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It has not been proved that there is an initiation beyond the city which balances the circulation of males and females within the household, but this is a hypothesis which is very compelling that would explain a lot of the diverse fragments of Greek mythology and ritual. We will not attempt to prove the hypothesis because such an exercise would require a work as long as the one just attempted. Such a work would have to confront the bewildering variety of Greek myths and their variants and show how through distortion, inversion and displacement, many of these myths point back to the initiation beyond the city, making it visible by its very absence. This initiation is the opposite of the initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis. It operated under a taboo just as effective in sealing it off from our view -- even more effective because at least we know for sure that the mysteries of Ill-uses existed. We cannot know that the initiation beyond the city existed at all. It is an unsubstantiated hypothesis or speculation, and will probably always remain, so no matter how convincing our analysis of the ritual and mythic material.

That ritual was the effective site of the construction of the primal structure of the Indo-European city as we have uncovered it throughout our investigation. That structure within the city was the Li, or laid down pattern, which resulted from the channeling of Chi within the ritual which differentiated the classes of people within the city. We need to try to understand that channeling of Chi even more than we need to prove its existence. Understanding it is, perhaps, at least possible. In the initiation beyond the city, the male and female differences are underlined and manipulated. If we reverse them as Perseus does, we get male and female harmony; whereas if we allow the initiation to run its course, we get extreme male and female separation and reification of antithetical positions of the two genders. And of course, that is exactly what has been observed within the household. There is a radical split in the Greek household between the sexes enforced by the circulation of the children. That circulation of the children about the household is balanced by the circulation of the adolescents out of the city into the wilderness for the initiation and back into the city via the Mysteries of Eleusis. As a result of these two levels of circulation, there appears the radical separation between men and women within the household and the radical separation of classes within the city among men. Thus, each age of man that appears in the riddle solved by Oedipus has its underlying process that genetically builds to produce the reified structures of separation within the household and city. The old man finds these structures as immutable because they are branded into the social fabric due to the circulation of children and the circulation of youths.

But as always, we ask why this hypothesized initiation process has four stages, and the very stages we described, and no others. One quick answer is that these are the four stages of emergence which we have found so many intimations of within the history of philosophy and mythology. We might suspect that the initiation itself would in some way represent the autopoietic ring which has the structure of emergence. However, here we are seeing the seedy side of autopoiesis which exists as the foundation of the class structure in the real city, harnessed to keep those structures inviolate and in place for long periods of time. And we can see that those class structures have indeed existed in Indo-European society for thousands of years. So we can see that the mimicing of the autopoietic structure in the initiation ceremony, instead of in the city itself as Plato proposed, could be the source of the longevity of those eccentric class structures. In this interpretation, the stages of the initiation would raise the consciousness of the participants through a series of meta-levels. The meta-levels would fold through each other like an Escher waterfall, so that the ritual sex and killing and dispersal of the male in the beginning that establishes the oneness of the female and the multiplicity of the male would be mirrored by the magical tools given to the hero which symbolize the unity of the female and the fragmentation of the male. So in the ritual, the end is the beginning, and the beginning is the end. In between these extremes that return eternally to the same Indo-European pattern, there is the learning of dynamic clinging and the shamanic vision. The ritual sacrifice after sex shows us the lowest energy center of the Indo-European dreambody associated with Hel. Dynamic clinging emphasizes the second higher Well associated with Chi emanating from the kidneys. Here there is ritual marriage and taming horses. Here there is joining of the sexes rather than the deep separation of rape. Here there is learning the steward ship of transforming images as the Chi transforms under the influence of the five Hsing as it interacts with the four kinds of earth. Next we see visions in the uppermost well, mirmir, the clearest and stillest well of the heart, the place of visions. In this place, there is a healing of the dionysian madness of the women in the wilderness. There is the induced vision of the shaman, or seer. Finally, the one with the deepest vision becomes the king and is given the magical tools. These are the runes discovered by Odin in his self-sacrificial death. These magical implements, the deep magic of Varuna, of Harut and Marut, allow the possessor to rule the city of the gods which exists in the branches of the Tree. The magic implements, runes, allow the possessor to control the whole of the Tree and all of its Wells from on high. And thus, the magical tools represent the inner structure which connects the Well and the Tree. That inner structure appears as the positive and negative fourfold, the eagle and dragon, and between them moves the squirrel which passes their insults between them, going up and down the tree. That squirrel is the opposite of the movement of the clay and water between the well and tree and back again. These two movements, one oscillating and the other circular, define the point which is stillness. It is like the ritual of Hajj where the circulating around the Kaba is balanced by the running between Sawafa and Marwa and then defined the standing of the plain of Arafat. Both movements, circular and linear, define the possibility of stillness. So again the well and the tree point at the single source. The full glass and the empty glass point to the emptiness of both the glass and the liquid contents. The positive and negative fourfold emanates from the primal scene of the well and the tree as the male linear movements and the female circular movements. We know the circulation is female because it is the Norns that perform the action of taking the water from the well along with the clay to put on the tree. We know that the linear oscillating pattern of the squirrel is male because it moves between eagle and dragon or snake. Unity is symbolized when the eagle grasps the snake in its claws. The eagle picks up the creature of earth and takes it high into the air and light. It takes what is normally hidden and exposes it in the too bright light close to the sun. The positive fourfold is the transcendent manifestation of truth which pries the secrets from the earth; whereas the action of the norns takes the water out of the well only to allow it to return to the earth. It is a partial exposure in order to allow the water to become more hidden. So like the negative fourfold it makes manifest only in order to hide more effectively. Night, covering, chaos, and the abyss are the stages of this more effective hiding.

We can easily see that the stages of the wild initiation, that is opposite the tame Eleusian initiation, move through the realms of the Indo-European dreambody one by one, bringing us again and again to know the deep truth of the unity of the female and the dispersion of the male. In dynamic clinging, Peleus holds on to Thetis through her transformations. They are all illusions of manyness, appearances of variety which he holds on to until he gains the essence which is the inner core of female unity. This is the same with Helen who imitates the voices of all the wives of those within the Trojan horse. Helen is the source of female beauty, and so all those apparently different women are really just appearances of Helen as the source of human female beauty. So whereas in the sexual initiation of the selected male and female the woman remains whole while the male is killed and dispersed on a gross physical level, at the next level we discover the source or essence of female unity beyond all the apparently separate women. Thetis is all women dissembling within the patriarchal household in order to maintain her place in the alien environment of the husband's family. Helen is all women who each have some portion of beauty that they use as a lure to establish themselves with their husbands in a world where he holds all the cards. As we move to the next stage, we see that the seer heals all the women of their dionysian delirium and sends them back to their prisons in the households. The men see visions which distinguish who among them are shamen. The group of the 50 initiate women has been diminished by one. She bears the golden child. She has been singled out to be sacrificed to rape and transgression outside marriage. She is the singled out bearer of female unity. Once she has been separated out, the rest of the women may be dispersed throughout the city into their prison houses. This dispersion of the women is matched by a vision among the men. We would expect that vision to be unified and shared. It is an inward unity produced by the separation of the group of women into their prisons. Symbolically the group has been raped and sacrificed through the scapegoat. The healing of the women is possible because their unity has been destroyed, or at least gathered into one of them. Their outward healing and return to sanity of the women is balanced by the inward vision of the men. So from essence of woman, we move to the integra, the uniqueness of the one not married, who represents the inner unity and becomes sacred. In the dispersal of the women to their prisons and sanity (repression), the men get a vision of the inner unity of the female beyond her essence born out of the dispersion of the female group. This may be accompanied by the gang rape of the unique female whose outward body balances the inward vision. Finally, the single female is installed within the city as the harlot balancing the good imprisoned wives. She becomes the single female tool of power, the wallet against which the differences between the males within the city are defined. In the city, the harlot services many men for pleasure only, while the wives can only service one man for the purposes of engendering male offspring. Directly from the initiation comes the fundamental split in the female psyche between wife and harlot. The harlot allows open unity of a group of men having intercourse with the same woman. This balances the division of the women among the women for procreation. The imprisoned wives are the division of the resource of fecundity among the men. Fecundity is separated radically from pleasure, and the possibility of the sensuous wife is suppressed. In pleasure, the men find an outward unity flowing from the female. In procreation, the men celebrate their own separation with separate vessels. Droupadi united these two functions by being the single wife of the five brothers. But still, the brothers managed to know which son was their own through their mechanism of sharing her. Each brother had a separate window of access to fecundity, and at the same time, they had the outward pleasure of having sex with the same woman. This unity of the female within the city, actually gives order and structure to the city in the way the female pleasure resource is shared and the female fecundity resource is allotted.

