Four years earlier, in December 1935, the entity that would be in charge of the project, Lebensborn—Source of Life—had been created: a social assistance organisation whose main purpose was to offer different types of facilities for single mothers and their babies.
The German population had been declining for decades, and the country was suffering a severe demographic crisis. The birth rate, which at the beginning of the century was 35.8 children per thousand inhabitants, had fallen to 14.7 in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power. For the Führer’s ambition to populate the eastern regions with Aryans, it was essential to reverse this trend. Himmler estimated that 120 million people were needed.
Family life and motherhood were promoted in various ways, notably with special marriage loans and grants for each birth to encourage Germans to bring more children into the world. At the same time, any information on contraception was suppressed and contraceptives were banned. Abortion was also outlawed, which was labelled ‘sabotage against the future of Germany’.
The idea of increasing the population with a large number of children of the superior race was firmly rooted in the mentality of the party. ‘If Germany had a million children a year and eliminated between 700,000 and 800,000 of the weakest, the result would probably be an increase in its strength’, Hitler had affirmed with conviction at a party meeting in 1929.
Here it is worth interpolating vignettes from my own life.
Non-consanguineous relatives had a son who was born the same year I was born. But this guy is mentally retarded, so terribly retarded that he once bit off his sister’s finger. Another case: the only friend with whom I spoke disparagingly about the race of the country in which we were born had a Down syndrome sister whose retardation was so great that, if they left her a few meters outside her apartment, she wouldn’t know how to return home: a lower IQ than a dog.
These real-life cases show that one must be truly lobotomised through Christian ethics to avoid what the ancient Greeks and Romans did with their defective babies. It is more than obvious that Christianity has fried the brains of the white parents of these people I know, and millions of others like them.
Among my relatives, only Uncle Beto admired Hitler. He once said having in mind, I believe, one of my handicapped cousins: ‘I would kill such a daughter and then I would go to hell!’ He meant that he’d kill her if she was his daughter. Although I was not a witness of this anecdote I guess that his sisters, my great-aunts, were scandalised by these kinds of pronouncements.
But let’s continue with the Third Reich.
‘If we could establish the Nordic race from Germany and, from this seedbed, produce a race of 200 million, the world would be ours’, Himmler eloquently expressed. A few months after its founding, Lebensborn opened Heim Hochland, the first home for pregnant women. For this, the National Socialists took over the building of a Catholic orphanage located in the town of Munich.
Initially, the institution could host up to thirty mothers and fifty-five children, and applicants were carefully screened. Only women who had the characteristics of the dominant race were admitted. Candidates had their skull measured, and only those with the highly coveted elongated skull, typical of the Aryans, were eligible for admission. They also had to meet other requirements, such as being blonde, having blue or green eyes, and being in good health.
Those who passed the test received the best care in exquisite surroundings as a reward. Homes were often in stately homes that, as in the case of Heim Hochland, had often been taken from Hitler’s enemies, and other mansions from Jews. The organisation’s headquarters in Munich was in a house that had been owned by the writer Thomas Mann, (who had six children with his Jewish wife). All homes were equipped with modern medical equipment and cared for by specialised medical personnel.
These luxurious conditions had their effect. In 1939, Gregor Ebner, Lebensborn’s medical director, informed Himmler that a total of 1,300 women had applied. Of these, 635 had been considered suitable due to their racial characteristics and their state of health.
The births went very well. While in Germany the mortality of newborns was six percent, in the homes of the Lebensborn Organisation this figure was reduced by half. ‘Deliveries are easy, without major complications, which is attributable to the racial selection and quality of women we welcome’, Ebner wrote proudly. Logically, all this had a high cost: 400 marks per mother. ‘It is not a great sacrifice if we can save a million children with good blood’, Ebner concluded.
Beth dancing to a degenerate piece of music
that was a hit when I was pubescent, with trophies
from all the chess tournaments she had won.
As a teenager I was a big fan of chess, and even in my early twenties I played daily in a park visited by middle-class chess players (I recount my adventures in Spanish: here).
The Queen’s Gambit is an American TV miniseries based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the role of Beth Harmon. It was directed by the Jew Scott Frank and the script was written by a gentile, Allan Scott. The Queen’s Gambit was released on Netflix last month and has now concluded.
The past few days I watched The Queen’s Gambit. From one of the first episodes, when Beth approaches the camera showing the shape of her beautiful boobs under her clothes, I realised the impossible chimera of this series that is causing a sensation in the world. But first of all I must speak a little about female tits in our species.
Decades ago, the biggest surprise I came across when reading The Naked Ape was discovering why men crave women. If we consider the shape of a baby bottle for milk, that is exactly the shape female teats would have if the objective were purely functional for baby sucking. But women’s breasts are completely different. Zoologist Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape, explains the phenomenon of ‘self-mimicry’ in other species of apes. In these species, natural selection favours females to imitate their buttocks with their coloured breasts, in order to shift the aggression of the males to a more erotic channelling.
I was shocked to discover that my own species is a more aesthetic version of the same phenomenon of self-mimicry! But that is exactly what it is when we see the ape we are with a naked eye: the needs of the baby are secondary to the trick that Nature does to us so that we impregnate our females. Nature makes them absolutely irresistible to our instincts in order for the human species to breed.
But our species is also governed by the concept of the trade-off, and I will have no choice but to speak scientifically for a few paragraphs.
Why can’t there be a species that is a mix between a super-poisonous bug and a winged, big, beautiful and highly intelligent creature? In a fantastic world just imagine what power such a creature would have. In my science course at the Open University I learned about the concept of a trade-off between one aspect of an organism’s biology and another. A trade-off is a situation where, to gain some advantage, an organism has to pay a price: to compromise. In our species big brains are a good example. Our huge frontal lobes are certainly nice to have but they are costly in terms of the energy they use up, and make childbirth extremely difficult.
As explained in my Day of Wrath (see sidebar), this is the main cause of massive infanticide of babies in past history. Extremely immature babies are bothersome. A unique feature of the human race—prolonged childhood with consequent long dependence on adults—is the basis for the psychodynamics of mental disorders. The long childhood of Homo sapiens lends itself to parents abusing their young. After all, premature birth was Nature’s solution to the trade-off of bipedalism and the limitations of the pelvis of hominid females in our simian ancestors. (If Homo sapiens weren’t born so immature, we would have to stay within our mothers’ bodies for about 20 months.) The ‘long childhood’ lays a solid foundation for understanding the abuses committed by parents in our species and, therefore, the mental disorders suffered by the progeny. But that’s the price we have paid for our big brains!
Body size is another example of trade-offs. In the animal kingdom being big gives you some advantages against predators but it also means you need more food. Being small means that you don’t need much food but it makes it easier for another animal to hunt you. That species can’t gain an advantage without having to pay a price means that there will be many ways to survive and prosper: and explains why there is so rich diversity in the animal kingdom.
In my Open University course I had to answer this question: Why a bird with a complete set of the five potentially very successful traits (a species of bird whose individuals lived a long time, reproduced repeatedly and at high frequency, and with large clutch sizes) doesn’t exist? The answer is because of trade-offs. A bird that produces large clutches cannot reproduce frequently because the production of each clutch requires a lot of resources. Also, large clutches require more looking after because in due course there are more mouths to feed. Large clutches are therefore likely to suffer higher mortality than small clutches while adults are absent from the nest.
The same applies to the surreal example of the impossible chimera I imagined above. Having assimilated the concept of trade-offs, let’s now remember old Schopenhauer:
at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honourably in some form or another for the rest of his life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy [my emphasis—a trade-off].
The media lie is equivalent to ‘filming’ those flying and poisonous bugs which, in turn, are smart as humans: impossible chimeras.
In previous years I insisted a lot on how the most popular series of all time, Game of Thrones, made us see several female characters as brave warriors: something that never existed in the Middle Ages or in old-time chivalric novels (Brienne of Tarth, Yara Greyjoy, the wildling Ygritte, the masculinised female warriors at Dorne) or queens without a king to control them (Daenerys Targaryen and Cersei Lannister). Worst of all was that a girl (Arya Stark) killed the bad guy of the series, the Night King, in what I consider to be the climax of the whole series (Theon Greyjoy should have killed the Night King). In real medieval times, and in chivalric novels, all these women would have been similar to Lady Sansa, the only character who played a feminine role in most of the seasons of Game of Thrones (except for the end of seasons 6 and 8).
The goal of Hollywood and TV is to brainwash us by reversing sex roles to exterminate the white race. And it is a disgrace that even the greatest white nationalist novelist of the 21st century, the late Harold Covington, fell for this feminism in his most voluminous novel (see ‘Freedom’s Daughters’ in my Daybreak).
HBO produced Game of Thrones. Netflix has produced The Queen’s Gambit. HBO wanted us to believe that women can compete with men, and even surpass them, in matters of what used to be called the knight-errant. (Remember how Brienne of Tarth beat the very tough Hound in the last episode of the fourth season of Game of Thrones.) Now Netflix wants us to believe that in matters of the intellect a woman, Beth Harmon, can beat the toughest chess players and even the very world champion (Vasily Borgov in the TV series: Beth’s strongest competitor).
Some people in the media are publishing articles with titles such as ‘Is The Queen’s Gambit a true story?’ They claim that the series was inspired by the woman who has reached the highest when competing in chess tournaments: the Hungarian Judit Polgar, now retired from the competition although she continues to comment on professional chess games. But Polgar’s life was quite different from the fictional Beth Harmon whose photo appears at the top of this entry. It is true that in real life Polgar once beat the world champion of chess, Garry Kasparov. But what the Netflix series omit is the score of all their confrontations. In real life, Kasparov beat Judit Polgar 12 to 1, with 4 draws!
It seems important to me to present the scores of the best female chess player in history, Polgar, in her games against the male world champions (to date, no woman has been crowned world champion of chess). The source for the list below is Chess Life:
As we can see, Polgar is at a disadvantage against all of her contemporary world champions. The only world champion with whom she maintained an almost even score was Topalov. Her score against Karpov was not bad, and although her disadvantage against Anand is wide, her results are noteworthy. But against Kasparov, Carlsen and especially against Kramnik, Polgar took real beatings.
These are the pure and hard facts of real life that more HBO or Netflix feminist series won’t change. They want us to believe that women are interchangeable with us in matters of physical activity and, now, intellectual sports!
Nature has endowed the woman with feminine charms so that a man may impregnate her thanks to her inviting tits, and support her for the rest of her life. Nature didn’t give her muscles or brain-power equal to the man. We have more cranial capacity than women. Anyone who hasn’t read pages 99-116 of On Beth’s Cute Tits should read them now. It is the best way to understand not only our sexuality but also the sexuality of the fair sex.
