Cult is the Root of Culture in the Electronic Age
Error 404: No roots of trans cult found in global religions
The University of Toronto has given us more than one leading public intellectual in my lifetime. Since August 2016, Jordan Peterson has helped to shape the way we think about the culture wars and the complexities of our times in many ways - but in the 1960s and 70s, UofT professor Marshall McCluhan, philosopher and media theorist shaped our thinking about changing technologies in prescient and prophetic ways.
The man who coined the term, Global Village, once said that school was increasingly becoming a place of detention rather than a place of attention - observing that the increasing sophistication and attractiveness of television, radio and music in the 60s was making it harder and harder for teachers to compete with modern technology. He was afraid that children were increasingly being socialized by technology rather than by being engaged within the auditory environment that up until the invention of these new communication technologies had been central to human experience and development for centuries.
Little could he have understood that just a few decades later, we would have access to the sum of human knowledge in our pockets and that our children would be completely divorced from the material environment. He could not have predicted that our kids would be captured by contagious and dangerous ideas that girls can become boys and boys can become girls; corrupted in their thinking in digitally dissociated spaces, where toxic ideas have taken on transpersonal trajectories rooted in group identities and delusions. Masses of teens dissociated from their bodies are taking fantasies as realities and we collectively believe these are so real that we are shaping medical and governmental policies to support them.
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Twenty-five years ago I met a Nisga’a traditional man who had been raised in a residential school in northern British Columbia. I met him during the period of his life when he was returning to his tradition and learning his langauge, traditional art, carving, storytelling and medicine. We met in a cafe where he had been commissioned to paint a mural in fine west-coast style and we carried on conversations on the subject of the sacred and the symbolic over months until each of us was called by the duties of parenthood to root ourselves in the demands of the material world.
Without compromising oaths to him to protect his stories; following a lesson from him that the story belongs to the teller, his first lesson to me had to do with divine masculine and divine feminine and the aspects of each that we each embody.
He shared a perception with me, that as human beings become more and more distant from the natural rhythms and cycles of life; as we disconnect from the energies of Earth Mother and Sky Father, and from the four seasons, and the cycles of the moon; and as we replace them with technology and modern vices, the first casualty is that our sense of what it means to be a man or a woman loses its balance and strays from the binary of nature.
I find it hard to dispute this. I spent time on a farm in Saskatchewan as a child, and in more than one fishing village as a boy, and I retain a felt sense of the cycles of life. It is natural to understand that the masculine and feminine are central to existence for people who depend on the earth and the sea for their survival.
On the farm, where generations of my father’s family lived, we understood the fertilization of crops. We understood that hogs and sows make piglets, that cocks fertilize hens, that stallions and mares breed colts and fillies. This is the way of nature.
In the fishing community where generations of my mother’s family lived we see this in the annual cycles of fertility, where the capelin came into the bay to spawn by the billions. We see this in the life cycles of Seal, Moose and Rabbit. The fundamental understanding of natural cycles supported our ancestors of farm and forest and sea since time before memory.
There is no questioning the role of male and female in the annual salmon runs that sustained the Nisga’a people. No questioning the roles of She-Bear and He-Bear; She-Wolf and He-Wolf. No questioning the centrality of the stories kept by grandmothers and grandfathers for the education of boys and girls.
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With the technological shift we are are living through in 2021, Canada and many other places in the world have enacted legislation that protects the cult beliefs, delusions and fantasies that men by self-identification can actually become women; and girls, radicalized in online spaces, can become boys by taking hormones and having their breasts and reproductive organs surgically removed.
We not only entertain this delusion as a society, we claim that this is natural and normal. Priests of this cult claim that transgenderism is a normal feature of human diversity and that Trans people have been subject to centuries of oppression. We fawn over people who claim these myths to be true; we rush to rescue them over the false claim that they have been persecuted, marginalized, subjugated and oppressed for centuries.
There is no significant representation of what some people call Two-Spirit in Indigenous culture or in the claim that indigenous people understood this as a normal phenomenon, in any of the lessons I had about the sacred masculine (Sky Father) or the sacred feminine(Earth Mother) from my friends of the Red Nation. Certainly none substantiate the meaning that some boys are actually girls; or some girls are actually boys. Nor, after twenty-five years of studying the sacred stories of the great cultures of the world, is there any significant representation of cross-sex or androgynous gods in any of the religious or spiritual traditions of the world.
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I could point to a few references, even ones central to my own beliefs, that the god Hermes/Mercury, the patron of my spiritual practice, took the form of and presented sometimes as an androgynous child. But he is a trickster, an ephemeral being and a master of shapeshifting. This childlike state was not an end state, but a transient one, one used in deception, seduction and thievery.
I could point to the ancient Mesopotamian Goddess Inanna (Thanks Lisa Marchiano), and the poetries of the goddess’ fertility cult, who, in some stories, was once rescued from the underworld by several non-gendered beings. During her time in the underworld, stripped of her powers of life and fertility, her corpse hung on a hook like meat while the world above lost its vitality, and it’s fertility, and fecundity. And what ambassadors would remain to traverse the space between the world of men and the underworld hell, but the pitiful, asexual shells of beings without libido, neither man nor woman. Grotesques of the supernatural realms.
I could point to the Classical fertility cults of Venus/Aphrodite and Inanna’s Greek counterpart Persephone, when imprisoned by Hades, left the world above in the sterility of winter and remind us that Her release from Her imprisonment, like Inanna, for only half of every year gave us the anthropomorphization of the cycles of the seasons, the life-giving goddess energy of spring fertility, and the cold decrepitude of wintery death.
At best these androgynes are peripheral creatures, exceptions to the natural order, outside the cultural frameworks of anything we remember in any of our metaphysics, our philosophies or as recounted by any of our great thinkers.