It would have been counterproductive to have adult women suck the boys’ penises. The adult women already had adult male partners, and procreation was moving along nicely without any glitches. Again, too much familiarity, too little exoticism.
Having children—young boys age seven to ten—be the receivers of the ejaculant is brilliant, at least in the context of a horribly harsh environment and with a belief system to match the act. You can teach these kids anything; they will believe anything; you can imbue them with a bullish belief that swallowing as much semen as possible will make them into real men. The Sambia intuitively knew of the maximal and optimal level of suggestibility and hypnotizability in young boys ages seven to ten.
And look at us here in the West. We do indeed use these years of heightened suggestibility to teach our children everything we can about our culture, customs, and rituals. Reading, writing, ’rithmetic, religious training, the four Rs—but nothing about sex. And no way to harness and use the power of the orgasm, the power of the ejaculation in our teenagers. We adults shy away from it. We joke about it. Yes, Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pie, American Reunion—all looking at the secrecy of it, the secretiveness of the secretions. We as teenagers do not ejaculate into the mouths of seven-year-olds, but instead into cow’s liver and apple pie and wads of tissues. Or into the vaginas of fellow fourteen-year-olds, not quite ready for sex, not quite ready for primetime, not nearly ready to have a baby.
And do we imbue ejaculation with any meaning, any significance—other than a possible pregnancy? Virtually none at all. Circle jerks, jerking off into the toilet, any release we guys can find. And, if we happen to grow up in a religiously fundamentalist family, we might be taught some meaning to masturbation, specifically that it is evil and taboo, that it is semen being wasted, that it is an unborn child who will never come alive, that it is potential humanity that will never come to fruition. No release is feasible at all without a huge release of guilt and shame. Masturbation as the equivalent of fetal abortion, masturbation as wasted semen, masturbation as a nascent being come to naught.
What the hell are we teaching our children? Too often nothing, too often nothing that makes sense. Too many prohibitions without enough rituals and teachings. All or nothing, sexual liberation and promiscuous pleasure or injunctions and no-no’s. Mostly: let’s just ignore the sex subject with our children and adolescents altogether. Certainly: no sexual initiation rites, no reasonable way of thinking about human sexuality for the twenty-first century.
And what did we Westerners end up teaching the Sambia? A new social operating system entered the picture in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the form of Christian missionaries. An extensive network of Seventh-Day Adventist and Lutheran evangelists established themselves in villages throughout the valley; and these evangelists were, in the words of Gilbert Herdt, “a remarkable force for change in sexuality and gender—offering some new role models and sometimes a form of casual sexual relationships between men and women utterly unknown to the Sambia before.”
These missionaries and evangelists preached against the male ritual initiation rites and the “heathen” ways of the Sambia. The shamans and elders were often shamed and ridiculed, and attacked as “witch doctors” and “devil helpers.” The missionaries also introduced Levitican-style dietary restrictions so that almost all hunting and eating of possum came to a halt. A new masculinity, based on the accumulation of Western goods, led to a migration to coastal plantations where men could earn cash in order to develop these material displays. In the meantime young women could achieve a new and different kind of status and power through schooling.
Quite a major upheaval in the social fabric within less than one generation. Fewer men remained in the villages. The women had more power and authority, with a genuine sense of equality developing between the genders. Money rather than successfully hunted possum meat became the measure of a man’s masculinity and manliness. And the concept of a love or “luv” marriage became more commonplace instead of the traditional system of contracted and arranged marriages. Women were less deferential to their husbands and much less accepting of any physical abuse.
So, the modern, more civilized world has had its benefits. Exposure to a less harsh environment—with access to new foods, health care, fewer physical threats, a less isolated and brutal ecosystem—has allowed the Sambia to change their operating system. Not to change easily and comfortably—but to change nevertheless, and in a quicker way than one can imagine people in the West changing.
Has not the operating system, the mental and religious software, the signposts on our doorposts and our gates here in the West also run its course?
With the advent of the industrial revolution, of the information age, of the knowledge-based economy, of the nuclear age, we here in the West are still stuck with a belief system that formed twenty-seven hundred years ago with the Old Testament, nineteen hundred years ago with the New Testament, and fourteen hundred years ago with the Koran. What we teach our children is outdated and bizarre, as strange in its own way as what the Sambian elders taught their children.
With my prostate cancer I wanted to believe in the Sambian way of thinking. Yes, the masculine to the feminine to the asexual to the emasculated and back to the masculine. The heathen in me told me that I must not have sucked enough penises, swallowed enough semen in my malleable and suggestible childhood years. If only I had known: I would have been delighted to have fellated hundreds of adolescent boys, even thousands and millions of teenage boys—if I could have believed that sucking the penises of these teenagers would have made me more of a man, if I could have believed it would allow me to retain or regain my seminal fluids and sexual juices.
But, alas, I could not believe any of the Sambian nonsense, nor could I believe much of the nonsense coming out of the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
I could believe the following: that up was usually up, but sometimes up was down; that masculine could be feminine; that gay could be straight; that left could be right; that our universe is more mysterious and paradoxical than any of the ancients could have realized.
Do we really need a purely heterosexual world in the twenty-first century? Unlike the Sambia pre-1975, we are not living in a brutal and harsh environment in which a feral masculinity is essential. Unlike the world in biblical times, we understand the universe a bit more; we understand the value and meaning of a “luv” bond a bit more; we understand gay and straight a bit more; we understand the bonds of sex and love a bit more.
To survive I follow the religion of Love, wherever His camels take me. My seminal vesicles have been ousted; my prostate has been discarded; my androgens have periodically been ablated. But I can still follow the religion of love.
How can any of us deny love, the perks of love, the boons of love to another couple, to any other couples—based on an outdated belief system from millennia ago?
For any of you adults out there—men and women, gay or straight, transgender or not—a warning: Please make use of your genitals—yes, responsibly and consensually. We only recognize the value of things when we lose them. Teach your children to enjoy adult sexual play and the bonds of love before it is too late.
A man without a prostate, a man without seminal vesicles, a man without androgens—I can think of worse things to reconcile oneself to. But I cannot, for the life of me, think of too many worse things.
CHAPTER 19
Sermons in Stones, Clarity in Calamity, Cogency in Cojones: Rebooting and Regenerating My Inner Life–and the Collective Inner Life
“Men make use of their illnesses, at least as much as they are made use of by them.”
Aldous Huxley
“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life . . . Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones . . .”
I have now faced the nightside of life, happily and unhappily, for the past thirty years. One of the benefits of prostate cancer, at least mine, is the longevity it has given me. In facing this nightside for an extended period, we prostate cancer stragglers have time to say long good-byes to our friends and family, and to look at life in all its vagaries and hypocrisies. Unlike victims of wars and holocausts and many diseases—heart disease and cancers like melanoma come to mind—I have not gone to my end, to the slaughter quickly. I have lingered; I have seen things that others may not see. A new kind of salvation, of redemption, of regeneration.
I did not ask to see these things; I did not want to see these things. Like every mortal I wanted to believe in my immortality, to deny my fragility, to negate the existence of illness and death. I wanted to keep playing tennis three times a week, to do the work I love; I wanted to raise my family, to love Helen, and to love my two daughters. To make love to Helen. Ego diligam, ego sum; Amo, ergo sum; coito, ergo sum. I love and will love, therefore I am; I fornicate, therefore I am. A new variation of cogito ergo sum.
Prostate cancer has created a new reality; it has taken me away from my previously unacknowledged delusions and denials; it has forced me to transform my inner life. In my efforts to restore my sexual health and to extend my life, I have managed to reboot my brain and see life through a new lens.
Yes, life can be extended; sexual health can be extended. If I as an individual can achieve this extension, so can we generalize to us as a species. Every species, just like every living cell, is programmed to die. We human beings are the only species programmed, through our scientific knowledge and our ability to create lethal tools, to be capable of killing off our own selves. But there are ways of extending our life as a species and prevent us from destroying ourselves prematurely.
The key lies in our collective inner lives, which as reflected in our religions, have become stale. Our inner lives have not kept pace with the experiences and knowledge and collective wisdom that have accumulated in the past few hundred years. Given the staleness of our religions, we have no way of reconciling religion and science. No new shared or unified visions have come forth since the writing of the Koran and the New and Old Testaments.
We have taught the ideas and rules articulated in these books all too diligently to our children for at least a hundred generations. For many centuries these books were the only texts in print. Most people were illiterate. Scribes, among the only few who were literate, became highly valued for their ability to bring these texts into being.
These books served a vital purpose. For Jews the Torah, or the five books of Moses, reached a higher level of sanctity after the development of Christianity. Before Jesus’s apotheosis Jews were not viewing themselves as the “people of the book.” But with the evolving popularity of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, the Jews were tormented. They lost their identity in the face of a new religious movement. Interpretations of the Torah through Talmudic and rabbinical study and debate became a way of life for literate Jews over the course of many centuries—in a variety of settings including Judea and Samaria, Babylonia, Spain, and Eastern Europe. They retreated from the world, and the Torah became their organizing and motivating force, the major source of their identity.
The book became a fetish, an obsession, an idol. Even in the twenty-first century, on every Saturday, Jews worship the Torah as if it were a god itself—kissing it at Sabbath services, hugging it as if it held their salvation, parading around with it in paroxysms of joy and tribulation. Idol worshiping ironically at its worst, for a people who originally created their religion as a way of eliminating idol worship.
