“This book is outstanding. Well done, sir. I buy a lot of e-books. But yours really has captured my attention. What I like most so far is the rebuttal to Jack Donovan's idea that we all need a gang. Your response reminded me of the movie The Book of Eli. Like you say, the more lethal you are personally, the less you need to rely on others.”

Take care.

Dave

Dave,

I'm really glad you liked Taboo You. A friend of mine had been bothering me about the fact that I needed to do a sequel to When You're Food. Then I read The Way of Men while reading some Melville and was hit with the spark.

Although I disagree with Jack on that tribal point, I owe him for the impetus.

Take care, sir.

Arguing masculinity versus tribalism is like pitting chickens against eggs. Although Jack Donovan, in his book The Way of Men, makes an excellent case for the ascendant male needing a tribal or ‘gang’ social structure in order to reach his potential, it does not, in my mind, follow that the tribe creates the man, but rather serves as his forge, in which case he may become a man by going against the tribe. That said, although most of us would rather be Achilles than Agamemnon, most of us would, if given the choice, chart a life course more in line with the masterful king rather than the defiant warrior.

Before we walk down this road let it be said that the most denatured, morally senile, emotionally vacuous, and testicular-challenged men to ever slither back down the evolutionary chute as emasculated newts are postmodern men of European descent. And that this is the case explicitly because the Whiteman has, in his state of material hubris, abandoned tribalism, as an outmoded artifice clung to be lesser races, and has embraced womanly materialism as his universal ethos; sitting empty-hearted now, at the End of Masculine Time, worshipping his God of Things. Let us also stipulate that most Taboo Men, even the world beaters, have engaged in diplomacy and tribal alliance-making, unlike most Hollywood heroes, who tend to be weighted more toward action for cinema's sake.

The idea of the Taboo Man is not a theory I propose but a reality I have observed researching the combat arts. In the book Taboo You many an example are given, and many more are neglected. In this brief I will outline for you a handful of Taboo Men from antiquity, each with a very brief bio. I intend to expend this gallery into a book—my next book in the masculinity department—which shall be nothing more than a series of biographies of Taboo Men of antiquity.

The Taboo Man, as a masculine phenomenon throughout the ages, is not anti-tribal, but extra-tribal; he is a facet of the tribal condition, more apt than not to be hyper-masculine, and sometimes also a visionary, as is the fictional character in the movie cited by Dave, The Book of Eli, which I find to be a nice sketch of the Taboo Man. Modern tribalism proponents will scoff at such characters as loner fantasies, and suggest that they did not exist historically. They will further suggest that harboring loner ambitions—and the Taboo Man is a loner—is a low yield proposition most likely to result in a lonely death in any highly lethal environment.

Surely the lethal loner is very much overdone in fiction, particularly in the recent Equalizer movie, in which the actor that brought Eli to life in the above mentioned movie creates a parody of the Taboo Man in that wretched film. The historical facts are that the Taboo Man has existed as a prominent figure in reality and myth, and has suffered sorrow in large measure. His appeal is largely based on his rarity. I estimate roughly, that of every 100 men who find the answer to their soul’s masculine yearning in Jack’s The Way of Men, that only one or two will care much for Taboo You. The dust cover of the book does not prevent a rosy picture, but rather shows how marginal the life of an unremarkable Taboo Man, such as myself, can be. I was not exactly Achilles chanting about feeding my enemies to the dogs outside of Troy when I was fleeing down an alley in Pig Town with two pit bulls on my heels.

Briefly, the Taboo Man is a tribal person who is not part of the tribal pecking order [Hierarchies are male adaptations of female pecking orders, and hence have emasculating effects, that must be countered by rituals in a healthy masculine culture.], but stands apart and interacts by turns, and is tolerated by key members of the tribal hierarchy only because he has a unique skill set and/or perspective. He is the shaman, the assassin, the advisor, the scout, the poet, and the boxer*, and he serves at the pleasure of the chief.

*Boxing is, according to my research, foundational as an Indo-European ritual for the inclusion of the anti-social killer in the tribe. It is no accident, that the race who conquered the world from its humble beginnings essentially invented the most brutal combat ritual at the beginning of its lethal trajectory, and that the entire art was in essence a collective spell to invite the spirit of War into the hearts of men. Rather than chariots or certain weapons, Robert L. O’Connell, in his ground breaking book Of Arms and Men, places the key to military success in Western Man’s willingness to come to grips with his enemy, to get in close and slug it out.