The wild initiation structures the city by reaffirming the unity of the female outwardly, and the separation of the males inwardly, at every stage in a different way. This moves us from woman as ephemeron, to woman as essence, to woman as integra, and finally to woman as holoid. Each woman imprisoned is a part of the source of fecundity for the whole city. In that part, one may see the whole human drama. It is woman who appears as the holoidal point of the interpenetration of the community through the exploitation of the source of human female beauty that draws from the source of beauty that escapes the human, Aphrodite, the immortal. Heaven slices up the earth and makes houses to imprison each piece broken off of this source of fecundity. Men horde the pieces, but share with pleasure, the sacrificed female who represents the source itself.

This is a complex picture, but it makes some sense as we see that the initiation acts out the embodiment of the Indo-European dreambody through raising the difference between male disunity as contrast to female unity to ever higher meta-levels of significance. At the highest level, we see the structures of the household and city reified and fully encoded. But this is all dependent on the manipulation of the female as embodiment of unity in the face of separation. As such, we see that the two kinds of immortality are implicitly affirmed. Through the female rape outside marriage, the undertow of the lifeforce beyond culture is affirmed. But then in the group marriage, the law of culture which allots women to men is affirmed. When the women are sent off to their home-prisons and their rebellion has been successfully channeled back into society, the lifeforce that exists outside of marriage is controlled and channeled by society in the service of lineages. Thus, the patriarchal law appropriates the immortality within the lifestream dominated by Dionysus in the service of the order of society represented by Apollo. The immortality of law is blended successfully with the immortality of human generations. But those same women who go off to their homes to raise families are always vulnerable to the call of Dionysus. The sexual act in the wilderness is a tantric sexual ritual in which the separations between men and women, so carefully controlled within the city, may break down at any moment, and the men and women may find unity which, in effect, is magical and cosmic. At this tantric level, the very ordering of the two immortalities that keep them apart but together may be transcended so that they become truly One. This possibility of discovering that the two immortalities are really two sides of the same thing points us to the underlying reality of the autopoietic ring that sets on the threshold just beyond the collapse into Conceptual Being. This tantric cosmic marriage is the subject of the Elusian mysteries, Demeter and Iason, in the thrice plowed field. Zeus zaps Iason with a lightening bolt. The lightening bolt in this case is the realization of complete identity between man and wife in sexual union. It is the realization of Aristophane's vision from the Symposium of the whole creatures that are of three sexes. It is the realization of the holoidal state in sexual union. The initiation that for young girls is gang rape or group marriage becomes a different possibility for mature women. It is the possibility of actually manifesting the inner unity projected on women in Indo-European society. It becomes the realization of cosmic oneness through tantric sexual rites. In it, the man is zapped by the Kundalini rising, the dragon at the base of the tree. The man is destroyed again, but now on a different level, while the woman reaches sexual fulfillment. Freud talked about vaginal orgasm as opposed to clitoral. Some modern books talk of the "G" point which gives women pleasure through penetration after clitoral orgasm is achieved. Our culture has a need to project some deeper level of satisfaction on the female. Teresius, who became a woman, said that women get more pleasure from the sexual act. Modern studies seem to indicate that the feminine sexual apparatus is structured to give multiple orgasms. Multiple orgasms -- are these the final images of the transformations of Theitis in the grasp of Peleus? The fantasy of continuous orgasm on the part of the female is one face of the illusory production of continuity which arises in the tantric sexual act that revisits the site of wild initiation and reappropriates it for the woman trapped within the Indo-European matrix. In the cosmic marriage where the woman achieves continuous orgasm, the man vanishes. He is incapable of continuous orgasm biologically. Even the fantasy is impossible. Instead, his fantasy is to have multiple young girls servicing him. His generic fantasy is separated younger females rather than the unitary mature female who achieves her fantasy of multiple orgasms. The older female can do without the services of the man. The biological limitations of the man is an implicit castration. His sexual performance is in resisting ejaculation and preserving body fluids, as in the Taoist case. Thus, we can pair the continuous orgasm fantasy of the older female to the stimulation without ejaculation fantasy of the male who attempts to prolong his pleasure. When the two fantasies are brought together, there are the makings of a cosmic marriage. The denial of release, the building intensity of stimulation infinitely without release is eros, infinite arousal. It is a sick fantasy which turns real marriage into a purely sexual obsession. The real marriage, like the autopoietic ring, does not fall into the false unity of conceptual identity. In the real marriage, the genders maintain their difference, and out of the difference comes compassion for one another as limited beings. Limitation and imperfection -- partialness -- have within them a higher perfection, intrinsic and implicit. When marriage is broken, then there is a rush toward the outward perfection of equality of the sexes and the cosmic marriage. When marriage is broken, there is the production of the higher utopia, and the inner sophistication of the second best city is lost to sight.

Explaining the wild rite beyond the city walls as the institution of an autopoietic process off of which the real city feeds in order to maintain its structures is the easy way out. It allows us to find, beneath the structure of the city, the vestiges of the autopoietic ring and posit that the structure of the emergent event informed every aspect of the Indo-European city by lying beneath that city from the very beginning. It gives a neat ending to our long involved trek through the onto-mythological landscape out of which the Western worldview arose. And in fact, this scenario makes a lot of sense. Yet we need a model which allows us to understand the inner logic of the four discrete phases of the initiation. It does not help to merely find the structure we started out with at the basis of everything. We are not here merely to show that everywhere we look is the same structure operating within the remains of the carcass of our worldview. It clearly died when it lost the dynamo of the initiation which secured its inner structure. The last known performers of these rites were the Mithrists. When the Christians stamped them out, they killed the process that gave reality to Indo-European society. The worldview became a mere shell -- a conceptual construct without any grounding in a generating process.

