Iakov Levi


Who Burns the Books?


April 29, 2003

In the last days (April 2003), we have been reported that in Baghdad an angry mob, taking advantage of the confusion generated by the war, has looted the archaeological Museum and has put fire on the library.
This is not the first time in history that people in an excited mood put fire on books.
One of the first records of such an event is in 213 BC, when the first emperor of the Ch'in dynasty (China), commanded a bonfire of books.

The most famous and destructive bonfire of books of all remains the one of the Great Alexandrian library, house of the wisdom of the ancient world, savagely perpetrated in 391 AD.
With the words of Ahmed Osman (Out of Egypt, Arrow, London 1998, Prologue):

In their agitated mood, the angry mob took little heed of the gold and silver ornaments, the precious jewels, the priceless bronze and marble statues, the rare murals and tapestries, the carved and painted pillars of granite and many marbles, the ebony and scented woods, the ivory and exotic furniture - all were smashed to pieces with cries of pleasure.
Those shouting men, full of demoniac delight, then turned to the library, where hundrends of thousands of papyrus rolls and parchments, inscribed with ancient wisdom and knowledge, were taken off their shelves, torn to pieces and thrown on to bonfires.
In the sixth century there was the Justinianic destruction of the books of Origen.

In 1242, perhaps 10,000 copies of the Talmud, carried in twenty-four wagon loads, were burned at the stake, in France, before the eyes of grieving Parisian Jews kept at bay by royal soldiers.

"That was only a prelude, there where books are burnt, ultimately people are burnt".  This sentence appears in Heinrich Heine's tragic drama "Almansor". A Spanish Moslem pronounces the words during the burning of the Koran on a funeral pyre, by Catholics.

Then, in Nazi Germany, on the 15th May 1933 the Nazis staged the burning of books in Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer.
On the 30th May 1933, several thousand "Hitlerjugend" (HJ), ("Hitler Youth") and "Bund Deutscher Mdel" (BDM), and other Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), (Nazi Party) members were ordered to assemble on the Lebeckertorfeld, to witness the burning of books by Kurt Tucholsky and Erich Maria Remarque, Lenin and Egon Erwin Kisch. Books by Jewish authors were also thrown into the flames.

Burning books in Jakarta
Police guard books at during a protest in Jakarta, Indonesia. The protesters were demanding an end to nationalist and Islamic groups' vows to destroy texts they consider communist. (Guardian Unlimited May 15 2001)

And so on, until our very days, including in the cultured West
The Pentecostal church, located about 40 miles (64 km) north of Pittsburgh, sponsored a ceremonial burning of "ungodly" books at the edge of its gravel parking lot on Sunday evening. Among the 30 church members and guests in attendance church, teen-agers led hymns including "Amazing Grace" and "Father of Creation". The church modeled the book burning on a biblical passage from the New Testament's Book of Acts, which describes how former practitioners of magic burned their books in public. Bender said the church had never held a book burning before but might try it again if doing so would "accomplish something positive toward expressing our love for God."  (Reuters, Wednesday, March 28, 2001)

What does it mean?
Why people like to burn books, why the excitement, and why the orgiastic connotation of public bonfires ?
Let us check what Freud has shown us on the symbolism of books: "Materials too, are symbols for women: wood, paper and objects made of then, like tables and books". (Sigmund Freud, "Symbolism in Dreams", in "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis", 1915-1917, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London 1963, vol. XV, p.156).
Therefore, books are a female symbol. Books are women.
Furthermore, as Freud has shown: "Flame is always a male genital, and the hearth is its female counterpart" (op.cit., p. 162)
Henceforth, burning books is an erotic and aggressive acting out against the female body.
It is not the only one. We are all used to soccer plays where two groups of youngsters, each one composed by eleven players, fight each other to reach a ball, which, like every rounded and spherical object, symbolizes the female body too, and, when they reach it, they kick it violently with their foot. This, too, represents a violent and aggressive acting out towards the female body.
Soccer plays are also the most common happening where the emotions of the public easily catch up "fire", as we say about inflamed emotions, and often the crowd cannot refrain from throwing objects at each other, rioting in a dangerous and even deadly way.
It seems that burning books, and kicking balls, raise the same excited and inflamed emotions. Mobs love seeing violent acting out against books and balls.
As Freud and Abraham have shown, fire is by itself a symbolism charged with erotic tension. We all know the idioms: "burning of love" and "burning of hatred".
But why the excitement reaches its peak in the collective acting out, when a group of youngsters (see the Hitlerjugend and the event at the Pentecostal Church) or a mob (as in the bonfire at the Alexandrian library) gather, and are no more a single person but a collectivity?
The answer can be found in Theodor Reik's essay "The Puberty Rites of Savages" (in Ritual - Psychoanalytic Studies, Farrar,  Straus & Co., New York 1946). Reik analyzed the group - dynamics through which a group of novices acquires cohesion. As part of the process, a new sentiment is shared by the members of the group: misogyny. With the author’s words:

If we take into consideration the results of psychoanalytical investigation in examining the libidinal processes dominating the brother clan, we arrive at the following situation. There was an actual privation in the realization of the heterosexual libido, arising essentially from the number of the brothers and their consequent sexual rivalry. The emotions excited by the mother, who was a common libido object denied to all, had to find a new object. It was transferred to a male object, and thus the tender (homosexual) feelings of the brothers towards each other found reinforcement from a second source [the first being the sense of guilt because of the common parricide [...] The brothers had already accomplished a partial turning away from their libido object, the woman, through their strengthened homosexual tendencies. On the other hand - and this seems to me important - impulses of hate based on ambivalence of feelings must have manifested against the woman on whose account the dreadful and fruitless deed [the parricide] was carried out. The brothers' abnormal and intense libido that was turned upon the mother burst out in full force in the crime of parricide, and thus attained its maximum psychical effect. The hostile part of their ambivalent attitude, powerfully increased by remorse and guilty conscience, now made a way for itself. We have seen how an unconscious hostile attitude towards the women is clearly expressed in the puberty rites of primitive peoples (p.154).
It seems that when a crowd gathers, people return to be, like in archaic times, a group of young novices filled with homosexual and misogynist feelings.

Links:

Soccer Games and Caravaggio
Caravaggio, Clitorectomy and the Talion of the Woman
Caravaggio and La Madonna del serpente
Islam e clitoridectomia



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