The recognition of universal consanguinity harmonizes the relationship between sexuality and alimentary consumption in the anarchic model. Consanguinity proposes a correspondence between a perceived kinship of all peoples (which arranges how humans sexually relate to one another, and to other species) and a perceived kinship of all species (which arranges how humans alimentally relate to one another and to other species). The entire model remains highly symmetrical and achieves a delicate equilibrium, with the two spheres maintained in a relationship of complementarity. Just as the sphere of sexuality possesses a centrifugal tendency, with the perceived kinship of all peoples inclined toward encompassing all species, so the sphere of alimentation possesses a centripetal tendency, with the perceived kinship of all species tapering toward its focal point of sentient beings. The motive power energizing this model remains pleasure — the mutual pleasure of all participants — which ultimately determines the nature of the transactions that may be made. Hence, to maximize pleasure, all relations which do not involve coercion are admissible in the sphere of sexuality. However, to minimize pain, all acts which involve coercion (particularly violation of a creature’s inalienable right to life) are inadmissible in the sphere of alimentary consumption. Virtually unlimited sexual freedom, therefore, remains possible because of a voluntary limitation of alimentary possibility.

In contrast, the coercive model circumscribes possibilities in both spheres. Consanguinity emerges, not as a harmonizer, but as a demarcator of differences. The analogy between sexuality and alimentary consumption is pursued merely because it reinforces a felt need for the insertion of identical regulatory mechanisms within each sphere. Rather than complement one another, the two spheres possess a relationship of equivalence: they can, in typical hierarchical fashion, be superimposed over one another in order to create an interlocking, homogeneous structure of domination. Consanguinity functions as a means of carving up the previously unified spheres and aligning them in an appropriately coercive pattern. The control complex, a radically disconnected mentality, sharply delimits the ramifications of blood relationship.

In the sphere of sexuality, the latter remains limited to the family or clan; all other people are non-relatives, or members of other (possible heteronomous) clans. [31] This basic division inserts a wedge into the sexual sphere. It divides the latter into the permissible and the impermissible (a sure sign of the presence of the control complex). [32] Those relations which are deemed incestuous occur when an individual experiences sexual congress with a person to whom it is assumed — by the patriarch — that individual possesses a blood relation. Such relations are proscribed (or possibly reserved for the patriarch only). (The reasons for the suppression of incest lie in its anarchic capacities which were examined earlier.) On the other hand, non-incestuous relations are deemed to occur when an individual experiences a sexual relationship with a person to whom it is assumed again, by the patriarch — that individual possesses no blood relationship. But this basic division of sexual expression into proscribed and permitted forms soon becomes more complex. In order to tighten control over sexuality, the area of permitted acts is further divided into licit or illicit. Exactly which acts are defined as licit or illicit remains relative to context, and depends on various historical permutations of class, race, gender, ideology and so forth. But however liberal definitions of the licit may become, a constant remains the presence of negative ethical injunctions in other words, the law. Sexual morality — an offical or unoffical arm of the law — squabbles over the placing of boundary lines, but does not question their legitimacy. For the fact remains that the prohibition of incest constitutes the often unacknowledged legitimization for all sexual regulation. The presence of the incest taboo — a term now construed, not to mean sacred and replete with mana, but forbidden and unclean [33] — reorders the sphere of sexuality in a hierarchical maimer, creating distinctions between absolute prohibition (incest), relative prohibition (illicit acts), and permission (licit relations). Without this keystone, the whole edifice would collapse.

As might be expected, given the relationship of equivalence between the two spheres in the coercive model, a comparable situation pertains in the realm of alimentary consumption. The basic distinction here remains between the human family (or species) and other species. Alimentary acts are considered — once again, by patriarchal authority — to be cannibalistic when a person eats another creature with whom it is assumed the person possesses a blood relation. In this case, the control complex deems that the creature consumed must be another human being. In other words, the species solidarity so conspicuously denied in the sphere of sexuality suddenly assumes paramount importance. Such hypocrisy remains typical of the control mentality, for whom exigency and opportunism are key determinants of policy. On the other hand, however, alimentary acts are considered as non-cannibalistic when a person eats another creature with whom it is assumed — yet again, by patriarchal authority — the person possesses no blood relation. In this instance, the creature consumed can be practically anything except another human being. But again, as with sexuality, this basic binary distinction further breaks down into the familiar hierarchical pattern of tripartite distinctions: absolute prohibition (cannibalism), relative prohibition (proscribed consumption), and permission (authorized consumption). And, mutatis mutandis, the two spheres are organized in comparable patterns for identical reasons. Consequently, the motive power energizing this system remains the antithesis of its counterpart in the anarchic model. Whereas in the latter contact between elements always accords with the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain for all participants, here the permissibility of contact depends purely upon its conformity with arbitrary rules maintained by the control complex, irrespective of the pain or pleasure caused in the process.

Some important contrasts between the anarchic and coercive models thus arise at precisely this point. First, whereas the anarchic model offsets voluntary limitation in consumption against unlimited sexual expression, the coercive model intervenes in both spheres and imposes compul-sory controls. The anarchic model allows unfettered sexual expression, while the coercive model draws distinctions and makes an absolute prohibition against incest, the heart of matristic consciousness and lifeways. The anarchic model joyously repudiates the consumption of animal flesh, including that of humans (although retaining a form of symbolic ritual cannibalism), while the coercive model prohibits anthropophagy, but allows the consumption of practically anything else, including animal flesh.

Such are the outlines of the perverse distortion of totemic consciousness effected by the invasion of the control complex. But, for contemporary proponents of anarchy, the crucial issue remains the light thrown on the most ancient and deeply-seated control structures in the present psychosocial environment. The taboos against incest and cannibalism are the basic instruments through which the control complex maintains its domination over humanity. [34] Proponents of anarchy, who desire total global liberation, must confront this issue if they are to achieve anything but a failed because incomplete revolution. To have any meaning, revolution must be total, comprehensive in its scope. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich has demonstrated how authoritarianism thrives on the irrational. And the taboos against incest and cannibalism are inherently irrational (irrational because incest seems so inevitable, and cannibalism so alien, to hominid life).

Clearly, this is not a call to commit indiscriminate incest, and certainly not cannibalism! To do so would be merely to fall into the trap set by the control complex. Committing the inverse of those acts prohibited by the control force merely propels the perpetrator into the arms of the counter-control force. Such a response does not transcend the control complex. Only eversion can achieve such a transcendence. And in the present context, eversion can be identified as a recovery, individually and collectively, of totemic consciousness, informed by the most enlightened contemporary anarchic perspectives. [35] Intimations concerning such a recovery will appear later. But at present the Red Riding Hood narrative must be resumed.

The maid and her grandmother were last seen locked in an uroboric embrace, a flowing circuit of kundalini energy. From time immemorial this ritual initiation, following the transmission of com/passional consciousness, concluded with the maid’s return to the community. Replete (indeed, reborn) with the mantic capacities of a prophetess or shamanic healer, she employed her endowments to promote communal harmony and enrichment through embodying and exercising charis. In addition, the unbroken tradition of the mysteries of consanguinity, which physically linked the initiate to the origin of life in primal chaos, remained intact. Universal harmony prevailed.

But now, in the case of Red Riding Hood, a rupture occurs, and everything is thrown into a harsh, jangling discordance. The figure of the patriarch or control force enters the scene. Usually represented as the maid’s father, he arrives to assert his prerogative: to claim his rights of paternity; to define female relations as subordinates, as property; and to annihilate their mana and way of life through a disruption of their rites. He typifies the treacherous, unfilial male who has brutally severed his connection with the primal matrix. Earth, nature, the biosphere, the blood mysteries, the community of women — all things female now become subject to his conquest and denudation.

The motivations which cause the patriarch to act in this way are not difficult to discern. In matristic eras, men are peripheral to the community of women, the real locus of primal cult-lore. [36] Sharing only minimal participation in female transformative rites, and virtually excluded from female transformational capacities, they remain in awe of women. “The transformation mysteries of the woman are primarily blood-transformation mysteries that lead her to the experience of her own creativity and produce a numinous impression on the man” (Neumann 1955, p.31). As adjuncts, rather than cultivate their masculinity, which they regard as worthless, they aspire toward the ideal condition of womanhood. “All [male] lovers of Mother Godesses have certain features in common: they are all youths whose beauty and loveliness are as striking as their narcissism. They are delicate blossoms, symbolized by the myths as anemones, narcissi, hyacinths, or violets, which we, with our [sic] markedly masculine-patriarchal mentality, would more readily associate with young girls” (Neumann 1954, p.50) — and for obvious reasons. Rather than merely desiring sexual union with women, they want — in order to participate fully in female mysteries — to become women. [37] One of Nancy Friday’s male respondents makes a highly articulate remark which precisely exemplifies the gender attitude of primal men: “At times I have thought it would have been nice if I had been a girl, for then I could have been a lesbian” (Friday 1980, p.351).

Men aspire to the ontological status of the (biological) female so that they can participate in the rites of sexual/ alimentary transformation. Through such participation they achieve total mystical union with the transcendent female principle (the Goddess), share in the abundance of female creative capacities and, most importantly, firmly situate themselves within the cyclical patterns of birth, death and regeneration. “The natural rhythm of the female is one of eternal recurrence”. But without female aid males, with their tendencies to linearity, remain unable to transcend dissolu-tion: “The male embodies the mystery of death; his climactic phallus seems to say it all. We come out of matter (materia, Mater), and we are simply many little pieces broken off from the One; as fragments we can only hope to lead a fragmentary life until the One takes us back in death. The Great Mother is no simple notion from primitive religion, but an idea in a complex mythology that became demythologized and secularized by the Presocratics, but not changed. The male as the limited and vanishing principle and the female as the unlimited, eternal, and containing principle are simply expressed differently by Anaximander from the manner used by the painters of Lascaux or Çatal Hüyük” (Thompson 1981, p.128). To overcome this fragmentary condition, men must seek initiation into the female mysteries of cyclicity: “the process needed to initiate men... originally belonged to women... male initiation depends or depended on women” (Bettelheim 1955, p.173).

Metaphysically becoming a woman was the only route to direct communion available to men; the alternative remained a conjunction by proxy through the mediation of a female intercessor. “It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vise-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity... Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a semi-goddess — she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate” (Graves 1986, p.110).

To resolve his inner duality, and overcome tendencies to envy, primal man became a shakta, “a male worshiper [sic] of the Tantric image of the Great Goddess, Shakti; a man versed in the techniques of Tantric yoga and identified with the Goddess herself through sexual union with her earthly representative” (Walker 1983, p.929). Such men were not duped by “the yogic myth that sexual repression is necessary for the elevation of kundalini and the autosemination of the brain” (Thompson 1981, p.77). Like the women, they brought into equilibrium the two poles of the spine, the sexual and the spiritual, passion and compassion. But whereas the women set up a circuit of energy between the womb and the belly, figured in the labia and the lips, and empowered by the menses, the men in contrast create a complementary loop between the genitals and the brain, figured in the penis and the tongue, and galvanized by semen (“Latin lingus, ‘tongue’, was derived from Sanskrit lingam, ‘phallus’” (Walker 1983, p.1002).)

Under female guidance, the male initiate achieves the customary erection of deep trance, and simultaneously experiences the sexual orgasm of the body and the spinal orgasm of the spirit. “As the male feels as if the semen were traveling up the spine, he feels as if the spinal column were a vagina, and the brain a womb where he is becoming reborn. The yogi is in this way the androgyne of prehistory reachieved” (Thompson 1981, p.33).

