betrayal of our poor Iphigenia—then we can see the senseless destruction of the moral for what it is. Invariably, a lack of commune—a lack of communication—a lack of divinisation—a flaccidity to the will—or a stupidity in its intelligibility; the only thing we are left to say about it is, have you forgotten your humanity? It is through the absolutist or transcendentalist agential modalities of rhetoric do we find an actual “purpose giving”, anything else is just a cloak and dagger (intentional or unconscious) begging you to be in-forgetfulness, to be stupid and the same for eternity and beyond.
If you recall from Foundations we can see a way around this through aspiration and openness to the introduction of the Divine. Rather than abstract backwards, infinitely proving our own resentment to ourselves (if you recall, much like the scientisms encroaching upon cultural history, attempting to obviate genuine research through the enforcement of their own rhetorical structures), we should rather begin delineating a difference. Where we are localized. Who is calling the shots and who is doing the work? Isn’t there a healthy way to bring both into harmony?
Media as Infrastructural Translation
I wonder how much of an exaggeration it would be to say that every single literary work depends upon some “case”—some situation in which “justice” is demanded, denied, received, tested, questioned, literally or metaphorically. Look even at lyrics and love poetry and see how often charges of “betrayal” or a failure to fulfill some obligation, some violation of trust, all of which invoke some image of juridical proceedings, some demand that someone judge between us, are at the center of the discourse.
Disciplinarity and the Center
A great deal of literature remains within a Christian framework which exposes and denounces sacrifice by representing an exemplary form of it[…] But testing trust by mistrusting and testing love by doubting it is a reductive approach and therefore a caricature of science. More scientific would be taking care to create new objects of shared attention that would either increase love and trust or contribute to the broader set of relations that formalize such commitments and provide new models for them.
This is exactly why a “true” characterization of science, as Pastoureau likely intuits his amassing of “cultural history” to be, is one methodology that goes against a primarily Christian framework. He sublimates the sciences to their rightful disciplines—delineates the differences, motives and use-cases between types of rhetorical agency, the many ways a speaker asserts his “center-ness”—and showcases to us a more primal version of love. One that was centered around the bear. I have a hard time believing his interdisciplinary bestiary love-science is anything but useful to understanding the Christian modalities of the “exemplary victim”. Rather than donate upon the victim a Divine transformation—an increase in consciousness through varying abilities even if marginally traumatic and leading to resentment—, we are expected to act in increasingly doctrinal, atomized ways. Much like dolls and marionettes.
All acts are acts in which Christ lives behind you, and judges you as the Other. However, this isn’t all that it is, really. What it really means is that the institution which enforces the Christ-like doctrine shames you for growing through your lower beings and that you must look inward and donate your resentments to God to cleanse your soul. This is hardly integral and can forget that love-making is exactly that which is a transformation not just for personal salvation, as a massaging of the dooms of the hearer, but that of the respect and primal love for the speaker and hearer. Both are affected and we seem to forget that.
Staged Succession: Marginalizing the Victimary and Scapegoating in a Single Move
[E]ach would also have to think about how to win and how to lose and how to display oneself more generally, while always accepting that the decision is out of your hands, with the proof that you have put yourself forward for pure love of the central intelligence[…]
The ideation of the “central intelligence” within Christianity is that of God, but not really God but Christ, the scapegoat. While, the orientation and primal love is in deed an organization in which the Divine is put where it belongs—and that the relationship between us should be re-established—this is still forgetting that previous living quarters and situations from history were at once moral, too. The bears do not, in Christ-like servitude abstain from violence; they accomplish a progression of history that allows the growth and integration of the forgotten modes of existence, of being and institutions. The generic Christian cosmology is one that seeks the exact same thing as the scientisms we mentioned in the outset, useless, senseless institutionalization of Christ into the minds of all as the massaging of our dooms; not quite the re-birth through metamorphosis and integration, but rather the rebirth through Christ and the “new life”. Here, we will go over some of the doctrines that show that the Christian faith is not nearly as universal as it purports, and that it depends on the principles of Christ that are brought into the sadhana—or the bringing of the Divine in practice and work as love.
Giveon is remiss and struggles with the existentialism of his conflicting patronages:
“[Tryna be] all that I can be for you when you're not with me, it's hard because it's lonely. Honesty, I told them I'm in love with you but they're okay with bein' number two.”
