Psychohistory
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.
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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 month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.