THE TRIUNE LOVE

Our analysis of love in its three dimensions seems to be completed. However, sexual love is merely the horizontal axis of a cross, the vertical axis of which is parental love. The lower part of this vertical axis represents the love between parents and children, the upper part the love between grandparents and parents. And this cross is inscribed in a circle. This circle unfolds because both axes are eternally transforming in one another: children become lovers, and lovers become parents of new children. In this continuous transformation originates the community, and with it a third form of love, communal love. Thus, the fourfold movement, wherein love unfolds, is continued in a threefold, which inscribes sexual love together with parental and communal love in one closed whole.

Let us join this new movement step by step.


UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN

Lovers want to become each other's complement from a productive point of view, and each other's mirror image from a consumptive point of view. As they succeed, they want not only to merge in orgasm, but also to become united in a child, wherein they redouble themselves. No wonder, because the aim of the cooperation between the parents and of their love is their child. This goal only intensifies sexual love. The fascination with beauty and the pleasure of cooperationhave only the force of means. The desire of the lovers for a child wherein they redouble themselves, has its counterpart in the desire of the child to become the mirror image of its father or mother. The immense feeling of happiness that is experienced by children as well as parents when they recognise themselves in each other, is of the same nature as the feeling that overwhelms lovers. Parents as well as children want to recognise each other in their deepest essence. By analogy to sexual romantic love, we could speak of parental romantic love. This new phasereleases love from remaining incomplete as a mere means: only in the shared desire for a child does love find its completion. Without it, it remains unfulfilled. And with this fulfilment a second form of love is born: parental love between parent and child. Meanwhile, we already know that, from an evolutionary point of view, parental love is the forerunner and the fundament of sexual love.

The metamorphosis of lovers in parents has as a consequence that both kinds of love reciprocally enhance one another. This reciprocal induction strongly resembles the way in which cooperation and lovemaking fuel one another within the frame of sexual love. Parental love strengthens sexual love: the strength of romantic love manifests itself in the willingness to become father and mother to each other. The desire for a child is the ultimate proof of love. Childbirth leaves an strong impression on the lovers as the first sight at which they fell in love. Every man, who saw his beloved give birth to a child, knows that childbirth leaves an indelible impression in the soul. The screams of childbirth are only parallels the screams of orgasm, of which they are the echo. Finally, the education of the children strengthens the necessity of cooperation, which in its turn fuels sexual desire. Parental love not only enriches sexual love, the enriched sexual loveenriches parental love in its turn: parents love their children all the more when they also love each other. Conversely, every distancing between the lovers also increases the gap between parents and children. In that marvellous body that woman have when they are pregnant, both loves are condensed before the eye of the father. A pregnant body is only unattractive for whoever is not the father, or for whoever has become father against his will. And, after childbirth, there is no greater joy than embracing one's children after a common orgasm and to enjoy together the degree to which they seem to match the expectations. What, at first sight, seems to destroy love - children - is in fact the very completion of love. In that sense, children are a bond indeed.

After the example of Freud, who sees the cross as a symbol of coition, we could speak of the cross of love. The horizontal axis represents the relation between the parents, the vertical axis the relation between parents and children. Before examining the upper half of the vertical axis, we should first have a closer look at the lower half.


FATHERS

With humans, parental care encompasses not only the physical care for the children, but also the handing over of tradition. Parents have not only to see that the genetic program contained in their genes is properly executed, they also have to culturally fill in a number of open programs. That is why the human child developed an unstoppable urge to imitate. This desire to become the mirror image of an example, can only be compared with the quasi hypnotic desire with which lovers want to become each other's mirror image. Parents developed a converse urge to act as an example for their children. Thus, the mirror image that lovers want to become for each other, is in its turn mirrored in the children. An important consequence of this development should not escape our attention. With humans, the sexually specialised role in economic cooperation and sexual intercourse has to be filled in by tradition. Mothers can act as an example for their daughters, but only from fathers can sons learn the role of a male. Fathers will have to stay with their sons until they are grown up culturally.Human fathers have more to do than help their mothersor feed and protect their children. They have to actively participate in education, a trend that is already apparent in primates. Human education can not take place within the frame of a man-mother-family: only a father-mother-family will do. And that father-mother-family will have to last until the last child has grown up. Man are not only begetters and co-operators, but also educating fathers. That compels us to fill another lacuna in the image of the symmetry between the sexes. We previously mentioned the reluctance of women to engage in motherhood. This perverse trend now appears also to exist with men: they expect their second wife to remain childless.


MONOPAEDIA

We already described the evolutionary trend towards monopaedia: the decrease in the number of offspring as a result of the increased need for parental care. What goes for sexual relations, goes also for parental relations: the more demanding and many-faceted the relations between parents and children, the less children a parent can raise succesfully. With humans, the relation with children has become so complex, that it asks for a lifelong parental faithfulness and an increasing degree of exclusivity. In the first place the children demand monopaedic faithfulness: every child wants to be and to remain the one and only. The proverbial jealousy of children is a complement to their exclusive love of the parents. And, just like unfaithfulness towards a sexual partner, also the unfaithfulness of a child towards its parents testifies to monopaedic faithfulness. The desire of the child to be the one and only boy or girl, is mirrored in the desire of every parent to have one chosen boy or girl. In the ideal case, the couple will redouble itself in one boy and one girl: the father in his chosen son and the mother in her chosen daughter. What is presented here as an ideal, must be a nightmare for many parents (think of the Chinese). Only when parents can delegate their desire for reproduction to a next generation, can they realise the dream of Abraham. The reproductive potential of each pair of parents is reduplicated through the marriage of the children, who produce grandchildren, who quadruple the reproductive potential, and so on. In the end, each couple is like the stem ofa constantly growing tree of offspring, while the total population remains constant. When that problem is solved, another looms up: parents cannot choose their children like lovers their beloved. They are produced by the roulette of the genes. Parents often have to produce a hole series of children before getting one of the desired sex: that was already the problem of Henry VIII. Furthermore, there is always only one child that best matches the expectations of the parents: that was the problem of King Lear. There are pyramids of attractiveness also here, and they often induce parents to become unfaithful to the children they already made. Children react to their rejection through looking out for real of fantasised substitute parents, for whom they are the one and only. The unfaithfulness of children is the reaction to the polypaedia of their parents. Reduction of the number of children is not only a wish of parents and children and a necessity in view of the quality of education, it is also beneficial to the quality of the sexual relation between the parents. What goes for the multiplication of sexual partners - that quality decreases as the number of partners increases - holds a fortiori when the sexual relation is extended with parental relations. Except when we are dealing with complementary polygamy (a childless lover and a sexually frigid mother), every additional partner means at least one additional child. The number of relations is multiplied with each new child, and in the same degree, their quality has to decrease. Polygamy of rich fathers (or mothers) only obfuscates this fact, because the parents can delegate their function to specialised educators. Remarkably enough, it is often those who stress the destructive effect of children for the sexual relation, who often plead for an extension of the sexual relation with sexual polygamy and with social relations (a career). Also the increasing energy that men and women alike have to invest in children, has as a consequence that sexual relations tend to monogamy.


