Wetiko – The Greatest Epidemic Known to Humanity – by Paul Levy

Translated from English: Yasmine Bergner

Opening image: Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1850

In the book Columbus and Other Cannibals, the indigenous author Jack D. Forbes [1] vitally investigates a psychological disease affecting human behavior that is destructive to itself, which the indigenous people of the American continent felt on their own flesh for years. After reading the book, it was clear to me that it describes the same psycho-spiritual illness of the mind that I wrote about in my book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection on Our Collective Psychosis. In it, I presented the idea that since the dawn of human history, our species has fallen victim to a collective psychosis, which I call “malignant egophrenia.” Speaking about this same mental epidemic, Forbes writes: “For several thousand years, human beings have suffered from an epidemic. A disease more terrible than leprosy, worse than malaria, harder than smallpox” [2]. Indigenous cultures have identified this same mental virus [3], which I call malignant egophrenia, for many hundreds of years. They call it “Wetiko” – a term from the Cree tribe referring to a negative person or entity that imposes terror on others. Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, says that “tragically, human history in the last 2000 years tells the story of the epidemiology of the Wetiko disease” [4].

Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a “psychosis” in the true sense of the word, as it is a disease of the spirit/mind. Although we use different names, Forbes and I are trying to point to the same illness of the mind which lies at the root of humanity’s inhuman behavior toward itself.

As we come to investigate the Wetiko entity, we must awaken its spirit and enter into a relationship with it, just as if we were performing a magical ritual. We must contemplate and engage with Wetiko in the most objective way possible, just as if it existed outside of ourselves. Because of its unique psychological origin, the epidemiology of Wetiko is very different from any other disease. A fundamental challenge to our investigation of the Wetiko virus is the fact that it revolves within the mind, which is itself the instrument we use for our investigation. Referring to the paradox inherent in this, Forbes says he aspires to study the disease from a perspective that is as free as possible from assumptions created by the disease we are studying [5]. If we are not aware of the viewpoint from which we are examining the Wetiko virus, our investigation will be infected by the virus itself and will cloud the sharpness of vision needed to begin the healing process. We must learn how Wetiko embodies itself in others and how it embodies itself within us; this will allow us to see it with greater objectivity. Observing the ways in which the psychological disease manifests in the world is a mirror through which we can potentially recognize the same disease rising subjectively from within our own consciousness.

Hans Ulrich

In awakening an entity like Wetiko, if we want to examine it as objectively as possible, we must hermetically seal it within an alchemical vessel. This ensures that its mercurial spirit does not evaporate back into the hidden unconscious, where it would act upon us and through us. Jung consistently emphasized the importance of developing a vessel designed to contain disturbing spirits such as Wetiko. Jung suggests shifting the disturbing spirit from its place and placing it within a vessel located at a distance between the individual and their neighbor. “For the sake of humanity, we must build such vessels where we can place all this vile poison. Because it must always exist somewhere. Not to trap it, to deny its existence, gives it the best chance to grow” [6].

Wetiko is an elusive entity, and it is very challenging to focus the gaze on its essence, yet it is very important to analyze it into its components. Unlike a physiological virus, the Wetiko virus cannot be isolated materially, but its unique characteristics can be discerned and discovered through the extraordinary actions of the mind that is under its spell. Not acknowledging the existence of the Wetiko germ—to say that “it does not exist”—allows the mental infection to manifest in action (acting out) without restraint. Being “always everywhere” means being non-local, always around, even potentially and especially within ourselves. By awakening the spirit of Wetiko, we simultaneously create (through the personal investigation itself) the vessel we need to study the germ and understand what we are actually dealing with. We learn how it operates in the world, in others, and subjectively—within ourselves. In order to complete the circle in this exercise/exorcism [7] of observation, we must homeopathically return the gaze inward toward ourselves. Like in a dream where the inside is the outside, we can understand that the Wetiko virus we observed “in the outside world,” outside of ourselves, is a reflection and exists in interaction with this process within ourselves. Within the symptomatology of the Wetiko virus, deep insight is encoded, something essential that we must know.

A Disease of Culture
Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a disease of culture, or of its absence. To quote Forbes loosely: “The development of the Wetiko disease strikingly parallels the rise of civilization through Western eyes; this is not a coincidence” [8]. The nature of industrial society is unsustainable and requires more and more violence in order to sustain and maintain it. The true meaning of society is, simply, not to kill people. Referring to the lack of culture in modern society, Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization. His answer was, “I think it would be a good idea.” It makes sense that indigenous peoples knew of the existence of malignant egophrenia, through which they were oppressed, but at least in the beginning, they were not under the bewitching influence of Western culture. Living under the control of modern culture can feel as though something foreign to our nature is being forced upon us, or as if we are living in occupied territory. Modern culture suffers from a primarily one-sided dominance of rationality, of the intellectual mind. A one-sidedness that ostensibly disconnects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. As a result of its dissociation from the holistic whole, the Wetiko disease is a disorder of the order of humanity and the natural world. It is a disease that spreads aggression and can ignite violence among living creatures. The Wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity found at the heart of human nature. This “mental virus,” this system failure, informs and illustrates the madness of the so-called society, which in a feedback loop perpetuates and feeds the madness within itself.

Forbes continues: “This disease, this (cannibalistic) psychosis called Wetiko, is the disease of the most epidemic magnitude known to man” [9]. We, as a human species, are in the midst of a widespread mental epidemic. A contagious collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of the human mind since the dawn of days. Like a fractal, Wetiko operates in multiple dimensions simultaneously: in the intra-personal dimension (within individuals), the inter-personal dimension (between individuals), and the collective dimension (as a human species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’ words, is “the consumption of the life of the other for personal gain” [10]. Those infected with the Wetiko virus, like cannibals, consume the life force of the other—human and non-human—for personal purposes or profit, and do so without giving anything in return from their own lives. One example that symbolizes the madness of collective self-destruction is the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by oil companies, the lungs of planet Earth. This is a living example that strikingly illustrates what we are doing to ourselves. Another tangible example that symbolically embodies the Wetiko complex in action is the genetically engineered sterile seeds of the Monsanto corporation, which are prevented from reproducing into a second generation of seeds and force farmers to buy new seeds from the corporation again and again for the coming year’s harvest. This agricultural terrorism makes it very difficult for small farmers to survive and has ignited a wave of suicides among farmers, while Monsanto corporation only grows and steadily enriches itself in the process.

Forbes writes: “The compulsive/trampling characteristic of Wetiko is the fact that it consumes other human beings, or in other words, it is a kind of predator and cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease” [11]. Predators, Wetiko entities that embody themselves overwhelmingly, are not in contact with their humanity, and therefore are unable to see humanity in others. Instead, they treat others as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. Individuals fully infected with Wetiko psychosis consume the lives of others physically, emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically—beyond the material body and physical assets—to the level of meaning itself. Wetiko victims are the anti-artists of our culture. They embody the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist who creates life-affirming meaning and enriches the world without robbing others (see my article: The Artist as World Healer), Wetiko consumes and takes without giving anything in return, steadily depleting and emptying the world of its resources.

We are currently in the midst of the greatest epidemic disease known to man (see my article: Diagnosis: Mental Epidemic). Many of us are not aware of this, because our collective madness is so widespread that it has undergone “normalization.” Our collective madness has become transparent to us, while we see and interpret the world through it, making our madness invisible, and inadvertently conspiring with the collective psychosis that sows destruction and death on our planet. Being “transparent,” our madness is far beyond visibility; it is invisible. Our collective psychosis is invisible to us because it expresses itself both in the way we observe and in the way we are conditioned not to observe. Thanks to its cloak of invisibility, we fail to notice our madness, a mental blindness that makes us partners in creating our madness.

Many of us are unable to grasp the scale of the evil to which Wetiko-filled entities have fallen victim and what they are capable of. Our inability to imagine the evil that exists potentially in humanity is a direct result of a lack of intimacy with the potential for evil that exists within us, which allows the cruelty of Wetiko to rule without restraint in our world (see my article: Shedding Light on Evil). Through our mental blindness, we become partners in spreading the evil of Wetiko psychosis, a systemic evil whose depth reaches far beyond the ability of words to describe. Evil paralyzes our ability to verbalize the experience and creates an ostensibly unbridgeable gap between language and the event described. In finding the place where language fails, we discover and create a new language, a universal language that transcends language itself—a language known as art.

A Parasite of a Different Order
When people are infected with the Wetiko virus, Forbes writes, they become the “hosts” of the Wetiko parasite [12]. The Wetiko virus is a kind of mental “worm,” a parasite of consciousness. Similar to computer viruses or malware infecting and programming a computer to destroy itself, a consciousness virus like Wetiko can program the human biological computer to think, believe, and behave in ways that result in self-destruction. Wetiko is a contagious mental pathogen that sneaks thought-forms into our consciousness that activate and feed it, and eventually kill the host (us). The pathogen does not want to kill us too quickly, because in order to successfully carry out its agenda, to reproduce and spread itself in space, it must allow the host to live long enough to spread the virus. If the host dies too soon, the virus will be evicted prematurely and will suffer the inconvenience of finding a new home.

Like a cancer of the mind that sends out metastases, in Wetiko disease, a pathological part of the mind attaches and incorporates all healthy parts to itself to serve its pathology. The personality reorganizes a coherent external display around the pathogenic core, hiding the internal dysfunction and making it very difficult to identify. In this military coup of the mind, the Wetiko virus displaces the personality and takes it over, and it becomes its puppet. Like a parasite, the Wetiko virus can take over the free will of an animal more developed than itself, thereby making it a servant of its malicious agenda. Once the parasite is well-rooted within the mind, the main command coordinating the person’s behavior comes directly from the disease, which is now the one pulling the strings. Just as a person infected with the rabies virus will resist drinking water that could wash away the infection, a person infected with the Wetiko virus will refuse any help that could assist them in getting rid of the disease. Wetiko patients are phobic toward the light of truth, and they avoid it like the disease itself. In advanced stages, this process takes over the person completely until we can honestly say that the person “is not really there,” but rather an empty shell functioning through what looks like a human being. The person now identifies completely with their mask, their persona, but it seems as if there is no one behind the mask.

