Chapter 8

Infanticide, Child Rape and War in Early States

The progress accomplished when moving from tribes to early states based upon more complex non-kinship political systems—splendidly documented by Eli Sagan in his book At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State1—was the result of improvements in childrearing that moved beyond the tribal abandoning childrearing mode described in the previous chapter to the more maternal domination-centered childrearing mode of antiquity. Mothers in early states became more trapped into limited areas in their homes with other females (the gynarchy) and fathers had little to do with their families. As historians have concluded: “In antiquity, women lived shut away. They rarely showed themselves in public [but] stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with their husbands….They never spent their days together.”2 Xenophon reports that the women and children were “separated from the men’s quarters by a bolted door,”3 where the men “dined and entertained male guests,” especially the young boys they used in sexual intercourse in preference to their wives. Thus Herodotus could admit that “a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women.”4 It was mainly the women of the gynarchy in every early state who determined the child’s personality through infanticide, incest, torture and domination, so early families are termed by historians as matrifamilies: “The family in Egypt was matriarchal. The most important person in the family was not the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the ‘Ruler of the House.’”5 Right up to the Reformation it was common that “a boy until seventeen should sleep in the same bed as his mother,”6 so that maternal incest was common. The result of this new family arrangement was that mothers, grandmothers and aunts became all-powerful in the family, taking out their own enormous frustrations and abandonments by their husbands and their huge responsibilities for feeding and clothing their families by routinely killing their newborn, dominating them and calling them “sinful, greedy beasts” for needing them,7 tying them up in tight swaddling bands, battering and torturing them, handing them over to cruel nurses and adoptive parents for daily care, and giving them to neighboring men and teachers to rape. It is therefore not surprising to discover that after living millions of years under tribal kinships these earliest states could only begin to organize their political systems by repeating their dominating, sadistic childrearing practices, whereby sovereigns were all-powerful delegates of Killer Goddesses, often practicing ritual human sacrifice of children, as of the infants sacrificed to goddesses in megalithic temples. The “wandering spirits” of tribal inner voice alters became organized into the sadistic gods of sacrificial states, and people owed their allegiance beyond kinship ties to rulers and priests in central cities where the Killer Mother goddess ritually slaughtered and ate people to energize Herself.8 The result was an early state that devoted most of its energies to sacrificial wars whose purpose is not just to kill others but also to destroy one’s own warriors and resources in endless suicidal battles. Borrowing from James Masterson’s list of borderline personalities,9 I have described the psychoclass of antiquity as “a narcissistic personality, warding off their sense of an empty self by fusing with the harsh attacking parent inner alter and forming a grandiose self that is exploitative, distrustful, ruthless and lacking in empathy, preoccupied with fantasies of power needed to defend against their weak sense of self.”10



