-- on their lives. and particularly on their adolescent loves, which were all destroyed by those forces.

And I want to say first off to these guys that I'm sorry your lives were ripped apart in the way they were.

In a sane society -- such as Sparta's -- you guys would have been together, in one way or another, all your lives.

So we need to think about that, and how we might go about returning some measure of sanity to society.

Robert Loring has said, regarding religious fanaticism in America and the religious right in particular, that much of American religious thought, particularly about sex, is Puritan, and that the Puritans were and are PSYCHOTIC about sex.

Here's Robert's reply to the Tiny and Stable? message thread:

I think it important that we realize that before anything else WE ARE MEN. Everything else including labels are SECONDARY to the FACT that we are MEN! And not only are we men but we are MASCULINE MEN.

As for the churches what we have today is SELECTIVE Christianity that has become EXclusive and rather ARROGANT. Jesus did not come to destroy masculinity or manhood. He came to boost it up! He did not come to disempower men but to EMPOWER us! Yet, many Christians today have missed that point completely. Most have missed the fact that the MOVEMENT founded by Jesus was and is suppose to STILL be a MASCULINE WARRIOR movement and faith! There IS a reason why the New Testament is OVERFLOWING with WARRIOR and MASCULINE imagery and symbols. Symbols such as eagles, swords, shields, armor, mounted warriors, etc. are not contained in the New Testament by accident. Those images were put in it ON PURPOSE and for a REASON. Modern Christianity missed the boat when they de-nutted the Christ and turned him into something between other than a masculine man EVEN though Christ was a perfect example of a MASCULINE MAN in my opinion.

The Christian Church suffers from a psychotic form of SEXUAL SHAME AND GUILT! Notice any and every form of sex is a SIN? The Church ASSUMES that Adam and Eve fell from the Garden of Eden because they had sex with each other! The Church ASSUMES that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God because they were full of men having sex with men. But, NONE of these things are BIBILICAL FACT! Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the cities were destroyed because men were having sex with men or women with women. In fact, in Eziekel the sins of Sodom are sighted as LAZINESS, INDIFFERENCE, GREED, and unconcern of people for other people! Sounds pretty much like today! Sounds like the whole world today is SODOM REBORN!

Christianity in its modern form has cast MALES into the role of evil, dirty, vile creatures full of sin and error. That is NOT biblically accurate. God gave men manhood and masculinity to be PROUD of not ashamed of. As for ancient warrior societies falling because men started having sex with men that is COMPLETELY INACCURATE! That is just one more SOCIAL MYTH created in modern times out of FEAR by the bible totters who are overwhelmed by their OWN sexual guilt. It's just one in a long list of EXCUSES and false justifications that promote the false idea that MEN must not be allowed to be MEN!! It is one more guilt-trip to make and keep men as BOYS! Shame is a powerful weapon and Christianity uses that weapon as much as they can especially against men. Sex and Men are NOT EVIL, NOT SINFUL. It is those who are trying to destroy men that are the truly EVIL ONES! It is those who have castrated the Christ that are the truly evil ones!

While in his reply to the confused "Christian" in i need some answers, Robert said

So you feel "ashamed" for coming to this site? Why? Is it that centuries old Puritan ethic that sex and ANYTHING associated with sex is SINFUL? Especially when it is sex between two men? Yet, as you admit, seeing two guys kissing, etc. pleasures you. That's not confusion my friend. That's CONFLICT! The real you is at war with the part of you that is trying so hard to be what our Puritan hate filled, money worshipping society wants you to be. You are trying to live in two worlds at the same time and it's not working. And, it's NOT going to work. It's not going to work because our UNNATURAL society is battling against everything in a man that is NATURAL.

I suppose you think somewhere in the back of your mind that if you just be the YOU that God created you to be that hell-fire-and brimstone await you. That's the garbage that has come out of the pulpits BUT that is NOT what the Bible says. Confused? Then listen to God speaking in your heart but first set aside all the Puritan garbage you've been fed and realize that the Puritans were INSANE and PSYCHOTIC especially when it came to matters of sexuality in ANY form.

Robert's right.

Which means that many Americans -- probably most -- are psychotic about sex.

They're not sane.

They're crazy.

In ways that can be and often are dangerous to themselves, to their children, and to their nation.

And the ideas we put forth -- that sex between Men is Natural; that Frot is the most Natural expression of sex and love between Men; and that Men, Masculinity, Manhood, and Frot are all sacred -- are not ideas they're going to have an easy time with.

To put it mildly.

Now, regarding the religious right and the sort of upbringing so many of you had:

The great American novelist and short story writer Flannery O'Connor, who was a devout Catholic, who lived in the American South, and who wrote extensively about evangelical Christians in the South, said:

Children are cursed with believing.

"Children are cursed with believing."

It's upon that curse that these various ministers and preachers and pastors and priests and reverends and divines -- depend.

They rely upon it to poison the minds of the young.

So we need to see these people for what they are: poisoners, exploiters, and abusers who rely upon the credulity of children to devastate and destroy their young lives.

At the same time, I feel very strongly that we need to look beyond the individuals -- as heinous as they are -- involved in this destruction to see the underlying force:

Which is heterosexualization.

And in that regard I want to come back to something that Warrior Studcuddler said:

Oh how I wish that todays image of men loving men would just go completely away and love could return to take its place. It grieves me to watch "gays" searching their entire life to find true love and compassion, only to fall victim to a sick lifestyle that robs them of the very thing they crave, and their masculinity in the process. Back to a time before all the openness, life was so much simpler, for when you found a man to love, it just happened and so spontaneous, genuine and natural, without stereotypes or feminism involved.

Is he right?

Was life at one time "so much simpler, for when you found a man to love, it just happened and so spontaneous, genuine and natural, without stereotypes or feminism involved"?

Actually, yes.

Was it a very long time ago?

Actually, no.

Only about 150 years -- in, as we'll see, the 19th century.

Now, before going further, and in attempting to consider how heterosexualization has worked, it's important to remember that in the 19th century, virtually all American Protestantism -- and most worldwide -- was "evangelical."

Evangelical Christianity -- what we often think of today as "fundamentalism," and which today is synonymous with the religious right -- was the norm in the 19th century.

Which means that the vast majority of people believed in the literal truth of the Bible.

Yet in the 19th century, it was common for Men to form passionate relationships, usually starting early in life, with other Men.

For example, in his book, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, which we discussed in Warriorhood and Male Intimacy, John Ibson talks about Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahon, well-known as the "father of the modern American navy" and as the author of a tremendously important book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which in turn had a huge influence on President Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy.

Think Panama Canal guys.

What is less well known, says Ibson, is

the extensive and highly romantic correspondence that Admiral Mahon carried on with a fellow officer, Samuel Ashe, letters documenting a relationship of forty years that had begun when both were Annapolis midshipmen before the Civil War.

In one letter, Mahon provocatively wrote: "I lay in bed last night, dear Sam, thinking of the gradual rise and growth of our friendship. My first visit ever to your room is vividly before me, and how as I went up there night after night I could feel my attachment to you growing and see your own love for me showing itself more and more every night."

"When you come to a question of sex," wrote the father of the navy on another occasion, "on the whole commend me to men."

No kidding.

Ibson adds:

...if civilian society [in the nineteenth century] was significantly segregated by sex, military society was a thoroughly all-male environment, with much more of a familial culture than any fraternal lodge. ...

Ibson continues:

Before homosexuality was culturally conceived as a condition rather than simply an activity, there was perhaps less anxiety in the military, as in society at large, about the precise line between acceptable and forbidden degrees of closeness between men. Photographs of American military men from the Civil War through World War I document, as they must also have nurtured, an environment of even more intimacy than one sees in civilian photos of the same era.

So at a time when "society was significantly segregated by sex" and "before homosexuality was culturally conceived as a condition rather than simply an activity" --

two key attributes of Life PRE-heterosexualization --

what we can see between Alfred Mahon and Samuel Ashe is, just as Warrior Studcuddler said, a life which was "simpler, for when you found a man to love, it just happened and so spontaneous, genuine and natural, without stereotypes or feminism involved."

That's right.

And without the analism which came between Studcuddler and his cousin.

And despite the fact that Ashe and Mahon lived at a time when evangelical Christianity ruled the religious roost to an even greater extent than it does today.

Consider Ashe and Mahon.

Here are two guys, pre Civil War, who are midshipmen at Annapolis together, and every night Alfred goes to Sam's room, and they gradually and *spontaneously* fall in love.

In a way which is "genuine and natural, without stereotypes or feminism involved."

What do you think would happen to two Annapolis midshipmen who tried that today?

They'd be "caught" -- just as Lawrence and Gary and Robert and Ted were caught -- and they'd be canned.

