question...

Sat, Feb 13, 12:26 PM (2 days ago)

"Anti-heroism is the core value of Puritanism..."

Read this on one of your recent posts on Patreon...been pondering it...

I do not think you mean in the vein of the anti-hero definitions here...

it's much more literal I sense...

You said this on the heels of describing the thought process of a New Englander about having to be solemn and shameful in killing "Indians"

Merci in advance if you can share a thought about this...

May your day feel peace filled James....

-Fire

This, Fire, is a central concept that underpins The 13th Tribe project, into which I have already sunk three years.

Our modern idea of heroism is based on sacrifice, preferably passive sacrifice like Jesus on the cross or active service, like Health care "heroes" today. The Puritans did not have an ideal of heroism at all. To them this did not exist. First of all, they did not call themselves Puritans. That was an outsider view. But since we are outsides to their elite coven of mind-herders, I think that naming them Puritans makes as much sense as the Puritans calling the Wompanoags Heathen and the Romans calling the Hellenes Greek.

Generally speaking, the people we call Puritans were known as Congregationalists in England and among themselves, they were The Saints. Like the Labadist saint Jasper Danckearts touring America for a place to form a religious colony [colony being the minority religious/governmental term for a plantation], and the saints of Ephretta Closter in Pennsylvania, these folk saw themselves as living intercessors for the "Strangers" and other damned folk. At the Ephretta Closter, families of the living Congregation supported the Saints, celibate recluses of both sexes who prayed on the End Times. Each Saint was a priest-king among men.

In the view of Increase Mather and the other patriarchs of the New England Saints, the reason for the Indians [usually referred to as heathens] rising up against their Christian masters with torch and hatchet, was the sins of their Christian Masters. Indians lived in the forest, the domain of Satan, and they were his wicked children. However, as Satan, in the view of saints of that era, is ultimately God's tool for testing and punishing man, than the war waged by the heathen against the many injustices they suffered, was in fact God's punishment upon the saints for abusing the heathen in un-Christian ways, as well as for living less than saintly lives at home. These wars would be almost immediately followed by the accusation, trial, and killing of numerous women on charges of witchcraft.

Over and over again the period authors, religious men, who had no concept of heroism, as heroism in the European sense means to struggle against mortals and aspects of the divine will and is Blasphemous. The authors constantly reminded the readers that no skill, bravery, massive numerical superiority, Indian allies or limitless supplies defeated the few, starving heathen hiding in the swamps like Grendal and his mother. But that it was only The Avenging Angel of the Lord, smiting the heathen with disease and disaster that restored the Saints. The sacred watchword in these accounts is "humiliation," that the good Christian must hang his head in humiliation and beg the Lord's forgiveness. For only this can save, with no feat of arms, no daring, no tenacious waging of war, ever, of any use in a struggle that is simply the punishment of fallen saints by the Devil and his wicked children at the behest of a displeased God. The best comparison for today, would be that since God's existence was dedicated to the creation, shepherding and salvation of men, the puritan view was metaphysically very much like the current view we have of the State, that Government is dedicated too our propagation, education, well-being, and yes punishment, all for our utopian salvation here, in heaven brought down to earth.

So, as we stand here at the end of American History, it is obvious, that we, like the people of 1600s New England, are ruled via humiliation and negation, told to hide indoors, to lockdown, to follow the science, to mask-up, that anything we do other than obey can never improve our condition or maintain our health. One can also trace with a fine clarity the evolution of the University System of American Higher Education, and its fervent pursuit of social compliance and mind control—the use of shame, humiliation and the keeping of exclusive information amongst the elite—to the generation of Increase Mather's son, Cotton Mather, both of whom presided over the Salem Witch Trials. God has been moved from Heaven to the south shore of the Potomac River as the priest-hood has steadily migrated from church to university.

Most people will define a hero simply as a champion.

But in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Achilles, Odysseus, Herakles, Euthymus, Roland and Beowulf, the Arуan hero struggles not just for and against men, but for and against The Powers. The strict protestant interpretation that when God said, "Let us make man in our image after our likeness" He was mistaken and meant Me and only singular Me, [1] and that Satan is God's servant, makes the idea of a hero struggling against the Powers blasphemous, as all The Powers are regarded as insanely one. [1] This extreme reactionary orthodoxy is still expressed in civic and military management, with the best and most aggressive soldiers and policemen typically chastised, demoted and eventually cashiered from service.

Thus the Puritan ethos of shame and humiliation yet remains as the key-stone of our social ethos, even after our university educated leaders, all hailing from schools ultimately founded by the Puritans, have told us for a hundred years now that there is no God, there are no Higher Powers, that they are the highest authority, our living collective divinity, our Good Shepherd. In our every war, since the decade before my birth, our movies and media have portrayed the enemies of this nation as vile insects, human rats to be hunted for their sins as we try and save them from their decisions in their far off lands. Thus the post-conflict negation of military heroics in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nigeria, Chad and whatever the next shithole is that U.S. forces invades, are denied by depicting the enemy as universally evil, traitorous to their own [by inserting non-existent values such as Saddam Hussein being a Kurd or a Shia Arab when he was a Sunni Arab] and most of all cowardly and incompetent, even when conducting suicide missions against an unbeatable invader. By, as Increase Mather did, insisting that our enemies are nothing more than punishments from our benevolent Almighty, and our victories nothing but his Avenging Angel [the failure to explain away angels being a crucial flaw in monotheist doctrine, which by beginning the denial of all but one Power inevitable leads to the denial of all supra-human powers] [1] makes the hero impossible, and his name is reassigned to crippled children, ambushed soldiers, medical functionaries and civil "servants."

There is no room for heroism in such an ethos, except to entertain the idle masses in movie and video games.

I hope that covers it, Fire.

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Notes

-1. The triumvirate godhead doctrine is something I understand and reject, as a semantic web spun like other church doctrines to separate itself from its predecessor religions, such as when "slaves" were magically transferred from the property of man to the property of land and renamed "serfs," semantically now not the property of the owner of the property that owned them... When all of the plural Higher Powers of Heaven, and the Lower Powers of Hell are all conceptualized as working God's unified, three-faceted, omniscient will, than battling any of these aspects, even fighting Satan, is blasphemy, the misapplication of Heathen and Pagan notions of heroism [with heroism defined in the Arуan diaspora as breaking out of the system] to a religion, that by the 1600s, was actually providing civic, judicial, police and military functions and essentially was The System. So, unlike the crusaders of a hundred and more years before them, and unlike Gordon of Khartoum 200 years later, who saw themselves as fighting evil in the Name of God, the Puritans saw themselves as suffering evil under God's judgment as so many thousands of Christ-figures paying anew the wages of their sins.