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 is 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 the subsequent hardening of the glans shrinks the urethra, reducing the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases in promiscuous individuals. We can contrast this to universally decried female circumcision. Not dissimilar from circumcision’s removal of the hood of the glans, the female practice removes the clitoral hood. Its small size has commonly led to the removal of the 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. (Parents making the choice should read this article.)
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 represents humanity itself.
Roots of Penile Cutting
Antecedents
There is another narrative, commonly overlooked, which is the psychodynamic source of the practice. In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann (a depth psychologist known as the star pupil of Freud’s star pupil Carl Jung) traces the allegorical antecedents of modern thought. Stories show how ancient peoples viewed the world and appropriate behaviors. Stories were teaching tools, and continue to be. Consider parables, allegories, 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 was of the sky, the gods. 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 rooted to the earth and extending to heaven. Barbaric tribes were especially psychopathic in their development, with murder and molestation being introduced at very early stages of development. Castration was seen as a sacrificial right. Virginity was taken from males before they were slaughtered and their phalluses were planted to “seed the earth.” Barbaric tribes understood the “seed” came from men and was implanted in women who gave birth to children after the shedding of blood, the menstrual cycle, or with the birth itself. They therefore sacrificed males to help the earth give birth. It bears repeating: men were perceived as sacrificial objects in barbaric civilizations and castration was part of the ritual.
The Age of Kings
Later stories promoted the ascension of kings who were 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 (sleep with mothers) and then castrate and murder their shamed fathers. The king must be subjugated by his stronger heir, seed, to allow this successor to take 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 and the consciousness rapidly developing in society.
This metaphor for the mind over the body is not accidental. Perhaps most famously, Judaism promoted the idea of one God and personal subjugation to him. It was understood that elevating the individual to hero status was accomplished by asceticism, a “sacrifice of the body to gain spirituality“ (Neuman, 253). This was also echoed in Greek and other cultures. Gods such as Zeus were famous for taking on beast aspects to seduce human women and produce heirs born by joining the earth to the heavens. These heroes were then faced with protecting the heavens from the earth. Female sacrifice also arrived at this time as a symbolic, exclusive part of the heroic love relationship, whereby the hero would sacrifice himself for the future good—to protect the virgin who would birth the next hero.
Christian Eradication
Judaism promoted the metaphor of the subjugation of the body (human) to the mind (worship of God) and ended the castrate/murder aspect. Access to God now applied to all individuals and circumcision provided the symbolic gateway, spreading ideas of physical subjugation on a metaphorical level. Christianity further developed the idea, as teachers explicitly note that circumcision of the body is useless and “circumcision of the heart” is important. They replaced the castration metaphor with the symbol of baptism, the dark night of the soul, symbolically drowning the individual in the underworld or subconscious and raising them 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.” ~ John 12:24-26
Modern Interpretations
The Renaissance understood this idea and represented men as powerful beings looking towards the future and heavens while having small, uncircumcised penises. This explains phallic portrayal in modern culture as a base or grossly common nature that competes with the higher, intellectual mind. This is the ultimate 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, psychotherapy practices etc. which quiet cortical preprogramming of our early experiences and provides prefrontal control of our more bestial systems.
"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
Cages on the Munster Cathedral
Modern Regressions
Advances in this narrative, from the Renaissance to modern science, have been hindered by the ongoing evolution of the individual from serf to self-determined, democratic citizen, and more. The drawback to this expansion of difficult knowledge is misinterpretation by laypersons. The authoritarian, medieval Catholic Church rightly feared this shift. Circumcision was discarded by the first Christians and even declared a moral sin in 1442 AD to help terminate the rare instances of the practice.
When the Protestant Reformation occurred in 1517 AD, personal interpretation of scripture by self-educated individuals preaching to uneducated audiences produced both cultural regressions and scientific explosions. (Dan Carlin’s Prophets of Doom, is an excellent retelling of this trend, focusing on the religious schism Munster.) Without the education required to trace the steps of historical development, people misunderstood circumcision or continued to see the body as corrupt and dangerous.
Yet circumcision was still seen as a relic of the past now replaced by baptism, until science began to conflict with religion and, in a bizarre turn, took up the mantle of regressive religious practices:
"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 either led through science or followed suit, eager to see their ancient religious practices validated by “rational” medicine as useful at reducing sexual diseases and corrupting masturbation. Weak minds decry science for contradictions to beliefs and conversely laud praise upon it when beliefs are validated, failing to understand science is only an investigative tool. We would do better to update our models, test, and retest the validity of the outcomes.
The Future of Circumcision
The alchemists spent generations trying to understand why Jesus did not return to save the earth, why men’s souls still died and why matter was not created anew. Their 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 disposition towards the earth. They then designed a method for empirically measuring and exploring 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, while scientists explore just that. People are also expanding the idea of God from an old man in the sky into a being that 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 have a firm point. The body is neither good nor evil—what we do with it is what defines our state of being, 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, theory, and experiential testing. Ethics are a pattern not confined by material, but a pattern of action that lives alongside matter itself and can dictate what matter becomes or be controlled by the material. The two are irrevocably intertwined. While it is useless to judge our ancestors and the processes that gave rise to various practices, the sexual mutilation of children does not help them become more ethical or better adapted to confront the future.
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 that support partner bonding. The risk is harming the development of the spirit irreparably through physical and emotional trauma leading to repressed, latent traits contributing to later behavioral issues.
We must remember that circumcision 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 shows us that actual body mutilation is unnecessary for the development of the individual. Patterns that preserve value and spirit in the best possible sense should be transferred from the consciousness of an older mentor 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.“
