Filicide: The Mythic Reality of Childhood

WHAT IS THE THEORY OF FILICIDE?

Though literal filicide is still not uncommon (war being the primary example), it is psychological filicide that turns out to be universally present in human society. If one the goes back and looks at the treatment of children in our old stories, the ones we keep repeating, which I refer to here as myths, one discovers something quite extraordinary. One discovers countless manifestations of this kind of filicide. Filicide: The Mythic Reality of Childhood contains many instances of such behavior—Oedipus and other mythical figures, various Biblical figures, Hamlet, Faust, Frankenstein, and even into the present with HAL 9000 and Myra Breckinridge.

What the theory of filicide does is to stand history on its head. Traditionally, history is our story of ourselves as told by ourselves. In the theory of filicide, I imagine how history would be perceived if told from the viewpoint of the child, the child, please remember, as sentient being who is in the process of being psychologically murdered. The old stories suddenly take on new meaning, illuminating our puzzling, violent behavior in many unexpected ways. Here are three examples: the story of Adam and Eve, that of Abraham and Isaac, and that of Jesus.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Filicide: The Mythic Reality of Childhood (Electronic Edition Copyright © 1996 by Douglas Milburn):

ADAM AND EVE

Adam and Eve eat the apple, and we get the Judeo-Christian proto-scene. Jehovah threatens them with death —and they will die eventually —but for now he settles for psychological filicide; he rejects them as unworthy creatures. They will have to survive on their own, through suffering and work. Part of the punishment is the sex-role division, which we know as "masculinity" and "femininity," and about which he is very specific. He then ejects them from his garden, because if they stay there they may eat from the tree of life and live forever. He sets up a heavy guard at the entrance to keep them out. Adam and Eve are faced with the classic children's dilemma: the problem is me (/ was disobedient), but the solution is outside of me (I can be happy again only when my parents stop punishing me, which means I must behave in such a way as to be worthy of their love).

Jehovah is a master of filicide: he controls perfectly (they leave, they suffer, they die), he is cautious (the guard at the gates), he is rational (he explains to them what will happen if they don't obey him). When they don't, he rationally imposes the promised punishment.

Notice that we tell ourselves two versions of this beginning in Genesis. The first version is nonaccusatory, nonpunitive, nonfilicidal: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. And God blessed them... And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Genesis 1.27-28, 31). How do we get from that place of initial joy to this place of suffering? We try to explain by telling the story a second time (Genesis 2ff.). This time the story is directly accusatory —we blame ourselves for our own disobedience of Jehovah's edicts, unjustified though they may have been. It is also punitive —Jehovah places the curse of femininity on woman (painful childbirth and subservience to her husband) and the curse of masculinity on man (a life of hard work with minimal rewards).

This second version is also filicidal. Until they commit their act of disobedience, Adam and Eve are children, untouched by guilt: they are naked and unashamed of their nakedness. How do they become filicidal adults? By disobeying parental, filicidal will. After they eat the apple, Jehovah is walking through Eden looking for them. When he finds them, he asks where they were. Adam answers: I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked,- and I hid myself. It is by the threat and the fact of punishment that we are cut off from the possibility and potential of love and initiated into filicidal adulthood. Fear is the weapon of filicide, and it is also the means by which our filicidal behavior is self-perpetuating. If disobedience of parental commands, which to the child may seem whimsical (what can the newborn know of death?), results in such extreme punishment, the child's consciousness can hardly contain the resulting fear. The child learns that the parent is wise and right about certain totally nonwhimsical things (touching hot stoves). Who knows what unforeseen dangers may lurk behind other nonwhimsical things which are never discussed (such as playing with the genitals of one's parents)? So we in fear submit to the cultural and sexual roles, and in fear we then impose the roles on our own children.

ABRAHAM AND ISAAC

If the peculiar mutilation known as circumcision has any comprehensible justification behind it, practiced as it is by primitive and civilized societies all over the planet, it seems to have originally been linked with a profound male envy of the female as the ultimate source of real, biological life-power. Among primitives, circumcision is generally a part of the rite of initiation into manhood, inflicted at puberty. In that context it seems to be, individually, a masculine attempt to imitate the special role of the girl who becomes woman when blood flows from her genitals.

In the covenant with Abraham, circumcision receives authorization right from the top. It ceases to be part of the rites of puberty. Jehovah specifies that it is to be done on the eighth day after birth. Thus it ceases to be so obviously a sign of male envy of the biologically potent female. Circumcision now becomes primarily a sign of agreement between Father and his chosen Sons. The patriarchality of Jewish circumcision is shown by the fact that:
        — the male is mutilated, but not the female;
        — the mutilation is of the penis, the central anatomical
             feature of masculinity;
        — the circumcision is done on the helpless infant.