ROUTINE INFANTICIDE AND CHILD SACRIFICE IN EARLY STATES

Clinical studies of violent mothers show the reason mothers are sadistic toward their children is that they have internalized their own mothers, and fear that the very act of having a child is “the most forbidden act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense,” bringing with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution.11 Infanticidal mothers fear punishment by their own mothers for daring to have a baby, so “to save herself she must disown motherhood by destroying the child.”12 Mothers in antiquity continuously hallucinated female demons (Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa) who were inner maternal alters that were “so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their blood… So fearful were they of these inner Killer Mothers that they would wear amulets to protect them from Lilith, the child killer, and would write on the wall of the birth room: ‘Out Lilith!’”13 Often first-born babies were routinely sacrificed to the avenging goddess. Hippocrates said that Greeks often experienced “convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions” and physicians were expected to treat the possessions and hallucinations of their dissociated personalities.14 People in antiquity regularly talked to their inner alternate personalities, which were given names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, fradie, etor, noos, ate, and so on. Medea says she did not kill her children, her thumos forced her to kill them.15 Dragon Mothers are worshipped by all early states—from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were called “Terrible Mothers” by their worshippers, and were seen as cruel, jealous and unjust: “her glance brings death, her will is supreme.”16 Even early Hebrews worshipped a mother goddess, Asherah, who, along with Lilith, “roamed the world in search of children to eat, rape, and kill.”17 Statues of bloodthirsty goddesses were set up in ziggurats and temples all over the world, fed, talked to and heard to speak their sacrificial demands. Often women would become so possessed by their Killer Mother alters that, as Euripides describes them during Dionysian rituals, “Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers clawed calves to pieces with bare hands, snatched children from their homes” and killed them.18 Girls were killed in far greater numbers than boys in early states, carrying out the instructions of Hilarion to his wife: “If it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, cast it out.”19 The result is that males often outnumbered females by over four to one in census figures from Greece and Rome to India and China; of the 600 families on Delphic inscriptions, just one percent reared two daughters.20 The cause is not economic. As Poseidippos stated, “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.” As one visitor to Hawaii reported, “there probably wasn’t a single mother who didn’t throw at least one of her children to the sharks, and wealthy royal families killed more than anyone.”21 If early societies wanted to reduce the number of children for economic reasons they would not have routinely forced girls to get married at age 12 and have lots of children. Early prophylactic devices made of various materials were actually available, but little used.22 What was lacking in early states wasn’t contraception devices, but parental love. Most children in antiquity would therefore have watched their mothers drown, suffocate and stab their siblings to death.23 Mothers often simply gave birth to their babies in the privy, smashed their heads in and treated the birth as an evacuation. Romans reported watching hundreds of mothers throwing their newborn into the Tiber every morning. So many infants were killed that even though mothers had eight or more babies the populations of antiquity regularly decreased. It is not surprising that the children who survived implanted terrifying Killer Mother alters in their amygdalan fear centers and then acted them out as adults in human sacrifice and war. Children playing in dung heaps, rivers and cess trenches would find hundreds of dead babies, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend” (Euripides).24 Those few exposed children who were rescued were raised as slaves or prostitutes. Physicians wrote works like Soranus’s “How to Recognize the Newborn that is Worth Rearing.”25 So many children were killed by their parents in early Greece and Rome that people were afraid their populations were declining, and passed laws limiting the infanticide of children of citizens, which, however, were rarely enforced. As Tertullian told Romans, “Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity.”26 Parents in early ancient states proudly sacrificed their children to avenging deities. As I have documented in detail: “Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions.”27 Maccoby’s book, The Sacred Executioner, portrays the entire history of religion as based upon a vengeful, bloodthirsty executioner with a child figure, from Isaac to Christ, being killed for the sins of others.28 Mass burials of thousands of sacrificed infants have been discovered in early states from Germany and France to Carthage, where archaeologists found one cemetery filled with over 20,000 urns containing bones of children sacrificed by their parents, who would kill them if the gods would grant the parents a favor—like if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely.29 As