In this way men too could participate in the primal scene of cosmic creation, uniting mysteries of sexuality and alimentation through the metaphoric agency of the seed — which fecundates through pleasure and generates foodstuffs from its nucleus. Primal male mysteries are concerned, not with transformation per se, but with germination and insemination. The relationship between men and women remains analogous to that between a fruit, the womb of a plant, and the seeds it contains: men are always offspring and agents of women,[38] and like their natures, their mysteries are always seminal.

But to activate their germinal potentialities, men must be impregnated, and to do so they must metaphorically become women to acquire female genitalia and generative capacities. They must overcome their inner male dividedness by pairing their “masculine” and “feminine” aspects to attain “uroboric bisexuality” (Neumann 1955, p.173). “The labial wound in the side of Christ is an expression that the male shaman, to have magical power, must take on the power [read: mana] of woman. The wound that does not kill Christ is the magical labial wound; it is the seal of the resurrection and an expression of the myth of eternal recurrence. From Christ to the Fisher King of the Grail legends, the man suffering from a magical wound is no ordinary man; he is the man who has transcended the duality of sexuality, the man with a vulva, the shamanistic androgyne” (Thompson 1981, p.109). Androgynously communing with shakti, female energy and female form, the male initiate realizes that “not until he had made a vulva of his own heart and had felt it break open to give birth to a love he had always felt to be the embarrassing, illegitimate bastard of his secret life, did he dare approach this altar of the immediate, intimate God” (Thompson 1985, p.215). Infused with charis and initiated into the mysteries of incarnation, he experiences rebirth as a consort or emanation of the sacred female.

Over time, however, male reverence for the womb turned, for some men, into womb envy and ultimately womb denial. “Females can identify with the mother and expect to achieve her power [read: mana]; males have had to reach outward and compensate for their inability to bear children. Womb envy precedes penis envy” (Fisher 1980, p.124). [39] This deterioration was accompanied by a shift from metaphoric to literal modes of thought; and a corresponding shift from interior significance to exterior meaning. Instead of metaphorically becoming female, men tried to imitate female processes and their ritualistic manifestation. [40] Herein resides the origin of that monstrous aberration known as mimesis.

Mimicry assumed some very blatant forms — transvestism, for example. Many “initiation customs not only permit but require transvestism. It seems to be another indication of the pervading desire to share the sexual functions and social role of the other sex” (Bettelheim 1955, pp.62–3). Transvestism played an important role in women’s mysteries, as indicated in the wolf’s cross-dressing in the Red Riding Hood narrative. Envious males latched onto this facet of female ritual, hoping that merely assuming women’s garments would effectuate the necessary identification of themselves as women. They made a fetish of this practice, as the persistence of priestly robes indicates. But this superficial imitation of women did not produce the desired result: wearing female clothes — like other piecemeal imitations such as the couvade — failed to confer women’s transformational capacities on men. And so some men tried to imitate female mysteries by enacting their own rites. These rites were initially intended to bring the two sexes into close contiguity, but inevitably had the opposite effect, and drove them further apart. “While the male mysteries, in so far as they are not mere usurpations of originally female mysteries, are largely enacted in an abstract spiritual space, the primordial mysteries of the Feminine are connected more with the proximate realities of everyday life” (Neumann 1955 , p.282). The concrete intersections of myth and everyday life were gradually supplanted by the abstract intersections of history and deracinated conceptualization.

Male rites try to effect a son’s rebirth into manhood through the father. “The birth from the male womb is to rid the child from the infection of his mother — to turn him from a woman-thing into a man-thing” (Harrison 1927, p.36). But male attempts to emulate the birth and rebirth capacities of women were obviously hampered by an evident lack of appropriate genitalia. Men knew that female mana derived from the cyclical menstrual flow, and so attempted to manipulate their genitals in ways which would mimic the bleeding vagina. In different cultures, perhaps in proportion to the degree of desperation with which men hungered to become women, various wounds were ritually inflicted on the penis — ranging from circumcision through subincision to castration. In some cases, these lacerations were staunched by small flat stones which were chafed once a month to occasion a trickle of blood in imitation of the menses. Ultimately, this symbolic wounding resulted in the institution of blood sacrifice. “Among the oldest myths there is much evidence that formal sacrifices of males first arose from a misguided attempt to redesign male bodies to a female model, possibly in the hope of acquiring the female power of reproduction. Cutting off male genitals was constantly associated with fertility magic for ancient gods, in either human or animal form. The idea would have been to provide the male with a bleeding hole in crude imitation of a woman’s body. [Patriarchal] myths assumed the male deity could give birth successfully as a result of this treatment” (Walker 1985, pp.47–8).

In other words: “When man, by subincision [or related forms of genital abrasion], make themselves resemble women, the obvious interpretation of this behavior is that they are faying to be women”. But the attempt always fails, partly because mimesis cannot be equated with participation (i.e., mimetic reproduction can never replicate organic reproductive capacities), and partly because of the unwitting parodic element in the male rites. Men are motivated to mimic female mysteries because they experience “vagina envy”, a phenonmenon “much more complex than the term indicates, including, in addition, envy of and fascination with female breasts and lactation, with pregnancy and childbearing” (Bettelheim 1955, pp.88,20) — indeed with the entire range of female transformational capacities. But the fascination arises from the negative emotion of envy, which distorts the character of its mimetic representations and indicates the latent presence of a deeper resentment, a profound fear. So on a superficial level males parody female mysteries by placing pain, not pleasure at the center of their rites, and by celebrating, not birth, but death (i.e., bloodshed). The deeper disturbances of the envious male psyche, however, are apparent in precisely these perverse emphases.

Womb (or vagina) envy remains predicated upon the great denial — the denial of death. [41] When males lose their reverence for the womb, but still desire its transformative capacities, they begin to envy its female possessors. Their envy derives from a recognition that women, through their womb consciousness, maintain a direct access to the cyclical mysteries of the cosmos — an access unavailable to men. Participating in the processes of generation and renewal, women possess the capacity to negotiate the labyrinthine intricacies of reincarnation, and thus effectuate rebirth. But men, bereft of comparable consciousness, and thus unable to influence their fate without the aid of women, fall into despair at the thought of their dependency, and the fear that female guidance might be withdrawn. They envy women for the autonomy their wombs provide, but also fear that this independence will cause women to overlook or neglect the male spiritual condition, and thus consign them to what they consider as adverse reincarnations. [42] This envy intensifies with the development of a masculine ethos or ideology. “An ideology, religious or political, is a form of possession, and as such it is a possession of the ego”. And “by operating at this lower level of the ego” one remains “at the level of the unconscious workings of kaima”. Envious males need, but are unable “to make the unconscious conscious, to move out of the mechanisms of remorseless karma into a more enlightened or initiatic awareness of the dynamics of Being” (Thompson 1982, pp.33,50). But they can do so only with the aid of women, and their envy precludes this option, so they remain ensnared in illusion.

Envy deepens into resentment as the (unfounded) fear of death becomes more pronounced. This fear is then projected onto that aspect of the Triple Goddess which men found most intimidating in these circumstances: “the negative aspects of the all-powerful Mother, who embodied the fearful potential for rejection, abandonment, death” — in short, the crone or grandmother figure. [43] The latter, at the crux of female mysteries, represents both the earthly embodiment of the male fear of rejection, and the cosmic personification of the male fear of death. Thus this figure, and the entire dispensation she symbolizes, must be extirpated. Patriarchy bases itself upon the premise that “to achieve a rejection of death, man must reject the Mother manifested in all women, including his own mother”. Within the perspective of expansive — ultimately global — conflagration, womb envy modulates into its opposite: “Male eschatology combines male womb envy with womb negation”. And the latter inevitably produces not only misogyny, but sexual repression. The patriarchal “abhorrence of sex and reproduction began with a vast fear: the fear of death, of dissolution, of being swallowed up in the blackness of cosmic chaos — symbolically, the fear of the Crone”. Repudiating anarchy for order, and equating female rebirth rites with extinction, the patriarchal “denial of death was inevitably confused with denial of sex, for the very reason that man’s ‘little death’ in sexual intercourse was viewed as a foretaste of the ultimate death represented by the fearsome Goddess. To the extent, however slight, that the elder woman might resemble that fearsome image, she was hastily rejected as a possible sexual partner” (Walker 1985, pp.12,82,160,89).

Womb denial could not brook so close an approximation to the central coupling of the female mysteries — a coupling some men had despaired of ever authentically achieving — thus fueling the frustrations which led to their derogation of the female. Indeed, older women were not merely spurned as sexual partners, but ultimately disempowered, enslaved or annihilated. “Nearly everyone knows the ugly story of Western man’s slaughter of the mothers and grandmothers of his race: the so-called witch mania”. But this recurrent phenomenon of “gynocide” should not be confined merely to the era of the Inquisition. The grandmother figure, that “implacable female Fate or cyclically destructive Crone Mother”, remains subject to perpetual patriarchal suppression. “She became the secret fear of Western civilization, whose massive attempts to destroy or at least deny her eventually sickened the society itself and poisoned its relationships between the sexes, in which man may have found real comfort and real courage to face the inevitable without forcing it prematurely upon his fellow creatures” (Walker, 1985, 125, 94–5).

Fear of death paradoxically results in mass minder. Men try to kill death by slaughtering someone other than themselves (including sacrificial saviors). “It has been suggested that such hidden, unacknowledged fears are the very forces that drive men to kill other members of their own [and other] species in such appalling numbers, as in war, dividing them into We and They, the latter always viewed as expendable. Part of the vast cultural attempt to deny death is the possibility of inflicting death on others in order to purge it from oneself” (Walker 1985, p.13). Indeed, not merely the institution of war, but civilization and the entire enterprise of culture derives from the failed attempt by males to imitate, rather than become female. “If we assume that the man felt compelled to make themselves similar to women — whether by so mutilating themselves that they could bleed from the genitals as women do, or by copying childbirth — if they even dimly realized that they inflicted these injuries on themselves becuse they wished to possess the procreative power of women, then we can understand why, when they failed in their purpose, they also become angry at women... and perhaps, after gaining political ascendancy, sought to retaliate on women the mutilation [physical or psychic — introcision or erotic repression] that originated with them”. In fact: “The failure of autoplastic manipulation to give men powers equal to women’s in procreation may have been the cause of their turning to alloplastic manipulation of the natural world” (Bettelheim 1955, pp.192,138). Indeed, it sanctions not merely the manipulation of nature, but its domination and destruction, and the attempt to depart from it.

Neumann identifies as a leitmotiv of patriarchy the male development of hierarchy in an attempt to climb away from the dark, devouring mother toward the immortal light of the sun — a theme evinced in ziggurats, church spires, skyscrapers, rockets and other phallic imagery. Such enterprises are designed to assuage a primary fear of the patriarchal male: that of being seduced by the Mother Goddess, an act which would make him “regress” into being her incestuous son- lover, and thus relinquish his stauts as a patriarch. Under matristic conditions, the son always remains a son — an integral agency of the mother — and never becomes a father. But a patriarch by definition must base his identity on his status as a father and his denial of all connection with his mother. Admitting any link would be tantamount to acknowledging male dependency on women, and men’s involvement in cyclical processes. To counteract this threat, and as an act of will-to-power, patriarchy evolved the ideal of the hero. “In a sense, man’s most ancient attempt to copy the sacred status of motherhood was the cult of the hero” (Walker 1985, p.47). Sometimes the hero was a savior who gave his blood in order to redeem mankind from the cycles of nature. But often, and more importantly in the present context, the hero sacrificed the blood of others in order to ward off the fear of death. And bloodshed in the service of suppressing matristic lifeways remained especially heroic.

The ascendancy of the hero, as a representative figure of patriarchy, took place gradually, and finds dramatic expression in modifications of myth. These changes can be represented schematically as follows. Initially myths conceive the cosmic lifeforce as a pantheistic goddess, the Great Mother of All. Further sophistication results in the perception of a dyad, the mother/ daughter or grandmother/ granddaughter ritual polarity of goddess and serpent. The three generations or three phases (virgin-mother-crone) of womanhood are conceptualized as the Triple Goddess, the source of birth, multiplication and death.

