THE SEVEN STAGES OF HISTORICAL PERSONALITY
According to James Masterson, personality disorders are results of "false selves"
that defend against painful affects of early life and present-day experiences,
designed to camouflage the real targets of emotional life—the infantile feelings
and memories—and based not on reality but on organized fantasies involving part-selves.
Contemporary personality disorders as described in Masterson’s revisions of
DSM IV75 form a series of personality types from schizoid to narcissistic,
borderline, depressive and neurotic which conform to the stages of evolution
of historical personalities that result from the childrearing modes described
in the previous two chapters.
Childrearing
|
Personality
|
Ideal
|
Mother/God
|
Sacrifice
|
Tribal:
Early infanticidal
|
Schizoid
|
Shaman
|
Devours, seduces, abandons child
|
To animal alter spirits
|
Antiquity:
Late Infanticidal
|
Narcissist
|
Hero
|
Kills, punishes evil child
|
To human alter gods
|
Christian: Abandoning
|
Masochist
|
Martyr
|
Forgives hurt Self-child
|
Torture
|
Middle Ages: Ambivalent
|
Borderline
|
Vassal
|
Dominates, beats worshipful child
|
Subservient clinging
|
Renaissance: Intrusive
|
Depressive
|
Holy Warrior
|
Disciplines obedient child
|
Obeying
|
Modern:
Socializing
|
Neurotic
|
Patriot
|
Manipulates child
|
Incomplete Separation
|
Post-Modern: Helping
|
Individuated
|
Activist
|
Trusts, loves child
|
No sacrifice of real self
|
Illustration 9-1—Table of
Historical Personalities
THE SCHIZOID PSYCHOCLASS OF TRIBAL SOCIETIES
The schizoid personality cluster—including paranoid and psychopathic personalities—features
magical, primary process thinking; periods of depersonalization, unreality and
grandiosity; animistic fused subject/object experiences; an inability to experience
intimacy; and extreme episodes of suspicion and rage. Because tribal mothering
(see Chapter 6) is so primitive, so lacking in empathy for the child and so
engulfing in overt maternal incest, the schizoid tribal personality has a fear
of being taken over and a "profound inability to love himself."76
Schizoids therefore cannot stand close relationships and so cannot form higher
levels of social organization based on trust. Tribal personalities since the
Palaeolithic formed animal and organ alters containing dissociated Perpetrator
and Victim Alters.
Animal alters were depicted in the cave paintings of early
times and were sacrificially stabbed over and over again in ecstatic rebirth
rituals held deep in womb-caves covered with several inches of blood-red ochre.
The depersonalization of schizoids—the result of severe separation stress—is
so extreme that they regularly felt themselves breaking into fragmented pieces,
switching into dissociated states and going into shamanistic trances to try
to put themselves together. During shamanistic journeys, schizoids experience
themselves as sliced up, their bones removed, their flesh devoured by female
monsters, and as repeating the tortures of childhood by being starved, burned,
beaten, raped and lacerated.77
Like schizoid personalities today,
much of their lives were spent in fantasy worlds that repeated the childhood
isolation that resulted from their feeling that there was simply no path to
a real relationship with parents or others. Since alters are formed to contain
and control memories of early terrors, when defenses threaten to break down
the schizoid is flooded with agony.78 In tribal groups, there is
no hope for forgiveness, there is no "sin," no chance of atonement, only "eat
mommy or be eaten by her," only sadistic master-slave fears and detachment-alienation
defenses, all restaged in endless rituals and cannibalistic feasts where organ
alters are eaten. Bourguignon found spirit possession rituals (where an alter
totally takes over the host personality) only in simple hunter-gatherer societies,
while possession-trance rituals (where various demon alters appear as spirits
during brief ritual trances) were found in agricultural or animal herding societies.79
Possession rituals today feature a "judgement of the soul by an old woman, the
mother-animal, the mistress of the dead," and in the past featured "human victims
offered in sacrifice to propitiate the Master of the Animals."80
The animal masks of the shaman are familiar from the various cave paintings
that have survived this early period, with the shaman’s drum said to be "the
voice of the primeval mother" and with Mistress of the Animal representations
continuing as late as the Greek goddess Artemis.81 Yakut shamans
still hallucinate self-sacrifice to "a Bird-of-Prey-Mother, which is like a
great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws, and a long tail [who] cuts its body
into bits and devours it."82
Animistic alter fetishes surrounded early humans.