In a similar way Jesus and Christianity became an organizing and unifying principle for most of the Mediterranean and on into all of Europe. Christianity’s own book, the New Testament, became a source of laws and values, but at the same time the very conception of Jesus, the notion of the virgin birth, served to negate and corrupt human sexuality. The notion of Jesus as a Son of God gave life to an anthropomorphic god, with a view of a palpable god made in the image of man and a view of man made in the image of god. More idols emerged in the form of Jesus and Mary.
Six centuries after the arrival of Jesus and after the Jews retreated from the political world into their books and laws, the Arabian world was transformed by the Koran. The Koran was the first major book written in formal Arabic, and this formal language took hold as a unified way of expressing the Arabic language in written form. Without the Koran the spoken Arabic languages would have remained splintered with diverse dialects from region to region—a phenomenon still in existence to some degree today.
The Koran indeed has served a significant purpose in bringing together a diverse world from northern Africa to the Middle East and to the Saudi peninsula. The book has provided a unifying principle for propagating the impressive spread of Islam throughout Asia and Africa, into Indonesia and southern Africa in the past century.
Any book that has the power to shape a language also has the power to shape the inner life, the thought processes, the values of an entire culture.
With the arrival of Gutenberg and the printing press over five hundred years ago, we might have expected the possibility of making books other than bibles. But the initial impetus was to spread The Word, to produce more and more bibles. Ironically, with the advent of printing, the imprint on our brains and on our inner lives from these so-called sacred books became even greater. Translations of these texts into numerous languages made the new editions accessible and palpable. Everyone on the planet potentially became a person of The Book—whatever book we were exposed to as children. If we were illiterate, unable to read the book, we could at least memorize passages in this designated book. The ultimate imprint, the ultimate propaganda machine.
And the propaganda has always had purpose: to preserve the life of the larger community, the group in which one belongs—even if it means that the individual in that group sacrifices himself in his willingness to die for his community and to die for his god.
Contrary to popular belief, religions do not cause wars or crusades. No, wars cause religion; wars are the midwife of religion. Wars and our warring nature create a need for religion, a need for a god to inspire us to kill and be willing to be killed. Human bellicosity—it’s all in our nature—requires religious fervor, something to inspire us to go to our death in the face of battles with our enemies, with the outsiders, with the alien group—something to make us willing to kill others despite our capacity for compassion and empathy, something to make us willing to destroy another group or society or community despite the prohibitions against killing in our civil and religious laws.
Yes, my god is better than your god. My book is better than your book. My scriptures—my blueprint and owner’s manual—are better than your scriptures. My love of my god is fuller and richer than the love you have for your god. I am part of the chosen people; you are not one of the chosen. I am faithful to my god; you are an infidel. I will go to heaven; you will rot in hell. My god will bless me in life and in death; my god will curse you in life and in hell for your godlessness.
Chances are Moses never existed, as Nicholas Wade has noted in The Faith Instinct. He was created as a figure to help inspire an effort to unite two small kingdoms, Israel and Judah, in the seventh century BC, after the Assyrians had withdrawn from the region. The notion that the Israelites had lived in Egypt and escaped from Egypt three hundred years earlier may have been pure fiction.
Jesus was a small figure prophesizing a catastrophe unless his fellow Jews changed their ways—a small figure made larger than life by the Christ movement three hundred years after his death.
Mohammed probably never existed other than as a word drawn out of a gerundive phrase referring originally to Jesus—“muhammadun rasul allah,” meaning “The messenger of god is to be praised.” “Muhammadun” is a gerund, meaning “one who should be praised.�
� Centuries later this phrase, now a key statement of the Muslim faith, is translated as, “Muhammad is the messenger of God.” In the seventh century, Arabian-Christian rulers were attempting to separate themselves from the Christ movement and from the notion of a holy trinity; instead, Jesus alone was to be praised. The Koran may have been derived from the Syriac Christian liturgical work—note the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, including “For the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is the messenger of God.” Ultimately, around the year 575, the Arabian-Christian tribal leaders of the Near East and North Africa were overthrown by the Abbasids who separated themselves further from Syriac Christianity. They made Mecca the holy city instead of Jerusalem or Damascus, and the Koran was reinterpreted and reimagined as a new text for a new religion. This text and religion provided a unifying identity for these new Arab rulers and for their subjects to help in the fight against the Byzantine empire next door.
Monotheism is a joke. Based on folklore, myths, fiction, and occasional true events—who can tell what is true, what is made up?—the books are a joke. Yes, they have some inspiring stories; they will always be part of our canon. But do they have to continue to light the fuse for our nuclear cannons? The natural order of things has changed dramatically in the past seventy years with the development and evolution of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. If the anthropomorphic gods—a separate god for each religion—inspire us to light the fuse of a nuclear bomb, our species as we know it comes to an end.
To paraphrase the old Soviet Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead.”
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