But at this juncture patriarchal males, who attempt to evade death by embodying it for others instead of experiencing it themselves, appropriate the death-dealing (and indeed, devouring) aspect of the goddess. [44] This act of aggrandizement produces fierce competition, and ultimately conflict, between the two consorts of the goddess — the female serpent and the male hero (who is heroic because he represents patriarchal forces). This patriarchally-induced contention for the goddess’s favors inevitably results in the belligerent hero’s triumph over the pacific serpent. The hero thus asserts his claim, not merely to be the goddess’s lover, but her son — not in order to obtain her guidance for his shamanic initiation, but as a maneuver in a power game. This averment of familial blood relations — defined increasingly in patriarchal terms — leads, after further bellicosity, to the son’s achievement of an equal footing with the daughter.

In matrilineal eras, the status of sonship remained meager. Mana — not property, which did not exist — was inherited, through ritual initiation, by female lineage. [45] So to achieve parity the son has to become the counterpart of the daughter, her twin — as in the myth of Artemis and Apollo. But the power-hungry patriarch is not content with this arrangement. True twins, to mirror each other exactly, must be not of the opposite but of the same sex. Hence, the daughter is cast out entirely, and the anthropologically notorious struggles between the sacred king (or hero) and his tanist (who possibly once represented the goddess’s champion, the mother’s brother) commence.

But even before this stage an important change in the character of these mythic transactions had occurred. Once, the hero had fought the serpent or dragon-daughter to win the favors of the goddess. Increasingly, however, the goddess becomes not the determinant of the conflict but the prize gained by the victor. Andromeda becomes the helpless victim chained to the rock, awaiting her deliverance from evil by the brave hero.

The introduction of the king/ tanist pattern reinforces this tendency. The victor — sometimes a divine patriarchal child who slayed both hero and tanist — is no longer the consort of the goddess, but her spouse, and from that vantage point it is only a short step to becoming her lord and master, thence her god and even her creator. The tanist figure helps in this respect too. The introjection of an additional male element facilitates the proliferation of a whole range of deified heroes — or gods who arrogates to themselves various aspects and functions of the previously integral goddess. Thus dismembered, the latter is downgraded to a mere constituent of the classical pantheon — in which she is sometimes assigned the role of daughter — while her erstwhile partner is elevated to the position of Father-god.

From this Olympian perspective it is easy for the god to absorb the masculinized fragments of the goddess and thus become the patriarchal monotheistic God, a supreme deity beyond or above — indeed, outside — the creation he rules, and thus out of the reach of death. In this way, the entire character of the cosmos is mythically inverted, and the dispensation of mana is replaced by the rule of power.

The Red Riding Hood tale participates in this iconotropic shift, as myth becomes narrative, and dreamtime becomes history. The story unfolds during a period in which insurgent patriarchal forces are accelerating their assault on the forest, its sacred groves, its mysteries, and its inhabitants, both animal and human. The increasingly distended settlements are becoming dangerous places for devotees of the goddess, and the forest provides a diminishing site of refuge. [46] In some versions of the tale, the wolf refrains from gobbling up the maiden in the open because of the proximity of woodcutters. Already women’s mysteries are being forced underground — they can no longer be practiced in the sacred groves, but only in the isolated seclusion of sites like the grandmother’s cottage. Men like the woodcutters do not seek initiation into the labyrinthine mysteries, but to pervert and destroy them. “The hero enters the labyrinth not to be intitiated and therefore lose his will, but to kill the mysteries — as in the Minotaur myth: the hero enters, but retains his sense of individuality [i.e., egohood], and returns as a conqueror” (Neumann 1955, p.177). This repudiation of regeneration remains characteristic of the patriarch figure in the Red Riding Hood tale.

The maiden’s father disrupts the mysteries. He discovers the wolf, who has eaten both granddaughter and grandmother, asleep — i.e., in an ecstatic trance. He slaughters the beast by cutting open its womb/ belly, [47] finds the two females whole and unharmed inside, removes them, and forcibly returns them to the emergent realm of civilization. Artemis was “a Wolf-goddess” (Graves 1986, p.222), so the slaying of the animal here represents the patriarchal destruction of the mysteries. The women are reborn, but perversely. Their birth (as egos) coincides with the death of their animal nature. Rather than through the organic guidance of a medicine woman, Red Riding Hood is reborn as if through a cesarean (i.e., kingly) section administered by a male obstetrician, a technologist. Already the hero claims the birth-giving capabilities ascribed to patriarchal gods like Jehovah. The two women are removed intact, but also as separate, isolated individuals. They will no longer be allowed to unite, to intermingle and pool their energies. [48] From now on they shall be the helots of mankind — and are expected to be grateful for being saved from a supposedly horrible fate.

The designation of the father as either a woodcutter or a hunter remains significant. In either guise, he remains a dispenser of death. One assaults the natural environment, the other exterminates its inhabitants. The two identifications are complementary rather than exclusive. The hunter invades the forest either to exterminate its wildlife — human or animal — or domesticate them as slaves. The woodcutter levels the forest and converts it into lumber. [49] Then slaves can construct imperial war machines with this timber, so that the process of denudation may be repeated throughout the globe. And when the biosphere has been wrecked, and life on earth becomes impossible, then the patriarchs will catapult themselves into space in search of new worlds to conquer. For their cryogenics can never be anything but an indefinite stopgap. Their denial of death and corresponding quest for personal immortality are foredoomed to failure. Existence remains cyclical and karmically regulated: deathlessness — in the sense of egoic perpetuity — remains a mirage. Immortality resides in continual transformation, not suspended animation, and this remains rooted in the mysteries of blood, not their supposed transcendence. By definition, however, the hunter denies validity to claims of universal consanguinity. He spills blood, rather than celebrates its mysteries, promoting diminution and death rather than increase and fecundity. And what remains true of the huntsman also applies indirectly to the woodcutter, who destroys the habitats and thus ultimately the lives of consanguinous beings.

But the dual designation of the father figure also possesses a more precise mythical connotation, and relates to the issue of the Wild Hunt or Wild Horde. “The Wild Horde itself was a complex phenomenon whose origins lose themselves partly in the prehistoric past. There was the assembly of ghosts under the leadership of a feminine divinity, Hecate or Artemis in ancient Greece, Diana or Herodias, the mother of Salome, in the Latin West” (Bernheimer 1962, pp.78–9). But the Wild Horde was more than a spectral crew: in addition to ancestral spirits (the original meaning of the term “ghosts”), it included female devotees of the goddess who gathered “to swarm in wild rapture over the far reaches of the land” (Duerr 1987, p.16). These ecstatic maenads did not indulge in blood sports, but blood mysteries. “Whereas the male god in myth, like the male hero, usually appears in opposition to the animal [i.e., goddess symbol] that he fights and defeats, the Great Goddess, as Lady of the Beasts, dominates [read: safeguards] but seldom fights them. Between her and the animal world there is no hostility or antagonism, although she deals with wild as well as gentle and tame beasts” (Neumann 1955, p.272). The Wild Hunt, which occurred under the egis of the Divine Huntress, Artemis or Diana, did not seek game, but its participants’ animal natures or tutelary spirits. The pursuit was a “love-chase” (Graves 1986, p.403) rather than a hunt. The arrows shot were those of desire, now more frequently associated with Eros. The hunt consummated not in death, but in a celebration of life, ecstatic orgiastic rites (orgy — “from the Greek orgia, “secret worship” (Walker 1983, p.742)).

Sympathetic men were welcome at many women’s rites, where they too would manifest their animal natures and become fauns and satyrs, but not at the Wild Hunt. As patriarchal forces began to emerge, however, interlopers like Actaeon try to disrupt exclusively female rites. This voyeuristic young man, refusing to participate in transformatin mysteries, tries to convert the naked bathing maenads into sex objects through the exercise of his gaze. Furthermore, as a hunter, he attempts to contaminate their rites by associating their carnal lusts with his bloodlust. But at this stage patriarchal forces are ineffectual, and Diana’s vengeance is swift and apt. Actaeon, transformed into a stag, is torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs, emblems of his perverse bestiality, who turn upon and devour him. “This is the elder version, reflecting the religious theory of early European society where woman was the master of man’s destiny: pursued, was not pursued; raped, was not raped — as may be read in the faded legends of Dryope and Hylas, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Endymion, Circe and Ulysses. The danger of the various islands of women was that the male who ventured there might be sexually assaulted in the same murderous way, as according to B. Malinowski in The Sexual Life of Savages, men of North-Western Melanesia are punished for trespassing against female privilege. At least one coven of wild women seems to have been active in South Wales during early Medieval times: old St. Samson of Dol, traveling with a young companion, was unlucky enough to trespass in their precinct. A frightful shriek rang out suddenly and from a thicket darted a gray-haired, red-garmented hag with a bloody trident in her hand. St. Samson stood his ground; his companion fled, but was soon overtaken and stabbed to death. The hag refused to come to an accommodation with St. Samson when he reproached her, and informed him that she was one of the nine sisters who lived in those woods with their mother — apparently the Goddess, Hecate. Perhaps if the younger sisters had reached the scene first, the young man would have been the victim of a concerted sexual assault” (Graves 1986, p.400). Evidently, in more tractable cases than Actaeon, conversion through orgiastic expression could take the place of aggressive vengeance.

As patriarchal expansion and persecution developed, however, more sustained resistance became necessary. At this juncture the Wild Hunt lost its initial amorous character and became ecstatically combative. It now transmuted into “the Furious Host — which races in certain winter nights through the valleys and deserted villages, destroying every living thing it meets in its way” (Bernheimer 1952, p.24). Although essentially accurate, Bernheimer’s characterization remains wrong on two counts: such assaults were not confined to winter nights (except in the symbolic sense of the bleakest hours), nor was “every” living thing encountered destroyed. Euripides’s The Bacchae proves otherwise. The maenads did not attack randomly or seasonally: they often undertook systematic campaigns to extirpate the patriarchal plague, and their incursions were aimed exclusively at civilizing areas and their domesticated inhabitants. Ecstatic anarchic women launched a total assault on the emerging control complex, and attempted its complete overthrow. Their aims were to regenerate the ancient shamanic lifeways, to restore harmony in the face of total evil.

Such a potent threat could not be ignored by control elements, and so they inaugurated a counterforce, a band of brutally violent and demented thugs, who were never entirely under the control of their masters. “The belief in the masculine Wild Horde, which disputes with its feminine counterpart the dominance over central Europe, is usually regarded as of Germanic origin and thus as prior to any influence from the Mediterranean world: whether rightly so it is hard to say, since the history of the motive previous to its first explicit appearance in the chronicle by Oderious Vitalis can only be inferred from philological evidence. Suffice it to say that, in the Alps at least, where the two traditions meet face to face, the leadership of the Wild Horde is accorded almost as often to the wild man, a figure of the local mythology, as it is to the demonic leader of the Wild Horde” (Bernheimer 1952, p.79). The members of these patriarchal shocktroops were known as wild men, werewolves, or berserkers. “These wild young men, who ate raw meat and drank blood, also professed to having Odin, god of death, as their leader” (Duerr 1987, p.62). Famous for driving themselves into murderous frenzies, these fanatical psychopaths were the absolute antithesis of the maenads. In contradistinction, they were the perverse apotheosis of patriarchal man. Worshipers of death (Duerr adumbrates their historical lineage to the nazi SS — although Hell’s Angels are an obvious later manifestation), they dismissed all claims of consanguinity, delighting in cruelty and barbaric, omophagic feasts “during the crusades against those who are still outside the machine: untouched trees, wolves, Primitives” (Perlman 1983B, p.16). [50] They were known as werewolves — “Germanic wer, the Latin vir, means ‘man’, ‘male’” (Eisler 1951, p.34) — because they wore their fur on the outside (i.e., they dressed in the coats of wolves — and symbolically the skins of the devotees of Artemis — which they had slaughtered). In contrast, the maenads wore their fur inside (i.e., they were inherently, spiritually wild).