Instead of taking the easy way out, however true it is, let us look at the inner logic of the four phases of the initiation itself. It is clearly not an autopoietic ring of the form we have come to know. It is a different kind of structure with its own inner logic. To understand this intrinsic logic, we will use the hypnotherapeutic theory of David Grove¹, as interpreted by a practitioner, Steven Briggs, as the model we use to look at the Indo-European initiation. David Grove developed a way of working with patients called Clean Language. Clean Language is a particular way for the therapist to work with and guide the inner healing work of the patients without interfering. The therapist becomes a facilitator which helps the patient unfold their own healing process from within themselves, which they experience directly in self-induced trance. The therapist is an accessory to the healing, who ultimately does not even have to know what "happened" inside the patient for the treatment to be successful. This view of therapy is fundamentally different from all other kinds of psycho-therapeutic intervention. It respects the closure of the patient, but still helps by acting as a catalyst which makes it possible for changes to occur within the closed inner world of the patient. Because Grove respects the closure of the patient and can act as a catalyst without being a voyeur, he has been able to develop a fundamentally different theory of the way consciousness works and how to do therapy. This theory allows us to approach the Indo-European initiation in a way that allows us to understand how it works. The initiation has aspects that point to autopoiesis and its relation to the structure emergent event. Yet, the initiation is not an autopoietic system. It is something deeper. It is a generative process which produces the long lasting class structures we see in Indo-European society. Those structures, as Plato foresaw, will give form to the real city. The real city might degenerate into a city like Atlantis where the positive and negative fourfold interpenetrate and are balanced and which will self destruct. At best, they might be used to produce the lower utopia described in the Laws. Or in extreme cases, they might go too far and be forced into the totalitarian shape of the higher utopia of the Republic. In any case, the city's structure is generated by a process which lies outside the city. In the theory of autopoietic systems, there is no origin. The autopoietic system's origin is always already lost. So too, is the origin of the real city which is covered over by the founding myths. The men of earth spring from the ground fully grown and armed. Yet when we look beyond the origin to the functioning city, we see that there is a circulation of male and female children. The female children are either "exposed" at birth or given away when they reach adolescence to men of other households. Male children go between the female and male portions of the house, and then out into the world. These circulations out of the house and back by the two sexes are transformed in adolescence when the boys and girls, or at least a selected group like the group sent to Thebes to meet the Minotaur, go outside the city to experience the initiation in the wilderness. Finally, these boys and girls return as men and women, transformed by the initiation to live within houses, or to be sacred harlots, or to be one of the classes of Indo-European men. The latter stay within the city and succeed their elders in control of the city, leaving only to fight wars, or to do agriculture or even trade. The men and women circulate between the households and between cities, but with their selves fully formed. They guide and participate in the festivals, sacrifices, funerals, business and pleasurable occasions, each gender in their own way. But what we see is that the circulation of the children and the adults follow a format which is familiar and attuned to each other within the cities and its households. Only the adolescents go out of their households and out of the city to experience the transformation that awaits them in the wilderness. So we can see that the familiar structure of adults and children in the city, bizarre as it was in Greek times, was balanced against the liminal events which served as their counterpoint. These liminal events outside generated the bizarre social pattern inside which was based on utter separation between the genders. The social pattern produced was the real city. But the real city always had its other reflections. The real city expressed the implicit Real aspect of Being. The higher utopia expressed the implicit Identical aspect of Being. The lower utopia expressed the implicit True aspect of Being. The true exists as the intermediary position between Reality and Identity. In the true city, what it says and what it does are the same. Only the autopoietic system achieves this. The distopia of Atlantis expressed the implict Metaphorical aspect of Being. The metaphor is that the positive fourfold IS the negative fourfold. The metaphor is the pure metonymy of the two fourfolds as they interpenetrate. The different cities are the different aspects of Being realized as a social milieu. Except as a tyranny, the identical, or totalitarian city cannot be realized. It is only an ideal never achieved. The autopoietic city is always there as a possibility where social harmony is realized without the complete destruction of intrinsic variety. The real city is the normal state of affairs, where a nihilistic war of the all against the all is continually occurring, to the extent that each is an enemy to himself. This means that the real city fosters self-destructive behavior, like drugs, alcohol consumption, obsessive sexual behavior and all the other socially destructive behaviors that can be observed in any real city. However, within that environment, still there is occasional formation of close knit cooperating groups who produce neg-entropic organizations within the chaos of the real city. Haunting the real city is the constant possibility of the cancellation of nihilistic opposites which are continually being generated. This possibility of cancellation, in which all the false opposites are identified and disappear through mutual cancellation, is the metaphorical opposite of the real city in which the revolution occurs, or the defeat and sacking of the city occurs, or the natural catastrophe occurs. Whatever scenario of catastrophic destruction you can name constantly haunts the real city. It stands between the nihilistic poles of self-destruction and tyranny as a seething caldron of nihilistic opposites. In this situation, the only possibility of making a non-nihilistic distinction lies in the embodiment of the autopoietic ring. This is realized whenever invisible non-nihilistic distinctions are made within society, such as marriage. The real city sports the radical separation of genders. The ideal city abolishes the distinction. The distopia of Atlantis has statues of the ten tyrants and their wives. It has multiple tyrannies running in parallel in which the women are as visible as the men. In the true city the marriages are like that of Odysseus and Pennelope. The marriage bed grows out of a living tree. It is not threatened by offers of immortality by goddesses or offers of marriage by suitors. This is because in this kind of marriage, a living source has been found from which sustenance is drawn. The true city is the only one which has the possibility of locating and taping this source. Plato saw that possibility and attempted to elucidate it for us. Unfortunately, we have too long misunderstood what he was saying for us. The autopoietic social organization was forgotten. We have only had the ideology of the Heavenly City to guide us, and that is just as destructive as the distopia of Atlantis, the city of imperial war. Ultimately, both of these possibilities that had been left us are, in different ways, hell on earth. Each of the different structures of the city that reflect the implicit aspects of Being are generated in the initiation beyond the city. That generator is of a different order than what it generates. It is not the always already lost origin, but instead the liminal active dialectical counter moment to the structure as it appears in the children and adults. Adolescence means "addled essence." It is the point when the essences of the boy or girl are mixed up and molded by traumatic experiences. It is the point when the worldview is impressed upon their consciousnesses. It is a magical point in their lives. in more ways than one. This is when the spell of the dominant world system was cast over all existence.

David Grove tells us that there are four kinds of language: Memories, Symbols, Metaphors and Semantics. The symbol is an internal warp in the body image associated with sensations. The metaphor is an external focus which gives meaning outside the body image for inner experience. Semantics is the private language of the patient. Here we see that there is are two relations between memory and language which either have in internal or external referent. Symbols and Metaphors organize memories serving as the present reminder, and are named by language. What is significant is when Grove says, "One presenting problem can be presented in four different ways."² That is, any trauma might appear in any or all of the different languages that the patient has at his disposal for understanding his own experiences. We have to expect that the initiation will act upon each of these languages. We have to see that the initiation is structuring the experience of those who may inhabit any one of the four cities; that cities over their history may become any one of these cities. Tyrannies, Harmonies, Catastrophes occur in the history of any city if it exists long enough. But normally the city is locked in fits of nihilistic overwhelming as nihilism intensifies without limit. The initiated is fit for any of these four states which the Indo-European city precesses through. It generates the kind of individual that can live under any of these regimes. It does so by building into his psyche experiences that encode the structures on which any one of these cities will thrive. That occurs primarily by seeding traumas and magical relations with the world of a special type. This seeding of traumas and magical relations into a basically closed system sets up some fundamental patterns which we will now study.

One of the ideas upon which David Grove's therapy is based is that the patients will heal themselves given a chance. They do this by interacting with their inner selves at levels below the conscious through the four languages guided by the clean language of the therapist. This assumes that the patient's wholeness has been disturbed by traumatic situations and that these trauma leave traces in the conscious and unconscious realms of the patients' inner experience. These traumatic traces will be ejected by the healing processes of the patient. They are seen as things inside that should be outside the patient. Through therapy, these impurities are shepherded back out where they belong. They metamorphose as they move back out in sometimes startling ways. But there is an inner logic to the traumatic residue which must work itself out, and therapy is structured in such a way to allow this to happen.

Now we know that the initiation that occurs in the wilderness has as one of its elements the creation of trauma. We have a good idea what that traumatic situation was like from the myth of the Danae. It is clear that everything in the myth of the Danae is opposite to the sexual sacrifice in the initiation. Here there are 50 boys and girls. They are pursed in a marriage they do not want and made to flee beyond their city. When the marriage occurs, they kill their husbands on the wedding night, except for one who did not have intercourse with his bride. The women are punished by carrying sieves in Hades. In the initiation, just the opposite state of affairs probably existed. Out of 50 boys and girls, two are selected. This couple has intercourse as a rape outside of marriage. Here the boy represents Dionysus (as Hades) and the girl Persephone. The boy is killed for this offense, and perhaps eaten by the group. The girl is perhaps gang raped in the next phase when a group marriage occurs between the remaining boys and girls. This produces a split between the marriageable women and the women who are only good for giving pleasure to men. The girl who is raped is seen as sacred, as she is seen as one who has been selected by the gods and raped by them. That the jinn somehow participated in this act through the sacrificed boy is almost certain. Her child (hiranyagharba, the golden seed from the golden womb), whose father has been killed and dispersed, is the opposite of the coming together of all the other men in the same vessel to impregnate the girl. Dispersal of the killed boy is the opposite of the cooperation of the others in gang rape. That child who is born of the group of males, born of the sacrificed one, is the golden child who appears again in the mysteries of Eleusis as Pluton. That golden child represents bounty from Hades. Out of Hades as the embodiment of the ephemeron arises the embodiment of the holoidal, the self as the vessel of unitary Being. The traumatic situation that produces this child is truly a hell on earth, or kakatopia. In the Danae myth, two are saved from marriage, whereas in the initiation, two are sacrificed. In the Danae myth, the one who does not have sex in marriage is saved, whereas in the initiation, the one who does have sex outside marriage is killed. In the Danae myth, the women kill their husbands on their wedding night, whereas in the initiation the other boys kill the sacrificed one after sex outside of marriage. In the Danae myth, the women who killed their husbands were sentenced to carrying sieves in Hades. In the initiation, it is the raped woman who becomes like a sieve due to the many puncturing of gang rape. Her integrity has been destroyed outside of marriage. She has become the archetypal harlot, Aphrodite the harlot, forced out of the prison of the household into the prison of sexual exploitation as a warning to the other girls not to rebel. Watching this scene for the other girls is a considerable trauma, as well as a threat. It sets up the radical difference between the genders discovered in the Greek household in which the imprisonment of the women can be seen as the withdrawal of the women to safety from their tormentors as well.

This traumatic situation in the wilderness, if it actually occurred, would make a lot of the mythic evidence fall into place for us. We treat it as a hypothesis which allows us to organize much of the mythic and ritual material and explains the many of the structures we have found in the Greek worldview which indicate the alienation of men and women from each other. But we need to go further and attempt to understand how this traumatic situation relates to the other four phases of the hypothetical initiation. At the other end of the initiation process we see the giving of the magical tools to the hero, or future king. Now we can see trauma as the injection of negative experiences into the dreambody/mythbody of the participants in the initiation which leave traces in the four languages of the initiates and ultimately build up a cultural pattern of radical estrangement of the genders. We might expect that there would be an opposite aspect to this which would project outside what should only be inside. This projection outside of intentionality into objects which are manipulated for effect in the world, is, in effect magic. Magical tools are produced by projecting intersubjective intentionality into sacred objects, such as those that appear in temples, which may be manipulated to have supra-causal effects in the world. If one projects intentionality in one specific direction for effect, then one is sure to produce blindspots in the field of the projection of the world as a whole. These blindspots are the opposite of the magical tools. They are the things that cannot be seen in a particular worldview. The additive unity of all these blindspots in the Western worldview has been called the Flaw in this series of essays. The Flaw is produced by the incredible amounts of energy used to project the universe. The projection of the universe produces a gigantic warp in the way everyone looks at existence. This is because in the pluriverse, the multiple intersecting realities do not have to be excluded. In the universe, the filtering out of all the other realities causes a warpage in the way everything is seen. This warpage has holes called blindspots, and points of ultra intensity which are the magical tools. For instance, in today's society money is a magical intensification. Everything is reduced to money, whereas at the same time the worlds of jinn, or animals, or angels cannot be seen any more. Thus, at the other end of the series of initiation phases, there is the production of magic as the projecting outward of what ought to stay inward that is opposite the trauma of the sexual sacrifice.

Now when we realize that the initiation is a double assault on the integrity of those being initiated by injecting inside what should remain outside, and ejecting what should remain inside, then we see that the initiation is a double assault. That assault is balanced by the two inner phases of the initiation. We know these as the second phase of dynamic clinging and the third phase in which the seers are produced, perhaps by some drug-induced experience. But if we look carefully, we see that each of these inner phases are directly the duals of their adjacent end phases. For instance, when the trauma is injected, then we know from David Grove's therapy that the trauma traces begin to metamorphose as they work their way back out of the dreambody/mythbody. The mythbody is, of course, the intersubjective dreambody. All the metamorphosis in Greek mythology is produced by this working its way back out of the trauma of witnessed rape. So for instance, when Apollo attempts to rape Dauphine, she turns into a tree to escape. Her metamorphosis allows her to escape the rape of the gods. She is saved. Metamorphosis for Io is due to her being raped by Zeus and cursed by Hera. There are many examples of rape and metamorphosis scenes. Here we see the natural self-healing at work in the mythbody. As the traumatic traces work themselves out, there is a continual transformation of images. Dynamic clinging is the holding onto the essence of the trauma through this series of transformations, just as Peleus held onto Thetis. Holding onto something that is transforming is the essence of dynamic clinging. In horses, we hold on to them as they transform from wild to tame. In the group marriage of the girls in the initiation, we hold onto them as they change from unmarried virgins to married "experienced" women and wives. So we see that the phase of dynamic clinging is the opposite of the injection of the trauma as its dual. It is the sheparding of the trauma back out of the dream/mythbodies in the natural process of healing. Likewise the phase in which the seers who become priests in the city appear, is a similar duality with the other end point in the initiation. We spoke earlier of the production of blindspots in the distorted worlds produced by the Indo-European tradition. These blindspots are opposite the magical locuses of intentionality which are projected by these worlds. When these blindspots come inward as the opposite to the projection of the magical intensifications, then there is the production of visions. When you see some aspect of the world you never dreamed existed, then the result is a vision. Those who see those things that others do not see are called seers. The production of visions is complementary to the projection of magical intentionalities. Of course, magic seeks to make things appear other than they are, whereas visions are realizations of the reality that underlies the appearances. In the rape scene at the other end of initiation, it is the genders that are opposite duals, like the blindspots and magical intensities. The blindspots are too dark, and the magical intensities are too bright. They are nihilistic opposites. At the other end of the initiation, there is the positive fourfold which is associated with men and the negative fourfold associated with women that play a similar role as nihilistic opposites that inform the genders that are reified and estranged by the traumatic experience.

Through this type of argument, we can see that the initiation outside the city is the very image of the deformation of the autopoietic unity. As marriage, the autopoietic unity is violated through rape. The closed autopoietic ring has a major perturbation through the injection of trauma and the projection of magical intensities. So although we saw some common features between the initiation and the autopoietic ring, it is now clear that the initiation is really a means of deforming the autopoietic ring and what that deformation produces are the four possible cities: Real, True, Metaphorical and Identical. The autopoietic system responds to the injection of trauma and the projection of magical intensities by the production of visions and the transformation of images. The external assault is balanced by the natural tendencies of the autopoietic system to right itself. But the relation between assault and the move back toward balance of the autopoietic system reacting to assault, maintaining its internal homeostatic variables in spite of the environment, shows that the autopoietic system's resilience is assumed by the Western worldview that depends on that resilience which it attempts to crush but does not take to its conclusion. This is, in a way, another picture of dynamic clinging. The Western worldview set up a situation where it attempts to crush but does not completely crush the autopoietic system. This is mirrored in the crushing of the boy who is sacrificed only after he has implanted his seed in the sacrificed girl. So that there is a very good possibility that a child will be born from this rape, the others help by filling the same human vessel with their own seed as well. The boy who is sacrificed is eaten by those who do the impregnating beforehand. This has a magical compounding effect. Thus, the birth of the golden child is the reappearance of the autopoietic system after the attempt to crush it. This appears also as the rising of the Phoenix from its own ashes. The raped girl is the aromatic nest. The bird arises from the flames that engulfed it, just like the lightening bolt that engulfs Iasius who couples with Demeter in a cornfield. The corn that arose after the planting would be his arising from his own seed. Rebirth of something from itself is the very image of the autopoietic system. The Western worldview assumes that the autopoietic system is there for it to attack and deform, and that this can be done without crushing it completely so that it will spring back to life. The autopoietic system's existence is central to every aspect of the Western worldview. It is the hidden foundation of the Western worldview whose resilience is necessary for the brutality of the Western worldview to act against in order to produce the wanted reactions that give dynamism to the Western worldview that differ from the dynamism of other worldviews. The autopoietic system is like HunTun, Yamir or Parusa, which is destroyed to give rise to the world. The Western worldview destroys in order that it may reap what appears after the autopoietic system bounces back. This is central to Christian doctrine which is based on very deep roots in the Indo-European culture. Christ is the sacrificed one who bounces back. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ allows one to gain eternal life, which means to participate in the autopoietic unity. We can see that the sacrificed one in the initiation is the one born of it previously, so when the others eat the sacrificed one, they are partaking in the autopoietic unity which has been artificially produced, and by the initiation rite with its tantric magic and magic based on human reproduction.

This whole sick system of the radical split in the household, the initiation in the wilderness, and the structuring of the caste system within the city, has a gruesome inner logic that lies beneath our worldview and penetrates our consciousness even today. Rape still plays a big role in our society, as does child abuse. We have learned to produce different kinds of magical intensifications like money, but we are essentially still involved in producing all kinds of appearances contrary to reality. The traps which any individual might fall into, which are self-destroying, are myriad. Each of these traps are the splintered remnants of the initiation ceremony. Whether it be sexual obsession, substance abuse, greed and coveting, or any one of innumerable self-destructive avenues which are cultivated by capitalist society, there is an assault on the integrity of the individual which the healthy wholeness of the individual must react to and attempt to heal itself. Too often the individual is overwhelmed and destroyed; if not physically, then spiritually or emotionally. You must learn yourself to avoid these pitfalls, and not fall prey to those who would gladly help you destroy yourself by supplying the object of your obsession, whatever it is, for a price.