The effect is that all males become, virtually from birth, patriarchs-in-training; and they carry unmistakable evidence of their role about with them for the rest of their lives. Circumcision is the most specific and tangible of filicidal acts, short of murder. All the hidden rules and imperatives of filicide are operative in the act of circumcision. Like Oedipus' club-foot, the circumcised penis is the outward and visible sign of filicide.

Abraham keeps his side of the bargain by having himself and all males in his power circumcised. Jehovah keeps his side of the bargain first by enabling Abraham and his servant-woman, Hagar, to have a son, Ishmael, and then by enabling Abraham and his wife, Sarah, to have a son, Isaac. Both sons are circumcised. Out of jealousy, Sarah banishes Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham confers with Jehovah, who assures him a mighty race will spring from Ishmael (Mohammed will later trace his lineage back to Ishmael); so mother and son are sent packing.

This filicidal rejection of one son would be quickly overshadowed by a far worse deed imposed by divine will. The actual meaning of circumcision, the fact that it is a symbolic murder of the son, was about to be made explicit, as was the degree of obedience which a filicidal father expects from his son.

... God tested Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! And he said, "Here am I. " He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac, and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off. Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the ass. I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son,- and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, "My father! " And he said, "Here am I, my son." He said, "Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

The intensification of filicidal behavior throughout history consists specifically in the intensification of feelings of guilt and inadequacy on the part of the child. The person who is "parent" transfers its own unfaced, growing guilt to the person who is "child". In the Greek myths we were dealing for the most part with human parents and children. In Eden the parent was removed from this reality and seen as omnipotent deity. In the story of Abraham, things become more intense and more complicated. Abraham is both parent and child. To Isaac he is parent, and to Jehovah he is child. As God is to Abraham, Abraham is to Isaac. And: what God does to Abraham, Abraham does to Isaac. The result is that Abraham's guilt, which —to the extent that he is aware of it —he sees in terms of his failure or success in being the perfectly obedient son to God, is transferred in the most direct way possible to his son Isaac, whose life is endangered by the whole sorry process.

But it all turns out to be only a test. When God the father is convinced, by seeing Abraham holding his knife to lsaac's throat, that Abraham has learned the lesson of obedience ( .. for now l know that you fear God),he backs off. It is worth remembering that God the father had already given Abraham an object lesson in the administration of paternal justice by allowing him to witness and even participate in the judgment and destruction of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. On that occasion we observe God pondering, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do. . .? He decides not to hide his bloody judgment from Abraham, since Abraham must learn to be as much a father on earth as God is in heaven.

At this point in biblical history we had already been tested several times, and had failed to demonstrate proper fear and obedience toward the deity —at Babel, and in the Flood. Now Abraham, with lsaac's innocent if terrified aid, has passed the supreme parental test. He proves he is as much of a father as God is, and the filicidal pattern of the historical events which make up the remainder of the Old Testament is set: God commands, men disobey, God punishes. It is men primarily and not women depicted in these stories, since we were at this time busy creating a patriarchy. Anyhow, women had been written off at the beginning, as an inferior and generally unreliable source of help. In the Judeo-Christian view of things, woman's only role was that of daughter, whose cleaning and child-rearing duties —if properly carried out —could provide some small counterbalance to her fate as eternal source of temptation to the ever-struggling men.

In the Greek stories we are for the most part innocent victims of the gods' fickleness. In the Bible we are the wayward children of God, incessantly punished for our incessant disobedience. The difference is important, because it means that as heirs of the Judeo-Christian patriarchs we find the guilt and cause of our pain and suffering (which we interpret as punishment) only in ourselves (l am the problem) and never in the Father-God, because he is omniscient and must therefore be a fair and righteous judge of our behavior ( . . . but the solution is outside of me). The implication is that we in the Bible took, and we in the present still take, the roles of parent and child, father and son, mother and daughter, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that for us nothing else exists outside the reality circumscribed by those roles. We cannot conceive of existing in other ways, in other relationships to each other, or to the world, or to whatever God or gods may be. Such is filicide. The gentle humility of irony with its blessing of true freedom therefor eludes us as a civilization.

For us to reach the point where we find guilt only in ourselves and never in the Father-God means we have reached the point where outright, unrestrained worship of that deity begins. At that point we abdicate individual responsibility as we constantly seek the approval and pleasure of outside authority. In retrospect it is obvious that we had reached that point long before the first chapter of Genesis was written down.

This deity does not err. Any hint that this deity might act out of whimsy or maliciousness is instantly quashed by the visitation of another plague. His authority is absolute, and his administration of it is perfect. Imperfection, pain, and suffering come only from us, from our foolish, childish immaturity and our idiotic and culpable inability to carry out his crystal-clear orders. Mosaic law represents the codification —by fallible human hands, to be sure —of those orders. Since grownup sons were not yet very good at being fathers, it was necessary to attribute the orders to the highest possible source.