As myth and folklore testify, the berserkers transformed the Wild Hunt into a witch-hunt. Maenads, and particularly their elders, the crones, were identified as witches: “The wild woman is thus a libidinous hag and it would seem entirely appropriate to apply to her the term used for centuries to designate creatures of her kind by calling her a witch [or lamia, “the wild woman of the woods”]... To understand these identities, one will have to remember that lamia, the child-devouring ghoul from Greek antiquity, was regarded in the Middle Ages as a living reality whose existence was accepted without question by such popular writers as Gervasius of Tilbury, of the thirteenth century, or even by the Bishop of Paris in the early thirteenth century, William of Auvergne. These were the writers who established the identity between lamia and strix, the latter the precise technical term for what we call a witch”. [51] By now, the significance of the references to wildness, libidinousness, shamanism and child-devouring should be apparent. But these elements were either demonized (in the case of the first three) or interpreted literally (in the last case) in order to justify mass murder.

The berserkers, whether dressed in wolves’ skins or the robes of the Inquisition, ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated the maenadic resistance movement: “Modern folklore in regions as far apart as the Austrian Alps, Sweden, Denmark, and England relates how wild women of every variety suffer persecution from a hunting and riding demon who chases through the countryside alone or in rowdy company, and ends, when he has found his victim, by tearing her apart. Even if she escapes murder, the wild woman will be thrown over the demon’s horse, tied down with her own long hair, and carried away by force”. The Wild Hunt takes place on foot, but the witch-hunt occurs on horseback. The berserkers defeat the amazons, not because the latter are lesser warriors, but because the former are not averse to domesticating and exploiting nature, as figured in the equine species. The pegasus of poetic or shamanic flight is broken, converted into a warhorse, and its master becomes that hated figure, the man on horseback. Increasingly divorced from the earth, he becomes a centaur, a knight, a charioteer, a fighter pilot, a starship commander. And he always rapes and tears the female apart. The Actaeon tale is completely inverted. “It can hardly be accidental that to the chasing of Vila [a hag-like Yugoslavian wild woman], Striga, or the wood damsel there corresponded in classical times the chase of Artemis by a masculine demon, who forces her to precipitate herself from a rock and thus brings about her death... It is striking, at any rate, that the tale of the demise of a woman demon at the hands of a male foe should have been told of the goddess Artemis who, as Hecate, was the whip and leader of rampant souls and who, as Diana, later in the Middle Ages, became the Latin eponym of the wild woman as mistress of the Wild Horde. It is obvious that there must be a historical connection” (Bernheimer 1952, pp.35,129,131–2).

Indeed, at this juncture myth becomes history, but history also invades myth. “When the victory of the patriarchal Indo-Europeans revolutionized the social system of the Eastern Mediterranean, the myth of the sexual chase was reversed. Greek and Latin mythology contains numerous anecdotes of the pursuit and rape of elusive goddesses or nymphs by gods in beast disguise: especially by the two senior gods, Zeus and Poseidon. Similarly in European folklore there are scores of variants on the ‘Two Magicians’ theme, in which the male magician, after a hot chase, out-magics the female and gains her maidenhead” (Graves 1986, p.401).

It is not accidental that these patriarchal marauders were credited with using uprooted oaks as cudgels (Bettelheim 1952, p.71) with which to crush the skulls of their animal and human prey. The three oaks which screen the house of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother indicate that it is a sacred grove (the original meaning of the word temple), devoted to the Triple Goddess and the oak-cult. [52] As both woodcutter and hunter, the father figure of the narrative storms the grove in order ro uproot its trees and its tree-lore, the language of poetic mysteries, and to hunt and kill its inhabitants and celebrants. He is clearly a berserker; his skinning of the slaughtered wolf merely confirms this identification.

Decimation and destruction must continue until women’s rites have been thoroughly eradicated and nature subdued, [53] because “until the Crone figure was suppressed, patriarchal religions could not achieve full control of man’s minds” (Walker 1985, p.29). And total control was the aim. “There is no doubt that the development leading from the group psyche to ego consciousness and individuality, and from the matriarchal to the patriarchal dominance in psychic life, has its correspondence in the social process. The development of the ego brings with it not only the acquisition of an individual ‘soul’, of an individual name and a personal ancestry, but also of private property” (Neumann 1955, p.268). Deracinated individuation and privatization ensure the facilitation of control, but also evoke an interior horror. “The name of the label is egohood. The heroes have achieved egohood and consciousness and now they are painfully aware that they are no longer part of the cyclical eternal round of the Great Mother. They live a life, a linear phallic extension, a life with a beginning and an end. Precisely because they cannot accept the natural life of death. The ego has definitely arrived on the scene of history, and it is screaming out against its cosmic isolation... Egohood dawned with civilization, and no doubt the rise of warfare associated with it gave many a man an occasion to meditate on the meaning of death... civilized man... when he wipes out an entire city or levels a forest... is no longer working within the natural balance of things. In warfare one is cut off from nature in cutting down his enemy; in warfare the nature of death takes on an entirely new cultural dimension” (Thompson 1981, pp.195–6).

But ruling forces cannot control by terror — interiorized or exteriorized — alone; they need to formulate a technique which infiltrates and structures both consciousness and perception. In the process of looting women’s shrines, this technique was discovered. It was the logos, and here the origins of logocentrism — and indeed of plallogocentrism — may be discovered. “One of the reasons for male enthusiasm for the Logos doctrine was that it provided male gods with a method of creating, formerly the exclusive prerogative of the birth-giving Goddess... Though male gods popularized the idea of the Logos, the ability to destroy and recreate by word-power belonged originally to the Goddess, who created languages, alphabets, and the secret mantras known as Words of Power” (Walker 1983, pp.545–6). Having failed to acquire female generative capacities through imitation, patriarchal males appropriated women’s magico-linguistic faculties. By doing so, they could become creators, not merely destroyers, albeit creating an empire of death. For in appropriating the female logos, they distorted its nature, rendering it qualitatively different from its previous character. ‘It is self-evident that the early phase of man’s [sic] existence, the matriarchal world of the beginning with which we are here concerned, could not be reflected in a discursive consciousness, before the birth of the sun. Its archetypal reality is to be found in the symbols, myths, and figures by which men [sic] speak of it; but aü these are image and metaphor, never knowledge or the direct, reasoned statement by which the later, patriarchal world, rooted in consciousness, knows itself and seeks to formulate itself in religion, philosophy and science” (Neumann 1955, p.212).

Patriarchs gradually developed a form of language which led to the separation of two different types of discourse. “There are two distinct and complementary languages; the ancient, intuitive language of poetry, rejected under Communism, merely mis-spoken elsewhere, and the more modern, rational language of prose, universally current. Myth and religion are clothed in poetic language; science, ethics, philosopnhy and statistics in prose”. The former gradully became obscured. “The poetic language of myth and symbol used in ancient Europe was not, in principle, a difficult one but became confused, with the passage of time, by frequent modifications due to religious, social and linguistic change, and by the tendency of history to taint the purity of myth”.

Nevertheless, expressed in different mindstyles or conceptual modes, these two divergent linguistic registers continue to exist. “What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical Age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge... As a result the poetic faculty is atrophied... And from the inability to think poetically — to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and recombine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense — derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines. Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars” (Graves 1986, p.223).

This discrimination between poetic and prosaic modes of thought — a distinction homologous with the differentiation between iconic and representational language made earlier — remains crucial to the continued domination of the control complex. By promoting the replacement of poetry by prose, patriarchy severely limits the potentials of the imagination — the capacity to create magic through images, and to cast spells through syllabic utterance. In other words, it imprisons individuals within the linearity of history, discouraging proleptic thought (“the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning”) and analeptic thought (“the recovery of lost events by the same suspension”). Deprived of poetic discourse, humanity remains trapped in the coordinates of spatio-temporal determinism. “In the poetic act, time is suspended and details of future experience often become incorporated into the poem, as they do in dreams. This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past. Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings” (Graves 1986, p.343).

The control complex eliminates memory in two stages. First, by destroying the mysteries it eradicates the transmission of totemic consciousness, that bodily awareness achieved through an “acting out of instinctual tendencies” which remains “primarily a learning experience” (Bettelheim 1955, p.90). Secondly, by replacing oral cult-lore (and its practitioners, those shamanic “repositories of the knowledge of the culture’s history” (Halifax 1980, p.28)) with written culture. Inscriptional codification tends to define the empirical realm of matter as the only reality, and the faculty of reason as the only legitimate means to its accurate perception. The result remains the development of cognicentrism, [54] the characteristic mode of consciousness of the control complex. Stunting imagination, dismissing intuition, discouraging shifts in modes of consciousness, control forces entrap humanity in the cold logic of rationality. And having siphoned out the metaphoric consciousness of myth, they refill human beings with the literal facts of history. Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness reigns. Literal interpretation — in short, fundamentalism — becomes the key epistemological mode of the control project. The collection and manipulation of data remains its chief methodology, its way of ensuring the predominance of the logos.

But cognicentrism also produces a more insidious effect: namely, an incapacity to undertake transformation. Primal peoples “look at reality in a way that makes it possible for them to know something by temporarily turning into it”. Transformation remains a keynote of everyday life, particularly infusing relations with nature. “In an effort to move closer to the centers of power in nature, primal people often imitate and transform themselves into things of the natural world that invest them with vision and strength”. All kinds of transformations are available. “Not only are primal people permitted to change their names, but since names are sacred designations of being, people also have the ability to be transformed — briefly or permanently — into other beings and animals. They are often permitted to change their gender, and they will be greatly admired for what would be considered personal peculiarities in the West”. In contrast: “Almost none of the alternative identities available to Indians [and other primal peoples] are accessible to the people of the West. With the exception of the religious transformation of Catholic initiates and women who change their names, family ties, and loyalties when they are married, no personal transformations are acceptable in the West”. Transformation remains difficult here because discursive epistemology impedes access to non-ordinary modes of consciousness. Categorical language inhibits bodily participation in experience: “It cannot participate in other beings and objects but can only observe them. Without an articulate body; without a sense of the body’s wholeness, we cannot participate in the world that lies beyond observation”. Such spectacularization alienates individuals from transformational experience at the level of self, other and community: “Their resistance to transformation includes their inability to accept the changing identities of other people.” Authoritarian character structures demand uniformity, and as a result “identity is a prison in the West”. “Among primal peoples, there are numerous societal and personal ceremonies that make all types of drastic changes in identity and reality possible for virtually everyone. And these changes are considered actual transformations” (Highwater 1981, pp.61,141,174,181,77,182). But such mutations are ridiculed by most denizens of the control complex, who have been effectively indoctrinated to conformity and routine, to deny the existence of alternative modes of existence — indeed, to desire their own oppression, and that of everyone and everything else too.

This oppression can be identified precisely: its name is culture. The current text traces a shift from anarchy to control, or in other words from cult to culture: “From cult to culture is only a step, but it took a lot of making. Cult-lore was the wisdom of the old races. We now have culture... It is fairly difficult for one culture to understand another. But for culture to understand cult-lore is extremely difficult, and, for rather stupid people, impossible. Becuse culture is chiefly an activity of the mind, and cult-lore is an activity of the senses... We have not the faintest conception of the vast range that was covered by the ancient sense-consciousness. We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason. It was a knowledge based not on words but on images. The abstraction was not into generalizations or into qualities, but into symbols. And the connection was not logical but emotional. The word ‘therefore’ did not exist. Images or symbols succeeded one another in a procession of instinctive and arbitrary physical connection — some of the Psalms give us examples — and they ‘get nowhere’ because there was nowhere to get to, the desire was to achieve a consummation of a certain state of consciousness, to fulfill a certain state of feeling-awareness” (Lawrence 1977, pp.47–8).

At the basis of the metaphorical cult-lore sensibility remained “the old pagan process of rotary image-thought” in which “every image fulfills its own little circle of action and meaning, then is superseded by another image”: “the pagan thinker or poet — pagan thinkers were necessarily poets — ... starts with an image, sets the image in motion, allows it to achieve a certain course or circuit of its own, and then takes up another image. The old Greeks were very fine image-thinkers, as the myths prove. Their images were wonderfully natural and harmonious. They followed the logic of action rather than of reason, and they had no moral ax to grind. But still they are nearer to us than the orientals, whose image-thinking often followed no plan whatsoever, not even the sequence of action. We can see it in some of the Psalms, the flitting from image to image with no essential connection at all, but just the curious image-association” (Lawrence 1977, pp.52,54).

The metaphorical perception of the play of resemblances and differences remains central to cult-lore sensibility, its predilection for experiencing transformation and its effortless shifts into nonordinary modes of consciousness. Playfulness constitutes its fundamental characteristic. “The most we can say of the function that is operative in the process of image-making or imagination is that it is a poetic function; and we define it best of all by calling it a function of play — the ludic function, in fact”. Indeed, “the whole sphere of so-called primitive culture” can be characterized “as a play-sphere”. “The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness” in such contexts because sacred lore emerges from sacred play. Always anterior and superior to culture, play evolves ritual as a set of particularly felicitous game patterns. “In play as we conceive it the distinction between belief and make-believe breaks down” (Huizinga 1970, pp.44–5 passim).

Spirituality allows belief to emerge from the ludic reticulations of make-believe, whereas religion denies all connection, denigrating make-believe as fantasy and exalting belief — or faith — as actuality. Recognizing belief as merely doctrinal/sacramental scaffolding around the numinous, spirituality grants that imagination constitutes the most valid and congenial faculty for formulating beliefs about the sacred. But religion, with each of its authoritarian sects claiming their methodology as the only true path to salvation, demands literal belief in its tenets. This difference occurs because religion externalizes and anthropomorphizes its deities, who then demand worship, whereas spirituality does not differentiate between interior and exterior, and rather than personify the sacred promotes participation in its vast elemental mysteries. “The very ancient world was entirely religious [read: spiritual] and godless. While men [read: humans] still lived in close physical union, like flocks of birds on the wing, in a close physical oneness, an ancient tribal unison in which the individual was hardly separated out, then the tribe lived breast to breast, as it were, with the cosmos, in naked contact with the cosmos, the whole cosmos was alive and in contact with the flesh of man [read: humanity], there was no room for the intrusion of the god idea. It was not till the individual began to feel separated off, not till he fell into awareness of himself, and hence into apartness; not, mythologically, till he ate of the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life, and knew himself apart and separate, that the conception of a God arose, to intervene between man and the cosmos. The very oldest ideas of man are purely religious [read: spiritual], and there is no notion of any sort of god or gods. God and gods enter when man has ‘fallen’ into a sense of separateness and loneliness” (Lawrence 1977, p.101). [55] Separation connotes alienation, deracination, spectacularization and cognicentrism. Cult-lore invites imaginative participation, but culture interposes a mediatized version of reality which provokes frustration and anger — violence directed outward onto those who remain immersed in the sacred. At this juncture the origins of imperialism may be discerned.

In this respect, it remains significant that the praxis of cognicentrism also provides the control complex with a language of conquest. The latter was necessary given the imperial aim of global domination. Having extirapted primitivist resistance and denuded the surrounding natural; environment, control forces set off to conquer new worlds. In doing so, they projected their negative understanding of totemic consciousness onto other cult-lore communities. This re-mained a comparatively simple act given that the lifeways of the people encountered broadly resembled those of the invaders’ repudiated ancestors. Encountered peoples were characterized as savages, a word etymologically derived from the Latin term silva, sylvan or forest-dweller. Immediately, repeating a familiar pattern, such people were identified as cannibals. From Herodotus “until the end of the fifteenth century the literal term anthropophagist described those savages on the fringes of western civilization who partook of human flesh” (Arens 1979, p.44). Often, they were also characterized as practitioners of incest: “Formerly, the accusation that certain peoples in the past or distant present were engaged in both cannibalism and incest was quite common. These visions of the exotic other were popularly entertained in travelers’ accounts for centuries” (Arens 1986, p.vii). Such characterizations acted as a pretext for invasion and enslavement. Colonization was often justified on the basis of the supposed cannibalistic (and other immoral) practices of indigenes.

But anthropophagy, despite what many anthropologists continue to believe, remains a fantasy. Arens concludes: “excluding survival conditions, I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society”. Symbolic cannibalism, eradicated in the domesticated heartlands of the control complex, was — and is — interpreted in a literal manner by the invaders. The empirical orientation of the control mentality ensures a literalist conclusion, which aptly conforms with imperial aims. “In examining the pervasiveness of the notion of others as cannibals, the implication that this charge denies the accused their humanity is immediately recognizable. Defining them in this way sweeps them outside the pale of culture and places them in a category with animals... Warfare and annihilation are then excusable, while more sophisticated forms of dominance, such as enslavement and colonization, become an actual responsibility of the culture-bearers”. The imputation of cannibalism comprises a convenient pretext for wiping out resistance. “According to Las Casas, who accompanied Columbus on one expedition and spent a lifetime on the [Caribbean] islands before turning to religion and a defense of the Indian cause, any resistance to Spanish colonization was laid to the cannibals... Resistance and cannibalism became synonymous and also legitimized the barbaric Spanish reaction”. History repeats itself, and in this respect it remains unsurprising that at the same time that witches, the control complex’s internal antagonists, were being persecuted on the pretext of alleged cannibalism, an identical slur was used to justify the slaughter or enslavement of its external opponents. “Thus the operational definition of cannibalism in the sixteenth century was resistance to foreign invasion followed by being sold into slavery, which was held to be a higher state than freedom under aboriginal conditions” (Arens 1979, pp.21,140,49,51). Indeed, such was the deep-seated nature of this definition that the very word cannibal derives from a Spanish mispronunciation of Caribs, the name of an indigenous Carribbean tribe.

By this time the control complex has become a Leviathan, “a Worldeater” (Perlman 1983A, p.195), and to warrant global consumption, it projects anthropophagic ideas onto the entirety of the outside world, when they most clearly apply to itself. The other always remains cannibalistic and incestuous, and this identification justifies its domination or extermination. Projecting its own evil onto adversaries remains a typical control complex ruse. In this way an important inversion becomes possible: the forces of death can convince themselves that they are in fact the forces of life, bravely battling the legions of darkness and ignorance. And a denial of death can once again occur. Similarly, the continuing — metaphorically correct — identification made between American indigenes and wolves [56] not only vindicated the destruction of both, but links the eradication of free shamanic communities in the New World with comparable extirpations in Eurasia and later Africa and Australasia.

In the New World, resistance to Leviathanic invasion assumed similar contours to those in Europe. That resistance, as in the Old World, was ultimately unsuccessful, but the lessons that can be learned from its failure may infuse contemporary attempts to evoke a total revolution toward visionary anarchy. To appreciate the significance of indigenous resistance it remains necessary, not to investigate the historical record, but to reenter the world of myth. Once again narrative remains inadequate to the task: only mythopeic tales can convey the requisite depth of insight.

As a complement to the tale of Red Riding Hood, derived from European folklore, attention will now shift to an Amerindian tale entitled “The Cannibal Monster”. This shift, rather than merely continental in proportion, involves a displacement from a well-known folktale to a relatively obscure fable. Given these circumstances, it remains important to understand some-thing of the context of its expression.

“The Cannibal Monster” was the creation of a great visionary shaman named Tenskwatawa (“Open Door”), and known as the Shawnee Prophet. This medicine man, “the leading figure in the Indians’ efforts to resist the Americans” (Edmunds 1983, p.x), helped to forge an inter-tribal confederacy opposed to American settlement of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region. The confederacy remained a major obstacle until 1813, when Tenskwatawa’s brother, the great warrior Tecumseh, was killed in battle and the military resistance disintegrated.

In 1823, Tenskwatawa was interviewed by the Indian agent at Detroit, Charles Trowbridge, and during that or the following year the Prophet narrated a series of stories, including “The Cannibal Monster”. Trowbridge, personal secretary and researcher for the governor of Michigan Territory, Lewis Cass, was assigned to discover all he could about the languages and cultures of the Indian tribes in the area. Tenskwatawa, interviewed through a translator in Cass’s office, sometimes with the governor present, had to provide answers to a long questionnaire (one question asked: Do the Shawnee eat wolves?). But apparently he became bored with the questionnaire format, and decided to relate something more profound about his visions and the lifeways of his people. And so he narrated eleven tales — including “The Cannibal Monster” — to Trowbridge, fulfilling his role as a prophet by speaking truth to power. Trowbridge predictably regarded these tales as little more than curiosities, and the transcriptions sat in the back of a desk drawer for fifty years before being donated to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. An exact printed copy of the Trowbridge manuscript was published for scholarly reasons in 1965, but not until the 1984 retelling of selected tales by James A. Clifton did they reach anything approaching the public domain.

Following the defeat of the military resistance, Tenskwatawa lived in exile in Canada from 1813 to 1826. His cooperation in answering Trowbridge’s questionnaire and ultimatey in narrating his eleven tales comprised part of his campaign to be allowed to return to live in a Shawnee village in the United States. Before exile, he had been a charismatic and renowned figure in the resistance movement. Now, like his people, he was impoverished and demoralized. Tenskwatawa, once a great prophet, was now a defeated man. Relating his tales was a final, but nonetheless for us a crucial, act of defiant resistance. And of the eleven fables, “The Cannibal Monster” remains the most significant of all.

In many respects, “The Cannibal Monster” resumes the narrative where Red Riding Hood left off. Or, rather, it develops some variations on the themes of the European folktale. The tale opens in a context of seemingly crushed resistance. Just as Red Riding Hood visits her progenitrix in the forest, so this narrative centers on a boy who lives isolated amid “fields and forests” with his grandmother. Like his European analog, he is “a small boy” and “a little fellow”. Moreover, he shares with his precursor, who was known merely by the appellation of the cape given to her by her grandmother, an archetypal identity. He too has no name, only a title accorded to him by his grandmother: Ball. His identity derives from his constant plaything. “This ball he was always tossing and amusing himself with. Now this sphere was unique, for sticking out of its side was... a long, sharp-pointed fang” (Clifton 1984, p.23). Unlike Red Riding Hood’s cape, however, the provenance of Ball’s sphere remains unexplained within the narrative. To appreciate the significance of this ball, attention will shift to the visions of another great Amerindian shaman, Black Elk.

In The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk discusses a game “which was played with a ball, four teams and four goals which were set up at the four quarters” of the compass. Originally this game was sacred, “not really a game, but one of our most important rites”: “The game as it is played today represents the course of a man’s life, which should be spent in trying to get the ball, for the ball represents Wakan-Tanka [the sacred lifeforce], or universe... In the game today it is very difficult to get the ball, for the odds — which represent ignorance — are against you, and it is only one or two of the teams who are able to get the ball and score with it. But in the original rite everybody was able to have the ball, and if you think about what the ball represents, you will see that there is much truth in it” (Brown 1953, pp.127–8).