Quintilian said, “To put one’s own children to death is at times the noblest of deeds.”30 Suetonius said the Roman Senate “decreed that no male born that year should be reared” in order to appease the gods.31 As Poseipippus wrote, “girls are always exposed, even by the well-off.”32 Infant skulls split by an ax have been found at religious sites from Stonehenge to Jericho, early Arabians sacrificed their infants to “the Mothers,” Aztecs ripped out the hearts of their children and ate them, in India children were sacrificed in quantity to goddesses well into the nineteenth century, and Mayans still sometimes sacrifice their children in the mountains to give them good luck in cocaine trade.33 The skin of the sacrificed children was considered so holy that in societies like the Maya and Aztecs the sacrificers flayed the skin and wore it to increase their strength.34 Sacrificial rituals always contain elements of the abusive childhood practice that engendered them. Aztec mothers would regularly pierce their children’s genitals and pull knotted cords through the wounds to cleanse them of sin; during sacrificial rituals, therefore, the genitals of the victim would be pierced during the sacrifice and the blood spread over the idol of the goddess.35 Sacrifices are always necessary whenever independence and success is achieved and the avenging Killer Mother goddess must be placated. Even when people built new buildings or bridges, little children were usually sealed in them alive as “foundation sacrifices” to ward off the avenging maternal spirits who resent the hubris of building the structure.36 Not even ancient Greeks could dispense with human sacrifices; early reports of burning and eating of children in human sacrifices were followed in classical Athens by the practice of keeping victims called Pharmakoi who were ritually stoned to death as scapegoats for the sins of others.37 CHILD RAPE AND GENITAL MUTILATION IN ANTIQUITY

Historians usually characterize the routine rape of children in early states as “love,” whether in their books they entitle Loving Boys,38 by calling the rape “pedophilia” (which translates as “love of children”), or by picturing the rape as an approved instance of “gay rights,” ignoring the fact that the boys are minors, not consenting adults. That children are not harmed by sexual relations with adults is the claim made by dozens of scholarly authors, forming a long tradition of “blaming children for their abuse, accusing children of fabricating stories of abuse” and “inspired by the admiration and gratitude of the victims” toward the abuser.39 Boys are depicted by scholars as being “lonely” and needing sex, “seductive,” and as “routinely fellating older men [but] not abused despite ingesting their elders’ semen but ritually initiated into manhood.”40 In antiquity, since “women were an alien and inferior species,”41 sex with wives was a rare duty engaged in mainly to provide offspring, and men were addicted to raping young children, both boys and girls, in order to prove their virility and dominance. Their rapes were almost always agreed to by their parents, who often pimped their children and slaves for a price, rented them out to neighbors as servants to be raped, sold their virgin daughters for marriage for fifty pieces of silver, gave their children to pedagogues for sexual use, made their children serve at their banquets so they could be raped after dinner, went to war in order to rape the children of enemies, and handed over their children to the brothels, bath-houses and temples that could be found in any city of antiquity.42 Physicians advocated the rape of children as a way to overcome depression and as a cure for venereal disease.43 Most political leaders kept children to rape, like Nero, who roamed about daily, raping boys who he found in the streets and in brothels.44 Some even used babies for fellatio, like Tiberius, who “taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had not yet been weaned…he set at fellatio.”45 Wealthy Romans kept large harems of both sexes to rape, saying with Martialis: “How pitiful, to be the owner of thirty girls and thirty boys and have only one cock.”46 As in most societies today, the rape began when the children were about seven years old;47 although the ideal age was 12–14, many of the images show them younger. Petronius depicts men raping a seven-year-old girl, with women happily clapping in a long line around the bed.48 Being raped was simply part of growing up. The word pais could mean any of the following: “child,” “sexual partner,” “son,” “daughter,” or “slave.”49 In early Egypt, where brothers were forced to marry and rape their sisters,50 in Babylon, where daughters were sold in rape auctions, in Germanic states, where boys were sometimes forced to marry older men, in Greece, Rome, and other European states and in India, China, and Japan where incestuous sex was common, all early states assumed boys and girls could be used as sexual partners.51 Rent-a-boy brothels were rife throughout antiquity.52 Parents taught their children that “the teacher’s thrusting his penis between his thighs or in his anus is the fee which the pupil pays for good teaching.”53 In Sparta and Crete, husbands sometimes didn’t move in with their wives when they got married; they slept in barracks and had sex with boys.54 Wives often complained that their husbands had too little sex with them because of the boys they normally raped. Martial describes a wife yelling: “Bumming a boy again! Don’t I have a rump as well?”55

