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Oct. 5, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:31
1475 Chapter 9 - Bipolar Christianity: How Torturing 'Sinful' Children Produced Holy Wars

Chapter 9 of 'The Origins of War in Child Abuse' by Lloyd DeMause.

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The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMoss Read by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Chapter 9 Bipolar Christianity How Torturing, quote, sinful children produced holy wars Who would not shudder if he were given the choice of eternal death or life again as a child?
Who would not choose to die?
St. Augustine. The source of killer motherhood in Christian misogyny.
That all human sin and misery came into the world through the first woman, Eve, is the founding belief of both Judaism and Christianity, and the origin of the most severely misogynistic cultures in history.
When a girl was born, said early Hebrews, quote, the walls wept.
Girls were everywhere considered, quote, not worth raising, since they would not carry on the family name.
And so infanticide of girls by killer mothers by strangling, drowning, exposure, and sending to wet nurses was so common among early Christians that high sex ratios, up to 400 boys to 100 girls and higher, are common, even among the rich.
Newborn girls, like Eve, quote, were considered as full of dangerous pollution, and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped, and neglected than boys.
Everyone agreed girls should be fed less than boys, as Jerome put it, let her meals always leave her hungry.
Of the 600 families in Delphic inscription records, just 1% reared two daughters.
Children watched their parents kill their newborn siblings and learned the first rules of misogyny.
Females are murderous, and baby girls worthless, and boys had better not seem weak or disobedient, or they too might be killed.
As Christian girls grew up, they were constantly told of their worthlessness and sinful lustiness.
Women, said Tatooion, were, quote, irrational, more prone to lust than men, and at every turn waiting to seduce men.
So fathers and husbands had to beat them all the time to keep them from sinning.
A good woman and a bad one equally require the stick, ran a Florentine saying, and medieval laws concluded, quote, provided he neither kills nor maims her, it is legal for a man to beat his wife.
St. Paul said that women had to cover their heads in church because otherwise, quote, Lice-like demons would leap like sparks from their female hair and poison the church.
Plus, of course, women were liable to turn into witches at any time and remove a man's penis.
As John Chrysostom maintained, quote, All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.
Parents in early Christian families beat their little girls badly from early infancy in order to punish their lustfulness.
The historical records contain hundreds of descriptions of beating girls, quote, to discipline them, as with this father who punished a little girl for four hours.
The little girl in diapers would not receive her discipline, she cried and cried, and he kept hitting her.
He told me, you spank her till she breaks.
But she didn't break, and after four hours, he couldn't continue.
Christian priests and nuns backed the bloody beatings as necessary to punish the child's endless sins, since, as Augustine put it, quote, if the infant is left to do what he wants, there is no crime it will not plunge into.
Better that you should beat a child within an inch of its life than that they would be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity.
The constant sinfulness of all Christian children demands the maximum torture, or even death, as punishment.
Moses told the Israelites that, quote, If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, all the men of his city shall stone him with stones that he die.
Little changed in the next 1600 years of Christianity.
As John Calvin decreed, those children who violate parental authority are monsters.
Therefore the Lord commands all those who are disobedient to their parents to be put to death.
If a young woman should simply speak to someone who wasn't approved by her father, this was enough of a sin for Constantine, the first Christian emperor, to decree a penalty of, quote, death by having molten lead poured down her throat.
It was, in fact, sometimes a practice during the Middle Ages to, quote, bury an unbaptized infant with a stake through its heart so that it would not arise and injure many.
So full of sin it was at birth.
Most of the murders, abandonments, and tortures of Christian children were accomplished by deeply depressed mothers and wet nurses, since fathers, until early modern times, had little to do with children during their early years.
Jean Gerson felt he had to advise fathers as late as the fifteenth century, quote, Let us not be ashamed of speaking to children.
Marriage itself was sinful when spouses had sex for any reason other than to produce a child.
Fathers who paid some attention to their young children only did so to express their ownership of them, quote, The father then lifted the baby in the air above his head and kissed it on the thigh, calling out, My cattle!
For that was what it represented to his imagination.
Girls wouldn't be around to take over their father's cattle, of course, since by the time they were 10 to 15 years old, the fathers would hand them over to a much older man to marry.
Actually, to be raped, since the girls would usually not even have met their so-called husbands.
So what were called arranged Christian marriages were actually arranged rapes, particularly in Italy.
Girls were raped so often by neighbors or employers that they were often forced into lives of prostitution if they should give birth.
Throughout medieval Europe, daughters were loaned to guests as an act of hospitality.
Medieval girls were told to carry knives as they walked down the street to ward off rapists, since the men who might have protected them seemed to regard their rape as a trivial issue.
When psychoanalysts today work with women who have been raped as young girls, they often find they cannot live with their rage and humiliation, so they identify with the rapist and dominate and abuse others, including their own children, saying, I am the man who gets to have whatever he wants.
Thus the sexual assaults on young girls feed their abusive assaults upon their children when they become mothers.
So, too, the extraordinarily traumatic genital mutilation of little girls that was common around the world at this time was passed on to generations of children.
You will not discover most of these horrible aspects about Christian misogyny from the thousands of books written on medieval Christianity, since most of the authors are both male and believing Christians, and they idealize Christian childhood regularly.
But the daily assaults upon Christian females, along with the necessity for wives to work in the fields, so make all the meals and somehow also give loving attention to their babies after their horribly abusive upbringing, is quite impossible for any mother to accomplish.
Christian mothers are obviously clinically postpartum depressed after giving birth.
They were routinely described in historical documents as being depressed and withdrawn after birth, showing no signs of wanting to nurse the child, so that newborns are often depicted as not eating for days or even weeks after birth.
The paintings of the Madonna and Child for more than the first thousand years of Christianity show Mary as looking depressed, never looking at or smiling at her baby, and often show baby Jesus as trying to cheer her up, wiping her tears away.
The first paintings of Mary actually looking at, or smiling at, the baby Jesus in her lap date from the Renaissance, when Mary might be shown as, quote, sometimes sad and often adoring mother, since actually a child at this age was probably lying swaddled and immobile, and often miserable and starving, fed opiates to quiet them, at the mercy of a wet nurse, often miles away from its mother.
When their children return from wet nurses, mothers in the Renaissance followed the prescriptions of friars like Dominici to avoid hugging and kissing them, so they won't be sensual, and instead scare them with a dozen bogeys to make them fearful.