As one Chukchi put it: "All that exists lives. The lamp walks around. The walls
of the house have voices of their own, while the deceased get up and visit the
living."83 Every alter fetish contains traces of the original trauma
from when it was formed—even the shaman’s rattle betraying the routine raping
of children by having a "gourd representing the womb and a penis-handle that
inseminates it."84 Indeed, it is likely that most of the misnamed
"Venus figurines" found in early caves were in fact raping wands similar
to those used in contemporary cults that rape virgins in rituals,85
with faceless heads shaped like the glans of the penis, bulbous breasts looking
just like testicles, a vaginal triangle carefully indicated and covered with
red ochre representing the bloody results of the childhood rape.86
It was no coincidence that the very first art in the Upper Palaeolithic was
mainly representations of the vulva.87 "Sacred rape" is part of shamanistic
beliefs today,88 and virgins are still cut and raped as sacrificial
offerings to gods in some areas of the world, giving as the reason: "Only blood
satisfies the tius [avenging spirits]."89 Girls in some
African tribes are still made to sit on erect penis figurines as punishment.90
That tunnels and caves were the locations of these raping rituals fits well
with the frequent use of tunnels and caves by contemporary cults that rape schoolchildren.91
That the caves of the Palaeolithic are cultic sanctuaries for trance hallucinations
is further confirmed by their being covered with "entoptic" images identical
to those experienced by contemporary shamans engaged in trance vision quests.92
Plunging into the terrifying, hallucinatory world
of "Dreamtime" trances meant revisiting the terrifying world of childhood, where
mommies suck infants’ penises and fathers have seven-year-olds fellate them.
Initiates felt so polluted by their early seductions that they submitted themselves
at adolescence to initiatory group-fantasies of disemboweling and washing of
their entrails and other body parts, while endlessly cutting themselves to cleanse
their blood of their badness. The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari still switch
into cleansing trances once a week to experience their alter memories in convulsion-like
tremors, ending in the usual temporal lobe seizures of tribal personalities,
"bursting open, like a ripe pod" when "God killed my every thought. He wiped
me clean."93
Body parts containing projected alters collected by
early headhunters and cannibals existed with hallucinatory reality: "The Dyaks
were obsessed with the notion that severed heads continued to exist as living
beings…[they were] treated for months with deep reverence and flattering speech.
Choice morsels from the table would be thrust into its mouth, and at the end
of the meal a cigar would be placed between its lips."94 Alters in
enemy scalps collected by warriors in many tribes were so real the scalps used
to be taken home, called "my child" and fed regularly.95 Since "enemies"
were usually quite innocent of any wrongdoing until a warrior’s alters were
projected into them, captured enemies were often tortured—to punish the projected
childhood alters—and then eaten—to return the punished alter to the
original owner.96 Thus what Sagan calls "aggressive cannibalism"
and ascribes to "vengeance" is in fact a punishment of a part of the self, projected
into another body, and then returned after punishment to one’s own body by eating
it.
Apparently the cultural explosion at the beginning
of the Upper Palaeolithic some 35,000 years ago was the result of early language
abilities affording the capacity to project alters into others and into shared
cultural alter fetishes.97 Early humans were schizoid personalities
who did not have unified real selves, only dozens of subselves which they projected
into other people and objects. One archeologist suggests that the spectacular
explosion of cultural developments 35,000 years ago came from "the appearance
of a very simple additional cognitive affective mechanism—a disposition to engage
in pretend play in childhood,"98 which in turn depends upon the ability
to project parts of one’s self into others and into objects.
Contemporary tribal
children have alters they play with, far more real to them than the "imaginary
playmates" children in more complex societies have. In New Guinea, small children
have alternate personalities called finiik that "temporarily depart
from the body to wander abroad…during trances and other forms of mystical experience."99
Anthropologists are often startled to be introduced by a little child to his
finiik, projected into a certain stone or bird, or be told about how
witch alters regularly possess children’s bodies both in dreams and waking life—all
spontaneously experienced, long before being taught in ritual.
