dismemberment

For years they said to me, “We didn’t hurt you and you are not hurt.  We will not believe you are traumatized either by us or by anyone, unless you show us more and more clearly, so that one day we can see it. “

But it was all a joke and a lead-on.   The point is that colonials took liberties with morality that they don’t readily permit themselves, and so now I am in a vulnerable position, I have to be punished for the behavior of my tribe – its arrogance.

They saw they’d captured an enemy combatant and they were now throwing me down the pyramid inritual sacrifice, after dismembering me slowly.

So, now, really, I DO get the joke at last – haha!   It’s quite a well planned one and quite effective revenge, but somehow I am not inclined to play the game anymore.  I won’t write for them and I won’t show them my wounding so that they can see what they are capable of achieving surreptitiously, without having to be overt “colonials” and without having to be transparent about their sadism.

I now understand them in a very, very deep way – much more deeply than they understand themselves.

And furthermore, oddly enough, I do not find their attitudes or behavior enlightening or seductive.

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Also see: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), p 38, regarding the Yakut: “[T]he central theme of an initiation ceremony [is] dismembership of the neophyte’s body and renewal of his organs; ritual death followed by resurrection.”

See also, concerning Siberian shamans, p 43: “demonic beings cut his body to pieces, boil it, and exchange it for better organs.”

This type of shamanic consciousness accords with a state of regression to the paranoid-schizoid position of the early pre-Oedipal stage, when one’s body image and mental state are subjectively fragmented rather than being experienced as a coherent whole.