Beautiful tits that enchant us cannot go in the body that houses, at the same time, a superior brain of those whom her tits seduce: an elemental trade-off.
Postscript of 2021: Desmond Morris’ exact quote appears in the first indented paragraph: here.
Four years ago I had posted this chapter here but now, that I’ve used engines to check the grammar, I realised the old text was plagued with syntactic inaccuracies. Although I feel it is greatly improved (see below) I can never be sure as English is not my native language. Now that the revision is almost compete, as soon as I order a proof copy, and get it from Amazon Books, the softcover will be available again for the general public.
______ 卐 ______
(Abridged Spanish-English translation
from the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?)
Men are the devils of the earth, and
animals are their tormented souls.
—Schopenhauer
At fifty-three, I received a surprise in what in Hojas Susurrantes I call the cursed house. Someone had left a box on the shelf outside the bathroom for visitors. When I opened it I saw something that amazed me. A divine little animal! He looked like a very young bunny but it was so beautiful and graceful that it could not be a rabbit, I told myself. It took me a long time to recognize that he was really a white bunny, but so otherworldly it seemed to me that I had difficulty in reconciling my two hemispheres: one telling me that it could only be a divine creature, and another telling me that it was a little rabbit that had come into the world not long ago.
Almost abandoned in a non-custodial box, it had been one among many gift bunnies to the kids at a birthday party that one of my irresponsible siblings had bought, the father of the celebrated child. Elsewhere I might tell how I came to interact with the creature, whom I would rescue from an uncertain destiny due to the pettiness of my family and the Mexicans in general. I had never interacted in such way with an animal before. In fact, I had never wanted to have a pet even though I did not get married and have no offspring. But seeing a being so helpless and at the mercy of the modified apes in my family moved me to adapt it. Elsewhere I may tell anecdotes, but the only thing I can add now is that, over time, the white rabbit would help me in my way out from the inverted world of Alice.
A little less than two and a half years later I would receive a great shock. The Mirror reported that four teenagers from Seaham in Durham, England, tortured and murdered Percy: a bunny who, in the picture that can be seen online with the naked young people, seems identical to my pet; now, an adult rabbit. They tried to shave and rape Percy; set her on fire, tried to drown her and then threw her dying but still alive from the window. The human monsters, all white, even recorded on their cell phone what they did: a video that the owner of the bunny could not see when the police arrested the perpetrators; only a frozen image to identify it. The punishment for these criminals was negligible in today’s Britain. I would have tortured them—exactly what they did to the rabbit—and then cast them out the window to let them die in agony lying on the ground (eye for an eye). In fact, if by a miracle of fate an extraterrestrial force had empowered me on my latest visit to the United Kingdom, I would have done it.
We must bear in mind that if the Anglo-Saxon demons had allowed Germany an empire from the Atlantic to the Urals, in the areas under the Nazi flag the torment of the animals would have been greatly reduced. Personally, I regard Hermann Göring one of my patron saints: and he should also be for those who long for a world free of this type of abuse. Let us not forget the 1933 caricature in which the freed animals—“No more vivisection! No more experimentation with animals!”—salute their savior Hermann. Unlike my beloved Nazis, in one of my blogs I spoke of what non-Nazis are capable of doing with defenseless animals. I mentioned fur coats factories in China where some mammals are skinned alive; farms in Mexico where they hang rabbits from their ears until they die, which has also happened in some Australian farms. That and what they did to Percy pierced my soul. Her photograph in The Mirror shows her in a posture of serene confidence before the humans who would torture her: identical image to the postures of my own little bunny who, accustomed as Percy was to her benign owner, relaxes placidly in human presence. The betrayal of the universe that Percy had to experience before the change from her angelic owner to human devils must have been such that I caressed the idea of dedicating this volume to her memory.
Although what those damned humans did in Durham was condemned by other Englishmen, so-called normal people are not left behind. Humans whom I consider exterminable are able to pour concentrated solutions into laboratory rabbits, and to prevent them from closing their eyes, hold their eyelids with tongs. How many women ignore that their cosmetic products have been tested in this way… This happens today with the approval of society precisely because the Second World War was won by the wicked. Few know that from 1944 to 1947 the Soviets and the Americans, including Jews on both sides, practiced a real holocaust of Germans, the “Hellstorm,” preventing among other things that the benign policies of Hermann, who had saved our mammals cousins in the very brief historical window that represented the Third Reich, were implemented in the West after the war.
Science philosopher Thomas Kuhn used the optical illusion of the duck-rabbit to show how a paradigm shift causes one to see the same information in a completely different way. If Westerners had not been brainwashed, instead of seeing a duck (the Nazis were bad) they would see a rabbit (actually they were the good guys). I noticed this psychological phenomenon in 1992 when I studied the so-called Faces of Bélmez in a small town in Andalusia. (The author at thirty-three in Spain’s “House of the Faces”.) Originally I believed that the faces of Mrs. María Gómez Cámara’s kitchen were a paranormal phenomenon until, once, seeing the face called “La Pelona” (part of the concrete block with this image is behind my back in the photo above), I made a change in my inner subjectivity. I experienced the sensation that the crude strokes of the face were the work of a human hand, debunking the parapsychological investigation in which I had placed my hopes. Perhaps in the future I will have a life to write the details of that adventure in Spain. Suffice it to say that the paradigm shift comes from the internal will. Following Kuhn’s example, the volitional faculty of my mind stopped seeing a bird and discovered another small animal. The same can happen in our inner eye as we transcend Christian and neo-Christian values to their National Socialist antithesis. Many white nationalists, mostly Christian theists and Neochristian atheists, are frightened by The Turner Diaries. Unlike William Pierce, with their stupid love for the modified apes they condemn other animals to a torture of millennia—as potentially the Aryans, who are extinguishing themselves, are capable of becoming Görings. For a truly integrated individual it is obvious that moral is putting a screeching stop to the sadism towards our cousins, and the only way to do this is to get rid of the human devils. A change from love to hatred towards sinful humanity—great hatred I mean: a hatred à la Yahweh in the mouth of Jeremiah—represents a paradigm shift.
Do you remember the quote from Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End that I included in the fifth and final book of Hojas Susurrantes? In this novel human beings are metamorphosed into a higher entity. I will quote one of those passages again. In the novel “Karellen” was the leader of the extraterrestrial visitors, physically indistinguishable from the iconography of the devils:
“If you want a single proof of the essential—how shall I put it—benevolence of the Overlords, think of that cruelty-to-animals order which they made within a month of their arrival. If I had had any doubts about Karellen before, that banished them—even though that order has caused me more trouble than anything else he’s ever done!
That was scarcely an exaggeration, Stormgren thought. The whole incident had been an extraordinary one, the first revelation of the Overlords’ hatred of cruelty. That, and their passion for justice and order, seemed to be the dominant emotions in their lives—as far as one could judge them by their actions.
And it was the only time Karellen had shown anger, or at least the appearance of anger. “You may kill one another if you wish,” the message had gone, “and that is a matter between you and your own laws. But if you slay, except for food or in self-defense, the beasts that share your world with you—then you may be answerable to me.”
No one knew how comprehensive this ban was supposed to be, or what Karellen would do to enforce it. They had not long to wait.
The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their processional entry. Everything seemed normal; the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favorites as it had a hundred times before. Yet here and there faces were turned anxiously towards the sky, to the aloof silver shape fifty kilometers above Madrid.
Then the picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight and their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed—made contact—and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on earth before.
It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting, for the news spread rapidly.
Before I woke up to the real world and stopped diabolizing Hitler, Childhood’s End had been my favorite book. Now I see that the devil Karellen, as Clarke painted him, was too magnanimous with humans. The mere fact that there are seedy slaughterhouses should move us to take more drastic measures than those of that character.
In Mexico the calves are enclosed in compartments so narrow that they cannot even turn inside the cage. As adults, farmers cut horns, castrate and mark with iron without anesthesia. In trucks on the way to the slaughterhouses, the animals sometimes spend more than a day without food or drink, arriving thirsty and dizzy to the Inferno. The first thing the poor animal sees in the slaughterhouse is a Dantesque spectacle: puddles of blood and corpses skinned or torn from other cows; severed heads on the ground… She enters the first circles of hell in a state of panic. At the seventh circle the blow that the slaughterer gives the cow’s head does not always kill her. Sometimes this noble animal is only wounded, in a state of shock and with the deepest pain, wondering without language why the demons of Hell do what they do to her. Humans are so exterminable that they throw live pigs into a pond of boiling water so that the pain of the Gehenna fire causes the animal to release its hairs. (In Mexico people are fond of eating pork rind—a delicacy for my father by the way—and they dislike seeing hairs on it.) The Spaniards do not stay too far behind. They prepare the bull in a bullfight to make it less dangerous: they cut off the tips of the horns, they put vaseline on his eyes to cloud his vision and an irritating solution on his legs so that the bull is always moving in the ring. (Long before they would have stuck a needle in his genitals to atrophy its growth.) They put tow in the nose to make it hard for him to breathe, they give him strong laxatives before the bullfight, and hit his loins and kidneys with sacks before he faces the bullfighter. And let’s not talk about what can be seen on television at both sides of the Atlantic once the bull goes out to the arena.
Only until now can the strength of my unconscious be glimpsed during my dream in Madrid [recounted also in the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?]. If we pass the dream from the unconscious not only to consciousness but to super-consciousness, it means that most human beings should not exist. It is not enough that, according to the polls, most Spaniards of today do not care about bullfighting. The mere fact that they and other peoples are involved in the chain of cruelty to animals—whether using a feminine vanity product that was experimented in the eyes of a bunny or gobbling fried skin from a pig that had been submerged alive in boiling water—should be enough to arouse the exterminationist hatred of the savior devil. Consider for example this passage from a comment by one J. Marone, who in 2005 reviewed for Amazon Books Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhuman Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry:
Cows, pigs and chickens are taken through the slaughter house alive. Cows are often alive all the way through the line, this includes while they are getting their legs chopped off with cutters—imagine that… They do not stop the line for these inconveniences. The workers shove electric prods in their rectums and eyes—deep into the sockets occasionally pulling out the eye to get them moving to the slaughter line.
After reading this I will never eat another piece of meat again. It is not my decision to make any other living thing suffer. But I find it amazing that when you go to share this book, people don’t want to know. They would rather stay ignorant and that in itself has shocked me tremendously.
The italics in the last paragraph are mine and express why it is not enough for humans to claim ignorance, as almost every adult has heard what happens in the slaughterhouses.
When in my preparations to write this chapter I began to read what was happening in those places, I promised myself, like Marone, not to put again pieces of mammalian or bird carcasses into my mouth. I do not believe in the postmortem survival of the soul. However, until one has stopped eating meat (or derivatives from tormented animals), a part of our soul remains unawakened. This goes back to what was stated in the previous pages, which expose the psychogenic evolution of man. If in childrearing the Spaniards represented a psychogenic quantum leap compared to the Amerindians who still ate the flesh of their children, a new leap means to develop, in our times, empathy towards our cousins of the animal kingdom. Unlike Hitler and the vegetarians at the top of the Nazi party most Aryans have not gone through that leap, not even neo-Nazis. It is enough to see the photographs of mammals in laboratory experiments that are carried out throughout North America and Europe to perceive that the human being is truly a wicked species. I will not incur the rudeness of adding those photographs in this text: a task I leave to my readers.
My exterminating fantasies would not seem unhealthy if we do another thought experiment. In Dies Irae I quoted a non-fiction book by Arthur Clarke where he talked about the “judgment from the Stars” that earthlings could experience. If we imagine that in real life someone similar to a Karellen visited our planet, what is the first thing he would see from his distant silver ships, far above the human tingling? Urban spots. Industries that destroy the environment and, bringing his cameras closer, abject human misery and inconceivable suffering of the other species that share the planet with us. If, as in Clarke’s novel, the visitor also possessed machines to open a visual window to the past to study the species, he would perceive that, besides the hell that the naked apes subject their cousins, through history and prehistory they had behaved in an absolutely horrendous way with their own children. It does not hurt to summarize the revelations of the previous pages.
With his machines to literally see the human past this hypothetical extraterrestrial would be taken aghast by the magnitude of infanticide: nine percent of all human births. He would see thousands of young children slaughtered ritually, offered to the goddess of Babylon. He would see the infant sacrifices of the Pelasgians, the Syrians, the sacrifices in Gezer and in Egypt of the centuries that the earthlings call 10th to 8th before Christ. And let’s not talk about what the visitor would see with his machines when focusing on the ancient Semites of Carthage, where the burning of living children ordered by their own parents reached levels that surpassed the exclamation of Sahagún. Something similar could be seen by our visitor about other Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites, Sepharvaim, and ancient Hebrews: who in their origins offered their firstborn as a sacrifice to their gods. With his magic to see our past, the alien visitor would learn that both the exposure and the abandonment of infants continued in Europe until a council took action against the custom of leaving the children to die in the open.
With technology based on unimaginable principles the visitor would also see much worse behavior in the lands of colored people: thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned in the streets of ancient China, and how those babies that were not abandoned were put in cold water until they died. He would see how in feudal Japan the baby was suffocated with wet paper covering her nose and mouth; how infanticide was systematic in the feudal Rajputs in India, sometimes throwing the living children to the crocodiles; and how in pre-Islamic Arabia they buried alive not a few newborns. The visitor would also see that the sub-Saharan inhabitants of Africa killed their children much more frequently than other races did. He would even see that the sacrifice of children in Zimbabwe was practiced as recently as the beginning of the century that the earthlings call the 20th century. The window to the past would also make visible the incredibly massive slaughter of infants among the natives of the countless islands of Oceania, New Guinea and even more so among the extremely primitive aborigines of Australia, Tasmania and Polynesia. He would realize that in the American tribes, including the redskins, infanticide continued at a time when the practice had been abandoned in Europe. The same happened not only in Central American and South American tribes, but also in the civilizations prior to the Spanish conquest: where the ritual sacrifice of women and children suggests that they did it out of pure sadism. Finally, the visitor would see how, after the Conquest, the sacrificial institution of the Mesoamerican and Inca Indians was forbidden only to be transferred to the animals in the so-called santería in times when our visitor no longer has to use his devices to open the Complete Book of History and Prehistory of the species he studies.
It’s clear where I want to go… If it is legitimate for this hypothetical extraterrestrial to remove from the face of the Earth a newly-arrived species whose haughtiness blinds them from seeing their evil ways, how can it be pathological for an earthling to arrive at identical conclusions? Just because, unlike the visitor, he lacks technological power? The sad truth is that the infanticidal passion and cruelty of primitive humans have not been atoned, only transferred to our cousins.
In Dies Irae I talked about the Star-Child. An eschatology from above would be a son of man who returned on the clouds with great power and glory to judge humanity, or, in the new version of the myth, a David Bowman in a sphere of light approaching Earth. But I, who am skeptical of both personal deities and intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, could conceive, rather than an eschatology “from above”, an eschatology “from below.” I am referring to the intrapsychic evolution of a human being by developing an infinitely more intense empathy than that developed by the bulk of the modified apes (whom I call Neanderthals).
In other words, the rhetoric currently used by child and animal protectors in the West is just a first babbling of what we have in mind. Unlike the hypothetical Star-Child, the most fanatical animal protectors I have met do not even dare to see that, in addition to humans, there are other species that must be removed from the earth and its oceans. A Star-Child with mile-high empathy and powers would not tolerate, for example, the torture of hours that a pack of killer whales inflict on a whale calf by killing her to tear out her tongue. And the images of hyenas eating a small elephant alive—there are video recordings of how a member of the pack rips off the trunk from the small elephant—speak for themselves and we do not need to think much about how we would proceed.
Regardless of the cruelty of animals with animals, the hatred that the metamorphosed human also feels towards the modified apes that surround him can be glimpsed in the following anecdote. Before visiting England with plans to emigrate I left my pet in the cursed house that, as we saw in the fifth book of Hojas Susurrantes, is virtually on a freeway that goes out to the Cuernavaca highway where trucks and cars are constantly passing, even in the wee hours of the morning. Seeing my bunny in a cultivated garden that is paradise for him, but wrapped in such noise, especially at night, I imagined, with powers à la Bowman, eliminating each and every one of the Mexicans who drive through that stretch of the road in order to avoid the background roar for the little animal. Such a fantasy would not seem far-fetched if, in the new tablets of the law, we value the naked apes negatively; and noble species of animals, like some lagomorph mammals, positively regardless of the relative size of their brains or sophistication of their culture. It does not matter that to cleanse the freeway from humans it is necessary to eliminate millions of Mexicans, since literally millions are taking that road. The interests of a single bunny trump the interests of millions of humans, insofar as the modified apes are valued on the negative side of our scale.
Except for a few nymphs as beautiful as Catalina residing here (see the cover of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour) no one else from the inhabitants of this city is worthy. Of Creole men, for example, I know exactly no one with honor or true nobility of the soul. In an article that the author himself requested to be removed from The Occidental Observer, Farnham O’Reilly stated that Mexico City needs to be razed and transformed into a memorial atonement park dedicated to Nature. I would add that the sum of millions of modified apes in this city does not give a positive just because they are millions. It gives a great negative. In contrast, a single modified dinosaur (contemporary bird) or a lagomorph, however modest and discreet his life, is a small positive. The arithmetic with which the Star-Child judges the species of the Earth, including the primates, has little to do with the standards about the positive or the negative in the eyes of the latter. A world of cultivated forests turned into an Arcadia, and Percys that will never be molested again by monsters, is what the Earth shall inherit. It cannot be more significant that my most important works to date, Hojas Susurrantes and this one that I begin to write, are dedicated to nonhumans: a tree and a bunny.
In the final chapter of Childhood’s End the metamorphosed children eliminated all forms of animal and plant life except theirs. I do not think it is necessary to go that far. In the laws of the universe there is an Aristotelian golden mean between the apocalyptic children of the end and the law of the jungle that the naked apes currently impose. The mean lies in populating the planet with an archipelago of Elysian islands. Twenty-nine-year-old Clarke beautifully described this place with his prose: the city of Lys in his first novella, Against the Fall of Night, where, in addition to the forests and some animals, an evolved form of human being is allowed—a human in which empathy prevails and the original sin is a thing of the past. But let’s get down from the heights of Clarkean science-fiction and get back to the real world.
The monastic orders brought by the Spanish crown alongside the soldiery, including some mendicant orders that protected the natives, did not represent genuine empathy. The 16th century Spain was Don Quixote, and these orders represented a counterproductive version of empathy or compassion for those who suffer. What the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and eventually the Jesuits did in the Americas was quixotic folly: to conceive the naturals as souls to be saved. In the islands of the Caribbean and Tasmania the Europeans would exterminate the natives but not having exterminated them in the American continent meant that, throughout the Colonial period, the natives displaced their sadism with their children (as we have seen) towards the animals. If, instead of catechizing them, they had been cornered, as the Americans did on this part of the continent, the New Spaniard psychoclass of the Americas would have reflected the Iberian psychoclass without the tinges of Mesoamerican sadism. The social engineering of the Counter-Reformation was the great culprit that a mestizo cruelty between Spanish bullfighting and the Amerindian sacrificial passion was born in this enormous part of the continent.
In this book [¿Me Ayudarás?] we will analyze the stubborn infatuation of my father for a Dominican who protected the Amerindians and who, with his jeremiads, originated the Black Legend against Spain. At the moment suffice it to say that the bases of my feelings towards humanity are already in these pages. Hojas Susurrantes was like the tunnel in which Dave suddenly found himself: a vortex of colored lights where, terrified, he traveled at great speed across vast distances of space, seeing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors. But Hojas ends before the final metamorphosis: before the new Odysseus discovered himself as middle-aged in a bedroom designed in the style of Louis XVI; progressively seeing later versions of himself and, finally, a very old man lying in a bed.
My complete autobiography will explain how, due to the evil in my family and society, without extraterrestrial agency in the form of a black monolith at the foot of the bed of an agonizing centenary, I underwent an inner metamorphosis and now I return to hate humanity as much as the Star-Child.
At the beginning of our century some Amazonian tribes continue the practice as horribly as described above. With the advances in technology we can even watch videos on YouTube about such practices, like children being buried alive.
Let us remember the exclamation of Sahagún. The humble friar would have found it rather difficult to imagine that not only the ancient Mexicans, but all humanity had been seized by a passion for killing their little ones. Throughout his treatise on infanticide, Larry Milner mentioned several times that our species could have killed not millions, but billions of children since the emergence of Homo sapiens. At the beginning of his book Milner chose as the epigraph a quotation of Laila Williamson, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History:
Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter-gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.
