Blood magic in the age of psychopathy, mass shootings and ecological catastrophe*

Abstract

This paper is an effort to locate blood magic in the age of psychopathy. Taking as a starting point Michael Eigen’s observation that psychopathic tendencies can become cut off from balancing capacities and wreak havoc, we consider the ways in which practices of blood magic, including rituals surrounding menstruation have functioned variously across cultures to balance destructive tendencies and sustain relationship with the living surround. We argue that the lack of these practices and the attitudes fed by and feeding them has contributed to an upsurge in ultra-violent phenomena like mass shootings in our culture. Moreover, we consider the ways in which such phenomena are perverted expressions of a need for blood magic that, though twisted beyond recognition, nevertheless seek expression and wishes to be recognized in this age, which has as its backdrop an unrecognized, unfolding human-wrought ecological catastrophe.

“the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death.”

—Georges Bataille in Hegel, Death and Sacrifice (1990, p. 24)

“Human sensitivity expresses itself in low and high ways, running the gamut from vulgarity to spirituality, which, far from being mutually exclusive, fuse and feed each other.”

—Michael Eigen, The Sensitive Self (2004, p.152)

This paper will attempt to elucidate a link between our culture’s epidemic of mass shootings, varieties of blood ritual, and our unfolding ecological crisis. In the course of this elucidation, we hope the adumbration of something else might reveal itself, rekindling a sense of what may be called the sacred. It is this shadow with a thousand faces that we feel our culture has lost touch with; a sensibility for the sacred in everyday life having been replaced with a psycho-social-environmental numbness. We argue that periodic eruptions of ultra-violence, such as mass shootings, which produce fleeting fits of collective hyperarousal, are a consequence of attitudes that have congealed around this loss of contact with the sacred other in its many staggering forms. In forging this link, we wish to help relax the stranglehold these attitudes have on our way of life and to filter their toxic influence on our relationships to human and nonhuman others.

Echoing Freud (1920), what follows is speculation. As a contemplation of perversions in our culture, this paper instantiates a psychoanalytic encounter with cultural phenomena, what Laplanche (1987) deemed “psychoanalysis outside-the-walls. [Such psychoanalysis] is not only a matter of psychoanalytic thinking and theory but is also a mode of being, a mode of being that invades culture” (p.15). To conjure the image of invasion cannot but evoke the very phallocentric attitudes we are critiquing. Is ours a perverse attempt to address perversion? A strategic fiction replete with truths? A sort of academic subincision? It is, further, a dogged attempt to follow out some ideas, with curiosity to see where they will lead, and in so doing to set in motion the mode of being Laplanche speaks of, not merely to invade a culture, but to be invaded by opening the gates to the outside, to be dissolved from the inside-out—and transformed—if only for a moment.

THE RADICAL DEMAND FOR PURITY³ AND COMPULSIVE AVERSION⁴ OF OTHERNESS

Freud (1930) situates the beginning of culture in a denial and hierarchical ordering of the senses. Freud gives two examples of what he calls “organic repression:” the taboos on menstrual blood and feces. In telling this story he returns us to an “animal” moment of being on all-fours, when the sense of smell was primary and “the menstrual process produced sexual excitement in the mind of the male” (p. 99). When we stood up on two legs, exposing the genitals as vision came to dominate the senses, humanity committed the fateful “reversal of values” whereby what was once pleasurable became a source of shame. Freud points out that “excreta arouse no aversion in children; they seem precious to them, as being parts of their own bodies which have been detached from them” (p. 99). Thus, phylogenetically and ontogenetically, taboos act as “a barrier against a phase of development that has been surpassed” (p. 99). Yet, as Marcel Mauss (in Clifford, 1981, p. 545) was known to say, “Taboos are made to be violated:” for it is through ritualized violation of taboos that cyclicity is honored.

The shame to which Freud refers is part of a legacy of alienation that Nietzsche (1908) deems “two millennia of anti-nature” (p. 274). And we know that the West reserves a special privilege for vision in its access to Truth ever since Plato declared it the noblest of the senses. Vision maintains the illusion of a safe distance, whereas smell, the most natural of mimetic behaviors, “bears closest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other’... Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization, the sign of lower social strata, lesser races and base animals” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1947, p. 184). Adorno and Horkheimer identify intolerance of smell, and by extension, intolerance of the other, as a key characteristic of Fascism⁵. There is a dissociation of the self from itself and consequential projection and imposition of the disavowed parts of self onto the other. Neither the self nor the other can be known in any capacity except where knowledge equals power, with the self as master and the other as slave, or vice versa.

