The following is one of the passages I reviewed today from the translation of Savitri Devi’s book. It clearly shows what the transvaluation of values is:
One can compare the action of the Einsatzgruppen against the Jews in Germany and in the countries occupied by the armies of the Third Reich with that of the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern territories.
In both cases, according to the instructions given by Reinhard Heydrich in May 1941 to the leaders of the latter, the aim was to ‘mercilessly destroy all past, present and future opposition to National Socialism’ that is, to eliminate as many actual or potential enemies of the new Germanic faith and Empire as possible. In both cases, the action revealed a scale of values in complete opposition to all anthropocentrism or a scale of values completely devoid of hypocrisy. War is in itself the negation of any anthropocentric faith or philosophy—especially war between men of different races and civilisations, some of whom regard the habitat of others as necessary, or favourable, to their development.
Himmler remarked that the Anglo-Saxon pioneers in North America had ‘exterminated the Indians and only wanted to live on their native land.’ And the fiercest anti-Hitlerites are forced to admit that he was right, and that there is no ‘respect for the human person’ in the attitude of the founders of the US towards the real Americans. It is all too easy, after the fact, when you have installed your democracy over the entire surface of a continent practically emptied of its inhabitants, whose race you have destroyed in the most cowardly way by alcohol, it is easy then, I say, to proclaim that the age of violence is over; to forbid others to carve out a ‘living space’ for themselves as you have carved out one for yourself and, should their effort end in failure, to bring them before a parody ‘International Tribunal’ as ‘criminals against humanity.’
The question arises, however, as to the boundary between the two intolerances, or rather, between acts and gestures hostile to the order dreamed of by the legislator and ‘thoughts’, deep-seated convictions, attachment to values that contradict the basic propositions on which this order is based. It is certain that gestures, unless they are purely mechanical, presuppose thoughts, convictions and the acceptance of well-defined values. And it is also certain that any ardent attachment to given values will sooner or later be expressed in gestures—by creating ‘facts’. It will do so as soon as it can, that is, as soon as the pressure of the hostile forces which have hitherto prevented it, relaxes.
And in the meantime, if any public demonstration is prohibited for him—if he is, even as a feeling, considered ‘subversive’, even ‘criminal’, by those in power—he will express himself clandestinely: by word and deed, behind closed doors, among ‘brothers’. This is exactly how our attachment to the values of Aryan racism in its contemporary form, Hitlerism, has been expressed for a quarter of a century now. We are tolerated only insofar as we are invisible. And the immense hostile world in whose midst we are scattered, accustomed as it is to trust only its senses, believes us to be non-existent. Any clandestine thought is necessarily tolerated, or rather ignored, and for good reason!
Tolerance of the expression of another’s thought or faith, in a society based on norms which it seems to despise, is logically justified in only two cases.
Either one considers this thought or faith as not being likely to have any influence on the social life of the individual (and even less on that of his racial brothers), or one admits its harmfulness; its subversive character, its potential danger on the practical level—but, either we don’t esteem the representatives enough to judge them capable of sustained persistence, or we don’t believe in the efficacy of thought and faith, even when expressed, if the action they call for is impossible. We don’t admit the real danger.
The Hindu who has no objection to one of his sons worshipping Jesus, rather than the divine Incarnations known and worshipped by his fathers, has in view only one function of religion: leading the worshipper to the lived experience of ‘God’ to the realisation of the universal Self within himself. He presupposes that his son, while tending towards this supreme experience through his devotion to the Christ, will not break any of the ties that bind him to Brahmanical society. If he thought differently, if he suspected, for example, that the young man no longer had the same respect for the traditional laws concerning food and marriage; if he believed that he was now capable of eating flesh (and especially bovine flesh) or of procreating children outside his caste, and this because his new faith had given rise to a new mentality in him, he would be less tolerant.
The European who is refused entry to a Hindu temple is excluded not because of his metaphysics, which is held to be false, still less because of his race, if he is indeed an Aryan, but because of the culinary habits attributed to him, sometimes wrongly; but no regulation takes account, alas, of the exception! (Although Hindu society in general had long since accepted me, I was refused entry to one of the temples of Sringeri, the homeland of Sankaracharya, in South-West India, on the pretext that I had been, before embracing Hinduism, a beef-eater. And when I vehemently objected to this accusation, pointing out that I had always been a vegetarian, both before I came to India and afterwards, the priest told me that ‘my fathers, no doubt’ had not been vegetarians. I must confess, to be fair, that I was admitted to almost every other temple in India, including the one at Pandharpur in the Mahrat country.)
Hindu ‘intolerance’ being, like ours, essentially defensive, is understood that it manifest itself against any idea or belief, or metaphysical or moral attitude, seen as tending to undermine the traditional social order. But it will never be exercised in respect of a different traditional order, to change it by force or even by persuasion. This is, I repeat—and it cannot be repeated too often—the ‘intolerance’ of all the peoples of antiquity, minus the Jews. The judges who condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock because he ‘didn’t believe in the gods of the city’ would never have dreamt of imposing these same gods of Athens on an Egyptian or a Persian.
If they could have known in which direction ideas would evolve and history would unfold—Christian (or Muslim) proselytism, the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, the suppression of indigenous religions in America—, they would have seemed as monstrous to them as they do to us, the much-hated ‘intolerants’ of today. And we, who would be ready to crack down with the utmost violence on all those who, by nature or choice, would oppose the resurgence of a social and political order based on Aryan racial values among Aryan peoples, would regard as absurd any attempt to preach our values to Negroes or, in general, to peoples of other blood than ours.
Even in Europe we distinguish between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’, the Germanic and the Mediterranean element even though the latter was already mixed with the blood of the Nordic conquerors in ancient times. After every conquest there is a gradual return to the race of the conquered, if no ‘caste system’ or at least no marriage laws guarantee the survival of the conquerors.
If Aryans with our mentality would have conquered the Americas instead of the Spaniards and Portuguese, they would have left the temples and the worship of the native gods intact. At most, seeing that they themselves were taken for gods from the start, they would have allowed themselves to be worshipped while trying, with all their might, to become and remain worthy of being so. And they would have punished, with exemplary severity, any intimacy between their own soldiers and the women of the country, or at least prevented the birth of children from mixed unions, thus preserving the purity of both races.
______ 卐 ______
Note of the Editor: The following passage from Breve Historia de México (A Brief History of Mexico) by José Vasconcelos portrays the Catholic ethos criticised by Savitri:
In sum, it is time to proclaim, without reservation, that both the Aztec and the [Mesoamerican] civilisations that preceded it formed a set of aborted cases of humanity. Neither the technical means at their disposal, nor the morality in use, nor the ideas, could have ever raised them, by themselves.
The only means of saving peoples thus decayed is the one used by the Spaniards: the miscegenation legalised by the Papal Bull that authorised the marriages of Spaniards and natives. And with miscegenation, the total replacement of the old soul by a new soul, through the miracle of Christianity. The fact that we have so many millions of Indians in Mexico should not demoralise us, as long as the traditional tendency subsists: that is, the effort to make the Indian a European by soul, a Christian, and not a pagan with the paganism of savages. On the contrary, the Indianism that they try to take back from the past, to return us to the Indian, is a betrayal of the homeland that, since the Colony, stopped being Indian.
That is why we have always talked about incorporating the Indian into civilisation, that is, into Christianity and Hispanism, so that all our children, united, enjoy a Mexico totally regenerated from its Aztec-ism, even the Indians and the children of the Indians!
Vasconcelos was pathetically wrong. It’s impossible to turn the Other into oneself. Vasconcelos died when I was one year old. He could never have imagined that the statue of Christopher Columbus would be vandalised by the slightly mesticized Indians that he idealised; removed from its pedestal by the government itself, and replaced by that of an Amerindian woman as I said in my post yesterday.
Incidentally, those who want to read a translation of mine from ten years ago of another passage from Vasconcelos’ book can do it at Counter-Currents.
It is the deep connection of Christianity (and, in particular, the ‘holy Sacrifice of the Mass’) with the ancient mysteries that has ensured its survival to the present day. And it was a stroke of (political) genius in Paul of Tarsus to have given such an interpretation to the most ancient myths of the Mediterranean world that he thereby assured his own people, over this world and over all the peoples he was destined to influence over the centuries, an indefinite spiritual domination.
It was a stroke of genius (also political) of the Emperor Constantine to have chosen the spread of the religion which, by spreading most rapidly, would give the ethnic chaos which the Roman world then represented the only unity to which it could still aspire.
Editor’s Note: Once again, Savitri was ignorant of the history of the House of Constantine. But we can’t blame her. In English, the real history of Christianity only reached public opinion decades later, with books like Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (see our quotations of Nixey: here).
And it was, in the case of the Germanic leader Clodwig, known as Clovis in the history of France, another stroke of genius (political, too), to have felt that nothing would ensure him permanent domination over his rivals, other Germanic leaders, as much as his own adherence—and that of his warriors—to Christianity, in a world that was already three-quarters Christian, where the bishops represented a power to be sought as an ally.
Editor’s Note: Nixey’s book is just a book. Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Christianity’s Criminal History is almost an encyclopaedia, and unlike Nixey he did write about Clovis (see our translation: here).
Political genius, not religious; still less philosophical—for in all cases it was a question of power, personal or national; of material stability and success, not of truth in the full sense of the word, i.e., of agreement with the eternal. Those were ambitions on the human plane, not thirsts for knowledge of the Laws of Being, or thirsts for union with the Essence of all things, the Soul, both transcendent and immanent, of the Cosmos.
If it had been otherwise, there would have been no reason why the religion of the Nazarene should have triumphed for so many centuries: its rivals were equal to it. It had only one practical advantage over them: its fanaticism, its childish intolerance inherited from the Jews: an intolerance which could make the Roman or the cultured Greek of the early days of the Church smile, and which the German, nurtured in his beautiful religion which was both cosmic and warlike, could rightly find absurd; but which was going to give to Christianity a militant character, which it alone possessed since orthodox Judaism remained—and was to remain—the faith of a people.
Nothing forced the Goths, Lombards, Burgundians and Franks to be Christianised but their greed for power and willingness to take over the remains of the Empire without reflection or discussion of its ‘ideological’ bases, fully Christianised by the 5th century (the century of the Germanic expansions). This was not the case of forced Christianisation, centuries later, of the Saxons and Frisians (by Charlemagne), or the politics from the top (the monarchs) as done by the Norwegians (Olaf ‘The Holy’) and the Slavs (Vladimir, also ‘The Holy’). The Germans could have been the liberators of Europe, but they put their arms in the service of a foreign faith and an ecclesia (priestly community). This attitude says very clearly how they were indifferent to their own traditions.
It was a betrayal. Our history would have been different if they had remained faithful to the cultural legacy of their ancestors.
Savitri continues:
Christianity could now only be fought by another religion that claimed to be as universal and as intolerant. And it is a fact that, up to now, it has only retreated on a large scale from Islam and, in our days, from the false religion of Communism.
Islam also was linked to the Old Testament of the Jews. It had, like it, come out of the desert, but was stripped of all the symbolism which links the cult of Christ to the old Mediterranean myths, Egyptian, Chaldean, etc., of the death and resurrection of the Saviour Wheat, and to the prehistoric rites which made them tangible to the faithful. (For the Mohammedan, Jesus-Issa is ‘a prophet’, not a God, and certainly not ‘God’). Syria, Egypt and the whole of North Africa, which had been Christian for three or four centuries, were Islamised overnight. Europe would have been conquered, had it not been for the war that Charles Martel and his Franks were victorious between Tours and Poitiers in 732 (and of course, hadn’t it resisted for centuries as Spain did).
Certainly, an Arab victory, followed by the conquest of the whole of Europe according to the plan conceived twenty years earlier by the brilliant Musa al-Kabir, would have been, from the racial point of view, a catastrophe of the first magnitude. The Aryan race would have lost, throughout the continent, the purity it still retained in the eighth century. At most, there would have remained here and there islands of predominantly Aryan population, just as there are still regions in North Africa populated mainly by Berbers, or as there are still places in Spain where the (northern) Visigoth type has left more traces than elsewhere. On the whole, Europe would have become, as regards blood, less pure even than it is today, which is not an understatement. But from the strict point of view of the evolution of the ideas and morals of each of its peoples, and more particularly of its religious psychology, its history would perhaps not have been very different.
It is true that Arabic would probably have supplanted Latin, and that there would probably not have been a ‘Renaissance’ in the tenth century of the Hegira. Or would the Greek scholars of Constantinople (themselves Islamized?) have emigrated to the West when the Turks approached, to courts very similar to those of the Moorish capitals of Spain, and would they have awakened a nostalgia for classical antiquity there, despite everything? Let us not forget that Aristou (Aristotle) and Aflatoun (Plato) were known and admired by Arab scholars.
There would certainly have been no painting or sculpture reproducing the human form: this is contrary to the laws of Islam. The artists of Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, the Leonards, the Michelangelos, the Dürer and the Rembrandts, would have been born. Enough Aryan blood would have remained for them to be born. And they would have given their genius an expression that was just as strong and probably just as beautiful, but different. But there are two features of the Christian civilisation of Europe which would have remained tragically the same: anthropocentrism, and intolerance—intolerance on all levels, a normal continuation of religious intolerance and its consequence, what I have called the superstition of ‘man’.
The spirit of controversy, inherited from decadent Hellenism, would not have failed to give rise to sects. The spirit of exclusiveness, inherited from the Jews, the mania that each one must believe, with his brothers in faith, the sole holder of the secrets of the Unknowable, would have made of these sects parties hating each other, and militating savagely against each other, for it was and is still the temperament of the European to fight savagely, as soon as he has accepted the combat.
There would undoubtedly have been wars of religion, and a Holy Inquisition which, in terms of horror, would have left nothing to be desired of the one that now exists. The Americas would have been discovered and conquered, and exploited. The caravels would have carried the faith of the victorious Prophet instead of that of the crucified Jesus, and the standard of the Khalifs would have replaced that of the very Catholic kings.
But the conquest, exploitation and proselytising would have been just as ruthless. The old cults would have been rigorously abolished, as had been, twenty-five centuries earlier, the worship of the Baalim and the Mother Goddesses, wherever the ‘good’ Jewish kings had extended their domination. The Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan would also have been razed to the ground. It did not matter that mosques had sprung up on their foundations instead of Christian cathedrals! From the point of view of Quautemoc and Atahuallpa, and of the populations of Mexico and Peru, this would have meant the same thing: the choice between conversion or death.
It is true that the Jews of antiquity had not even given this choice to the worshippers of Baal and Astarte, and that in North America the Aryans, morally could not be more Jewish (giving enormous importance to the Old Testament), were hardly going to leave it to the Indians, whom they had to decimate, almost to the point of complete extinction, by alcohol, not even granting them the honour of dying for their Gods, with weapons in their hands.
The Spaniards—and the Portuguese—apparently cared more about the fate of the immortal souls of ‘all men’. They were closer to the Jews, followers of Jesus, and especially of Paul of Tarsus, than they were to the Jews who were comrades-in-arms of Joshua, son of Nunn, or of King David or of Jehu. Nevertheless, they were, in any case, what all good Christians are or should be, according to Pope Pius XI: ‘spiritual Semites’, and religious intolerance is a Jewish product, the Jewish product par excellence.
Several years ago, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent posted articles in which he blamed liberal republicanism and ‘the spread of evangelical Christianity’ for today’s suicidal liberalism: a clever way of avoiding the C-word, Christianity without adjectives. Today Kevin MacDonald did the same in The Occidental Observer: he blamed a specific form of Christianity, Yankee puritanism, for today’s suicidal liberalism. In ‘Massive blindspot’ on Friday I wrote: ‘Instead of seeing the elephant in the room, Christian ethics, they fixate on these trifles’.
It is very easy to reply to these racialists. First of all, Americans tend to only see their belly button. If we introduce the history of Latin America in the racial discourse, it is clear that from the Rio Grande to Argentina the Europeans of the Iberian Peninsula managed to develop an ethnosuicidal ideology without the influence of Protestant puritanism.
But our voice is not heard by the majority of American racialists. Last month, for example, no one commented on ‘Reflections of an Aryan woman, 5’. There I denounced my father’s symphonic work, where he honours a Spanish monk. As early as the 16th century, my father boasted, some monks who emigrated to the Americas behaved as true precursors of (so-called) human rights.
In my previous post I cited the best definition of Christianity that I’ve ever heard: ‘Christianity, in essence, means not the number of priests ordained: but the number of niggers loved’. Well, south of the Rio Grande we could rephrase that definition like this: ‘Christianity means not the number of Catholic priests ordained but the number of nacos loved’. (In Mexico naco is equivalent to the North American nigger, although referring to the Amerinds.) The number of nacos loved by the Spanish and Portuguese was such that in Latin America, unlike the Anglo-Germans of the north, they weren’t cornered in special territories. This very Christian practise resulted in the greatest miscegenation in history: a whole continent, where Europeans irrevocably stained their blood.
The important thing to note here is that my late father was right: Spain brought with it the monastic orders dedicated to protecting the Indian with zeal. Without the help of Protestant puritanism or republican liberalism, the Europeans in the Spanish and Portuguese part of the continent practised a racial harakiri, of which today we see the consequences only by turning on the TV.
MacDonald and the white nationalists will continue to avoid the word. Alas, I can’t even say that racial science will advance during the burials of the old proponents of white nationalism because even the young nationalists—not just Griffin—avoid the C-word!
Recently I came up with the idea of starting to change our colloquialisms, residues of Judeo-Christianity, for expressions like ‘For the Gods…!’ If people answer us by saying that there is only one god, we shall answer: ‘I don’t believe the god of the Jews exists!’ (not long ago I told exactly that to my very Catholic mother).
It does not matter that the Aryan Gods do not exist either. They exist in another sense. As Jung said, they represent healthy archetypes of the Aryan psyche. Just remember the high opinion of Jung about Hitler and Wotan as a Germanic Renaissance.
Yesterday and today I have continued watching the fifth season of Vikings. My favourite dialogue of everything I’ve seen since the first season appears in S5-E15, after a war against the Christians on English soil (YouTube clip: here).
Harald Finehair: Magnus, son of Ragnar… What is to become of us now, eh?
Magnus: I think our Faith should prevail. No doubt at all. Our Gods will ultimately triumph over the Christian god [contempt in Magnus’s voice] who is a usurper, who has no meaning; is not real. One day not so far away the name ‘Jesus Christ’ will be utterly forgotten [emphasis in Magnus’ voice].
Oh how many times I have fantasised about a time tunnel that will take me to the 9th century to deter the Vikings from entering Europe at the moment…
First, I’d advise, they should conquer the Mesoamericans and the Incas. In a couple of centuries of ethnic cleansing, with all the gold of the New World and those fertile lands producing hundreds of thousands of American Viking warriors, they could then conquer Europe to make Ragnar’s son’s dream come true…
Alfonso Cuarón won best director for his semi-autobiographical Roma. Yalitza Aparicio (pic) is the first indigenous Mexican woman to be nominated for best actress at the Oscars.
The movie, filmed not so far from my own district when I was a child and teenager, is plagued with toxic messages. This was expected, as Cuarón is openly anti-racist, as I informed last year.
French ethnologist Danièle Dehouve dedicates an article to the study of the ritual sacrifices of contemporary animals by Tlapanec Amerindiansin pages 499-517 of El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana, edited by Leonardo López Lujánet al: the foremost authorities on human sacrifice in pre-Columbian America.
As a typical indigenista, Dehouve’s scholarly piece contains no single line condemning cruelty; in this case, the cruelty perpetrated with the animals, despite the fact that she writes that the Amerind sacrifice in the 21st century is slow to produce ‘agony’ (her word) in the animal, and that such practices are linked to the human sacrifice of yesteryear:
At the base of this investigation is the conviction that the principles and structures that organised the sacrifice before the age of the Spanish conquistadors persist in contemporary sacrificial acts, even though the type of victim has changed.[1]
For more information about this most reliable source about Amerind sacrifice, human and animal, see this appendix to my essayThe Return of Quetzalcoatl.
________
[1] En la base de esta investigación está la convicción de que los principios y estructuras que organizaron el sacrificio antes de la Conquista persisten en los actos sacrificiales contemporáneos, a pesar de que haya cambiado el tipo de víctima.
Yesterday and in the first hours of this day I watched, on Netflix, the latest film by the Mexican Alfonso Cuarón, Roma, which alludes to the Colonia Roma where Cuarón lived as a child, not very far from where I also lived as a child in Mexico City.
Surely some visitors of this site will wonder how a phenotypically Creole family looks like in Mexico; that is to say, a family with little or no Amerindian blood. The autobiographic Cuarón recreates, in a black-and-white film, the daily life of one of these families in the great Mexican capital of the late 1970 and 1971 (a period that I remember so well).
Before talking about the film, I must say that I feel outraged by the awards that the Mexicans Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro have received by cinematographic institutions and film critics. Although none is Jewish, their films navigate the same currents of the anti-white Zeitgeist of our time.
Of Cuarón, who has a huge talent for the seventh art, I would only recommend Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: the film with fewer bad messages for the Aryan cause. In Children of Men and Gravity the bad messages are more conspicuous, and let’s not talk about the 2015 film, The Revenant by González Iñárritu, which won three awards in a Hollywood dominated by Jews.
Exactly the same must be said of Guillermo del Toro, whose monstrous The Shape of Water gave him the Oscar for best director last year. Also, his 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth sides the wrong guys of the Spanish Civil War.
