Consciousness & Male Castration

Circumcision

Circumcision is promoted in America with Jewish and Christian communities leading the charge. Globally, 38.7% of men are circumcised, with mostly Jewish and Muslim religions promoting the act, while Christian and secular communities have mostly ceased the practice. America in an anomaly. Global incidence rates place America in a league with predominantly Muslim countries, the Middle East, and Saharan Africa, the last location for the eradication of female circumcision.

Practice

Some doctors say the surgical procedure prevents diseases related to hygiene and reduces contraction of sexually transmitted diseases. We can contrast this to universally decried female circumcision. Not dissimilar from circumcision, which removes the hood of the glans, the female practice removes the clitoral hood. Its small size commonly led to removal of clitoris entirely, universally viewed as bad. However, the complication rate for male circumcision in the US is as high as 1 in 10, causing everything from castration to death in 3 infants for every 200,000 surgeries. (All parents making the choice should read this article and be informed.)

Dissent

Many doctors now stand against the practice as inhumane and unnecessary. Theologians point out that early Christianity sought to nullify and end the practice. Psychologists further assert genital mutilation is harmful to baby psychology with severe repercussions obscured by the prevalence of the practice and assumptions about gender. This includes volatile aggression and withdrawal. They ask why children can’t simply be taught good hygiene and safe sex. They argue it is genital mutilation regardless of gender and challenge parents of new babies to watch a circumcision performed. Despite this, the practice continues in America.

"The hundreds of boys I have seen who needed surgery to repair problems caused by their circumcisions are real. The men who lost more parts of their penis than the foreskin are real. The thousands of adult men saying they wish they hadn’t been cut are real. Not recognizing that circumcision is harmful is either ignorance or denial." ~ Adrienne Carmack, M.D., urologist

There is a deeper narrative, a symbolic, metaphorical value embodied in this act which is representative of humanity itself.

Roots of Penile Cutting

Antecedents

The purpose here is to look at the psychodynamic source of the practice. There is another narrative, commonly overlooked. In The Origins and History of Consciousness, by Erich Neumann (a depth psychologist known as the star pupil of Freud’s star pupil Carl Jung), I discovered something that pundits and the author overlooked, at least in this work – the origins of the circumcision rite itself, and the justification for later questions and teaching about circumcision being meaningless.

Neumann traces the allegorical story antecedents of modern thought. Stories show how ancient peoples perceived the truths of the world and accordingly appropriate behaviors. Stories were teaching tools, and continue to be. Consider parables and allegories, or modern hero stories or individually motivated group sacrifice.

Barbarianism

In these old stories, castration is a major theme. Their understanding extended to the idea that the body was of the earth and the mind, the gods, were of the sky. Trees represented this metaphor, with roots to hell supporting the extending of branches to the heavens. People were seen as a part of this cycle, as seeds. It appears that barbaric tribes were primarily psychopathic in their development, with murder and molestation being introduced at very early stages of development.

Castration then became a sacrificial right after virginity was taken from males, just before they were slaughtered in order to “seed the earth.” Ancient barbaric tribes understood the “seed” came from man and was implanted in women who only gave birth to children after the shedding of blood, the menstrual cycle. Therefore, males were sacrificed a majority of the time, whereas female sacrifice arrived later as an allegorical, exclusive part of the heroic love relationship. It bears repeating: men were the predominant sacrificial objects in barbaric civilizations and castration was part of the ritual.

The Age of Kings

Later stories promoted the ascension of kings who are acquainted with God. Having a level of development and consciousness that lower individuals of the time couldn’t fathom, they were gods by comparison. They were the top of the tree, and their subjects were the roots, so they were periodically ritualistically castrated and sacrificed. In later times, the story was modified to become familial and sons were expected to cuckold (sleeping with their mothers) and then castrating and murdering their shamed fathers. The individual must be subjugated by his own heir, seed, to allow this successor to take full psychodynamic power through violence.

Judeo-Christian Symbolic Evolution

As stories evolved, religion, in the form of Judaism coming from Egyptian culture, promoted the idea of “honor your father and mother,” directly countering the old cuckold, castrate, kill idea. However, castration was still seen as a subjugation of the earthly physical body to the mental, spiritual brain of the individual, the consciousness that was rapidly developing in society.

Perhaps most famously, Judaism promoted the idea of one God and personal subjugation to him. It was understood that the role of elevating the individual to hero was accomplished through ascetic trends of “the sacrifice of lower masculinity as the precondition for spirituality“ (N. 253). This was also echoed in Greek culture and other cultures. Gods such as Zeus were famous for taking on beast aspects to seduce human women and produce heirs born of the earth and the heavens who were faced with protecting the heavens from the earth. This metaphor for the mind over the body is not accidental.

Christian Eradication

So Judaism promoted the metaphor of the subjugation of the body (human) to the mind (worship of God) and did away with the castrate/murder aspect. Access to God now applied to all individuals and circumcision provided the gateway, disseminating physical subjugation on a physical but much more metaphorical level. Christianity further developed the idea, as teachers explicitly note that circumcision of the body is useless and circumcision of the heart what is important. They replaced the castration metaphor with the symbol of baptism, the dark night of the soul whereby the individual drowns in the underworld and is reborn. Many religions failed to make the step, including gnostic Christianity and mysticism which is hostile towards the world, the body, materialism, and women. “The heavenly side of man triumphs and the earthly side is sacrificed.”

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” ~ Jesus, John 12:24-26

Modern Interpretations

The Renaissance understood this empirically and represented men as powerful beings looking towards the future and heavens while having small, uncircumcised penises. This explains phallic portrayal in modern culture – it is a base nature which trumps the higher mind, part of the penultimate view of Christian teaching. Scientifically speaking, we now know that consciousness is in control when the animalistic, limbic, emotional brain that directs the body obeys the higher mind of the frontal lobe. This is achieved through the practice of meditation, prayer, transcendence, etc. which quiets cortical preprogramming of our early experiences.

"As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth." ~ Mircea Eliade

Modern Regressions

Advances in this narrative, from the Renaissance to modern science, have been hindered by the ongoing evolution, the necessary transition to theosis or divinization – divinity of the individual applied to self-determination, democracy, and more. However, there is a drawback to the expansion of difficult knowledge and access by lay persons. The power-corrupted, authoritarian, medieval Catholic Church saw this, rightly and perhaps prophetically. Circumcision had been discarded by early Christians and even declared a moral sin in 1442 AD. Then the Protestant Reformation occurred in 1517 AD. Personal interpretation of ancient scriptural texts by siloed, unexpanded, limbic-minded individuals preaching to uneducated audiences produced booth cultural regressions and scientific explosions. (For anyone doubting this narrative, check out Dan Carlin’s Prophets of Doom, a gory and psychotic retelling of the taking of Munster by religious zealots in the anarchy of the fall of Catholic order.)

Without the education required to trace the steps of development, many individuals failed to understand the symbolism of circumcision itself or continued to see the body as that which is corrupt and dangerous. Yet circumcision was still a thing of the past replaced by baptism, until science tried to kill religion and, in a bizarre turn, took up the mantle of regressive religious practices. This transition happened at the turn of the century as science divorced itself from what were incorrectly perceived as religious precepts:

"The account on circumcision in the Encyclopædia Britannica [1876] discusses the practice as a religious rite… the author rejected sanitary explanations of the procedure in favour of a religious one: “like other body mutilations … [it is] of the nature of a representative sacrifice.” However, by 1910 the entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica had been turned on its head: “commonly prescribed for purely medical reasons.” ~ Encyclopædia Britannica

Christians then followed suit, eager to see their ancient religious practices instantiated and validated by “rational” medicine for the reduction of sexual diseases and masturbation. Weak minds decry science for contradictions to beliefs and laud praise upon it when beliefs are validated, but it is only an investigative tool. We would do better to update our models, test and test the validity of the outcome. 

The Future of Circumcision

The alchemists spent generations trying to understand why Jesus did not save the earth, why men’s souls still died and matter was not created anew, why Jesus did not return for generations and generations. The result was the creation of science, psychology, and philosophy. What they figured out was that the individual man is the inheritor of the hero archetype and thereby that which will restore heal and transform the world and the body itself through changes in one’s position towards the world. They then designed a method for empirically measuring the world, the mind, and ideas, developing rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and the scientific method.

This metaphorical position, not surgery, creates these physical results. Famously, many individuals, such as Google Executives, are pursuing eternal life through medicine at the cellular level, and many science-fiction writers are supposing consciousness itself may be preserved or pulled back from the quantum realm. People are also expanding the idea of God from an old man in the sky into a being which is more energetically and scientifically-based, or perhaps an organism of which we are all a part in some way, shape, or form.

Metaphor and Ethics

While seemingly blasphemous or confusing, arcane or archaic, these disparate ideas coalesce into one understanding. The body is neither good nor evil, but it is what one does with it that defines its state of being, its health, thoughts, and emotions. Humans can live from the limbic mind as a result of ancient survival imprinting or from the frontal lobe, the higher mind of conscious, long term knowledge and experiential testing. Thus we can see that ethics are a pattern not confined by material, but a pattern of action which lives alongside matter itself and can dictate what matter becomes or be controlled by the material. The two are irrevocably intertwined.

Summary

To cut a child’s body is to impede sensory function and forcibly limit the body. We now know that it removes significant male sensory function and most of the chemical receptors which support partner bonding. The risk is harming the development of the spirit irreparably through physical and emotional trauma.

We must remember that it is derived from psychopathological barbaric roots of castration and sacrifice of unconscious men to appease the conscious gods. Although a poor substitute for teaching, it is a powerful metaphor for the important developmental need to subjugate – or rather integrate – the limbic, chemical body to the mind.

Ecological and Educational Psychology show us that actual body mutilation is unnecessary for the development of the individual. Patterns which preserve value and spirit in the best possible sense should be transferred from the consciousness of an older individual rather than beat, cut into, or branded upon a child. Doing so is the replication of a barbaric right clearly defined in ancient religious texts as “useless.“