We would like to trouble the certainty of the master, this transcendental, and thus deeply alienated subject who idealizes itself as separate, elevated, and pure. As Nietzsche (1908) reminds us, “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge” (p. 15). For what is unknown is the other within, the unconscious. Building off Adorno and Horkheimer (1947), we suggest that the unconscious desire for sacrifice of the self, now repressed, asserts itself as persecution of the other.⁶ Enter the mass shooters, killer cops, Standing Rock, Flint, and a thousand other examples of toxic horror.

BAD AIR⁷

Following Nietzsche⁸ and assuming a psychic flehmen, what do we notice? Our ideas have a particular stench, that of Western metaphysics, of hierarchy and exclusion. The rigid dichotomy between pure and impure, self and other is the rupture of history. Artaud (1938) wrote, “anywhere but in Europe it is we whites who ‘smell bad’… we give off an odor as white as the gathering of pus in an infected wound” (p. 9). But this impact on others goes unnoticed. Winnicott (1945) speaks to ways dissociation and destruction feed off each other. For Winnicott destructiveness is a life-force that needs integration through play. When a child’s ruthlessness is unwelcomed by a caregiver, even in play, a ruthless self can only be fed through dissociated acts of destruction. He counts urban life itself as a prime example of dissociation for civilization, a form of life predicated on much unseen and unthought destruction. In dominating nature, we have had to repudiate and subjugate both inner and outer wilds (Melmed, 2020)—what Fanon (1952) calls our ‘jungle’ and our soul’s “local cultural originality” (p. 18). The self, deformed by this dissociation, is hardened, closed-off, rigid, resentful and accusatory. But Western identity masks the agonies of this alienated and deformed self with a reactive idealism that is expansive, grandiose, and ruthlessly hopeful. The madness and megalomania of conquest, the delusion of power and obsession with purity is expressed by the ending of Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972) when Aguirre raves to a hoard of monkeys that he will marry his daughter, steal Spain’s colonies, and found the purest dynasty known to man. As Jean Rouch (1981) would say, the “colonial masters are the ones who are mad!” (p. 279). His film, The Mad Masters (Rouch, 1955), provides a counterpoint to Aguirre’s madness, wherein members of the Hauka cult in Ghana become possessed by the spirits of their colonial masters to remedy the toxic effects of colonialism through a transgressive becoming-other and ritual re-integration of that which has been traumatically split-off. Not surprisingly, the film was banned by colonial authorities, who felt mocked, and scorned by African scholars, who felt the film reaffirmed stereotypes of the irrational savage.

Drawing on Foucault, Leo Bersani (1987) points out that relationship has embedded in it “divisions, inequalities and disequilibriums” (p. 216) that all too easily become amplified and organized by hierarchical power dynamics—polarizing relationship into a specific kind of relatedness bound to an axis of mastery and subordination. These “effects of power” (p. 216) result from a hierarchical reactivity to the overwhelming heterogeneity of being (in Aguirre, represented by the jungle). Such a reaction issues from the lack of capacity to contain, in the Bionian sense (1977), the overwhelming affects produced by qualities of difference embedded in and delineated by relationship. Ritual containment expands the capacity to experience diverse qualities and thresholds of affective intensity, maximal and minimal, collectively and in synchrony with nature’s periods. While the incapacity to do so ultimately leads to the destruction and disintegration of both self and other. That is, “effects of power” effectuate, propagating and intensifying further incapacity to tolerate difference. Again, in Aguirre, the sense that the jungle is devouring him undergoes reversal, feeding his madness and will to conquer. Thus, repetitions of traumatic excess supplant the welcome emergence of difference in an encounter with the other. Instead of dosing out the inevitable “ontological obscenity” (Bersani, 1987, p. 221) and varieties of madness engendered through contact with the other—we, the inheritors of this wounded culture in its colonial and post-industrial forms, are overdosed with ontological obscenities, which have become the norm. Consider, for example, the televising of the “Shock and Awe” 2003 US military campaign in Iraq and, more recently, the spreading through social media of video images of mass shootings; both illustrate the role technology—and screen-mediated experience in particular—has had in limiting, distorting and deteriorating contact with the other.