What's more, one of them, at the least, would "come out" and come into analism, where he'd be acculturated into anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy.

The process, after all, which Studcuddler described with his cousin, is one we've all seen:

He went headlong into the whole gay scene, ending up as a bartender in a gay bar, and getting totally into the anal sex, tongue on ass, feminine sissy boy lifestyle. We couldn't have been more different after his switch. I felt I had not only lost my frot brother, but my cousin as well. I wanted so much to go kick the ass of the degenerate that pulled him into the scum of todays idea of what "gay" is.

Right.

We've all seen this process of effeminization.

And it's recounted all the time in the gay and alternative press.

Just read Field of Queens, in which a masculine-identified, "bi," high school athlete comes out and emerges a bitchy and promiscuous gay male.

Which is why I'm so suspicious of claims that effeminacy is innate.

If it's innate, why doesn't it appear pre-acculturation?

That makes no sense.

Of course, today, with the internet, kids are learning about and adopting the "femmy" lifestyle at ages 11 and 12.

Doesn't matter.

It's still a LEARNED behavior.

And a consequence of heterosexualization.

And you need to consider in that regard that Frot is, by and large, NOT a learned behavior.

Guys like Luke and Stephen and Lawrence and Gary and Robert and Ted and Studcuddler and his cousin discover it on their own.

They invent it for themselves.

As did I when I was a boy.

I figured out Frot without any help from anybody.

As have most of our Warriors.

There are no cultural supports for Frot, and before this website existed, no instruction manuals on how to do it.

Which is just as well, since such manuals aren't necessary.

Sometimes I get an email from a buttboy, or a post goes up in Frot Club, saying, "I want to learn how to Frot."

But no lessons are required.

Once I even got a letter from a guy saying, There must be more to it than you've presented.

And I responded, No there's not.

If I said to you that in penile-vaginal, the guy rubs the girl's clit with his dick, and then inserts his dick into her vagina and rubs and thrusts until they both come -- would you say "there has to be more to it than that'?

Sex is not supposed to be complicated.

If doing something "sexual" requires an instruction manual, chances are that it's

1. NOT sexual; and

2. NOT something you should be doing.

So: Frot is a completely Natural behavior.

As are the components of what we rightly call NATURAL Masculinity.

And I'm going to talk about that more in a future post, because we really need to understand that some behaviors, such as anal and exclusive "heterosexuality," depend upon the support of and pressure generated by vast cultural apparatuses for their existence.

Frot and the True and Natural Love of Man for Man -- do not.

Nor does ordinary male-on-male Fighting -- fist-fighting and wrestling.

Those are Natural Male behaviors.

Warfare -- mass warfare -- usually requires a cultural apparatus.

But individual Men bond into groups of Warriors -- naturally.

So, and to come back to the main point of this post, in a PRE-heterosexualized era, and despite the power of evangelical Christianity in that era, Men -- and not just any Men, but Military Men like Mahon and Ashe -- were able to fall spontaneously in love and remain in love for four decades.

And without the cultural artifact or by-product of heterosexualization which we refer to as analism -- coming between them.

So: let's talk more about heterosexualization and how it works.

In my reply to Naked Wrestler's Full Mount Fight, I said that Men need the skin-on-skin experience of Fight Sport, and I noted that despite that plain fact

In the name of gender equity -- which is really just heterosexualization -- Men are being deprived of that.

The genderists want a unisex and effeminized world in which males have been un-Manned and de-Masculinized.

So that just as the genitals are being divorced from sexuality, aggression is being divorced from the male.

It's not an accident that those two separations are occurring simultaneously.

Remember that Aggression is necessary for the True and Natural Attraction of Man for Man.

Which is why I said that Men need the skin-on-skin experience of the bodies of other men, not as passive sex objects, but as MEN -- aggressive, FIGHTING, MEN.

The destruction of the Male's Natural Aggression also destroys the Male's Natural Sexuality -- what we sometimes refer to as his natural male sex aggression; and leads directly to the mutilated, negativised, and UNnatural expression of male-male attraction which we know as analism.

Under heterosexualization, then, and simultaneously:

1. Same-gender / homosocial spaces are destroyed;

2. Attributes viewed as feminine are consistently favored and attributes viewed as masculine, particularly aggression, are incessantly denigrated; and,

3. Same-sex affection and intimacy are medicalized and marginalized and thus isolated from the mainstream of society;

   resulting in the cultural dominance of the categories known to us as sexual orientation, which in turn further isolate same-sex affection, and severely distort or simply destroy outright the True Love of Man for Man.

That's what happens.

And that's what's happened to Luke and Stephen, and Gary and Lawrence, and Robert and Ted, and Studcuddler and his cousin.

The categories of sexual orientation were used to destroy the love between Luke and Stephen, and Lawrence and his cousin, and Studcuddler and his cousin, and what was probably an incipient love between Robert and Ted.

That's truly dreadful -- there are no words strong enough to condemn it, though maybe these from Wm Blake are a start:

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.

And that's the truth.

These kids were treated like criminals.

Because they loved each other.

So, and once again, while Redd has identified our opponents -- and if they're our opponents, they're the opponents of the True and Natural Love of Man for Man -- as three:

• religious fanaticism

• heterosexism

• analism

we need to remember that behind all three of these negative forces is heterosexualization.

Heterosexualization has been responsibile for the creation of two of these forces -- analism and heterosexism -- while making the third -- religious fanaticism -- far more powerful in, and of course focused on, sexual matters than, I suspect, it had been.

Again, in the 19th century, evangelical Christianity was the coin of the realm.

Everyone, with the exception of a few free-thinkers, believed in the literal truth of the Bible.

Yet male-male affection and intimacy was far more tolerated.

What's changed?

The Bible hasn't changed.

Society has changed.

Due to HETEROSEXUALIZATION.

HETEROSEXUALIZATION has changed society.

And the contemporary religious right, no matter what it may think, is part of society.

So: heterosexualization is the common denominator and the agent of change throughout society.

And you can see in Robert's account of what happened to him and Ted, that when you remove even one element of heterosexualization -- in this case, the omnipresent mixed gender environment -- men revert to having sex with each other, even in a religious-right milieu:

The next "solution" that came out of the Preacher's mouth was that I just had to go to Christian Boys Camp for 2 weeks and associate with "normal" boys my age. So, about a week later I found myself being loaded up into the Church van and being whisked away to Christian Boys Camp and 2 weeks of TERROR, all in the name of JESUS but of course! So, there I was in the middle of nowhere with about 50 other boys my same age dwelling in "nature" complete with beds and army style barracks in the name of JESUS. There was one BIG problem however that the Preacher seemed to not know about. That problem was that there was a lot of FROT going on every night in those barracks! Wow! Sin...Sin...and even MORE SIN! And right in camp itself that was suppose to turn us into good Christian boys! So what did I learn at camp in those 2 weeks? That FROT was NORMAL and that the lunatic Preacher was in fact a LUNATIC! I think the Preacher's plan for my "salvation" backfired all the way.

Right.

So you put guys in an all-male setting, like a barracks, and out in nature, where they can be guys again, instead of standardized students and commercialized money-making machines, and they revert to being Men.

I know that Robert's talking about boys, but in my view what he's describing is NOT boyish, but rather Manly -- because it's an expression of a Manly impulse -- the Manly impulse to bond phallically with another Man -- another Warrior.

And we need always to frame it that way:

That this is about MEN acting in Manly and Masculine ways.

Also, Robert's account echoes something that Ibson said:

That in the nineteenth century, when the military was "thoroughly all male," the result was "an environment of even more intimacy" than was the case in civilian life.

Not only that, but Ibson observes that

The closeness found in the army may have been exceeded by that found in the navy, where long and isolated absences from civilian society were commonplace.

Ibson then cites the extensive same-sex sexual life of one Philip van Buskirk, a young Marine, whose memoirs recorded all "expenditures of semen," during the years 1852-1858, when he served aboard an American Man-of-War.

The implication is clear and quite simple:

The more purely homosocial the environment, the more male intimacy.

Not just sex, says Ibson, but true intimacy -- affection and indeed Love.

Now, based on what I've read so far, and despite his clear understanding of the power of the military -- what we would call Warrior -- milieu, I don't think that Ibson understands the role of aggression in male-male attraction -- though again, I haven't finished his book and I don't want to pre-judge him.

However, it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not.

Because he's documenting it.

So -- how do we escape the anti-male and anti-masculine trap created by heterosexualization?

Some things are clear.

It's clear that we need to create, and insure that boys and men have access to, all-male / homosocial spaces.

And the more homosocial the better.

We know, in that regard, that the Spartans organized their boys into small all-male groups.