Mothers in early Christian literature are shown as not getting up from bed, not eating, not washing, and not nursing their babies after giving birth because they felt bewitched by night spirits, a condition still found in some Eastern European mothers.
The starving of the newborn infant is further contributed to by the widespread belief that the mother's milk was made from her poisonous menstrual fluid.
So infants might be corrupted by nursing from her breasts unless she gets a few weeks rest to transform her milk into a less poisonous fluid.
The conviction that mother's milk was really her menstrual blood was accepted by all doctors until recently and was one of the reasons why families who could afford to hire wet nurses did so for at least the first few months of the infant's life or, more often, for several years.
All these conditions, plus the abusive developmental history of the mother's psyche, including regular beatings by her spouse, were enough to make her unable, even with the best of intentions, to care for her child, making infanticide, wet nursing, swaddling, beating, and the torture of children routine during the Christian period until recently.
Routine Infanticide by Christian Mothers Medieval scholars of marriage regularly conclude from widespread evidence that during the pre-modern period, quote, conjugal love between husband and wife was considered ridiculous and impossible.
Husbands rarely visited the women's quarters.
Duby's book on love and marriage in the Middle Ages stated the main reason why, quote,"...men were afraid of women, especially their own wives." Shorter found men were excluded from the kitchen and the nursery, and, quote, Diane Ackerman's survey, A Natural History of Love, found no evidence of lasting intimate love, only temporary sexual excitement, in pre-modern marriages.
According to church fathers, Christian men were only rarely supposed to have sexual intercourse with their wives, in order to produce children for the church to rule over.
A man must not use his wife as if she were a whore, and a woman must not behave with her husband as with a lover.
Men more often had sex with prostitutes, concubines, servants, or slaves.
Even supposedly celibate priests regularly had sex with concubines and nuns until the twelfth century.
Any arrangement was good if it confirmed Christian misogyny.
Real Christian masculinity was defined as domination of sinful women by loveless men, just as the fighting classes were expected to demonstrate their masculinity by their domination of the sinful toiling classes.
Kuntz characterizes patriarchal families before modern times as loveless, demonstrating in her book Marriage, a History from Obedience to Intimacy, that only, quote,"...by the end of the 1700s, personal choice of partners had replaced arranged marriages,
and individuals were encouraged to marry for love." The total absence of intimate married love, plus the paucity of sexual pleasures, and the frequency of spousal beatings, were the main causes of postpartum depression in Christian mothers.
New mothers often hallucinated devils inside them that commanded them to kill the newborn.
Jewish mothers would have delusions of child killer Lilith goddesses attacking them during birth, and would write, Out Lilith!
on the walls of the birth room to scare them away.
Mothers would overlay the infant or throw it into the latrine under the delusion that devils were helping them get rid of the child, confessing that children eat you up, you're such dry by them, all my vitality is gone.
Male children were hated more than females by Christian mothers, thus martyrs castrated themselves for God-slash-Mother to become more like girls, so she might be more likely to love them in heaven.
Scholars often depict Christianity as opposing infanticide.
Most do not mention that what they actually opposed was killing a child after it was part of the church.
Stein shows that, quote, Jews only until recently regarded any child who dies within 30 days after birth, even by violence, as a miscarriage.
So they are not counted as infanticide.
Philo described Jewish mothers regularly, quote, throttling their infants or throwing them into a river.
Since political courts paid little attention to infanticide until the 18th century, and since church courts had no interest in the infant until baptized, infanticide was very common, even if some church fathers subjected to it.
The church in the 9th century subjected mothers who killed their children to at most exclusion from the church for 40 days.
Few cases of infanticide were tried in the king's court, even by the 18th century, and these had minimal sentences, the court being more interested in punishing the immoral woman who were accused of conceiving out of wedlock than in protecting infants.
The Christian church punished disobedience to husbands as a worse sin than infanticide, which was a venal, minor sin, usually punished, if at all, by mild dietary restrictions or by performing prayers.
Children were not considered fully human for many years by the early church, since priests believed, quote, the majority of children become unprofitable, possessed by demons, performing useless and abominable deeds.
God himself, Gregory said, killed newborn infants, quote, in order to prevent their full development of their evil passions.
Even when infants are found dead in privies, they, quote, might have fallen into it by accident or been placed there after stillbirth, so the mother was usually not thought guilty of anything.
Postpartum depressed mothers paid far more attention to Seranus' instructions on how to recognize the newborn that is worth rearing than to any church dogma.
Leopardi said he noticed that his mother, quote, when she saw the death of one of her infants approaching, experienced a deep happiness.
Even by the 16th century, a priest admitted that, quote, the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.
Every morning, mothers during most of the Christian period could be watched, throwing their babies into rivers.
Unbaptized children were so full of sins that they were supposed to be buried below the roof-gutter of a church to have holy water wash them of their sins.
Poverty was hardly the only excuse for killing children.
I have shown that the wealthy, in fact, had higher infanticide rates, as measured by boy-girl ratios, than the peasantry.
The following list of infanticide excuses, all calling the killing of newborn unintentional, adds up to at least half of all children born, even if each excuse is only responsible for a few percentage points of child deaths.
Infants were supposed to have been 1.
Overlaid 2.
Killed before baptism 3.
Miscarried 4.
Born deformed 5.
Female 6.
Not husband's child.
7. Too weak to thrive.
8. Greedy.
9. Evil.
Changeling. 10.
Died at wet-nurse or foundling home or monastery.
It is not surprising that Tertullian, 3rd century, concluded,"...the laws forbid infanticide, but of all the laws there is not one eluded more easily or with more impunity, and that the Council of Toledo, 6th century, said that there was a,
"...very widespread practice of parents killing their children." Anglo-Saxons considered infanticide, a virtue not a crime, saying, A child cries when he comes into the world, for he anticipates its wretchedness.
It is well for him that he should die.
He was placed on a slanting roof, and if he laughed, he was reared, but if he was frightened and cried, he was thrust out, to perish.
The first laws against infanticide in the 16th century only applied to unwed mothers, not married women, for how could one prove infanticide within the walls of the family home?
An English statute against infanticide was passed in 1623, but only a handful of cases were actually prosecuted.
Since nearly every family practiced infanticide, tens of billions of children until recently had to grow up seeing their siblings being murdered by their mothers and wondering if they could be next.