While Rome did the managerial work required to keep the Western world functioning on some sort of orderly basis, the responsibility for giving that world meaning thus shifted from the Greeks to the Jews. Patriarchal values which were largely implicit in Rome were in Hebraic law made explicit. The Judaic system of patriarchy, which reached its full flower in the period covered by the Old Testament, was as complete as any we have since devised, encompassing as it did both the secular and the sacred, all worlds seen and unseen. All that was lacking was the final mythic justification of the filicide which lay beneath those values.

JESUS

Given our filicidal needs, the Jesus story, like the Oedipal myth before it, was almost too rich in potential. As the story has come down to us, it is so patently filicidal that it is difficult to read into it anything more than the pure desperation of a race trapped in massive guilt of its own devising. The son of man indeed; and the father of us all. The biblical accounts of his life are rich in the confusion characteristic of our own filicidal lives. In one verse we find him preaching a message of breath-taking love and in the next he is reveling in condemning millions of souls to the outer darkness.

To read through one of the gospels with the theory of filicide in mind is an extraordinary experience. One easily senses the difficulty the writers had in grasping Jesus' message, not to mention the difficulty they had in communicating that message. What comes through is a highly garbled account of the life of a person who was preaching, and possibly living, the one message which is most dangerous and threatening to our filicidal selves and our filicidal civilization: don't hit back. In the gospels that disturbing message is surrounded and often permeated by the standard filicidal recipe for the solution of all life's problems: violence. If these earliest reports are contaminated rather thoroughly by filicidal interpretations of his deeds and parables, it is hardly surprising that in the intervening two thousand years we have turned the Jesus story almost completely to our own filicidal ends.

We have not done so consciously; because as we have been unaware of our filicide, we have also been unaware of our great need to justify it. The steady erosion of the joyous mystery embodied by Jesus has been as much an unconscious, compulsive process as our continuing flight from facing the filicidal truth about ourselves. The story was just too good for us to pass it up. What better source of additional fuel for our already blazing furnace of self-hatred than this: miserable, unworthy creatures though we children of God are, God finally deigns to send his only real son into our world. Notice that if we wanted to be accurate, we would have to speak of him as either the son of God, or the son of woman; biologically he is not the son of a man. So great is our self-hatred that we men remove ourselves completely from the process. God sends his son into the world, and what happens? We kill him. Of course, the gospel writers assure us that God knew we would kill him; even knowing that, he sent him anyway to take on the burden of human guilt, to wash away human sin in the blood of the lamb.

The knowledge that we killed the Son of God is a heavy burden, so heavy that it could more than outweigh the very guilt which filicidal Jesus was supposed to lift from us. Yes, the problem is me, but sometimes the problem gets too big to handle. In such cases one lays the blame on another person or persons. Therefore: we didn't kill Jesus, the Jews did. They killed our God's son. But then, theological finesse has never been the long suit of institutional Christianity.

Whatever problems we had with the story, we were finally able to adjust it to fit our needs. For two thousand years a confirming echo has rolled toward us from the dark night of Golgotha as child after child after child has fallen victim to the violence of filicide; it is an echo which calms the parental mind, saying, If God could do that to his child, then surely it is all right for me to do this to mine. And adults have found consolation there too for their own pain and suffering: If God could do that to his child, who am I to complain that he is doing this to me?

Not only have we used the story to justify our own filicide, we have used it to justify a great deal of conscious homicide: If God can kill his own son, then no one who does not share our belief in his divinity is safe before our own divinely inspired, divinely justified wrath. So we have killed millions in wars fought explicitly or implicitly in Jesus' name. We still on occasion refer to them as holy wars.

Surely the most bizarre and revealing aspect of the very complex interpretations, rituals, and institutions based on the story of the son of God is the ritual called "communion." By eating the dead son we supposedly commune with the higher reality of his life and death. The central ritual of the dominant religion of Western civilization is a cannibalistic celebration of filicide. When we take communion we are justifying and celebrating God's killing of his only son, our killing of our own children, our parents' killing of ourselves, and their parents' killing of them. We kill the god of filicide and then we eat his flesh and drink his blood to convince ourselves that it is all right. At the beginning of Greek time, Chronos was doing the same thing —except he was eating his own children. The filicidal tautology is certainly true: (filicidal) human nature does not change.

The dominant image we settle on is that of crucifixion: the child of God tortured and mortified beyond endurance. Even the truly divine son cannot escape the final humiliation of filicide, that being total submissiveness to the will of the father. How we have loved to dwell an that scene through the years, in pictures and in words. To remove the familiar trappings —the grieving bystanders, the taunting soldiers, and all the rest —as Lovis Corinth did, is profoundly disturbing. We in the West were able to justify man's inhumanity to man by constructing a story of God's inhumanity to God. If that justification is removed, as Corinth did, then we are left alone with our own cruelty.