Milner cowers in his book to avoid giving the impression that he openly condemns the parents. Before I distanced myself from deMause, in the Journal of Psychohistory of Autumn 2008 I published a critical essay-review of his treatise. My criticism aside, Milner’s words about the even more serious cowardice among other scholars is worth quoting:
As for the research into general human behavior, infanticide has been almost totally ignored. When acts of child-murder are referenced at all, they generally are passed off as some quirk or defective apparatus of an unusual place or time. Look in the index of almost all major social treatises and you will find only a rare reference to the presence of infanticide. […] Yet, the importance of understanding the reasons for infanticide is borne out by its mathematical proportions. Since man first appeared on earth about 600,000 years ago, it has been calculated that about 77 billion human babies have been born. If estimates of infanticide of 5-10 percent are true, then up to seven billion children [9 percent!] have been killed by their parents: a figure which should suffice as one of incredible importance.
Even assuming that this figure is contradicted by future studies, the anthropologist Glenn Hausfater would have agreed with Milner. In an August 1982 article of the New York Times about a conference of several specialists at the University of Cornell on animal and human infanticide, Hausfater said: “Infanticide has not received much study because it’s a repulsive subject. Many people regard it as reprehensible to even think about it…” In that same conference Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist at Harvard said that infanticide occurs in all groups of evolved primates. Given the psychological limitations of academics, it is not surprising to see that the few who are not silent on the subject argue that the primary cause is economic. But the “economic explanation” does not explain why infanticide occurred equally among both the rich and the poor, or why it had been so frequent and sometimes even more frequent in the most prosperous periods of Rome and Carthage. The same is true about those seeking explanations about the taboos, superstitions and customs of the peoples, or the stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. None of these factors explains infanticide for the simple reason that modern Western societies have had these features and refrain from practicing it. Marvin Harris’s position is typical. Harris has calculated that among Paleolithic hunters, up to 23-50 percent of infants were put to death, and postulated that female infanticide was a form of population control. His colleagues have criticized him as a typical proponent of “environmental determinism.” If environmental determinism were true, there would have to be more sacrifice and infanticide today given the demographic explosion.
It is true that Milner fails to condemn the perpetrators. But despite his flaws, outlined in my 2008 review in deMause’s journal, the information Milner collected under a single cover is so disturbing that it made me think: What is really the human species? I have no choice but to try to ponder the question by analyzing one of the most horrendous forms of infanticide practiced over the centuries.
Historical Israel
In the past, the shadow of infanticide covered the world, but the Phoenicians and their biblical ancestors, the Canaanites, performed sacrifices that turn pale the Mesoamerican sacrifices of children.
The Tophet, located in the valley of Gehenna, was a place near Jerusalem where it is believed that children were burned alive to the god Moloch Baal. Later it became synonymous with hell, and the generic name “tophet” would be transferred to the sacrificial site of the cemetery at Carthage and other Mediterranean cities like Motya, Tharros and Hadrumetum, where bones have been found of Carthaginian and Phoenician children.
According to a traditional reading of the Bible, stories of sacrifice by the Hebrews were relapses of the chosen people to pagan customs. Recent studies, such as Jon Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity have suggested that the ancient Hebrews did not differ much from the neighboring towns but that they were typical examples of the Semitic peoples of Canaan. The cult of Yahweh was only gradually imposed in a group while the cult of Baal was still part of the fabric of the Hebrew-Canaanite culture. Such religion had not been a syncretistic custom that the most purist Hebrews rejected from their “neighbor” Canaanites: it was part of their roots. For Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli archaeologist and academic, the writing of the book of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah was a milestone in the development and invention of Judaism. Josiah represents what I call one of the psychogenic mutants who firmly rejected the infanticidal psychoclass of their own people. Never mind that he and his aides had rewritten their nation’s past by idealizing the epic of Israel. More important is that they make Yahweh say—who led the captivity of his people by the Assyrians—that it was a punishment for their idolatry: which includes the burning of children. The book of Josiah’s scribes even promotes to conquer other peoples that, like the Hebrews, carried out such practices. “The nations whom you go in to dispossess,” says the Deuteronomy, “they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.” (12: 29-31). “When you come into the land that the Lord is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering.” (18: 9-10).
This emergence, or jump to a higher psychoclass from the infanticidal, is also attested in other books of the Hebrew Bible. “The men from Babylon made Succoth Benoth, the men from Cuthah made Nergal, and the men from Hamath made Ashima; the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim” (2 Kings: 17: 30-31). There were kings of Judah who committed these outrages with their children too. In the 8th century B.C. the thriving king Ahaz “even sacrificed his son in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites” (2 Kings 16: 1-3). Manasseh, one of the most successful kings of Judah, “burnt his son in sacrifice” (21:6). The sacrificial site also flourished under Amon, the son of Manasseh. Fortunately it was destroyed during the reign of Josiah. Josiah also destroyed the sacrificial site of the Valley of Ben Hinnom “so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech” (23:10). Such destructions are like the destruction of Mesoamerican temples by the Spaniards, and for identical reasons.
Ezekiel, taken into exile to Babylon preached there to his people. He angrily chided them: “And you took your sons and daughters whom you bore to me and sacrificed them as food to the idols. Was your prostitution not enough? You slaughtered my children and made them pass through the fire” (Ezekiel 16: 20-21). The prophet tells us that from the times when his people wandered in the desert they burned their children, adding: “When you offer your gifts—making your sons pass through the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, O house of Israel? As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will not let you inquire of me” (20:31). Other passages in Ezekiel that complain about his people’s sins appear in 20: 23-26 and 23: 37-39. A secular though Jung-inspired way of seeing God is to conceive it as how the ego of an individual’s superficial consciousness relates to the core of his own psyche: the Self. In Ezekiel’s next diatribe against his people (16: 35-38) I can hear his inner daimon, the “lord” of the man Ezekiel:
Therefore, you prostitute, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord says: Because you poured out your lust and exposed your nakedness in your promiscuity with your lovers, and because of all your detestable idols, and because you gave them your children’s blood in sacrifice, therefore I am going to gather all your lovers, with whom you found pleasure, those you loved as well as those you hated. I will gather them against you from all around and will strip you in front of them, and they will see all your nakedness. I will sentence you to the punishment of women who commit adultery and who shed blood; I will bring upon you the blood vengeance of my wrath and jealous anger.
When a “prophet” (an individual who has made a leap to a higher psychoclass) maligned his inferiors, he received insults. Isaiah (57: 4-5) wrote:
Whom are you mocking? At whom do you sneer and stick out your tongue? Are you not a brood of rebels, the offspring of liars? You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.
The very psalmist complained that people sacrificed their children to idols. But what exactly were these sacrificial rites? The spoken tradition of what was to be collected in biblical texts centuries later complained that Solomon “built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites,” and that his wives made offerings to these gods (1 Kings 11: 7-8). And even from the third book of the Torah we read the commandment: “Do not give any of your children to be passed through the fire to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God.” (Leviticus 18:21). A couple of pages later (20: 2-5) it says:
Say to the Israelites: “Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech.”
Despite these admonitions, the influential anthropologist James Frazer interpreted some biblical passages as indicating that the god of the early Hebrews, unlike the emergent god quoted above, required sacrifices of children. After all, “God” is but the projection of the Jungian Self from a human being at a given stage of the human theodicy. Unlike Milner, a Christian frightened by the idea, I do not see it impossible that the ancient Hebrews had emerged from the infanticidal psychoclass to a more emergent one. In “The Dying God,” part three of The Golden Bough, Frazer draws our attention to these verses of Exodus (22: 29-30):
Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.
A similar passage can be read in Numbers (18: 14-15), and the following one (3: 11-13) seems especially revealing:
The Lord also said to Moses, “I have taken the Levites from among the Israelites in place of the first male offspring of every Israelite woman. The Levites are mine, for all the firstborn are mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set apart for myself every firstborn in Israel, whether man or animal. They are to be mine. I am the Lord.”
The psychohistorian Howard Stein, who has written scholarly articles on Judaism since the mid-1970s, concludes in an article of 2009 that the gathered information suggests a particular interpretation. According to Stein, the substrate of fear for the slaughter “helps to explain the valency that the High Holiday have for millions of Jews worldwide,” presumably echoes of very ancient happenings: actual sacrifices by the Hebrews.
In contrast to what the evangelicals were taught in Sunday school as children, Moses did not write the Torah—it was not written before the Persian period. In fact, the most sacred book of the Jews includes four different sources. Since the 17th-century thinkers such as Spinoza and Hobbes had researched the origins of the Pentateuch, and the consensus of contemporary studies is that the final edition is dated by the 5th century B.C. (the biblical Moses, assuming he existed, would have lived in the 13th century B.C.). Taking into account the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible—for example, Isaiah, who belonged to a much more evolved psychoclass, even abhorred animal sacrifice—it should not surprise us that the first chapter of Leviticus consists only of animal sacrifices. The “Lord” called them holocausts to be offered at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. After killing, skinning and butchering the poor animal, the priest incinerates everything on the altar “as a burnt offering to the Lord; it is a pleasing aroma, a special gift presented to the Lord.” A phrase that is repeated three times in that first chapter, it also appears in subsequent chapters and reminds me those words by Cortés to Charles V about the Mesoamerican sacrifices (“They take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as the sacrifice.”) In the book of Exodus (34:20) even the emerging transition of child sacrifice to lamb sacrifice can be guessed in some passages, what gave rise to the legend of Abraham:
For the first foal of a donkey, they should give a lamb or a goat instead of the ass, but if you do not give, you break the neck of the donkey. You must also give an offering instead of each eldest child. And no one is to appear before me empty-handed.
Compared with other infanticidal peoples the projection of the demanding father had been identical, but the emergency to a less dissociated layer of the human psyche is clearly visible. As noted by Jaynes, the Bible is a treasure to keep track of the greatest psychogenic change in history. The Hebrews sacrificed their children just as other peoples, but eventually they would leave behind the barbaric practice.
After captivity in the comparatively more civilized Babylon in 586 B.C., the Jews abandoned their practices. In his book King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities, published in 2004, Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that child sacrifice was part of the worship of Yahweh, and that the practice was condemned only after the exile. Like their Christian successors, the Jews had sublimated their filicidal impulses in the Passover ritual. Each year they celebrate the liberation of their people and remember how Yahweh killed the firstborn Egyptians: legendary resonance of the habit of killing one’s eldest son.
But the biblical Moloch (in Hebrew without vowels, mlk), represented as a human figure with a bull’s head was not only a Canaanite god. It also was a god of the descendants of the Canaanites, the Phoenicians. The founding myth of Moloch was similar to that of many other religions: sacrifices were compensation for a catastrophe from the beginning of time. Above I said that Plutarch, Tertullian, Orosius, Philo, Cleitarchus and Diodorus Siculus mentioned the practice of the burning children to Moloch in Carthage, but refrained from wielding the most disturbing details. Diodorus says that every child who was placed in the outstretched hands of Moloch fell through the open mouth of the heated bronze statue, into the fire. When at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. Agathocles defeated Carthage the Carthaginians began to burn their children in a huge sacrifice as a tactical “defense” before the enemy. The sources mention three hundred incinerated children. If I had made a career as a film director, I would feel obliged to visually show humanity its infamous past by filming the huge bronze statue, heated red-hot while the Greek troops besieged the city, gobbling child after child: who would be sliding to the bottom of the flaming chimney. In addition to Carthage, the worship of Moloch, whose ritual was held outdoors, was widespread in other Phoenician cities. He was widely worshiped in the Middle East and in the Punic cultures of the time, including several Semitic peoples and as far as the Etruscans. Various sacrificial tophets have been found in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, outside Tyre and at a temple of Amman.
Terracotta urns containing the cremated remains of children, discovered in 1817, have been photographed numerous times. However, since the late 1980s some Italian teachers began to question the historicity of the accounts of classical writers. Tunisian nationalists took advantage, including the president whose palace near the suburban sea is very close the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. The Tunisian tourist guides even make foreigners believe that the Carthaginians did not perform sacrifices (something similar to what some ignorant Mexican tourist guides do in Chiapas). Traditional historians argue that the fact that the remains are from very young children suggests sacrifice, not cremation by natural death as alleged by the revisionists. The sacrificial interpretation of Carthage is also suggested by the fact that, along with the children, there are charred remains of lambs (remember the biblical quote that an evolved Yahweh says that the slaughter of sheep was a barter for the firstborn). This suggests that some Carthaginians replaced animals in the sacrificial rite: data inconsistent with the revisionist theory that the tophet was a normal cemetery. Furthermore, the word mlk (Moloch) appears in many stelae as a dedication to this god. If they were simple burials, it would not make sense to find those stelae dedicated to the fire god: common graves are not inscribed as offerings to the gods. Finally, although classical writers were staunch enemies of the Carthaginians, historical violence is exerted by rejecting all their testimonies, from Alexander’s time to the Common Era. The revisionism on Carthage has been a phenomenon that is not part of new archaeological discoveries, or newly discovered ancient texts. The revisionists simply put into question the veracity of the accounts of classical writers, and they try to rationalize the archaeological data by stressing our credulity to the breaking point. Brian Garnand, of the University of Chicago, concluded in his monograph on the Phoenician sacrifice that “the distinguished scholars of the ridimensionamento [revisionism] have not proven their case.”
However, I must say that the revisionists do not bother me. What I cannot tolerate are those subjects who, while accepting the reality of the Carthaginian sacrifice, idealize it. On September 1, 1987 an article in the New York Times, “Relics of Carthage Show Brutality Amid the Good Life” contains this nefarious phrase: “Some scholars assert, the practice of infanticide helped produce Carthage’s great wealth and its flowering of artistic achievement.” The memory of these sacrificed children has not really been vindicated even by present-day standards.
The Carthaginian tophet is the largest cemetery of humans, actually of boys and girls, ever discovered. After the Third Punic War Rome forced the Carthaginians to learn Latin, just as the Spanish imposed their language on the conquered Mexicans. Personally, what most alarms me is that there is evidence in the tophets of remains of tens of thousands of children sacrificed by fire over so many centuries. I cannot tremble more in imagining what would have been of our civilization had the Semitic Hannibal reached Rome.
Lately I’ve had contact with a child that a couple of days ago has turned six years old and who loves his mother very much. I confess that to imagine what a Carthaginian boy of the same age would have felt when his dear papa handed him over to the imposing bronze statue with a Bull’s head; to imagine what he would have felt for such treachery as he writhed with infinite pain in the fired oven, moved me to write this last chapter. Although my parents did not physically kill me (only shattered my soul), every time I come across stories about sacrificed firstborns, it’s hard not to touch my inner fiber.
In the final book of this work I will return to my autobiography, and we will see if after this type of findings humanity has the right to exist.
___________ 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 final chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again through Amazon Books.
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.
The best introduction to the sane side of the deMausean thought available on the internet appears in the third part of the book The Emotional Life of Nations, especially in the final chapters: “The Evolution of Childrearing” and “The Evolution of Psyche and Society.” However, even in the following pages, where I would like to spare the salvageable part of deMause’s legacy, I will continue the criticism of his psychohistory.
Pseudoscientific charts
DeMause likes to interpolate ever-ascending charts on the historical treatment of children in his books, and even once he wrote that primitive humans treated their children better than our ape ancestors. I do not think that is true. The most terrible form of interactions between parents and children is the ritual sacrifice and cannibalism of one’s own children: a level of cruelty that has not been observed in primates other than man. Also, deMause assumes a gradual improvement in child treatment from 460 AD to approximately 1100 AD: an impossibility if we consider that we have no childrearing data around 8th century Europe. This mistake does not invalidate the salvageable part of deMause’s model: only the dogmatic idea that the treatment of children was always from worst to least bad.
In The History of Childhood deMause writes: “The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity.” But in post-Homeric Greece it was already unusual to kill grown-up children as Medea did. The insistence on denigrating the Classical World is derived from the deMause’s dogma that childcare has always gone from worse to less bad, from major to minor abuse: the eternal upward charts in deMausean psychohistory. The prolific Jewish psychohistorian Robert Godwin, for example, emphatically dispatches the Greco-Roman world as barbarian in terms of upbringing. Once again: regarding the Jewish narrative versus the Aryan, in the next chapters we will see who were really the most barbaric.
One of the things that piqued my interest when I first encountered psychohistory was the secularized Judeo-Christian spirit breathed in it. DeMause and Godwin seem to reject the vision of the Enlightenment: to consider the Middle Ages darker than the most lucid moments of Greece and Rome. In contrast to deMause’s claims it does not seem likely at all that the Middle Ages was better as childrearing methods are concerned, or that Christendom was better compared to Pericles’ Athens or Republican Rome. In my own version of psychohistory, the Athenians should have treated the children well enough to allow the explosion of arts, philosophies and politics that we have inherited. However, due to the tenet that “the further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care,” deMause has blinded himself to see the obvious. True, an archaic ritual performed at Knossos by the non-Aryan natives included the cooking and eating of children as part of the fertility celebration (see the history on the white race by William Pierce in Who We Are). But as Ramón Xirau writes at the beginning of his Introducción a la Historia de la Filosofía, the Greece that we know is great precisely because it gave up such practices: something I’ve always related to the Hebrew story of Abraham, who at the last moment changed his mind as to sacrifice his child. The veracity of Xirau’s opening paragraph can be substantiated in the final chapter of the most erudite contemporary study on the subject, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece by Dennis Hughes. To the Greeks of the time of Plato and Theophrastus, says Hughes, human sacrifice was a thing of the past; what was left in their time were isolated cases “and the custom is particularly associated with non-Greeks.”
Not only does the classical world refutes deMause. Julian Jaynes, the author of the book that could be classified as a different kind of psychohistory, implied that the cruel Assyrian law contrasted sharply with the Code of Hammurabi, written six centuries earlier. However, deMause might not err in his assessment of the West from the 12th century AD onward. One of my most memorable readings, based on the captivating television series by Kenneth Clark, was the second chapter of Civilisation about the “The Great Thaw” of Europe at the beginning of the 12th century, as well as the next chapter on courtly love: the West had invented love. The thaw was nothing other than the beginning to treat European women better than what non-westerners did in the rest of the world; hence the treatment of these women to their children changed. From the late 13th century begins the historical record of the death penalty in cases of voluntary infanticide. In addition to their relatively high IQ, psychogenically speaking the people of Europe would evolve more than the rest of the world.
But the white man of the present is suffering the worst psychosis in the history of the West. When by the end of 2008 I called deMause’s attention on the issue of the betrayal that the white man inflicts on himself with mass migration, I realized he knew nothing about the subject. This has led me to think that his chart that appears in his texts about the evolving historic personalities is flawed. DeMause puts there as inferior the psychoclass that has as its model the “patriotic” man compared to the “activist.” The truth is that patriots are precisely the ones who defend their nations against the greatest evil of our times: race replacement. Unlike the ivory tower where both deMause and the academics live, it appears that the recent Western self-treason represents the most serious, plummeting drop in psychogenesis since prehistory.
The case of deMause is aggravated by his Jewish colleagues who abhor not only the Classical World but the West in general: a position that has infected and corrupted his school of psychohistory since its inception. I have not been able to corroborate that deMause himself comes from a Jewish family, although the names he gave to his children, as well as his extreme aversion for the Third Reich, would seem to suggest it.
Shoddy scholarship
DeMause’s mistakes do not end with the discussion in previous pages. Since he sometimes uses his sources very loosely, the possibility exists that his psychohistory could consist of assumptions based on little, if any, evidence. I have found that occasionally deMause takes his data out of context, and that some of his pronouncements on subjects I know better contain serious errors. (For example, instead of the Mexica patron god, Huitzilopochtli, in his books he writes of him as an “Aztec goddess.”) Although such errors do not invalidate his theory, deMause could have used his sources more carefully.
So far the only interesting discussion about psychohistory I am aware of can be read in several discussion pages of Wikipedia. After Ark insulted the editors of the article mentioned above, he returned for a brief time to edit and discuss in the article “Infanticide.” In the discussion page Julie Hofmann Kemp, the editor whom Ark had insulted, responded to him and the other Wikipedia editors in a reasonable manner:
Problems with this. You’re using shoddy scholarship to try to back up an unprovable claim. DeMause provides no analysis or discussion of his sources, merely a catalog of horrific quotes. We cannot tell the context, nor can we take them as representative.
What Julie told Ark next is more substantial:
Anybody can go through books and pick out quotes to make an argument. Since deMause’s work is criminally lax in scholarship, I suggest you try to use better sources. I just reread “A Modest Proposal,” and could see absolutely nothing that referred to rotting corpses of babies in the streets. The only reference was to children accompanying their mothers begging. This certainly makes me question the veracity of other statements in this article.
Ark angrily replied that she could not accept the reality of infanticide because it was very uncomfortable for her. Julie responded:
No, Ark—I am fully aware that we live in a society where people do horrible things to children. I am also aware that this has long been the case. There are plenty of records out there for at least the Victorian area on things like the treatment of children in workhouses, and they clearly indicate widespread abuse of minors and women. I removed what I did [from the Wikipedia article] because I reread Swift and the deMause article you used as sources. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lot of stuff quoted out of context. Some of the sources, like Philippe Ariès, I’ve read. If you want things to stay unchallenged, you’ve got to make sure they have recognizable merit. This is why I think we need to look beyond deMause. DeMause is only one of thousands of people writing on child abuse and infanticide. As a historian, I can see great gaping holes in deMause’s use of sources. It doesn’t make him wrong, but it certainly sets off warning bells—if the scholarship doesn’t stand up, then are the conclusions he draws really proven?