LOVE AND PROCREATION

The close interrelatedness of sexual and parental love is overlooked, if not altogether negated by most authors. A first series of authors wants to uncouple the combination of sexual love and procreation - as it is inscribed in the coitus. They do so by reducing intercourse to fertilisation. For them, sexuality is no recreation, but procreation. In a world where women were either lovers or mothers,this point of view was defended by those who only recognised the relation with mothers. For them, there is no place for a sexual relation between the parents, a fertilisation now and then will do. Marriage is in the first place a relation between parents. We find this point of view in many Jewish and Christian authors. Other authors deny, conversely, every relation between love and reproduction. For them, there is no place for children in a sexual relation. Alberoni remarks that the presence of children destroys eroticism because the lovers have to hide themselves, have to be silent, have to wait until the children sleep, and so on. For these authors, children have to be educated by women who are reduced to mothers, in a harem or a family, or by specialised educators (private or public). A man has to find his sexual pleasures outside marriage. Also with many primitive tribes, sexual intercourse is interrupted by pregnancy and breastfeeding. Scarce are the authors who regard parenthood as the completion of sexual love. To be sure, widespread was the belief that fertilisation was only possible when the woman got an orgasm. But few were those who drew the conclusion that sexual and parental role beong together. Only Ortega y Gasset contends that real love is completed in the wish to symbolise the union in a child, in which the perfection of the beloved will endure and be confirmed.

That does not prevent many authors from pleading for a marriage where there is place for reproduction as well as for sexual pleasure. With Jewish and Christian authors, the motive is the prevention of promiscuous and polygamous temptations. Their pleas amount even to recommendations to eat meals together and to keep each other company. The bourgeois take a more positive stance. That holds for the Puritans who discern themselves from the communal Ranters and the polygamous feudal lords. Their socialist and anarchist heirs follow suit. The depravity, regarded as ''heathen' by the religious authors quoted above, is now - ironically enough - denounced as 'Cbristian/feudal'. As opposed to the separation from sexuality and reproduction, which is the corollary to the separation between lovers and mothers, between marriage de raison and 'liaison d'amour', they develop the ideal of a sexuality that has to be integrated in marriage. It is their voices that resound in the ban with which Mozart's Commandeur drives don Giovanni in hell. Michelet opposes 'la barbare impiété des temps gothiques' with the slogan: 'La femme est pure!"' And he thereby does not mean that she should not make love, but rather that she should not be divided in whore and mother. Michelet clearly condemns the 'gothic feudal lords and clergy', because they held that marriage had the child as only purpose, and forgot that a woman, before being a mother, is in the first place a wife and a companion of her husband. As opposed to the harem and the brothel - say Versailles - Michelet pleads for the idyllic cottage of the shepherd, for the 'a comfortable cage' in which to protect the wife and wherein the lovers retire in a splendid isolation. No feudal maids and servants in the house: man and woman have to help each other. And, in compliance with the already mentioned relation between lovemaking and cooperation, neither separate chambers in the cottage: man and woman belong in the same bed, and a ample bed at that, not only to enjoy and to rest, but above all to' reconcile the souls in an exchange of thoughts' - as a counterpart to the gothic altar: the bourgeois bed as 'grand communicateur' and what happens in it as 'communion'. Such strive could not but hurt on the then economic relations and the poor techniques for birth control, that condemned men to social work and women to the childbed. Michelet's bird cage could not but turn out to be an subterranean prison, from which soon swarms of feministic bats would break loose like goddesses of vengeance. Only later was it understood what were the bars. Havelock Ellis hopes that birth control will create the material condition which can complete the 'union of bodies' with a 'union of souls'. And what he thereby means is that marriage should not only focus on reproduction, but also on the 'spiritual' - read 'erotic' - aspect. The Christians want to surpass the heathen. The bourgeois wanted to surpass the feudal lords and the Christians. Ellis, on the other hand, wants to evolutionistically transcend the animals and 'the lower races of man'. This is at the same time a enumeration of the three phase in the history of romantic love. 'There are, finally, many authors who grant that sexuality can play a role in the attraction between man and woman, but who doubt that something so precarious could be the cement of a relation. Sexual attractiveness is transient. When sexual appeal disappears, parental love has to take over. Many authors see the transition only with women. Thus, the same Alberoni, who declared that children and eroticism are not compatible, contends that for many women pregnancy is an enrichment of her love for her husband, and that many women feel fully in love only when they have become mother.


THE ABSENT FATHERS

Parental love is even less understood than sexual love, and that goes especially for the relation between the two. That is above all apparent in that the phenomenon of the dedicated human fathers, an evolutionary curiosum, is practically not thematised. That is what the dedicated father and the beautiful mother have in common... Scarce are the authors who understand the importance of fatherhood with humans. Practically all the theories have motherly love originate in the evolution, and regard fatherly lover as a product of culture. The majority of authors is so prejudiced by the really existing fatherhood, that they recognise fathers only in their economical function: they have to provide the mother of the necessary means. The same Alberoni who describes the completion of female love in pregnancy, sees the male only as protector and breadwinner.

In al those theories, the human father does not much differ from his forerunners in the animal kingdom. Thus, the central changes are failing in most theories on the origin of man: the beautiful women and the dedicated father. Not as unrestrained begetter, not as polygamous or promiscuous lover is the male human, but as educating father. And because these only beastly males have stolen the show for so long, the father was relegated to the role of the protector of the seed that they had planted: as a ridiculous Saint Joseph, the complement of don Juan.