The task for us, then, is to develop, or rekindle a kind of relatedness that in the first place contains and metabolizes (Bion, 1977) the toxic effects of this incapacity to stomach the other, and perhaps even one day replaces the all-too easy hierarchical reactivity to difference with something that might serve as a cultural catalytic enzyme that facilitates psychic digestion through transformative means. Ritual can provide such psychic digestion—and in fact, psychotherapy has, at its best, functioned in just this way, especially the variant of psychoanalysis championed by Michael Eigen (2018), which gropes after ways to better tolerate ourselves, to find and build complementary forms of relatedness that detoxify our destructiveness. Such a form of relatedness would include, inevitably, as Bersani (1987) and Ghent (1990) demonstrate, a capacity to surrender, a willingness to give of the self to the other, and to receive of the other in such a way that does not expand, inflate or propagate the self, but dissolves it—even if only incompletely and temporarily. Such experiences may be felt as annihilative or castrative from the point of view of an affective attitude (i.e., a culture) in which hierarchical relatedness is the sin qua non of existence. But, our point is precisely that these specters of castration and annihilation, and their compensatory ideological derivative— phallocentric power with its dizzying technological “advancements”—have obfuscated other registers and qualities of relatedness, namely those of giving-receiving, which honor the deep partnership and inextricability of life-death processes.

The denial of this flow of reciprocity contributes to an amplification of retentive tendencies and their proliferation in various forms, which ultimately function to deny death. One of the most severe is the Puritan doctrine of predestination, which splits eternal destiny between the pure who are saved and the impure who are damned. There is an absolute intolerance of “otherness”, whether in natives, women, animals, children, the elderly, the mad, etc. Lumped together in the shadow of the white man these others represent his own disavowal of death and impurity externalized, and as such pose a threat to his hallucinated purity of existence. And so to escape death he barricades himself. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) tie post-reformation culture to a compulsive self-preservation, “constantly magnified into the choice between survival and doom,” a binary reflected in “the exclusivity of logical laws,” (i.e., rigidly approaching the world through true/false dichotomies) (p. 23). This rupture of the circulation between purity and impurity ironically confuses the poles, disorienting our senses, leading to inner and outer catastrophes that feed off each other. Salvific longings intensify, fueling phantasies of an infinite and absolute movement away from doom. Weber (1946) warns us, however, that within an ideology of limitless progress, “death has no meaning… and because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless” (pp. 139–140). Thus, the flight from catastrophe is at once a movement toward catastrophe.

MONEY, CIRCULATION AND ACCUMULATION

In our culture money has become like a circulatory humor yet one that paralyzes the social body it is supposed to invigorate. In writing about the Iraq war, Michael Eigen (2006) touches on a hallucinatory exclusivity, where the animism of the market and the “almighty dollar god” is at odds with the inanimism of everything else in the world. Is the market truly alive, and deserving of the animistic language so often used to describe it—‘breathing,’ ‘growing,’ ‘pumping,’ ‘hemorrhaging’—or is it more akin to a virus, brutally self-serving, infectious, blind, exploitative, and thus “an organism at the edge of life” (Rybicki, 1990), not quite alive, not quite dead, an uncanny, confounding force? Eigen wonders whether our culture’s power-hungry madness feeds, and is fed by, a delusion where “being powerful gets us closer to beatitude.” Is this beatitude a whitewashed ecstasy? Does it include, as Chuang-tzŭ (Zhuangzi, 2001) does in his description of the Tao, “shit and piss” and “shards” (p. 161)—or are these “lower” substances repudiated, and at what cost? As children we watched television advertisements for tampons as they were shown soaking up an unearthly blue substance. “The eerie unreal,” Eigen writes, “often masks lethal realities.” Such commercials ran between segments of television depicting extreme violence. We were denied images of generative blood and fed lethal blood instead. As the vital circulation of substances is sanitized their vigor is lost. Unslaked, our thirst for blood returns in repressed, monstrous form.

Despite its resemblance to a kind of circulatory humor, the circulation of wealth under capitalism is not a priority. The priority is acquisition and accumulation. For Bataille (1933), the need to acquire occludes a more basic need to lose and destroy (p. 121). Numerous ethnographic accounts show economies that prioritize circulation of wealth. Regarding the great gift-giving tradition of the Kula, Malinowski (1922) highlights the incessant circulation and ever exchangeability of valuables, whose worth derives from these very qualities (p. 511).

