Sunday, August 10, 2014

The Loss of Our Rites of Passage

"The purpose of the temptress is to test (and hence demonstrate) the integrity of the hero by placing easy gratification or other gain in their path. By refusing this, the hero demonstrates himself to be true to heroic values and dedicated above all else to achievement of the primary goal." - Changing Minds

When I was 12 years old I entered seventh grade, and I knew there was something very wrong. Sixth grade had been fun and I thought there was going to be a linear progression. It wasn't even close. It was as if I had stepped off of those fjords in Norway.

Years later I realized all cultures send their boys, at the age of 12, though Rites of Passage. Ours consists of sending them into middle school. It ain't working.

Rites of Passage consists of transiting boys from childhood to adulthood. One of the things it does is remove boys from the world of women and introduce them to the world of men.

Comparative mythologists have identified three phases to Rites of Passage:

Separation/Departure

Initiation

Return/Reincorporation/Reintegration

The mythologist Joseph Campbell, incorporated this Separation/Initiation/Return into his Hero's Journey. Now the interesting and important thing about it, these days, is that he put Meeting With the Goddess and Woman as Temptress under Initiation.

Wikipedia says this about Campbell:

The Meeting with the Goddess

"This is the point when the person experiences a love that has the power and significance of the all-powerful, all encompassing, unconditional love that a fortunate infant may experience with his or her mother. This is a very important step in the process and is often represented by the person finding the other person that he or she loves most completely.

Campbell: 'The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart. The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed—whether she will or not. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.'

Woman as Temptress

"In this step, the hero faces those temptations, often of a physical or pleasurable nature, that may lead him or her to abandon or stray from his or her quest, which does not necessarily have to be represented by a woman. Woman is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life, since the hero-knight was often tempted by lust from his spiritual journey.

Campbell: 'The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else. But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond (the woman), surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.'"

Now of course I see these problems all over the place in the Manosphere. Is the Manosphere not about women failing to be women (although women can't see it), even though they are so unhappy? And men wondering how to be men?

What men seek is that Union with the Goddess (the Greeks called this Eros, which meant union created by love) and few are getting that today since women have turned into Temptresses (who will destroy him), and so men are responding by going AWOL (MGTOW) or turning into PUAs (which will destroy their lives, contrary to the claims of the Wimpy Frauds of the Manosphere). Chasing women, playing video games, working out...these only go so far - and it's not very far at all. It's acting like a perpetual teenager. MGTOW and PUA are cruel hoaxes, just as feminism is a cruel hoax.

Either way, men are refusing to do what they are supposed to do. They haven't grown up. Neither have women.

The fact we no longer have any Rites of Passage, and men and women are failing right at the point of Initiation, does not bode well for the continued existence of our society and civilization.

Mythologically men have always been protectors/providers and women were nurturers (even in the East: "Yang protects Yin and Yin nurtures Yang"). Again, mythologically, women are either nurturers or destroyers.

So, mythologically, when women reject their role as love that men seek, and as nurturers, then they become temptresses and destroyers, so many men cannot make it all the way through that Separation/Initiation/Return.

So society suffers and continues its merry way to Hell.

"Consequently love must needs precede hatred; and nothing is hated, save through being contrary to a suitable thing which is loved. And hence it is that every hatred is caused by love." - Thomas Aquinas

1 comment:

outsider said...

As an outsider I would probably have wimped out of any rights of passage, but I think most boys have the boisterous energy to prevail.