Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Offsite Post: ‘Dark Anima: The Yankee Witch in World Politics’

 

One of the events that the ethnos of New England – the cultural section of the United States that has controlled most of its institutions since the War ended in 1865 – is most known for is the Salem Witch Trials.  But while that episode is hundreds of years in the past, the face of the witch is still the one she presents to the world.

The witch – that is to say, in Carl Jung’s terminology, the ‘evil stepmother’ archetype, the ‘displaced anima’:

‘Some typical qualities of the displaced Anima are:

‘Uncontained, constantly seeking external affirmation.

Lack of creativity.

Moody.

B*tchy.

Poor relatedness, behaviour in relationships designed to isolate the person from others.

Masochistic.

Greedy, grasping.

Self centred.’

We vividly see these characteristics in the women (nearly all Yankee born and bred) who have dominated US foreign policy in recent years:

Madelaine Albright salivated over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and Serbian civilians.

Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power pushed for war in Libya in 2011 that unleashed total chaos there.

Victoria Nuland has overseen the vicious destruction of the Ukraine by the US-EU.

With this bunch in mind, we are forced to wonder if there is more to a television show like Motherland: Fort Salem than simply a fictional drama:  A trio of witches is trained to become powerful weapons for the American military.

But how did this happen?  How did this archetype come to dominate New England, and through her, the rest of the States and their peoples?

One of the most perceptive of the Southern Agrarian writers, Andrew Lytle, takes us back to the land and sea division:

‘In New England, at least the coastal areas, there was always the sea to intervene, holding up a distant image and not the familiar, seasonal one such as land allows.  Of course there was a sea-board in the South and farms in New England, but the county and township represented the difference.  Both the sea and land are feminine images, but the sea takes only men; and so the communion between husband and wife was interrupted and for long periods of time.  Relate this sea-faring to the theocratic oligarchies, and we discover the cultural forms acting upon man’s relation to woman, which at one time made witches.  What is a woman deprived but a witch, especially under the discipline of a Puritan distortion of the senses’ (Stories: Alchemy and Others, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., 1984, pgs. xvii-xviii).

Yet even still, nothing was foreordained.  New England could have followed the example of Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), whose father and husband were both governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Though well-educated and an exceptionally gifted writer, she checked her ambition and kept herself subservient to the patriarchal social order in which she lived.

She chose instead the example of another Anne – Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), the Antinomian heretic (Antinomos = ‘against the law’) who minimized the role of good works in the life of a Christian, claimed direct revelations from the Holy Ghost, etc.  Like Mrs Bradstreet, Mrs Hutchinson was also a talented and intelligent woman, but as the foregoing shows, she used her considerable gifts to undermine the traditions of New England.  One of her statements is telling:  ‘As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway.’

The episode with Mrs Hutchinson was not the origin of New England’s troubled history; that began in the preceding centuries back in Old England.  However, it did set the stage for the revolutionary acts of ‘women’s liberation’ that followed – from women’s suffrage to equal rights between the sexes to contraception and on up to the rejection of womanhood altogether along with gender reassignment surgery.

Displaced anima indeed.

Dixie, being closer to the land and to tradition, developed in another direction.  Returning to Mr Lytle,

‘Man’s attitude to woman is the foundation of society under God.  In the South, because of the prevailing sense of the family, the matriarch becomes the defining image.  The earlier insistence on purity, an ideal not always a fact, was not chivalric romanticism but a matter of family integrity, with the very practical aim of keeping the blood lines sure and the inheritance meaningful.  Before machinery was made which lessened the need for the whole family to do its part on the farm, husband, wife, children, cousins, dependents, servants all served the land and were kept by it, according to their various demands and capacities.  The parts of the family made a whole by their diversity (Stories, p. xviii).

This is the archetype of the good mother, the integrated anima, the opposite of New England:

‘Self soothing, self nurturing and self loving.

Access to creative inspiration.

Strong centre and contained inner life.

Capable of empathy.

Able to make value judgements beyond the realm of pure rationality.

Access to feeling life.

Good relatedness.

Happy.’

Understandably, New England has tried to couch its distortions, errors, and heresies in Christian language, but that will only bring them more harm in the end.  The Holy Elder Cleopa of Sihăstria (+1998) explains:

 . . .

The rest is here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/dark-anima-yankee-witch-world-politics

Or here:

https://katehon.com/en/article/dark-anima-yankee-witch-world-politics

It is also available in Russian and Italian:
https://katehon.com/ru/article/temnaya-anima-yanki-vedma-v-mirovoy-politike

https://www.geopolitika.ru/it/article/anima-nera-la-strega-yankee-nella-politica-mondiale

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

No comments:

Post a Comment