Hans Ulrich

A Foreign Intrusion
The spiritual teacher Don Juan, in Carlos Castaneda’s books, speaks in his own language about Wetiko. He says that the ancient shamans made it clear that this is “the subject of subjects” [13]. Don Juan explains: “We have a life partner… We have a predator that came from the depths of the universe and took control of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. This predator is our ruler” [14]. It seems this is the same state of affairs described in the New Testament, when in the Gospel according to John, the Devil is referred to as the “ruler of this world” (14:30; 16:11). Paul speaks of the Devil as the “god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Gnostic Gospel of Philip says that the root of evil originated from within us, implying in fact that if we do not recognize the evil, “it rules over us, we are its slaves, and it takes us captive” (II, 3, 83.5-30). Speaking of the predator, Don Juan continues: “It has made us submissive, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we do not do so” [15]. It is impressive how Don Juan explains how the influence of Wetiko is expressed in our society, which is becoming increasingly militaristic. Our freedoms and rights are being taken away from us, just as if there is a latent and internal unmanifested archetypal pattern within the human mind that embodies itself in and shows itself through the external world. To quote Don Juan: “We are indeed prisoners! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico” [16]. Don Juan refers to an “energetic fact,” in the sense that we can all connect to it, “something” within us that prevents us from expressing our inner genius creativity and realizing our full potential. These “predators” are “time thieves,” stealing the precious hours of our lives, as if we are wage slaves on a prison planet “doing time.” Deepening his description of these “predators,” Don Juan continues: “They gave us their mind, which became our mind” [18]. Just as if they are in “competition” with us to share a piece of our mind. The predator changes shape and is fashioned according to our shape, and if we are not aware of its disguise, we will identify with its intrusive thought-forms as if they were ours and act upon them. We will mistakenly think that we are acting according to our own impulses, with the best of intentions. This predator, Don Juan continues, “fears every moment that its moves will be discovered and food will be withheld from it” [19].

The Wetiko predator is driven by an internal and compulsive necessity born out of terror that continues to feed itself out of a desire to delay its expected death. Don Juan continues: “Through the mind, which is ultimately their mind, the predators insert into human beings what is convenient for them (the predators)” [20], hiding themselves within our form; this predator penetrates under our skin, disguising itself beneath us, deluding us into recognizing the false version of ourselves (that is why the abbreviation of Malignant Egophrenia is “ME disease,” and it refers to the distortion of our identity—our sense of “I”). Instead of being in our power and in service to others, we become servants of the predator. Instead of recognizing our inner authority, and the creation of reality from our thoughts, we are formed by them, because the predator thinks for us and sits in our chair.

Remedios Varo

Speaking of the predator’s conspiracy, Don Juan says: “It offers something, agrees with its own premise, and makes you believe that you did something of value” [21], just as if there is a foreign presence within us, a metaphysical alien entity, invading subliminally into our consciousness until we identify with it completely and disconnect from our own consciousness. Don Juan refers to this state as a kind of “foreign installation,” as if an alien race had set up a station within our consciousness. This is what the Gnostics (“the knowers”) meant when they spoke of a foreign entity they called “Archons,” infiltrating and infiltrating into our consciousness [22] to the level that we are not aware that a foreign entity has taken control of our mind. We are recruited against our will to the dark agenda of the predator, inadvertently becoming its slaves. This internal state of war happening within the mind echoes and is reflected through the psychological moves and dark forces we witness in the external world. This disease is fed by our lack of awareness of it.

Vampires
Forbes writes: “Wetiko psychosis is a disease of the spirit that takes human beings down an ugly and heartless path… After all, Wetiko disease turns human beings into werewolves and vampires, creatures from the world of European nightmares and creatures from the Wetiko reality” [23]. Werewolves and vampires are shapeshifters, symbolic representations of the threatening potential existing in the heart of us all, which is liable to take over and embody itself in action as the archetypal “shadow,” returning us to a regressive state of mind of being like a predator or a sub-human creature. When these pre-human mental energies erupt into consciousness and are not mediated by the conscious, Jung writes: “They sweep away everything before them like a flood and turn human beings into creatures for whom the word ‘monsters’ is too good a word” [24].

Vampires, considered the darkest creature in the arsenal of evil, have drawn our imagination for many hundreds of years, because they represent a living process existing in the heart of the human mind. A vampire is not a human figure but a soulless creature, an entity that has lost its soul, and if it has not lost its soul, it has become “cursed,” which means the loss of a soul. Either way, something is missing. Isolated from the world, it has lost the connection with the part of itself that communicates with everything else. From its point of view, the world exists simply for its use. Although it has lost its heart and soul, the vampire has not lost its consciousness (although in a certain sense it has), since vampires are often endowed with a sharp intellect that hides their pathology and makes it hard for us to see it. This is similar to the way in which people in a deep state of trauma can be blessed with a brilliant mind, a gift that makes it easier for them to hide the scope of their trauma and makes it difficult to diagnose their illness. Instead of the vampire’s sharp mind being dedicated to developing inner insights into the illness and healing from it, it is dedicated to passing the illness along and spreading its dark art. As a kind of living-dead, the vampire is death taking the form of human life. The Wetiko virus is not, in the end, something alive, but a living form of death. Like a virus, Wetiko is “lifeless” matter. Because only within living creatures can viruses sustain “life-by-proxy.” A vampire is a kind of living-dead. Like a mature vampire, developed Wetiko entities have been stripped of their humanity and have become a conduit for the impersonal and transpersonal Wetiko virus to revolve and act through them. They have become a living portal, an opening torn into the three-dimensional fabric of space and time through which a multi-dimensional contagious virus spreads locally and non-locally in the field.

Lacking a soul dimension, Wetiko entities are efficient “machines,” dedicating themselves to the service of “the State, which [to quote Forbes] is itself a Wetiko entity that has taken over the mechanisms of power” [25].

A mature Wetiko becomes a robotic automaton, conditioned to react to reflexive stimulation. They become part of “the machine,” without spontaneity, creativity, originality, or free thinking. Wetiko entities undergo a process of dehumanization and lose contact with the sense of aesthetics and with the ability to appreciate the inherent beauty of life, becoming “an-aesthetic,” devoid of feeling and emotion for everything that is human. Messengers of a patriarchal, military, and authoritarian planetary “society,” the Wetiko germ spawns fascism and terror. To quote the great healer Wilhelm Reich: “Fascism is the vampire that attaches itself to the living body. The urge to kill gains absolute control” [26]. Fascism is the external collective political expression of the destructive inner landscape of an individual who has been oppressed and maimed by the authoritarian civilization of “the machine.”

Like a vampire, in a mature Wetiko entity “there is no one home,” and this is one of the reasons why, symbolically, vampires have no reflection in a mirror (which, from a mythological point of view, reflects back an image of the human soul). Mature Wetiko people are empty to the bone, so there is nothing that can be reflected. Internally, there is only an infinite void, a sponge that can never absorb, a devouring black hole that feeds on the universe. Their degenerate soul has been emptied of content like a hollow tree trunk emptied by mental termites. Mature Wetiko people are compulsively haunted by the unconscious in its destructive version, denying consciousness in a way that they are unable to see or experience themselves, which the philosopher Hannah Arendt argues is one of the main characteristics of evil. Devoid of the ability for self-observation, they have no access to the mechanism of the mind that allows this action. One of the reasons why we cannot see a vampire’s reflection in a mirror is because our inner unconscious vampire dims the reflection, and the meaning is that the ghost of the unacknowledged “shadow” of ourselves blocks our gaze.

A vampire casts no shadow. In order to cast a shadow, there must be a source of light. Inside a vampire, there is no light, only infinite darkness. Because it is not a living creature, a vampire has no inherent reality, no essence. Only an object with essential existence can produce a shadow. Vampires cannot cast a shadow because they are the living embodiment of the “shadow” archetype. A shadow cannot cast a shadow itself and is devoid of essence. There are certain advantages to a vampire not casting a shadow—it allows it to hide its true identity more easily, to move between shadows, to become invisible, and to lie in wait for people. The vampire, a shapeshifter and master of disguise and camouflage, can more easily seduce and mislead the innocent, just as a sugar-coated vampire traps us using our unconscious “shadow” and blind spots. In this sense, denying our “shadow” can lead to energetic vampirism. The vampire archetype is activated within us when we turn our back and deny our inner darkness and make it invisible to us. We fail to see vampires because we chose not to see the dark “vampiric” aspects within ourselves. Our unwillingness to see the “vampiric” qualities within ourselves blinds us to the “vampiric” traits in others.

In addition to the weak and defenseless, the vampire also seeks those who are on the verge of a quantum evolutionary leap in consciousness but have not yet managed to integrate their insights and “come out on the other side.” Such human beings are in a charged and sensitive state energetically. The openness of their heart and their vulnerability invites vampiric entities to covet and feed on the light of their expanding consciousness. The strategy of these predators is to divert our attention outward, thereby preventing us from recognizing our inner light, which would “kill” the vampire. If we hold up the mirror and reflect the madness projected onto us by the people suffering from it, we risk being the ones labeled “crazy.” If we manage to gain access to the light within us and try to share it with others, it is possible that non-local vampiric entities (what I previously called non-local demonic entities) which are not limited to three-dimensional existence and the laws of space and time will try, through their access to the non-local field, to block us by influencing other human beings to act against us. This process is liable to destroy us, unless we have the meta-awareness to see it in action—to have the skill to navigate our way wisely—and this will deepen our resilience and intent, deepen our covenant with the light of clarity, and strengthen our creative ability to broadcast our insights and cultivate compassion and openness of heart. It seems as though those non-local mental vampiric entities are the guardians of the threshold of evolution.

Just like vampires, mature Wetiko entities feel an intense thirst for the very thing they lack—the mystical essence of life, the “blood” of our soul. By coveting other human beings, Wetiko disease is a kind of mental “eating disorder,” where the damaged mind “consumes” other souls, and ultimately itself. Wetiko entities are a kind of “soul-eaters,” destroyed by the wildness of their ceaseless hunger, by their insatiable appetite. This vampiric feeding is an unnatural parody, a demonic reflection of the self-renewal of life. This unnatural internal process is projected onto us collectively by the consumer society we are part of, a culture that relentlessly fuels the flame of ceaseless craving, conditioning us to always want more. We are in a feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless void, as if we are starving. This violent process of obsessive/compulsive consumption is a mirror of a shared, deep, internal sense of spiritual hunger. The entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of uncontrolled Wetiko disease in action.

In vampiric lineage, self-replication is achieved through the family system (family of origin, or the human family). The legacy of abuse (physical, sexual, political, psychological, or spiritual) is passed between generations personally and collectively, steadily rolling between lives. The Wetiko virus passes along its broken logic and its distorted code into the bodymind of the other through the traumatic shattering of our wholeness. Our species suffers from an inherited collective PTSD, just as if it were under a curse.