We don't know how much contact, if any, they had with girls and women outside the group.

But it's clear from every commentary we have on the Spartans that their aim was to get the boys to focus on each other as love objects.

For example, Plutarch says, in describing the agogé, that the boys were taught

to endure pain and conquer in battle. To this end, as they grew in years, their discipline was proportionately increased; their heads were close-clipped, they were accustomed to go barefoot, and for the most part to play naked.

After they were twelve years old, they were no longer allowed to wear any undergarment; they had one coat to serve them a year; their bodies were hard and dry, with but little acquaintance of baths and unguents; these human indulgences they were allowed only on some particular days in the year. They lodged together in little bands upon beds made of rushes that grew by the banks of the river Eurotas, which they were to break off with their hands without a knife; if it were winter, they mingled some thistle down with their rushes, which it was thought had the property of giving warmth. By the time they were come to this age there was not any of the more hopeful boys who had not a lover to bear him company.

You'll notice that the Spartans subjected the boys to many privations.

Interestingly, Ibson notes that

In the 1910 Boy Scout Handbook ... Ernest Thompson Seton was comfortable in speaking of men showing their "naked soul[s]" to each other and even winning each other's love so long as the men had experienced together the privations of camping.

Unlike Seton, Ibson is not comfortable with this idea.

He clearly feels that privation and / or "toughness," as he calls it, should not be a necessary precursor to affection.

Which once again is why I feel he doesn't understand aggression, or the Warrior roots of male-male Love, Affection, and Intimacy.

Experiencing the roughs and toughs of life together, as my foreign friend puts it, is the raw material of love among Boys and among Men.

That's just how it is.

And that is not cultural.

It is rather rooted in our deepest Male Biology.

Which seeks to prepare us for being Warriors -- the most important role that Men play.

So, as a first step, we need to restore all-male, homosocial, spaces, and be sure that Boys and Men are able to spend lots of time in those spaces.

Preferably out in Nature, living a simpler life -- that is, roughing it:

and engaged in activities which are Natural to Men, such as Fighting -- toughing it.

Structured correctly, those sorts of activities create bonds of great affection and intimacy between Men.

Secondly, we need to present same-sex sex as an activity, rather than a condition.

That's what it used to be, and obviously not only is that far more accurate, but it's far easier on Men, who aren't forced to choose between loving a buddy -- and "being heterosexual."

Destroying the false categories of sexual orientation -- all of them, including "heterosexual," "homosexual," "straight," and "gay" -- would also have the effect of restoring to the word Masculine its original meaning.

Which is NOT heterosexual, but simply Manly -- possessed of Manly Virtue.

And Manly Virtue can be expressed in many ways, including in the Manly Love of another Man -- a Warrior-brother.

That's how life used to be.

Sex was an activity -- not a category.

Which is why Mahon could hang out in Ashe's room while their love swelled and grew.

And why the sailors and marines on van Buskirk's ship were having sex with each other at every opportunity.

It's Natural.

A bunch of young guys, sharing a common martial life and the privations of that life, isolated for long periods at sea, form and begin living a Natural Warriorhood.

In which not only do they have sex, but they become intimate in other ways -- affectionate, loving, and in love.

And they don't worry about it, because they think of sex between men -- and with it other expressions of male-male intimacy and affection -- as an activity -- not a category.

In other words, they experience their emotional and physical closeness with other Men as -- closeness -- intimacy.

A pleasurable and unconflicted emotion.

They don't experience their closeness as putting them into a box which will forever limit them in the rest of their life choices.

Translation: They don't experience their closeness as putting them into a box which will deny them the company of women or the opportunity to marry or the pleasure of having children.

They don't, in sum, experience their closeness as imprisoning them.

Rather, and if anything, their Love of Men is liberating and fulfilling.

It makes them complete.

So, to repeat what I said in my reply to Lawrence's struggling on the way back up, there was a time, not terribly long ago, when sex between men was an activity -- not a category.

And that's what it has to become again -- an activity.

A Manly and Masculine act.

So that it's understood that MEN --

have sex with Women; and that MEN --

have sex with MEN.

Men have sex with Men.

Guys have sex with Guys.

Always have, always will.

In fact, the two quintessentially male activities are fighting and rubbing cocks.

Fighting and Frot.

Because they're both aggressive, and they both celebrate the Male's Fighting Spirit.

His Manhood.

In both Fighting and Frot, Manhood meets Manhood.