PAPAGENO AND PAPAGENA

Also in literature, positive stories about parenthood are rather scarce. In so far as relations between parents and children are described, it is mostly problematic relations like those of Kronos, Abraham and Isaac, King Lear and Mutter Courage. Parents who enjoy children are mostly depicted as ridiculous figures, like Papageno and Papagena, the profane counterparts of Tamino and Pamina, who dedicate themselves to higher tasks. An exception are the stories about figures like Jesus and Mozart. Thus, the second phase of the completion of love is seldom put into words: it is only whispered in happy families. In the world of the plastic arts, on the other hand, things are rather different. In the Christian world, there are countless depictions of Mary and her child - with or without Joseph. Weininger thereby sneers that the former overestimation of Raphael has dwindled away and that those who handle the subject no longer attain the same level. Other successors of Raphael's Madonna's are to be found in the family albums. Portraits of children used to hang in living rooms, but are no longer fashionable. Apart from that, it appears that, in literature as in the real world, parents and children seem not to esteem each other's company. Only American presidents have to pose as lovers and to appear with their children at that.

There is, on the other hand, an abundant literature about parents as seen from the perspective of children. From Oedipus, over Emile to countless novels today, especially since psychoanalysis, they are steadily depicted as the producers of infantile traumas, not at all as inspiring examples. And that reminds us of the fact that there are some problems with the really existing family.


THE CHILD EATERS (1)

Although sexual love has to necessarily unfold into parental love, the perverse move blocks this move. In the exhibitionistic amphitheatre, there is no room for children. The same economical conditions, which fuel the perverse trend, also undermine the relation between parents and children. Let us have a closer look.

From primeval times onwards, many couples want to escape parenthood. Witness the development of countless techniques of contraception: from prolonged breastfeeding, over more or less efficient contraceptive techniques and more or less civilised forms of abortion, to barbarian forms of child murder, like the fall in the abyss with the Spartans, drowning in the Yellow River with the Chinese, suffocation with the Indians and, finally, plain cannibalism like with Australian Aborigines. McLennan's girlicide is only a special case of infanticide on a much larger scale. In the majority of cases, these interventions are inspired through overpopulation. But, the children who are supposed to belong to the population, are not better off. Either their parents at the base of the pyramid cannot command the necessary means to raise them. They are forced to relegate them to other parents (through sale or as a foundling). As soon as the social division of labour enables it, better situated fathers can relegate the task of educating their sons to specialised educators, and the burden of little children to their wives. Women who could afford, shifted the burden in their turn on nurses or looked out for substitutes for mothermilk. Contact with children is thus reduced to a strict minimum. Formerly, children were often wrapped in swaddling clothes and hung on hook so that the rats could not harm them. Nowadays, babies are deposited in crèches short after birth. School, television and computer games soon take over the role of babysitters. Many parents cannot educate their children altogether: they are forced to let them work for them. Even worse is the fate of children who are bluntly abandoned by their parents. In the countless megacities of the Third World, they gather in children gangs.

In practice, parenthood seems to be the complete opposite of the utopia we sketched above. Parental love is still worse off than sexual love. Lovers are as eager to engage in parenthood as they are doomed to fail. That, nevertheless, practically nobody is prepared to resign from parenthood, has perhaps to do with the fact that parenthood is one of the scarce tasks where one is indispensable and irreplaceable. For their children, parents are the 'one and only'. One could argue that the bad treatment of children is the consequence of unreliable contraception. The introduction of reliable contraception, however, leads to the reduction of the number of children, not to an increase in the number of couples without children. It seems that people want children, but that, as soon as they have them, the become as parentally frigid as they are sexually impotent and frigid in marriage. The refusal is not due to the fact that children are not wanted, but to other factors. These are not the same for men as for women.


GRANDPARENTS
O weiter, StillerFriede!
So tief im Abendrot.
Wie sind wir wandermude -
ist dies etwa der Tod?
Eichendorf / R. Strauss, Vier letzte Lieder

That human fathers not only protect and feed, but also educate, discerns them from their forebears in the animal kingdom. Apart from fathers in the real sense of the word, our species contains another remarkable specimen: grandparents. Human mothers survive their reproductive period (menopause) and thus promote their men through parallel evolution to elders. The meaning of this evolutionary trend is not difficult to find out. The slower animals grow, the more they have to learn, the longer their parents will have to care for them, the longer these parents will have to survive their last insemination or pregnancy. TWhereas their bodies begins to decay, but their mind becomes a treasury of indispensable experience that can be handed over through language. Whereas the sexual organs in the ageing body wither away, the brains develop into the organs of a new kind of cultural reproduction through tradition. The soul in the brains of the grandparents is reproduced in their grown up children through verbal insemination. With humans, the task of reproduction is not completed when the genitalia have fulfilled their fertile task and when the labouring hands have raised the children. Spiritual reproduction only comes to its apogee when this process is completed. The tradition which have to handed over comprise in the first place the expertise of educating. This can only be handed over to the children when they have themselves become parents. That is why parents need grandparents to learn how to become father and mother.

The evolution of a third age not only creates new possibilities of survival through the development of culture, but new problems as well. Grandparents become susceptible to all the evils of ageing: decay (in the first place that of bodily beauty), illness and death. The decay of their body gives the grandparents a new place in the division of labour. Their children have grown up physically and have to care in their turn for themselves and their children. The grandparents are now released form the physical care for their children, but they now have to sustain each others' decaying bodies. Sooner or later, they will become dependent on their children. When they have acquitted themselves well of their task, their children will willingly care for them in their turn. For all this reasons, the father-mother families cannot fall apart after the completion of physical reproduction. Faithfulness between parents and children will have to last for a lifetime, just like that between man and woman. The sexual function of the genitalia has, if possible, to remain intact to hold the couple together. But in the course of the process, there is a change of roles: those who helped must now be cared for. The ageing partners cannot leave each other when, with the completion of physical reproduction, also the decay of their body is impending. They have loved each other's body passionately and cannot let it loose when it begins to physically fall apart. Whereas with physical decay also sexual appeal disappears and sexual potency decreases, they have become become a good team on the economical plane. The satisfaction of caring for each other becomes a source of warmth and affection, comparable with the relation of a child to its parents. For the loss of the passion for each other's beautiful and vigorous bodies, they now are more than compensated through the knowledge that they managed to hand it over to a next generation. While they relegate their sexual pleasure to their children, their grandchildren eagerly look out for it. Grandparents have not only completed their physical task, but soon also their spiritual mission. The importance of cooperation and sexual love as instruments of reproduction decreases in proportion. Conversely, the importance of the goal only increases. The place of cooperation and sexual love as a bond is gradually taken over by the common joy in contemplating the own physical and spiritual essence in the next generation. Here alone is true happiness for ageing peopleto be found. Whereas Brahmans have the wise habit to become ascetes when their grandchildren see the light of day, in the West, ageing most ageing people prefer to frenetically resist the decay of their body, rather than enjoying the youthful appearance of their children. Women, who so passionately want to compete with the beauty of their daughters, and therefore do not shun from plastic surgery, not only have missed full sexual love, but their parenthood at that. The same fate befalls men who envy the potency of their sons and do no shun injections in their penis. Especially couples who had no children or who did not care much about their children, have to prolong their existence as lovers or to renew it through a marriage with a younger partner. Those who spent their lives in the exhibitionistic amphitheatres have become persona non grata there, and often want in extremis to engage in the enduring relation that they evaded up to now. Meanwhile, they have wasted precisely what makes the end of life with a lifelong partner endurable. It suffices to refer to Odysseus and Penelope, to Byron, to Sarah Bernardt.... Only those who refuse to become grandparents, have to become lovers again. The missed completion of live in the children is thus compensated on the sexual axis through remaining a seductor or seductress. There is also a compensation on the parental axis. Many grandmothers remain mothers for their grandchildren and many a man discovers in his grandchildren what he missed as a father. The missed completion of life turns also dying into a problem. We only have to be afraid for death in so far as we have become individuals, who isolate themselves from the other sex in sexual asceticism and from the previous and the next generation in parental asceticism. As individuals, we not only want to obtain eternal youth, we also want to have an immortal soul. Real eternity and immortality is the privilege only of those who have understood that they are not individuals, but mere halves 'dividuals'. These halves find their completion only in the couple and their continuity through redoubling themselves in a next generation. Whereas the Taoist engaged in the pursuit of eternal youth be remaining sexually active - albeit without ejaculation - also in old age, the Confucianists held that real immortality can only be realised through producing a next generation. There is some sarcasm in the idea of the Taoists and the Greek that sperm originates in brains and that prolonged sexual activity in old age makes insane. It is also the same Greek fathers who delegated the education of the souls of their sons to soul-loving teacher, who had not to pursue their immortality in the love of a next generation, but in love for eternal truth.


THE ENDOGAMOUS GROUP

Many authors described how grandparents of both sexes played an important role in the early stages of human development. That given has, however, never been given due account in theories on the structure of society - except in the form that there is something like a 'gerontocraty'. And that is all the more deplorable, since the existence of a third generation is the key to the reconstruction of the pattern of society in primeval times. What are the consequences of the presence of grandparents for the structure of the primeval human group?

With many species, the only social units are parental groups: groups of parents - mostly mothers - and children. Every generation, these units are formed and dissolved: the young leave their mother as soon as they are grown up. Every tie is broken. Parents and children no longer recognise each other.

A first step towards continuity is set when the sexual relation between the parents is maintained during more than one reproductive cycle. That is the case with most monogamous birds. The children leave the parents, but the parents maintain an enduring bond. Also these groups dissolve as soon as one of the partners dies. The situation changes drastically when, next to the sexual bond between the parents, also the parental bond between parents and children is maintained after adulthood. That is a consequence of prolonged growth, sometimes of ecological circumstances. The bond between parents and children can in principle be maintained in maternal as well as in paternal line. As a consequence of the specialisation of mothers on reproduction, the maintenance of the contact between mothers and daughters is the most obvious. For the first time, we witness the advent of a social formation that is eternal as long as the generations continue to replace each other: the parental group survives the individuals that are part of it. We can call such a group a matrilineal group. The males are expulsed from the group that raised them and they try to become part of one or more new matrilineal groups. Such groups, then, are exogamous: the children chose their sexual partners born in another matrilineal group. Each matrilineal group is thus extended with (promiscuous, monogamous or polygamous) sexual groups on the horizontal axis. We find such formations with bears, elephants and chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, we know that, with humans, the generations stay in contact with each other in both sexes. The human group is parentally linear over three generations, in the maternal as well in the paternal line: grandfathers want to stay with fathers and fathers with sons, grandmothers want to stay with mothers and mothers with daughters; and on the sexual axis, grandfathers are joined to grandmothers, and mothers to fathers. Nobody can leave the group. Every member is tied to it: vertically through parental bonds, horizontally through sexual bonds. All the children will have to choose their partners within the group that generated and raised them. That is why we will call this remarkable formation an 'endogamous group': a number of couples that generate children that will form new couples, and so on into eternity. Only the endogamous group is the real human in-dividual, of which the six kinds of parts are merely dividuals - sixths. And only this individual is, as what remains through the succession of the generations, the eternal but earthly collective soul of man. This soul is not created by some god, but in a most earthly way: in that all the adults copulate with the other sex and thus generate children that will become parents and grandparents. By analogy to the mystic body of the church, we can call this earthly, supra-individual soul the mystic body of man. Only in that mystic body do the dividuals realise their meaning.

How big is such a group? In principle, its size can vary from minimally six to billions. In practice, there are purely technical constraints. Unless all the brothers would marry their sisters - which can only be an exception, as we shall demonstrate in the last chapter - every pair grandparents has to establish contacts with other pairs of grandparents, since their children will have to marry with each other. And since all the (in)dividuals are spread over the earth's surface, the number of movements between the members of the endogamous group will increase with the number of relations. No doubt, the technology of transport (the transmission of voices, images and soon also touch included) will push the boundaries. In expectance, the size of the groups in primeval times had to remain rather modest. Second, there are the limitations imposed by ecological conditions. In primeval times, the size of the endogamous group had to remain rather modest, for the simple reason that the required territory increases with its size. Lee en De vore estimate that, on a primitive technological level, the required surface is about 275 square kilometre per person. That means that, before the development of commerce and agriculture, there was only room for some ten million humans on earth. We conjecture that man has for a long period lived in small groups of a couple of dozens. We will call such groups 'hordes'. They were spread over different ecological niches, each with their own technological traditions. The success of a horde lead to a gradual increase in its size. Above a certain level, the cohesion of the group can no longer be warranted, because the territory that has to be covered becomes too large to control. The horde will have to split and spread over new territories. Through this continual growing and splitting, the entire surface of the earth was gradually populated by humans.