Wars, too, are fought to cleanse internal alters
of badness, repair the fragmented self and restore potency. Tribal warfare against
alter container "enemies" is accomplished mainly through ambush, with warriors
spearing unarmed men, women and children for wholly imagined grievances.
Tribes switch into Persecutory Alters mainly on occasions of extreme growth panic,
when new tasks such as building houses or expanding gardens threaten too much
growth and after initiations that center on adolescents growing up. Homicide
rates reach the highest levels anywhere in the world—up to 60 percent—in schizoid
tribal societies, since extreme distrust of others is common: "Both men and
women are volatile, prone to quarreling and quick to take offense at a suspected
slight,"100 restaging the distrust and rage of their infanticidal
mothers. Women are routinely viewed as secretly being witches "who can kill
simply by staring at a person" and are often killed because they are believed
to poison people.101 Wife-beating is nearly universal, female suicide
rates from mistreatment often reaches 10-25 percent of women’s deaths, and routine
torture and execution of women suspected of poisoning men is common.102
Supreme gods in schizoids—unlike the more personal
gods of borderlines—are totally unloving and distant, reflecting the uncaring
nature of the parents. Eliade points out that even when thought of as "eternal,
omniscient and all-powerful," creator gods in tribal cultures "withdraw to the
sky," too remote and uncaring to be prayed to or addressed.103 What
takes their place is merging with guardian spirits—empowerment by first torturing
yourself to cleanse your alters and then hallucinating an animal alter that
might protect you against being devoured by cannibalistic maternal giant alters
like the Australian "Old Serpent Woman" or the Kwakiutl giantess Tsonoqua, who
roams the forest searching for children to eat.104 Even when schizoids
try to incorporate paternal features to avoid being devoured, they end up giving
their gods maternal features—like the Rainbow Serpents of Australia, described
as "gods who are male but have a womb or female breasts…who look like snakes
but also like a woman…the ‘bad Mother’…who swallowed children left in her care."105
The main content, however, of tribal rituals
is constructed from fetal fantasies, because schizoid disintegration produces
deep regression to bad womb and rebirth memories. Psychotherapists like Stan
Grof—who regress their patients to fetal states—reproduce their drawings in
their books, and these look very much like shamanistic experiences.108
Possessed shamans often describe switching into trances during their dances
in language that closely resembles the birth experience:
The loa dance suggests water [amniotic
fluid]…when the drumbeat quickens [mother experiences contractions]…the whole
structure crashes like a cosmic surf over one’s head [breaking of the amniotic
waters]…the terror strikes and with a supreme effort I wrench my leg loose,
I must keep moving {trapped in birth canal]…My skull is a drum, my veins will
burst my skin [bloodstream anoxic because placenta no longer delivers oxygenated
blood]…I am sucked down and exploded upward at once [birth]…Finally it is as
if I lay at the far distant end of an infinitely deep-down, sunken well, then
suddenly: surface; suddenly: air; suddenly:dazzling white [born].107
Róheim describes the initiation ritual of the
Australian aborigines in which initiates were forced to drink blood as "throwing
the novice into the Old Woman whose womb is symbolized by a semi-circular trench…The
Rainbow Serpent [Poisonous Placenta] is represented engraved on the walls of
the trench. A bull-roarer, called the ‘Mother’ and also representing her womb,
her ‘shade,’ is buried in the trench, his spirit [alter] later leaving it to
return to his spirit home."108
Both initiation rituals and shamanistic
journeys usually include going through long birth tunnels with umbilical ropes
attaching them to visit placental World Trees, feeling body dismemberments like
those fetuses feel during birth, performing bloody birth rituals in medicine
wheel circles shaped like placentas and restaging the "poison blood" memories
of birth by being covered by "the menstrual blood that can cause you to die,
called ‘dead womb blood.’"109 Only after going through poison-blood
rebirth restagings could tribal men hope for a time to put their Devouring Mommy
alters at rest and go about with the daily work of living
The result of always being subject to infanticidal,
incestuous abandoning maternal memories is that schizoid tribal personalities
cannot tolerate separation or rejection in their daily life. "Rejection is unendurable…families
cluster together in an encampment ‘often touching against their neighbors’ [because]
separation and loneliness are unendurable to them. [They] cannot bear the sense
of rejection that even mild disapproval makes them feel."110 What
is misnamed "egalitarianism" is really mistrust and fear of being called "selfish"
for owning.