Thus embedding the dissociated killer-mother alter ego in their amygdala networks to act out in war and social violence when they grew up.
Abandoning infants to wet nurses Historians all overlook the massive evidence that a large proportion of children before modern times were not brought up by their parents.
Most infants were shipped out to wet nurses, or, if the family could afford it, were nursed and cared for within the family by hired wet nurses.
Christianity taught that all pleasure was sinful, and you would not want mothers to get sinful pleasure from nursing.
Mothers damn their children when they suckle them voluptuously.
The underlying message for children was, quote, My killer mother chose to hand me over to another woman rather than killing me like she did my sibling, so I'd better be very obedient so I won't not only be abandoned, but might actually be killed.
This message was the basis for the Christian group fantasy, that God wanted his son to be killed, and that you too deserve being killed for your sins.
Children of the wealthy, as Tacitus put it, quote, as soon as they are born are abandoned to any old Greek servant to be nursed.
Most children, however, were given over to neighbouring mothers to wet nurse because, quote, it was better for the wife to put her child out to nurse and keep herself available for intercourse to her husband.
Newborn infants were bundled up in donkey carts and sent to distant hired poor women to nurse.
Official statistics showed that less than 5% of the babies born in Paris from the 18th to the early 20th century were nursed by their mothers, rich or poor alike, and earlier censuses were comparable.
Parents were said to have, quote, seldom inquired about the survival of their infants and were often uninformed as to their whereabouts.
Moralis, who urged maternal nursing to no avail, also, quote, tried unsuccessfully to get parents to visit their babies, but there is little evidence of such visits.
Indeed, parents seem to have been indifferent to their offspring's fate.
The children were total strangers when they were returned two to four years later.
And since they were then likely soon to be reshipped off to neighbours or relatives as servants and apprentices, it is no surprise that many of them reported that they had been brought up by anyone but their mothers.
Should children not be totally obedient, they were declared sinful and handed over to monasteries and convents as oblates for the rest of their lives.
Thus, pure was a word for both child and slave.
Since wet nurses were often expected to get rid of their own babies that they had been nursing, usually by killing them, They too were generally terribly abusive towards the stranger in the house, sometimes even being openly called killing nurses.
If children were returned to their families alive, they often came back in a pitiable state, thin, tiny, deformed, consumed by fevers, prone to convulsions.
A typical woman describes her mother saying to the wet nurse as she was returned, My God!
What have you brought me here, this goggle-eyed, splatter-faced, gabbert-mouthed wretch is not my child?
Take her away! Most mothers, however, kept their returned children, hoping to beat them into obedience.
One is praised by John Locke because she was, quote, forced to whip her daughter at first coming home from the nurse eight times successfully before she could master her stubbornness.
Children, of course, were hypersensitive to possible abandonment by their mothers when they were returned home.
Madame d'Epinay got her twenty-month-old son back from the wet-nurse and wrote about his fears in her diary.
"'My son is back with me.
He cries when I leave him.
He is already afraid of me.
I am not sorry for it, for I do not want to spoil him.' Many were never returned home.
The sale of children, often by auction, was fully legal in the Christian period, either for their labour, or for sexual use, or to pay off their parents' debts, or for mutilation as beggars.
Wet nurses neglected and abused their charges even more than parents did.
They were rarely washed and lived in their tight swaddling bands in their own feces and urine.
And while the wet nurse attended to her own duties, were often, quote, suspended on a hook or slung from the rafters in an improvised hammock, their mouths crammed with rotting rags.
The wet nurse was Christian too, of course, and felt they had to torture the infants to overcome their sinfulness.
Because they believed, quote, infants are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, anger, strife, gluttony, hatred, and more.
It had to be tied to swaddling boards by yards of long bandages, so it would not, quote, tear its ears off, touch its genitals, or go upon all fours as most other animals do.
Since there is so much viciousness in all children, if you pamper them the least little bit, at once they will rule their parents.
Children were described everywhere as being, quote, kept ragged and bare, sickly and starved in terror of their nurse who handed out blows and vituperation freely.
Wet nurses were instructed to feed their infants only small amounts, two or three times during the day.
So most babies were starving most of the time.
Many wet nurses didn't breastfeed at all, but just gave the infants pap, a gruel made of water or sour milk mixed with flour, which had little nourishment and was so thick that, quote, soon the whole belly is clogged, convulsions set in, and the little ones die.
It was not until 17th century English Puritans began to preach to mothers the astoundingly new message that, quote, mothers are encouraged to love her children and the best way for a mother to do this was by letting it suck her own breasts.
That increasing numbers of Christian mothers actually began to nurse themselves.
The majority of children set to wet nurse died, giving lie to the claims by Christian historians, like the one who claimed that, quote, sending the child off to wet nurse was an act of love by parents.
Those who were found abandoned by their parents on the side of the road were taken to foundling homes, where 90% died.
It was no wonder that it was proposed that a motto be carved over the gate of one foundling home, Here children are killed at public expense.
Yet priests only opposed abandonment of newborn babies because a father, quote, might meet his own child later in a brothel, and to have sexual relations with his offspring would be a sin, not because of any empathy for the abandoned child.
Children given to monasteries and nunneries were treated equally abusively, holding the legal status of slaves, endlessly whipped, stripped naked, starved in severe fasts, only allowed to sleep for five hours a night, and used sexually by the clerics.
Since slavery continued to exist during the Christian centuries, parents continued to sell their children into slavery where they were often castrated.
Giralde's Cambrensis relates that the English sold great numbers of their children to the Irish as slaves as late as the 12th century.
All of these abuses were considered a carrying out of God's will, since children were so full of sin that even a newborn infant crying for milk was considered as sinning by lusting for the breast, a terrible sin for which all infants deserve terrible suffering in hell, as church fathers believed.
That killer mothers and God would only love her children if they endlessly suffered was the central masochistic solution of Christianity.
It is not surprising that they therefore felt so bad inside that they were continuously depressed and fearful of punishment.
Producing their own suffering, borderline masochism, was their main emotional defense against their fears.
After Christian mothers saw murdered babies in every stream and field they played in, they concluded with church fathers that only their suffering can quell their anger, so they might avoid being killed.
When children returned from wet nurse, they were still not often cared for by their parents, but were often set off to fosterage, usually to other family members, and most children by the age of seven were sent out to be servants or apprentices, essentially child slavery, and not returned until adolescence.