EXOGAMY

It is not difficult to fancy how, under the pressure of ecological conditions, a horde had to split, or how, conversely, the increasing population density brought separated hordes into contact with each other. In both cases, the cohesion of the group is under threat. In view of environmental advantages, some members of the group could decide to isolate themselves from the rest of the group by marrying among themselves. Conversely, others could decide to merge with (a part of) another horde. To safeguard the cohesion of the group and its continued reproduction through the generations, the members of the group can decide to forbid marrying outside the group. Factual endogamy is than transformed in an explicit endogamy. This protects against fusion with other groups, but not against the splitting up of the group in smaller parts. The families of the endogamous group have to agree to exchange their daughters for marriage. The most obvious method is to divide the group in one or more parts, and to have the boys of one part marry the girls of another part and the other way round. Thus originates explicit exogamy, that forbids marriages within the own section of the group. Such exogamy is only conceivable within the frame of a explicit, compulsory endogamy: one has to choose a partner outside the own section of the group, but within the group as such. As soon as the structure of the group is thus reproduced through the generations, we are talking about regulated tribes, and no longer of spontaneous hordes. For convenience sake, we will call the exogamous parts of a tribe 'clans'. Human exogamy differs from exogamy in the animal kingdom, in that it operates within the frame of a pre-existent endogamy. The tribe is a new strategy of survival. Not the whole tribe has to be settled on a homogenous territory, each part can occupy a specialised ecological niche and the differential advantages can be exchanged through marriage. As a consequence of internal specialisation, the size of the endogamous group can increase. Thus is initiated a second phase in the population explosion.


THE AMPUTATED PRIMEVAL BODY

Meanwhile, we know that the endogamous group as horde or tribe is affected by the development of the social division of labour. The internal specialisation of the tribe is checked not only by social, but also by ecological constraints. Farmers can survive on a small territory, like a delta, on condition that raw materials, such as copper, can be imported from the territories of other tribes. Trade between strangers has to replace marriage between kin. The tribe as economical unit has to give way to a network of social co-operators, who will soon grow out to an eventually world encompassing society. Therewith is sealed the fate not only of the tribe, but of the endogamous group as well. The sexual and parental relations which lie at the roots of the endogamous group, are deprived of their economical kernel and integrated in a new structure. Henceforward, they have only to secure that the social products are distributed over the sexes and the generations through sexual and parental division of labour. To every social co-operator, a sexual co-operator is attached, and through him also his children grandparents. The parental-sexual cross that sustained the endogamous group, is dissolved into its membra disjecta. These are reintegrated into new social units, that are merely appendixes of a network of social relations: parental-sexual formations like families, three-generation families, 'extended families', communes or harems; purely sexual formations with concubines, whores, or lovers; purely parental formations like units of mother and child or mother and grandmother; and finally the negation of every formation: male and female celibates and isolated children. All these new formations discern themselves form their endogamous predecessor in two respects: they no longer encompass all the five possible relations between the six (in)dividuals, and they deviate from primeval monogamy and primeval monopaedia alongside the three coordinates of perversion, polygamy and promiscuity. Henceforward, love will have to unfold within the frame of these more or less severely amputated formations. The closed endogamous group can survive as caste, but it then has merely an political function (such as safeguarding a profession through heredity). Also as a merely political formation, it is doomed to be overruled by completely desexualised and deparentalised political entities such as states, parties, unions and what have you. Conversely, these new entities may evolve in the direction of the endogamous group. They do so when they survive for many generations, when membership is hereditary (citizenship, religion) and when the members begin to intermarry. Just like the caste, they never can become more then bad fitting envelopes around the ever growing societal body.


COMMUNAL LOVE

We already described how parents and children want to become each other's mirror image. Thus originate male and female traditions, that are handed over through many generations. The way in which the child imitates the example of the parents, reminds us of the way in which lovers mould themselves after each others image. But there is more. The children, wherein such a couple of parents redoubled itself, have to marry with children of other couples. To make this possible, the parents have to mould there children after the same model, and hence to accommodate themselves to each other, also in the horizontal line. Tradition presupposes diffusion, first between the two halves of the couple, and then between the couples themselves. Such overall reciprocal imitation of the members of the endogamous group derives, from an evolutionary point of view, from the imitation of the parents through the child. It originates in the parental axis, extends to the horizontal, sexual axis of the couple, to finally encompass the entire community in one and the same identity. Thus originates the collective, cultural soul of the group, embodied in all of its members. The primeval couple is the archetype of such communal identity. Below, we shall study how it is reduced to a male god. Here lie the roots of the inextinguishable human desire to imitate the members of the community. This desire to pose as an example to each other and to imitate each other's example has been called 'instinct of the herd' with Le Bon, 'Induction' with Mc Dougall, 'identification' with Freud, 'mimesis' with Girard, etc.

Just like the couple on the basis of sexual live, and just like the parents on the basis of parental love, the endogamous group has to be tied on the basis of what we will call 'communal love'. And just like sexual love manifests itself in cooperation and coition, also communal love will have to find its own expression. It is not difficult to see which behaviour will be transformed in order to become such an expression. We immediately discern the primeval form of communal love in the way in which the child proudly demonstrates how much it is able to equal the example of the parents: the demonstration of identity. The group expresses its cohesion through performing whatever behaviour communally in the same way and thus demonstrating identity. This is achieved through ritual behaviour developed in view of such demonstration: think of dances typical of the community. Already the assessment of identity between parents and children is a source of happiness, but that goes especially for the identity of all with all within the endogamous group. Thus, the expression of communal love does not depart from breastfeeding, like parental love, nor from coition, like sexual love, but from imitation between the generation and the sexes - from diffusion and tradition. Only here does it become clear why lovers prefer to marry with equals (homogamy). Only now do we fully understand why they are looking out for identity with the parents (tradition) as well as for identity with the partners (diffusion). We will come back to that subject in our chapter on the orgy. Only now does it become clear, finally, that the strive for identity between parents and children (parental romantic love) and the reciprocal strive for identity between lovers (sexual romantic love) are functionally tied to the strive for identity of all with all within the endogamous groups (communal romantic love). We have already seen how the endogamous group is a closed whole as a consequence of its endogamy and ecological circumstances. Within that self-contained entity the own cultural traditions are passed down. The groups evolve independently from each other, and hand over different traditions. Their endogamy is not only positively founded in internal ties, but also in the difference that discerns members of different groups. In that difference roots every xenophobia, every expulsion of strangers and their customs and habits. That is only enhanced in that the ritual behaviour that has to strengthen the own identity, is mostly developed through negation of that of the neighbours. Where one tribe practices excision of the clitoris, the other tribe tries to increase its size by continuous stimulation.


THE CHILD-EATERS (2)

The above makes it abundantly clear how not only the sexual, but foremost the parental love has been damaged. Not only the relation between parents and children, but also the relation between parents and grandparents is almost completely undermined. That is apparent from the fact that we can only conceive of sexual and parental relations in the frame of the family. The damage has been realised in several phases.

The political consolidation of the tribal structure requires all kind of regulations that undermine the bond between the generations: the (foremost) unilineal inheritance of clan, location and economical goods and what have you. It does not matter whether the inheritance is in the male or female line: in both cases, it disturbs the continuity in the excluded sex. Thus, daughters have to leave the elderly home with inheritance of location in the male line, while sons can maintain their relation with their parents. The converse is true with inheritance of location in the female line. The breakdown of the endogamous group with the advent of society cuts an even deeper wound. In the lower sections of society, many have no longer access to marriage and therewith to the children that have to care for them when they are old. Conversely, many children are disinherited in order to keep the family property undivided. Thus, all the daughters and many sons are disinherited with inheritance of the firstborn son. The wound reaches the heart, as soon as social cooperation creates the possibility to survive without the previous generation. When parents retire themselves within the frame of the family, the elderly have to secure themselves of a pension. This is a late revenge of the former children on their treatment by the former child-eaters that are grown old. The child-eaters produce parent-eaters, who only wish their parents dead. The homes for the elderly are the counterparts of the crèches and the schools. Homes for the elderly, crèches and schools are on the parental axis, what factories and shopping centres are on the sexual axis. The busier all those social formations, the emptier the living rooms, where there are no longer sexual partners to be found and no children neither, let alone grandparents.


FATHERS WITHOUT SONS AND MOTHERS OF BODIES

The advent of society cuts even deeper wounds, and these affect fathers differently than mothers. Let us first examine how fathers are affected. On the tribal level, all the men have the same profession. The son will automatically succeed his father, and thus inscribe himself in an endless row. The advent of the social division of labour makes the prospect of such eternal reproduction increasingly hopeless. First, it fuels competition, so that the development of talents booms. A father can attain such heights, that he can only die out in the shadow of his sons. That was the case with Bach and his sons. Conversely, genial sons can outgrow their fathers: a sudden flare that dies out in a dramatic silence. That was the case with father and son Mozart. Second, the ever increasing specialisation reduces the chance that the son can have the same profession as his father. In traditional societies, professions could be hereditary, but in modern industrial societies, that is no longer possible. The more specialisation, the smaller the chance that the required capacities will be found with one's own children. Furthermore, ever new specialities emerge and other specialisms become obsolete, while the remaining are improved with every generation. For new specialisms, there are no fathers, for obsolete ones no sons, and for the remaining ones, fathers can no longer match their sons or conversely.

A society with division of labour is, finally, characterised by a strong pyramidal structure, with prestigious professions on the top and on the basis a broad array of inferior employment. No father wants his son to remain on the lower strata of this pyramid. The desire for redoubling takes the shape of a fear of it, the desire that the child will take a higher position, and hence has to become be different. The advent of society thus bereaves fatherhood of its central spiritual kernel. Hereditary professions have become curiosities, like families of composers or dynasties of miners. Specialised teachers have to educate the sons. In the name of society (and of their fathers), they incite sons to leave their fathers and hence to commit patricide. That has two consequences. In the first place, men, who have already been left in the cold by their women, are now also bereft of their sons. After having been doomed to sexual asceticism, there is nothing much more left than to wish themselves unbegotten in so far as they are fatherless sons, and eternal in so far as they are sonless. Unbegotten and eternal, such is, ever since Plato, the soul. And that cold soul is the male, who is castrated not only in his organ of lust, but also in his organ of reproduction. In the second place, the theft of the soul of his sons is the deepest motive why he relegates their body to his wife, who feeds and washes it without enthusiasm. As opposed to the male, reduced to a soul: the female, reduced to a mother, who gives birth to bodies. The women, who had to undergo the fate of hysterectomy in the lower regions of the beehive/termite hill, became all the more susceptible to taht fate after their previous hysterogenesis. To phrase it with Weininger: 'The mothers cares for the physis of her child, not for its psyche'. Eventually, we witness - after the promiscuous and the ascetes on the sexual axis - also the atoms on the parental axis: pure individuals, who are their own beginning and end: solitaries, who no longer connect a previous generation with a following. They are embodied in pure individuals souls, that leave when dying the body in which they descended with birth; they are merely furtive visitors of the sublunary world, where mothers warrant the continuity in the flesh.


OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN....
Diotima tot Socrates:
'Goddelijke mensen hebben een veel engere gemeenschap en hechtere vriendschap met elkaar, omdat zij gemeenschappelijk schonere en onsterfelijkere kinderen bezitten, dan de kinderen die de natuur schenkt. Ieder zou liever zulke kinderen willen verwerven dan lijfelijke, wanneer hij bewonderend ziet naar Homeros en Hesiodos en de andere grote dichters, wat voor nakomelingen zij nalaten, die hun onsterfelijke roem en nagedachtenis verschaffen, daar zij zelf onsterfelijk zijn'. Plato, Symposium

The same move that makes fathers sonless, makes sons fatherless. Sonless fathers, who want their example to be followed nevertheless, find willing followers in fatherless sons, who are looking out for an example. The same society that bereaves fathers of the souls of their bodily sons, grants them the souls form bodies that are begotten by other men. Thus, fatherless sons and sonless fathers find each other in the society, as in a heaven of spiritual kinship, far above the earth, where the bodies are begotten in blood kinship in the family.