After further critical responses from other editors, quite reasonable and civic, Ark quit editing Wikipedia, and this time definitely, on my birthday of 2002. I agree that the way deMause has used the sources lacks academic rigor. However, if as Julie and others advised, it could be possible to source deMause’s model with non-deMausean references, the psychohistorical structure would be supported upon a new sort of column.
That is exactly what I did. In March and April of 2008 I massively edited “Infanticide,” the same article where years before Julie and Ark had discussed, adding a hundred references that I did not read in deMausean texts, but in a voluminous treatise of Larry S. Milner published in 2000. The model of the breakdown of the bicameral mind by surpassing the infanticidal psychoclass, is the cornerstone on which rests what remained of the psychohistorical building after my critique. Therefore, I will reproduce here what I added to that article, which I also translated for Wikipedia in Spanish. In my second book the critique of psychiatry contained such incredible facts that, unlike the other books, I was forced to include bibliographical notes. For the same reasons here I will do the same.
___________ 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 month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.
A quick way to show the Aristotelian phase where present-day history, anthropology and sociology are stuck is by quoting excerpts from a heated debate about psychohistory. To make the reading easier I will omit the use of ellipsis even between long unquoted paragraphs. The complete debate can be read in the Wikipedia archive of the article “Early infanticidal childrearing.” Since the original text is a raw discussion I slightly corrected the syntax. The following is a 2002 debate that came about the subsequent year when Wikipedia was launched, the multi-language encyclopedia edited by volunteers. To simplify the discussion I will also change the names and pennames used by various academics that discussed with a psychohistorian who edited Wikipedia under the penname of “Ark.” The fascinating polemic initiated with the subject of the tribes of Papua New Guinea.
Academic 1: Does this “model” [psychohistory] reflect actual facts? Increased mortality after weaning is common in non-Neolithic cultures as well; it’s a consequence of inadequate nutrition, not of parental desire. Ark: You’re wrong there. “Inadequate nutrition” isn’t some random fact of reality. It’s a consequence of feeding pap to children, and not having the empathy necessary to understand that crying means the baby is hungry. These are both psychological problems of the parents, since feeding pap is a response to the fear of breastfeeding. Academic 1: So PNG [Papua New Guinea] children were better off in the more “primitive” culture, and exposure to an “advanced” society has increased sexual abuse of children.
Notice how this is similar to Miguel León Portilla’s preposterous claim that, by becoming exposed the Mexicas to a more advanced society, they abused their own women.
Ark: Yeah right. The myth of the “noble savage” rears its ugly head again. The reproductive rate is proportional to the ignorance and poverty of the population. So the more ignorant and poor the population, the more they will fuck. What’s generally the case is that birthrate is inversely proportional to female education. The PNG have a very high reproductive rate. The PNG have a very high rate of infanticide, child suicide. So now you know why I think that “noble savage” is just complete bullshit.
There are a bunch of known facts which everyone agrees on. Ninety-nine percent of modern people will put a very specific interpretation on those facts. That interpretation is that primitives are pedophilic, incestuous child molesters. This isn’t something which is cooked up by deMause’s model. Academic 2: I am unimpressed by your hysterical claim that 99 percent of our society would agree with this. My claim is that people in different cultures describe things differently. The issue for me is, what do Marquesans, or Yolngu, or Gimi, or whomever, think it is? An article that makes claims about a particular society must care what members of that society claim is going on. Ark: The interpretation of child abuse in the case of infants is acultural. Infants do not have culture so are incapable of “interpreting” anything through a cultural filter. And yet again, you persist in ignoring the child’s point of view, as if the rationalization of the child abuser mattered to them. You’re promoting a very specific POV [point of view], the one of the child molester, and don’t seem to care at all about the POV of the infant. Only anthropologists care about how the members of the primitive culture rationalize their behaviors. Anthropologists are just very bizarre people, and about as relevant to most people’s view of what constitutes child molestation as experts in the paranormal. The relevant experts in the area are developmental psychologists. There is a substantial faction that regards any kind of sexual activity with children to be inherently abusive. They would reject the anthropologists’ claims that cultural attitudes are at all relevant to the matter. They would rather emphasize the universality and uniformity of children’s emotional needs. At the center of this faction are the likes of Alice Miller. There is another faction that traces its lineage all the way to Freud. When possible, it denies that child abuse exists. When it can’t do that it denies that it is traumatic. And when it can’t do that, it denies that it is inherently traumatic. Academic 3: The purpose of anthropology is to describe culture, not judge it. If an anthropologist judges a culture under study, the ability to describe a culture objectively and explain how it is perceived by its members is lost. Ark: Anthropologists widely report that primitives do not see their practices as abusive or sexual. I have no hesitation agreeing with that. But then, neither do typical pedophiles see their practices as abusive either. So the basic idea is to completely steal the psychology and child-rearing of non-Western cultures (contemporary and historical) away from anthropologists. If that happens, then theories about these phenomena will be held to different standards than theories in anthropology. Anthropologists are trained to ignore that tool. Academic 3: Ah, so you’re an opponent of cultural relativism. I don’t consider North European values to be “more advanced,” just different. There’s a difference between considering a set of values to be more amenable to one’s conscience and labeling one set of values as “more advanced” than another. That’s like implying that a Papuan is dumber than a European just because his culture doesn’t use electricity. Anthropologists do regularly debate how much they can or should interfere when they disagree strongly with the values of a culture under study. Ethically, all we can do is present viable options and allow individuals to make their own choices and suffer the consequences of those choices. Ark: But Papuans are dumber than Europeans because they don’t use electricity.☺ You just have to ask “why do we use electricity?” We use it because we have a high population density and a high technological level. Why is that? Because we are culturally evolved. Why is that? Because at some point a couple of millennia ago, our ancestors decided to stop murdering their children and start evolving culturally. Of course, that only proves the Papuans are dumb, not that we’re smart; we’re just the product of a long line of smarter mothers. Academic 3: What you are proposing is a form of genocide: systematically destroying a culture simply because you consider that culture to be primitive and immoral. If lip piercing, or trauma to the brain leads to successful adult lives, is that not sufficient justification for continuing the practice? You sound to me as if you are a “moral absolutist.” I’d hazard a guess that you believe everyone should live under the same moral code. Ark: Just because I’m a moral absolutist doesn’t mean I think I have a perfect access to moral truth. It does mean that I have a far, far better understanding of basic moral truths than people who beat or sexually abuse kids. We could emphasize that anthropologists don’t really try to understand their subjects’ psyche. It’s not moral assumptions which differ between societies. It’s the capacity for empathy and rationality. Academic 3: The anthropologist in me, on the other hand, still bemoans yet another drop added to the overflowing bucket of human cultures is forever lost. Ark: The primitive cultures are a failure. We should let them die. Academic 4: Good—as long as we all understand that psychohistory has nothing to do with history and is not even accepted by all schools of psychology. I think that there’s a real problem here in that the entire concept as titled [“Early infanticidal childrearing”] makes no sense. The title implies that these cultures intentionally endanger and kill their children: something that makes no sense for peoples who want to survive and which, if these cultures still exist after thousands of years, is clearly misleading. Ark: I’ve chosen to take extreme offense at what you’ve said, e.g., “psychohistory has nothing to do with history,” and will treat you like a hostile. I really wish I didn’t have to deal with people who say stupid things. For example, things that amount to “every human being is rational and since it’s not rational to kill children…” This negates the overwhelming evidence that infanticide occurs. Never mind such truly stupid statements like “preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes are those most concerned with basic survival.” Oh really, I guess that explains why they never developed any technology in order to guarantee their survival (never mind such annoying facts like beliefs in reincarnation, animism and ancestor-worship). Academic 5: Ark, play nice. Julie Hofmann Kemp [Academic 4] is many things, can even be abrasive sometimes, but acting “stupid” (I see you modified the “idiot” statement)? That’s over the top. She is one of the smartest people contributing to Wikipedia. This is an encyclopedia, not a soap box for new ideas. Sorry, but regurgitation of the canon of human knowledge is what we do here. Academic 6: I disagree, Maveric [Academic 5]. One of the things that makes Wikipedia different from a standard encyclopedia is our ability to reflect new thinking. Now, the whole that deMause put together and Ark is advertising here is striking, but I think that you will find most of the individual points are not nearly as radical or contrary to current understanding as you seem to present. To begin with, there are many people who would reject cultural relativism. The first example that comes to mind are the women’s historians which have become increasingly common, but a proper search shouldn’t have trouble coming up with others. Further, the idea of the noble savage is very controversial, and one should hardly consider it some sort of canon.
With regards to infanticide per se, I personally have very little knowledge about the Paleolithic, but that deliberate murder or abandonment of infants was common among ancient civilizations like Carthage, Greece, and Rome is well-known, and I can remember a mainstream text mentioning Mohammed’s prohibitions against the then-widespread killing of children without any implication that might be controversial. In absence of further data, a backwards trendline would be all it takes to suggest that Paleolithic infanticide was very common indeed. And I can recall articles suggesting that tribal cannibalism, to take the most headline-grabbing example, was far more common than previously thought. In short, I think this position is not nearly outlandish enough to deserve such curt rejection. An informative and lasting page on this would be valuable enough. Academic 7: Note that the definition of rape and molestation vary among cultures. Ark: Rape and molestation do vary among cultures. This is bad. Cultural relativism is crap, believed only by idiots, ignoramuses, anthropologists and historians. The Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly rejects cultural relativism. Cultural relativists are merely denying human rights. (On a moral level, they are still violating human rights.) Anthropology and history have achieved nothing, or close to nothing. The reason anthropology and history are fucked is because they reject psychology and that is the only possible explanation for both culture and history.