In an act which pits Manhood against Manhood.

"pits"

The pit is the arena, the ring, the cage.

In which Men rage.

The pit, the palestra, where, says Statius, "crudisque virum sudoribus ardet pulvis"

"the dust is hot with men's raw sweat"

The pit, where the hot raw sweat of men lubricates the fight.

And the pit is the ManSpace created by the intersection of male groin with male groin.

In which the cocks conflict, and then converge.

"nudamque lacessere pugnam" says Statius.

"and incites to nude combat"

Cock incites cock to nude combat.

Balls incite balls to nude combat.

That's what happens.

The genitals, in which reside the male's Virtus -- his Valour -- incite to combat.

Nude combat.

Pugnam nudam.

So both Fighting and Frot are primally male.

Again, as I said in that reply to Lawrence, you can't get more primal, you can't get more male, than Frot.

Both Fighting and Frot exalt Masculinity and honor Manhood.

That's the truth.

And it's more than time that other Men begin to hear that Truth.

Robert says, and correctly, that

The DAMAGE done to boys growing up in the camp of the religious RIGHT is astounding! Not just the psychological damage BUT the SPIRITUAL DAMAGE as well.

And that too is the truth.

And we need, as Robert says, to do all we can to correct that damage.

What, beyond opposing the religious right, the heterosexists, and the analists; and getting our message out as clearly and cogently as we can -- can we do?

Well, let me suggest some things about Sparta.

We can see, in the story of Lawrence and Gary and also Robert and Ted, how their adolescent love was ripped from them by hateful priests.

Could clerics like those have taken such love from two bonded Spartan teenagers?

No.

Why not?

Because such adolescent love was part of a larger social and religious order.

I've told you that at Sparta the boys prayed at the shrine of the mythic hero Achilles before fighting:

On the road which leads northwards from Sparta stands a sanctuary built for Achilles by Prax, his great-grandson, which is closed to the general public;

but the boys who are required to fight in a near-by plane-tree grove enter and sacrifice to him beforehand.

~ Pausanias via Graves, The Greek Myths, 164.p.

And that one of the major holidays was the Hyacinthia, which celebrated the love of the Spartan prince Hyacinthus and the God Apollo.

So: everything a Spartan did had a sacred context.

Fighting was sacred.

The Love of Man for Man was sacred.

And it was around those two poles of male-male aggression and male-male attraction that a Spartan Warrior's life revolved.

That's how it was.

Of course Spartans married and had kids.

They were expected to.

And they cared about their kids.

BUT -- the kids were raised communally.

The Spartan Warrior did not have the huge burden of child-rearing that people in our oh-so-Christian Republic are expected to shoulder.

And which is another element of Christian social control.

It's what Chuck Tarver talked about in the You can't tell a fish he's all wet!.

If you can keep Men fearful and in debt -- you can control them.

Forever.

The Spartans didn't have that.

They called their society the Eu-Nomia.

Eu = good.

Nomia = rule.

The Good Rule.

Within that good rule, I repeat,

Fighting was sacred.

The Love of Man for Man was sacred.

And it was around those two poles of male-male aggression and male-male attraction that a Spartan Warrior's life revolved.

That's how it was.

Indeed, that's how it was, in varying degree, in most places throughout most of antiquity.

And for a goodly part of the Christian era.

It was destroyed by heterosexualization.

And EVER SINCE, MEN HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIND THEIR WAY BACK.

I just wrote about that in two replies -- to She Didn't Understand and Full Mount Fight.

Please read those replies.

Now, Frances has proposed that we form a Warrior Community modeled on Sparta.

She's right.

Of course that would mean dislocation for every one of you.

Wouldn't it?

But it would be your Salvation.

In strugglling on the way back up, Lawrence asked:

Can frot lead to Salvation?

Here's the answer:

Frot is part of the Warrior Way.

The Warrior Way is a re-sacralization -- a making once again sacred -- of the lives of Men.

Making sacred again the lives of Men -- will require work.

And sacrifice.

But the reward will be enormous.

The reward -- for both the individual and for Mankind -- will be Salvation.

Not Salvation in some life to come.

But Salvation in the here and now.

It was in the name of the former that Robert and Ted's and Luke and Stephen's and Lawrence and Gary's lives -- and countless others -- were devastated and destroyed.

What sort of Salvation is it that destroys innocent lives in that way?

