Christian civilization is a civilization of inculcated homosexuality .. dark, angry and insecure. It is a civilization in denial. It is a civilization of theologically and culturally practiced misogyny. Raphael’s paradox points to the Christian homosexual’s necessary maintenance of denial (through hypocrisy) to succeed in this environment and how the exception of living true to oneself as an unabashed heterosexual, one might say ‘a pagan’, would require a certain stealth and luck, or at the least, a clever balancing act, to survive. Raphael’s paradox reflects these complications.
At the beginning of this exam, it does well to examine the Western languages’ simplistic gender; masculine, feminine and neuter. In mainstream (Western) culture, these limited ideas largely determine, via peer perception, whether one is straight or gay, ignoring pretty much altogether the nuance of a natural androgyny in our species. And consider the thought; androgyny is not necessarily gay (or for that matter, straight) but is something altogether on its own. But therein lies a fixation in suppressing much that is feminine in most self-identified ‘straight’ males. And in Western culture, many females have hyper-developed male characteristics in a contradiction of demanding ‘equal rights’ to men. Is to become male an authentic avenue to equality for women? And in this matrix where natural androgyny is confused with sexuality, endless self-deceits play out.
In Westerners, misogyny and gynophobia are so intertwined as to be nearly indistinguishable. This stems from confusing natural androgyny with sexuality in a crucible of fear engendered in violence. This is the source of ‘hidden’ or inculcated homosexuality in larger society that is experienced as homophobia in both males and females, where deviancy should be defined as aggressive-anti-social behaviors as opposed to sexual orientation. Wars of aggression bleeding societies foreign and domestic are, by definition, collective anti-social behavior of a suicidal civilization, any and all ethnocentric bias/denial notwithstanding.
From speculations concerning Frederick the Great’s preoccupation with homo-erotica…
Typical German palace ‘garden art’
…to the more certain case of a German general who dropped dead mid-pirouette wearing only a ballerina tutu as documented by William Manchester, Western militarism is thoroughly littered with closet homosexuality. That women are punished within the context of literal rape or the sacking of cities over the course of Western history, points to the misogyny within the gynophobia in Western society.
Contemporary extreme examples of this mentality would be Michele Bachmann married to a man so freaked out at homosexuality, he engages in ‘therapy’ supposedly able to ‘cure’ gays. His attraction to Bachmann is her hyper-masculine aggressiveness or that is to say they are engaged in a psychological homosexual relationship themselves; the physical gender is superficial. Another case of this could be David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell; she is hyper-masculine in her physicality (a West Point body-building queen)
As well (as do many Western women) often preferring masculine attire..
..in a culture where men suppress the feminine elements of a naturally androgynous intelligence and women seek to bolster their masculine traits and appearance to become attractive to the most aggressive males. This is a homosexual under-culture or foundation of Western society that manifests in competitions at every level and glories in conquests. The other side of the coin is, the inherent denial required generates a deep and abiding anger; this is what translates into bigotry and hate. The source of the denial is fear and the fear stems from abhorrence at what any naked self-exam would discover: a hyper-inculcated homosexuality at odds with the one’s own cultural myths.
In Europe and Asia male hierarchy rose to create and maintain civilizations based on essential slavery of those many required to keep a society militarized on a large scale. This model has held, in several incarnations, to the present and has largely overtaken the world. The most aggressive incarnation of this system stems from Europe and is the present global model. Modern Europe is a result of the inter-meshing of two phenomena; a tribal mythology (The Fall) based in gynophobia overtook an empire or, that is to say, when Rome became Christianized.