High Risk of Contagion
Speaking of Wetiko, Forbes says: “They are not sane in the true sense of the word. They are mentally ill and, tragically, this mental illness they carry is contagious” [27]. Wetiko psychosis is, as mentioned, highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our collective unconscious. The pathways of contagion and spread do not move like a physical pathogen. This nomadic wandering germ moves in a “plasmatic” way, penetrating and feeding on our unconscious blind spots and strengthening them in a feedback loop, and thus spreading itself in the field non-locally. In Wetiko, there is a “code” or a certain logic that influences/infects consciousness in a way parallel to how the DNA of a virus passes and infects the cell. People who communicate the frequency of Wetiko align with each other through psychic resonance, which strengthens the shared consensus and maintains their distorted perception of reality. As they cooperate with their shared psychosis, groups of people gathered together by the unconscious could potentially become a socio-political force to be dealt with. When a group of people is in agreement, regardless of whether it is true or not, their alignment with each other creates a contagious magnetic force-field that is liable to sweep up and magnetize the unconscious person toward it.

People who have been taken over by the Wetiko virus usually do not suspect that they have been “scammed.” Wetiko culture does not offer them any incentives to examine themselves and contemplate their sad state. On the contrary, the non-local field programs itself to conspire and allow the continued nurturing of the psychosis. When someone is a full Wetiko entity but does not recognize it themselves, the field around them twists in order to protect, conspire, and feed on the psychosis in a way that leaves those around them in a trance.

Under the spell of Wetiko, they lose the ability to recognize Wetiko pathology in others. In a situation of “social narcissism,” Wetiko entities at different stages of the disease take certain positions and roles relative to others, with the goal of protecting themselves from their own madness and darkness. They strengthen and feed each other’s narcissism, because it strengthens their own. Forbes writes that the type of personality that is typically liable to fall victim to the Wetiko virus is the individual whose “strings are pulled by others, or those who walk a life path dictated by others. They are the ones who are ripe for the Wetiko virus” [28]. Because they are not in contact with their inner guidance, they project authority outside of themselves and become very prone to influence regarding consensus opinion and the agreed-upon opinions of the dominant group. Because they have lost the ability for internal discrimination and critical thinking, the “masses” become a mindless herd and fall victim to groupthink, whose members enable, in the form of codependency, their version of the world (Wetiko). Their group consensus on the nature of reality becomes harder and harder to maintain as time passes, but like a house of cards about to collapse at any moment, their perception of reality is based on a fundamental error. Strangely, people subject to the collective enchantment of Wetiko sometimes become fanatic supporters of an agenda that is completely contrary to their own interests. This is an external reflection of the internal state of being subject to the seduction of self-destruction caused by the Wetiko parasite.

It even seems as though a holy-less, negative, or “unclean” entity has taken control of the person subject to Wetiko and resides in them. Such people are exploited against their will as tools, as secret agents of this dark and unclean entity, to allow it to spread itself in the wider field. As secret agents of the disease, the secret of Wetiko is a self-secret, a secret they hide even from themselves. Just as sometimes something larger than us takes control of us, so Wetiko victims do not know how much they are controlled in every moment. The experience of being controlled by something vast, larger than you, happens in their blind spots (see my article “Are We Possessed?”).

The Wetiko germ affects our perception by stealth and deceit with the goal of hiding and confusing us from being seen. Wetiko sows its seeds and strikes root within consciousness. Like mental vegetable foliage, it covers, distracts us, and diverts us from the calling of our true destiny and from our spiritual path. The alienating and alien effect of the Wetiko virus, exactly the thing we must notice, hides within the perception, the thought, and the meaning we attribute to our experience. When someone has fallen as a full member into a Wetiko “cult” (see my article “The Bush Cult”), it seems as though their consciousness has been populated by the virus in such a way that they have no faint clue about their pathological state. Wetiko entities do not perceive themselves as needing help; for them, other people are always “the problem.” Their disease does not bother them, and they do not recognize it, because it is all they know, and their leaders and the society in which they live encourages them. They have no assessment of their disorder, and they do not understand how sick they are.

Forbes writes: “One of the central traits characterizing the extreme negative form of Wetikoism is arrogance” [29]. Full Wetiko entities are wrapped in self-importance, “inflated” tools of evil, and arrogantly, ignorantly, and self-righteously, they are sure that they are acting in the service of truth and the general good. It seems they fail to perceive the negativity of their actions and think that everything they do is good. Forbes concludes: “In any case, Wetiko disease, the disease of exploitation, has been spread widely in the last several thousand years. Because we are not vaccinated against it, it seems to be getting worse with time. More and more people are infected with it, in a more wide-ranging way, and those people become the teachers of the younger generation” [30]. Wetiko cultures are taught both at home and in “academia,” where people become “qualified” in the depths of this world and therefore receive credit and empowerment in spreading the corrupt ways in a more wide-ranging way than ever before.

Writing about the wide-ranging spread of the Wetiko virus, Forbes writes: “It is spread by Wetiko entities themselves, who recruit and corrupt others. It is spread through history books, television, military training programs, police, comic books, pornographic magazines, movies, right-wing movements, fanaticism of various types, high-pressure missionary groups, and countless governments” [31].

All mainstream corporate institutions, subject to social sanctions, are in the business of indoctrination (brainwashing), telling us what to think and what not to think, and of course, how to think. Our consciousness is fashioned into a certain form by the dominant society, and it seems that our “true face” undergoes a facelift. We are robbed of our spiritual abundance. It seems our society has become the mouthpiece for the propaganda organ of the disease, hypnotizing us into being convinced into this perception while we drain what is more important than anything else in the world. The culture that informs and is fashioned around Wetiko disease is itself a channel for its spread. If we sign on the dotted line and act according to its life-denying perception, it will finally consume us, and we will become the extensions of its orders. This is how the “mental empire” of the collective psychosis operates, spreading itself and expanding, trying to approach full distribution.

Full Wetiko entities can be petty tyrants at home or at work, but can also be on the depleted and oppressed side that exercises no power in the world around them. When Forbes speaks of “Big Wetikos,” he refers to full Wetiko entities who have “climbed the Wetiko ladder,” jumped through the Wetiko hoops, and risen in Wetiko status, finding themselves presiding over positions of power through which they can influence and control events in our world and operate the system. “Big Wetikos” who navigate the levers of control, whether they are the wealthiest, corporate executives, bankers, or heads of state, are particularly dangerous because they define the terms of the dialogue and control the reigning historical narrative. They manage our perceptions through the propaganda engines of the mainstream corporate media controlled by them (see my article “The War on Consciousness”). Big Wetikos in positions of power create the boundaries of discourse and debate. Wetiko is an ideological virus whose currency is conceptual syntax.

Wetiko shifts our mental syntax, the laws of our language creation, and therefore distorts the semantics (grammar), the meaning we attribute to our experience of ourselves and the world. Wetiko is a semantic disorder because it changes the axioms through which the mind fashions, projects, and bewitches the words, and from there draws the experience. The thought-forms and beliefs that express and represent the viral Wetiko act as an inherent system of control, fashioning the boundaries of the imagination of what we experience as possible, as individuals, as nations, and as a human species. Wetikoism supports and perpetuates the myths, stories, dogmas, and the (non) sacred books that validate their self-serving agenda. Books and other forms of information that do not support the Wetiko version of the order of things are metaphorically “burned” (or literally in some cases—as in the case of the books of Dr. Wilhelm Reich mentioned above, which were burned by the United States government. In describing what he called “the mental epidemic,” Reich pointed in his own way to the evil of the Wetiko virus).

We live within a world which, similar to a dream, constitutes an interactive mirror inseparable from our internal personal entity. As a reflection of a deep state within ourselves, Wetiko is an unmediated phenomenon, a direct manifestation of the dream-like nature of the universe, and this is the deep understanding that Wetiko shows us. Recognizing the dream-like nature of our situation produces a living antidote made of consciousness that is personally fashioned in order to neutralize the mental pathogen of Wetiko. In other words, within the pathogen itself is found an insight, a revelation, which is the cure for the disease (please see my article “Shadow Projection is its own Medicine”). The self-recognition of Wetiko offers mental healing, but in order to enjoy the benefits of the cure, we must recognize and understand deeply the miracle of maintaining psycho-spiritual health. How amazing it is that the thing that can potentially destroy us is simultaneously what wakes us up. A potential catalyst for our evolution as a human species, we all create and dream Wetiko together. Wetiko is truly a quantum phenomenon, in that it is the most lethal poison and the most healing medicine, joined together. Will Wetiko kill us? Or will it wake us up? Everything depends on whether we recognize what it potentially reveals to us. The prognosis for Wetiko/malignant egophrenia depends on the way we dream it.

Now, when we have in our possession the understanding and the knowledge (dia-gnosis and pro-gnosis), all that we need to do is to discover the cure, a thing which in itself requires understanding (gnosis).

All rights reserved to Paul Levy
Translation: Yasmine Bergner

הפוסט Votiko | The Greatest Plague Known to Mankind | By Paul Levy | Translated by Yasmin Bergner הופיע לראשונה ב-גיאומטריה מקודשת.

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In the midst of a brave wave of women exposing documentation of sexual harassment in various industries, many of us, women and men alike, are beginning to grasp the breadth of this reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we must ask: why do so many men have the urge to belittle, hate, and harm women? Where does this reality come from? And what can we do to stop it?

What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny – Bethany Webster – translated by Yasmine Bergner

As a globally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I am often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this critical time of exposure of sexual assaults, I wanted to write an article that explores how the mother wound is the missing link in understanding the phenomenon of misogyny. In this article, I examine how boys develop in the modern world, analyze the unprocessed rage lurking beneath the surface in men’s lives, the role of privilege, and the internal work that men and women can do to change the situation.

The Oxford Dictionary defines misogyny as: “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”

In order to understand misogyny, we must explore the first-ever relationship a man had with a woman: with his mother.

For both girls and boys, the relationship with our mothers is one of the most significant relationships we will experience in our lives. The fundamental importance of this relationship and the way it affects our well-being into adulthood cannot be overstated.

In the weeks and months of our early life, the mother is nourishment, the world, the body, and the self. For both women and men, the mother wound is a product of patriarchy, a product of living in a society based on control over women.

“The mother-child relationship, blurred as the first relationship harmed by patriarchy.” – Adrienne Rich

On a personal level, the mother wound is a system of internalized limiting patterns and beliefs – arising from the relationship with the mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum between a healthy, supportive mother-child system and a traumatic, abusive mother-child system. Many complex factors define the uniqueness of how the mother wound manifests personally and where it lies on this spectrum. In men, it largely depends on the specific dynamic between the child and his mother, and on how the father supported or opposed this initial bond.

Patriarchy is a principle of dominance and can be embodied by both men and women. The role of the patriarch in a boy’s life can be expressed through both mother and father. For example, some boys experienced their mothers as neglectful or domineering. Some experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers, while others experienced their mother as the dominant parent and the father as the more passive parent.

