Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

[David Morris]

That was a lot of typing, Dave.  Thanks.

I loved this book.  As Brown further explains later in this chapter, it is 
significant that this archetype is of sons (plural) against the father.  The 
sons together form a "false" and asexual (or homosexual) union against the 
father.  This is the genesis of fraternity.  It is a forced unity which 
necessitates the ritual of an initiation, usually a secret ritual.  The 
reason the ritual is secret is that it takes the form of a mutual crime 
shared by all the brothers: the murder of the father (or another substitute 
taboo).  Guilt is the common bond.

Because the archives are down, I'll repost this related poem, also from this 
_Love's Body_ chapter:

----------
  Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous 
intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs,

  or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves,
cannot resist meeting

  to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of 
their secret which he would most like to forget,

  forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but 
for him I could forget the blood, but for me I could forget the innocence)

  on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin 
Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike 
founded:

  For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no 
secular wall will safely stand.

Auden, "Vespers," _Shield of Achilles_

----------

>From: Dave Monroe From Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (Berkeley: U of
>California P, 1968 [New York: Random House, 1966]),
>Ch. 1, "Liberty," pp. 3-31 ...
>
>"Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the
>father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a
>historical explanation of origins, but a
>supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a
>myth; an old, old story..

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp