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Boy-Love as religion -- J. Darling

Posted by Manstuprator on 2024-March-6 19:01:43, Wednesday

BOY-LOVE AS RELIGION

by J. Darling


NOTE: 3329 Words -- Reading time 6 TO 9 MINUTES (approx.)

Recently an English judge, presiding over the trial of a paedophile, declared that P.I.E. was "evil" because it attempted to give a moral justification to the "perverted lusts" of the child-lover. One's immediate reaction to such a charge is, 'How irrational! What a ridiculous, ignorant remark; and this from a supposedly intelligent and civilized man!' One asks, 'Why is it evil to involve natural behaviour in a code of ethics?' One ends up feeling hot under the collar, indignant, aware of the hopelessness of trying to plead one's case by appealing to the reasonableness of humanity.

Again, if one were to take any psychiatrist and debate with him on the beneficence of paedophilia, one would find it easy to demolish any reasoned, opposed argument he cared to make.

Pressed, the psychiatrist would either admit to you that, in fact, paedophilia had no harmful effects on either party, but that nevertheless society refused to tolerate it, or he would drop all pretence of scientific objectivity and flatly declare paedophilia to be unnatural, wrong, deviant, or evil, and that all paedophiles, if they did not respond to treatment, should be locked up for life. Nothing more enrages supposedly reasonable people than the reasonableness of paedophilia.

The boy-lover soon realizes that the opposition to the natural expression of his sexuality is based on a set, obsessive concept. The boy-lover notices the power of this concept, which appears, like the monster in the film Alien, to burst voracious from the very heart of an otherwise ordinary, decent human being. What the boy-lover is up against is the primitive, but potent, force of Taboo. Taboo is a negative aspect of Religion. Its lack of response to Reason is due to its primitive origins in the human mind, a relic from that period of human savagery when Reason and Logic had not yet become prominent in the conduct of affairs.

The mistake of today's Western paedophiles is to answer this terrible hatred with the voice of Reason alone. It is as if a Jew in Nazi Germany, in order to save himself from the gas-chambers, had engaged Herr Hitler in debate upon the illogicality of anti-Semitism. What the paedophile should realize is that boy-love is attacked by Taboo because it, too, is a religious force. The paedophile's rational understanding of his sexuality should be backed by a faith in the absolute rightness of his love, and by a sense of awe, akin to worship, of the source of its power over him. With such a fundament of belief, amounting to religious conviction, he will have the inner strength to combat and survive the persecution against him.

Many paedophiles are anti-religious because their most vocal antagonists have often been people who have invoked Christianity in their condemnation. One should not confuse, however, the concept of Religion only with such evolved religions. Much of the intolerance of boy-love, I believe, stems from the recognition by the great monotheistic religions, and by the modern monopolistic State, of its essentially religious nature. It is seen as a rival. In a work which I shall use as a guide to definition and terminology (Religion Without Revelation, New York, 1957), the late Sir Julian Huxley, the biologist and naturalist, wrote:
Every advanced religion must experience some hostility towards religions at lower levels of development, whether intellectual, moral, or emotional; it is impossible for it to remain neutral. The ideal of religious tolerance is probably the best which the State can adopt, but even where it has been adopted it has only been between certain limits. . . . So long as States exist, it is clear that religious toleration cannot, or at least will not, be permitted in cases where religious belief aims at or tends toward the overthrow of the State or the principles on which its existence is grounded.
It is in the context of the above quotation that one can best understand the extraordinary statement at the end of last January's Time Magazine article on NAMBLA, to whit that no State can allow such an organization to flourish if it cares about its survival. It is my contention that boy-love is one of the world's less-developed religions, and therefore extremely vulnerable to the hostility of organized socially-reinforced monotheism, just as the animism of primitive Pacific peoples was crushed by the activities of nineteenth-century American missionaries.

What do we mean by Religion? Are we talking about belief in boy-gods? Are we elevating our young friends into godlings to whom we administer their due rites? That is a charming idea, a fancy to be indulged in, but it is not a belief to be held to literally. Belief in gods, however, is not necessarily what religion is about.

Sir Julian Huxley regarded religious experience as a necessary function of the human brain. Many people today declare that they are not religious. This arises from the misapprehension that religious experience assumes a belief in supernatural beings or in God. This need not be the case. In our secular world many feelings, associated, for example, with music or the adoration of a political figure, are religious in nature. It is well known that early Buddhism did not accept the existence of a supernatural being. What religion does do is subjectively to invest things or ideas with an immanent power to which the person reacts with feelings of awe and reverence, feelings powerful enough profoundly to alter his behaviour and to forge the destiny of his inner life. As Huxley pointed out, students of primitive religions testify that feelings essentially and obviously religious may be evoked in reference to an undefined sense of spiritual power or sanctity inhering in objects . . . or events . . . without linking them up with belief in any spiritual being.

Huxley went on,
What, then, is religion? It is a way of life. It is a way of life which follows necessarily from a man's holding certain things in reverence, from his feeling and believing them to be sacred. And those things which are held sacred by religion primarily concern human destiny and the forces with which it comes into contact. . . . I believe, then, that religion arose as a feeling of the sacred. The capacity for expressing this feeling in relation to various objects and events seems to be a fundamental capacity of man, something given in and by the construction of the normal human mind . . .
Huxley indicated how religions, like social organization and ideas, have evolved: monotheism and organized dogma backed by philosophical argument being an extremely late development in religious history. In no way, of course, can this historical evolution be regarded as an evolution towards Truth. Scientifically, there is no evidence at all for the actual existence of either transcendent deities or immanent spiritual powers. These must be considered as constructions of the human mind. What is true, what is evident, is that man is a religious animal.

How is boy-love a religion? Just because we like boys does not make us cultists, in the same way that our appreciation of a rose does not transform us into high priests of horticulture. The distinction between a religious experience and a passing aesthetic fancy is that the one has become the centre of our life, its events central to our destiny as men, while the other is tangential to our conception of ourselves and how our loves should be conducted. Then should not a loving parent, as much as a paedophile, be a devotee of our religion? Parents, however, adore (or not, as the case may be) only their own genetic excrescences. They are usually indifferent or hostile to other people's children. Their affection is nothing more than a tribal attachment, or a form of narcissism. The boy-lover recognizes the universality of the idea of the boy, and sees its beauty in greater or lesser degree within all boys. The boy-lover is so devoted to the image, concept and the body of the boy that he will make the boy the centre of his spiritual, and subsequently active, life.

In looking at boy-love as a religion one should not presume that the boy-lover must perceive any particular young friend of his as instilled with numinous power in the manner of a primitive totem. Certainly, however, the boy has served in history as a symbol of certain basic religious ideas.

Most often in the past, religious feelings associated with the love of boys have been disguised, for they have been grafted onto existing religious traditions. In his contribution (in collaboration with C.G. Jung) to a study of the myth of the divine child (Essays on a Science of Mythology, Princeton, 1963) Carlo Kerenyi indicated how such divinities as Apollo, Dionysus and Hermes were transformed in the evolution of Greek art from being rendered as bearded, mature -- men to being depicted as supple, adolescent boys. Kerenyi went on to argue that these boy-gods are symbols of the fructifying source of all things. They are the seeds and origins of men. They are thus associated with water, the primordial home of life. Many are the images in Greek art, for example, of young boys riding on the backs of dolphins. In one myth a certain Enalus jumps into the sea to be united with his beloved boy, Phineis, who has been cast into the waves as a sacrifice; dolphins appear and rescue the lovers. In another, Apollo brings the first priests to his shrine at Delphi by appearing upon a Cretan ship in the form of a dolphin. He leads the ship to Krisa, the port of Delphi, and then transforms himself into a beautiful, golden-haired boy. So enchanted are the sailors that they vow to remain at Delphi the rest of their days, that they might serve the god. In the Ancient World Apollo was to become a divinity particularly associated with the wooing of boys. Crete, the great island-nation of seafarers, was traditionally connected with the love of boys (even down, according to Hans Licht, to a form of ritualized rape). Another legend holds that as well as being taken by Zeus to be the wine-pourer of the gods, Ganymede was the concubine of Minos, King of Crete. The association of Ganymede with the source-concept, with the outpouring of life-giving substances, is strong. For the gods the boy dispensed wine and nectar. It was also said that, in order to protect his beloved from the jealousy of Hera, whose daughter Hebe had been supplanted as cup-bearer, Zeus set Ganymede permanently among the stars as the constellation Aquarius, whose water-jar was the source of the ever-flowing Nile. Any man who reached the Source, and drank from the jar held out to him by the hand of the beloved of Zeus, would be blessed with eternal youth.

