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II: Nature
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// Mature Fraternity comes into being after the sons are expelled from the family; when they form their own club, in the wilderness, away from home, away from women. The brotherhood is a substitute family, a substitute woman— alma mater. In puberty rites the boys are detached from their mothers, and given a new mother by initiation. In one of the Chinese secret societies in Singapore the oath was, "I swear that I shall know neither father nor mother, nor brother nor sister, nor wife nor child, but the brotherhood alone." "And one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said, Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward 32 his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren !" Habere non potest Deum patrem, qui ecclesiam non habet matrem. Heckethorn, Secret Societies, II, 132. Matthew XII, 47-50. Cyprian quoted in Willis, St. Augustine and the Donatist Controversy, g6n. Initiation is rebirth. By rebirth birth from one's "real" mother is nullified. At the marriage in Cana "the mother of Jesus said unto him, They have no wine. And Jesus said unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee?" By being born again, the original sin is canceled. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Birth from the mother is nullified, and a new spiritual mother found. John II, 3-4; III 3. Cf. Reik, "Puberty Rites of Savages," 145-146. Who is my real mother? It is a political question. The two sons of King Tarquin, and Brutus, the future Liberator , were on a mission to the Delphic Oracle. "A desire sprang up in the hearts of the youths to find out which one of them should be king at Rome. From the depths of the cavern this answer, they say, was returned. 'The highest power at Rome shall be his, young men, who shall be first among you to kiss his mother.' The two sons of Tarquin gave orders that the incident should be kept strictly secret, and, as between themselves, they cast lots to determine which should be the first, upon their return to Rome, to give their mother a kiss. The Liberator thought the Pythian utterance had another meaning: pretending to stumble, he fell and touched his lips to the earth, regarding her as the common mother of all mortals." Livy, I, 36. 33 Nature [100.26.135.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:59 GMT) In Plato's Republic the fraternity of guardians are to think of the land they dwell in as mother and nurse. They are to think of their former experience as a dream: "in reality they were the whole time down inside the earth, being fostered and moulded while their arms and all their equipment were being fashioned also; and at last, when they were complete, the earth sent them up from her womb into the light of day." Men of the golden age were earth-born and not born of human parents: a race formed from men dead and laid in earth, made new in that womb and thence returning to life once more, in a resurrection of the dead. Plato, Republic, III, 414; cf. Politicus, 269-272. Cf. Bachofen, Das MuUerrecht, 258. As in the "Marseillaise": s'ils tombent, nos jeunes heros, la terre en produit de nouveaux— "Ma m&re, c'est la Republique," says a character in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables; a motto for Swinburne, in one song to the Earth Mother, who is Maiden most beautiful, mother most bountiful, lady of lands, Queen and republican— She is our real mother: Hast thou known how I fashioned thee, Child, underground? Swinburne, "Song of the Standard," "Hertha"; cf. "Litany of Nations," "Mater Dolorosa," "Mater Triumphalis." The fraternity is itself the mother. "The journey of initiation is ended. It goes from the mothers to the mothers . Although in reality the young man is henceforth to be 34 LOVE'S 'BODY separated from the mother, symbolically he is brought back to her. . . . The young man is put into a hole and reborn —this time under the auspices of his malemothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother...