Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality
Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality is the title of a 1984 monograph by the American anthropologist Weston La Barre . In it, La Barre reconstructs, using archaeological , prehistoric and anthropological findings, the emergence and persistence of the popular belief that is widespread around the world that male ejaculation weakens the brain and the spine .
content
Muelos… provides evidence of the genesis of an archaic delusion in terms of human sexuality and its continued effect in classical literature or philosophy, Hinduism, Renaissance art or the sexual-biological conceptions of the early days. The traces followed by La Barre lead from prehistoric Europe across Asia to back India and the New World. His main focus is on the persistent irrationality of human traditions .
Origin in hunting ceremony
The superstition , the La Barre criticized, has developed according to his findings from prehistoric hunting ceremonies. It implies that bones are the product of the male parent, from which a body can be magically (re) established. La Barre comes to this interpretation through a reconstruction of the behavior of the primitive society after the hunt and the consumption of the hunted game. The remaining bones were laid out in the shape of the body and ceremonially conjured up. In this way, the primitive had hallucinated the game, which is vital for him, as something to be awakened and resurrected from the conjured bones in the next hunting encounter. Like Walter Burkert , La Barre sees the origins of religion in this act.
Brain mass as fuel
According to La Barre, primitive thinking held bone marrow, nerve / brain matter and seminal fluid to be the same matter because of their superficial similarity. The main source of this "fuel" was the brain mass; outgoing semen was literally understood as - via the spine - outflow of a limited reservoir. For the primitive, the special fertility of the head due to the mass of the brain was an image of the cosmic fertility of sun, rain and thunderstorms.
Reasons for head hunting
Fire, light, lightning and bone marrow / brain matter / semen were conceived as aspects of the same sacred male mystery. The fertility of people, animals or fields therefore z. B. by the collection of severed human heads (semen containers ...) can be multiplied. Almost every prehistoric society, La Barre shows, had to do with headhunting (among other things, he refers here to the finds in the Ofnet caves ). Fat marrow and bones were the right sacrifices for the immortal spirits, the eternal gods (many corresponding passages in the Odyssey ).
Means to immortality
Immortality was assured through different ways of withholding "fuel". The most astonishing variant is the self-castration , which was common in antiquity - e.g. B. the church father Origen - which was understood not as emasculation, but as a method to keep the semen as the epitome of the immortality imagined as male.
Secret of masculinity
According to the superstition reconstructed by La Barre, adult masculinity is not due to a natural development, but must be administered through special procedures, including homosexual acts. Manhood is excreted through semen in any form of ejaculation; Masculinity can be given / administered in this way. Loss of masculinity, power, and ultimately life itself is caused by the "wasting" of life force, which is limited capital.
Penetrance of superstition
La Barre shows how this conviction has been irrefutable for many thousands of years all over the world - in Africa, Asia, America and Europe - although it does not correspond to reality in any point. In his first small-child encounter with overpowering people and objects, La Barre believes that humans - especially in emotional distress - interpret the world in a considerably wrong way. Such misinterpretations would then often have an alarmingly long life, in adults mostly in the form of neuroses or psychoses .
Unexpected expansion
Ironically, even the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association was still discussing masturbation in Stone Age terms at the beginning of the century . Even Freud did not rule out the possibility of masculinity being lost in this way.
literature
- Weston La Barre: Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality , Columbia University Press, 1984, ISBN 0231059612
swell
- ^ Protocols of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association , Volume 3