wotan7

Good Guys vs. Bad Guys is a game for babies. I�m not a child anymore, and neither is America. It's long past time we grew up. Vengeance is not given to us, for good reason.

The American cowboy is no hero. He is not the revolutionary male, the �wondrous counselor,� but instead a reactionary throwback, a wish for infantile regression, the matriarchate�s bully tool of vengeance. As is evident in such films as The Unforgiven -- and a more modern Western, Slingblade -- in America the greatest sin is offense against a female, and violence against a female assures bloody retribution, to the cheers of the audience. Same as it ever was.

Authentic masculinity is iconoclastic, not imitative. Country music, until very recently, was thoroughly matriarchal in its homage to women. Walk through the �cowboy� parts of the nation, and you�ll see all the males wearing the exact same kind of hat. That�s rugged individualism?! Cow-boy. The cow is domesticated femaleness. And a boy is, well, just a boy � not yet a man.

Bachofen continues: "The justice represented by the number two [dualism, good guys vs. bad guys] is bloody, always assuring the subterranean gods of two sacrifices, as we have seen above in connection with the tellurian justice of the Erinyes [entities of collective female vengeance] ... but such justice never brings a solution ... [T]he justice conceived as duality is an eternal, never-ending conflict. Murder begets murder and the demon of the race rages down through the generations until all are destroyed." (Bachofen, p. 187)

Matriarchal and patriarchal "justice" � the vengeance of America�s Prison Industrial Complex � binds humanity in a closed loop of unending suffering and brutality. Every "doing of injustice" results in a "suffering of injustice," which provokes another equal injustice. The men we subject to incarceration, beatings, and rape eventually emerge from imprisonment to return our blood-justice to us. The action which is supposed to restore the balance merely perpetuates injustice, while providing an emotional quick-fix to placate the blood-kin of the injured, and soothe the fearful mob.

This is the crowd surrounding the scaffold or electric chair, the townsfolk with stones in hand. The only way out of the loop -- as lived by the Christos, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, for example -- is the forgoing of vengeance in deference to higher, more inclusive purpose. This is the way of the authentic male, like the scene in Fight Club when Tyler Durden allows the mobster to beat him to a bloody pulp, and then shakes the blood back into the Mafiosi�s face. The mobster is horrified, shamed, and defeated by the superior courage � the daemonic divinity � of Durden�s fierce, loving will.

America in recent decades has become a nation of mob mentality, alternately indulging in, and denying, its fascination with the coerciveness of power. The mob of political correctness, Mafia glorification, street and school gangs, the prison industry and coercive government have the same root. The Hit Man is the new hero � but he doesn�t hurt women and children, of course. Sound familiar? Yes, the modern American Hit Man � who only kills his brothers � is our old friend Set, the step-mother�s brother, the castrating uncle of the matriarchies who wields the blood-knife, again and again.

The mob reflects the inferior masculine, the Toxic King, who maintains power by brutality and coercion, adhering to the ancient cycles of matriarchal vengeance. This represents a revealing inversion of authentic heroism. The modern conception of a masculine hero is one who sacrifices his own welfare, or life, to protect the interests and needs of society, or women, or of one woman in particular. This is heroism of a lesser kind, for it is highly conditioned culturally and vulnerable to abuse. In mythology and literature, the greater hero is the initiator of consciousness, the man who first breaks the hegemony of the matriarchate and its rituals and rules of blood-law vengeance. He is the Christos who reveals and resists the occult feminine power cliques of family, State, and religion, demanding instead a humanity that is truly inclusive. He is capable of Just Saying "No" to Women, if that is what's necessary. In every instance and respect, the hero of antiquity was a male who consciously placed himself in opposition to the primal supremacy of the feminine, and/or to the totalitarianism of the Toxic King�s State.

Moderns define male heroism as service to the feminine, to the point of self-mutilation or death. Yet when we delve into mythology, we find that this state of unconscious servitude is exactly opposite to the meaning of �hero.� In Western mythology, the hero is almost always the lone male who opposes and exposes the tremendous, maleficent power of the entity that Erich Neumann calls the "Terrible Mother" -- the negative feminine, whether expressed through an individual female being (for example, the Gorgon) or through the collective feminine (for example, the Erinyes or N.O.W.). Far from supporting individual and institutional expressions of feminine power, the hero is the small male voice battling against the overwhelming odds of the Empowered Witch and her Toxic Toady.

The true hero is the Secret Agent Man who evolves collective consciousness, the man who first breaks the hegemony of the matriarchate and its rituals and rules of blood-law vengeance. He overthrows Bachofen's vengeful "demon of the race" who "rages down through the generations until all are destroyed." He smashes the stranglehold of the dyas, and like the alchemical Mercurius (Hermes), brings the opposites first into consciousness, and then into creative harmony.