In the formative period of what has become modern Europe we see this example:
“Do you not know you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is death – even the Son of God had to die.” –Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (d. 255 AD)
And then we have a Christian mob kidnapped the Roman-Greek philosopher (a woman) Hypatia of Alexandria (d. 415 AD)
“and took her to the “Church called Caesareum. They then completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.” Socrates Scholasticus was hence interpreted as saying that, while she was still alive, Hypatia’s flesh was torn off using oyster shells”
After this had happened, when Christianity had finally stamped out the competition throughout the empire, Pope Boniface requested Emperor Phocas neuter the female goddess, formerly peer-consort to the male:
“to order that in the old temple called the Pantheon, after the pagan filth was removed, a church should be made, to the holy virgin Mary and all the martyrs, so that the commemoration of the saints would take place henceforth where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped”
This (preceding) was accomplished in 609. Just shy of 900 years after, Raphael was interred in his crypt at the Pantheon. Meanwhile, the extreme gynophobia which had overtaken the Romans, one could now describe as a cult of the virgin, had only become more entrenched with a (following) Papal Bull kicking witch-hunts into overdrive (noting the ‘both sexes’ is disingenuous, it was primarily women were accused of witchcraft due to ‘The Fall’ and women responsible for all of the evil in this world according to Christian theology in force to this day)
“any persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many (…) the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished not without open danger to the souls of many and peril of eternal damnation” -Pope Innocent VIII (decree issued in 1484)
Raphael is about 19 months old when this (preceding) document is entered into force .. by a man (Pope Innocent VIII) who will have a direct bearing on his future. Raphael has been born into a world still making war on pagans, under the guise of prosecuting witchcraft or what the church construes to be the essence of female intelligence or knowledge of ‘sin.’ By this time, closet and suppressed homosexuality has been inculcated in the Christian hierarchy for generations, via inter-generational violence in form of pederasty. Women are simply seen as tools of the devil, except that they are perfect wives who do not question their lot (brood mares) or become cloistered. These are the two safe routes within the male hierarchy. To be a noblewoman is no means to freedom but rather entails a certain privilege to behave in certain respects as a man that is fraught with intrigue and risk. Female or intuitive intelligence is associated with stark evil and villainous. Meanwhile, the men have become heavily homosexual oriented but this must be denied at any cost. Sexual attraction to the female form has been reduced to a metaphor for conquest and become in our modern times (through advertising) the various stages of undress that suggest rape in the sack of cities…
…where the modern rendering depicts subliminal message of triumph over the feminine principle little different to the historical image .. with women in a constant state of imagined powerlessness demanding surrender to the inevitable:
This necrotic circumstance where suppression of the female in an otherwise state of natural androgynous intelligence demands a persistent state of rape, whether literal or metaphor, has been quite consistent over the Christian age; celebrated in a culture born within Rome, from the time of the apostate Roman citizen Saint Paul initiated a misogynist teaching falsely attributed to the historical Jesus, to present.
It follows, when Raphael became a celebrated artist invited to Rome, little was different to the Christian culture of 900 years previous, when the Pantheon was ‘converted’ to the cult of the virgin (women being the ‘untouchable caste’ in the ideal Christian understanding) as well, little difference is to be discovered from the time of Raphael to present; where the Michele Bachmanns and Paula Broadwells of today are little different to a Catherine DeMedici of four centuries past .. psychological males climbing in the hierarchy who would play the games of men’s intrigues at the level of State. These personalities are masculine in actuality, in a mental state of homosexuality with their physical male consorts. And so it is a Michele Bachmann and her ilk will demand a woman bear a rape child in a consistent context of misogynist Christian culture.
The more entrenched one becomes in the hierarchy, the greater degree of (repressed) homosexuality is demanded. If the common citizen is the foot soldier of the culture that sacks cities, the ruling classes produce the generals in competition to demonstrate their greater masculine arts via conquest of the feminine, empowering mass or societal rape. This Christian social phenomena has its exceptions but they remain exactly that, exceptions. Raphael appears to be an exception.
It was the same Pope Innocent VIII who’d issued the papal bull of 1484 concerning witches went on to appoint Tomas Torquemada to head up the Spanish Inquisition. Considering Innocent VIII also made a Cardinal of then 13 years old Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici who would become Pope Leo X who would become Raphael’s sponsor for most of Raphael’s years in Rome, gives a bit of context to the intrigues, corruption and class prejudices the great painter would be required to negotiate:
“Innocent VIII had two illegitimate children born before he entered the clergy “towards whom his nepotism had been as lavish as it was shameless.” In 1487 he married his elder son Franceschetto Cybo (d. 1519) to Maddalena de’ Medici (1473–1528), the daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who in return obtained the cardinal’s hat for his thirteen-year-old son Giovanni, later Pope Leo X”
In circumstance where women serve as brood mares to insure dynasty, and are otherwise condemned to a class designated as responsible for every ill extant in this world as a matter of theological holding, Raphael was thrust into a subsequent near clone of the preceding arrangement; when he was betrothed to a de Medici Cardinal’s niece at the Cardinal’s insistence.
Unlike Leo X who kept his homosexuality a concealed court intrigue, and unlike Leonardo Da Vinci who was discreet but more or less comfortable with his homosexuality, and unlike Michaelangelo whose homosexuality manifest in perpetually angry personality, Raphael had neither his contemporaries proclivity nor did he suppress his natural androgynous intelligence or confuse this intelligence with sexuality. Indeed, he was a remarkable man in his time and especially in his circumstance.