As I said, the film Roma portrays a white family in Mexico City (Cuarón and I even went to the same High School, the Colegio Madrid). As to the plot, I do not know a single father of any of these white Mexican families who, in addition to abandoning his young children and wife, has no intention of seeing them again! From this point of view, the message of Roma is analogous to del Toro’s The Shape of Water, where a typical American man of the 1950s, father of a white family, is the bad guy in the movie.
In Roma the heroine is a Mixtec Indian woman who, by at the end of the film, saves two children from drowning in the sea, putting her life at risk. This image represents the culmination of the Mexican movie with the white kids and the mother embracing the heroic Indian.
My mother has had a legion of Indian maids, and my dear grandmother was a great confidant of them who actually loved them. Needless to say, I never heard of a case in which an Indian maid risked her life to save a white child. Thus Cuarón’s heroine is the counterpart of which I’ve never heard: that a father of a white family in Colonia Roma, or another similar district in Mexico City, abandons his children to the degree of not wanting to see them again. Did Cuarón’s father did exactly this to his children? The autobiographic Cuarón doesn’t specify this in the interviews.
In both Hollywood and in art films, the cultural war against the Aryan is absolute. It bothers me that, in the white nationalist forums, these Mexican directors are not seen for what they are: little Jews even if they do not have a drop of Jewish blood. Even Greg Johnson under a penname recently wrote a review of Children of Men without fully understanding the toxicity of these acclaimed films directed by talented Mexicans.
Tuesday update:
Cuarón shows his true colours in this interview in Spanish, from which I translate the essential pronouncements:
To the liberal interviewer he said: ‘La perversa relación que existe en nuestro país entre raza y clase’ (‘The perverse relationship that exists in our country between race and class’) in a context in which Mexico’s poverty is blamed for this ‘perverse relationship’: a phrase that Cuarón repeats twice throughout the interview. On the second occasion, he says that ‘por el color de tu piel también estás determinado socialmente’ (‘by the colour of your skin you are also socially determined’ in Mexico).
He also said: ‘¡México es clasicista y bien racista!, y al mexicano le cuesta mucho trabajo aceptar eso… Si queremos una verdadera transformación, todo empieza con la autorreflexión’ (‘Mexico is classicist and very racist! And the Mexican has a hard time accepting that… If we want a true transformation, everything starts with self-reflection’).
Isn’t it crystal-clear now why the anti-white System has overfilled Cuarón with so many international awards?
Wikipedia has the problem that many of its editors and administrators are either white traitors to the West or Jews like those of deMause’s journal. Although some scholars contribute to editing it, there is always an anti-westerner who censures the passages opposing the anti-white zeitgeist. For example, regarding the articles on infanticide I edited in 2008, a couple of Australian administrators from the English Wikipedia abused their powers. Not only did they eliminate most of the section on Australia within the article “Infanticide.” They went so far as to erase, from that online encyclopedia, an entire article that another editor had started. This last article focused on expanding the subject of the infanticide committed by aboriginal Australians. (Part of what was censored by Wikipedia is covered in this chapter, in the section on Australia.) Almost a decade later I learned that, since the 1970s, it has been a common practice in that continent to censor studies on infanticide, insofar as the aborigines have been idealized. Rewriting the history of the natives by vaporizing, in Stalin’s style, part of the collective memory of a nation misinforms visitors to the encyclopedia. But not all Wikipedia editors have behaved like that pair of administrators, so zealous in idealizing the natives in their country. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:
In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.
Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.
Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.1
I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest.
This chapter summarizes the data collected in the first exhaustive study on infanticide: a book by Larry Milner, Hardness of Heart, published in the last year of the 20th century. That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate.
Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50 percent of the total number of births in prehistoric times.2 Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20 percent.3 Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.4 Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50 percent of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.5 These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.
Paleolithic and Neolithic
Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.6
Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50 percent of newborns were put to death. However, Harris conceived a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he says that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001 percent. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel surpasses him. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20 percent. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science,7 one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of psychogenic regression that we suffer in our times.
Ancient World
As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times. Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”8 Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46-120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.9
Greece and Rome. In the Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.
The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.10 It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psychohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Note how the biblical classics, the 16th-century chroniclers, and the 19th-century anthropologists wield value judgments, something banned in an academy under the shadow of Franz Boas.)
In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we saw that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.11
“The greatest respect is owed to a child,” wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all males and the first female and forbade killing them after a certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so, exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.12
In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tablets of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.13
Hebrew people. Although the Bible says many Hebrews sacrificed their children to pagan gods, Judaism prohibits infanticide (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites in the last chapter). Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children.”14 Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward.”15
Pagan European tribes. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. “It was the custom of the pagans that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food.”16 In the most influential archeological book of the 19th century, Prehistoric Times, John Lubbock invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. He described that burnt bones indicated the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.17
The Christian Era
Something goes completely unnoticed for the modern mind. In a world plagued by sacrifices like the Old World, the innocent son has to die ordered by his father: a well-known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity by overlooking this reality converted into a powerful symbol. This is true despite, as I have stated in the previous pages, that forms of upbringing should have suffered, in general terms, a regression throughout the Middle Ages. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”18The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.19 So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine considered infanticide a crime but reinstated the practice of selling one’s own children. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus complained in 322 AD:
We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood, parents are selling or pledging their children. Such an ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.
Towards 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling newborns was sinful. Already within the historical period known as Christendom, infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). However, both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.
Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was a homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.20 Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.21 More archaic forms of infanticide, such as sacrifice, were practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. “They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich,” a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.22 Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.23 In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.24 According to William Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”25 By the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber River even in daylight.26 In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Some residents of rural areas got rid of their babies by throwing them to the hogs. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime.27 The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to wild dogs.28
The darkness of Europe would begin to fade in the 12th century. As explained above, the “little Renaissance” of that century reminds me the famous series of Kenneth Clark, the first of its kind that showed us the personal view of an intellectual in a television series. Other cultures would be arrested in their ways of treatment of women and children.
China and Japan. The American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.29 Since the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had found thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned on the streets of China. Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi.30 China’s society promoted gendercide. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century B.C., who developed a school of law, wrote: “As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death.”31 Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called “baby water.” 32 Even before feudal Japan infanticide was performed. The common slang for infanticide was mabiki which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. It has been estimated that 40 percent of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu.33 A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby’s mouth and nose.34Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.35
India and Pakistan. Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta (approx. 1560-1620), as soon as a female child was born she was holding “in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death.”36 The practice of female infanticide was also common among the inhabitants of Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and also among the Sind in Pakistan.37 It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the crocodiles in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.38
Arabia and Islam. Female infanticide was common all over Arabia during pre-Islamic Arabia, especially by burying alive the newborn female.39 Later it would be explicitly prohibited by the Koran: “And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; Surely to kill them is a great wrong.”40 However, in spite of this emergent psychoclass, if compared with their infanticidal neighbors of the Arabian peninsula, the forms of childcare and the treatment of women in Islam would be stagnant for centuries.
Tribes
Infanticide in tribal societies was, and in some tribes still is, more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.