Black Elk relates the visionary origins of this game and the ceremonies it inaugurated. Central to the game is a “sacred ball” painted in such a way that it represents the universe, the pantheistic unity of all things. The ball is held by a “young and pure girl” who stands at the center of the universe. “She sees her Grandmother and Mother Earth and all her relatives in the things that move and grow. She stands there with the universe on her hand, and all her relatives there are really one” (Brown 1953, pp.132,133). A circle of people surround the girl. She throws the ball to the west, where one person catches it, offers it to the six sacred directions, and returns it to the girl at the center. The same process occurs for the north, east and south respectively. Finally, the girl throws the ball straight up, and all rush in to catch it. Those who are fortunate enough to catch the ball in any one of these five throws are highly favored.

Black Elk explains the significance of this ludic rite. First, he stresses the importance of the fact that “it is a little girl, and not an older person, who stands at the center and throws the ball. This is as it should be, for just as Wakan-Tanka is eternally youthful and pure, so is this little one who has just come from Wakan-Tanka, pure and without any darkness”. Secondly, he explains that “Just as the ball is thrown from the center to the four quarters, so Wakan-Tanka is at every direction and is everywhere in the world; and as the ball descends upon the people, so does his power, which is only received by a very few people, especially in these last days”. This imminent millenarian perspective informs Black Elk’s view of contemporaneity. “At this sad time today among our people, we are scrambling for the ball, and some are not even trying to catch it, which makes me cry when I think of it. But soon I know it will be returned to the center, for our people will be with it. It is my prayer that this be so, and it is in order to aid this ‘recovery of the ball’, that I have wished to make this book” (Brown 1953, pp.137,138).

The significance of Ball’s appellation should now be apparent. He is one of those persons fortunate enough to catch the ball — indeed this act defines his entire identity. And he has been especially blessed in that the ball is armed with a fang, which points the way toward renewed resistance and ultimately (when combined with the recovery of other traditional ways, especially the shamanic power animal) liberation. But Ball always remains an agent of the pure girl at the center of the sacred circle (who herself, through her youth, her virginity, and her close relationship with her grandmother, remains an analog to the Red Riding Hood figure). He must ultimately return the ball to her. When the game of life ends, the ball must be recentred, and then harmony will recommence.

One issue that requires elucidation, however, is the question of why Tenskwatawa chose to displace the female figure from the center of his tale, and selected a male as his redemptive figure. [57] The answer lies in his patriarchal tendencies, which were precipitated by the invading control complex’s decimation of his people’s traditional lifeways. “Pressures engendered by the loss of lands, food shortages, white injustice, and disease caused serious rifts within the [Shawnee] tribal communities. The traditional fabric of interpersonal relationships, formalized roles, and elaborate kinship groups came apart because the tribes were unable to cope with the rapid changes around them” (Edmunds 1983, p.5). The Prophet tried to revivify traditional lifeways, but his reforms were insidiously infected by the control virus. [58]

Like many other tribes, the Shawnee believed that their world was an island balanced on the back of a Great Turtle. “But the Shawnee were unique among related Algonquin peoples in thinking of their Creator as a woman, whom they addressed as our Grandmother”. She “was accompanied and aided by her young grandson and a small dog” in traditional myth. However, Tenskwatawa “attempted to remake the creator-spirit over into the image of a male and this is one of the reasons why most Shawnee refused to follow his teachings” on cosmological issues. He “recast the image of Creator in an effort to enhance the status of males”: “However, ... Grand-mother, her Grand-son, and even Brother-Dog are not absent from the tales Tenskwatawa told. Although much reduced in importance, she appears and reappears in these stories as a protective and important if not all-powerful figure. Obviously, Tenskwatawa could try to demote, but he could not entirely erase her memory” (Clifton, pp.67,68). The “grandmother Earth” (Halifax 1980, p.180) figure appears much in this light in “The Cannibal Monster”.

At the beginning of the tale, Ball spends much of his time perfecting his aim with the “unique” fanged sphere. The addition of the fang to the wholly spherical ball of Black Elk’s ritual remains significant for two associated reasons. First, a fang, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is a “canine tooth, especially of dogs and wolves” — a feature which here symbolizes the connection between Ball and the European wolf-goddess. Secondly, although the fanged ball seems wholly phallic — it no doubt unconsciously echoes the Western sigil for masculinity, ♂ — this impression remains misleading. The ♂, the sign of Mars — a red figure like Adam (“a man of blood” — i.e., a participant in consanguinous mysteries) — represents “a ligam-yoni arrangement of a phallic spear attached to a female disc” (Walker 1983, p.598). Like Red Riding Hood, the redskin youth remains associated with wolves and the color of blood. In short, on both counts, Ball remains an agent of the goddess: his masculinity remains firmly rooted in womb consciousness.

But Ball’s connectedness and masculinity are both misdirected. He perfects his aim with the ball so that “he could hit even tiny birds in flight, while they were darting back and forth amid the trees” (Clifton 1984, p.23). This aberrancy, predicated on a loss of consciousness of universal consanguinity, remains symptomatic of the control complex’s disruption of traditional initiation rites. The grandmother does not ritually correct his deviant behavior, but seems preoccupied with other matters — a neglect of her initiatory duties which provides the wellspring for the narrative. Ball’s redemptive mission remains based on the absence of initiation.

Every day the grandmother digs up wild tubers, roots and potatoes — i.e., uncultivated vegetable foodstuffs — to eat. She no longer receives the offerings of Red Riding Hoods. Food has become scarce now the invaders have arrived. And just as in the Demeter myth, when the daughter-initiate figure, Persephone, has been kidnapped and the Earth Mother refuses to be fruitful, making the world barren, so here the crone-goddess figure, similarly bereft, inhabits a place of scarcity. But those few tasty comestibles she does find are secreted away, and the famished Ball is only given “the smallest, roughest, bitter potatoes for his meal” (Clifton 1984, p.23), symbolizing the meager rations — in every respect — accorded to the indigenes by the invaders.

Ball wonders what his grandmother can be doing with the nourishing food she finds. And so instead of sleeping, he conceals himself one night in a bearskin robe to watch her actions. [59] Red Riding Hood was consumed by a live wolf, and joined her grandmother inside, while Ball has to hide in a dead bearskin to keep his grandmother under surveillance. But, mutatis mutandis, both achieve a vision of secret knowledge through getting inside and seeing from the perspective of a wild beast (symbolically their animal natures). Ball discovers that his grandmother is feeding the best food to Uncle, who remains concealed in a hidden room in the lodge. The word Uncle is capitalized because, like other names in this tale, it remains generic: the action is archetypal, mythic, not historical narrative. The presence of Uncle indicates the matristic nature of the community under consideration. In “such clan systems throughout most of humanity’s existence on this earth, fatherhood was unknown, and the primary adult male kinsman was the maternal uncle, united with the mother by the all-important uterine blood bond. Each man’s personal loyalty was to his mother’s clan and his sister’s children” (Walker 1985, p.46). The value of consanguinity remains latent, but not lost, in this community. But the characterization of this male figure remains significant. Red Riding Hood was discovered by her father, a powerful figure from the control complex, whereas Ball finds his uncle, a frightened fugitive from control, and evidently a member of the defeated military resistance.

The next day, while Grandmother searches for food, Ball enters the secret room and converses with his uncle, who reveals that “those Man Eaters” — an accurate characterization of the world- eating Leviathan — “are after me”. By entering the sealed compartment, the boy has placed the man in danger: Uncle indicates that Ball’s intrusion has spoiled the “special power” (Clifton 1984, p.25) of concealment — an indication of the grandmother’s magical powers, given Uncle’s feebleness. But Ball remains unperturbed by Uncle’s forebodings, and requests that he fulfill his filial duties by showing his nephew how to make a bow and arrows. Uncle complies with this entreaty. Unlike Red Riding Hood’s father, the adult male figure in this tale is benevolent. But the bow and arrows will never be used for anything except target practice. Ball’s power does not reside in weaponry: armed resistance to the control complex has already proven impotent. [60]

When the grandmother ascertains that Ball has discovered the whereabouts of his uncle, she is aghast and describes the “terrible things” done by the “cannibal monsters” who threaten Uncle, how “incredibly ugly” they are, of how these “evil spirits” are only seen in the shape of “hideous old people” and “ghastly animals”. But Ball, rather than frightened by these disclosures, becomes “eager to see one of these cannibal monsters” so he can “shoot my fanged-ball to fight him” (Clifton 1984, pp.23–4). Impatience and recklessness emerge as the boy’s chief characteristics. [61] The grandmother prohibits Ball from making further visits to Uncle, but remains powerless to prevent them.

In all, four increasingly reckless meetings between uncle and nephew occur. The first takes place in the concealed room, where Uncle teaches Ball to make a bow and arrows. During the second Uncle emerges briefly from the secret chamber to watch his nephew undertake target practice with the bow and arrows. On the third, Uncle emerges for a longer period to watch Ball shoot down small birds with his fanged sphere. And on the fourth he again emerges to watch Ball resume his target practice with his bow and arrows. But on the latter occasion: “Uncle started to congratulate himself for having escaped the hideous Hamotaleniwa [cannibal monsters]. Instantly, even before he had half-shaped this happy idea, both Uncle and Ball heard the fierce growling of a large dog. It was coming from high above them, from the sky” (Clifton 1984, p.27). For all the grandmother’s fears and the uncle’s lack of caution, only when the latter becomes complacent and relaxes his vigilance, can he be discovered. Already the text has prefigured the era of thought police and total surveillance, where there is no hiding place except through shifts into altered states of consciousness, regions into which thought control cannot follow. Like the military resistance movement he symbolizes, the warrior Uncle encounters peril through fascination with weaponry and an armed solution to invasion. It thus remains appropriate that, as sky gods, the cannibalistic control forces descend like helicopter gunships to round up and exterminate the peoples of the earth.

Ball hides Uncle in the secret chamber, conceals the entrance and covers their tracks. But instantaneously he is confronted by the cannibal monster and his dog, both of whom have only one eye. Like the cyclops, mythic cannibals are often one-eyed. They possess linear perspective, Blake’s hated “Single vision and Newton’s sleep” — an inability to access “the multiplicities of experience” (Highwater 1981, p.68). But this does not prevent the domesticated dog from sniffing out and then lunging at the entrance to the concealed room. Ball responds, not by using his bow and arrows, despite his recently acquired dexterity and their proximity, but by reaching into “his medicine bag, his sack of special powers” (a phrase echoing the earlier reference to the grandmother’s magic) to extract “his sharp-toothed ball” — not a weapon, but a spiritual device (Clifton 1984, p.28).

But in itself the sphere remains insufficient to dispatch the cannibals, for reasons which will become fully apparent later. It remains partly inadequate, however, because the cannibals are a machine: when Ball wounds one, the other assaults the door, and the fanged ball has to be removed and flung at the other, which only releases the first to resume the attack. This relentless mechanistic alternation eventually exhausts Ball, and the cannibals burst into the secret room. And although Uncle is a “young man” and a warrior, the “hideous old man”, the cannibal monster, possesses a demonic power over him. “Entering, he approached Uncle and bid him, ‘Follow me! Now!’ The terrified young man did so, showing no sign of resistance” (Clifton 1984, p.28). The barked order, the failure to resist, indeed the inability to resist an incomprehensibly powerful force — these are familiar from contemporary accounts of totalitarianism such as The Gulag Archipelago. [62]

But Ball continues to resist: he ignores the order not to follow, and trails the monsters and their captive. The trio board an “iron canoe”, clearly a product of industrial technology, and the cannibal strikes the side of the vessel, making a noise which imitates the sound of a machine. “At this sound the canoe shot swiftly forward across the lake”. As it does so, the cannibal chants a song of world-eating and technological glorification. “I will devour them all/them all/my victims!/I will cross in my canoe/my canoe.’” But Ball will not permit this escape, and “reaching into his medicine pouch” throws the fanged sphere at the vessel. “Immediately the canoe and all in it were pulled back to shore”. Ball possesses magical powers which even control forces cannot withstand. He insists that he accompany them on the voyage. The propaganda machine cranks into action as the cannibal monster maintains: “‘Your uncle will only be visiting friends on the opposite shore. He will return in the morning. I assure you of this, you can believe me.’” But Ball sees through these transparent lies, and the cannibal, “tired of all this unexpected defiance” (Clifton 1984, p.29) — resistance has become unfamiliar — consents to the boy’s request.