Raphael painted himself as neither heroic nor macho, not wealthy, and not great; as well he did not portray himself as effeminate. One sees the balance of his natural androgynous intelligence in his demeanor:
Raphael was patently heterosexual in his orientation. He evaded the expectations of his time by keeping a lasting relationship with a baker’s daughter whose “mind was as beautiful as she”
By contrast to the living intelligence portrayed in his long time partner (and secret wife, above illustration), his paintings of those women sitting in privilege depict imprisoned personalities with dead countenance somewhat in the style of Da Vinci:
The de Medici known as Pope Leo X not only narrowly escaped poisoning by his own cardinals, but is from a long line of poisoners bearing the de Medici name. Likely this is what upended Raphael’s life. Had Raphael been the more typical corrupt court favored personality, he’d not have invited deadly offense on two overlapping counts. 1) He dared to marry the woman he actually loved in the course of offending the de Medici family honor in the immediate proximity of three powerful persons of that family name .. a de Medici Pope, a de Medici Duke and a de Medici Cardinal whose niece he was betrothed to as a matter of public record but dared not marry; having secretly married the woman he actually cared for. 2) Raphael daring to marry a baker’s daughter ‘for the beauty of her mind’ or that is to say he did not play by the rules of male hierarchy and held a low born woman to be superior to the wishes of his noble born patron’s family of de Medici name, a second deadly insult.
The inculcated homosexuality of male hierarchy necessary to prop up civilizations, and wars between those civilizations, is irrevocably attached to the consequently created artificial ego of those same civilized cultures. Previous to monotheism’s ‘The Fall’ overtaking what has become modern civilizations, with Christian civilization of modern Europe becoming the most aggressive of these, the preceding civilizations’ militancy based in wars of conquest and male hierarchy, allowed these civilizations’ inherent homosexuality to be in the open. Such was the case with the Greeks of Alexander the Great and the pre-Christian Romans.
Two men and a woman making love; Pompeii wall painting 79 BC
With the advent of Christian civilization and the repression of this (necessary to male hierarchy) homosexuality, aggression increased exponentially. Consequent intra-cultural wars in Christian Europe, contrasted to the previous Roman model, are example prima facie. Where Alexander or the Caesars would allow for self governance of vassal states, changed mentality subsequently saw the culture and laws of conquerors imposed on entire peoples, whether Napoleonic Code on Europe or Western style democracy imposed on Iraq. No differently to the de Medicis were psychologically incapable to refrain from feeling insult at Raphael’s sense of truth to himself, the USA’s ‘exceptionalism’ cannot avoid sense of injury to its’ ego in relation to any challenge of modern empire it denies it exercises so easily; little different to the ease with which modern civilization denies the male hierarchy principles requiring a malignant male narcissism or culturally inculcated homosexuality at its’ core. This reflects in church teaching where only males can be priests of a church which is “the bride of Christ” or the bride of a man who never defiled himself by lying with a woman.
One doesn’t develop a fever and die after 15 days as a consequence of sex with the woman one loves as purportedly had been the fate of Raphael. Rather one falls ill and dies as a matter of having crossed a noble family in the habit of poisoning people or that is to say insulted the de Medicis’ masculine ego. The script of circumstance is unmistakeable.
When the rise of male hierarchy created a militant mentality or the narcissism necessary to civilization, the resultant homosexuality embedded as a cultural phenomena had been, in the beginning, transitional or optional. Monotheism’s “The Fall” took this development two steps further; with banishing the female principle of intelligence as equal to the male (paganism) and what is more, demonizing the feminine. This paved a sole avenue to a future Roman empire whose philosophical foundation mutated to a malignant-sublimated homosexuality in its entirety. The result is European-based, Christian cultural mentality.
In an ultimate act of irony, a man who never perverted his natural androgynous intelligence, reflected in his art and life, resembling more the pagan of antiquity as opposed to the modern male narcissist, consecrates an original pagan temple against all odds; for Raphael had been interred in the Roman Pantheon. This is Raphael’s paradox.
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Related:
You’ve Got Apes! On European cultural mentality
The Gospel According to Ronald On the historical Jesus
Original Sin is a Hate Crime Abuse of women & nature
Celebrating the Anti-Christ Lies, the church & history
Marquis de Sade Pervert of Western Philosophy
Junípero Serra On house breaking dogs (Catholic style)
A Coward Called Machismo Observations on Machismo
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Ronald Thomas West 