Fig. 8-1 Zeus Carries Off Ganymede to Rape

56 As the Mahabharata says, “Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old.”57 That using children for sex was routine in the past should hardly be surprising, since the most accurate statistics we have for the United States today still indicate over half of girls and over a third of boys have been sexually molested as children.58 All kinds of rationalizations were given early marriage, as when Indian mothers married off their daughters at age seven because otherwise “the men of the family” might rape her “if she was left home alone for an hour.”59 Boys as well as girls were regularly masturbated and raped by mothers, fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins, described by one as “I rotated every night between my various uncles and my grandmother,” so that, as one Indian proverb has it, “For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousins nor father.”60 According to psychoanalysts who treat child rapists, children are assaulted as an attack of revenge against the mother, to show that they are in total control, to overcome a profound sense of emptiness and abandonment—as one boy rapist put it: “I want to hold him in my arms, control him, dominate him, show him I’m all-powerful.”61 The hairless boy who is raped represents the smooth maternal breast and the circumcised penis glans the nipple. Plutarch said boys should be taught about being raped to “put up with it; not as a pleasure, but as a duty.”62 In many early states, boys as young as six would be dressed up by their mothers as girls to make a living out of prostitution or to be raped by priests during religious rituals.63 Men could pick up boys to be raped at any barbershop, in any boy brothel, at the exit of any of the Roman games. Men regularly went into streets with “scissors to make a hole in the trousers of the boy and a small pillow to put in the boy’s mouth if he should scream.”64 Physicians were expected to provide lubricants for anal penetration of boys, and to repair the rectal tears that came from being raped.65 Rape laws in early societies were only concerned with “protection of bloodlines.”66 All other rape was legal, facilitated by the parents. Plutarch and others wrote essays on what was the best kind of person a father should give his son over for raping. Mothers, too, masturbated and had sex with their children, who shared their beds nightly, in order “to put them to sleep, “thus providing the basis for the worship of goddesses who were usually depicted as having incest with their sons.67 Extensive studies show in Japan, for instance, mothers today not only still commonly masturbate their children but also often have sex with their sons while the father is out having sex with other women, the mothers promising them they can have intercourse with them in return for good grades.68 Both mothers and nurses in early states were shown as routinely masturbating their children, “the boy ‘to make him manly’ [and] the girl ‘to make her sleep well.’”69 Since girls in antiquity married at around age 12 to men twice their age, and since their partners were chosen by their parents, it is obvious that “marriage” itself was really child rape. “It was not uncommon, since Greek girls married very early, for them to play with their dolls up to the time of their marriage.”As the Mahabharata says, “Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old.”That using children for sex was routine in the past should hardly be surprising, since the most accurate statistics we have for the United States today still indicate over half of girls and over a third of boys have been sexually molested as children.All kinds of rationalizations were given early marriage, as when Indian mothers married off their daughters at age seven because otherwise “the men of the family” might rape her “if she was left home alone for an hour.”Boys as well as girls were regularly masturbated and raped by mothers, fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins, described by one as “I rotated every night between my various uncles and my grandmother,” so that, as one Indian proverb has it, “For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousins nor father.”According to psychoanalysts who treat child rapists, children are assaulted as an attack of revenge against the mother, to show that they are in total control, to overcome a profound sense of emptiness and abandonment—as one boy rapist put it: “I want to hold him in my arms, control him, dominate him, show him I’m all-powerful.”The hairless boy who is raped represents the smooth maternal breast and the circumcised penis glans the nipple. Plutarch said boys should be taught about being raped to “put up with it; not as a pleasure, but as a duty.”In many early states, boys as young as six would be dressed up by their mothers as girls to make a living out of prostitution or to be raped by priests during religious rituals.Men could pick up boys to be raped at any barbershop, in any boy brothel, at the exit of any of the Roman games. Men regularly went into streets with “scissors to make a hole in the trousers of the boy and a small pillow to put in the boy’s mouth if he should scream.”Physicians were expected to provide lubricants for anal penetration of boys, and to repair the rectal tears that came from being raped.Rape laws in early societies were only concerned with “protection of bloodlines.”All other rape was legal, facilitated by the parents. Plutarch and others wrote essays on what was the best kind of person a father should give his son over for raping. Mothers, too, masturbated and had sex with their children, who shared their beds nightly, in order “to put them to sleep, “thus providing the basis for the worship of goddesses who were usually depicted as having incest with their sons.Extensive studies show in Japan, for instance, mothers today not only still commonly masturbate their children but also often have sex with their sons while the father is out having sex with other women, the mothers promising them they can have intercourse with them in return for good grades.Both mothers and nurses in early states were shown as routinely masturbating their children, “the boy ‘to make him manly’ [and] the girl ‘to make her sleep well.’” Since raped children are blamed for “being too sexual,” they had to be punished for being assaulted, since she was considered culpable, “too sexual.” Raped women in Babylon were bound and thrown into the river; raped women in Hebrew cultures were stoned to death at the city gates.70 Vives says: “I know many fathers have cut the throats of their daughters” if raped, and fathers of raped girls often put her up for sale.71 Both boys and girls were blamed for wanting to be raped, and both were genitally mutilated as punishment for their sinfulness, boys by having their foreskins perforated or cut off or by castration, girls by having their hymens, clitorises and labia chopped off. The mutilation of girls’ genitals was universally practiced in pre-modern states, from Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome to Africa, Middle America and China.72 Physicians from antiquity to early modern times have often reported they were unable to discover a hymen on any of the little girls they examined.73 Genital mutilation of both boys and girls began in pre-dynastic times—even mummies have been found missing their clitorises and labia—and recent surveys of Egyptian girls show 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practicing clitoridectomy.74 It is estimated that there still are still over 74 million sexually mutilated females today in nations where documentation exists.75 The rationalization for the mutilation is that girls were so sexual it was necessary “to release them from their bondage to sex,” that their clitorises were “male parts” might grow to be several feet long, and that it would “stop them from masturbating.” In Sudan, it is believed that “the clitoris could grow to the length of a goose’s neck until it dangles between the legs, in rivalry with the male’s penis, if it is not cut.”76 Circumcision of boys was also said to be needed for reducing masturbation. In Athens, where circumcision was avoided, infibulation was practiced, drilling two holes in the foreskin and closing it up with a ring.77 The mutilation of both girls and boys was performed around age six by the women of the family and was excruciatingly painful—the girls sometimes dying of complications, especially shock, since no anesthetic is used.78 The girls’ vaginal areas were usually sewn up after being mutilated, leaving only a small hole for urination, so that grooms had to cut open the vagina on their wedding night to have intercourse.79 The worst genital mutilation for boys was, of course, castration, which was practiced East and West both as a sacrificial rite to early goddesses (“Piles of freshly severed genitals lay beneath the altars in Egyptian temples”) and in order to prepare the boys for later rape by men. Eunuchs were popular for sexual use from Byzantium to Italy to China, with many areas famous as “eunuch factories,” and infants were often castrated “in the cradle” to be used in brothels. Parents who sent their boys to other households as servants, who were usually used sexually by them, often cut off their genitals and kept them in a jar.80 In the early Roman Empire “the castration of boys was a big business” used for raping by the aristocracy and by priests.81 The genital mutilation of boys is still so pervasive that some psychologists claim that little boys want their genitals cut—“because of an inborn vagina envy” (Bruno Bettleheim)—or because they are supposed to need to “feel grown up.”82 The wholesale mutilation of both boys’ and girls’ genitals is not considered as sadistic by historians, and its universality is never cited as a cause of the religions and state systems that have been founded upon it.83 Like infanticide and other widespread severe tortures of children in early states, both universal child rape and genital mutilation are assumed to have had no effect on the formation of the adult psyche, and are even described as “loving” since it reduces sexual desire and shows the child, as one historian put it, that “we love you, but we must rid you of your infantilisms.”84 LACK OF LOVE AND EMPATHY IN EARLY STATE FAMILIES