Following the trail to the cannibal village on the opposite shore, Ball notices the constant presence of Wren. “Getting annoyed, he reached into his medicine pouch and pulled out his toothed-ball, thinking to impale this tiny bird. Ball was not being patient. He did not see that Wren was his ... special guardian”. But Wren forsees the threat and warns Ball how stupid it would be to kill him “‘when I have to come to aid you, to give you favors — skills and strength to match your boldness’”. The previous slaying of small birds symbolizes Ball’s (and indirectly Uncle’s) abandonment of traditional, totemic lifeways. He does not recognize the sanctity of all life, and indeed has unwittingly shot down his spirit helper or power animal. He uses his gift or propensity unwisely — against his shamanic animal rather than the enemy. Hence, divided against himself, the ball remains ineffective against the cannibals. It can lacerate — the cannibal is “injured”, his cur “wounded” — but not kill them. Wren indicates that Ball’s energy and dexterity must be informed with visionary wisdom and spiritual guidance. “‘Be patient... be understanding... Be calm. Think! Control yourself ... Reflect on what will happen’” (Clifton 1984, pp.30,29). So far Ball has been characterized by impetuous action rather than reflection, and in this respect he resembles his people as a whole. Wren counsels patience and expedience, but above all points him inward to the spiritual interior. There effective resistance can commence.

Wren divulges Uncle’s fate to Ball. The cannibals “‘order them [their victims] to do some impossible task. And they threaten these poor prisoners — if they do not succeed in these tasks, the Old Ones will clap them in prison and starve them to death. Then will the slavering Old Ones devour them — flesh, sinew, and blood, leaving only a pile of gnawed bones’” (Clifton 1984, p.30). Once again the text prophetically enters the gulags, with their impossibly stringent work requirements, deliberately unfulfillable so that the controllers can achieve their real goal — the extermination of prisoners. But the metaphoric nature of cannibalism also becomes apparent at precisely this juncture. If the monsters were literally anthropophagic, they would fatten rather than starve their victims. The control complex spiritually emaciates the latter, parasitically extracting its lifeblood or lifeforce, — absorbing its vital energies, and thus denying fears of entropy and death. Sacrificial victims are slaughtered so that the system may continue to function (something true since at least the patriarchal inauguration of the hero/tanist agon).

“‘The Old Ones’”, Wren continues, “‘may tell Uncle to kill a bear in a place where bears are never seen. When he fails, he will then be starved, and when he is almost dead, he will be food for the hunger of this loathsome trio. When you arrive you will soon see many other prisoners already there, those who have already failed. These are now no more than skin and bones. Soon they will be butchered and thrown into the kettle’” (Clifton 1984, p.31). Uncle’s prospective fate, mantically foreseen by Wren, consists of reluctantly performing a parodic version of the hero’s supposedly noble quest. The control project has surpassed its “heroic” phase, and its knightly deeds of derring-do are foisted upon coerced and unwilling captives. The Age of Chivalry is dead, and the controllers no longer take personal risks. Concentration camp inmates are forced on pain of death to implement the leviathanic project of destroying the wilderness. Uncle must kill a bear, a wild animal often mythically equated with the wolf, the beast of Artemis and of the fanged sphere. The ursine image echoes Ball’s concealment in the bearskin to discover his grandmother’s secret. The latter episode remains significant here because, just as it indicated that the boy could only gain insight through assuming his animal nature, so the imperative that a bear must be killed constitutes not merely a physical denudation of nature, but a further obliteration of indigenous shamanic capacities. Prisoners are compelled to liquidate, not merely the wilderness, but their ability to resonate with it, their own animal natures, and hence their capabilities to resist and create a regenerated anarchy.

Wren, as agent of the sacred cosmos, aims to terminate this process through the instrument of Ball. The bird (whose gender remains unspecified, although in European traditions it is customarily identified as female — as in Jenny Wren — because it represents the goddess) [63] warns Ball: “‘That will be his [Uncle’s] fate, unless you are patient, unless you can find some way to save him’”. The onus remains on the youth, but again non-attachment and self-possession, the ability to achieve equipose and thus become open to the guidance of intuition remains the key to right action. More explicitly, Wren insists: “‘By yourself you cannot save Uncle... It will be impossible by yourself, for their [the cannibals’] hearts are not kept in their bodies. Their hearts are kept and guarded in the lodge of... the Great Turtle, himself. And Great Turtle lives in a far distant place, at the bottom of ... the Great Lake’”. By himself, even with the fanged sphere, Ball remains powerless; he needs the help of totemic or power animals, but as yet fails to realize this fact. He mentally — “thinking but not speaking aloud” — responds to Wren by resolving: “I will speak to the Great Turtle and capture the hearts of these devils by myself”. But the telepathic Wren reminds him that he cannot do anything on his own: “‘Have patience, Boy-With-A-Ball... have patience and remember you cannot fly’” (Clifton 1984, p.31). The youth needs the spirit-bird to take him on a shamanic flight, but egotistically proclaims that he does not need any help to become airborne. At this, the exasperated Wren ceases from conversation.

Ball’s hubris remains inappropriate because the bird invites him to abandon the domain of history constituted by the invading control complex, for the realm of myth. This shift is figured in the introduction of the global folk motif of the external soul, in which “A person (often a giant or ogre) keeps his soul or life separate from the rest of his body” (Thompson 1956, p.43), and “The hero follows instructions [“from his animal brothers-in-law”], finds the ogre’s soul hidden away, and kills the ogre by destroying the external soul” (Aarne 1961, p.93). The cannibal monsters remain invulnerable (indeed, invincible) because they keep their hearts — their vital principles, their spiritual essence, their very souls — discrete from their bodies.

The control complex — the principle of control — can be injured but never killed by merely physical or martial assaults. Its apparatus may be damaged, but not its constitutive principle, its sine qua non. Just as a single-celled cloning organism can undergo cell division in binary fission and produce two new cells possessing identical genetic material, so Leviathan can repair and regenerate itself so long as the codices or hereditary information pattern transmitted from each reconstitution remains in the structure of psychosocial analogs of DNA molecules. As long as the pattern remains intact, even if in a single cell, the pathological leviathanic organism can reconstruct and begin to expand itself. An attack on a part is never an attack on the whole. The cannibal monsters keep their bodies apart from their souls. Individuals may be physically wounded, but the cohesive principle, the spirit of authority, permeates the entire system. And while one constituent part remains, the whole sociopathy, and the potential for its rejuvenation, becomes inevitable. Indigenous military resistance has only strengthened the bloodthirsty war-god by feeding its maw with corpses. Such a response to incursions by control forces remains inadequate because of its partial nature. To be efficacious/counteraction must be total, but more importantly it must be holistic. It must heal as it eradicates, and it must take place on all planes, including — most crucially of all — the spiritual. The spirit of authority, which is intangible because it is everywhere and nowhere, pervading the entire system, can be combated only on the spiritual plane. Physical attacks miss the point because they assail the units in the system, not the structural relations, the filaments, the spiritual adhesive which acts in the interstices and provides the organization with its motivational cohesion. Ball’s fanged sphere harms individuals, but cannot defeat the complex because his attacks occur only on the physical plane and are the product of his personal ego. He must learn to renounce the will of the lesser self, to merge it in the wider subjectivity of the cosmic consciousness, and listen to its guidance, channeled through Wren. Only then will he be able to undertake spiritual resistance as part of a holistic liberatory praxis which heals and restores harmony to psyche, community and cosmos, even as it annihilates the pathology of control.

When the party arrive at the “monster’s village” (Clifton 1984, p.31) — not a dwelling, the site of a social group rather than a mere family — the one-eyed cannibal wife, a negative crone figure in contrast to Ball’s grandmother, [64] scolds her husband (a patriarchal designation) for returning with such a scrawny specimen as the youth. The cannibal silently considers that the latter will eventually be eaten, but Ball, as at his grandmother’s lodge, impertinently speaks up for himself — once again in sharp contrast to his cowed and obedient uncle. By contrasting the two indigenous figures in this way, Tenskwatawa indicates that the despondency of the militarily defeated older generation must be replaced by the intransigence of young spiritual resisters.

The next morning Wren’s prediction proves correct: the cannibal dispatches Uncle to kill a bear. But Ball, taking the bird’s advice and using his intuition, takes Uncle’s place, finds a bear and chases it back to the compound for the cannibal to slaughter. Now he has encountered Wren, Ball acquires a sense of the consanguinous sanctity of all life, and refrains from killing the creature. But this does not prevent the youth from covertly slipping a tiny piece of bear fat into his medicine pouch. This container remains significant in the present context because it holds his shamanic artifacts, and thus by being retained there the bear fat gains magical properties. Hence, when cooked, it expands like Christ’s loaves and fishes, and feeds the famished prisoners, among whom Ball shares it, [65] saying: “Take your strength and courage from this fine, rich, tasty, bear-stew.’” The dilation of this morsel to fill the hungry bellies of all the inmates pointedly contrasts with the fact that the rest of the bear “made just one breakfast only” for the three cannibals. But the concatenation of the medicine pouch and the miraculous augmentation of food indicates the symbolic significance of the episode. While the voracious cannibals — anthropophagists nonetheless for eating bearmeat, symbolic substitute for Uncle’s flesh — merely consume the bear’s body (and still remain unsatiated), the indigenes are adaquately replenished by metaphorically imbibing its spiritual essence. Although dead, like the pelt used by Ball earlier, the bear spiritually nourishes the prisoners, giving them “strength and courage” (Clifton 1984, p.33) to resist through reengagement with their animal natures. This constitutes a basis upon which a resumption of traditional totemic lifeways can occur — something reinforced on the following day, when the entire episode recurs and a further restoration of vitality takes place.

After this second day of bearmeat breakfast, however, Ball quits the cannibal settlement and goes into the wilderness in search of his vision quest. There he reencounters “friend Wren” (Clifton 1984, p.33) — an indication of their new relationship. “Eurasian shamans couldn’t practice until they completed an initiatory death and resurrection, with a soul journeying to heaven. In this, a shaman required the help of a female guardian angel, a celestial wife or mistress, or the earthly embodiment of such a being, who was often supposed to be able to change her shape to that of a bird” (Walker 1985, p.75). If this pattern holds true for Amerindian shamans, then this increases the likelihood of the female gender identity of Wren. In that case, the bird represents the activation of the female (and in particular crone) principle, suggesting that Ball needs to combine his phallic impetuosity (the ball) with the “female” intuition of his power animal. Certainly, however, as an agent of Mother Earth, Wren can be taken as female, and thus as a representative of the grandmother (just as the wolf represented the animal aspect of her counterpart in the Red Riding Hood tale). Like other men before him, Ball can become an initiate only with female aid.

After encountering Wren, Ball calls “for Crane to join him” (Clifton 1984, p.33) — a further indication of his developing shamanic authority. Crane, perhaps to counterbalance Wren, is definitely identified as male. Ball tells the two birds: “‘Now I am ready to fly with you to the Great Lake where we can find the hearts of this Cannibal-Monster, his repulsive wife, and that foul hound’” (Clifton 1984, p.33). The birds agree that they too are now prepared to undertake this journey. The young man’s wishes meet compliance because of the spiritual transformations he has undergone. His previous arrogant assertions of his ability to fly and single-handedly save his people from destruction have evidently been exposed as illusions. The heroic delusions of the incipient warrior, eager to replicate the mistakes of the previous generation, and the accompanying hubris, are now gone. In their place resides a humility and receptiveness which in no way efface the healthily refractory elements in his character. Ball has employed his intuition, neatly sidestepped the karmic and ethical implications of bloodshed, and used his magic powers to nourish the community (another function attributed to the grandmother at the opening of the tale). In other words, rather than acting in an aggressive and ultimately self-serving manner, he has altruistically served others by beginning to heal the rifts in the sacred lifeways opened up by the control complex. “The shaman’s work entails maintaining a balance in the human community as well as in the relationships between the community and the gods or divine forces that direct the life of the culture. When these various domains of existence are out of balance, it is the shaman’s responsibility to restore the lost harmony... The ancient rituals that have persisted through millennia are the true heart of the community, linking it to an inexhaustible and sacred past. When there is social strife and disharmony, resolution is frequently achieved through these timeless events” (Halifax 1980, p.21). Now this process must be brought to an apocalyptic climax.

The trio — the third triad of the text — journey to the Great Lakes. Wren guides, Ball rides on Crane’s back. “When they reached a certain spot near the middle of this inland sea” (Clifton 1984, p.33), Wren signals and Ball plunges down to the lake bottom like a diving bird, and commands the Great Turtle to swim upward. [66] The amphibian’s instantaneous compliance indicates Ball’s shamanic eminence, particularly given that the American continent — Turtle Island — rests on its back. The young man’s capabilities are quite literally earth-shaking: at his behest global eversion commences. [67] But such an event remains absolutely necessary in the current context.

In the Great Turtle’s nest, “Ball spied ... three hearts attached one to the other” (Clifton 1984, p.34). Here, in the externalized womb of the New World itself, lie the peverse eggs of patriarchy. Laid by men, addled and unhatched, they supplant the cosmic egg, “mystical symbol of the Creatress, whose World Egg contained the universe in embryo” (Walker 1983, p.270), the result of the primal coupling of goddess and serpent. Like a cuckoo, the control complex has smuggled into another’s nest a progeny that flings out the rightful inhabitants and bleeds its surrogate parent dry. [68] The nest is America, the rightful inhabitants are indigenes, and the parent is Nature, Mother Earth. Here the motivations behind control complex imperialism are revealed. Fearing and denying death, control forces attempt a perverse rebirth: they aim to become born again Adams in a continent empty through genocide, a virgin continent waiting to be raped. Death’s ravages are displaced onto others so that the controllers may be resurrected into eternity. Ball intends to abort this horrific natality.

After surfacing with the three hearts clasped in his arms, Ball receives further instructions from Wren: “‘When you are ready to kill the cannibal monsters you must thrust a large bone-needle into all three hearts, impaling them, spearing them together! Only then will these three vile monstrosities die at last.’” The young man slips the hearts into his medicine pouch, and the return journey to the cannibal encampment begins. On the way Ball torments the cannibals by squeezing and twisting the hearts, but only on arrival does he kill the monsters by drawing “a long, sharp bone awl” (Clifton 1984, p.34) from his medicine bundle and skewering the hearts together.

In this section of the tale, the onus once again falls on Ball. Interestingly, however, a further shift in emphasis from the masculine to the feminine occurs at this juncture. He can injure the cannibals with the phallic wolf-fang, but can only kill them with a needle — the tool of the sewer, spinner or spinster, the grandmother or Fate figure who spins, weaves and cuts the thread of life. Only the crone aspect of the goddess, recovering her usurped death-dealing capacities, can annihilate the control complex — here through the agency of her grandson. “The Crone... can still serve women as an empowering image of biological truth, female wisdom, and mother-right, to which men must learn to defer, if they are ever to conquer the enemy within themselves” (Walker 1985, p.144). Ball implicitly defers to the crone, and in various respects destroys the internal foe: he masters his patriarchal tendencies and consequent fear of death, and slaughters the demons whose souls were embedded in the very heart of America. But it should be noted that the latter act can only occur once the cannibal monsters’ bodies and souls have been brought into close contiguity — in other words, metaphorically reunited. Ball prevents further depredations against the prisoners during his return journey by tormenting the monsters into agonized helplessness. Only when contiguity of the abstracted parts occurs, however, can the death of the control complex take place. Cartesian dualism must be overcome. Body and soul, material apparatus and the spirit of authority must be brought together to be utterly nullified. Nothing must remain — for if it does the entire edifice can be reconstituted. The assault on the control complex must be total, but primarily spiritual. Without this vital ingredient, the whole resistance project remains worthless.

Hence the fact that Ball places the cannibal corpses on a funeral pyre, “and only when the flames were roaring did he turn away” (Clifton 1984, p.34). Only fire, the devouring, shamanic element, can cleanse the earth of the pathology of control. The flesh of the flesheaters, those who suppressed the fleshly desires of the consanguinous in an orgy of bloodshed, must now be consumed in the fiery flames, the cloak of the scarlet woman, [69] Red Riding Hood, and the hue of the red man, Ball. Reconciliation between man and woman, symbolized by these two mythic figures, occurs following the recognition that the toothed vagina and the fanged sphere complement one another. The first possesses a centripetal, the second a centrifugal orientation; like passion and compassion, they remain in dynamic polarity. [70]

But before the love-feast can commence, the old order — metaphorically, the old world — must end. Apocalypse arrives! amid scenes of terror, wonder and jubilation. Now unfolds götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, the swallowing up of all in collective initiation at the end — here literally — of time by the death or crone goddess, followed by communal renewal. “Ball now gathered materials for a huge sweat-house. This he constructed on the shores of the Lake of the Great Turtle. And now he commanded all the former prisoners of the cannibal village: ‘Gather together all the poor bones of those who have been murdered and eaten! Carry them with respect to my sweat-house and place them lovingly inside! This done, you survivors will join your relatives and friends in my sweat-house! Await me there!’” (Clifton 1984, pp.34–5). Ball now possesses mana, or wisdom: no longer the “small boy” of the beginning of the tale — although only the seven symbolic days of a week have passed [71] — he does not require the prompting of Wren, but knows exactly what to do. He builds a communal sweat lodge, a site for psychosomatic renewal and preparation for shamanic initiation, over which he clearly presides. In this cauldron of renewal, the liberated prisoners, both dead and living, consanguinously commingled, are to experience rebirth:

While those who had been rescued set to work, Ball drew a stone-headed ax from his medicine pouch and began chopping down a huge Walnut tree that leaned over the medicine-house. When they heard the blows of his stone-ax, those inside became frightened and cried out: ‘What is happening to us? What must we do to be safe at last!’

Ball called back: ‘All you living ones! All you breathing ones! Get out of the sweat-house! Run to the cool water of the lake and dove in!’ All inside immediately rushed outside. More ran out then had walked in. A great many bounded out as whole living men, women, and children who had been borne in as gnawed bones. Every one of the murdered ones had been restored to life, cleansed and purified in the sweat-house. All of them together leaped into the refreshing waters of the Kchikami [Great Lake] (Clifton 1984, p.35).

Ball constructs the sweat lodge, the means of renewal, but the act of communal revitalization must come through the members of the community exercising mutual aid. As they do so, Ball — terminating a process inaugurated by the woodcutters’ destruction of the forest and women’s rites — cuts down the World Tree with an ax taken from his shamanic medicine bundle. The inhabitants of the old order, the old world symbolized by the lodge which will be demolished by the fall of the arboreal axis mundi, are urged to emerge and redeem themselves. All are invited and all respond. This is not a Judeo-Christian apocalypse with distinctions drawn between saints and sinners. The inhabitants ask what they can do to be “safe at last”. They cannot do anything — neither good works nor faith will save them — apart from accept cosmic processes. The control complex desire to leap off the wheel of reincarnation, to be finally secure in the heavenly eternity of a patriarchal god, remains an illusion. Assurance resides in harmonization with karmic cycles of life, death and rebirth. For with this acceptance arises the possibility of resurrection. Hence the apocalyptic renewal, where the dead are brought back to life, and the living are rejuvenated. Those who were carried or “walked” into the lodge, “rushed” or “bounded” out. Infused with energy, they become “whole”.

Echoing Ball’s plunge, they all immerse themselves in the water, a futher cleansing which physically complements the ritual purification of the psyche in the sweat lodge. Submersed in the womb of all earthly life, the oceanic consciousness of the primal mother, they are reborn into totemic consciousness stripped of their clothes and their fear of death. “When they came to the surface, no longer fearful, but freshened and vigorous, they all swam back to shore. Most but not all remembered their former homes and villages. These Ball instructed to make their way back to their kinfolk and friends. But some had been dead so long they had no memory whatever of former times. These gathered together and approached Ball, saying to him:’... our Elder Brother, let us join you and form our own village together. Let us make our own ... clan together’. These new companions and kinfolk Ball gathered around him, leading them and Uncle back to Grandmother’s lodge, where they lived together with great happiness for many years” (Clifton 1984, p.35). [72] Unlike Styx, the Great Lake does not induce oblivion, but remembrance, and with the return of cult-lore memory — Mnemosyne, mother of the muses — the poetry of iconic language becomes generalized once again. Global dreamtime can recommence in all its variegated forms, as the peoples of the earth recoalesce into their multifarious assemblages. [73]

But those who have been dead for so long that they cannot recollect their origins — i.e., those whose cult-lore has been effaced in the mists of time — cluster around Ball and seek to constitute a new clan around the figure of the crone. And surely here Tenskwatawa alludes to people of European extraction, whose rich totemic mysteries were among the first to be shattered into fragments. These people above all, not because they are chosen, but because of the debilitated condition of their cult-lore, require the direct tutelage of the Earth Mother. They need her watchful, pervasive presence to effectuate the profound recovery their spiritually debased condition requires. [74] They need her to apply the balm of charis and to learn from her the process of redintegration. Victims of the diaspora called history, the dispossessed and dislocated gather “together” — a constantly reiterated term — around the locus of the renewed female mysteries. There they will recall their lost heritage and begin to reconstruct their visionary lifeways. Already this medley of disparate individuals start to recognize the claims of universal interrelatedness: they consider Ball an elder brother and thus become “new companions and kinfolk”. [75]

The barren wastes of history are abandoned. A storm solemnly rolls over, sending sharp lightning bolts to further blast and desolate the scene. The wind whistles through this howling wilderness, soughing the dead branches of the World Tree, and scattering ashes from the funeral pyre to the four corners of the universe. In time, the parched soil becomes drenched by downpours of rain. Breezes bring seeds, and the sun brings warmth and light. Profuse vegetation swathes the scars, and animals alter the topography. Streams flow and a new forest towers toward the sky. And ages hence, ecstatic dancers, perhaps from the clan of the grandmother, chance upon this place in their revels, and geomantically sense its sacred resonance. Enraptured by its holy atmosphere, they recognize a new sacred grove. Through animistic communion, they consecrate the area as a site devoted to initiation rites. Soon a venerable crone — maybe a direct descendant of the progenitrix of Red Riding Hood or Ball — is installed here. And with her initiates, she practices the sacred mysteries which ensure the isomorphism of Dreamtime and the earthly paradise.

The full circle of the uroboros has been completed. The journey may have been merely another revolution in the spiral evolution of the cosmos. There may be no end to the tale, only a whorl without end. But every folktale, every myth must come to an end, even if it remains in perpetual enaction. In this respect, no more appropriate ending exists than the assertion:

...and they all lived happily ever after.

Whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it you can see that it is true” — Black Elk.

Bibliography