Mothers often express the casualness of their abandonment of their infants, quote,"'The baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned, and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others?' Adults could treat their foster children, servants, and apprentices even more abusively than if they had kept their own children with them, working them like slaves, beating them, torturing them, using them sexually.
Parents would simply ask the uncles or grandparents or neighbors, quote, if they needed a child, and shipped one off to them.
Apprenticeship and service were the fate of virtually all children, rich or poor alike, and a master, quote, may be a tiger in cruelty he may beat, abuse, strip naked, starve, or do what he will to the poor innocent lad.
Few people take much notice.
If one sent one's child to royalty and it was killed by abuse, one was expected to send another to replace him.
It was widely accepted that, quote, It is good to remove children from the sight of their father and mother, so that they do not become quarrelsome.
Everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the house of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.
And on inquiring their reason for this severity, they answered that they did it in order that their children might learn better manners.
The church historian's claims that Christian children were mainly loved and cared for by their parents is simply untrue, until quite recently.
Their evidence of maternal love is limited to a few instances of mothers crying when their babies died.
Torturing children to, quote, break their will.
After half a century of primary source research into the history of child-rearing, I, and over a hundred other child historians, have been unable to find a single mother who did not badly beat and torture their children prior to modern times.
I've offered a prize to anyone who could find actual evidence of just one mother prior to the 18th century who would not today be thrown in jail for badly abusing their children.
The occasional reformers like St.
Anselm, who sometimes questioned whether whipping children day and night was wise, did not raise any children themselves because they were ascetic.
Despite the fact that Jesus nowhere says children should be beaten, Christians taught that he wanted them to beat the sins out of them continuously from birth.
Actually, the main reference Jesus makes to children was, The central rule of Christians towards children is simply never to give the child anything it wants.
Willfulness was the cardinal sin, and the words, I want, were impermissible, for which children were punished severely.
Even babies had to be taught.
The only thing that mattered was what the adults wanted.
As John Wesley put it, quote, Never, on any account, give a child anything that it cries for.
If you give a child what he cries for, you pay him for crying.
That beating and torturing, quote, sinful children usually did not work was acknowledged by all.
As one mother wrote of her first battle with her four-month-old infant, quote, I whipped him till he was actually black and blue, and I could not whip him anymore, and he never gave up one single inch.
If the parent's regular beating of their children still does not result in obedience, the child should be, quote,"...put to death if they curse or smite their father or mother," according to a 1646 Massachusetts law.
The only restriction sometimes mentioned by priests was that children should not be hit, quote,"...about the face and head with fire shovels.
Hit him upon the sides with the rod.
He shall not die thereof." Christian children shared every abuse of the, quote, battered child syndrome.
Since every sign of independence was considered disobedience and evidence of terrible sins needing hellish tortures, parents considered themselves, quote, disciples of God, as they beat and tortured their children.
Children said they were, quote, frequently whipped for looking blue on a frosty morning, and whether I deserved it or not, I was sure of correction every day of my life.
My mother said that one mustn't spoil children, and she whipped me every morning.
Beatings began before birth, since father's blows to the mother's abdomen badly harmed the fetus.
If the mother could not spare the time to beat her children, she could hire a professional flagellant who advertised their child beating services in newspaper ads, or she could hire a gardée de ville to whip her three children once a week, naughty or not.
Parents were regularly described as being out of control, quote, fierce and eager upon the child, striking, flinging, kicking it, as the usual manner is.
As long as children were not killed, no laws protected them.
Brutal floggings filled the days of children, and near the kitchen shelves hung dog whips, razor straps, and carpet beaters for use by the mother at any time.
Children were forced to ask to be beaten and would often be made to kiss the beating instrument or would simply be, quote, cast on the ground and kicked like dogs.
The children grew up with horribly damaged brains.
Their prefrontal cortexes and temporal lobes were unlike healthy children today, since their brains were like black holes from their swaddling and deteriorated and toxic from their beatings and tortures.
Parents were proud of being God's agent in inflicting tortures.
Fathers would brag about their being given the child to beat by the mother, saying, quote, The man who does not correct his children with whip or rod does not love them.
Mothers are not shown as protecting their children against the father's blows, quote, She holds not his hand from due strokes, but bears their skins with delight to his fatherly stripes.
Girls were battered as often as boys, often later reporting that their, quote,"...head was broken in two or three places." Quote,"...fathers and mothers slashed their daughters, and as a result, the child perfectly loathed the sight of her parents." Parents that tolerated independence in their children are simply not to be found anywhere in the sources.
Historians simply ignore the hundreds of primary source instances of the endless beating of children, concluding without citing any evidence at all that, quote, girls and boys were not maltreated in medieval times.
The first parents who have been discovered by family historians who did not regularly batter their children, who, quote, abjured whipping, caning, slapping, ear-pulling or hair-dragging, We're in 19th century America.
But even then, the overwhelming majority of children were whipped or battered.
Showing affection for children was deemed a Christian sin.
Parents were told their children should not be, quote, petted, embraced, or kissed by you until after their 25th year.
Parents instructed teachers in schools and tutors at home that they were to whip their children routinely.
Henri IV wrote to Madame de Molat, quote, I have a complaint to make.
You do not send word that you have whipped my son, I wish, and command you to whip him every time he is obstinate.
When I was his age, I was often whipped.
The king would also whip Louis himself, sometimes instructing soldiers of the guard to hold him while being whipped, telling his son, quote, I am the master, and you are my valet.
Louis reported regular nightmares about his whippings.
Children in school were tortured even more than at home.
Quote, Whoever taught the children to read would grab their shirts about the shoulders, then hold the book in one hand and rod in the other, ready to flail away at the slightest oversight.
Teachers felt that, quote, Fear is good for putting the child in the mood to hear and to understand.
A child cannot quickly forget what he has learned in fear.
Augustine later recalled the terrible beatings he received regularly at school and described the teachers' use of, quote, racks and hooks and other torments.
The sexual sadism rampant among teachers and priests was evident in the many descriptions of how the children were, quote, stripped in front of the whole community and beaten until they bled.
The students noticed their teachers had, quote, a gloating glance of sensual cruelty as they took the most pretty and amorous boys into his lodgings and after a ducky of two, a blow with a rod or a whip, would meddle with their privities.
Teachers trained their pupils like farmers trained their horses, saying, quote, as a sharp spur makes a horse run, so a rod makes a child learn.
