How Do Masculine Rites Reflect Western Cultural Dominance Throughout the Ages?
Written for Myth of the 20th Century by James LaFond
There are four aspects of sports:
-Primal
-Tribal
-Ritual
-Spectacle
All four of these aspects are present in a given sport at a given time. However, the social mechanisms key on the primacy of each aspect, with that aspect most predominant in the current social setting, marking the rise, apex and decline of a given athletic ritual.
The term athlete comes from the ancient Hellenic words for "prize seeker," so an athlete is not just a practitioner of a primal, tribal, ritual or spectacular art, but one whose aim is to be rewarded with honors or material. The further a sport is from its origin and the further into decline the host society, the more material gain supplants honor as the prize.
This degradation has a corollary in masculine domestication in the wider sphere as well, a degradation of masculinity that begins at the very dawn of civilization, in chiefdoms such as the Achaean society of the Iliad, in which the material resources of Agamemnon brought more social leverage in an honor-based society than the actual honor accrued by Achilles. Likewise, Beowulf, most honored man of the epic named after him, is employed as a tool by a dynasty based on wealth accumulation which lay prostrate before their enemy, unable to defend themselves.
In Alexander’s singular quest to conquer the world as a boyish exploration and godlike aspiration, he literally carted soil for wrestling on wherever his armies went, to the point where his men called themselves, “the boys from the gym” planting their hyper-masculine values wherever they went. His every conquest was consecrated with athletic contests, mostly in honor of Herakles, the demigod later most admired by the Romans, as a re-ascendant being.
Emergence, Evolution and Devolution of Sports
Primal
All sports contain aspects of the hunt, with aiming, chasing and wrangling [wrestling, lifting, bull riding, etc.] being present in all forms. Thus the first prehistoric sports were most likely preparations for the hunt.
There are also significant gathering aspects, especially in ball sports, which are exclusively tribal and were played by women nearly as often as men in Western societies.
The modern and postmodern focus on ball sport as the definition of masculine expression is, in and of itself, symptomatic of a deep emasculation. In the ancient world, there was only one kind of athlete, and he fought. [Track and field athletes were considered combat artists, as they engaged in segments of a warrior’s preparation and war tasks.]
Tribal
Team ball sports are quintessential examples of tribal athletics, which served primarily as bonding rites—often across gender and age lines—but not across alien or enemy lines.
The urge for WWI soldiers to play ball between the lines, documented by Ernst Junger, and which was ruined by the officers in charge of ethno-cultural negation ordering snipers to fire on the players to reignite false hatreds, are a good example of the social purpose of masculine ritual, to preserve competing societies of the same ethnicity from extermination. The “Rules of War,” ceasefires and truces are essentially based on athletic frame works at least 4,000 years old.
A ball sport is supposed to pit one identified group against another and often contains gathering and capture elements, with the goalkeeper of many modern ball sports being an actual descendant of the early modern gaolkeeper, who jailed runaway slaves until they could be resold.
The natural human affinity for such community versus community contests has been harnessed in modern times to render the spectacle of degenerate sports addictive in a way that ancient spectacles were not. When ball sports evolve beyond amateur associations and the players become mercenary in character, the natural tribal affinity for inter-community, sub-lethal skirmishing had been successfully hijacked by the manipulative class into a tool for subverting, rather than affirming, community identity.
Ritual
The first evidence of specific forms of ritual combat were as follows:
Wrestling, 20,000 BP, Spain
Dueling, 5,000 BP, Sumer
Boxing, 4,000 BP, Indo-Aryan Conquests
Such rites were generally maintained as exclusive to combative classes of men, with notable exceptions such as the warrior-slaves of the Roman arena, known as gladiators. All such rites, in the ancient world, had sacral aspects, which were maintained even in the face of spectacular degradation [1] and the rise of professional athletes and slave athletes, the most famous of the latter being charioteers.