A well-known example of the deification of a boy, on account of his beauty and of his having been loved, is that of Antinous by the Emperor Hadrian. More statues of Antinous exist than any other mortal who ever lived in the Ancient World, including those of any particular emperor. Many of these images put Antinous in the guise of a pre-existent divinity, such as Silvanus, the Italic spirit of the woods, or of Dionysus. The hieroglyphics of an obelisk, now mounted on the Pincio Hill in Rome, describe the details of Antinous' own cult. As Marguerite Yourcenar has shown in her novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, there may well have been religious significance in the historical fact of the youth's being drowned in the Nile.

Medieval Persian poems of the Sufi school associate, although the meaning is often veiled by several layers of allegory, the love of boys with the mystic understanding of God. The 'sarghi' of Old Persia, the wine-pourer, is represented in poetry and paintings as a beardless adolescent boy.

J.Z. Eglinton, in his pioneering work on Greek Love, claims that in Europe during the Middle Ages angels were not thought of as sexually neutral, but as beautiful boys. In baroque Rome the painter Caravaggio was to have his first altar picture for the Chapel of Saint Matthew, in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, rejected because it showed the boy-angel bodily embracing the Saint as he wrote his gospel. Another painting of Caravaggio's, the 'Amor Victorious' or, originally, Amor Vincit Omnia (Staatliche Museum, Berlin), blatantly combines the sexual sauciness of a young boy with the symbolic attributes of Eros. When the picture was first hung in the palazzo of Vincenzo Giustiniani it was covered by a curtain of green velvet, which the prospective viewer would pull aside by means of a cord.

Neo-classical nostalgia for Ancient Greece and Neo-Gothic for the Middle Ages sometimes represented themselves in an investiture of sacredness in the figure of the boy. Winckelmann developed his theory of beauty from the proportions of Greek statues of youths. Frederick Rolfe's attachment to Roman Catholicism was in part due to his worship of certain of the boy-saints venerated by the Church.

The religious emotions connected with beautiful boys which reappear in mythology, literature and art link the boy with the source of life, and through it with redemption and salvation. The boy is also associated with immortality. It would appear that three central ideas -- Beauty, Salvation and Immortality -- transform boy-love into a religion. The boy's evident power over us, and his gifts to us, as much spiritual as physical, make him central to our destiny, to the integration of our personalities and sense of self. By saying this, I am not suggesting that this numinous power, which appears to us as invested in boys, actually exists as an independent force: it is a natural, religious conception in the mind of the lover. This is made apparent in Visconti's famous film version of Mann's Death in Venice. There, the ethereal, all but unearthly beauty of the boy is recognized and duly worshipped by none save von Aschenbach. Von Aschenbach's adoration of the boy is never physical; the man is involved in a long mystical meditation upon that beauty which can only be described as celestial, yet which, to his surprise, is rendered in the flesh.