Hoarding and self-aggrandizement are simply not tolerated—people
were often killed for trying to keep more than their share of goods—ambition
was stopped by overwhelming schizoid envy, change was feared and the surpluses
and savings which were necessary for future innovation were nowhere to be found.
As Murphy found, in tribal societies "the mother is an eternal threat to self-individuation,
a frustrater of urges, and a swallower of emergent identity" of men.111
The early incest was particularly destructive of separation and individuation.
As one Maori sage put it: "That which destroys man is the mana of the vagina."
Men are forced to merge with their mothers in order to appropriate the power
of their vagina: "Warriors became the symbolic equivalent of menstruating women…[both]
bloody warriors and menstruating women…were charged with powerful destructive
energy…warriors’ bodies and weapons were decorated with designs marked in red
hematite [and] they expropriated the destructive power of menstruating women
[by] ritual nosebleeding or subincision."112 Often the bond between
men was obtained by their sharing the mommy-alter in their blood, cutting their
veins and smearing their blood on each other to form "blood brotherhoods."113
But strong leaders are avoided because they might bring back memories of maternal
domination: "Australian aborigines traditionally eliminated aggressive men who
tried to dominate them [and] in New Guinea, they execute prominent individuals
who overstep their prerogatives."114 Personal loyalty to leaders
is tentative because of their overwhelming schizoid mistrust and envy, so the
most social organization that can be achieved is "Big Men" who do not threaten
to subject others too much to maternal engulfment and despair—better to stick
to alter fetishes and constant gift-exchange to ward off the return of childhood
memories of starvation and abandonment. Every step toward personal closeness
or trust brings flashbacks to maternal distancing, since "schizoid states often
lead to acute paranoid regressions because the patient’s aggression becomes
more threatening to him as he allows himself to get closer to other individuals."115
Thus wars in tribal societies often follow disappointments in sexual affairs—as
men fail in achieving intimacy, they become paranoid and go off to kill imagined
"enemies." Only when childrearing achieved the next highest mode were men able
to achieve complex societies that allowed dominant male leaders and trust in
others sufficient to permit ownership and complex hierarchical organizations
that could permit development of higher levels of economic production and trade.
THE NARCISSISTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF ANTIQUITY
Narcissistic personalities ward off their sense of an empty, inadequate self
by fusing with the harsh attacking parent alter and forming a grandiose self
that identifies with the omnipotent parent. Or they become a latent narcissist
and cling to and admire a grandiose other, a narcissistic hero who can stand
up to the destructive mother alter.116 Whereas schizoid tribal personalities
tried to maintain a safe distance to avoid engulfment, the narcissistic personalities
of antiquity tried to maintain some sense of self by arming themselves with
grandiose exhibitionism.
Thus they constantly live in the state of narcissistic
display, as for instance early Greeks did when they spent their days displaying
their bodies at gymnasiums and at night—rather than going home to risk intimacy
with their wives —engaged in male-only drinking/raping parties. The narcissistic
personalities of antiquity were exploitative, distrustful, ruthless and lacking
in empathy,117 being preoccupied with fantasies of the power and
brilliance of a world filled with arrogant, distant narcissistic heroes and
gods and grandiose political leaders upon whom they depended to validate their
weak sense of self. Their pedophilia was also a result of their only being able
to have sex with a narcissistic double of themselves stemming from when they
were beautiful youths and, like Narcissus, fell in love with themselves, avoiding
women as "vultures" who were out to catch and devour them.
Early civilizations began with both gods and
leaders who had maternal characteristics: devouring goddesses everywhere prevailed,
and even chiefs seemed to be mommies—as the Anyi said: "When the king’s breasts
are full of milk, it is his people who drink."118 Parin found the
Anyi clung to their kings because "their fear of women was greater than their
fear of men" and because of "their need to find a chief or master who enjoys
prestige and power so that they can submit to him and introject power" and avoid
maternal engulfment.119
As Galen put it: "Each man trembled forever
on the brink of becoming ‘womanish’"120 —i.e., of switching permanently
into his mommy alter and losing his self. The ever-present fear of turning into
a woman found throughout early civilizations explains why religions and politics
were defensive arenas filled with sadistic maternal alters and why periodic
wars were desperately needed to attempt to restore men’s potency.
