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.
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 cooperation have 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 phase releases 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. 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. 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 mothers or 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 of a 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 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. 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.
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
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. 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. 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. 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 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 people to 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.... 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.
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 IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 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. THE DIVINE HAREM 'De
vrouw die hsyterisch is in haar jeugd, wordt godsdienstig op haar oude
dag' 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. 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. Reactions: Stefan. Beyst@Pandora. be. Footnotes will be added
soon.
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