Africa. In this continent newborns were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.41 The Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.42 Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, as a result of fearing a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered.43 The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents.44 Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first.45 If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.46 In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children.47 Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.48
Oceania and the Pacific Islands. Infanticide among the autochthon people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50 percent of newborn infants were killed.49 In the 19th-century Ugi, in the Solomon Islands almost 75 percent of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies.50 In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered ahubweu and often buried alive.51 As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: “Girls […] don’t become warriors, and they don’t stay to look for us in our old age.”52
Australia. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, “infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives.”53 The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote:
When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.54
Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30 percent of the births resulted in infanticide.55 Mildred Dickeman concurs that the figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate.56 Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.57 Thomas Robert Malthus said that, in the New South Wales region when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her.58 In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced “by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand.”59 In Queensland a tribal woman only could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.60 The Australian Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.61 According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.62 Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia.63 In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.64 Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19 percent of their newborns.65 In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s-1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian “females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies,” which were later used for hunting.66 Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.67
Polynesia. In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was fairly common.68 Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives Raymond Firth noted: “If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones.”69 In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions.70 Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.71 Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti.72 Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.73
North America. Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it had been largely abandoned. There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50 percent to 80 percent.74 Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea.75 There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, “The Unwanted Child,” where a mother throws her child into the fjord. The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die.76 In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.77 Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures of the South.78 The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.79 In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide.80 For the Maidu Native Americans in the United States twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well.81 In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.82
South American tribes. Although data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as data from North America, the estimates seem to be similar. The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced.83 The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.84
While Capacocha sacrifice was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide.85 Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50 percent of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried.86 The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.87
Conclusion
As can be gathered from the above data, it is possible to support psychohistory’s cornerstone, the idea of an infanticidal psychoclass, with sources other than those used by deMause. The main criticism of historian Julie Hofmann Kemp to the deMausean model has, therefore, been solved.
References
1 Loren Cobb signs under a penname in Wikipedia. His post appeared in the talk page of Psychohistory (03:41, April 3, 2008).
2 Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986), “Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Co., p. 239.
3 Williamson, Laila (1978), “Infanticide: an anthropological analysis,” in Kohl, Marvin, Infanticide and the Value of Life, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 61-75.
4 Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, p. 19.
5 Hoffer, Peter, N.E.H. Hull (1981). Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and America, 1558-1803. New York University Press, p. 3.
6 Simons, E. L. (1989). “Human origins.” Science, 245: p. 1344.
7 Neel, James. (1970). “Lessons from a ‘primitive’ people.” Science, 1: p. 816.
8 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) p. 324.
9 Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 22s. See also: Stager, Lawrence, Samuel R. Wolff (1984). “Child sacrifice at Carthage—religious rite or population control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10: pp. 31-51.
10 Hughes, Dennis D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge, p. 187.
11 Philo (1950). The Special Laws. Harvard University Press, Vol. VII, pp. 117s, 551, 549.
12 Naphtali, Lewis, ed. (1985), “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744,” Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, Oxford University Press, p. 54.
13 Radville, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Strauss, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
14 Tacitus (1931). The Histories. London: William Heinemann, Vol. II, p. 183.
15 Josephus (1976). The Works of Flavius Josephus, “Against Apion.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.25, p. 597.
16 John Boswell (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Vintage Books, p. 211.
17 Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, p. 176.
18 Robinson, J. Armitage (translator) (1920), “Didache,” Barnabas, Hermar and the Didache, Vol. D.ii.2c, New York: The MacMillan Co., p. 112.
19 Ibid., Epistle of Barnabas, xix. 5d.
20 Radbill, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Straus, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
21 John Boswell (1984). “Exposition and oblation: the abandonment of children and the ancient and medieval family.” American Historical Review 89: pp. 10-33.
22 Dorson, Richard (1968). Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, p. 351.
23 Westrup, C.W. (1944). Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press, p. 249.
24 Turville-Petre, Gabriel (1964). Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, p. 253.
25 Langer, William L. (1974). “Infanticide: a historical survey.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, pp. 353-366.
26 Trexler, Richard (1973). “Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1: p. 99.
27 Ransel, David (1988). Mothers of Misery. Princeton University Press, pp. 10-12.
28 McLennan: Studies in Ancient History (op. cit.), pp. 105s.
29 Kennan, George (1986 [originally published in 1871]). Tent Life in Siberia. New York: Gibbs Smith.
30 Polo, Marco (1965). The Travels. Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 174.
31 Yu-Lan, Fung (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, p. 327.
32 Yao, Esther S. Lee (1983). Chinese Women: Past and Present. Mesquite: Ide House, p. 75.
33 Kushe, Helga and Peter Singer (1985). Should the Baby Live? Oxford University Press, p. 106.
34 Shiono, Hiroshi and Atoyo Maya, Noriko Tabata, Masataka Fujiwara, Junich Azumi and Mashahiko Morita (1986). “Medico-legal aspects of infanticide in Hokkaido District, Japan.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 7: p. 104.
35 Vaux, Kenneth (1989). Birth Ethics. New York: Crossroad, p. 12.
36 Westermarck, Edward (1968). A Short History of Marriage. New York: Humanities Press, Vol. III, p. 162.
37 Panigrahi, Lalita (1972). British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, p. 18.
38 Davies, Nigel (1981). Human Sacrifice. New York: William Morrow & Co, p. 18.
39 Milner: Hardness of Heart, (op. cit.), p. 59. See also: Smith, William Robertson (1903). Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. London: Adam & Charles Block, p. 293.
40 The Koran, XVII:31. See also LXXXI:8-9, XVI:60-62, XVII:42 and XLII:48.
41 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) pp. 160s.
42 LeVine, Sarah and Robert LeVine (1981), “Child abuse and neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 39.
43 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 150.
44 Schapera, I.A. (1955). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford University Press, p. 261.
45 Sumner, William (1956 [originally published in 1906). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Oxford University Press, p. 274.
46 Basden, G.T. (1996). Niger Ibos. New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 180-184, 262s.
47 Miller, Nathan (1928). The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Bretano’s, p. 37.
48 Davies: Human Sacrifice (op. cit.), p. 143.
49 McLennan, J.F. (1886). Studies in Ancient History, The Second Series. New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 90s.
50 Guppy, H.B. (1887). The Solomon Islands and Their Natives. London: Swan Sonnenschein, p. 42.
51 Frazer, J.G. (1935). The Golden Bough. New York: MacMillan Co., pp. 332s.
52 Langness, L.L. (1984), “Child abuse and cultural values: the case of New Guinea,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 15.
53 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1963). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. New York: Scocken Books, p. 235.
54 Róheim, Géza (1962). “The Western tribes of Central Australia: childhood.” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 2: p. 200.
55 Smyth, Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Australia. London: John Ferres, p. 52.
56 Dickeman, Mildred (1975). “Demographic consequences of infanticide in man.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 6: p. 121.
57 Howitt, A.W. (1904). The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 749s.
58 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1963). On Population. New York: The Modern Library, I.III, p. 170.
59 Bonney, Frederic (1884). “On some customs of the aborigines of the River Darling.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 13: p. 125.
60 Cowlishaw, Gillian (1978). “Infanticide in aboriginal Australia.” Oceania, 48: p. 267.
61 Murdock, G.P. (1971). Our Primitive Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, p. 34.
62 Frazer, James George (1963). The Dying God. New York: Macmillan, p. 180.
63 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 34.