The daily life of the narcissistic personalities
of antiquity was filled with projected alters, from the evil spirits, devils
and dybbuks that Jews were constantly exorcising to the bloodthirsty
female spirits, serpents and demons that Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans
tried to ward off with their various religious fetishes. "At every corner evil
spirits were on the watch…there was also danger from the spells of numerous
witches, in whom everyone believed implicitly."121 Even supposedly
rational Greeks were, as Gouldner put it, "deeply concerned about their capacity
to go murderously berserk."122
Egyptians regularly talked to their
avenging alters, as the "world-weary man" talked to his "double," his Ba, about
suicide, making "suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no
longer cope with the corpses."123 Hippocrates confirmed that Greeks
often experienced "convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions," and physicians
in every country of antiquity were expected to treat possessions, hallucinations,
frenzies, lycanthropies and other symptoms of dissociated personalities (melancholy
in Greek meaning "furor.")124 The average Greek acknowledged that
his emotional life was constantly controlled by his alters, which were given
names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, kradie, etor, noos, ate,
and so on. Dodds says that Homer describes ate, for instance, as "a
temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness…a partial and
temporary insanity…ascribed to an external ‘daemonic’ agency."125
Medea says she did not kill her children, her thumos forced her to
kill them.
One’s psyche looks and sounds like a living person, Odysseus
says, but it flies off "like a shadow or a dream."126 Sometimes they
were co-conscious with these alters, but often they were not, since they completely
took over the self. Adkins wrote an entire book on how the Greeks of antiquity
kept switching into their subpersonalities, describing their "low degree of
unity and cohesion [as] one ‘little man’ (so to speak) within him after another
addresses and prompts him…"127 Usually the spirits and demons of
antiquity betrayed their maternal origin—not so surprising when one reads statements
like that of Galen who said "my mother was so very prone to anger that sometimes
she bit her handmaids"128 or that of Xenophon who said he would "rather
bear a wild beast’s brutality than that of his mother."129
The earliest civilizations uniformly worshipped
vampire goddesses who were devouring maternal alters. All were what Jungians
term "Dragon Mothers"130 —from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and Ishtar
to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were usually called by their worshipers
"Terrible Mothers," usually had serpentine features and were called terms like
"cruel, jealous, unjust, her glance brings death, her will is supreme" by worshippers.131
Since contemporary multiple personalities also sometimes hallucinate gigantic
serpents as alters,132 one must believe the witnesses in early civilizations
when they insist they really saw these serpent-goddesses. The Dragon Mother
Goddesses accurately embodied the infanticidal "infinitely needy mother who
cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival…giving
her child the impossible task of filling her limitless void [and] engulfing
them to prevent them from claiming a separate life for themselves."133
One of the earliest Vulture Goddesses can be seen on the shrine walls of the
Neolithic town of Catal Hüyük, a bloodthirsty Goddess with wings of a vulture
who is shown eating headless corpses. Corpses of people were actually thrown
into the fields nearby so vultures could eat them in sacrificial rebirth rituals.134
That vultures were maternal was shown long ago in Freud’s paper showing that
the Egyptian hieroglyph for "mother" clearly represents a vulture and that the
Egyptians worshipped a vulture-headed mother-goddess.135 Even early
Hebrews worshipped a mother-goddess, Asherah,136 who, along with
Lilith, the other vampire goddess mentioned in the Bible, "ceaselessly devoured
the blood" of her worshippers and "roamed the world in search of children to
eat, rape and kill." Even the Sphinx (sphinx means "throttler") was
a maternal monster who devoured youth.137
Most of the male animal
gods of early civilizations were pictured as slaves of goddesses, like "the
Bull of Heaven, the ferocious monster who killed three hundred men at each snort
of his breath [whom] Ishtar in her rage sent down to devastate the land."138
But usually the Mother Goddesses accomplished their own slaughters: "Kali, the
Black One, breasts big with milk, adorned with the blood-dripping hands and