The entire male world is thereby genealogically restructured on a spiritual level. Blood kinship is replaced with spiritual kinship. We find the earliest cases on the plane of the crafts. In the history of the arts, blood kinship like in the Bach family, becomes more and more an exception. Since the advent of the world religions, with the exception of the Islam, hereditary castes, like those of the Jews or the Hindus, are replaced with spiritual descendency, like that of the popes in the Christian Church or that of the Dalai Lamas in Tibet. Since the bourgeois revolutions, dynasties or kings are replaced with elected presidents. And so on. In these spiritual worlds, a small number of prestigious fathers have countless sons. All those sons want to sooner or later surpass the father, but only a few chosen ones will succeed. Whoever does not attain the highest level, remains sonless. He therefore often prefers to remain the son of an admired father. Whereas, on the tribal level, adolescent men were each other's equals, they now subordinate themselves on a prolonged parental axis as sons of those among their ranks who succeeded in becoming their spiritual fathers. Here, in this spiritual world, do we finally find the relation between the primeval father and his sons, that Freud erroneously thought to find in the earthly primeval horde. Since spiritual power - not otherwise than wealth - only increases with age, spiritual fathers are old indeed. Their sons may be adolescent on the physical plane and may well have begotten physical sons, but they remain lifelong sons. That is what they have in common with their more earthly counterparts: men that want to become rich. The problem is that spiritual fathers survive the death of their body. After their death, one can take the place of their body on the throne (the case of Freud and Jung), but their prestige continues to terrorise all the future sons: it survives in their memories or speaks from their imperishable works. The founders of spiritual dynasties throw their shadows far in the future: Moses and Buddha, Plato and Aristotle, Alexander and Cesar, Christ and Mohammed, Michelangelo and Titian, Bach and Mozart, Napoleon and Hitler....In these shadows, like in that of a beech, no other tree can thrive. Only such powerless sons can easily be castrated by powerful spiritual fathers. They will never become father. Only this loss of spiritual fertility is the real castration. Only as a story of fatherhood - as a story of a primeval father and not of a primeval men - is Freud's construction a hit. In the firmament of the spiritual world, new fathers (come to) appear as renegade sons. The spiritual murder of the father seals the birth of 'culture heroes', that now and then emerge from the ranks of the imitating sons and found a new tradition, that breaks with the fatherly. They seem to pop up from nothingness to never die. The steady succession of the generations is stopped by the advent of unbegotten and eternal fathers and replaced with the accumulation of ever new culture heroes. These discern themselves form each other and gather an ever renewed host of sons, that obediently subordinate themselves, each under their own father. Unbegotten and eternal fathers only weaken in that their multiplication reduces the number of sons per father. They die only in that comparison makes some disappear in the dark, like a supernova eclipses other stars. As opposed to earthly fathers, spiritual fathers have no need of women to reproduce. The souls ascend to them from bodies born out of the wombs of earthly mothers. They thus spare themselves the detour over love and reproduce themselves directly in a spiritual parthenogenesis. The sexual relations that reigned in the world before the advent of fatherly love, are reversed in a spiritual world through its frustration. In the material world, pre-human fathers used to be merely the providers of sperm, while mothers formed the bodies from their fertilised eggs. In the spiritual world, mothers are degraded to providers of bodies, in which devoted fathers plant the seeds of the spirit, in the hope to see it develop to an eternal son. The earthly man-mother-family is transformed into a heavenly father-woman family. Such male parthenogenesis is the ultimate revenge of man on the sexual and maternal frigidity of woman.

Only in these spiritual worlds is accomplished the ascent of man in the spiritual ascent of fatherhood. The ascent of fatherhood is necessary to hand over the cultural tradition in the frame of the sexual division of labour. When the sexual division of labour is replaced with the social, fatherhood is spiritualised and becomes the main vehicle of culture. The fathers, doubly frustrated in the flesh, resurrect in all their glory in the spiritual world. Only those who cannot become spiritual super fathers, can compensate through becoming mere physical fathers.
THE COMMUNITY All the sons, who subordinate themselves in shared admiration for the spiritual father, are no blood kin, like the members of an endogamous group, but spiritual kin. With the advent of the spiritual father, the endogamous group is split into two spheres. Blood kinship withdraws in the already mentioned formations that are formed on the basis of isolated parental and sexual relations (families and so on). Spiritual kinship, on the other hand, develops in the relations between spiritual fathers and their spiritual sons. We will call such a group of spiritual kin a 'community': this is the social formation in which the former collective soul of the endogamous group survives. That is the case with communities around military heroes, kings and emperors, above all gods, but also great artists and revolutionary scientists, and soon also the 'stars' from the world of industrialised mass-culture. Just like a family, also the society is sustained by parts that are isolated from the complete love cross: in case the prolonged relation between the exemplary father and the imitating son. The overall identity, that penetrated all the generations and the sexes in the primeval group, is reduced into one-sided identity between males. That has as a consequence that the identity between man and woman in the frame of the sexual relations disappears. Henceforth, men feel far more kindred to their spiritual father than to their wife. From heavenly heights, they look down upon this minor being: they are only prepared to share its bed in the flesh. Thus, the community undermines one of the strongest pillars of romantic love: the attraction that is fuelled by the feeling of identity. The disappearance of the identity between the generations and the sexes, as it existed in the endogamous group, is a further and essential damage of the sexual and parental relations.

The undivided primeval group manifested itself first as a horde. It could increase in size through the introduction of the tribal structure. Ever since the development of commerce it fell apart in smaller parts on the level of blood kinship, but on the spiritual level, it is released from all the fetters of blood kinship. As a community, the primeval group can become world encompassing in principle: not for nothing was it the ambition of Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed to become the father of the whole - albeit male - world.


THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

The counterpart of the father who retires from the family in his social relations and looks for spiritual sons in society, is the mother, who is rejected from society and banned into the family. The big scale heavenly patriarchate of the males is the counterpart of the small scale earthly matriarchate of the females in the family. Raising bodies is far less prestigious that begetting spiritual children. Here is to be found the deepest motive of the refusal of motherhood with women. The rejection of motherhood is inspired through its reduction to feeding and bodily care, to purely bodily motherhood, that does not even equal the animal level.

This deeper factor is joined to the other two, that we already studied: that women is doomed to low productive work in the household, so that she becomes subordinated to the rich man, and that being referred to the household means resigning from the exhibitionistic amphitheatre. Only now is our image of the mater frigida completed. Only now do we understand the ultimate rejection of their nasty body by women. And since, as we have seen, sexual love is prolonged in parental love, we also understand why the aversion for the womb is extended to the aversion for its entrance: maternal frigidity only strengthens the sexual frigidity that continues to plague men. We cannot expect women to pose as an example for their daughters in their desire to reduplicate themselves. The kernel of femininity is rejected by the mothers, and their daughters will soon come to regard it equally as an ideal that is to be avoided. That is why women are often only able to define themselves negatively. Here lies the origin of the spiritual penis envy of the spiritual fathers, which is in fact an aversion for the womb and its entrance. It is in this void that settle the men who want to ignite the orgasmic fire in their women. Their endeavours are countered through dark proceedings that go largely unnoticed. On the bottoms of the world, grandmothers who have become infertile have settled. They are out at luring their daughters in their dark caves to spare them the besmirching through the outrage to which they owe their life. Thus, they finally swallow up what they so unwillingly gave birth to. Thus, many a grandmother, who was supposed to pass down her experience in matters of femininity, turns into the destroyer of the life she was supposed to continuate. It is here that we find the hidden female Kronos, the counterpart of the over fertile spiritual fathers on the firmament, who give eternal spiritual life to endless hosts.