For all the harm it has done, Christianity as an organized religion contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is, after all, a son-religion, a religion whose central role is played by a non-adult, let us say. Jesus is the dutifully obedient son who, as we have depicted him, walks knowingly to his filicidal death. He despairs twice, when he asks that "this cup" should pass from him and when he feels forsaken on the cross. Otherwise, he moves directly toward his filicide. His verbal responses to his fate were generally of a forgiving sort, and have over the years proved troublesome and more than a little threatening to the patriarchal interpreters. Even more threatening were certain of his deeds, known as miracles, which tended to undercut the substance of what we think of as reality. Each of the four versions of his life shows him going about opening windows into other realities, offering glimpses of human potential which stagger our filicidal imagination.

The final window which he opened was that of death. There he undercut the finality of filicide itself and thus robbed patriarchal and filicidal authority of any absolute or lasting importance. Notice how we turned this feat to our own filicidal ends by coming to see ultimate, absolute, and eternal authority in him (l am the resurrection and the life, he who lives and believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live... ). Which is to say, if we survive death, we do so only by submitting ourselves to the authority of the murdered son and his father.

If those other realities are valid and truly open to human exploration, others will open those same windows. Human explorers by definition seek —and when they succeed in their searching, offer —liberation of one kind or another. How ironic that we should have used the discoveries by perhaps one of our greatest explorers to reinforce the prison walls. And how revealing that we should call the work of reinforcement, "deliverance." We obtain our guarantee of entry into the kingdom of heaven not through love of anyone or anything but through fear of the judgment of God and his son, through fear of punishment. After Paul and a few others were done with their editing of the story, little was left to be added except a few structural, organizational, and decorative touches. Then we were ready for generation after generation of filicidal parents and children to live out their lives of violence, fear, and hatred, made content in their discontent by the knowledge that their pain-centered behavior had been sanctioned at the highest level.

Organized Christianity was so adequate and sufficient a justification of our pain that it provided a framework in which Western humanity could for fifteen hundred years live out its troubled lives with only occasional and brief eruptions of internal heresy.

Filicidal reality again slips far beneath the cultural surface. During the Christian era we see the same process at work which we noted in the Old Testament following the covenant with Abraham. Everyone, poets, philosophers, politicians, preachers, all become trapped in the exploration of some variation —now simple, now elaborate —on the basic filicidal cycle of commandment-disobedience-punishment-guilt, new commandment-new disobedience, etc.

Most of the leaders whom we think of as great, attain that stature by being exceptionally clever at maintaining and acting on the culture-wide pretense that filicide does not exist. Great men are those who have led us through times of peril by using the standard filicidal solutions of violence, coercion, and war. They are men who repeatedly demonstrate to us the validity of our most tightly and fearfully held belief that the only way to win peace with honor is to fight like hell, who in other words confirm our own worst opinions of ourselves and simultaneously confirm our belief in the supreme filicidal virtues —pain and suffering. Only hard-nosed perseverance really furthers.

Similarly, much of our great art is a symbolic depiction of this experience, in which the artist accomplishes the rather difficult sleight-of-hand (actually: trompe l'oeil), trick of holding a mirror up to ourselves and convincing us that the image we see in the mirror is really us. What we, and it seems most artists, fail to notice is that what we see in the mirror of art is in fact an image imposed on an image which the artist unconsciously painted on the mirror before starting on the "work of art" itself.

Obviously the lessons of art, along with those of history, are, like those of the myths, highly ambiguous. At the same time that we have in our art and our politics and our history acted out and justified our on-going filicide, we have, as in the world of myth, continuously spoken the truth about ourselves in various hidden ways. Thus to say that Milton's Paradise epics, for example, are almost parodies of themselves, so unrelentingly filicidal are they, is not to imply that they are worthless It is only to admit that certain of our cultural sacred cows are in fact steers whose potency has been somewhat overestimated by generations of adults with a vested interest in castration.

In our fear we have fallen into the habit of using what little of our potential is open to us as an excuse for avoiding the open decisions, the risk taking, the responsibility-taking of continuous growth. Compulsive art-making (not to mention compulsive art-interpreting) is in this respect no different from compulsive religioning, compulsive sciencing, compulsive politicking, compulsive generating, compulsive teaching, or compulsive working. Perhaps when we at last see the depths of our filicide and act on and beyond that insight we will discover that we can no longer art (though I suspect not). But if so, what will we have lost? Art. And what will we have gained? Life. Not a bad trade, I should think.