We get this sense, that, maybe, if he accepted a different feeling towards this; there might be a way out. It is the organization of previous sheaths that are in conflict that generate the musings and temptations.
Whether they are demons or emblems of a more beautiful love is his story that he tells.
“I’m all in, but I’m just a man with flaws, when my options come callin’, I should stop it. I’m tryin’”
Polygyny and Monogamy
What the Christ-as-exemplar means for many, is that there is connotatively a union in marriage that assumes a Christ-like identity. Forget the legitimate reality of “options”, divorce yourself from your lower-life and commit an aesthetization and fetishization of the divinity of your other, given by the grace of God.
Christ and His Brides
I think it is important to recognize what seems to be Rogers need for the approval of the rest of the Christian body in terms of acceptance for the queer community. I find this to be similar to black men who during the civil rights era refused to be associated with the gay males in the black community out of fear that they themselves would not be recognized as “men” within the greater White America.
Some individuals thrive in the role of being an outcast while others will do almost anything to gain acceptance from their peers.
A key difference; to some what is medicine is to others a poison; some have had their sheaths burst and different referents tied to their principles. It is not so easy for one to accept the other; but we should allow all to thrive and come to realize that is a principle itself, that we can created practices and sadhanas around.
Christianity’s constant obsession with returning to the past too often leaves out the eschatological hope of who we are supposed to eventually become
While the article I’m drawing upon here is indelibly more of a leftist-philosophical invention it is oriented enough to a sense of intuitive Divinity of what actual peoples in our actual reality actually do in their lives. This is what is key, they draw upon a cultural history, they draw upon other institutions, not to obviate them, but honor them.
His argument that Christ is a promiscuous lover whom we as Christians should model due to the radical nature of love was a great ending point.
I think this should be the same way for Christian sexuality. If one wants to practice monogamous marriage as a form of ascetic discipline, [or a] polyamourous lifestyle in order to imitate the love of the triune God they follow and find Christ in the bodies of the multiple members of the Church, [the] only time one of these methods of sexuality becomes oppressive is when they restrict the entire Christian body to fit into a box that Jesus himself sought to break.
This is exactly why I love this article. We all can clearly see that they reach into what matters: the sadhana of Christ; Christ is a breaker of molds—and this analysis is much like Nietzsche’s, where the problem is with the Christian body, not the Christ-body—and that the perpetuation of “sin”, willful ignorance, needs to be met with a transformation of the being. Aurobindo says much of the same in his methodology, actually.
Another term in Aurobindo’s repertoire I hadn’t mentioned before, but seems appropriate now, is that of inertia. For some, the monogamist tendencies are an inertia of another kind, where we are unconscious of a deeper process (for these particular Christians, the polyvalent triune of love as love par excellance); for others, it is exactly where they wish to direct themselves and their higher mindedness through the sadhanas of asceticism—devotion to some primal female or male energetic force, perhaps. That is to say, they have shuffled what is a sexual-identarian principle for one, is a different mental-identarian tool to provide “reason” for a different but coexisting practice. What matters is the application of integralism through the bringing down and union with principles through the absolutist differentiation of disciplines.
Pentecostalism and Africa
In a darker tone, here is a few quotes on where the Christian institution, as a legitimate, inertiatic and unconscious force is a fraudulent integrator of principles and truth:
The proliferation of Pentecostal churches in this continent has coincided with the implementation of neoliberal policies and the retreat of state power during the postcolonial and post-cold war era.
Here, it is the exact politicization of more direct, authority through the introduction of competing powers. It is, in deed, the siphoning of the legitimacy and actionability of the state:
These churches have been seen as filling a void left by the state in the provision of social services.
By demonizing anything associated with tradition, they challenge older forms of authority grounded in rural life.
In doing so, these churches […] establish new forms of authority that regulate people’s subjectivities and their affects.
Parasitically changing the good rural lives of the people leaves us with a faux metamorphosis. It is not a transformation but a siphoning, first, and replacement, second. This is the primary problem with the “Pentacostalism” of Africa.
The methodology of this process:
The first consists of processes of discipline established by the church to ensure the continuity of a Christian future. The second aspect concerns moments of uncertainty, where converts question the parameters established to define what acceptable Christian practice is and what it is not. The third is what he calls “act of philosophical labor and critical reflection” that intend to “either alleviate moral ambiguities or to create innovative positions around which new norms eventually develop”([28], p. 469; [29], p. 7). Framing rupture as ethical practice, he suggests allows “for a better understanding of how people respond to an incommensurability of values and practices internal to Pentecostalism” ([28], p. 468).
None of this should be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention so far; that is the usage of destruction-techniques without an integration of the previous sheaths of being ( implying we should seek an increasing consciousness and not a forgetfulness of their lived experience—we can imagine a good practice being one that doesn’t force them to think they were ever wrong to simply grow up in Africa—I am sure Jesus weeps for these men and women.) Whether the Pentecostals know this, is debatable. Surely they think they are doing good, by forcing these people into otherwise moral frameworks; however, in this case, and the case of Africa, this is abhorrent and frankly dumb. This is not a liberation of the ineratic force, the ones of temptation, this is a strategic and egoistic race to the summit; to submit an entire discipline and way of lived lifes into another, senselessly.
The ongoing theme is not the “rightfulness” or the neo-liberal paradigm of human rights that is the problem, but how much of the injustices in the world have been committed in the name of the good, the human rights they seek to protect? Clearly, we need an actual framework that isn’t dedicated to common sense, one that, as it sees fit, can engender the proficiency of locals to engage in the protection of the state (not siphon its resources) and inundate each other with our, perhaps, conflicting modes of asserting our agency. That is to say, a respect between sovereigns. It is when we forget the sovereign, that we usurp any instance of them, that we arrive at situations like these.
The methodology is one of these sheaths:
creating a semiotic vacancy(to borrow from John David Ebert) in the mental models many of the locals rely on
rather than bringing a consciousness to that, they simply replace it with their arbitrary framework
the enforcement or shaming of one into the sadhana, or disciplining, of a “protection measure” of the previous framework injected in—much like an immunological system
this is then used to prevent the re-entry of the previously moral (in some ways more moral) local and traditional reality the people engaged within
In this, it is primarily the maintenance of the philosophic-intellectual sheath of being, that then takes the arbitrary practices that descend from that. The realm this exists in is in-between evil and stupidity. It is unconscious and should be disgusting to anyone of any valor. If there are mechanisms and techniques of the mental that another culture lacks, then introduce them in innovative and creative ways that enforce and embolden their agency; not this grotesque beast that Pentecostalism represents.
Monogamy and its Association with Stratified Agricultural Identities
Here, we will talk about mongamistic-centricism, much like Pentecostalism, as an obfuscation of previous sheaths of being. That is, the foundation of romanticism, while an innovation, is based on, again, the siphoning of previous sheaths of being-in and love.
Male Fitness
Male fitness, in this way, is much of a socio-scientificism of what they really mean as the enactment of the institution of the male-principles.
However, these low values reflect changes in male fitness per wife.
[It is] the ability of males with more than a threshold level of resources per wife to minimize offspring mortality [71, 72], rather than to significantly enhance their own fertility.
[M]ale wealth impacts male fitness primarily by increasing the rate of wife acquisition rather than by increasing reproductive success per wife (see also [73]).
This suggests that males do indeed increase fitness through marriage to multiple women, even in cases in which these marriages are sequential.
Even within this framework, it is through the analysis of the study above, that seems to suggest that a simply intellectual framework of bio-technologies—where we gain some weird fertility as the result of money—is based in poor faith. It is much like the descent of the king and his abilities as a love for “his subjects”. The “fitness” increases as much as the male increases his capacity to “hold”. It is less so the virginal fantasies of the “sex god” that the greatest (most societally maximally fit men) get their powers from; it is the capital and “wealth”, or the debts he acquires and is able to hold with-him. He turns what would be daggers into protective measures which is appreciated by his wives and their energies. It is always a dual system, and it is only through and increasing harmony of both institutional principles that we see exemplary forms of them.
Wealth Inequality
This result provides cross-cultural support for the first of the two conditions needed to generate a transition to a greater degree of monogamy with increasing wealth inequality.
[…] [to] 'paraphrase’: the diminishing returns to increasing number of wives is greater than the importance of rival wealth in nearly all cultures studied.
That is to say: it doesn’t matter that others have more or less money, but it is the actual act of “holding” that increases the virality or fitness of the male in cultures. This is coherent and exactly synonymous with many of what we’ve discussed already; perhaps, the critiques of capitalism are correct in their sentiment, where capital is just a subsidiary to a deeper transcendental process.