In monasteries, the masters would hold a whipping cane over each boy's head as they woke up to remind them of the beatings of the day ahead.
St. Ambrose praised teachers for being unsparing with the whip.
Marshall jokes about the complaints of neighbours living next to a schoolroom.
The sounds of students being beaten awakens them annoyingly early in the morning.
Mothers are constantly depicted as demanding their children be beaten by teachers.
Children's hands are often depicted as being, quote, so swollen by the cane that they could barely hold their books.
Besides beating, there were many other extremely painful ways adults had to torture children that were regularly used by Christians for centuries to break their will.
Tying them up in long, swaddling bands, unable to move, trapped on the swaddling board in their feces and lice, was the practice even into the 20th century, claiming that the babies otherwise would, quote, Sharp objects, knives, needles, forks, nails, were stuck into the swaddling bands to protect against bad spirits.
Incubi. Salt was often rubbed into the baby's skin, irritating it.
Infants were made to drink their own urine, and parents would often spit on the baby, saying, Ugh, aren't you ugly?
to ward off evil eye spirits.
One of the most often mentioned ways to cure children possessed by night spirits was to hold them over a fire or to push them into a hot oven, practices still found in some 19th century Eastern European nations.
Or the evil spirits might be driven out and the child hardened by tortuous ice-water bathing, washing babies and older children in ice-cold water and rolling them upon ice in winter, so that, quote, the little infant in cold water is in one continuous scream.
The mother must cover her ears under the bedclothes that she may not be distressed by its cries.
The infants, of course, often, quote, developed convulsions and fever by the next day.
Girls especially needed training to resist their supposed lusts, so were often, quote, put to bed tied up by the hands, made to wear corsets with bone stays, iron bodices and steel collars, and forced to sit many hours a day in stocks, strapped to a backboard supposedly to teach them restraint.
Both boys and girls were frightened with ghost-like figures throughout history, with adults dressing up in terrifying, devouring figures of Lamia, Lilith, and Stryga, and storming into the child's room roaring and groaning, throwing the children into convulsions.
As useful in impressing children with the reality of their sins was the viewing of corpses, in which children are taken on visits to gibbets to inspect rotting corpses hanging there while being told moral stories.
One boy, quote, woke at night screaming after seeing hangings and practiced hanging his own cat.
Christian historians reviewing the hundreds of articles and books by psychohistorians have not disproved a single piece of our evidence of the overwhelming amount of beatings and torture of children, yet continue to say that, quote, practices that appear abusive today, such as repeated whippings, were motivated by love, as Colin Haywood concludes in his recent book, A History of Childhood, Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times.
Most simply agree with the abusing parents that beatings were needed to civilize them, and that, quote, Parents at that period, just like parents today, loved their children and wanted the best for them.
But correctly soar, they needed to be beaten, agreeing with the Bible when it says, He that spareth his rod, hateth his son.
Therefore, the massive evidence that children were endlessly beaten and tortured only proves to these historians that, quote, the great majority of children were surrounded with affection, because the beatings were proof of their affection.
Plus, as Bucky puts it, the routine sexual abuse of children in Christianity is, quote, not sexual abuse if in that society the behavior was not prescribed.
Despite the enormous volume of primary source evidence provided by psychohistorians of the massive violence inflicted upon pre-modern children, historians now cite, quote, a turning point in the study of the history of childhood.
Linda Pollack's best-selling book, Forgotten Children, Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900.
Which is supposed to embody, quote, rigorous research methodology to show that there was no significant change in parental care or affection given to an infant throughout the four centuries when children were happy, free from worry, and certainly not oppressed.
Pollack's rigorous methodology involved examining 496 parents' diaries, and she found only 8% of them mentioned child abuse.
Therefore, she concludes only 8% of parents in the past abused their children, and the other 92% loved them, and did not mistreat them, since otherwise they would have written their abuse down in their diaries.
As I said in my article reviewing Pollock's book, her argument-from-silence principle would measure the amount of crime by simply ignoring all police and other reports, and instead would rely solely on what percentage of criminals wrote up their crimes in their personal diaries.
Only one historian, Elizabeth Pleck, who examined the same diaries as Pollock, noticed her trick, and objected strongly to her concluding that the absence of information reflects the absence of punishment of children.
The sexual molestation of Christian children.
Despite the central Christian belief that all sexual pleasure is sinful, this is not an indication that there was no sexual molestation of children by adults.
In fact, just the opposite was the case.
Such a strong conviction that children were lustful by an entire society can only be the result of massive sexual abuse during childhood.
Quote, The fact that there are almost no court records of incest or rape of children may merely mean that formal charges were rarely brought against the abusers.
Children in the Middle Ages had no legal rights in canon law and could not bear witness against their parents.
There are records of some cases of monks accused of sexually abusing children in their charge, but I do not know of any evidence for court cases of sexual abuse of young children by parents or other caretakers.
In fact, fathers often had sex with their young daughters, quote, to teach them how.
Mothers slept with their sons until they were past puberty, wet nurses regularly slept with their charges, and children who were sent as servants and apprentices were regularly used sexually.
Bernardino of Siena said fathers regularly pimped their own sons for money, and mothers colluded in the sexual use of their boys, giving them a separate bedroom on the ground floor, so rapists could more easily use them sexually.
Ari's was correct in one conclusion, that in pre-modern times, the practice of playing with children's privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition.
He was wrong in concluding that it was, quote, only a harmless game, that it had no effect on them.
Children usually slept naked in communal family beds, quote, with people packed like sardines next to grandparents, parents, servants, and visitors.
So they regularly became a part of whatever sexual intercourse took place each night.
Rapes of children were until recently rarely prosecuted, though the fathers would usually severely punish their daughters for being raped.
Roving gangs of youths were very common in the past.
Gangs that practiced nightly collective raping attacks on women,"...constituted a veritable rite of initiation for youth in the past.
Neighbors did not intervene.
The rapes were considered normal, youthful sporting activities by officials." Christianity is what Susan Brandmiller calls, quote, a rape culture where rape functions as a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation.
Nunneries, quote, were often little more than whorehouses, providing fornication between nuns and the gentleman callers.
Wet nurses and masters frequently slept at night with both their boy and girl charges and raped them.
Many references to rape were common, like, quote, My master came to my bed at two o'clock in the morning and violated my person.
And parents who sent daughters to others to be servants might assure the new master that, quote, She will match your cock.