Still unconscious yet of their lugubrious destiny, many a woman cherishes a far more modest ideal: to be released from the childbed and the kitchen, and to get access to wealth and spiritual prestige. Like Saint Mary, they would have followed Jesus in his ascent to heaven, were it not for the fact that, until recently, they have been anchored in the material world by their womb. As long as motherhood has been the inescapable fate of women, there was only one exit from their earthly cellar left: reproducing themselves in a divine son. Only through such desire can also female parenthood become spiritual and social. The symbol of these women is again the Holy Virgin, this time not the virgin that ascended to heaven, but her prefiguration: the mother of a divine son, who owes his life to a spiritual wind, not to all those nasty proceedings in the flesh. From her to Valerie Solanas and her Society for Cutting Off Man's Balls is only one step.

The advent of mothers who are no longer prepared to reproduce in animal daughters, but in divine sons, seals the sexualisation of the parental relations between parents and children. Henceforth, the lines of reproduction no longer go through the same sex. In the wake of mothers who want themselves reproduced in divine sons, there soon appear fathers who want daughters, like Freud's primeval father. We will come back to this sexualisation of parental relations in our last chapter about incest.


THE DIVINE HAREM
De vrouw die hsyterisch is in haar jeugd, wordt godsdienstig op haar oude dag'
Les Femmes, Diderot.

The relation of women to their divine sons, reminds us of the fact that there is something as the prestige of man. Prestige, charisma, is the heightened magic that emanates from the example that the parents uphold for the child, that eagerly wants to imitate it. This charisma finds its apogee in the military hero, the god, the genius of the star. From their impotent nothingness, all look up to them with limitless admiration. Fathers have charisma not only for the sons that will never succeed them, but also for women. Their abandonment to prestigious men more than surpasses their earthly interest in economically potent men. Only in the spiritual pyramid of prestige do we find the real counterpart of the physical pyramid of beauty. Only the epiphany of charismatic men in the heavens is the counterpart of the exhibitionistic amphitheatre where women unveil their beauty. In the charismatic firmament and the exhibitionistic amphitheatre do culminate the two central evolutionary trends that discern man form his animal ancestors: the man who learned parental care from the animal mother and thus became father, and the woman who learned seduction and beauty from the animal man, and thus became women.

Both pyramids do not relate like those of the beautiful woman and the rich man: Saint John and Salome only meet each other in the decapitation. In the exhibitionistic amphitheatre the beautiful woman triumphs over the sexual man. In as much as he succeeded in abducting them from the amphitheatre and to chain her to the child bed, she becomes susceptible to the attractiveness of the spiritual man. And we immediately understand why. The woman, that has been reduced to womb and vagina in the living room, admires - just like her son - in God the embodiment of the spirit of which she has been deprived through her hysterogeneis. That provides her a secret satisfaction. The spirit which she admires in charismatic men, from gods to stars, is - again just like with her son - not the man that abducted her from the amphitheatre. Since the advent of heavenly fathers, he is not longer second hand from a sexual or economical point of view, but compared with the charismatic man definitely last hand.

In the above, we already mentioned Joseph as the counterpart of Don Juan. On the spiritual level, Joseph is also the counterpart of the Holy Ghost. In the face of that dove, earthly Don Juans are totally eclipsed. Every Joseph may monogamically plant his seeds, whether or not next to those of Don Juan, but it is only the dove that provides all these bodies with souls. Gods are supposed to be the spiritual fathers of all those mortals.

Here it begins to look like if Freud's primeval father resurrected in heaven after his descent in the stomach of his sons indeed. Only as a spiritual father does he not only castrate his sons, but plant his spiritual seeds in all mothers as well. No doubt, many woman swarm around charismatic men, from Jesus of Bergson and Freud to James Manson, not to mention the countless political leaders and stars. But around this mini-harem begins to extend the ever growing aura of the countless women that are eclipsed through the handful of beautiful women swarming around the charismatic men. All the nuns, all the old women, all the women that had to content themselves with second hand men, all the women that have been chained to the child bed, all the women that have to work hard on the bottom of the pyramid, throw themselves in the arms of their heavenly bride, with whom they are joined in a world encompassing harem. Christ as the bride of Maria, the church: this is the paradigm of all spiritual harems. Those eclipsed women all too eagerly let their body behind in the sublunary world: only as mystical brides to they appear before their heavenly bride. Otherwise than spiritual sons, who can only look up to their heavenly father, those mystical brides have direct access to their chosen one. The same unio mystica that unites them all with their bride, is at the same time also the tie that binds them among themselves in a spiritual community. Only as spiritual denial of the body that they have become in the society, can they join in a communal unio mystica with a man. That still betrays itself in feminism, where women close the ranks in their common struggle against the macho as the primeval patriarch.

The heavenly father accepts men only as spiritual sons and thus elevates them above the merely bodily women. The women themselves try to get rid of their body in becoming heavenly brides. Thus, the heavenly father becomes the embodiment of the group soul of the endogamous horde, that is reduced to spiritual community. Formerly reigned the primeval couple after the example of which parents moulded their children and after the example of which the couples mirrored themselves in each other. Henceforward a primeval father thrones in heaven and ties sons in a spiritualised parental bond and women in a spiritualised sexual bond.. What remains on earth are the isolated parts of the love cross.

The communities around the heavenly father, wherein women are mystical brides and men eternal sons, are not so much the spiritualised version of Freud's primeval horde, that never existed. Rather are they the prefiguration of a world encompassing community, that, in the end of times, will perhaps realise the seeds that were already present in the endogamous group of primeval times. To achieve that goal, the community will have to be rooted again in physical parental-sexual relations. Fathers will have to return to earth and begin to perform the task that they thus far only performed in heaven. And from Don Juan they will have to learn that a woman has to be seduced and not raped. Conversely, women will have to ascend to heaven, like Maria: their earthly bodies included. In their eager to break loose from the millenarian captivity in a sublunary existence, and in their haste to conquer their positions in a social and spiritual world, they threaten to degrade themselves into the penis envying caricatures of men. The wait is for feminists who formulate a positive ideal of womanhood. Next to a modest place for social labour and broad attention for an active and passive role in the spiritual world, room should also be left for the alluring beauty of the body, for sexual fervour and the bodily warmth of motherhood. Who knows, women will ever develop into what they are destined to become: the most desirable of all creatures, the prime movers, by whom all men want to be mobilised. Who knows the time will come that men have women and women man, that parents have children and children parents, that grandparents have grandchildren and grandchildren grandparents, and, last but not least, the all men are brothers. Thus our analysis of the three-one Eros is completed. It will not turn out to be superfluous to analyse two more appearances of Eros in the last two chapters of this book.