Now that we have gotten a view of the relation of the initiation ceremony to the wholeness of the individual, let us consider a case in point. Let us consider Oedipus. The myth of Oedipus has become a central theme taken from all the myths of antiquity and turned into a cultural symbol. This has been done primarily by the psychoanalytic tradition. Oedipus is an icon for the human dilemma within the family. He is the one who kills his father and makes love with his mother. He violates the incest taboo and discovers the possibility of the sensuous mother as a forbidden reality. Our consideration of the myth of Oedipus shall be based on the work of Deluze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus, and upon the work of Pietro Pucci in his book Oedipus And The Fabrication Of The Father. We will not, however, answer these new formulations of the meaning of Oedipus today and the ambiguities of the formulation of the myth in the plays of Sophocles. Instead, we will attempt to show how this myth is related directly to the initiation we have been considering.

The Oedipus myth has relations to the different phases of the initiation in a way that does not directly track the order of those phases. Basically, we can say that Oedipus kills his father without knowing who he is. Then he answers the riddle of the Sphinx. Then he marries his own mother without knowing it. Then he discovers all this and becomes a seer after blinding himself. The marrying of the mother is obviously related to the traumatic sexual initiation phase. The solving the riddle of the Sphinx is related to the second phase of dynamic clinging. The becoming a seer is related to the phase when visions appear, and the killing of the father is related to the fourth phase in which the magic tools are received. Oedipus is clearly an anti-hero, and it is clear that he sees himself as such in the play. If he had not killed the father at the three-way crossroads, he could not have taken his father's kingdom. Thus in the act of dying by his son's hand, the father, unknown to himself, handed over the keys to his kingdom to Oedipus. The chorus continually asks Oedipus why he blinded himself when he saw his wife/mother hanged. Oedipus answers in many ways, but it is clear that he wished to transform himself from the level of being deceived by appearances to another level in which he could know reality. He makes himself blind in order to see. So what begins with the killing of the father, which was fated, and which everyone was trying to avoid, ends with blindness. So the third and fourth phases are related in terms of beginning and end. The inability to recognize the father, and the belief that the father was someone who was not the father, are all appearances that are recoiled from by the gesture of blinding and the retreat into darkness. On the other hand, the non-recognition of the father is balanced by the ability of Oedipus to interpret the riddle of the sphinx. This apparent insight is the key to the city and power for Oedipus. The dead father has vacated the seat of power in Thebes, but Oedipus cannot take that seat without a feat of heroism. That feat is mental in this case, unlike the case of Perseus where the feat was physical. The riddle was about a transformation from a four to a two to a three legged animal. The answer that Oedipus gave recognized that the transforming animal was man himself. The riddle about the feet was answered by the one whose name means swollen-foot, a trauma imposed by the father when he exposed the father killing his son at birth. The one who is transforming in this case is man himself, not a woman. The one who is transforming is Oedipus because after he has blinded himself, he must walk with a cane, so he goes through all the phases. When he rises from four to two feet, he kills the father, and when he realizes that he has married the mother, he transforms himself, so he goes from two to three feet. He is transforming himself, and in this process of transformation, he must find and hold on to his own essence. He discovers that essence to be the heroic essence of one who is hated by the gods, like Prometheus, and like modern man who has shut the jinn out of their universe. The woman in this case, the Sphinx, is stable, while Oedipus transforms as he embodies the answer to the riddle. The heroism is mental and not physical. Answering the riddle is like coming up with the ruse of the Trojan horse. It is cunning which allows Oedipus to do it. But since it does not entail action to answer the riddle, Oedipus becomes passive and assumes the role normally played by the female. Of course, the Sphinx is a mirror of the mother. The son cannot recognize the mother either. By answering the riddle, he gets to sleep with his mother. The riddle has a man going through the phases of life. But his mother is the one who suggested exposing him in order to avoid the oracle. Thus, the mother is the one who would have denied him the life through which to transform in stages. The riddle of the mother is who is she that she could destroy her own boy child. Exposing girl children was no big deal. But exposing boy children was a major reversal of fortunes in terms of the Greek worldview. So answering the riddle is a kind of outward insight opposite to the inner visions that occur due to blindness. The killing of the father at a threeway road juncture is opposite the marrying of the mother. Notice that raping females is the equivalent of the murder of males. The one who kills the father and marries the mother has gone to the limits of what is culturally unacceptable in the Greek universe. The incest taboo covers over the possibility of the sensuous mother which does not appear in the tableau of the goddesses. The killing of the father attacks the trinity of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon which appears in the myth as the juncture of the three roads. By killing the father who represents the principle of transcendence, the father is fragmented into many voices, as Pucci points out in his interpretation of the play. These voices, as the projection of telos, are constantly running up against a subversive narration of chance which represents the mother. Jocasta is the mother by chance, and Oedipus is the child of Chance. These narratives of dispersal that run counter to the narratives of telos are the effective means of expressing the fragmentation of the father. In our terms, these are the narratives expressing the ephemeron as opposed to the narratives that are holoidal and attempt to express Conceptual Being as complete in itself, as the realization of Ontological Monism.

The fragmentation of the "Father", as the embodiment of the transcendental signifier, is the same as the fragmentation of Being. Being is always vulnerable to fragmentation because it was fragmented to begin with, and the production of a unified Conceptual Being was a project of artificial construction. So we should not be surprised when we see the Concept of Being fragmenting in modern ontology, ushering in the post-modern era. Being is merely returning to its original state of dispersion. The narratives of the father are merging back into the narratives of chance which disperse them. The father, in patriarchal society, is likewise an artificial construct. It arises from the separation of the female source of fecundity so that it is known who the father is of any given child. Without segregation, this would be impossible to know. Other than through this separation, it is impossible to recognize the father except through modern genetic techniques. The father is a construct of patriarchy which the Greeks took to an extreme in the radical imposition of estrangement and imprisonment of the female which is mirrored in the split engendered in the female psyche itself between wife and harlot. The splitting of the female is the means by which the concept of man as embodiment of positive fourfold, and beyond that, the concept of father as tyrant of the household is based. It produces the split between the different images of woman in the tableau of goddesses. It hides the possibility of the sensuous mother. But it also produces the three-way split between Zeus and his brothers. Here we see the third that induces chaos captured as a mystery in the tableau of the male gods in which each of the other male gods are just facets of the father, not true individuals like the female goddesses.

Of course, Oedipus is the one caught in the double bind between the Father (tableau of male gods) and the Mother (tableau of female goddesses). Oedipus is fated to act out the greatest taboos of the Greek universe. Like Prometheus, the helper of man, his role is to suffer and to embody this liminal fatedness. But Oedipus does not have an Oedipal complex. He has no knowledge who he is killing and who he is marrying until Apollo forces it on him, forces the Alethia, or uncovering of his fated situation, and destroying all his illusions about himself. The Oedipal complex represents the position of the transcendental signifier for us. Oedipus is ideation. The production of illusion, or illusory continuity is the way that Conceptual Being manifests in the Uni-verse. Deleuze attempts to trace back into history the genetic arising of the Oedipal complex. The stages of Savagery, Barbaric Tyranny and Capitalism are explored in detail. But we should be clear that the essence of savagery is more than the inscribing of bodies. It is the savagery of the initiation beyond the city in the wild. Out of that savagery comes the tyrant who appears as the all powerful king in the Indo-European system. Oedipus becomes this tyrant and learns that he is the rightful king at the same time he learns that he is polluted and must be exiled and killed. Oedipus is the king become scapegoat. The too brightness of tyranny is balanced by the darkness of pollution and exile. The tyrant keeps the Indo-European system running through his awesome overpowering imposition of telos or necessity. Capitalism is the realization of the hordes and circulations of human capital within the city between the households, and between the city and the wilderness. These human circulations of children and adolescents are turned into the circulations of magical commodities such as money, which has no real value but merely illusory exchange value based on agreements. Oedipus is the image of the flaw as it is embodied at the limits of human experience within the Western world system that arose from the Indo-European worldview. This is a system that is corrupt at its heart and which dominates us all, even those who feel they have power from it.