“Patriarchy demands that men become and remain emotionally crippled. Because it is a system that prevents full access to free will, it is very difficult for any person from any class to adopt a rebellious approach toward patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, whether father or mother.” – bell hooks

A boy growing into the modern world today is socialized by his father, other men, and society regarding the meaning of being male. Media culture, education, and patriarchal religion perform the same function. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that this socialization process includes internalizing control over others, repressing emotions, and devaluing women (see sources at the end of the article). This creates both personal and collective trauma.

Healing personal trauma is central to dismantling patriarchy.

Unlike the modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures that provide boys with initiation into mature masculinity through periods of physical challenges, helping them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comfort of childhood to the challenges of adulthood.

These boys are supported by ELDERS (mature men), who provide empowerment and positive connection. In this process, emotional or physical “wounding” occurs that helps the boy connect with his inner powers, self-confidence, and sense of personal responsibility. In today’s modern world, most boys experience this “wounding” without positive transformation. There are very few authentic initiation rites, very few mature men (ELDERS), and very few masculine role models beyond the toxic status quo.

The societal expectation to devalue women, and in this context their mothers, creates cognitive dissonance in the boy regarding the significance of his mother, destructive to his ability to express emotions, allow himself to be vulnerable, express physical affection, and more. In this way, the mother is generally experienced as a “lost source” for the boy. And the father, as the facilitator of the boy’s integration into the world of men, is experienced as severing the bond with the mother, the source.

For white men, privilege plays a critical role. In addition to repressing their emotions and enhancing their dominance, society grants them unfair advantages denied to other groups, including women and minorities. According to American sociologist Prof. Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it. This leaves white men with a triple wound: an impaired ability to process emotions, blindness to the privilege they possess, and a lack of empathy toward those they harm. This triple wound in white men remains relatively unconscious and causes immense suffering in our world.

I encountered a striking quote by Adrienne Rich from 1977 in her essay from the book “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” (not translated into Hebrew), speaking powerfully about the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men:

“Much of men’s fear of feminism is the fear that by becoming fully human, women will cease to be mothers for men, to provide nourishment, lullabies, and continuous attention associated with the mother-infant relationship. Much of men’s fear of feminism is actually infantilism – the desire to remain the mother’s baby, to fully dominate a woman for his own needs. These infantile needs of adult men toward women have been treated sentimentally and romantically, too permissively, as ‘love.’ This is the threshold of violence. Because the social, economic, and legal systems heavily favored men, the infantile needs of the grown man were validated by power structures, which did not grant the same validation to the needs of adult women. The institution of marriage and motherhood perpetuates the infantile male needs as law in the adult world.”

What is happening now, thanks to the #MeToo movement, as women share experiences of sexual assault and expose their abusers, is that men’s overall control over women in domestic and workspaces is diminishing. Women increasingly refuse to remain silent objects onto which men project their unprocessed pain and remain unaccountable. Additionally, male witnesses are increasingly unwilling to look the other way.

Sexual assault as hostile power

Sexual assault is not about sex, but about control. Alexandra Kettahakis, a sexual therapist and clinical director at the Center for Healthy Sexuality in Los Angeles, explains: “Men involved in this behavior hold immense rage toward women and often suffered abuse in childhood. For example, their mothers may have been emotionally abusive or failed to protect them from paternal abuse. As these men grow, they project the rage they feel toward women through sexualized behavior. They assign a sexual character to their feelings because they have no other way to act.”

It appears the inner child in men is unconsciously trapped between the painful longing for the “lost source” represented by their mother and social conditioning to hate her as a woman. In other words, men are caught between their natural desire for full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable, and empathetic) and their desire to maintain privilege and dominance. One cannot be both. Holding onto dominance (patriarchy) gradually erodes your humanity. True humanity means letting go of the desire for control and all the horrific ways it manifests. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, or status) can ever compensate for the destruction patriarchy wreaks on the inner child. Only through internal work can one reclaim this lost inner essence.

A man can find this ‘lost source,’ not in a tangible woman but through inner inquiry, attempting to understand what the mother or feminine represents within himself. For example, the significance of emotional functioning, the world of feeling, the experience of deep connection with oneself, and the sense of authentic belonging with those around him. However, to connect with these essential qualities in the dark, the man must connect with the inner child enraged over the meager gains he received in exchange for abandoning essential aspects of his self.

It is easy to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or “father substitute” somewhere in the world. Male privilege allows a man to remain blind to the mother and father wounds while the world burns.

It takes courage to trace these consequences and process the rage toward the inner patriarch, the archetypal cruel, unfeeling father, who admitted him into the world of men at the heavy cost of disconnecting from his authentic self. The innocent child who entered the world with an innate ability to express empathy, emotion, and vulnerability. The rage belongs to the patriarchal father (personal or collective) who broke the boy’s bond, forcing him into male fraternity at the cost of cutting off an essential part of himself to be accepted as a man. The rage also belongs to the mother who could not protect him from the patriarchal wound or caused it herself. (See my article https://womboflight.com/the-most-insidious-forms-of-patriarchy-pass-through-the-mother). When men direct their rage there, where it truly belongs, things can begin to change.

“Misogyny is the outward-projected rage of the son against the mother who could not protect him.” – Gabor Maté

For both men and women, the core task of healing the mother wound is the same: to separate the symbiotic “mother” membrane from both internal and external life in order to connect with full potential and self-realization.

In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow,” Jungian analyst and author James Hollis summarizes:

“When we understand that patriarchy is a social invention designed to compensate for helplessness, we realize that men, contrary to popular belief, are actually the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, may find himself attacked by his inner femininity, which he completely denies. Whenever a man is required to be the ‘good boy’ or feels he must be the ‘bad boy’ or ‘wild man,’ he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex.”

I am not saying it is the man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent, so human. But his responsibility is to recognize how much every child needs positive motherhood and how much this need shapes his psyche and operates beneath the surface. He may pretend to be an empowered man, holding government offices or wallets, but stress fissures penetrate deeply into his relationship with his mother. Men must recognize this and take responsibility, or they will continue to embody these infantile patterns forever.

Healing the mother wound in men involves redirecting rage away from women and processing it directly with its true object—the patriarchy itself—and the specific traumatic events of their childhood.

For men to do this deep inner work, they critically need support from other men who have already undergone significant parts of this inner journey, including professional support from experienced male therapists in this field.

Broadly defined, internal and external work for men includes:

Processing rage toward the parent (father or mother) for parental betrayal that forced them to give up essential parts of themselves to be considered a man, mourning the heavy cost.

Examining life honestly, acknowledging hidden secrets, and taking responsibility for actions.

Finding the lost inner source and reclaiming it. Connecting with the inner child.

Connecting with genuine remorse for how they have harmed others and the planet through unconscious projections of pain, both personally and collectively, and initiating empathetic actions regularly.

Creating community with other conscious men on the path of healing and reconciliation.

Men must commit to long-term internal work and also experience the immediate consequences of their actions here and now.

Sean Wastal explains that sexual assault in the workplace is not due to lack of training or understanding by men, but because men understand too well: that they can avoid punishment. They can rationalize, hide, justify, and no one will hold them accountable. “In other words, until men achieve enough internal integrity to restrain them from sexual assault, real intervention is required in workplaces and relationships to stop toxic behavior. Fundamentally, men require global intervention. Social ‘no’ echoes calling for awakening and recognition of realities they have been blind to until now.”

To support this process, women must say “no” in every possible way to the angry boys inside the men in our lives, whether they are friends, colleagues, brothers, or husbands. Referring again to Rich’s quote, women must withdraw from over-functioning or acting as mothers for the men in their lives.

“We must step back with the demon, the lullaby, the ceaseless attention associated with the mother-infant relationship.” In this way, men can feel the weight of the difficult situation, which is the first step toward meaningful and lasting change.

Only when men feel the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to tolerate for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally act and fill the gap from within themselves.

The process gradually develops paths of:

-Taking responsibility for their emotions, containing and processing them internally, and obtaining support.

-Engaging in sexual relations from a place of intimate connection, not as a means to feel powerful.

-Comforting the inner child when activated.

-Differentiating past pain from what is happening in the present.

-Developing awareness of the consequences of actions and the ability to see women in their lives as humans, not objects.

-Amplifying marginalized voices, developing listening skills and learning from them.

As women, we must continue to use our voice, speak out against abuse of power whenever possible, and amplify the voices of other women suffering male abuse, especially among minorities and indigenous cultures.

As women, we must cease:

– cooperating with male illusions arising from ignorance regarding their entitlement.

– remaining silent to avoid friction.

– internalizing the consequences of unprocessed male rage.

– minimizing our feelings in their presence.

– accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve.

– giving power and strength through therapeutic relationships.

– giving time and energy to men who refuse to do inner work.

The truth is women are very limited in their ability to assist men in healing. We can hold space for them, but cannot do the work for them. This is their journey, and they must want it. Meanwhile, let us expand our self-worth consciousness away from the male gaze, prioritize our inner work, and heal our childhood wounds. Let us maintain clear boundaries with people in our lives who are not doing inner work and spend more time with those who are. True female fellowship is a crucial source of nourishment at this time.

Harnessing our rage as fuel for wise action

The more we connect to the truth of our power as women, the more we feel rage at the destruction caused by toxic masculinity. Rage is an essential tool at this time to sharpen refusal to align with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves. For white women, this is a refusal to play the role of the patriarch toward others and to acknowledge how we mediate oppression of men and women in ethnic groups different from our own.

“We suppress what we fear.” – James Hollis

Healing from patriarchy requires that every group benefiting from entitlement confront its ignorance and develop genuine empathy for the ways its privilege harms others.

Allowing ourselves to be emotionally affected by the horrors committed as a result of our entitlement is often avoided but is essential if we wish to create true equality among people. Just as white women must connect to a genuine shock at how we mediate white supremacy over minorities, white men must do the same regarding their ignorance toward the entitlement they enjoy and internalize the immense pain it creates in the world for women, minorities, and the planet.

“The artist’s role is identical to that of the lover. If I love you, I must make you aware of the things you do not see.” – James Baldwin

May this growing surge of female rage inspire a wave of brave men willing to explore their inner space, embrace the abandoned child within, process legitimate rage, and mourn what patriarchy stole from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change. May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace exposed discomfort as the remedy they need to heal their personal and collective mother wounds. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

All rights reserved to Bethany Webster 2017

Translated from English by Yasmine Bergner

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Resources for Men:

Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men by James Hollis

Understanding Patriarchy by bell hooks

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis

The Eden Project: The Search for the Magical Other by James Hollis

Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly

Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound by Eugene Monick

Finding our Fathers by Sam Osherson

Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine by Eugene Monick

The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help by Jackson Katz

The Mankind Project

Jackson Katz

Link to the original Bethany Webster article in
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הפוסט What’s Up with Men? The Mother’s Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny | Bethany Webster | From English: Yasmin Bergner הופיע לראשונה ב-גיאומטריה מקודשת.

Part One: Rejection of the Goddess and the Death of Paganism – The Murder of Hypatia

In the spring of 415 AD, a pagan noblewoman stepped out of the lecture hall connected to the Great Library of Alexandria and called for her carriage to take her home. Many educated pagan women enjoyed high social and academic status at that time, but Hypatia was one of the few who traveled independently in a carriage that belonged to them. She often parked her horse-drawn carriage in the heart of the city to chat with the locals or to engage in lively conversation about philosophy with anyone who wished to speak with her. Her openness and elegant pleasantness brought her appreciation and love from the city’s inhabitants.

Hypatia was officially active in city affairs, an arena dominated mainly by men. It was said of her that her self-control and pleasant manners, which were the result of inner work and years of mental refinement, helped her express her voice with restraint and composure in countless governmental assemblies in which she participated. This ability brought her efficiency and precision in achieving her educational and social goals, and earned her admiration and respect wherever she went.

Hypatia’s beauty was considered legendary, and it was said to be matched only by her intelligence. Tall and confident, commanding her carriage with ease, dressed in the long robe and scarf of the educator class, she must have been an unusual sight in the vibrant streets of the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria. Unfortunately, no realistic portrait of her has survived.

In March 415, Hypatia entered a public square near the Church of Caesar, where Christian converts would gather, and found her path blocked by an angry mob. The mob was led by a man named Peter “the Reader,” and he incited the crowd on that fateful day to close in on Hypatia and block her way. A Christian convert who admired Cyril (a Christian bishop living in Alexandria) said of Peter “the Reader” that he was “a man who believed with all his heart in Jesus Christ.” At the same time, a local governor sued one of Cyril’s protégés who had publicly attacked pagan doctrines. Hypatia supported his lawsuit, and the attacker was severely reprimanded. Bishop Cyril held a grudge against Hypatia for her stance but could not afford to look bad and attack her directly. Long after the day of the horrific murder, the people of Alexandria wondered if Peter “the Reader” had been sent by his master Cyril or had acted independently, hoping to gain the patriarch’s trust.

Public opinion was that Bishop Cyril conspired to murder Hypatia because, on various occasions, he had publicly accused her of witchcraft. Peter incited the mob to throw heavy tiles at Hypatia and knock her off her carriage. Her robes and long scarf created an advantage for the angry mob, and they quickly overwhelmed her by pulling hard on her light, long clothes from all sides. Hypatia fought with all her might to escape, but in vain. Throngs of arms grabbed her forcefully and began stripping her of her clothes. A local crowd gathered at the edges of the commotion, paralyzed and helpless, gripped by horror at the bloodshed occurring before their eyes.

The violence of the angry mob escalated thanks to the cheers of Peter “the Reader,” who called Hypatia a horrific heretic—a witch who misleads people through her beauty and teachings, which are nothing but blasphemy by the Devil. Hypatia protested and called for help, but a sharp blow aimed at her jaw prevented her from speaking. Within a few minutes, while on her knees in a pool of her own blood, Hypatia was beaten to death by cruel blows and kicks. The mob was not satisfied with her brutal killing and continued to abuse her body until nothing remained but her bones. The situation was so terrible that none of the witnesses were able to intervene for fear of the madness of the attackers’ violence. The angry cries of the mob of Christian converts turned into cheers of victory and praise for the murder they had just committed. A foreign and inhumane force took over them and created an electricity of unrestrained violence in the air. The killers took the bones to a place called Cinaron and burned her bones to ashes.

Hypatia was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, the last known teacher of the traditions of the Mystery Schools—the spiritual universities of antiquity. Hypatia was born around 370 AD, making her 45 years old at her death.

Historians consider her death to be “**the** event” that defined the end of the classical culture of Eastern-Mediterranean Europe. This traumatic event marked the extinction of Paganism and the rise of the Middle Ages. (Paganism – is the generic name given to pantheistic beliefs, polytheistic with multiple gods and goddesses and nature worship).

Theon was the director of the Museum of the city of Alexandria in Egypt, the place dedicated to the Muses, the daughters of the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Each of the Muses embodied a sacred art such as astronomy, poetry, and history. The nine daughters of the goddess of memory presented a model of study and research in the ancient Mystery Schools.

In the year 400, when she was about 30 years old, Hypatia was appointed chair of the mathematics department at the university. She earned a salary equivalent to a professorship at a modern university. Theon’s daughter was also known for her perfect command of Platonic philosophy and the practice of spiritual work called Theurgy, which was a type of magical work that can be compared to Jungian active imagination work and the active imagination practices of Dzogchen and Tantra. Her dialectical abilities were extraordinary and refined through her mathematical training. It was said of her that in philosophical discussions regarding spirituality and the sublime, Hypatia could handle any position in the Christian doctrine in northern Egypt. Her theological abilities characterized the pagan intellectual class (the Gnostics – those who “know” – who understand spiritual matters), but she also specialized in geometry, physics, and astronomy. Ancient learning was multidisciplinary and eclectic, a stark contrast to the contemporary era in the West, where there is a tendency to professionalize and specialize in one usually narrow field. The word “philosophy” means love of wisdom. For the Gnostics, “Sophia” was a revered celestial being, the goddess whose story they explained in their sacred cosmology writings. For the people of that time, Hypatia was wisdom personified.

In addition to their spiritual role, the Mystery Schools provided a framework for multidisciplinary education. The Gnostics were exceptionally talented, polymaths, and prolific writers. Between 600 BC and Hypatia’s time, the Gnostics composed thousands of scrolls and writings stored in the Great Library of Alexandria and other libraries such as Nag Hammadi (both in Egypt) that were connected to learning centers throughout the Middle Eastern basin. Hypatia wrote treatises and articles on arithmetic and astronomy, none of which have survived to the best of our knowledge. However, there are 8 historical sources documenting the circumstances of her death and her achievements (the latter not always in a complimentary tone). Bishop Cyril, who was suspected of conspiring to murder Hypatia, was later known as one of the leaders of the theology of the Holy Trinity, along with other Christian ideologues whose fundamentalist faith celebrated the victory of the Church over “heretics” like Hypatia.

Part Two: Between the Birth of Patriarchy and the Rejection of Nature to the Emergence of a New Myth – Gaia Theory

The arts in prehistory—Buddhist, Tantric, Egyptian, and Greek, and everything called “pagan”—were a direct continuation of the pulsing forces of nature. In Western culture, our ability to see the sublime in nature alone has been damaged. Joseph Campbell says this is a result of the rise of monotheistic religions. In the Book of Kings and Samuel, the Hebrew kings “offered sacrifices on the mountains and did evil in the eyes of Yahweh.”

What is the meaning of this sentence and how can it be interpreted critically? In fact, the worship of Yahweh was a certain movement in the Hebrew community, a movement that eventually gained the upper hand. It was the promotion of a specific god limited to his temple, against the nature worship that existed throughout the land. Mythologist Joseph Campbell says that the three major Western religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—call the same biblical God by different names but fail to live side by side. They are stuck with their image without understanding what it refers to. Their myth and cultural ethos are a closed circle that fails to open and perpetuates violence against each other. Every mythology grows in a certain society and is bounded by its geographical area, and then the mythologies clash, manage relationships, merge, and create a larger narrative. There are two completely different orders of mythologies.

According to Joseph Campbell: there is Universal Mythology which builds the relationship between you and your nature and the natural world of which you are a part, and there is Social Mythology which binds you to a specific society. Social mythology is usually of nomadic peoples moving from place to place, so you learn that your center is there, in that group. Natural mythology belongs to agricultural peoples. The biblical tradition has a social orientation that denounces nature and tries to control it. Religions of nature do not try to control but to reach harmony with nature. When nature is perceived as something evil, you do not strive to achieve harmony with it. You control it, or at least try, hence the tension, anxiety, deforestation, imperialism, and the destruction of indigenous peoples. “In the Bible, eternity retreats, nature is corrupt, nature was expelled from Eden. In biblical thinking, we live in exile.”

According to Campbell, humanity needs myths that will not identify the individual with his local group, but with Gaia, our planet. Today there are no longer borders; the only mythology that has sustainable validity is the mythology of the planet. A mythology that will tell the narrative of the formation and true identity of our planet. In Buddhism, there are stories close to planetary mythology, as well as in Egyptian mythology and the Gnostic writings that grew out of it. Gnostic writings connect with what evolutionary biology and Gaia theory teach us, which treats the Earth as an ecological system that has a history of self-regulation and can be seen as a holistic intelligent entity where everything on it is its body. When we put race, culture, and gender before our humanity, we prevent ourselves from deeply knowing what is called “Anthropos”—our true identity as a human species and the future of our covenant with the planet Gaia.

According to Campbell, myth fulfills 4 roles: The first is the *Mystical role*—to remind us how wonderful the universe is and how wonderful we are and the awe before the great mystery. If we see mystery in everything—then everything becomes a sacred image. The second role is the *Cosmological role*—which connects science and spirituality; in this context, sacred geometry is the archetypal symbolic language of the shape of the universe, but in a way that shows us the mystery. The third role is the *Sociological role*—supporting and explaining the existing social order, and here vast differences between one place and another enter. For example, an entire mythology that supports polygamy versus a mythology that supports monogamy. Both mythologies are place and time dependent.

In our Western culture, the sociological role of myth has taken over our world. The fourth role of myth, and it is the role (which in Campbell’s opinion) we all need to learn to relate to—is the *Pedagogical role*—how to live a human life in any circumstances, a connection of universal myth and ethos. And there are many myths that can teach a person to do this. We must re-attain harmony with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with all kingdoms. The myth of the future that will grow here will talk about Gaia, the Earth, and everything on it. And it will have to deal with everything the myths before it had to deal with—the maturation of the individual, from dependency to maturity and then departure from the physical world. What will be the relationship of such a society to the world, to nature, and to the cosmos? It will be the myth of human society as a whole.

Joseph Campbell says that in the biblical tradition, which is the basis for the three major monotheistic religions, material life is impure and every impulse is a sin. Unless circumcised or baptized. It was the serpent that brought sin into the world and the woman who brought the apple to the man. Identifying the woman with sin, and therefore, identifying life with sin, is the way the entire story was distorted in the biblical myth and the doctrine of the expulsion from Eden.

The historical explanation according to Campbell is based on the conquest of Canaan by the Hebrews and the subjugation of the Canaanite peoples. “The main deity of the Canaanite peoples was the Goddess, and the serpent is associated with the Goddess. This is a symbol of the mystery of life. The group that promoted a male god rejected it. In other words, in the story of Eden, a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess is implied.”