Given the universal rape and beating of females in antiquity, mothers were regularly postpartum depressed, and therefore lasting love and empathy in the gynarchy was not found. As Plutarch wrote: “Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the women’s quarters.”85 Dozens of studies on marriage in early states conclude that “the model for true love was not the relationship between husband and wife”86 and “conjugal love between husband and wife was considered ridiculous and impossible.”87 Homer’s word for “wife” damar, means “broken into submission.” In addition, fathers can nowhere be documented as feeling empathy for their children. Alan Valentine, examining 600 years of letters from fathers to sons without finding a single instance of evidence of warmth or empathy, concluded that fathers probably have written loving letters to their sons but that for some reason, he thinks, “happy fathers must have left no history.”88 Roman fathers often condemned their children to death if they did not approve of them.89 In fact, I have searched for five decades without success for any trace of lasting intimate family love between parent and child or between husband and wife in the family letters and diaries of early history. The family historian Edward Shorter agrees with me: “Men regarded their wives as baby-machines and treated them as one would treat any machine: mechanically and without affection.”90 Love poems written by men could display sexual feelings for boys and girls, but, as Ovid wrote in his Art of Love: “Love is a kind of war,” and in his repetitive affairs he proved it.91 “Ovid’s love object is a demanding, even a devouring, female, her suitor a temporarily infatuated fool.”92 Antony may have felt sexual attraction for Cleopatra, but his passion, like Caesar’s, was really “a calculated, even ruthless, political intrigue.”93 Plus, after Cleopatra slept with her lovers, she killed them.94 Marriage was as temporary as an affair. As Coontz’s book on ancient marriage puts it, “Switching marital partners sometimes took place with as little emotional turmoil as we might feel in switching phone companies.”95 The closest to married love antiquity portrayed were in a handful of novels wherein “marriage came to be perceived or at least imagined in the novel as a matter of private attachment rather than a function of civic identity,”96 with the emphasis on “imagined.” Sexual attractions were short-lived, since, as Hipponax put it, “There are only two happy days in man’s life with a woman: The day he marries her and the day he buries her.”97 Lasting, intimate love had no place in the decision to marry, since fathers decided who their fourteen-year-old daughters would marry, and kinship wealth was the main motivation.98 Lasting affection in “companionate marriage” was not found in Europe until the 17th century.99 From Egypt to China, multiple marriages were common in early states. Men say they split their relationship with women into three parts: “We keep prostitutes for pleasure, slave concubines for the daily care of our bodies, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children.”100 As Protogenes put it: “I deny that it is love you have felt for women and girls…there is only one genuine love, the love of boys [i.e., rape].”101 The men lived in separate sections of the home with their prostitutes, rarely visiting their wives, whom they feared as representatives of their own cruel, dominating mothers. Husbands spent their lives outside the family rooms, mainly raping boys and girls. Solon passed a law decreeing that “a man should consort with his wife not less than three times a month—not for pleasure surely, but as cities renew their agreements from time to time.102 Plutarch reports that “if a woman left the house in daylight she had to be chaperoned” to avoid rape.103 In Athens, “the given names of women were rarely or never used…a husband normally addressed his wife as ‘woman.’”104 A Roman was expelled from the Senate “because he had kissed his wife in front of his daughter—Plutarch admitted “everyone knew that it was disgraceful to kiss one’s wife in front of others.”105 Women rarely learned to read, since “He who teaches letters to his wife is giving poison to a snake.”106 Juvenal’s plays portray the fears of all men in early states, concluding that “A wife is a tyrant…Cruelty is natural to women: they torment their husbands, whip the housekeeper, and enjoy having slaves flogged almost to death…their sexual lusts are disgusting.”107 ABANDONING, TYING UP, STARVING, BEATING AND TORTURING CHILDREN

Mothers since antiquity who could afford to do so handed over their newborn to negligent, abusive wetnurses. Sometimes these were slaves—as Tacitus said, “At birth our children are handed over to some silly little Greek serving girl—but more often they were sent out and not seen for years.”108 The wetnurses were described as “vicious, slothful [and] indolent, guilty of leaving babies…unattended when helping with the harvest…falling into the fire and being attacked by animals, especially pigs…hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothes…rarely washed and living in their own feces and urine.”109 The wetnurse was usually required to kill her own baby in order to nurse the stranger—termed “a life for a life”—which was considered fair since “by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved.”110 Doctors reported newborn babies should only be fed two to three times a day so as not to grow up “a tyrant.” When babies cried a lot because they were starving, they were given beer, wine, liquor or even opium to quiet them; as one Egyptian papyrus tells parents about opium for infants: “It acts at once!”111 When fathers were in the room with infants, they were totally lacking in empathy, telling their wives “those breasts are mine” and threatening to go on a hunger strike if the mothers nursed their baby while they were around.