To understand this system, we must go back to understand Laius, the father of Oedipus, and his crime for which Oedipus suffers his fate. Laius rapes the boy, Chrysippus, who commits suicide from shame. His father, Pelops, calls down a curse on the house of Laius for this act. Here we see that it is the homosexual relations that lie behind the distortion of human sexuality. But on the other hand, the homosexual relations grow out of the radical separation between the sexes in Greece. It is an imploding system, feeding on itself and destroying itself. The transcendent father's sexuality extends so far in hubris that it leaves the grounding of the relations with women completely. It destroys the beloved boy, the object of its desire. For this overreaching, there is a curse which seeds a fate for the offspring of Laius. He is threatened with childlessness, but due to an error, a child is born in spite of the curse. That child has to be exposed like a girlchild. The father pierces the feet of the child, leaving a sign, maiming the part that touches the earth. The child is exposed, and by fate, is rescued to live in another city with another set of parents who love him and who he loves. It was to escape the taint of the oracle and to save those apparent parents that Oedipus went toward Thebes, meeting his natural father who attempts to drive him from the road. The insolence of Laius toward the stranger meant that he brought on his own death. The arrogance of Laius who pursued a young lover too far so as to drive him to suicide and who drives strangers from the road is the cause of his death. But with his death, the father fragments. He begins to haunt Oedipus in the form of other sources of the narrative of telos. The telos is not just projection. It is the working out of the curse of Pelops. The curse destroys the son of Laius, but in the process, destroys Laius and his wife. The curse carries on into the sons of Oedipus whom he curses for not treating him right once he is blinded. They die fighting each other at the gates of Thebes. Thus, the overarching, overweening pride and arrogance of the transcendental signifier, transcendental meaning no longer tied to earth like the laws of Zeus with feet dangling in the air, no longer tied to women who represent the earth, leads to the destruction of the family. Here the male child is put out like the female girlchild and he does not transition properly from the female part of the house to the male part of the house. In fact, he comes in the front door like the prostitute killing the father and then going through to the women's quarters and having intercourse with the mother without recognizing either. This monster child, the purely liminal being, is the source of conflict in his own children/brothers. The conflict between the sons/brothers of Oedipus is directly related to the overweening arrogance of the transcendental signifier. The signifier's transcendence is based on conflict between nihilistic opposites. The brothers/sons represent the nihilistic opposites in conflict. The transcendental signifier arches out over this conflict between opposites. The transcendental signifier is the third thing which produces the chaos of war between the brothers/sons of Oedipus. The triangle is between the grandfather and the grandchildren. They represent the triangle of logic, the trinity, in which the idea arises from the particulars. The transcendental signified is an origin out of which the conflict of chaos arises. It glosses over the competing opposites as it rises over them and covers them. Laius does not realize that by killing another's son, he is really killing his own son and grandsons. This is the nature of retribution in fate. The father's violence threatens the son. The mother's relation with the child becomes sexualized because of bad sexual relations between husband and wife. The Oedipus complex is projected on the child. It is not the child that has the Oedipus complex, but the parents who produce it. Oedipus did not know he was killing his father and marrying his mother. He was, in fact, trying to avoid that for love of those he thought were his parents. Jocasta and Laius projected onto Oedipus the oracle and attempted to kill him to prevent the oracle's meaning from taking place. They both tried to avoid it, and in the very act made it happen. This is fatedness. There is an absolute teleology which occurs despite the fragmentation of the narrative of the father or the chance narrative of the mother. The absolute teleology the gods do not control. Zeus admits as much in the Iliad. Oedipus is wrong when he says Apollo is responsible. Apollo is bound by that absolute teleology beyond the telos of the father and the tukhe (chance) of the mother. So is Zeus and all the gods. The absolute teleology unfolds from the single source of all causation beyond the well and the tree, the always already lost origin of the primal scene.

Oedipus is merely the embodiment of the double bind field between the father and the mother set up by the father who is arrogant and domineering and the mother who colludes. The child merely grows up within and acts out the field between the father and mother. In the triangle between the transcendental signifier and the conflicting opposites, Oedipus represents the inherent double bind which becomes self destructive. Oedipus destroys himself as he destroys his parents. The family triangle is destroyed, and so is the triangle of the pedophile grandfather and grandsons in conflict. All children act out the relation between the parents. And we notice that the parents are children of the grandparents so that there is a progressive bisection which, in not too many generations, encompasses all of the human race that has ever been. Each generation is merely the embodiment of the distortions in the relations between the parents. In the Indo-European system, there is such extreme distortion in the relations between men and women that it is no wonder we have on our hands a race of murders, and perpetrators of genocide. Only when you get back to Adam and Eve in the garden is there a lack of distortion. But then a third thing came to them and introduced a feeling of shame. That shame is a distortion that has become a pall over the whole of the human race. Not as an original sin, but as an estrangement between the genders. Somehow each couple can be seen either as the result of the endless web of distorted relationships, or as or as an incarnation of the original situation between Adam and Eve in the Garden. (For me, one of the greatest appeals of Islam is the lack of distortion in the sexual relations between men and women. Women think that the Muslim women who cover themselves are strange, but they, on the other hand, put up with the terror of rape, the exploitation of pornography, the destructiveness of sexual obsession and many other ills far greater an imposition on their lives. Strange isn't it?)

Oedipus, trapped between the arrogant violent father and the sexually projecting mother (swollen foot also connotes the erect penis, piercing the feet is analogous to castration, castration is the attempt to satisfy the unsatisfiable older woman) self-destructs. He destroys himself, his father and mother, and his own sons through his curse on them. He is the epitome of the sniper from the tower in Texas or many other famous cases of those who go mad and kill their loved ones and then themselves. Oedipus embodies the flaw in the Western worldview. Oedipus has a vision of who he is as his blindspot is slowly revealed. He thought he outwitted the fate of the oracle but did not look hard enough or think hard enough. He was not as clever as he thought. He has the vision which results from the revelation of his blindspot. He has the trauma in which the male is killed and the female is impregnated. Only in this case, the golden child has turned into the monster who kills the father and impregnates the mother. And in some sense, if you read the initiation sexual ritual backwards, this is the sense it has. The golden child is the reason for the murder of his father and the rape of his mother. When he himself is sacrificed in a subsequent year, he has intercourse with another girl who is in the position of his mother and is killed like his father was before him. This insane logic that continually intensifies the trauma every few years when the initiations are held, shows that the transcendence of the father as tyrant is based on a terrible rite beyond the city in which there is a circulation of the scapegoats. The daughters are raped, and the sons are killed to produce the golden child which will, in turn, be raped or killed. It is the terrible scene of the arising of the phoenix from its own ashes. It is the self-production in an eternal return of the same. It is a fate produced by a hubris of will to power.

Teiresias, the seer, was turned into a woman. He was blinded when he saw Athena in the bath. He saw the beauty of the goddess beyond human beauty. He was blinded when he saw two snakes copulating, and he killed the female one. Then later he saw the same sight and killed the male being transformed into a man again. This transformation between the genders is an important counterpoint to the situation of Oedipus. Oedipus is the embodiment of the distorted relations between male and female in marriage. Teiresias is the only mortal to know both sides. And it is by his testimony that we know that women enjoy the sexual act nine times more than men. He became a harlot when he was transformed into a woman, and so had plenty of experience to base his testimony. Teiresias witnessed copulation of snakes and outcasts, and killed the female becoming a harlot. Remembering that killing the woman is done by rape, i.e. rape is worse than death, transforms him into a harlot. This reminds us of the selected rape victim who is turned into a harlot when her rape is witnessed. On the other hand, Teiresias is turned into a man when he witnesses the copulation and kills the male. This also reminds us of the sacrificed boy. Teiresias is moving between the positions of the male and the female which is the opposite of being trapped between them as Oedipus is. Teiresias has true inner sight, whereas Oedipus only has his cleverness. True inner sight sees both sides of the reification of the genders. The one who does not see beyond the surface of the double-bind is doomed to repeat it and self-destruct within it. Oedipus sees himself turning into a seer like Teiresias. But the play is inconclusive on whether he attains true inner sight like his mentor, his father of meaning. His gesture of self-blinding makes him a producer of at least a part of his destiny beyond what the absolute telos has in store for him. He moves from the sensory realm of the outward where he was blind to the non-nihilistic distinction between the father and other men and the mother and other women, into the inward realm where Teiresias is the master. But it is not clear that he learns the gift of the master. We only know that he becomes the sacred outcast. But in spite of his claim that he is invulnerable and knows his destiny, it is not clear that he ever achieved the knowledge of the invisible world that Teiresias possesses that allows him to bridge the gap between male and female in spite of their absolute estrangement and alienation in Greek society.