What sort of Salvation is it that essentially offers pie-in-the-sky -- because, let's face it, no one knows if there's an afterlife -- while destroying happiness in the here and now?

Is the sort of happiness that Gary and Lawrence had such a common thing in this world that it should be destroyed in the name of -- anything?

Let me say some more about what happened to Lawrence and Gary.

Lawrence wrote that he blamed himself for what had happened:

We should have been stronger. We could have stood shoulder to shoulder and taken on anything, anybody.

In my reply, I said that that wasn't realistic.

That there was no way two teenagers, in that milieu, could have resisted the pressure that was visited upon them.

After reading that, Lawrence told me in an email that "Something washed over me with your words. A calm. A deep sigh that needed to get out long ago."

Right.

So again, I want to emphasize that Lawrence and Gary could not have stood up to that pressure.

Remember Flannery O'Connor:

"Children are cursed with believing."

That's what the purveyors of all the backwoods baptist hooey depend upon.

That they can reach children and curse them with believing.

Remember this quote from an ancient Roman, Seneca:

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

So Lawrence and Gary, like Luke and Stephen, and like Robert and Ted, were lied to and cursed.

They were thrust outside the realm of truth.

But that was not their fault.

It was the fault of those lying and phoney priests.

Fact is, we've ALL been thrust outside the realm of truth.

The only way to truly and effectively counter-act that:

Is to create a New Realm of Truth.

Let's talk more about Sparta.

The image that moderns have of Sparta is of a grim, militaristic state.

That's completely inaccurate, and is a 20th century AD gloss on a 7th century BC phenomenon.

In these lines from the 7th century BC Spartan poets, who were commenting on life after the Lycurgan revolution, you hear that the Spartans are happy and take not just pride but joy in the way they live:

The spear-points of young men blossom there
And justice is done in open air
The stuff of gallant enterprise

That's Terpander in a fairly free but faithful translation.

Here's the less poetical:

Young men's warlike spirit flourishes there, along with
The clear-sounding Muse and Justice in the wide streets.

"Young men's warlike spirit flourishes there":

Warlike spirit -- Fighting spirit -- is the hallmark of Masculinity; and "Young men's warlike spirit flourishes" because under the agoge, it's cultivated among the boys, and honored among the men.

"Justice is done in open air, in the wide streets," because Lycurgus ordered that the Assembly meet out of doors, in the natural realm, so as not to be distracted or seduced by the luxurious interior of a fine building.

Then there's Pindar:

The councils of old men
Are pre-eminent there, and the spears of young men,
And choirs and Music and Festivity.

The old men are the Gerousia -- the young men are the Assembly.

And then this, which we don't associate with Sparta because our idea of Masculinity is that of pseudo-masculinity:

"Choirs and Music and Festivity"

"the clear-sounding Muse flourishes there -- along with young men's warlike spirit"

People don't understand that the Spartans set great store by music, and choral singing, and festivals.

So their lives were what we'd call "holistic."

It wasn't just about endless drilling and preparation for war.

It was about being Whole Human Beings.

For example, Plutarch notes that the boys in the agogé were encouraged to attend the adult males' messes, and there be trained further by the adult Men -- the Homoioi, the Equals.

So the boys had constant opportunities to learn not just from each other and the slightly older boys, but from the Men themselves.

It was a great system.

Which lasted a very long time.

And which just towards the end, was trying, via Agis and Cleomenes, to find its way back to the purity of the Lycurgan way -- the Eunomia and agogé.

And when Plutarch says that in response to Agis the young men stripped to show their mettle, you realize that the ideals of the state had lasted all that time.

The ideal of heroic nudity and democratic nudity was still with them.

By stripping off their clothes, they proclaimed their eagerness to return to the old ways of absolute equality and liberty.

That's the Way of the Warrior.

And the Way of the Warrior is the Way of Salvation.

Can we get there from here?

Sure we can.

It's just a matter of deciding to do it.

"Change the thinking, change the behavior," says Robert.

Thoreau agrees:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

You need to think "over and over the kind of thoughts you wish to dominate your lives."

Here's some more Thoreau, which I first cited in struggling on the way back up:

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

So -- your hopes and dreams are real.

Realizing them will take work.

But, as Thoreau says, if you endeavor confidently to live the life you've imagined -- you'll meet with success.

Thank you Lawrence, Studcuddler, Robert, Randy, and Justin.

True Warriors all.

Bill Weintraub

October 18, 2007

© All material Copyright 2007 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.