It is not surprising that doctors reported that the hymens were always missing of the young girls they treated.
In fact, many doctors taught that having sexual intercourse with little girls was actually a good idea to familiarize girls of immature ages with carnal matters.
Brothers in the extended families of Eastern Europe often traded daughters with each other for sexual use well into modern times.
Quote, the abuse of prepubescent children by close family members really does not seem to have been a concern for medieval writers.
When Karen Taylor studied 381 historical cases of venereal disease in children with the disease on their genitals, anuses, and mouths, she finds that almost all of them had fathers with the disease, fathers who obviously had had sex with their daughters.
Although the pateristic sexual use of boys decreased somewhat with Christianity, the constant condemnation by priests of the practice as widespread makes one reluctant to conclude it was not still common during the entire period.
Peter Brown concluded that among early Christians, quote, castration was a routine operation for purposes of sexual renunciation and also to obtain eunuchs for sexual use.
Abelyard was not the only Christian to be, quote,"...blissfully castrated," in order to be closer to God.
In Naples, signs hung above stores, quote,"...boys castrated here." In the 15th century, Bernardino of Siena could still complain about fathers who"...make pimps," of their own sons, saying boys were so likely to be raped in the streets that, quote, "...a boy can't even pass nearby without having a sodomite on his tail." And urging mothers to, send your girls out instead.
This is less evil. A thorough analysis of court records in 15th century Florence shows, quote, the majority of local males at least once in their lifetime were incriminated for engaging with homosexual relations with boys.
Every place where boys gathered, quote, from schools and monasteries to taverns and pastry shops were schools of sodomy where pederasts came to violate boys.
The penitentials said when boys were raped by older men, the boys were responsible for being too sexually attractive, so the boys were punished, but usually not the rapists.
Priests in monasteries, quote, could not keep their hands off their oblates.
Peter Damien said in the 11th century that sex with boys in monasteries usually, quote, rages like a bloodthirsty beast.
Yet only the boys, and not the priests, were punished.
Medieval gills used to put on mystery plays, which show the course of evil in the world and display the wicked deeds of Satan, during which children who were cup-bearers would be raped by the drunken revelers.
Priests, quote, impregnated girls who'd been forced by parents into nunneries, where drains ran free of infanticided newborns.
The rape of boys in British public schools, quote, with the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval of their elders, continued to modern times, with older boys and teachers using younger boys sexually as their bitches.
The best statistics for the sexual abuse of children in England today show 59% of women and 27% of men report remembering having been sexually abused as children.
America showed 45% of girls and 30% of boys.
Figures that do not include sexual abuse memories that are repressed or denied.
Given these still very high figures today, and recalling that virtually all medieval girls were married off, raped, in their teens to an older man chosen by her parents, it must be concluded that nearly all of medieval children were used sexually at some point in their lives. it must be concluded that nearly all of medieval children How Manic Depressive Personalities Created Bipolar Christianity
My overall conclusion that Christian personalities for centuries were essentially manic depressive may seem exaggerated, given that only about 10% of Americans today suffer from clinical manic depressive symptoms.
Thank you.
Even more improbable is my ascribing the cause of the bipolarity to child abuse and neglect, since most psychiatrists believe genes are the central cause, citing studies that show relatives of individuals with manic depressive illnesses are eight times more likely to have the condition.
What they overlook, as usual, is that relatives also share abusive child-rearing patterns.
Medieval clerics themselves said most people suffered from acedia, quote, a disgust of the heart, an enormous loathing of yourself.
Your soul is torn to pieces, sad and embittered.
Doctors during the Christian period were fully aware that most of their emotionally ill patients were either melancholic or manic.
Christianity is based upon severely depressive personality characteristics that are identical with bipolarity today.
Endlessly guilty, consumed by thoughts of death and suicide, full of paranoid persecutory delusions, having an inability to enjoy pleasures, hopeless, and hallucinating harmful spirits.
As Oesterreich put it in his book Possession and Exorcism, Christians often felt persecuted by spirits of dead people.
All these inner depressive spirits were actually alter egos, self-destructive voices that were dissociated during child abuse and embedded as nightmarish figures in the amygdala network.
The depression and addiction to suffering of Christians was also the result of the lack of serotonin and an excess of depressive neopiniferin that was the result of their severe early childhood abuses.
And the self-punishment by masochistic martyrs was a way for them to generate more serotonin in order to feel they have conquered their depressive sinfulness.
Everyone punished themselves in order to suffer more.
The clergy whipped and cut themselves to be martyrs, and the knights went to war to suffer, proudly boasting of how great their pains were, even more than the suffering of priests, making them even more acceptable to God.
What is less obvious is that Christians also had myriad manic symptoms.
They went into grandiose religious trances, believing they joined a gigantic being in the sky and arrogantly dividing the world into those who believed as they did and everyone else who deserved killing.
Persinger was the first to describe the neurobiological basis of manic Christian beliefs caused by, quote, micro-seizures that produce, quote, the release of the brain's own opiates that can result in a burst in the temporal lobe for a narcotic high during God-merger experiences.
These seizures produce not only a release from the usual bipolar self-blame, but also a conviction that they will never die.
The manic religious trances slash seizures combined both the ecstasies and the pains of the manic depressive states.
As St. Teresa told how it felt to experience the Holy Spirit, quote, An angel pierced its spear several times through my heart, leaving me all aflame with an immense love for God.
The pain was so great that I had to groan, but the sweetness that came with this violent pain was such that I could not wish to be free of it.
These Christian mystical trance experiences released the dopamine in the frontal cortex, which reduces fears and pains and produces extreme sensations of joy and euphoria.
These God fusion states are defenses against early childhood insecure and avoidant attachments by the mother figure, actually mainly the wet nurse for the Christian period.
Both the manic and depressive states are ways to control suffering by inflicting pains yourself by being in charge.
As Henry Suso put it, quote,"...suffering quells my anger and makes me no part of the world." Just as Christian children imagined their suffering for their sins would make their mothers love them.
Christianity posits that God and Jesus our Mother will love you if you suffer for your sins.
Suso wore for years a hair shirt with leather strips, with a hundred and fifty nails eating into his flesh, and on his back wore a cross that was furnished with iron nails and sharp needles he said were, in memory of Mary's sorrows, his mother's sorrows.
Suso, also like so many Christian clerics, regularly burned himself with hot wax, as a repetition of the common Christian practice of burning infants and putting them in the hot oven to cure them of their sins.