Fig. 8-2 Greek Infant Tied Up in Tight Bandages

112 The infant would be tied to a board with a rag stuffed into its mouth to stop its screaming, and often sharp objects like knives, needles, forks or nails were stuck between the bands “to protect against incubi.”113 Infants “strewed in their own excrement for days at a time,” the mothers often leaving them hung from a nail on the wall behind the hot oven while they worked, so while they were tied up (Plato said for their first two years) they were covered with excrement, their skin inflamed and covered with filthy ulcerations, almost to gangrene, so that if they were touched they would let out piercing cries.”114 In many areas of the world, beginning in early Egypt and continuing to modern European nations, the head was painfully molded to reshape it by putting another board on the forehead so as to squash the head into the angle formed by the boards.115 The newborn was tied up tightly in endless length of bandages, because if it were left free it was so full of the mother’s violent projections that it would “scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off , break its legs, and crawl about on all fours like an animal.”The infant would be tied to a board with a rag stuffed into its mouth to stop its screaming, and often sharp objects like knives, needles, forks or nails were stuck between the bands “to protect against incubi.”Infants “strewed in their own excrement for days at a time,” the mothers often leaving them hung from a nail on the wall behind the hot oven while they worked, so while they were tied up (Plato said for their first two years) they were covered with excrement, their skin inflamed and covered with filthy ulcerations, almost to gangrene, so that if they were touched they would let out piercing cries.”In many areas of the world, beginning in early Egypt and continuing to modern European nations, the head was painfully molded to reshape it by putting another board on the forehead so as to squash the head into the angle formed by the boards. Children in antiquity began being beaten in the womb, since pregnant mothers in the past were usually beaten by their husbands. Children could be stoned to death by their parents “if they were uncontrollable.” The Old Testament said if children curse their parents they “shall surely be put to death”116 and Philo wrote: “It is right that parents should rebuke their children, beat them, disgrace them and imprison them…If they still rebel, the law permits that they even be punished with death.”117 Seneca described the public floggings of children in Sparta, where it was considered patriotic to beat children to death in public squares. All children were believed to have devils in them, and a panoply of beating instruments were available for beating the devil out of them, from cat-o/-nine tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, and the discipline, a whip made of chains. Diaries are filled with mentions of “the dog-whip over the door,” “the razor-strap hanging on a nail” and “the carpet-beater in the corner” that were used for child beating. Assaults were inflicted “every morning, whether I deserved it or not, every day of my life” and there were even professional flagellants who could be hired to come in and whip the children “once a week, naughty or not.”118 To relieve the parents’ guilt, the child would be forced to ask to be beaten and sometimes made to kiss the beating instrument. Mothers are usually described by witnesses as being furious, out of control, “fierce and eager upon the child, striking, flinging, kicking it, as the usual manner is.”119 Most children in antiquity would have agreed with Xinophon who said he would “rather bear a wild beast’s brutality than that of his mother.”120 Mothers would dress up as monster dummies and terrorize their children, saying they were ghosts/Lamias who would eat them up.121 Ovid describes how children were often terrorized by saying they would at night be eaten by witches, strigae.122 When children went to school, parental beatings continued with increased ferocity, since beatings were considered by teachers as the basis for learning, and “fear is good for putting the child in the mood to hear and to understand. A child cannot quickly forget what he has learned in fear.”123 Scholars today continue to claim in their textbooks on childhood history that children who were battered in the past “grasped that practices that appear abusive today, such as repeated whippings, were motivated by love and a concern for their interests.”124

Fig. 8-3 Roman Children Being Beaten at School

125 Hardening practices began in infancy, including washing them into cold water and snow and making them sleep without blankets in cold bedrooms and putting them to bed wrapped in wet cold towels were widespread.126 Often the tortures are inflicted for religious group-fantasies, as when children were “baptized by being plunged into a large hole which had been made in the ice on the river….When the priest happened to let one of the children slip through his hands into the ice water, the father and mother were in an ecstasy of joy. The babe had been carried straight to heaven.”127 And sometimes the torture was inflicted for openly sexual reasons, as with the foot binding of Chinese girls that breaks her foot bones so that the foot becomes a vagina-substitute that men used for intercourse because they were afraid of female vaginas.128 Historical children from birth to adolescence were, as I have termed them, “poison containers” for adults, receptacles into which the adults can project disowned “Bad Self” alters for them to punish.



RELIGION, POLITICS AND WARS IN SACRIFICIAL EARLY STATES

The infanticides, tortures and worship of Killer Mothers in early states become repeated, as we have documented in Chapter 1, in the worship of warrior goddesses of antiquity. Mother goddesses all had son-lovers—from Inna and Tammuz to Isis and Osiris and Aphrodite and Adonis—who needed their sons simply for their phallus, castrating them to make herself fruitful.”129 Worshippers of the Magna Mater cult used to castrate themselves for the goddess, “wishing to be like child, the better to serve her…running through the city with severed organs and throwing them into any house.”130 Early civilizations worshipped what Jungians term “Dragon Mothers,” who were acknowledged by worshippers to be cruel and unjust: “her glance brings death, her will is supreme.”131 Even when male gods replaced goddesses in later antiquity, the goddesses were represented by the throne, from which the king derives his power: “the throne makes the king.”132 Early religions often betrayed the group-fantasy that the gods were less powerful than the goddesses,133 and goddesses continued to appear in such literary representations as Amazons who “threaten manhood and need to be subjugated and killed to prevent them from dominating us…In Athens, over 800 portrayals have survived of Greek heroes stabbing and clubbing Amazons to death.”134 The political structures of early states repeated the childhood maternal domination, with an authoritarian monarch ruling a bureaucracy of aristocratic courtiers, governors, priests and jailers and for the first time producing a “government full of rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, tyrannical politics and a vast priestly organization.”135 These early civilizations went beyond kinship to complex societies, whose loyalty to extremely violent monarchs is well documented by historians. But the degree to which these early societies are actually organized to achieve self-destructive aims is nowhere admitted. Goddesses need wars to “drink the blood of the victims who were formerly her children…Anat is filled with joy as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes.”136 Individuals in antiquity can be pictured as massively suicidal—Egyptians regularly talked about suicide to their “doubles,” their Ba, their self-destructive alters, making “suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no longer cope with the corpses”137—but the principle that all early states were organized for suicidal aims has, I believe, nowhere been acknowledged. When Homer depicts Ajax as saying “the thumos in my chest is zealous to fight” and has warriors constantly talking to the voices of their thumos, historians do not conclude that he was actually talking to a violent alternate personality embedded during early child abuse.138 When historians report that “when an Aztec captured an enemy, he called him ‘my beloved son’ and the captive answered, ‘my beloved father,’ then killed him,”139 there is no suspicion that actual early family relationships are being repeated. Nor are historians reminded of real mothers when they report that goddesses are said to “drink the blood of the victims who were formerly her children” and to be “filled with joy as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes” during wars.140 Other methods of assaulting children were universally used. Pouring scalding hot water (called “iron water”) over children, burning them on the neck with a hot iron, dropping burning candle wax upon them (called moxa in Japan), making them drink their own urine and pushing them into hot ovens are just some of the punishments that were widely used in all parts of the world to save children from the demons inside them.Hardening practices began in infancy, including washing them into cold water and snow and making them sleep without blankets in cold bedrooms and putting them to bed wrapped in wet cold towels were widespread.Often the tortures are inflicted for religious group-fantasies, as when children were “baptized by being plunged into a large hole which had been made in the ice on the river….When the priest happened to let one of the children slip through his hands into the ice water, the father and mother were in an ecstasy of joy. The babe had been carried straight to heaven.”And sometimes the torture was inflicted for openly sexual reasons, as with the foot binding of Chinese girls that breaks her foot bones so that the foot becomes a vagina-substitute that men used for intercourse because they were afraid of female vaginas.Historical children from birth to adolescence were, as I have termed them, “poison containers” for adults, receptacles into which the adults can project disowned “Bad Self” alters for them to punish.The infanticides, tortures and worship of Killer Mothers in early states become repeated, as we have documented in Chapter 1, in the worship of warrior goddesses of antiquity. Mother goddesses all had son-lovers—from Inna and Tammuz to Isis and Osiris and Aphrodite and Adonis—who needed their sons simply for their phallus, castrating them to make herself fruitful.”Worshippers of the Magna Mater cult used to castrate themselves for the goddess, “wishing to be like child, the better to serve her…running through the city with severed organs and throwing them into any house.”Early civilizations worshipped what Jungians term “Dragon Mothers,” who were acknowledged by worshippers to be cruel and unjust: “her glance brings death, her will is supreme.”Even when male gods replaced goddesses in later antiquity, the goddesses were represented by the throne, from which the king derives his power: “the throne makes the king.”Early religions often betrayed the group-fantasy that the gods were less powerful than the goddesses,and goddesses continued to appear in such literary representations as Amazons who “threaten manhood and need to be subjugated and killed to prevent them from dominating us…In Athens, over 800 portrayals have survived of Greek heroes stabbing and clubbing Amazons to death.”The political structures of early states repeated the childhood maternal domination, with an authoritarian monarch ruling a bureaucracy of aristocratic courtiers, governors, priests and jailers and for the first time producing a “government full of rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, tyrannical politics and a vast priestly organization.”These early civilizations went beyond kinship to complex societies, whose loyalty to extremely violent monarchs is well documented by historians. But the degree to which these early societies are actually organized to achieve self-destructive aims is nowhere admitted. Goddesses need wars to “drink the blood of the victims who were formerly her children…Anat is filled with joy as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes.”Individuals in antiquity can be pictured as massively suicidal—Egyptians regularly talked about suicide to their “doubles,” their Ba, their self-destructive alters, making “suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no longer cope with the corpses”—but the principle that all early states were organized for suicidal aims has, I believe, nowhere been acknowledged. When Homer depicts Ajax as saying “the thumos in my chest is zealous to fight” and has warriors constantly talking to the voices of their thumos, historians do not conclude that he was actually talking to a violent alternate personality embedded during early child abuse.When historians report that “when an Aztec captured an enemy, he called him ‘my beloved son’ and the captive answered, ‘my beloved father,’ then killed him,”there is no suspicion that actual early family relationships are being repeated. Nor are historians reminded