Why is boy-love a central religious experience? Why is it so prominent, so universal in human psychology? What is it that the lover is seeking? It will be recalled that Sir Julian Huxley stated his belief that religious conceptions were natural, not inspired, products of the human brain. In his contribution to Kerenyi's study of the myth of the divine child, which was referred to above, Carl Jung emphasized the importance of the child in our psychological structure. He described the idea of the child-god as an 'archetype' in the human collective unconscious, one of the ingrained primordial nuclei upon which our minds are built. The essential core-meaning of the archetype can never be fully grasped by the conscious mind:
It was, and still is, only interpreted, and every interpretation that comes anywhere near the hidden sense . . . has always, right from the beginning, laid claim not only to absolute truth and validity but to instant reverence and religious devotion. Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect.
Jung went on to state that the Christian destruction of both the religion of Classical Antiquity and that of early Germanic Europe has done serious harm to the acceptance of the child archetype by both the conscious and unconscious sections of the modern mind. The 'puer aeternus' has become a demonic figure. In dealing with neuroses, Jung tried to persuade the patient to accept the child archetype, to meditate upon its images (according to him the child was often grafted with the form of a jewel, pearl, flower or chalice). Jung regarded the image of the child in dream or fantasy as the projection of the ideally synthesized self, a self which had been repressed by the artificial ego of the adult. Jung saw a real danger in this repression, while a religions conception of the child might ensure once again a healthy balance between the conscious and the unconscious:
Religious observances . . . consequently serve the purpose of bringing the image of childhood, and everything connected with it, again and again before the eyes of the conscious mind so that the link with the original condition may not be broken.
I hold that paedophilia is such a religious observance, a celebration of the idea of childhood which is basic to our mental health and stability. Their very fury, the insane hatred, evident in those who attack paedophiles, is a result of their having sundered themselves from the child archetype, and in consequence they suffer.

As Jung stated, the religious conception of the child is a symbol of the potential synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality: "It is therefore not surprising that so many of the mythological saviours are child gods." The child functions as a uniter of opposites: Jung alluded to the hermaphroditic nature of young boys, where opposite qualities are, for a brief but crucial space in the lifespan of the male, harmoniously united. Jung rightly pointed to the modern mania for mass, compulsory education as a sub-conscious attempt to destroy the specific qualities of childhood, since the child as such is now feared, a primordial threat to the illusion of omnipotence built up by the conscious minds of twentieth-century adults. To sum up, Jung saw the child as the ultimate symbol of man's sense of wholeness and the relation of his individual life to universal time:

The 'child' is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning and the triumphal end. The 'eternal child' in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality.

It is the central place which the idea of the child has in the human mind which forces boy-love to be a religion. The celebration of the boy plays too important a role at the very core of human personality to be regarded as a "perverted lust", or a mere fetish, or a sign of immature emotional development. It is the boy-lover's detractors who are the immature ones, the psychically underdeveloped, the schizophrenics. Boy-love must be accepted as one of the world's sincerest religions, genuinely reflecting a natural process of the human psyche. Its lack of organized myth and dogma, its non-integration with the State, make it very vulnerable to the wrath of the great developed religions of the world, and of the communities they influence or control, hence the horrible, incredible punishments meted out to boy-lovers. Yet that very lack of theological consistency allows boy-love to adapt to changing historical and social environments, prevents it from becoming ossified and limited, to which fate the high religions are always prone. To quote once more Sir Julian Huxley:
But it should always be remembered that any particular religion will always be incomplete and that many potential religion-arousing objects will not be utilized in it. They may be forced into opposition, so to speak, and acquire negative sacredness, become taboo or sinful, as with sex in Christianity, in striking contradiction to many religions like Hinduism, in which sex and its emblems are part of worship.
What is required is for boy-lovers to recognize that they are indeed undergoing a religious experience when they minister to a young boy's happiness. In this experience, most paedophiles would admit, sex plays only one part in a much broader scheme. Boy-love is ecumenical, undivided by sects or schism, drawing its devotees from all nations and classes. Therefore it should not be categorized as a sex-offense, but as one of the world's great, enduring religions.

SOURCE:
Pan, Number 16, p.11 to p.17




So how about you? Do you agree that BoyLove is (or should be) a religion?

Or has (perhaps) an interaction you've had with a boy (physical or otherwise) been a "religious experience" for you?

M.
Experienced readers of BoyLove literature should recognize who "J. Darling" is...


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