“[W]ith the shift to stratified agricultural economies […] relatively poor individuals increased […] but [decreased] the frequency of individuals with sufficient wealth to secure polygynous marriage[…] These conditions jointly lead to a high population-level frequency of monogamy”
Again, we see that the relationship to agricultural, sedentary economies, not just of money but attention, lead to disparaging wealth gaps. These wealth gaps make the securing, or perhaps the literal ability for the average joe to engender and grow a polygynist marriage nearly unthinkable. He becomes less “fit”. Is it no wonder we see the increasing rise of divorces today? The only outlet for the increase of number of wives is no longer in the first intimate sheath we’ve encountered; I wouldn’t be surprised, and actually am making the argument, that this is a culture wide “reason” for understanding the increase of divorce. Unhinged abstraction leads to destruction without embedment. No longer is the fraternization allowed, many men become locked into a frame where they siphon their own ability until they end up in loveless marriages doomed to failure. This reality needs no more explanation than the prevalence of our “mens rights”, “MGTOW” and other mano-sphereisms of the, primarily, digital age.
So, we end up with the coeval emergence to a romanticism and the searching of many women in the one, as if the men couldn’t hold the first that they saw on the pure principle of her “hold-ability”. Simply rejecting this life, in favor for a previous would just be doing what the Pentecostals did to the Africans! This love, evanescent and undying, romantic in its glee for its institution to prevail over the “local” evils is a fraudulent one if mercilessly applied to all people—as we have seen it herein. It is not that we should so simply obviate and privilege a single mode of analysis, but rather, again, seek an integral understanding that can allow us to develop legitimate technologies—which a technology is just a discipline, a sadhana of another type, is it not?—to further a healthy trusting culture.
Transition / Conclusion
It is exactly the absolutist theories (the ones oriented to some transcendent modality) that engender the agency of man. The institution of blind-Christianity, the one locked into its older relative referents, does not truly hold a transcendental mode, as it cannot sublimate the other transcendent poles of neighboring cultures.
This is the problem with democracy, liberalism, capital and most of the insincere and forgetfulness inherent in our Seinsvergessenheit. A greater consciousness and realization of how we previously came to understand “bearhood”—destructive artistry or the conversion of the relative into a transcendental mode for the purposes of the Divine—and also studies on the “divine right” of kings reveals what is exactly the problem. By the nature of not associating and orienting to the Divine,—through which the divine right of kings was simply the first of many necessary abstractions to help increase the consciousness of all peoples in larger forces—we actually begin to focus on resentment rather than love.
It is through the illegitimately and fraudulent institutionalization and ideation of the principles of particular historical sadhanas that leads to un-integral and, frankly, evil methods of being human. Ones that, if we came to a greater sensibility into the transformation and metamorphosis of morals through time, could come to appreciate and not so simply subject so many of us into atomistic, relative molds. It is through this that I hope to not only prove my point here, but demonstrate the power of researches into various earlier consciousness that our current age may view as “sacrificial” and “evil”—and thus we’ve been, through a framing of principles, made unaware of. In reality, there is always a love lying behind these mythologies and organizations, it is simply the unconsciousness of our modernity that seems to think, in egotistical fashion, it holds a superior lens. It is reminiscent of a truism, to me, that the needless indifference to the life of another that can seemingly develop into the greatest of evils.
Perhaps we would like to remember that, even to Polyohonte, that here devotion to “mindlessly” honoring Artemis seemed to lead to a descent and transmutation of her chasity into the creation of powerful beings. It was a further integration to an integral loving sphere, one where Aphrodite competes in an attempt to prove the transcendence of all sheaths in which love inhabits. I
The secondary arm to scientism are the technologies of modernity, which are rather peculiar. For these we will confront media and McLuhan as well as wrap up our analysis in the final portion of this paper. It is only through love that resentment can be, for as good of an end as is possible, can be quelled—or transmuted into a more principled state.
“Old wounds, old fights, another day goes by”
“I’m not playing by the rules, they can’t take me for no fool”
“Are you gonna rock with me, hold me down? Will you listen, never lie to me?”
“This is all the sign I need. So tell me, will you keep me safe when I am in your arms?”
“Control-olll meeeeee”
“Cause it feels so good when I’m in your arms.”