Let us not forget that Teiresias gave the oracular saying pertaining to Narcissus to Leirope:

Could not the same thing be said of Oedipus? He would have lived to a ripe old age in ignorance of himself. But because he came to know himself through the god, Apollo, whose dictim is to know yourself, he came to be destroyed. Michael Balint, in The Basic Fault⁴, talks about three levels in the psyche. The Oedipal level occurs when the child relates to both the mother and father. But below that level is the pure relation to the mother which is represented by the myth of Narcissus and Lacan's mirror stage. The "Object Relations" school of psychanalysis concentrates on this more basic layer neglected by Freud. It is out of the study of children and their object relations that our understanding of the role of partial objects or desiring machines (ala Deluse and Guattari) arises. Narcissus is the very image of the beloved of Laius who kills himself. He is so beautiful he has many lovers. One of these is Ameinus who kills himself on a sword given by Narcissus and curses Narcissus. Narcissus, in due time, sees himself and falls in love with himself upon seeing himself reflected in a perfectly still pond.

At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; known at least that his other self would remain true to him whatever happened.⁵

Is this not a little like the self praise of Oedipus throughout the play. Self-production contains self-reference as one of its moments. Oedipus, as a child of chance, produces himself by his cunning before the Sphinx. The stranger becomes tyrant who uncannily becomes true king only to be expelled. Narcissus displays the self-reference that, along with self-construction and self-maintenance, makes up self-production. Self-reference signifies the immortality of the Law which folds back into the immortality of the generations. Oedipus breaks the immortality of the generations by the destruction of the father and the usurping of the place of the father which led to serious pollution. Narcissus breaks the immortality of the Law by destroying the infinite self-reference of the Law founded on itself as an embodiment of ontological monism but discovered to be ultimately groundlessness. The Oedipal and the Narcissus myths go together and really indicate two aspects of the intersubjective autopoietic ring with its two kinds of immortality. Narcissus is trapped inside the closed autopoietic system and cannot see anything but his own reflection in everything, just like the autopoietic system that always rights itself after every perturbation regardless of the situation in the environment. Oedipus, on the other hand, is able to eventually see something beyond his own illusions about himself. Both are self destructive images of the embodiment of the flaw within the household and the basic fault between the child and the less than good mother.

Balint mentions one further level beyond the Basic Fault. He says this is when the subject has no object or has to produce the object out of themselves. He calls this the Area of Creation.

Until now I have discussed two possible levels, or areas, in the mind: those of the Oedipus conflict and of the basic fault. To complete the picture I have to mention, though only briefly, a third area before summing up the relevance of my ideas for the psychology of the human mind.

Whereas the area of the Oedipus conflict is characterized by the presence of at least two objects, apart from the subject, and the area of the basic fault by a very peculiar, exclusively two-person relationship, the third area is characterized by the fact that in it there is no external object present. The subject is on his own and his main concern is to produce something out of himself; this something to be produced may be an object, but is not necessarily so. I propose to call this the level or area of creation. The most often-discussed example is, of course artistic creation, but other phenomena belong to the same group, among them mathematics and philosophy, gaining insight, understanding something or somebody; and last but not least, two highly important phenomena: the early phases of becoming -- bodily or physically -- "ill" and spontaneous recovery from an "illness."

Despite many attempts, very little indeed is understood of these processes. One obvious reason for this paucity of knowledge is the fact that throughout this whole area there is no external object present, and thus no transference relationship can develop. Where there is no transference, our analytic methods are powerless, and thus we are restricted to inferences from observations obtained after the individual has left the boundaries of the area. As soon as an external object appears on the scene, such as a completed work of art, a mathematical or philosophical thesis, a piece of insight or understanding which can be expressed in works, or as soon as the illness reaches the stage at which the individual can complain to someone about it, an external object is there and we can get to work with our analytic methods.

This "area of creation" is exactly what we set out to explore with our sociology of creativity long ago. That evolved into a conception of emergence where the emerging object goes through four phases on its way into the world that correspond to the meta-levels of Being. Both Oedipus and Narcissus cover over this area in which emergence occurs. They are, in fact, repressions. Narcissus is the repression of Identity. Oedipus is the repression of Truth. Reality too, as an artificial production of chaos, is a kind of repression. It is the repression caused by Laius, the third thing, the transcendent signifier at the triple crossroads. Jocasta, the mother, represents the repression of the Metaphor (mother IS wife). In the quote given in the preface, she asks Oedipus to define his "as if . . ." In these essays, we have explored these metaphors in depth and in detail. Some of our analysis has surely gone astray. But if any has reached the mark, that was by Allah's help alone.

Exploring the "area of creation" has led us back into the heart of the Western worldview. It has made us realize the importance of the structuring of the caste system and the meaning of the interstices between the castes. It has taken us beyond the city to find the origin of the city in the wild savage sites of Trauma and Magical rites. Out of the area of creation has unfolded the whole Western worldview in front of our eyes. And it is a terrifying hyper-reality. But the single question that we started out on this journey with has been answered, al hamdulilah, which concerned the specific nature of the Western form of Kufr that allowed it to destroy two huge empires, the Islamic and the Chinese. That answer is dynamic clinging. The Western barbarians learned dynamic clinging in the days when the Sumarians feared them and called the inhabitants of Hell. They were the people who first tamed and used the power of the horse in warfare. The lessons they learned in that leap has carried them to world domination more than once. Being is a linguistic project of the Indo-Europeans. It indicates a subtle clinging to existence. It started out as fragmented and has, in modern ontology, regained its original fragmented nature in a different way -- Being fragmented into four meta-levels which are the differences between the Indo-European castes. Only emptiness can be an antidote for this subtle clinging to existence, as the Buddha discovered so long ago. Our path goes from within the Western tradition through emptiness, the antidote, to Islam which lies beyond the void as the undistorted way of looking at the world before the intervention of the third thing that produced the flaw. I would like to describe how this other unflawed system works, but following the lead of my Shaykh, whose characters tend to disappear at the end of the book with just a hint that Isalm is the answer, I can at this time do no more than make similar hints. However, the study of the way of the Prophet Muhammad will reveal to anyone with an unprejudiced eye that he founded a completely different non-system which, in Medina, cannot be described by any of the four models of cities we have explored here which are reflections of the flaw and ultimately reflections of the implicit aspects of Being itself. Islam profits most by a comparison with not Christianity and Judaism, but Buddhism and Taoism. Christianity and Judaism are the nihilistic opposite reifications of Islam. They were Islam in a previous form before they were distorted in the ways described by Allah in the Quran. Comparing Islam to these nihilistic opposites rather than to a way that seeks to be a middle way distorts Islam by the comparison. Islam appears radical in relation to these nihilistic opposites because it is they who have racicalized themselves away from the middle way. The radicalism of Islam is merely the reflection of their own radicalism. Let us remind you that Christianity brought you the inquisition and the collusion with the Nazis, not to mention the Crusades. Islam shares much more with Judaism than with the Christianity. It is unfortunate that they have brought Allah's curse down upon their people for the treatment of their own prophets. Judaism reifies the laws of their way and refuses to change. Christianity changes too much, giving up the laws completely and following the heretic Paul, the mithraist. Islam takes a middle way between these extremes, and so is more like Buddhism and Taoism in this attempt to follow the center path between extremes. Buddhism was following a center path in relation to the extremes of Hinduism, an offshoot of the Indo-European tradition. Taoism was following a center path in relation to Confucianism and the schools of its time.

Any attempt to understand the Western brand of Kufr must enter the area of creation and dwell there. As it is the area of creation, everyone will find something different. Like in Turgenev's film The Zone, everyone finds their heart's desire at the center of the zone. Each one has to take a different circuitous route to get to that center. I have taken my route. Now I ask you to take your own route into the Zone of the flaw. Ask the question "Why are we the destroyers?" It is a deep question that cuts right to our core. What is your own answer to this question?

The lack of transference also explains why our attempts at understanding these important states of the mind have remained at a rather pedestrian stage. Most of the analytic theories relating to these states -- following the example of language -- consider the individual as a kind of procreator. All languages, as far as they are known to me, describe these states by works borrowed from conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The individual conceives an idea, is pregnant, has labor pains, gives birth to something, or miscarries, and so on. Perhaps it is due to the same lack of transference that our psychology of pregnancy and childbirth is comparatively poor. There too we try to turn an evidently one-person situation into a two-person relationship in order to be able to use our well-proven methods and accustomed ways of thinking.