When the classical world fell into decline, such masculine rituals were first sought as wells of spiritual rejuvenation by the upper class, with senators and even an emperor, turning their backs on civic life to compete in the arena. At the end of this social decline, athletics and gladiatorial combat were abolished altogether, with their eventual rebirth in the early modern period as dueling rose in Feudal Europe and then gave way to boxing in early-Modern Europe. Once reborn in Europe, these masculine rituals were first criminalized and then aggressively regulated by governments.
Eventually all advanced societies chain the masculine ritual to a spectacle format which in some way degrades the contestant and places him in a state of social judgment. Anti-boxing statutes, the bans on dueling, referees, umpires, judges, athletic codes and commissions are all expressions of the ruling elite’s innate fear of masculine agency, particularly in individualistic combative form. In fact, athletic commissions only oversee individual combat sports, not team ball sports. The lowest grossing sports draws the highest government regulation expenditures.
This State fear of masculine agency—particularly of the individual hero—is well expressed in the 1970s movie Rollerball, starring James Caan as Jonathan. [2]
Spectacle
Pre-combat war dances, coming-of-age rites and victory dances, were probably the first public spectacles and were, on a tribal level, participatory expressions, not passively observed ceremonies. Such do not become passive until external, alien rule is exerted one tribe upon the other.
In proto-nations, or chiefdoms, use of such rites by the elite toward a unified social cohesion in line with the ruler’s aspirations are in evidence, such as the dancing of Zulu maidens before their husbands-to-be, who could not marry until they had wet their spears in battle.
By the time tribal chiefdoms had been welded into larger polities, such as Athens, with its dozen tribes and Elis with its three, masculine rites were expanded from private observances such as a Roman son making two captives fight to the death before his father’s tomb in 366 B.C., to become social rudders such as the Olympics, chariot races in the Circus Maximus and the sanguine spectacles of the Arena [sands], which were originally conducted in the Forum and Circus and later in purpose-built amphitheaters.
Comparing Roman and American Spectacle Arcs
Gladiatorial combat [munera, from “rites due the dead”] provides the best arc from the private sacral rite to the obsessively diversionary spectacle from the ancient world.
Emergence
In 366 B.C., in early vigor, poised to conquer the entirety of non-Greek, tribal Italy, Rome began employing warrior slaves to sanctify patriarchal burials.
The American corollary is the 1869 [3] formation of intercollegiate football, in the wake of the Civil War, as America geared up to conquer the remaining, non-British, adjacent, tribal lands.
Hegemony
By 146 B.C., as Greece was conquered, dedicated amphitheaters were being built as the Republic entered an expansionist phase which would see it supplanting the Hellenistic empires of the east.
The American corollary is the 1892 [4] establishment of professional football, an overt territory conquest rite, just as America began to challenge old world industrial might, and set its sights on atrophied Spanish Dominions and entered unprecedented an unrepeated spate of civic construction. Most notable East Coast architecture comes from the period 1890-1914.
Decadence
Circa 100 B.C., Republican Rome entered a decadent era, in which slave rebellions and civil wars resulted in the usurpation of the Republic into an empire and increased military adventure abroad, culminating in the rise of empire under Augustus in 27 B.C. and, most tellingly to the Roman psyche, the loss of three legions in Germany in A.D. 9.
The American corollary to this would be the 1920 formation of the American Professional Football Association, in the midst of domestic labor upheavals, far flung wars, first with culturally similar and later alien peoples, culminating in the humiliating debacle of the Vietnam War, ending in 1975 which was, in Roman parlance, America’s Teutoburg Forest.
Rejuvenation
By A.D. 80, after the decadence of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero and the rise of the Flavians, who were military reactionaries, one sees the peak of architecture dedicated to spectacles as part of a state-driven campaign to extol masculine virtue before a passive audience.
The American corollary, in the 1970s, was the surpassing of Major League Baseball by the NFL in the wake of the Vietnam humiliation, well documented in the book,
The Last Head Bangers.
