I cite here, the account of the Jesuit mission among the Blackfeet in Ronald Thomas West's Cosmos and Consciousness, which is a must read for any warrior attempting to preserve his masculinity in today's American Manginastan. If you are a Christian you will be put back by the assertion of Christian cupidity. However, this cultural disembowelment that was affected by the Jesuits upon the Blackfeet is older than Christianity, older than its parent religion of Judaism, and has continued after the banishment of Christianity from temporal discourse.
The saga of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, our very first written story, is a tale of a goddess and a priestess emasculating and killing the two heroes. This predated even early Old Testament warnings of the same type, in which Adam and Samson are undermined by enemies who employ the women they are close to as vectors. Is that any different than you coming home from work to meet your wife and children who have been watching news, commercials, sitcoms and police dramas that all extol the white man as either a bumbling buffoon or an evil predator? To turn his woman against a man, he must either be defeated militarily or economically or be made to look the fool or the devil.
Keep in mind that the Jesuit, as well as competing protestant missions, to native peoples in this time, were dependent upon and inextricably liked with, the same gross materialism that evangelists of these same denominations would preach against back in the industrial cities of the Whiteman. Since 1498, outward-bound Christians had brought their medical, monetary, military, and agricultural methods—including alcohol, with early Indians identifying rum with the evil intent of the Christian God—with them. Their view of God's earth being a garden and the Devil's realm being a wilderness, putting that at severe odds with native theology.
This was all as much Hunter verses farmer, warrior verses shopkeeper, as it was white verses red, or Christian versus heathen. We can see that the Christian-Heathen aspect of missionary-borne emasculation is only one of many facets found in the ruination of warrior culture, as evidenced by the ongoing assault on masculinity and warrior culture among the largely atheist and only nominally Christian postmodern Americans.
John Eldredge, a Christian activist, has clearly marked many such strands of emasculation found in the submersion of Christianity in the modern material matrix, and comes off in his book, Wild at Heart as somewhat aboriginal in outlook, to such a degree that the Jesuits would have surely had him assassinated if he had been preaching in their parish in the 19th century. My evaluation of Wild at Heart is ongoing, with two essays notated that have not yet appeared on the site. Below is the link to my initial review.
Undermining the Warrior: Part 2 & 3 will include my correspondence with a religious scholar from the Middle East, a warrior himself, who makes some challenging observations to some of my own counter culture observations, and has convinced me to overhaul some of my views.
Your post here reminded me of your recent comment concerning Pressfield's outstanding book "Gates of Fire." Those who champion the undermining of the Heroic Masculine . . . I understand why a people would do that against an enemy, but those who seek to do so in the name of "liberating us from outdated norms" and all that horseshit are idiots, blind to the fact that pursuing these things (strength, brotherhood, loyalty, glory, etc.) dares us to rise out of the gutter of our ignorance, shit, and cowardice and be better. Castrating us in the name of setting us free.
From Pressfield's "Tides of War" (amazon.com/Tides-War-Steven-Pressfield-ebook/dp/B000NJL7QY?ie=UTF8&keywords=tides%20of%20war&qid=1463968521&ref_=sr_1_4&s=books&sr=1-4)
"Three and half years later, before Byzantium, I attended a nightlong drinking bout. Someone had put the query “How does one lead free men?”. “By being better than they,” Alcibiades responded at once. The symposiasts laughed at this, even Thrasybulus and Theramenes, our generals. “By being better”, Alcibiades continued, “and thus commanding their emulation”. He was drunk, but on him it accounted nothing, save to liberate those holdings nearest to his heart. “When I was not yet twenty, I served in the infantry. Among my mates was Socrates the son of Sophoroniscus. In a fight the enemy had routed us and were swarming upon our position. I was terrified and loaded up to flee. Yet when I beheld him, my friend with the grey in his beard, plant his feet on the earth and seat his shoulder within the great bowl of his shield, a species of eros, life-will, arose within me like a tide. I discovered myself compelled, absent all prudence, to stand beside him. A commander’s role is to model arete, excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness, only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.” [Tides of War, p. 250]"
Thanks for the quote, Sam.
Pressfield has such a great insight into ancient Hellas.
He also wrote Last of the Amazons, about a barbarian woman, which I thought was well done and placed her in a realistic context.