Here we see the hint that the creative area is associated with the parthenogenous female. She is the embodiment of the negative fourfold. It is no wonder the harsh light of "analysis" cannot penetrate into this area that has been purposely darkened by Indo-European culture. It is no wonder that the woman giving birth to the golden child is the very image of the creative act. This birth occurs outside the city as the other births to wives occurs inside the prison houses. The women are the channel for the manifestation of otherness. They embody the action of the emergent event. The negative fourfold cancels with the positive fourfold. Aphrodite, closed within the egg, manifests as Eros. All these actions are difficult to bring to light because so much effort has gone into obscuring them from the light. And the light of "Analysis" is too bright; it withers the fruit on the vine.

Beneath the level of the trinity of Laius and his grandchildren which frame the self-discovery of Oedipus, and beneath the double bind that Oedipus embodies, caught between the violent and arrogant father and the mother projecting sexual intentionality on the male child, beyond the level of object relations and Narcissism, beyond all those levels we see a fundamental level where the emergent event occurs. But this zone does not have to be psychologized. We discover it to have an ontological structure. That structure has an ancient history. It is the interstices between the ancient Vedic gods, the Norse gods, the Pandavas, the classes of Indo-European society. Deeply embedded are these sacred social realms in the Indo-European worldview. The emergent event is structured by the differences between these sacred social realms. Each genuine emergence has to pass through all the modalities by which we experience the world. In this way, it is made fully available to our experience. But it is directly experienced and so is not available to distanced or objective study. The world is not an object like other objects. We cannot get outside it to look at itfully but it is something that encompasses us. We are surrounded by it like a womb. When we see it as completely emptyfully the Buddhists call it the Womb of Thusness Coming (Tathagata Gharba). The emergent event is expressed as the gestation and birth because it is entering the womb of the world in which we are swimming. The emergent event can just as easily be seen as the reversal of birth, a coming inward from outside the world of something that has been outside. But here we see that these two views repeat the movement of what should be outside inwardfully or what should be outside outward. Emergence is in some ways opposite Trauma and Magical projection. The emergent event may either be the turning over of our paradigm, episteme, interpretation of Being inside or the manifestation of the genuinely new from outside. Either we are seeing the world anew or seeing something for the first time. We see these as positive events even when they lead to radical restructuring of the world which entail major dislocations in people's lives. The emergent event as Trauma or as Magical projection we have not considered. We do not usually think in these terms. But what we see as emergence is just the other side of the coin to the structuring based on the process of the savage initiation beyond the city. There a woman is raped so she can give rise to the golden child. The genuinely emergent event is the formed on the analogy of this sacred birth. A birth of Pluton that opens up a cornucopia from the underworld.

Here we come up again with the difficulties created by our adult, conventional language. We know that there are no "objects" in the area of creation, but we know also that for most -- or some -- of the time the subject is not entirely alone there. The trouble is that our language has no word to describe, or event to indicate, the "somethings" that are there when the subject is not completely alone; in order to be able to talk about them at all, I propose to use the term "pre-object;" "object-embryo" would be too definite; in German Object-Anlage may prove a good term. If I understood Bion (1962 and 1963), he was faced with the same; his proposition for this special case was to call a and b elements and a function.

All this indicated that the "pre-objects" existing in the area of creation must be so primitive that they cannot be considered as "organized" or "whole." Only after the work of creation has succeeded in making them "organized", or "whole," can a proper "verbal," or "Oedipal" interaction between them and external objects take place. It is probable that more primitive interactions -- congenial to the levels of the basic fault and creation -- take place all the time; these, however, are difficult to observe and still more difficult to describe adequately⁶.

Deleuze and Guattari use the term desiring machines for the partial objects discovered in children by Marylin Kline. The partial objects hang off the body without organs like metals off the suit of an old soldier. This is an apropos image. The metals are the partial objects which arise orthogonally out of the essence of manifestation or pure immanence of the body without organs. The innovation of Deleuze and Guattari, taken from Spinoza, is the realization that the body without organs may have a whole spectrum of intensities and that intensity zero is material substance, the opaque practico-inert. The higher the intensity of the body without organ, the greater the disorder and chaos so that its higher intensities fall over into schizophrenia. That the essence of manifestation can be seen as a "Catalyst," a source of manifestation, a cornucopia from which forms appear in emergent events is a great step forward. We no longer have to see the essence of manifestation as wholly dark and absent. It can be seen as having its own kind of light different from the light of the positive fourfold. We recognize that the essence of manifestation as pure immanence and source is represented in the theogony of Aristophanes as the windegg, and that the partial objects are represented as the birds. The manifestation of Eros is the revelation of the higher intensities of the essence of manifestation. This structure appears in the nexus of the intersection of the negative and positive fourfolds. This is the deep structure of manifestation beyond the positive fourfold alone on which Heidegger concentrated. To the one stuck in ontological monism, only the positive fourfold appears. To the one who takes into account the female other and the role she plays, then the whole structure appears. Aristophanes was the first to make explicit reference to this deep structure of manifestation, but once it has been discovered, then it appears many places throughout Greek literature. The discovery of this deep structure is one of the major discoveries of this investigation. It shows that through the lens of Islam, we can know more about the Western worldview than they know about themselves. The Islamic worldview, unflawed goes deeper, and recovers a more original kind of structure of manifestation called Tawhid, the unity of Allah. It goes beyond the primal scene and the source of no secondary causation. It only appears to those who venture beyond the void.

The only thing we know is that the process of creation -- transforming the "pre-object" into a proper object -- is unpredictable. We do not know why it succeeds in some cases and fails in others, why it takes ages in some and happens with lightening speed in others. The history of artistic and scientific creation gives us many interesting anecdotes, but this is all about all. We know, for instance, that the problems of Faust occupied Gothe all his life. The Urfaust was started when he was twenty-one, and the was working on the Second Part until his death in 1832. Flaubert's usual output was one or two pages a day; he needed seven years to finish Madame Bovary. Vermeer and Giorgione were very slow workers and so was Beethoven on the whole. Leonardo worked fifteen years on La Gioconda -- to mention a few. On the other hand, Mozart was a fast worker (the most famous example is his Overture to Don Giovani), and so were Haydn and Bach. Balzac was a fast writer, as was Simernon, whose habitual output was at one time one novel per fortnight. A very large part of Van Gogh's oeuvre was painted in two years. We have some idea that intense conflicts at the Oedipal level may accelerate or inhibit the speed of the creative process, but it seems that, over and above these conflicts, the individual's mental make-up, the structure of his area of creation, is what really matters.

All this amounts to very little, especially as compared with our knowledge of the unconscious processes and mechanisms operating under the pressure of conflicts. This is the more remarkable as analysts have the unique opportunity of observing people while absorbed in the act of creation. What I have in mind is the silent patient, a puzzling problem for our technique. The pedestrian analytic attitude is to consider the silence merely as a symptom of resistance to some unconscious material stemming either from the patient's past or from the actual transference situation. One must add that this interpretation is nearly always correct; the patient is running away from something, usually a conflict, but it is equally correct that he is running towards something, i.e. a state in which he feels relatively safe and can do something abut the problem bothering and tormenting him. The something that he will eventually produce and present to us is a kind of "creation" -- not necessarily honest, sincere, profound, or artistic -- but nonetheless a product of his creativity. True, we cannot be with him during the actual work of creation, but we can be with him in the moment just before and immediately after, and in addition, we can watch him from the outside during his actual work. Perhaps, if we can change our own approach from that of considering the silence as a symptom of resistance to studying it as a possible source of information, we may learn something about this area of the mind.⁷

Ultimately the emergent event itself as a unique event within the world cannot be known objectively. It can only be understood as an ontological structure in relation to the whole worldview. All attempts to psychologize the truly creative act is doomed to failure. Only in a scheme such as that of Deleuze and Guattari, that takes the intersubjective socius as the prominent level of reality, is it possible to understand the ontological structure of the emergent event. The emergent event is, as GH Mead says, intrinsically social. This is a great insight which has been ignored by sociologists but deserves to be deeply rethought. This series of essays has attempted to rethink his insight.