of real mothers when they report that goddesses are said to “drink the blood of the victims who were formerly her children” and to be “filled with joy as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes” during wars. Besides having enormous homicide and suicide rates, early states were mainly organized to dominate and kill their own people as well as neighbors, and the wars they engaged in were not in fact for more resources they could use to enrich their lives but for “tribute” like gold and other useless metals that would be kept in central cities by their elites “as signs of submission.” Azar Gat’s comprehensive book on War in Human Civilization makes clear that all early states transformed advanced tribes into genocidal warrior societies whose purpose was not to enrich themselves but to wipe out neighbors.141 These civilizations—“all with standing armies, all expansionist, all engaged in chronic interstate warfare”142—began with religious human sacrifice, found in the remains of Egypt, Greece and Rome and in early states like the Aztec. Carrasco’s excellent book on the Aztec empire is entitled “City of Sacrifice,” and convincingly describes how the entire Aztec civilization is run in order to carry out continuous sacrifices of children and adults and of tributes given to the Killer Goddess in the ceremonial center of Mexico City—which he calls “a performance space,” dedicated solely to the meaningless destruction of people and goods.143 The conquest of vast areas of nearby states was, he says, accomplished solely to feed the “Queen of the Central City,” who must constantly drink the blood of victims or die, and he concludes all her temples were nothing but “simple religious images of total destruction.”144 No slaves were taken in Aztec wars; all were sacrificed.145 The huge skull racks of victims were called “the mainstay of the city,” and the sacrificial rituals began with acting out the reason for the goddess being so murderous—her children were said to be furious with her for being pregnant, so they decided that “we must kill our mother” by becoming warriors, first killing a young girl who represented the goddess, flaying her skin and then donning it to get her power so as to be able to kill others.146 Every element of the masochistic sacrificial rituals repeated the violence inflicted upon Aztec children, beginning with the piercing their ears, tongues and genitals in cradles and continuing to their brutal torture as young children.147 The tribute captured was not goods that could be used by the people but consisted of items like precious metals, stones and feathers which might adorn the maternal goddess. As Anderson sums up Aztec culture: “The trinity of war, sacrifice and cannibalism made up a combined religious service…the Aztec state existed solely to produce sacrificial victims.”148 Although historians admit that slashing open the throats of infants and beheading young women had little economic value to the conquering nations, they nonetheless are reluctant to admit that the personal violence and all-consuming wars of early nations were clinically paranoid and were self-destructive in motivation. Few historians have concluded that the costs of conquering new territories exceeded the rewards they bothered to gain from them.149 Warriors who kill and are killed in constant battles with neighbors only end up murdering and raping them, for glory, not for profit, with the ubiquitous raping during wars being a repetition of the routine rape they experienced as children. Similarly, when Herodotus tells how during wars soldiers “no sooner got possession of a town than they chose out all the best favored boys and made them eunuchs,” this simply repeated the regular castration and then anal raping of little boys in their own societies.150 Spartans were not the only warriors who carried young boys into battles with them for sexual use. In addition, the widespread practice during antiquity of collecting thousands of penises as trophies during battles was derived from memories of childhood raping and castration.151 Most early wars were fought solely for the grandiosity of the state leader and for provoking further wars. As Maccoby puts it: “Men elect an all-powerful leader in their battle against the power of the women; the more they subordinate themselves to this leader, the more powerful they are in the battle.”152 When Rome fought the Punic Wars with Carthage they lost over a third of their population and gained nothing of value, utterly exterminating the Carthaginians.153 Aztec armies would even fight “Flower Wars” where they would split into smaller groups and kill their own fellow soldiers in order to feed the goddess.154 Mothers of the time regularly admitted they were looking forward to their sons being killed in battle. As Plutarch noted, Spartan mothers had a saying, “I accept gladly the death of my sons. [Admitting as she buried her son] I bore him that he may die for Sparta.”155 Mothers in ancient states often accompanied their sons into battle, publicly deriding those who had not yet killed anyone.156 Soldiers who panicked were often beaten to death by their comrades.157 Even when there was no enemy to fight, leaders would send out raiding expeditions “to keep the men sharp.”158 Sacrifice of life, not victory, ruled in battle—generals would even “offer their lives to the gods of the Underworld by charging the enemy and throwing himself onto their weapons,” a sacrificial ritual called devotio.159 As Schumpeter summarized the paranoia of the Roman Empire: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger…When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted….Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.”160 Leaders often engaged in suicidal wars they admitted they knew they would lose, as when Pericles warned the victorious Athenians “not to make any new conquests” against Sparta, but they attacked anyway, provoking them into an alliance with Persia, defeating Athens.161 Caesar spent all the economic surplus of Rome on endless, useless wars with the millions of citizens of Germania and Gaul, moved solely by schizoid grandiosity. Caesar started the suicidal butchery of the Roman Civil Wars solely to save his “honor.” Warriors sometimes fought bare-chested162 or even fully naked,163 as though they were little children again—a purely suicidal practice. Those who impulsively engaged in duels for personal glory without authorization were often ordered to be killed by their commanders.164 When soldiers returned from battles with trophies (spolia), they displayed them on the walls of their home, adding to their grandiosity but otherwise quite useless to their families.165 Even when enemies were captured and returned to the central city as slaves, they ended up producing far less goods than if the city had traded economically with them. Indeed, the entire slave system of antiquity was economically self-destructive—slave owners spent most of their time seeing to it that their slaves didn’t rape their daughters or steal their goods or run away166—so productive innovations in farming and other professions were few, resulting in very low economic output in antiquity, where “improvement in land use were marginal and methods of tillage remained unchanged” for centuries because land owners didn’t care about reducing the work load of their slaves.167 They couldn’t even invent the stirrup until the 4th century A.D., and improvements in ploughs had to wait until even later. That “growth panic” triumphed over progress and individuation in ancient societies is obvious to anyone admitting their dismal lack of economic innovation, their impoverishing of both enemies and friends, and their grandiose devotion to endless slaughter.168