See The First Boxers [soon to be published in print form], and Mister O’Connell’s seminal book.

These following figures are mythic, and though probably based on prehistoric leaders, are actually allegorical figures in the hands of the poets.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who together rejected the Goddess, as chief and shaman, are the mythic subject of our oldest book, and the template for understanding the fall of masculinity under civilized conditions, as well as the primitive warrior dynamic between such latter day primitives as Old Hatcher and the Liver-eater and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

Agamemnon and Achilles provide the longest ongoing cautionary tale in masculine history as the chief vested in a war-making hierarchy, and his necessarily defiant taboo killing machine, who, despite his extreme lethality, abhors war, where the soft-bellied and relatively womanly master loves war for its material gain.

Samson, is yet another doomed Taboo Man, who, despite being a Dannite, and not of native Hebrew blood, wished to fight on behalf of the Jews against the Philistines, only to have his allies send a woman to seduce him and place him in the power of the enemy.

David finally defeats the Philistines, though he comes from outside the military hierarchy, being a mere shepherd boy, and most likely an allegorical figure representing a long campaign of guerilla warfare. David rises from boy, to Taboo Man, to chief, and then immediately employs a cadre of Taboo Men, as his killers, drawn from various tribes. David’s men were, first and foremost, lethal. Rather than submit to his enemies and betray a Samson figure, he collected them like a boy collects trading cards and used them to lay low his opponents. Their ancestry was secondary. What was important was their loyalty to him.

These Hellenic men’s names are given in English. Of the two dozen ancient taboo Hellenes I can recall off the top of my head, they are but a sampling.

Best-of-men, son of Lion-maker of Naxos in Sicily did not become the most successful Olympic boxer in the ancient and modern eras by training as others. He swam in the sea to prepare for the agony of boxing and after the death of his tribe the memory of his accomplishments is all that remained of them, even in antiquity.

Gray-fish, son of a farmer, when seen fixing a plough by beating it with his palm, was entered into the Olympics despite his lowly class, having not even been schooled by a trainer. He went on to become the most famous athlete of his age and to serve a Sicilian tyrant as governor over a feuding city.

God-born defiled a sacred statue when he was a boy, and was only one of seven to be fined for insulting Zeus through his hubris, when he fought Grace-speaker in boxing before his own pankration event and, though beating Grace-speaker, caused the pankration crown to be awarded without a final round of combat, as he was too exhausted to finish the contest. God-born was worshipped as a deity for over 600 years. One might say he got one over on Zeus, whose temple fell before his shrine went out of use.

Grace-speaker was only prevented from equaling Greatest-of-men by the hubris of God-born. On his journey home from his third and final Olympic victory, he stopped over at Temesa to see a local ritual. Every year the most beautiful virgin of the town was sacrificed at the temple to an evil hero’s ghost. The ghost would come in black face and wolf-hide to conduct the woman off into the night, never to be seen again. Having the social stature—thanks to his boxing fame—to challenge custom and tradition, Grace-speaker put on his armor and took up his weapons, and waited in the temple with the girl for the ghost to appear. After what turned out to be a rough and final night at the office for the ghost [who we can assume was a priest masquerading as a ghost], Grace-speaker took the girl as his wife and lived on “into unnatural old age, passing from life in some way other than death.”

Spear-lord was an Olympic boxing and pankration champion and an admiral of his small island nation’s fleet. When his ship was captured by enemies, who then discovered that he was the noted champion, he was released, just so that his enemies could say that they had him, and were men enough to let him go. His life is proof that not every tribal war is a bug hunt to extermination, but alliances and points of honor are often integrated into the hostilities, with these points of honor often being the extra-tribal currency of the Taboo Man.

Foreign-voice, was a historian, soldier, mercenary, and student who traveled the world, served the masters of four different nations as an advisor, a capacity that he retains today, as war colleges continue to teach of his account of a mercenary army’s retreat from the heart of a hostile empire.

Best-purpose was a son of a minor city who was the hated tutor of at least two tyrants, one being the maniac boy king who would burn the world. Thanks to the patronage of a man determined to make himself into a god, he was able to conduct the most wide-ranging scientific inquiry in human history.

Of Lions and Men will conclude with:

The Money Tribe

The Philosopher King

Fading Legions