heads of her victims, devouring the entrails of a human victim or drinking blood
from a human skull."139
Statues of these bloodthirsty goddesses were
set up in ziggurats and temples all over the world, daily washed, dressed, fed,
talked to, and heard to speak their commands,140 so hallucinatory
was the power of the alters. The statues were such bloodthirsty maternal alter
fetishes that often priests would take the blood of the sacrificial victim and
anoint the face of the idol so She could drink of it.141 "Divinely-induced
madness"—as in the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece— would sometimes even
cause women to become possessed by their Terrible Mother alters and act out
the killing of the victim, especially when they were experiencing post-partum
depressions. As Euripides describes them: "Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers
who had left their babies behind at home…clawed calves to pieces with bare hands
[and] snatched children from their homes."142
The fetal origins of early religions were everywhere
evident. Actual human placentas were often hung on trees, worshipped and offered
human sacrifices.143 Goddesses like Tiamat were referred to as "poisonous
wombsnakes," Sumerians and Babylonians worshipped "placenta-ghosts," and even
the Hebrew name for Eve (Khawwa) meant "the Serpent Lady."144
Peruvians used to place their actual placentas into the womb of their religious
statues,145 just as most nagual worshipped in ancient Meso-American religions were real placentas.146
All the "Cosmic Trees" found in early religions—from the Tree of Eden to Jesus’ Cross—were placental in origin, and the priest was often portrayed as a fetus: "He has become a fetus. His head
is veiled and he is made to clench his fists, for the embryo in its bag has
its fists clenched. He walks around the hearth just as the fetus moves within
the womb…he unclenches his fists, he unveils himself, he is born into divine
existence, he is a god."147 Carthaginian and other child sacrifice
religions used both fetuses and newborn in their rites,148 and cults
even today often kill real fetuses in rebirth rituals.149 Even the
Deluge myths—from Gilgamesh to that of the Hebrew Bible—contain many elements
of the rush of amniotic waters prior to birth.
Every detail of the worship of Mother Goddesses
has its origins in actual traumatic childrearing experiences of antiquity. Most
"Terrifying Mothers" had divine sons who were forced to commit incest with them,150 similar to the Japanese mothers and others described in the previous chapter,151 with "every mother goddess having their son-lovers, Inanna and Tammuz, Isis
and Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis."152 The religious
rituals restaged accurately the maternal seduction: "Not only does the Mother
Goddess love her son simply for his phallus, she castrates him, taking possession
of it to make herself fruitful."153 In India until recently, "visitors
to many ancient shrines used to have symbolic intercourse with stone-cut female
deities by thrusting their fingers into deep touchholes, worn by generations
of finger-thrusters, at the deities’ sexual centers."154 Thus it
is quite mistaken to call ancient sexual seduction rituals "Sacred Marriages."
They are in fact "Sacred Maternal Incests."
When the incest is complete
and the "insatiable appetite" of the Goddess assuaged, the Mother Goddess then
castrated her son155 and even, in the case of Ishtar, "wore a necklace
of testicles in depictions of her. The Great Mother was gentler to women than
to men, who had great reason to fear her dark side as Devouring-Mother. [She]
existed not to be loved, but to be placated."156 Worshippers
of the Magna Mater, called galli, castrated themselves for her, "wishing
to be like a child, the better to serve the goddess,"157 "running
through the city with severed organs and throwing them into any house."158
That sacrifices of all sorts are for "wiping
out evil and guilt" of the community is well-established,159 but
that sacrifice was usually equated with childbirth ("man’s childbearing") and
sacrificers serve inner maternal alters and often pretend to be mothers ("the
priests masqueraded as pregnant women during the sacrifice")160 is
less well known. Astarte "massacred mankind, young and old, causing heads and
hands to fly and tying heads to her back, hands to her girdle."161
Drawings of the goddess "show her perpetual hunger for human sacrificial victims."162 Visnu particularly favored devouring the victims’ genitals.163 The
sacrificial rituals made a point of saying the victim must be innocent, like
a child. Ancient religions used to blurt out alter beliefs that we today only
tentatively suggest might be true.
Because these goddesses were also "The Mistresses
of Battle," soldiers killed in battle were also seen as sacrifices to her bloodthirsty
appetite. "The goddess brings destruction to enemies; she drinks the blood of
the victims who were formerly her children…she could not be halted in her slaughter
of the human race."164 Since these deaths originated in such memories
as watching his mother strangle his little sister when she was born, war goddesses
particularly needed the death of their own soldiers. As an early Ugaritic text
says of the goddess Anat: "She is filled with joy as she plunges her knees in
the blood of heroes."165
Often the sacrificer was actually female,
as was the chief priestess of the Celtic moon goddess, who cut off the victims’
heads with her own hands, restaging the maternal infanticide.166
But rituals don’t just repeat early trauma: they
restage them—rearrange them to include elements of both the violence
of the Perpetrating Alters and the rage of the Victim Alters. Thus the murderous
goddess Tiamat is killed by her son Marduk in a tremendous battle by an "arrow
that tore through her belly and inner parts."167 Only by defeating
the infanticidal mother could sons "overcome chaos." As Halpern says: "The hero
is one who slays his mother [and] institutes a new order on earth…culture is
the work of the hero, the mother-killer, and represents his attempt at self-generation."168
That the killing is the rage of the infantile victim alter against the mother
is seen by the fact that the Mother Goddess, after being killed, is nevertheless
identified with: for instance, the Aztecs beheaded women representing their
Mother Goddesses and flayed them, donning their skins so that they
can become them and acquire their dangerous powers, their mana.169
The acquisition of the powers of the Terrifying
Mother by a male God was only slowly and partially accomplished in antiquity.
Yahweh might conquer the primordial female monster, Leviathan, symbol of chaos,
and He might demand complete obedience, "with all thy heart and all thy soul
and all thy might." He might even take over sacrificial demands, as when He
tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to found Israel in a blood-brotherhood convenant.
But behind what Maccoby calls "The Sacred Executioner"170 lies the
sacrificial mother alter; behind every adored Adonis lies the cruel Astarte.
Greeks may have tried to defend against maternal engulfment by holding annual
processions where they marched with giant phalli, but the vase illustrations
of the phalli show women holding them up in the air. Even powerful
kings, like Odin or Wodan, had to be periodically sacrificed to the Mother Goddess,
the World Ash, to assuage her blood thirst and cleanse the people.171
Only by sacrificing together could men establish patrilineal kinship and political
power. Even in Greece and Rome, patrilineal kin only knew they were kin because
they sacrificed together: sacrifice was called "a remedy for having been born
of woman."
Even death in war strengthened the weak bonding between males—when
an Aztec captured an enemy, he called him "my beloved son" and the captive answered,
"my beloved father," then killed him.172 That the sacrificial victim
contained the Bad Boy Alter can be seen at the beginning of the ritual, when
the victim is "injected with the poison" of childhood sin, rubbed with dirt
if the victim was an animal or given many sexual partners before the sacrifice
if the victim was a human. That it was internal alters who demanded the sacrifice
was indicated by the priest saying, "The gods have done this deed; I did not
do it!" or, as in Athens, by holding a trial after the sacrifice in which the
full blame for the slaying was attributed to the knife, which, "having been
found guilty, was punished by being destroyed."173
The more wealthy and successful ancient societies
became, the more guilty they felt, the more their growth panic led them to defend
against their avenging maternal alters by clinging to a more and more powerful
male leader.
As Earle observes, "chiefdoms are states of mind [and] chiefs rule
not because of their power but because of their place in a sacredly chartered
world order"174 —the world order of alters and their containers.
The more kings appropriated maternal alter power—her mana—the more
they had to go through seasonal cleansing ceremonies, including ritual abasement
and even "killing of the king," in order to punish themselves for their hubris.175
In these ceremonies, the king was ritually called "a turd [who] has come to
save us,"176 hit in the face with a sword, and only then invested
with Heil,177 his portion of maternal mana. But
everyone in antiquity knew where his power really came from: the vaginal maternal
crown, which was addressed by the king as "O Red Crown, Let there be fear of
me like the fear of thee;" the throne, called the "mother" of the king; and
the sceptre, "a branch from the placental Tree of Life."178
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This article is Part II of Chapter 9 of deMause's new book The Emotional Life of Nations (New York: OtherPress, 2002). For more by deMause, see
his website, www.psychohistory.com
Go to Part III of Lloyd deMause's The Evolution of Psyche and Society
Read Dr. James C. Duffy's article about why deMause's findings are believable and why resistance persists despite the overwhelming evidence he presents.
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