The Hebrew language constantly forces us to make an effort and choose repeatedly whether to use male or female language, in a way that can always exclude or diminish one of the genders. The default in the language is to use male language as the norm, which repeatedly illustrates the patriarchy within the language. The reference to “God” is always in the masculine, and as much as we are reminded that He is neither male nor female, according to the rules of grammar—the image that comes to all of us is of a male god.

The story also does a great injustice to women because Eve is cast as the one responsible for the expulsion from Eden. Women represent life; the man cannot enter the world of life except through a woman, so the woman is the one who brings us into this world of pairs of opposites and suffering. In the biblical perception, sin begins with the exit from the mythological dream-time zone of Eden, where there is no time, where men and women do not even know they are different from each other, and then they eat the apple and wake up to the world of duality and opposites. In the monotheistic perception, God is “the Father,” but in religions where the God or Creator is a Mother, the whole world is her body; there is no other place.

Part Three: So what is happening with men? The missing link to understanding misogyny

*Selected excerpts from Bethany Webster’s article (the full article is here on the site)

Many of us, women and men alike, are beginning to perceive the breadth of this reality of rampant misogyny. A brave wave of women in recent years has been uncovering records of sexual harassment through the #metoo movement. As a culture, the question is asked: Why does the urge to disparage, hate, and harm women exist in so many men? Where does this reality come from? And what can we do to stop it?

The development of boys and men in the modern world places them in a privileged position, beneath which un-processed rage is hidden under the surface. What is the inner work that men and women can do in order to change the situation? Patriarchy constitutes the principle of dominance, and it can be embodied by both a man and a woman. The role of the patriarch in the boy’s life can be manifested through the mother as well as the father.

The Oxford Dictionary defines misogyny as: “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”

Bethany Webster says that in order to understand misogyny, we must investigate the first relationship a man ever had with a woman—with his mother.

“The relationship of mother and child is revealed as the first relationship damaged by patriarchy” – Adrienne Rich.

“Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Because it is a system that prevents full access to free will, it is very difficult for any person of any class to take a rebellious stance toward patriarchy, to be unfaithful to the patriarchal parent, whether it be a father or a mother” – bell hooks.

A boy maturing into the modern world today undergoes socialization by his father, by other men, and by society, regarding the meaning of being a man. Media culture, education, and patriarchal religion perform the same role. Unfortunately, there is much evidence that the boy’s socialization process largely includes internalizing control over others, repression of emotions, and the devaluation of women. This situation creates personal and collective trauma for the entire human species and the planet as a whole.

Healing personal trauma is central to undoing patriarchy. Unlike the modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures that give boys the initiation experience of maturing into adult masculinity through periods of physical challenges, helping them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comfort zone of childhood to the challenges of adulthood.

These boys are assisted by ELDERS (adult men) who provide them with empowerment and positive context. In this rite of passage and initiation, an emotional or physical “wound” occurs that helps the boy come into contact with his inner powers, his self-confidence, and his sense of personal responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience the “wounding” without the positive transformation. There are very few authentic rites of passage and initiation, very few elders (ELDERS), and very few male role models beyond the toxic status quo.

The social expectation to devalue women, and in this context also their mothers, creates cognitive dissonance in the boy regarding his mother’s meaning to him, which is destructive to his ability to express emotions, allow himself to be vulnerable, express physical affection, and more. In this way, the mother is usually experienced as a “lost source” for the boy. And the father, as the socializer of the boy into the world of men, is experienced as the one who breaks the alliance with the mother, with the source.

“The core of men’s fear of feminism is the fear that by becoming complete human beings, women will cease to be mothers for men, to provide the nourishment, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated with the mother-infant relationship. Much of male fear of feminism is actually infantilism—the longing to remain the mother’s infant son, to completely take over a woman for his own needs. These infantile needs of adult men toward women have received sentimental and overly forgiving romantic treatment until now as ‘love.’ This is the threshold of violence. Because the social order, the economy, and the legal system have leaned heavily in favor of men, the infantile needs of the adult male received validation by the mechanisms of power—those same mechanisms that do not give the same validity and approval to the needs of the adult woman. The institution of marriage and motherhood perpetuates the needs of the infant male as law in the adult world.”

Researcher and therapist Tamir Ashman says that the prison system is the capital city of patriarchal culture, a place where wounding masculinity merges with wounded masculinity.

What is happening now thanks to the #metoo movement, when women tell their experiences of sexual assault and bring their abusers to light, is that the total control of men over women in the domestic space and the workspace is decreasing. Now women are less and less willing to remain a silent slate upon which men project their un-processed pain and remain unpunished. Additionally, many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

It seems that the inner child in the man is unconsciously trapped between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his social conditioning to hate her as a woman. In other words, men are trapped between the natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable, and empathetic) and their desire to remain in a state of privilege and dominance. The point is that you cannot be both. To hold onto a position of dominance (patriarchy) means gradually losing your humanity. The meaning of being a real human being means giving up your desire for control and all the horrific ways it is manifested. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, and status) can ever compensate for the destruction that patriarchy wreaks on the child within. No amount of power over others can compensate for the loss of that part within him. Only through inner work can one reclaim ownership of the loss of this inner essence.

A man can find this “lost source” not within a tangible woman but in the form of inner inquiry, through the attempt to understand what the *mother* or the feminine represents within himself. For example, the meaning of emotional functioning, the world of feeling, the experience of deep connection with himself, and the sense of authentic belonging to those around him. However, in order to create a connection with these vital qualities found in the darkness, the man must create a connection with the inner child angry at the meager profit he received in exchange for abandoning the vital aspects of his selfhood.

It is easy to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or “father substitute” somewhere in the world. Male privilege allows a man blindness toward the mother and father wound while the world is on fire.

It takes courage to reconstruct these projections and process the rage at the inner patriarch—the archetype of the cruel, emotionless father who welcomed him into the world of men at the heavy price of disconnection from his authentic self. The innocent child who came into the world with a built-in ability to express empathy, emotion, and vulnerability. The rage belongs to the patriarchal father (personal or collective), the alliance-cutter who betrayed the boy, who brought him into the brotherhood of men at the price of amputating a vital part of himself in order to be accepted in the world as a man. The rage also belongs to the mother who was unable to protect him from the patriarchal wound, or who caused it herself. When men manage to direct their rage there, to the place where the rage truly belongs, then things can begin to change.

“Misogyny is the outward-projected rage of the son at the mother who could not protect him” – Gabor Maté.

“When we understand that patriarchy is a social invention, an invention intended to compensate for helplessness, we understand that men, contrary to popular opinion, are actually the more dependent sex.”

Webster says it is not the man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent, that he is simply human (and in Part 2 we stood on the deep sources of man’s dependency on woman, which is the only way for him to “enter life”). But his responsibility is to identify how much every child needs positive parenting and how much the pattern of this need affects his soul life and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to be an empowered man, holding the reins of government or the wallet, but the cracks of tension seep through and reach deep into his relationship with his mother. Men must understand this fact and take responsibility for it; otherwise, they will continue to enact these infantile patterns forever.”

Healing the *mother wound* for men involves shifting the projected rage away from women and processing it directly against its true object—patriarchy itself—and against the specific traumatic events that occurred in their childhood.

In order for men to succeed in doing this deep inner work, they critically need support from other men who have already undergone a significant part of this process and inner journey, and this also includes professional support from male therapists experienced in this field.

To define it broadly, inner and outer work for men includes:

1. Processing the rage toward the parent (father or mother) for the parental betrayal that forced him to give up vital parts of his selfhood in order to be considered a man in the world. Mourning the heavy price this took from him.
2. Looking honestly at his life, acknowledging the secrets kept within him, and taking responsibility for his actions.
3. Finding his lost inner source and working to reclaim ownership of it. Connecting with the inner child.
4. Connecting to sincere feelings of remorse for the way he harmed other human beings and the planet itself through the externalization of his pain in unconscious ways, personally and collectively, and initiating empathetic actions on a regular basis.
5. Creating a community together with other conscious men who are on the path of recovery and reconciliation.

Men must devote themselves to long-term inner work, and it is also essential that they immediately experience the consequences and results of their actions here and now.

Until men gain enough inner integrity to restrain them from sexual assault and acting with physical violence—the results of which we see increasing in the world and in our country—real intervention actions are required in legislation, police and judicial enforcement, and in protecting women in the workplace and within their family relationships, which will bring toxic behavior to a halt.

In principle, men themselves require global intervention. A resounding social “no” calling for an awakening and recognition of realities they were blind to until now.

In order to support this process, we as women must say “no” in every possible way to the angry boys inside the men in our lives. Whether they are friends, colleagues, brothers, or husbands. Women are required to withdraw from the ways in which they act in “over-functioning” or act as mothers of the men in their lives.

“We must withdraw with the breast, with the lullaby, with the incessant attention associated with the mother-infant relationship.” In this way, men will be able to feel the weight of the difficult situation, and this is the first stage on the path to significant and sustainable change.

Only when men feel the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to endure for them will a sufficient experience of motivation awaken in them that will finally help them act and complete the gap from within themselves.

The process will gradually open paths of:

* Taking responsibility for their feelings, containing and processing them within, and obtaining support.
* Having sex out of a desire for intimate connection, and not as a means to feel powerful.
* Comforting the inner child when it is triggered.
* Distinguishing between past pain and what is happening in the present.
* Developing awareness regarding the consequences of actions and the ability to see the women in their lives as human beings and not as objects.
* Centering and empowering marginalized voices, developing the ability to listen and learn from them.

As women, we must continue to use our voices and speak about inappropriate use of power at every opportunity we have and empower the voices of other women suffering from male abuse, especially among minorities and indigenous cultures.

As women, we must cease:

* Collaborating with male illusions stemming from ignorance regarding their over-entitlement.
* Remaining silent and avoiding friction.
* Internalizing within ourselves the consequences of un-processed male rage.
* Minimizing our feelings in their presence.
* Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve.
* Giving our power and strength in the form of a therapeutic relationship.
* Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do the inner work.

The truth is that women are very limited in their ability to assist men in their healing. We can hold space for them, but we cannot do the work for them. This is their journey and they must want it. Meanwhile, let us expand the consciousness of our self-worth away from the male gaze, prioritize our inner work, and heal our childhood wounds. Let us maintain clear boundaries with the people in our lives who are not doing inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment at this time.

Harnessing our rage as fuel for wise action

The more we connect to the truth of our power as women—the more we will feel rage at the destruction and devastation caused by toxic masculinity. Rage is an essential tool at this time, in order to sharpen the refusal to fall in line with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women—it is a refusal to play the role of the patriarch toward others and to look straight at the way we mediate oppression of men and women in ethnic groups other than our own.

“We oppress what we fear.” – James Hollis

Recovery from patriarchy requires that every group enjoying over-entitlement confront its ignorance and develop sincere empathy regarding how its privilege caused harm to others.

May there come, following this mounting tide of female rage, a surge of brave men ready to explore their inner space, to embrace the abandoned child within them, to process the legitimate rage, and to mourn what patriarchy stole from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change. May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace the exposed discomfort—as the medicine they need in order to heal their personal and collective *mother wound*. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

Sources:

Bethany Webster – The Mother Wound as the Missing Link to Understanding Misogyny, Article

[https://womboflight.com/article-169257](https://womboflight.com/article-169257)

John Lamb Lash

Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2006

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Modan Publishing, from English: Matti Ben Yaakov, 1998

Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, iUniversity Press, USA, 2000

Rina Kesem, The Way of Magic – The first Hebrew guide to ancient religion, the art of witchcraft, Wicca and the Goddess movement, Astrolog Publishing, 2006

Why it is critical for women to heal the mother wound, Bethany Webster, article, 2015, from English: Yasmine Bergner (Hayim Aherim Magazine, 2017)

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הפוסט The Murder of the Philosopher Hypatia and the History of Misogyny | By Yasmin Bergner הופיע לראשונה ב-גיאומטריה מקודשת.

These days, a fascinating exhibition curated by Chaim Maor (curator of the university galleries) in collaboration with students from the curation course, titled “Portraits of Cain – Representations of Others in Contemporary Israeli Art,” is being presented at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

In many ways, no one is more suitable than Maor, born in 1951, to curate a group exhibition that constitutes an additional and impressive layer of his long-standing exploration of the subject. In the opening of the catalog accompanying the exhibition, he writes that “[…] even now, as I return to this subject as a curator and teacher, I do not cease to engage with it as an artist. The figure of Cain and its incarnations, the mark of Cain, and the gazes directed at the ‘others’ are subjects of great importance, and my engagement with them has accompanied me for many years.” This curatorial approach is part of a long-term process of expanding the scope, from Maor’s interpersonal research to collective exploration of this topic in the Israeli art world, as well as a universal phenomenon.

At the same time, a large-scale solo exhibition of Maor called “They Are Me” is currently on display at the Open Museum in Omer (curator: Ruth Ofek). The exhibition reflects the broad range of the artist’s interdisciplinary work and distills the content he has been dealing with over the years. The exhibition consists of six rooms, each dedicated to a different figure connected to Maor’s life, through whom he addresses the concept of the “other.” The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to the figure of “Cain” and the mark of Cain, to the concept of the “double” / “shadow” that follows. Another room is devoted to the fragile relationship with second- and third-generation Germans post-Holocaust, the chasm between us and them, alongside the sincere effort to heal the wound through Suzanna, Maor’s German friend. Sibling rooms are dedicated to Maor’s family anthology, which is a microcosm of genocide, a genealogy of memory. Another room is dedicated to Hader and Ashah and their family, a Palestinian artist married to a Bedouin woman, and the Palestinian “other.” All the rooms together form a kind of mental map of reflection and a humanistic worldview, a sincere contemplation of the human psyche. Each room is constructed as an independent space emerging from an inner center. In the center of each room stands a central work acting as a compass (visual and ethical), and the works hanging on the surrounding walls relate to it.

Maor’s first solo exhibition, called “The Mark of Cain,” was presented in 1978 (Kibbutz Gallery, curated by Miriam Tuvia Bona). Observing his work over the years allows a better understanding of the contextual and emotional background to the exhibition “Portraits of Cain.” His pioneering body of work as a body artist since the 1970s is among the most impressive seen in Israel. Compared to the extensive American and European body art, in the 1970s only a handful of Israeli body artists worked alongside Chaim Maor, the most prominent of whom were Yocheved Weinfeld, Gideon Gechtman, Michael Druks, and Moti Mizrahi (the latter two also participate in the “Portraits of Cain” exhibition).

The performance works Maor created between 1975 and 1980 deal distinctly with the heavy personal traumatic legacy of a “second-generation Holocaust” artist, with representations of oppression and stigma through markings and body boundary delimitations (see my reference in the article “Bodily Ownership of the Symbol”). The family myth of Cain becomes a formative myth for large-scale and severe historical events, such as the Holocaust (Ch. Maor, from the 2012 catalog). He creates visual connections between concepts like “marking,” “victim,” and “sacrifice” through a disturbing physical presence. This breadth of meaning strengthens the understanding of social oppression as a universal human phenomenon.

“Portraits of Cain” observes the figure of Cain and the essence of the mark of Cain from multiple perspectives. This is a subject that currently arouses great interest among artists and scholars. The academic, philosophical, literary, and artistic interpretation of the biblical story is nourished by the social, political, religious, and criminal realities, in Israel and worldwide, and responds to them. Maor notes that hovering above the exhibition are the figures of social psychologist Dan Bar-On, who researched the ‘others’ within us and beside us, and the artist Michael Sgan Cohen, who offered fascinating interpretations about the figure of the artist as ‘Cain.’

Already in the Book of Genesis (Chapter 4, Verse 15), in the story of Cain and Abel, the idea of a tattoo is presented, at least conceptually: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” Cain becomes a wanderer, the first exile in history, as an act of punishment and atonement for the bloodshed he committed (Murder Case No. 001). The nature of the “mark” is not specified, but it likely refers to some external sign, a kind of identification meant to protect him from harm Cain fears. There is a dual meaning: the symbol is on the one hand a revealing mark of disgrace, and on the other hand, a protective symbol. Since then, the “Mark of Cain” has become an archetype symbolizing the gaze directed at the other, the ways in which society marks human beings. The act of marking is a primary means of their segregation, ostracism, expropriation, humiliation, and sometimes elimination. Many interpretations have been linked to the story of Cain and Abel, whose core is perhaps humanity’s internal struggle with the forces of good and evil within them: “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Historical interpretation links the conflict to the clash between ancient agricultural culture and pastoral culture – between those settled on their land and nomads following their flocks.

It is no coincidence that the exhibition “Portraits of Cain” was accompanied by a fascinating interdisciplinary conference, inviting researchers from various fields to delve into issues of labeling and stigma, to investigate the socio-semiotic tools available to society, which create on the one hand protection and glorification, and on the other, exclusion and deprivation. The exhibition presents many such faces: Jews and Arabs, religious settlers and seculars, men and women, wanted individuals and snipers, hunters and hunted, captives, prisoners, and more. In some works, the stereotypical image is distorted, displaced, or shifted to different contexts of time and place. In some works, the artists present themselves or their characters as marked with the mark of Cain and sometimes rebel against being marked. Marking and identity, then, are complex and intricate concepts in themselves, and they accompany the works displayed in the exhibition in various ways. They shed light on social, political, religious, and gender issues present in both the works and the society in which they were created. These definitions have probably been in use since the dawn of history. The conflict arises in the encounter between different systems that oppose each other or express intolerance toward another group. In the exhibition catalog text, Maor wisely asserts that the identity of the marker is as important as that of the marked and their identifying signs.

The work of Micha Bar-Am, “S = Captive,” stands out as a chilling example of identity erasure. The captives are photographed from behind, with a large black stamp in the form of the letter “S” (“Shavuy” – captive) on the back of their shirts. The captives are faceless, without identity. The mark is a decisive factor in creating the dehumanization of the marked. A glimpse over the bent bodies evokes, like a punch in the stomach, the feeling of humiliation accompanying the denial of human dignity. “S” also = “Shavur” (broken). “The work is an example of Bar-Am’s ongoing attempt to create complex and layered images, going beyond dry documentation of the subjects photographed. The camera angle exposes the viewer to the position and interpretation he gives to the situations he encounters during his work as a field photographer.”

In the work “Marking, Trade Strike, East Jerusalem,” the concepts of “marking” and “designation” receive interpretation in connection to the mark of Cain in several ways: as tangible marks meant to highlight an object (a closed shop door), or as association with a certain status (such as a prisoner of war). The letter “S” printed on the captives’ backs (resembling also a target on a shooting board) or the X inside a painted circle on a photographed iron door are powerful logo-like symbols. Bar-Am does not shy away from emphasizing the stigmatic mark in ways that evoke mixed, difficult, and provocative feelings, “similar to branding on living flesh or tattoo inscription,” in his words (Bismuth, Omer, Leibovitz, 2012).

Biblical scholar Meir Bar-Ilan points to fascinating findings revealing the existence of a Jewish tattoo culture in biblical times, providing evidence in his remarkable article “Magical Seals on the Body among Jews in the First Centuries CE” (2011). He argues that biblical tattooed individuals marked themselves with the last letter of the ancient Hebrew alphabet, which was likely the letter “X.” Simply because this was the simplest and clearest marking method. Various Torah laws were written to define what constituted a “proper” tattoo of a work of God, as opposed to a tattoo “like the gentiles.” A tattoo done for the service of God was an essential part of ritual and sacred intention before entering the mystical Merkavah vision. There is a theory that biblical Cain was tattooed with this mark. An ethnographic survey I conducted of various tribal tattoo cultures clearly shows that the “X” or “cross” symbol is the most ancient and widespread tattoo archetype in the world, originating in sun worship in ancient animistic belief systems, the cradle of religions.

The work of Eric Weiss presents his double portrait, in positive and negative, echoing billboards. On his forehead is stamped the mark of Cain in the form of the bitten apple, the logo of the company “Apple.” The caption under the portraits, ICain, references the word iPad, the company’s flagship product. “Weiss uses the brand to divert it to a new context: from the biblical context of Cain and his punishment, he connects it to the contemporary story of enslavement to brands. The mark of Cain on his forehead – in Weiss’s work – alludes to the original sin of his parents, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In a contemporary context, Weiss responds that ‘in today’s world, the “sinners” are branded toward themselves. They lose their inner self-personality and become part of a herd of users, worshipping their idols, external signs, and branded objects'” (Maor, 2012).

“Paul Goldman titled the photograph presented in the exhibition ‘Holocaust Survivor, Nahalal, 1945,’ but left no information about the subject, the circumstances of the photo, or its context. There is no doubt regarding the shocking power and implied meaning of the image – Jewish women in the Holocaust forced to serve as ‘field prostitutes.’ However, historically and in other respects, the photograph raises questions and no one can provide a definitive answer about it. There are hypotheses that the photo is staged. The reliability of the photograph as authentic documentation of a Holocaust survivor is undermined by the fact that the words on the woman’s chest (‘field prostitute’) are written in German as one word, Feldhure, not as two words separated by a space, as seen in the photo. Additionally, such a tattoo would be on the women’s back, not the chest. The main question is that Jewish women did not serve as field prostitutes to satisfy German soldiers or officers, since racial laws forbade any contact between Aryan men and Jewish women. ‘Field prostitutes’ were only Polish or German women. Nevertheless, this photograph is one of the most chilling artistic images in the Holocaust context” (Teshuva, Alon, Bernstein, 2012).