64 Spencer, Baldwin, F.J. Gillen (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: MacMillan & Co., p. 475.
65 Yengoyan, Aram (1972). “Biological and demographic components in aboriginal Australian socio-economic organization.” Oceania, 43: p. 88.
66 Roth, H. Ling (1899). The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: King & Sons, pp. 162s.
67 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 7.
68 Ritchie, Jane and James Ritchie (1979). Growing Up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 39.
69 Firth, Raymond (1983). Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge, p. 44.
70 Dibble, Sheldon (1839). History and General Views of the Sandwich Islands Mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd, p. 123.
71 Handy, E.S. and Mary Kawena Pukui (1958). The Polynesian Family System in Ka-’U, Hawaii. New Plymouth, New Zealand: Avery Press, p. 327.
72 Ritchie: Growing Up in Polynesia (op. cit.), p. 189.
73 Oliver, Douglas (1974). Ancient Tahitan Society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawii, Vol. I, p. 425.
74 Schrire, Carmel and William Lee Steiger (1974). “A matter of life and death: an investigation into the practice of female infanticide in the Artic.” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 9: p. 162.
75 Fridtjof, Nansen (1894). Eskimo Life. London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 152.
76 Garber, Clark (1947). “Eskimo Infanticide.” Scientific monthly, 64: p. 98.
77 Langer: “Infanticide: a historical survey” (op. cit.), p. 354.
78 Balikci, Asen (1984), “Netslik,” in Damas, David, Handbook of North American Indians (Arctic), Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 427.
79 Savishinsky, Joel and Hiroko Sue Hara (1981), “Hare,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 322. See also: Gillespie, Beryl (1981), “Mountain Indians,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 331.
80 Shimkin, Demitri, B. (1986), “Eastern Shoshone,” in D’Azevedo, Warren L., Handbook of North American Indians (Great Basin). Smithsonian Institution, p. 330.
81 Riddell, Francis (1978), “Maidu and Konkow,” in Heizer, Robert F., Handbook of North American Indians (California). Smithsonian Institution, p. 381.
82 Campbell, T.N. (1983), “Coahuitlecans and their neighbors,” in Ortiz, Alonso, Handbook of North American Indians (Southwest). Smithsonian Institution, p. 352.
83 Johnson, Orna (1981), “The socioeconomic context of child abuse and neglect in native South America,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63.
84 Cotlow, Lewis (1971). The Twilight of the Primitive. New York: Macmillan, p. 65.
85 de Meer, Kees, Roland Bergman and John S. Kushner (1993). “Socio-cultural determinations of child mortality in Southern Peru: including some methodological considerations.” Social Science and Medicine, 36: pp. 323, 328.
86 Hastings, James (1955). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. NY: Scribner’s Sons, Vol. I, p. 6.
87 Bugos, Paul E. and Lorraine M. McCarthy (1984), “Ayoreo infanticide: a case study,” in Hausfater, Glenn and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide, Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, New York: Aldine, p. 510.
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce the penultimate chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again in printed form.
If until recently westerners represented the zenith of civilization in the world, presently New Guineans and the headhunters of Munduruku in Brazil represent the nadir. The psychoclass of the poorest strata of Latin America lies at the middle of both extremes.
In contrast to most nations, Mexico City gave her name to the modern country. It was founded by the Tenochcas when a voice ordered them to establish themselves on the lake that they had arrived, “as the unembodied bicameral voices led Moses zigzagging across the Sinai desert.” It cannot be more symbolic that the Coat of Arms of Mexico, which they so much shoved under my nose at school, is an eagle perched upon a prickly pear cactus devouring a snake in one of the lake islets that the ancient Tenochcas recognized. It was an odd place to found a city, but the punishing voices had to be obeyed. We can deduce from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the buildings erected at the center of a community, such as the temple of Huitzilopochtli on the Texcoco Lake, were located where the guides listened the damned voices. (The etymology of the island of Mexico on the lake would be “navel of the maguey” or “of the Moon.”) If we now relate not only Jaynes to Arieti but also a passage of my first book about a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, the puzzle starts to take shape. I have in mind a woman [Maya Abbott] that, because her parents always tried to think for her, suffered from auditory hallucinations and confessed to Laing: “I don’t think, the voices think.” Unlike this sort of psychological analyzing—God forbid!—, some historians try to make amends for the pre-Columbian Indians. More disturbing is to see a friend taking offence about our compassion. The psychoanalyst Jenny Pavisic once addressed me severely: “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?” referring to child sacrifices in Mesoamerica.
The Tlatelolcan ceremonial show-ground and its surrounding neighborhoods have been excavated for archeological purposes. I have seen photographs of bone fragments of 41 sacrificed victims in the excavation of the terraces of the Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl temple, of which 30 were little children. Just as Pavisic, many people are capable of condemning the 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco, but never the child sacrifices perpetrated exactly on the same place. In April of 2007 bones were found of twenty-four sacrificed children to Tláloc in Tula, the capital of the Toltec civilization, dated 950-1150 AD according to a newspaper report that circulated the world. The children had been decapitated. If we remember that the intention was to avert an environmental crisis in that way, it should not surprise us that Mesoamerican civilizations disappeared even before the conquest. The sacrifices represented the distaff that moved the fabric of that culture, and a society as psychologically dissociated that had sacrifices on its basis was condemned to random disappearance. It is as if a civilization was composed of the self-harming women in the Colin Ross clinic and of male serial killers.
The iconic example of civilization disappearance is the abandonment by the Mesoamericans of their great cities, as is the case of the Mayas of the ninth century AD. From the climatic register, ice analysis in Greenland and mud of the subsoil of a lagoon in Maya areas it can be deduced that they suffered a serious draught. To deal with the draughts, just as their Mexica successors sacrificed the flower of their youth in face of external crises, from the bone register of about thirty sacrificed men, women and children it is deduced that the Mayas tried to appease the gods that had betrayed them. Had they arrived to the level of Aristotelian thought they would not have attempted to solve the problem by killing even more of their folk, and hardly would the draughts had been so apocalyptic for their civilization. Let us not forget that sudden desertion of the cities also occurred in Teotihuacan and Tula. Julian Jaynes comments:
I also think that the curious inhospitable sites on which Maya cities were often built and their sudden appearance and disappearance [my emphasis] can best be explained on the basis that such sites and movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing.
The whys of the periodic collapse of the Mesoamerican civilizations starts to be discerned if we consider that the demographic load of a prosperous Indian city sooner or later enters a critical phase that confronts the bicameral Diktat of the dominant theocracy. It is illustrative that when Egypt suffered a draught around 2100 B.C. absolutely all authority collapsed: the Egyptian people fled the towns and the literary sources of the time remind me the apocalyptic passages of a synoptic gospel. While Egyptologists struggle to explain the “why,” Jaynes compares it with the Maya catastrophe. The Mayas suffered a massive civilizational regression by going back to the jungle. He also compares it with the collapse of Assyria in 1700 B.C. that lasted two hundred years and that no historian quite understands. Jaynes also argues that the mystery is dissipated if we see it as a psychogenic leap. The bicameral societies are more susceptible to collapse once the gods refuse to talk; this is to say, once man overcomes his schizophrenic stage, so overwhelmed with auditory hallucinations. The collapse of the bicameral society is but the resulting chaos of the transit to consciousness. In Egypt, Assyria and other cultures of the Ancient World the birth of a schizoid psychoclass out of a schizophrenic one (Laing magnificently describes the difference between schizoid and schizophrenic in The Divided Self) represented a formidable threat for the status quo. “Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before,” writes Jaynes, “but such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.”