Decline
By 180 B.C., after a period of Roman expansion under the rule of the Five Good Emperors [Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius], internal decline and moral malaise set in, resulting in the spectacles taking on the same diversionary escapism one sees on weekends in American households before the television and at the stadium, and also serving the same function as the welfare state. For the only chance a poor Roman got to eat meat and where he sometimes received his bread dole, was at the gladiatorial amphitheater or circus.
From this point forward, few Roman emperors would die a natural death, but would be replaced at sword point, with Rome wracked by civil wars for the rest of its history until Constantine’s reform basically halved the Romam Imperium between Latin West and Greek East from A.D. 324 - 37 [5].
As civil wars raged, so were successful claimants called to police weakening external borders, such as Septimius Severus’s fatal invasion of Caledonia in 208 [6], with the empire actually reaching its power projection zenith under his reign, even as it collapsed morally and economically along internal lines.
The American corollary was the prominence of football as “the American religion” and “the religion of football” [to quote Rush Limbaugh] promoted by many as a defining American cultural phenomenon, even as military adventure ramped up to an “imperial influence maintenance” scale from 1991 through the present, only to have that image precipitously collapse.
Parting Notes on Roman/American Emasculation Corollaries
Just as the elite would eventually sully the arena and their own moral stature by going into it as part of the spectacle [Commodus for example], causing Roman thinkers to look upon the arena spectacles as a symbol of national decline rather than a display of manly virtue, as an obvious diversionary social brake on the common consciousness, the NFL scandals which accompanied the rise of Leftist political correctness and Rightist political dissidence circa 2012 have gutted “the religion of football” and broken its mystique.
After Severus, Roman soldiers were increasingly non-Roman mercenaries. Likewise, since the collapse of support for the ongoing Iraqi conflict, the U.S. has increasingly employed proxy forces in other developing conflicts.
At about A.D. 200, Roman birthrates began to decline markedly.
Also, at this time, traditional Greco-Roman cults were beginning to lose ground to Egyptian, Semitic and Mithraic forms of spiritual expression—the cult of Rome was dying and would be replaced, under Constantine, by an anti-athletic religion, which abolished all forms of masculine ritual.
In postmodern America, as athletics are no longer fields of virtuous expression and positive behavior cultivation, where our stone churches are now resettlement centers for people of rival religions from non-athletic cultures, will there be an athletic death or a reawakening?
There is one thing that America has that Rome did not, a thing borrowed from the Amerindians, a pre-athletic hunting tradition which did not exist in Post-Roman Europe for any but the elite. In what remains of America, we possess the actual root of sports—the hunt. We also possess a body of individual combat rites: boxing, wrestling, MMA, stick-fighting, fencing, that have actually survived 1700 years of Christian attempts to extinguish them. Indeed, the instinct for ritual combat is so strong among people of European descent, that in Europe and America, from A.D. 1200 to today, numerous Christian leaders have promoted the ancient Indo-Aryan pagan rites in defense of their faith, from Alfred the Great in A.D. 996, to an Italian priest circa A.D. 1200, to a “boxing” U.S. Navy chaplain in the 1890s, down to Christian men I train today, among those who accept the metaphysics of the Near East, there are men who reject the disdain for physicality that emerged ages ago from those ancient, decadent lands and continue to uphold their ancestral ways.
In the end, what is most important about masculine ritual is the sustaining of direct actionist honor, not the proxy honor of accumulation, agreement, appeasement and soft sympathy, but the creation of honor from action, a man’s only timeless accomplishment.
Honor Among Men
Notes
[1] Standing for the national anthem represents a civic-sacral element in the NFL, which the elite have moved to remove.
[2]
Preview for Rollerball
[3]
Intercollegiate football in America.
[4] The origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892, with William "Pudge" Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. In 1920 the American Professional Football Association was formed.
[5]
The Byzantine Empire
[6]
Septimius Severus
(c) 2017 James LaFond