Among the participants in the exhibition are Asad Azi, Eyal Adler-Klener, Adi Ness, Micha Kirshner, Vardi Kahna, Vered Aharonovitch, Erez Israeli, Hader and Ashah, Michael Druks, Ken Goldman, Boaz Lanir, Assi Meshulam, Moti Mizrahi.
Quotes in the article are taken from the exhibition catalog.

“Portraits of Cain,” group exhibition, Art Gallery, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, curators: Prof. Chaim Maor and students from the curation course, Department of Arts, April 2012 – June 2012
Chaim Maor: “They Are Me,” solo exhibition, Open Museum Omer, curator: Ruth Ofek, February 2012 – September 2012

הפוסט Mark of Shame and Symbol of Protection By Yasmine Bergner הופיע לראשונה ב-גיאומטריה מקודשת.

Opening Image: Tattooed slaves on a wall in the Temple of Seti I, Egypt, relief. Drawing: Yasmine Bergner

The practice of body adornment may date back as far as 100,000 years ago, or even earlier. Shells and bone tools discovered in [1] Blombos Cave (today in the region of South Africa) were found containing remnants of pigment made from red ochre. Archaeologists believe the cave served as a workshop for preparing pigments. This likely represents evidence of technology, artistic production, symbolic thinking, and language during the Middle Stone Age.

It is very possible that the ochre was used for body painting and that the shells functioned as tattooing tools [2]. In the Kid Cave [3] (Es-Skhul Cave) on the Carmel coast and in Qafzeh Cave in the Galilee, caves of a similar character were discovered and attributed to the Mousterian hunter-gatherer culture, dated to the same period and possibly even earlier. In these caves, Homo sapiens bones were found buried together with animal bones, tools, and shells. Large pieces of ochre were also discovered in this cave, brought from other regions and believed to have been used for body or burial decoration.

*This text is part of the exhibition catalog “Tattoos – The Human Body as a Work of Art,” research and curation: Yasmine Bergner, Eretz Israel Museum (MUZA), 2016–2017*

Across Africa, extensive practices of scarification and tattooing existed, as well as practices combining both, creating a type of raised tattoo. Colonial interventions during the 20th century led to a significant decline in these traditions. As in other parts of the world, missionary activity and Christian imperialism suppressed traditional indigenous arts.

Traditional tattooing and scarification practices still exist throughout Africa, such as in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Mali, Congo, Benin, Mozambique and more [4]. In various Mesopotamian cultures, clay figurines bearing body paintings made with the common ochre pigment have been discovered. Sometimes the female figures show incisions on the body, which can be interpreted as expressions of body art.

In the exhibition “Tattoos – The Human Body as a Work of Art,” three female figurines (in the photo below, in the middle display case) are presented, likely fascinating remnants of these ancient local cultures. The Yarmukian culture was an important local culture that existed about 8,000 years ago during the Pottery Neolithic period and was probably the first in our region to use ceramics. Among the many fertility figurines discovered at the archaeological site of Sha’ar HaGolan, a clay figurine with body incisions on one of its legs was also found. The chalice symbol (the goddess holding a churn in the middle display case) is also one of the prominent symbols of the ancient Great Goddess cultures that filled the globe between approximately 30,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Photographs: Dr. Lars Krutak, tattoo anthropologist

Display case: Right: Goddess figurine, Yarmukian culture.

Center: Goddess holding a churn (the Megiddo woman),

Left: The Revadim figurine

Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Special thanks to Dorit Shafir, Chief Curator of the Department of Ancient Cultures

A unique figurine type was found in several locations in the Land of Israel. The Revadim figurine depicts a female figure with a tormented expression, her hands placed near her genital area. She is nursing twins who suckle from her breasts, and on her neck appears the symbol of the moon. On her thighs are engraved animals and palm trees. It is believed that this figurine served as a protective amulet for women giving birth (possibly of twins). The animals and palms likely serve as a visual reminder of sacred sexuality, fertility, and domestic harmony.

It is assumed [5] that in the cultures of the ancient Near East, the woman and the tree were intertwined symbols, since both the woman and the tree bear fruit and were therefore objects of reverence and worship as feminine deities. Parchia Beck [6] notes that the placement of the decorations on the thighs resembles tattooing customs common in nearby Neolithic cultures and in ancient Egypt, where thigh tattooing was very common, suggesting that these may indeed represent tattoos.

The special symbols on the figurine – the moon, the goats, the palm trees, the act of breastfeeding, and the vulva – indicate that the figurine most likely belongs to one of the ancient Goddess cultures of our region thousands of years ago and tell the story of a deep connection to the earth and the perception of the planet as a nurturing mother.

Goddess figurine nursing twins, Revadim, drawing: Yasmine Bergner after Parchia Beck

In the Middle East and in the Land of Israel, tattoo cultures existed among Muslim communities, particularly among women. Tassi [7] notes that Egyptian women dyed their hands and the area around their mouths with small blue dots, pricking themselves with needles and rubbing charcoal into the wounds. Edward Lane (1860) wrote during his stay in Egypt that women from the lower classes tattooed their faces with blue designs, usually on their chins and foreheads, but also on the backs of their hands, their arms, their feet, and the center of their chest. Dots, circles, and simple lines were common.

Tattoos played a role in defining the individual and maintaining the continuity of social relationships and social units. Blackman [8] (1937) wrote that indigo and charcoal have antiseptic properties that helped prevent infections. Medicinal herbs such as clove or white beet leaves were also used after the tattoo was completed to strengthen the design and reduce swelling of the skin.

Tattoo traditions also existed among Bedouin communities throughout the Middle East, although conservative interpretations of the Qur’an regarding the practice, along with fundamentalist political influences, led to the suppression and significant reduction of tattoo culture among Muslims today in North Africa. In the Islamic Hadith, it is argued that tattooing harms the spiritual integrity before God. It is claimed that tattoos prevent water from penetrating the skin during purification rituals, one of the five fundamental principles of Islam. Nevertheless, tattoo culture survived for centuries within Islamic cultures in North Africa. In Morocco, for example, collections of popular prayers that included quotes from the Prophet Muhammad determined that tattoos between the eyebrows and on the cheeks were “traditional” and therefore legitimate.

Drawing: Yasmine Bergner after Thomson

The Byzantine physician Aetius described in the 6th century in his medical work TETRABIBLON the method of performing tattooing and even provided recipes for preparing pigment and methods for removing tattoos, for example in cases of freed slaves who had been tattooed on their faces [9]. Levy [10] writes that during the spread of early Christianity into the Mediterranean basin, it began a missionary process among ancient pagan communities who practiced tattooing. This created an ambivalent attitude toward tattooing in Christianity. In the 8th century, Christian monks in Egypt began tattooing symbols belonging to the Coptic tattoo tradition on their bodies. The inspiration for this practice may have come from their neighbors, the Ethiopian Copts, who tattooed their faces and arms. He mentions the earliest documentation of a Jerusalem Cross tattoo on the arm of a European pilgrim, the German knight Alexander von Peppenheim, during his journey to the Holy Land in 1653–4. A Jaffa Arab tattooed a small cross on him for which he paid one medin. Those who usually performed pilgrim tattoos were translators (known as dragomans). This profession fulfilled the need for translation in a region rich in intercultural encounters like the Middle East. They became permanent residents in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, served as guides for pilgrims, and tattooed pilgrimage tattoos, especially during Easter.

By the 17th century, the reputation of the Jerusalem tattoo had already spread far and wide and was documented in travel literature about the Holy Land. In the 18th century historical documentation on tattooing decreased, but in the second half of the 19th century sources again multiplied describing the custom of pilgrimage tattoos, as missionaries, pilgrims, and curious travelers noticed the phenomenon gaining renewed popularity during their visits to Jerusalem. The French traveler Charem recounted in 1880 that he was tattooed with the symbol of the Jerusalem Cross in the Old City by Francis Souben. In Souben’s shop he found about 200 framed recommendations, including one stating: “This is to certify that Francis Souben tattooed the Jerusalem Cross on the arm of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales” (son of Queen Victoria and later King Edward VII). The Jerusalem Cross also adorned the arm of the Duke of York, later George V, as well as the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick (later Emperor Frederick III) in 1869 [11].

John Carswell visited Israel in 1956 and wrote a book on the Coptic tattoo [12] after visiting the tattoo studio of the long-established Razzouk family, who have been tattooing pilgrimage tattoos in the Old City since the 17th century. These tattoos expressed religious devotion and also served as a symbol of religious belonging, and probably symbolized identification with the stigmata wounds of Jesus. The pilgrimage tattoo is a phenomenon unique to the Land of Israel and is created using a unique technique in which the tattoo is transferred to the skin using beautifully carved wooden stamps featuring complex Christian iconography. The preserved printing blocks allow us to understand the meaning of the symbols and their frequency among pilgrim tattoo bearers. The invention of the modern electric tattoo machine replaced the manual hand-poking technique, but the use of the ancient tattoo patterns has been preserved.

Wooden tattoo stamp images: Courtesy of Wassim Razzouk

An unusual pattern in Carswell’s catalog (52a) presents the Hebrew inscription “Jerusalem”. Part of the Temple Mount plaza can be seen, and in the foreground the location of the Western Wall is hinted at. Mordechai Levy believes that the presence of this pattern among Coptic tattooists suggests that Jews may also have desired tattoos. He finds support for this hypothesis in the memoirs of the English tattooist George Burchett, who deserted the British Navy in his youth while his ship was anchored in Jaffa. When he arrived in Jerusalem, probably in the early 1890s, he opened a small tattoo stand near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Burchett recounts that “The Holy City has been the center of tattooing for fifty years. Tattooists from among the Greeks, Maronites, Syrians, French, Jews and Italians worked there. The tattooists in Jerusalem were fully occupied tattooing pilgrims and tourists.” [13]

A pattern bearing the inscription “Jerusalem”

The practice still exists today among Kurds in northern Iraq and southern Turkey, and its origins are likely related to Balkan tattoos. In Iraq until 1930, both men and women commonly tattooed protective and healing tattoos as well as beauty-enhancing tattoos. Women were often the tattooists, and the ink was prepared by mixing soot with breast milk. The design was simple and geometric and applied to all parts of the body [14]. In Iraq there were women mullahs who conducted joint rituals of prayer and tattooing. The mullah was…

הפוסט Body Decoration and Tattoos in Africa and the Middle East | By Yasmine Bergner הופיע לראשונה ב-גיאומטריה מקודשת.