For psychological reasons, anthropologists have been butchering psych-heavy data; on the whole, the data is irretrievably corrupt and needs to be junked. Psychohistory is independent of both history and psychology and is at war with both. As the new kid on the bloc it’s going to get attacked as “simply not recognized by most historians and psychologists.” But psychohistory actually gets results. There is no rational argument against psychohistory’s methods. Conservatism is not a rational argument. And as noted above, there are plenty of arguments against both history and anthropology (i.e., they deny psychology’s influence even in psychological phenomena). Like cartography or natural history, anthropology and history aren’t sciences per se. Cartography was never anything more than an engineering enterprise (though it did give rise to plate tectonics) and when the time came, natural history gave way to evolutionary biology. Similarly, anthropology and history should give way to psychohistory wherever the latter is interested in taking over. Academic 2: To those who promote the myth of the brutal savage, I point out that westerners have often characterized non-Western practices as stupid, unhealthy, or wrong in part out of their own ignorance, and in part to justify colonial oppression. Ark: The brutal savage isn’t a myth. I do not mean by it that we aren’t savages. That is a notion you rightly reject because any article attacking modern people as savages will be destroyed. What I do claim is that modern societies are less savage than societies in the past. That’s most certainly not a myth. And to argue otherwise is to promote the noble savage myth. If you have an absolute standard of morality, there is no choice other than the brutal savage or the noble savage (as long as you don’t redefine rape and murder as non-violent behaviors, which by now I don’t trust you not to do). Whether deliberately or unwittingly, you have been promoting the noble savage myth. To recap: Primitives, in relation to modern people can be either: 1. equally savage (obviously untrue) 2. differently savage (cultural relativism) 3. less savage (noble savage) 4. more savage (brutal savage). So rejecting options #2 and #3 leaves one only with #4. There is no maneuvering room for anyone to weasel around. Academic 3: And this is where you and I differ. I generally contend that all present-day cultures are essentially “differently savage.”
It is unnecessary to cite Ark’s long response. It is already answered in the previous chapter. But I would like to mention a newspaper note about an atrocity in Kismayo, at the south of Somalia. On October 27 of 2008 Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a thirteen-year-old girl that had been raped, was accused of premarital sex by militant Islamists and condemned to die by stoning on the head. (Although hard to believe, there are people who punish the victim of rape, not the rapist: the hypothetical nightmare of my second book turned reality.) Most disturbing in the press release is that dozens of men stoned Aisha in a stadium with a thousand spectators! What better example to clear away any doubts about the relevancy of the concept of a manifestly inferior psychoclass to ours.
Academic 3: Hum, as I understand it, most casual murders recognize that their actions are considered morally “wrong.” They just don’t care. Ark: Morality is a psychological phenomenon. It refers to a person’s capacity for empathy. It’s difficult to describe empathy since nobody has a good grip on what it means. But of course, that’s the point: if a person has no morality then they don’t have any of these emotions. Keep in mind that our very ability to accept social and technological progress at the rate we’re going is something which primitives lack. And we’ve yet to annihilate a foreign nation (as the Assyrians did) to pay for that progress. This too is a genuine advance. Academic 4: Ark: in the interests of fairness, I went ahead and looked at the deMause article. Basically, it can be digested into one Philip Larkin poem. Big Whoop. Parents fuck up their kids. We know that. There is absolutely nothing there besides that fact that is provable. It is a mass of huge generalizations predicated on two simple ideas: violence begets violence (duh) and everything that happens is down to psychology. Yes, there are references to acts of violence by parents (particularly mothers) against children, but we don’t get to see the breadth of the studies to show what kind of population was used, etc. I stand by my statement that most historians reject psychohistory not because we feel threatened by it, but because most historians believe that human society is complex and filled with individuals who may act in particular ways for any number of reasons. Generally reductionism is not provable—merely a simplistic way for the insecure to find meaning. Ark: You dismiss the article I cited because it doesn’t provide concrete proof against history’s “no explanations” stance. Well so fucking what? I never claimed it did. I merely claimed it crucified history as a scientific field and historians as scientists by showing that the theories historians entertain are all unbelievably idiotic. If you wanted a detailed theory and the evidence to back it up, you’d have to read half a dozen of deMause’s books on the subject. You haven’t provided a single remotely intelligent argument, satisfying yourself with irrelevancies and vague aspersions. (This is what you call “fair”?) If you stand by your statement on that basis, it just proves you’re an idiot. I dismiss you from my consideration. Anonymous: Will someone please ban Ark? His non-stop slander, personal attacks, and foul language are damaging the Wikipedia community. Academic 4: I would happily do so, but being a ranting troll who supports crank theories in an anti-social way isn’t enough for a ban. He is correct in his assertion that deMause’s theories deserve their own article—even if he’s amazingly rude in the way he treats others, and his insults towards me.
To that end, Ark, You haven’t convinced anyone that you’re anything but a crank who thinks he’s far more intelligent than he’s demonstrated so far. Ark: I have a pretty good grasp on what history is and what it is not. As for psychology, you’re wrong about its scientific basis. Overall, it’s a fucked field but it’s one that has always aspired to be scientific.
As for psychohistory, it is not a fucked field. These two facts (history not being science and psychohistory being science) explain why I’m so eager to dismiss history. Why should scientists be subjected to the authority of non-scientists? The same arguments apply to anthropology, and doubly so when the psyches of primitives are concerned. Convincing people was never my goal, I’m too lazy and people are too bigoted for that. As for people thinking I’m a crank, I’m a power unto myself and I haven’t need for their approval nor favour. I’m just not interested in being the whipping boy on this subject. Fuck you all.
With this insult the psychohistorian who signed his posts under the penname of Ark left the discussion page. Perhaps with the exception of Academic 6, his opponents did not want to see that western childrearing has been less barbarous than in the rest of the world.
It was not always so. Both whites and Semites began as the others. Let us remember the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, and a similar sacrifice in the Bible: after victory over the Ammonites, according to the Book of Judges, Jephthah makes a vow to sacrifice whoever came out of the doors of his house to meet him. The one who met him on his return was his only daughter…
What remained in Europe was a mere metaphor of such sacrifice. Robert Godwin hit the nail when stating that Christianity’s unconscious message is that when we murder our innocent child we murder God. “The crucifixion of Jesus is meant to be the last human sacrifice, with Jesus standing in for our own murdered innocence.”
___________ 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 month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.
Perspective
Lloyd deMause has written that his scholarly life brought him to one conclusion: the history of mankind is founded in the abuse of children. His greater finding is that the central force of change in history is not the economy, but the psychogenic changes that occur due to the parental-filial interactions in successive generations. These changes are the result of the parents’ capabilities, especially the mothers, to experience inwardly previous traumas and sparing the next generation of children. The process ensues in an evolutive mutation of the inner space of human groups. DeMause goes as far as claiming that most forms of violence, from crime to mental disorders, are ultimately the consequence of abuses during childhood. In the article “The evolution of childhood reconsidered” Henry Ebel wrote:
DeMause’s argument had a breath-taking sweep and grandeur such as we associate with the work of Hegel, Darwin and Marx. Moreover, it seemed to be a valid response and interpretation of a series of gruesome facts that had been consistently understated or suppressed by conventional historians… “The Evolution of Childhood” has proved a morsel too large, too complete, too assertive, and in many ways too grim for the historical profession to digest… Since adult styles and roles, including the academic and professional, are mainly denial-systems erected against those early needs and terrors, the academic consideration of deMause’s argument has been, understandably enough, of less than earthshaking intelligence.
As terrible as being prisoner in a concentration camp may be, it cannot be compared to seeing that our parents themselves, with whom we are infinitely attached, destroy the head of one of our siblings, as did the tribes of the Canary Islands before they were conquered (as we will see). Throughout prehistory and history parents have committed more injurious crimes for the health of the human soul than the crimes committed during the genocides of the 20th century. But the current zeitgeist only allows us to judge the West. In a TV documentary I watched how a black tribesman grabbed a boy to sacrifice him. The anthropologist that studied the tribe did not intervene. Had this happened in the West, it would have raised indignation. For example, a pervert that was about to rape a little girl before his internet audience was detected through his I.P. address and the police rescued the girl. On the other hand, in the case of the tribes the anthropologists never rescue the children during passage rituals such as the Sambia, where New Guinea boys have to fellate the adults.
When we think about the implications of psychohistory we should bear in mind that the cannibalism of the bone and stone ages was much more common than previously thought. Also, from 3000 to 2500 B.C., before the psychogenic mutation that gradually left bicameralism behind, the people of the Mediterranean Basin and of Finland ate the flesh of the deceased. Moreover, the Mesoamerican mythology of the great transgression by some gods to create life without parental consent exemplifies what Ivan Strenski has pointed out in his book Contesting Sacrifice: originally all cultures had at its basis universal guilt, and thus require of purification rituals to repair the broken bond with the divinity.
For identical psychological impairments of the Amerindians, a huge quantity of human sacrifices was perpetrated at the other side of the Atlantic: in China, Chad, Egypt, Tahiti and even in the Greco-Roman world. Diverse societies in India, Indonesia, Melanesia, Filipinas, the Amazons and many others continued with their terrible practices before they were colonized. During the pre-classic times of Mesoamerica the ancient Spartans offered sacrifices to Agrotera. Rome practiced several forms of human sacrifice until they were abolished by senatorial decree. The circus races of the Coliseum represented a less barbarous form of sacrifice since, unlike their neighbors, it was not done with one’s own children. The Romans spearheaded the most advanced psychoclass of their times. When Scipio Africanus took Numantia, the Romans found mothers with half-devoured bodies of their children. Celts and Druids also practiced human sacrifices. The Gauls built hollow figures that, with people alive, were burnt. Gaul was conquered by Caesar. Rome’s victory over the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars was a milestone of a superior psychoclass over the inferior one. The sacrifices to the Phrygian god Attis consisted in choosing a young man who was treated like a king for a year only to be sacrificed. Were it not for the fact that the Mexica sacrifice was so splendorous, I would say that the young man who immolated himself for Tezcatlipoca was identical to the Phrygian sacrifice. In our times, among the forms that arguably could be described as sacrificial we could include rituals such as Cuban santería or Indian tantrism. More shocking is the sacrifice known as sati in the most retrograde areas of India, where the custom dictates that the widow throws herself to the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. At the moment of writing, the last of these cases was reported in October of 2008 in Kasdol in the district of Raipur.
The culture that the Europeans brought included family violence. But unlike them, in the conquered people the anxieties that the children arose, based in turn on the abuses the natives had suffered as children, were enough to kill the source that triggered the anxiety. Children have been the garbage bin where the adults dump the unrecognized parts of their psyches. It is expected that the child bin will absorb the ill moods of his custodians to prevent that the adult feels overwhelmed by her anxieties. If I kill the soul of my daughter I thus kill the naughty girl that once inhabited me.
It is interesting to note that according to deMause it is the mother, with her own hands, the perpetrator of most cases of infanticide: be by strangulation or by physical punishment. In this book I wrote about my female ancestors [omitted in this translation]. For deMause the crucial relationship in psychogenic evolution is the relationship between mother and daughter. If the girls are abused without helping witnesses, they will grow as adults incapable of feeling their pain. Since trauma demands repetition, they will traumatize the next generation, stalling all potential for psychogenic growth. DeMause exemplifies it with the mistreatment of women in Islamic countries and in China.
Since 1974, the year of deMause’s seminal essay, a fair amount of academic material about infanticide has been published. According to Larry Milner, since pre-history thousands of millions of infants have been killed by their parents (the bibliographical references on these incredible claims appear by the end of this chapter). Likewise, Joseph B. Birdsell estimates infanticidal rates between 15-50 percent of the total number of children born since prehistoric times. Laila Williamson’s estimates are lower: 15-20 percent. As we shall see, this kind of statistics appears time and again in the writings of other researchers. Although Milner is not a psycho-historian, he wonders why such data have not received its due place in the departments of history, anthropology and sociology.
This is a blindspot that will be studied in the rest of the book.
___________ 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 month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.
Throughout history and prehistory children’s lives have been a nightmare about which our species is barely starting to become conscious. “Parents are the child’s most lethal enemy,” wrote Lloyd deMause, the founder of psychohistory. While paleo-anthropologists have found evidence of decapitated infants since the time of our pre-human ancestors, and while it was known that infanticide continued into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods, the emotional after-effects on the surviving siblings was appreciated by deMause with the publishing of The History of Childhood in 1974. As we will see in the third section substantiated by a hundred references, infanticidal parents were the rule, not the exception. Even in the so-called great civilizations the sacrifice of children was common. In Carthage urns have been found containing thousands of burned remains of children sacrificed by parents asking favors from the gods. It is believed that infants were burned alive.
Although in a far less sadistic way than in Carthage and other ancient states, and this explains the genius of the classic world, Greeks and Romans practiced infanticide in the form of exposure of newborns, especially girls. Euripides’ Ion describes the exposed infant as: “prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend.” Philo was the first philosopher who made a clear statement against infanticide:
Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight.
In some of his satires Juvenal openly criticized abortion, child abandonment, and the killing of adoptive children and stepchildren.
My first reaction in the face of such revelations was, naturally, a healthy skepticism. This moved me to purchase books about infanticide and histories of childhood not written by “psychohistorians,” but by common historians; and I started to pay special attention to certain kinds of news in the papers of which previously I scarcely gave any importance. One day in 2006 a notice caught my eye, stating that there are 32 million fewer women than men in India, and that the imbalance was caused by feticide. I recalled a photograph I had seen in the June 2003 National Geographic, showing a Bihar midwife in the rural North of India, rescuing a female baby abandoned under a bridge. Infanticide and selective abortion, particularly of girls, continue as I write this line. According to a Reproductive Rights conference in October 2007 in Hyderabad, India, statistics show that 163 million women are missing in Asia, compared to the proportion of the male population. They are the result of the exposure of babies, and especially of selective abortion facilitated by access to techniques such as prenatal testing and ultrasound imagery. These snippets of information gathered from newspapers, coupled with the scholarly treatises which I was reading, eradicated my original skepticism about the reality of infanticide.
But let’s return to psychohistory as developed by deMause. There are cultures far more barbarous than contemporary India as regards childrearing. In the recent past of the tribes of New Guinea and Australia, little brothers and sisters witnessed how parents killed one of their siblings and made the rest of the family share the cannibal feast. “They eat the head first,” wrote Géza Róheim in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology published in 1950. Gillian Gillison observed in Between Culture and Fantasy: a New Guinea Highlands Mythology, published in 1993, that the mother eats the son’s penis. And Fritz Poole wrote:
Having witnessed their parents’ mortuary anthropophagy, many of these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs.
These passages are quoted in deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations. Reading further in this work, one can also learn, as Wolfgang Lederer wrote when observing the tribes, that other primitives threw their newborns to the swine, who devoured them swiftly. Lederer also recounts that he saw one of these mothers burying her child alive:
The baby’s movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breath; schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it out to save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept her foot on it…
Australian aboriginals killed approximately 30 percent of their infants, as reported by Gillian Cowlishaw in Oceania; and the first missionaries to Polynesia estimated that up to two-thirds of Polynesian children were killed by their parents. In a 2008 article I learned that infanticide continues in the islands even as of the time of reporting. Tribal women allege they have to kill their babies for fear they might become dreadful warriors as adults.
Another type of information that shocked me in deMause’s books was the frequency throughout history of the mutilation of children. Once more, my first reaction was a healthy skepticism. But I had no choice but to accept the fact that even today there are millions of girls whose genitals have been cut. The Emotional Life of Nations publishes a photograph of a panicked Cairo pubescent girl being held down by adults at the moment when her family has her mutilated. Every time I see that photo I have to turn away my head (the girl looks directly into the camera and her pain reaches me deeply). According to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), in 2007 there were between 100 and 140 million women who had had their genitals removed. The practice ranges from the partial cutting of the clitoris to the suturation of the vaginal orifice, the latter especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, some regions of the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The INED study points out that in Ethiopia three-quarters of women have been genitally mutilated, and in Mali up to 90 percent. The practice is also carried out in Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia.
In historic times there were a large number of eunuchs in Byzantium, and in the West mutilation was a common practice for boys. Verdun was notorious for the quantity of castrations performed, and in Naples signs hung above stores saying, “boys castrated here.” Castration was common as well in other cultures. DeMause observes that the testicles of boys between three and seven years were crushed or cut off. In China both the penis and the scrotum were cut, and in the Middle East the practice continued until recent times.
(A swaddled boy of the tribe Nez Perce, 1911.) DeMause’s books are eye-openers also about another practice that no school text of traditional anthropology had taught me: the tight swaddling of babies.
It is worth noting that historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists have been the target of fierce criticism by some psychohistorians for their failure to see the psychological after-effects brought about by such practices. Through the centuries, babies were swaddled by their mothers with swaddling clothes wrapped around their bodies, several times and tightly fastened while they screamed in their vain attempts at liberation. Before reading deMause the only thing I knew of such practice was when I as a boy saw a cartoon of a couple of Red Indians who had their baby swaddled, of which only a little head was visible crying big time, while the Indians walked on casually. Despite its being a comic strip, I remember it made a mark in my young memory because of the pity I felt for the baby boy and how I noted the parents’ indifference. This happened decades before I read Foundations of Psychohistory, wherein it is described that this practice was universal and that it goes back to our tribal ancestors. Even Alice Miller herself, the heroine of my third book of Hojas Susurrantes, was swaddled as a child. In Europe swaddling is still practiced in some rural parts of Greece. The sad spectacle of the swaddled newborns in Yugoslavia and Russia draws the visiting foreigners’ attention. Even in the city in which I was born a few friends have told me that some relatives swaddled their babies.
Those who have read my previous book would not be surprised that the man in the street has barely thought about the ravages that these practices—swaddling, mutilation, growing up knowing that mom and dad had abandoned or sacrificed a little sister—caused in the surviving siblings who witnessed it. What we have before us is the most potent taboo of the species: a lack of elemental consciousness of what parents do to their children. As we will see at the end of this book, some historians of infanticide who do not belong to the deMausean school estimate in astronomical figures the infanticide rate since the Paleolithic.
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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, the following week I will publish here the section on trauma model researcher Colin Ross. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.
Some examples [frescoes] of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, show a knife with knots of paper and a feathered plume of the sacrificial victim, with his heart possibly extracted, leaning over a bundle of paper for a burnt-offering.
The reduced size of the characters raises the possibility of youngsters or infants, whose breasts are opened more easily by its cartilaginous nature. There is a series of images on plates with infants whose breasts show a small cut on the heart (e.g., the famous dish of the Popol Vuh, K3395). But not all of them are representations. In 1985, as a member of Project Caracol in Belize, Stephen Houston excavated a reused crypt with at least twenty-five individuals, where he found the body of a newborn on top of a plate.
Incidentally, it is remarkable the presence of fire in scenes of children, such as in a mural of a jamb of Tohcok, Campeche, and another on Stela 3 of Yaxhá, Guatemala. The first image traces the shape of a body on an incendiary base, bundles of firewood with ajaw on the head, corresponding to the sign of the homes of the founders of dynasties, especially those related to the pre-eminent city of Teotihuacan.
The second image shows the remains of a human body on a plate supported by cross-shaped sticks. From above fall grains of incense, ch’aaj in the ch’olan language in most classical texts; from below clouds of fire raise up. Through the sign for “wood,” té, inscribed next to the trait, it is indicated that the dish will also burn.
A documented vase (K1645, above) by Justin Kerr explains the mythical context of these historical facts. Two supplicant characters, the first perhaps tied as a captive (at least placed in a very uncomfortable position), faces two “packages” with heads of gods, a scene that appears in other vessels, but with different dates and other companions. The verb “born” sihyaj suggests that Chahk, the rain god, and the so-called god of “Pax” are newborns. In the vase K1645 the supplicants are ch’ajoomtaak, “those who spread incense.” The first character carries the attributes of the ch’ajoom, “incense spreader,” even a distinctive headband and a dress of dry leaves.
Both supplicants offer to the enthroned figures an object named “his foot,” yook, perhaps referring to the wooden scaffolding that stands in the stela of Yaxhá. The link to the fires is made clear with the presence of the inflammatory base behind the scaffold. Unlike other sacrificed children, the infant appears to be alive [Chechar’s note: see image below].
As in several Mesoamerican societies, the image of a supernatural act can function as a basic model for the dynastic rituals. There is a parallel in the evidence of the sacrifice by fire, a torture with fatal goals, applied by a god on the back of another…
The presence of infants over the plates, especially in contexts of way [Mayan word] or co-essences of Maya rulers, indicates that this is a special “food.” Usually, the way was very different food from the food of human beings, with emphasis on hands, eyes, bones, and in this case, the soft bodies of children.
[Above I excerpted passages from pages 170 to 173. Below there’s an excerpt from page 182, where the authors discuss other Maya sacrifices:]
The presence of women and children indicates that these individuals were not enemy combatants and strongly suggests a sacrificial context, though perhaps a sacrifice of wider political significance.
Several skulls of Colhá show marks of sharp and unhealed cuts, particularly around the eye sockets, which suggests that some of these individuals were flayed, either shortly before or after death. The skinning of the face supports the iconographic images of beheading showing substantial mutilation, particularly of the eyes. Although it is likely that much of this occurred post-mortem, we must ask whether at least some of these traumas were inflicted before death to maximize the suffering of those about to be executed.
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Note: For my psychological interpretation of Maya and other Amerind cruelty, see The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a chapter of my book.
Those who passed the test received the best care in exquisite surroundings as a reward. Homes were often in stately homes that, as in the case of Heim Hochland, had often been taken from Hitler’s enemies, and other mansions from Jews. The organisation’s headquarters in Munich was in a house that had been owned by the writer Thomas Mann, (who had six children with his Jewish wife). All homes were equipped with modern medical equipment and cared for by specialised medical personnel.