Political correctness
The rupture of the bicameral age resulted in the greatest collision of consciousness that a society could endure. But unlike the people in the Old World, those in the New World were incapable of carrying out such intrapsychic metamorphosis. The reading of Jaynes’ book seems to suggest that the Mesoamerican world of the sixteenth-century still was bicameralized in a way that had already been overcome at the other side of the ocean. In other words, the Mesoamericans suffered from the stagnation that in psychohistory is called psychogenic arrest.
The Amerindians got what they deserved. But presently, who condemns the ancient dwellers of the Americas? In a politically correct world it cannot be said that the infanticidal pre-Hispanics were psychologically dissociated; that the military theocracy was composed of serial killers, or that they were morally inferior to us. But the moralists were not always muzzled. In the colorful Spanish of his time, Bernal wrote a chapter, “How the Indians of all New Spain had many Sacrifices and Clumsiness that We Took Them Away and Imposed on Them the Saintly Things of Good Doctrine.” Bernal’s cheekiness does not cease to fascinate me: and it is pathetic that, half a millennium later, compared to those soldiers the historians, ethnologists and anthropologists of today have psychogenically regressed. I will illustrate it with the other pre-Hispanic empire.
Communication between Mesoamericans and the Andean people was sporadic. Just as the Mayas, the Incas deformed the craniums of the babies; some scholars believe to demarcate different ethnic groups of the Inca empire. The torments on childhood started since the first day. The newborn was washed with cold water, covered and placed in a hole made in the ground that would be used as a simple playpen. At five the child was nationalized by a theocratic state that, like the Mexica, was governed by strict hierarchies. And just as in Mesoamerica, the ritual murder of children was carried out in several Andean societies.
In November of 1999 National Geographic published an article with several photographs of mummies perfectly preserved at 6,700 meters above the sea level: the highest archaeological site of the world. Those were children that had been voluntarily given by their parents to be killed: an eight-year-old boy and two girls. “The Inca,” says the article, “obtained children from throughout the empire [for sacrifice] and rewarded their families with positions or goods.” In some cases the parents themselves accompanied the child in her journey to immolation. In conjunction with other barbaric forms of childrearing, the practice formed the bicameral minds that would be an all-too-easy prey for Pizarro (who in Spain had been a swineherd). The chroniclers wrote about those sacrifices. Nevertheless, with the perennial excuse that “Winners write history” in some Latin American circles the myth was created that the chroniclers’ stories were mythical. The discovery of the mummies by the end of the century confirmed the authenticity of the Spanish stories that the children were buried alive, or killed by a blow to the head, which is how according to the autopsy they killed one of the girls.
However, just as Bolivian nationalists such as Pavisic angrily ask “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?,” the National Geographic article is a disgrace. The author, Johan Reinhard, is afraid to judge the parents and the society that produced them. He idealizes them in the most servile way, thus betraying the memory of the children. Reinhard wrote overt falsehoods about the Amerindians, for example, “the Inca were not the brutal conquerors the Spaniards were.” He writes that on the same page in which he asserted that the Inca rewarded the parents who offered their children for sacrifice. Reinhard also wrote, euphemistically, “right after she died” referring to one of the sacrificed girls instead of the natural “right after they killed her.” And when he mentions that the chroniclers reported that others were buried alive, he hastened to add: “The Llullaillaco children, however, have benign expressions.” More offensive are the photograph headings at the beginning and the end of the article: “Go Gently” referring to the pubescent girl that was found in fetal position buried in a hole, and “Eternity Bound” referring to the sacrifice of the three children in general. And the fact that the sacrificial site was found at the top of the mountain makes Reinhard exclaim: “The conditions only increased my respect for what the Inca had accomplished.”
In the next chapter I will approach the subject of the intellectual aberration known as cultural relativism, of which Reinhard and many other academics are distinguished exponents. Suffice it to say that the ethnologists and anthropologists are a lost cause. Our only hope lies in that another generation replaces those who presently occupy academic chairs. How I wish that the younger minds learned something about psychohistory; for example, that they became interested in the greatest adventure of the world by reading the Bernal Díaz story up to the arrival of the Spaniards to Tenochtitlan.
And I must tell how in this town of Tlaxcala we found wooden houses furnished with gratins, full of Indian men and women imprisoned in them, being fed up until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten. The prisons we broke open and destroyed and set free the prisoners who were in them, and these poor Indians did not dare to go to any direction, only to stay there with us and thus escape with their lives. From now on, in all the towns that we entered, the first thing our Captain ordered us was to break open these prisons and set free the prisoners.
These prisons are common throughout the land and when Cortés and all of us saw such great cruelty he was very angry with the Caciques of Tlaxcala, and they promised that from that time forth they would not eat and kill any more Indians in that way. I said of what benefit were all those promises, for as soon as we turned our heads they would commit the same cruelties. And let us leave it like that and tell how we were ordered to go to Mexico.
The indigenistas are dishonest people. In the book Toltecayotl Miguel León Portilla accepts that indigenous families usually abuse contemporary Indian women. But in that book León Portilla blames, incredibly, the Conquest for the current abuses by the male Indian to the female Indian. He then writes that “the situation of the pre-Hispanic Nahua woman highly differed from his condition today,” and to support his claim a few pages later he quotes a passage from those Nahua homiletics that León Portilla is so fond: “The little girl: little creature, little lovebird, oh so little, so tender, so well fed…” But in the same Toltecayotl chapter León Portilla also published an illustration of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis of a Mexica housewife that looks anything but happy. In absolute contrast to León Portilla, the Anonymous Conqueror wrote that there were no people in the world who had women in less esteem than the Mesoamericans. And in his most recent book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, deMause wrote: “Aztec females were treated even worse than Islamic females.” It is indeed preposterous that the Spanish soldiers of the sixteenth century manifested better empathy for the victims of that culture than the scholars of today. But to understand the mestizo León Portilla it is pertinent to note that in Apologética Historia, written at the middle of the sixteenth century, Las Casas praised the Indian reprimands of parents to their children by calling them “sane, prudent and rational.” Las Casas even located such poisonous pedagogy above the teachings of Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and even Aristotle.
The most recent treatise about the encounter between the Spanish and Mexican empires is Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas. It catches the attention that, as a typical bienpensant, in the preface’s first paragraph Thomas candidly talks about the members of the two cultures without realizing that they belong to very distinct psychoclasses. On the next page Thomas writes about “compassion” as one of the virtues of the Mexica in spite of the fact that on the next line he sates that even the babies in arms were made to cry with brutality before sacrificing them! As to the treatment of women Thomas writes, dishonestly, that their position was at lest as comparable to the female Europeans of that age, although we perfectly know that European women were not deceived to be sacrificed, decapitated and skinned punctually according to rituals of the Aztec calendar. And the women who would not be sacrificed were not allowed to wear sandals, unlike their husbands. In the codexes the Indian females appear generally on their knees while the males are on sitting facilities (This reminds me that when visiting Chiapas in his youth, it shocked my father that Indian women wore obscure clothing: their humblest figures could not contrast more with the very colorful garments of the male Indians.) And we must remember the Indian costume of selling, and even giving as presents, their daughters. The same Malinali, later called equivocally Marina or “La Malinche,” Cortés’ right hand, had been sold by her mother to some traders from Xicallanco, who in turn had sold her to some Mayas who sold her to some Chontales, who offered her as a present to Cortés. Thomas even takes as historical the words of the chronicler in regard to Xicoténcatl II’s delegation when, after Xicoténcatl’s people suffered crushing defeats, he went into the Spanish camp with words that portray the treatment of the Indian woman by their own: “And if you want sacrifices, take these four women that you may sacrifice, and you can eat their flesh and their hearts. Since we don’t know how you do it we have not sacrificed them before you.” The study of Salvador de Madariaga about the conquest, published under the title Hernán Cortés (Macmillan, NY, 1941), precedes half a century Thomas’ study. Without the ominous clouds of cultural relativism that cover the skies of our times, in Madariaga’s study it is valid to advance value judgments.
Fortunately, not all of our contemporaries live under a clouded sky. In 2003 El País Semanal published a translation of an article by Matthias Schulz that described as “demonic” and “brutal” the Mesoamerican practice of human sacrifice. Schulz also called the Mexicas “bloodthirsty.” The politically-correct Mexican indigenistas rendered their garments. In July of that year the farthest leftist of the Mexican newspapers, La Jornada, jointly published a response. Eduardo Matos-Moctezuma blurted out that “mentalities such as Schulz’s are the ones who lend themselves, because of their closed mind, to slaughtering.” But Matos-Moctezuma did not deny the historicity of the Indians slaughtering their own folks. Professor María Alba Pastor, also quoted in La Jornada, offered an absolutely psychotic and dishonest explanation for the sacrifices: “Perhaps they were a reaction to the Conquest.” For Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Talking about cannibalism, Yólotl González, author of a book on Mesoamerican sacrifices, was not left behind: “Thus they gave a practical use to the dead bodies.” Take note that González does not deny the historicity of cannibalism. Her nonsense consists in her interpretation. The historian Guillermo Tovar manifested that Schulz’s text was “a Taliban Occidentalism, deprecating and oblivious of other traditions.” Mónica Villar, the director of Arqueología Mexicana, criticized what she called “disinformation” referring to Schulz’s statement that “no peoples had practiced human sacrifices in such dimensions.” Nevertheless, when the next issue of Arqueología Mexicana came out, the journal’s scholars did not refute Schulz. León Portilla responded with his favorite argument: that the Christianity that the Spaniards brought also had as its basis the sacrifice of a son, Jesus Christ. The veteran indigenista ignored the fact that precisely such theology represented a deflection from the filicide drive to a symbolic sublimation of it; and that the Roman Christian emperors and the Church’s fathers fought to banish the late forms of infanticide in the Early Middle Ages with the same zeal that conservatives fight abortion today. DeMause has profusely written on this transition and it is unnecessary to elaborate his ideas here. This is something so obvious that, in contrast to the sophisticated indigenistas, any child could understand: in Christendom parents did not sacrifice and cannibalize their children, and León Portilla’s argument is gross sophistry.
While Jacques Soustelle’s panegyric of the ancient Mexicans is stunning from the lyrical viewpoint, a closer reading of Daily Life of the Aztecs reveals its trappings. Soustelle wants us to believe that the lowest social strata of the Mexica civilization was represented by the slave, who according to him was highly more privileged than the European slave. The fallacy of his presentation consists in the fact that the Mexica slave could be sold and sacrificed. In the Tlatelolco market, the largest market of the Americas, slaves were sold tied by the neck to big sticks (as in the film Apocalypto). Moreover: the slave was not actually at the bottom of the social strata. Down there were the captives who, whether fatten for consumption or not, awaited their turn on the sacrificial stone.
But moralists like Schulz are not alone. In his post-scriptum to The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz wrote these words that I translate now:
Like those torture wheels that appear in Sade’s novels, the Aztec year was a circle of eighteenth months soaked wet with blood; eighteenth ways to die by being killed by arrows or by immersion in water or by cutting the throat or by flaying […]. On which religious and social aberration could a city of the beauty of Mexico-Tenochtitlan be the theater of water, stone and sky for a hallucinating funeral ballet? And for which obfuscation of the spirit nobody among us—I don’t have in mind the outworn nationalists but the scholars, the historians, the artists and the poets—want to see and accept that the Aztec World is one of the aberrations in history?
Bernal talks even more directly than Paz, more rosy-cheeked I would dare to say. The sacrifices he simply labels as “wicked things,” “great cruelties,” and the self-harming, “clumsiness.” The original Spanish prose is delicious when Bernal writes, for example, that Mesoamericans “had the habit of sacrificing their foreheads and the ears, tongues and lips, breasts and arms and their fleshy parts, and the legs and even their natural parts,” the genitals. Conversely, when Hugh Thomas mentions the cannibalism he does it cautiously, as if he does not want to cause any offence. Yet, the erudite and refined Sahagún, considered by León Portilla the first ethnologist of history, concurs with the soldier, as we saw with his exclamation (there are other exclamations of this sort in his encyclopedic work).
The feathered serpent
If the pre-Hispanic world was an aberration, as Paz says, that does not demerit their findings in mathematics and astronomy.
Although Quetzalcoatl harmed his leg and sprinkled blood out of his penis, he was the most humanitarian of the gods in the pre-Columbian pantheon. He never offered human blood to the gods. According to the legend, Tezcatlipoca counteracted Quetzalcoatl’s influence and regained social control by means of the dark side of the force, thus reestablishing the sacrifices in the great Toltec city. Quetzalcoatl fled away toward the East, from which the ulterior legend emerged that he would return from the Orient.
In 1978 I went once more to live some months to the house of my grandmother [this is related to my first book]: a very numinous and even happy stage that I would like to recount in another place. I became wrapped in Jung’s Man and his Symbols and some nights I walked to the park called Parque Hundido, which contains exact replicas of pre-Hispanic statuary. One night, alone and immersed in my thoughts as always during my adolescence, the pair of enormous replicas of feathered serpents at the park’s entrance caught my attention. It stroke me as an extraordinary intuition or divination from the collective unconscious, the fact that long before paleontology pre-Hispanics could have bequeathed us the perfect symbol of the missing link between the reptile and the bird. The two great feathered serpents of stone that I contemplated that fresh night in the park, way taller than me, were the same symbol of the caduceus: two serpents that long for their wings. Quetzal is feather in Nahua, and cóatl serpent, feathered serpent: symbol par excellence of transcendence. However hard I struggled those days to transcend myself it was impossible to arrive to my present psychogenic state, even though the unconscious drive was formidable.
That night I did not understand how come the symbol of quetzal-cóatl could be so clairvoyant, so accurate to describe human emergency in such an oneiric and perceptive way. Now, exactly thirty years later, I ask myself: Hadn’t the Europeans existed how long would have taken these people to give up their practices and pass on to a later form of infanticide (say, the exposure in Rome)?
The legend of Quetzalcoatl, that in its latest incarnation appears as a god of white skin, makes me think that the very first feathers for a psychogenic leap were already present in the New World before the arrival of the white man.
___________ The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce another chapter. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath may visit: this artcle.