The same hot oven that furnished the threat of parents that their children deserved being thrown into a burning hell.
Unlike early states ruled by goddesses who kill their sons, Christianity called their god the Father.
Reflecting the rule of fathers over mothers in Christian families.
But since real fathers were mainly absent for children, God was never depicted in drawings or statues, and was not described in church writings.
At most, he was said to wear a long cloak and veil like women did.
When he spoke, quote, the voice of God was the Holy Spirit, which was feminine, so that the inner alter ego voice that was heard was maternal, not paternal.
During altar trances, when, quote,"...heaven opened before their eyes," Christians saw not God, but Christ on his throne, with the Blessed Virgin at his side.
And of course Christ, during the Eucharist, was seen to have breasts with milk coming out of them, which worshippers drank, like babies.
Medieval Christians increasingly, quote, saw God as a woman, nursing the soul at her breasts, drying its tears, punishing its mischief-making, giving birth to it in agony, seeing Christ or God or the Holy Spirit as female.
Although Mary is not shown for centuries as kissing the baby Jesus, she is regularly depicted as kissing the dead Christ at his crucifixion, reflecting the wish that the real killer mother of the worshipper was really sorry she murdered her baby.
The same wish for the killer mother to be a loving mother is shown by all the pictures of female angels receiving the soul of the worshipper into heaven.
Christ himself was, of course, the victim child, who was sent down by God to be murdered, while asking the central question of all Christian children, Why hast thou forsaken me?
Worshippers would sometimes, during Holy Communion, see in the host, quote, A very young boy, and when the priests began to break the host, they thought they saw an angel coming down out of the sky who cut the boy up with a knife.
Christian ritual was full of actual childhood events.
Believers repeated during communion the drinking of wine and eating of bread that they had experienced as newborn infants with their mouths stuffed with zulp and wine.
Christ on the cross was obviously a baby tied to his swaddling board being killed by his mother, God.
Naked but for his baby diaper, his head hurting from the board that was often pressed upon baby's foreheads, the crown of thorns.
Christ going through God's infanticide for you undoes the infanticide of mothers.
Julian explains, quote, Even though our earthly mother may suffer her child to perish, our heavenly mother Jesus may never suffer us that be his children to perish.
God is the giant punishing parent in the sky who can make you live forever if you confess your badness and worship him slash her.
Life, says St.
Benedict, is dread of judgment, fearing hell, and keeping the possibility of death ever before your eyes.
St. John Christestom tells believers to, quote, constantly think on death, speak of it all the time, visit tombs and attend to dying people, because nothing is so edifying as watching impious people die.
Bipolar Christians arrange their lives in two emotional states.
During weekdays, families spend many hours together in depressive praying sessions, admitting their sins and internal badness, and then spend the last part of the week switching into grandiose manic trance states in church, re-enacting the central emotions of their childhoods.
Admit you are full of sins and your killer mother will forgive you and let you live in heaven.
The central childhood wish of Christians is, Mommy, God, will forgive me and let me live if I constantly torture myself.
The desire for fusion with the killer mother is, as Chodoro says, quote, central to medieval Christian imagery.
Jesus is mentioned as an exorcist 65 times in the Gospels, expelling demons from Christians by applying his spittle.
Hankoff correctly sees these demons as alternate personalities, resulting from a history of abuse in childhood.
The manic high of God experiences caused by release of the brain's opiates to special receptors in the amygdala makes people, quote, addicted not only to the God experience, but to the God high, whereby parental omnipotence is passed on to God expectations.
For Christian bipolarists, there was no middle ground.
Christianity formed around the extreme need for catering to the dissociated alter egos of all sufferers, taking control through repetition of the tortures of childhood during church rituals that portray the suffering and death of Christ, suffering that martyrs repeat in their manic ecstatic trances, avoiding death with their self-inflicted depressive tortures.
As Yanov puts it, suicide is really an attempt at healing, an attempt to conquer death.
One would rather be dead than feel it.
It is not to be doubted that many Christians attempted and succeeded in actually committing suicide in response to their inner self-destructive states at far higher rates than the 10% of Americans today who commit suicide.
But the main suicidal practice of the Christian period, like today, was war.
Holy war for God, against whatever neighbor you could provoke into joining you in the mass slaughters of fifteen Christian centuries.
Women caretakers, toughen up boys to become holy warriors.
Although boys and girls, both until they reach puberty, have the same testosterone levels, Christian boys, by the time they are five years old, are trained by their mothers, or wet nurses, to be tough, to form hierarchical violent male dominance groups, and to win all fights with their peers and not be polluted girls.
The result was that medieval homicide rates were up to 50 times higher than today's rates.
Christian children were all beaten and tortured so badly that they were time bombs for later infliction of violence.
Neurobiologists have found that winning fights raises boys' testosterone levels, which in turn makes them want to fight more.
Plus their normally low serotonin levels rise with success in fighting, raising their low feelings of confidence.
Both parents throughout history warned their boys that they must win fights, not be like girls, weak sissies.
And this is the theme of most of the boy battles fought by pages and young knights.
The warrior class devoted to full-time fighting sanctified through the feminization argument that losers are poisonous females.
Knights were expected to respond to any insults by killing the other person.
Christian mothers gave their children their first weapons and first suits of armour as early as four years old.
Little boys endlessly enacted paranoid righteous combats against imagined enemies.
Young knights often chose courtly women as their sponsors in tournaments.
Knights chose courtly women to serve in combat, and women commonly egged on to war in Norse and German legends.
Mothers are described as, quote, instructing their sons in the art of magic, protecting them in battle with magical clothing, or by stroking their bodies.
Even today, says Carol Gilligan, little boys over-internalize their mothers' anxieties by saying to them, I am your knight.
Mothers then, as now, regularly held the fantasy that their boys would be masculine and tough enough to save them from the beatings and abuses they as females had experienced.
The hated enemy, infidels, was seen as both inferior and feminine, like their mothers.
They were created by God to be weak and beaten, like their mothers were beaten by their fathers.
Enemies were called poisonous, and holy wars were seen as searches for masculinity by God's warriors, since God himself promised holy warriors in the Bible, quote, I will cast into panic all the people among whom you pass, and I will cause all thy enemies to flee before you.
Provoking and Fighting Bipolar Holy Wars Since Christians were bipolar, they were either manic, violent warriors, or depressive, masochistic clerics, martyrs. But in either case, they risked dying for God their whole lives.
For your sake, we have been killed all of the day.
Martyrs would sometimes castrate themselves, quote, to demonstrate their potency and devotion to God.
In fact, clerics were said to have become female when they gave up fighting because the male must become female in order to escape the moral dangers of his masculine state.
In fact, Christianity can be seen as a way for males to become more like females.
Thus, priests didn't get married and wore female dresses, because young boys experienced their mothers as preferring her more passive daughters to her rough, impudent sons.
The central activities that were mainly frowned upon by Christians were those that were materialistic, those that increased productivity.
Investment of one's savings for interest and profit was declared sinful usury by the Pope, so the productivity of Europe stayed nearly level for over a millennium, during which all kinds of simple inventions, like the stirrup and nailed horseshoes and non-choking horse collars, were long delayed.
Economic progress could not be achieved because their horribly abusive child-rearing didn't establish the trust that was necessary for investing in innovative new projects.
If other conditions produced enough social-economic pain, wars were less needed, as in the 14th century, when the Black Death killed a quarter of the European population, so Christian wars were not needed for self-destruction.
The Christian warrior, fused with his all-powerful killer mother god, and kills in order to rid the world of evil.
But the evil they fight is their own, quote, sins, their own childhood needs, embedded in little boys as evil early on in their dissociated victim alter egos.
The quote enemies who were imagined to embody this evil were often quite unknown to the holy warriors as in the crusades and were attacked with no material motives in mind.
The war suddenly had to be fought because they imagined quote the holy sepulchre of our lord is polluted by the filthiness of an unclean nation.
Knights like Christ embraced death in order to conquer their constant fears of being murdered by their killer mother.
They became heroic martyrs in order to go to heaven and be embraced by God who liked them to suffer, to choose death, as Christ did.
Salvation was the goal.
Death led to an acceptance by mommy who had told you that she wished you were dead.
You were a good boy, a hero.
Christian wars were simply massive martyrdoms, horrible genocides, replaying childhood fears and violence, quote,"...in order to be a man and to die for God." Battlefields were slaughterfields resembling the fields children had played in that were filled with slaughtered infants.
As Fornari puts it,"...war is deferred infanticide, the aim of which is the elimination of young men." Even gentle Jesus is turned into a warrior containing the fury of the wrath of God, as he is described in Revelations, and Christian illustrations showed God tying a sword around Christ's waist.
Holy warriors wore his cross, or Mother Mary, on their shields, and Mary was said to, quote, send her warriors into battle and herself killing them outright.
Unlike many others in antiquity who tolerated their neighbors when they worshiped a different god, Christians split the world into holy and pagan souls and gratuitously went to war against all neighbors who were not Christian.
Should anyone refuse to fight as a soldier, they were excommunicated and sent to hell.
By 900 AD, the church had its own army and navy, led by bishops.
Most holy wars, like the Crusades, came because of growth panic, when governmental reforms or attempts to curb endemic warfare made people search harder for foreign enemies.
As Pope Urban said when announcing the First Crusade, quote, Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now fight against barbarians as they ought.
Christian crusaders impaling pagan children on spits and devouring them grilled.
Led by Peter the Hermit, the manic crowd of peasants, clerics, and poor knights swarmed through Europe, leaderless, killing whomever they found, especially Jews.
The advances in Protestant worship in the 16th century were too much for the Christian psycho-classes, and so they provoked prodigiously bloody national and civil wars beginning with the Thirty Years' War, which most of Europe fought in, the most destructive war prior to the 19th century, and the beginning of the hyper-violent nation-state system.
The bloody Protestant wars after the 16th century were fought as apocalyptic end-of-the-world slaughters, with the expectation that Jesus would return as a political messiah and rule the earth.
Civilians were slaughtered in all holy wars, as well as real enemies, by usually drunken soldiers.
Children were murdered, as well as adults, and women were both killed and raped by the millions, rape being considered, quote, a proof of masculinity of the warriors.
Killing the victim-child alter-ego was accomplished both by killing infidels and by the warrior dying himself for God.
Wars were so constant that, quote, no one gave much thought to the question of who was authorized to declare a war, and any prince or other authority could keep wars going for decades.
Christian holy wars were termed noble suicides, and battles were openly apocalyptic and masochistic, quote, the warriors glorying in their wounds and rejoicing to display their flowing blood.
As they had learned in childhood, the only way to get love from mommy, from Jesus, from God, was to suffer for your sinfulness.
Thus it was necessary for all self-destructive Christian armies to constantly insult infidels, attack stronger neighbors, and install grandiose, incompetent leaders of their own armies, in order to increase the destructiveness of their enemies.
The armor of knights was of little use in battle, since it was too heavy for fast horses to carry, and archers could easily outmaneuver knights, as when English archers at Agincourt shattered French knights in a matter of minutes.
A knight's armour was actually a mask of masculinity, behind which men could hide their fears of weakness, a defensive second skin that was said to symbolise what was termed the aloneness of the solitary hero of holy wars.
Beginning in the 11th century, grandiose castle strongholds were expanded, again on the model of the autistic shield fantasy of terrorised children.
Even more dangerous was the practice of the Frank and Norse warriors who, quote, left their chests bare and backs naked, or fought completely nude, presenting themselves as naked infants like those who were infanticided by their mothers.
The manic, wild, masochistic trances that warriors often switched into, often by becoming drunk, during battle, were also not useful to winning battles, and many accounts picture how berserkers had to be, quote, cooled down so that they would no longer be a threat to their own side.
Finally, like the killer mothers with whom they were fused, knights wore gaudy clothes and ribbons and long hair as if they were women.
And often actually went into battle as their mothers and other women watched them from a nearby hill and shamed them if they abandoned the fight.
Quote, The worst thing Christian mothers can accuse you of is looking out for yourself.
What they really want is for you to, quote, Join your friends dead, whose corpses lie before you.
Is this not a great martyrdom?
Because that is the aim of all holy wars.
Dying for God.
Lloyd DeMoss is director of the Institute for Psychohistory, founder of the International Psychohistorical Association, and author of seven books on psychohistory, four of which can be found for free downloading and author of seven books on psychohistory, four of which can be Thank you.
This article is Chapter 9 of the forthcoming book The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
All chapters of the book can be downloaded for free at www.psychohistory.com.
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