Psychedelics and Emasculation

Feminism and the attack on modern man

Psychedelics and promiscuity were promoted together as part of feminism. But few people understand why. It’s ironic that psychedelics are often thought of as countercultural. In fact, Brave New World was actually based on the non-fiction writings of the elite groups Huxley, a famous promoter of psychedelics, aligned himself with.

Since I was recently asked about my views on psychedelics, this article will explain why I think they are immoral. To explain their connection to feminism, however, we first need to consider the work of Erich Neumann (1905 – 1960), particularly his work Origins and History of Consciousness (1949).

It’s a common complaint that modern society is feminised. Neumann, too, saw modernity as a reversion to 'effeminacy' and 'the negative aspect of the Great Mother.' In his theory, ego consciousness is a male development and supersedes non-individuated infancy. To become a man, the boy has to break away from his mother.

He illustrated this with the Gilgamesh epic. In the Gilgamesh epic, the goddess Ishtar admires Gilgamesh’s virility and tries to seduce him. But he kills her because he knows the fate of her former lovers, who all died at her hands. And this, Neumann observed, echoes the younger male god Marduk's killing of the female water-monster Tiamat in the poem 'Enuma Elish'.

Why must the masculine heroes kill Ishtar and Tiamat? Because they are both Gaia figures. As Neumann warns, ‘The stronger the masculine ego-consciousness becomes, the more it is aware of the emasculating, bewitching, deadly, and stupefying nature of the Great Goddess.’

Thus the masculine hero reverses the son-lover sacrifice by dismemberment and castration common in ancient myths and cults: Attis and Cybele (Phrygian), Adonis and Aphrodite (Greek), Tammuz and Inanna (Syrian). As Frazer said, the female earth wants ‘the blood-seed of the male.’

By contrast, the masculine means law. In Hesiod's 'Theogony,' for example, Zeus brings light and order to darkness and chaos. And ‘this dominance of masculinity,’ says Neumann, ‘determines the spiritual development of Western man.’ Without it, society slumps towards ‘centreless agglomeration’.

The family, the clan or tribe, the village and the city: all are first atomised then massified, reabsorbed into the undifferentiated darkness of the womb of the terrible mother. In fact, anything attaching to form at all is attacked — including even sexual dimorphism itself.

For Neumann, then, ‘the global revolution which has seized upon modern man’ is the attack on the masculine principle of order. Feminisation and collectivisation are two aspects of one thing: ‘The individual soul is swallowed back by the Terrible Mother.’ It's cultural dissolution — an assault on all borders, from individuals and sexes to nations.

Using Jung's term 'participation mystique,' Neumann describes modernity as the tug of the unconscious towards formlessness and chaos. And just as promiscuity undermines the family, working towards the dissolution of patriarchy, so psychedelics undermine rationality and encourage pantheism.

Christianity says God created the world ex nihilo, not out of Himself — like a pregnant woman — as in pagan cosmology. Instead, God is utterly transcendent, and man can't take a single step towards Him with psychedelics. But psychedelics emasculate and stupefy with passivity and unity, aiming at womb-like oneness. They also undermine man’s rationality, part of the image of God in us.

Because man is made to worship, even in a so-called secular culture spirituality can’t be suppressed. The capital letter just shifts from God to Nature, Equality or the Promised Land of whatever revolutionary political ideology is currently repackaging the age-old dream of man creating heaven on earth. Worship is unavoidable. The only alternative to Christianity is always idolatry.

There’s a passage on this in Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent that hit me hard when I first read it. Makar (an old and wise peasant) explains to Arkady (a young intellectual) how ‘a man cannot live without worshiping something; without worshiping he cannot bear the burden of himself.’

That’s why some people have worshipped trees and animals. So it’s not surprising, then, that psychedelics have been a mainstay throughout human history. But Christianity has shaped Western culture more than anything else has done. And Christianity fundamentally rests on the Resurrection, not psychedelic or mystical experience. Whether person X has mystical experience Z — either as a result (at last in part) of ingesting substance Y or not — isn’t ultimately relevant to the question of whether the Resurrection happened or not.

Nor is it ultimately relevant to the philosophical arguments that conclude God exists, as the pre-Christian ancient Greek philosophers did, on the basis that the universe can’t possibly have caused itself. That’s not to dismiss the possibility of psychedelics inducing mystical experiences or the role they play in the spiritual awakening of some people. But none of that can tell us whether Christianity is true or not.

Another important but neglected factor is that the Church teaches that, with God’s permission, the devil can (among other things) produce bodily or imaginative visions and falsify ecstasy in addition to producing stigmata and simulating miracles. If psychedelics have a connection to the spiritual, it follows that they also have a potential connection to the demonic. And there is certainly no shortage of people who’ve had that kind of experience as well.

The Resurrection is also the stumbling block for the so-called pagan continuity hypothesis — the idea that Christianity is fundamentally just the same as the myths that went before it. I agree there’s something to this hypothesis. C. S. Lewis called all the pagan precursors of Christianity ‘good dreams’ — especially the stories of various gods dying and coming back to life. In addition, Demeter, Isis and all the other mother goddesses of antiquity can also be seen as types of the Virgin Mary.

But the scholars of comparative religion who looked into this around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century ran into three big problems:

1. The dying and rising gods of paganism didn’t really rise. Osiris, the most famous, doesn’t come back to life at all: he simply continues to exist in the nether realm of the departed.

2. They were also closely related to the cycle of the seasons, whereas Christ’s resurrection is a one-time event, not repeated, and unrelated to seasonal changes.

3. The Jews were aware of all these pagan beliefs but detested them, and although the Jews believed in the resurrection of ALL righteous people at the end of world, they had no concept of the resurrection of an individual within history.

So as T. N. D. Mettinger concludes in ‘The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East’, ‘the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions. The riddle remains.’ (p.221).

The Christian teaching about the Resurrection is that Christ actually came back to life; otherwise, He wouldn't have truly defeated death. The early Christians didn’t think they’d have drug-induced hallucinations of a Christ who hadn’t truly risen. The Resurrection put the divine seal on his teachings and started the Christian religion. When I was an atheist, my view about that was simply "but that's impossible" because I thought that only matter existed.

But then I realised not even the properties of matter are matter. And against the philosophical backdrop of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, there aren't any good arguments against the possibility of the Resurrection. As the Cambridge scholar C. F. D. Moule said,

'If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian purpose to stop it up with? . . . The birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church . . . remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.'

The secular stop-gap I personally find the most absurd is the idea that the disciples stole the body from the tomb, hid it and then faced exile, torture and death for what they certainly knew to be a lie. And the idea that the disciples were just tripping is similarly absurd.