One of the most intense forms of gift exchange is the Potlatch of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, a “war of wealth” in which “consumption and destruction [were] virtually unlimited” (Mauss, 1925, p. 35). Forms of wealth circulated included “immaterial possessions:” myths, songs, privileges and names (Benedict, 1934, p. 183). "The greatest of these prerogatives, and the basis of all others, were the nobility titles" (p. 183). Hierarchy did exist, for "these titles were the right of the eldest born", they were "not held in common, but were owned for the time being by an individual who singly and exclusively exercised the rights which they conveyed" (p. 183), yet it is a notion of hierarchy directly linked to "the distribution of great wealth" (p. 183) which signaled one's right to a title. Further, the hierarchical structure is a seasonal arrangement, giving way to an analogous one marked by sacred festivities and supernatural societies held for half the year (more about the Winter Ceremonial later). There were two ways to victory in a Potlatch: shaming your rival by giving more than he could return, or by destroying property (p. 193), which would quickly spin out of control. It is important to note that the giver “was not free to destroy property to the utter impoverishment of his people,” the great social check was the taboo on overdoing (p. 195). As Ruth Benedict writes, “Society sets limits, though the limits seem to us fantastic” (p. 195). One thing is clear: value was put on generosity, how much you could give, not how much you could accumulate.⁹

FLOW, PERIODICITY, SELF-SACRIFICE AND BECOMING-OTHER

“Dirt implies a structure of ideas”, as Mary Douglas (1968, p. 338) famously wrote regarding pollution, “the unclear is unclean.”¹⁰ But our enlightened, disenchanted minds have all but eradicated the unclear from the earth. We have little tolerance for ambiguity, and we also produce pollution at a rate and size hitherto unknown. Might the two attitudes be connected? Douglas (1968) posited that the “great puzzle” (p. 336) facing comparative religion was the reconciliation of the concept of pollution with that of holiness, whereas previous scholars asserted that the distinction between the two marked “a real advance above savagery” (Smith, 1927, p. 153 cited in Douglas, 1968, p. 336). Émile Durkheim (1915) stressed that sacred forces are of two kinds, the positive and the negative,¹¹ yet these forces are “closely akin” (p. 413), for “the impure is made from the pure, and vice versa” (p. 415). He gives as example, the blood that comes from a woman’s vagina, while considered impure, is often used as a remedy against sickness (p. 414).

Let us take a look at some ethnographic examples of blood magic, different orientations of self and other and the periodicity of their becoming and return. None of these ethnographic examples represent ahistorical constants (Fabian, 1983), each of them is subject to particular histories, colonial encounters, social structures, gender relations, academic distortions and so on, which continue to change ongoingly. The anthropological self is no more constant than the ethnographic other, for both are entangled with each other and within ongoing ecological and historical processes and relations of power.

In Shinto mythology, the Storm God bursts into the pure enclosure of the New Palace, where his sister, the Sun Goddess, and her virgins are weaving garments for the gods. He proceeds to strew his feces about. The Sun Goddess “leaps up in great disgust” and “falls against her loom, the shuttle piercing her vagina and wounding her or, in some versions, killing her” (Hyde, 1998, p. 178). The Sun hides herself in a cave as “all manner of calamities” occur and can only be lured out again with “ribald play and much laughter” (p. 178). The Storm God is banished from heaven and comes to live on Earth, which gives rise to agriculture: “as soon as he arrives, he kills a ‘food-goddess’ out of whose dead body come seeds” (p. 179). This story leads Lewis Hyde to a profound realization: “in trickster’s world, life and death are one thing, not two, and therefore no one gets rid of death without getting rid of life as well… you get no seeds if shit never enters the New Palace” (p. 179). These myths are bound to rituals that bring the agricultural year to its close. Is this myth, with its violence towards women, a patriarchal obfuscation of previous stories regarding goddesses and their power? Or does the ambiguity and periodicity of the sacred subvert the established hierarchy?

The Kaatans, an Aymara speaking people in Bolivia, name the places of their mountain according to the anatomy of the human body “with a head, heart and bowels, and legs” (Bastien, 1978, p. 81). The ritual of New Earth symbolically circulates the sacrificial blood of a llama “to the ecological parts of the ayllu¹² [community] body... The people inserted themselves by ritual into a cycle of the environment, not to control it, but to experience and be in exchange with it. Time was corporeal and environmental, circulating and cyclical” (p. 81). The people embrace and kiss the llama with tears in their eyes, before giving its blood to Mother Earth.

Mauss and Hubert (1898) argued that during sacrifice, killer, victim and god are fused together through identification (pp. 31–32).¹³ Bataille (1973) called this fusion the world of intimacy, which, he insisted, “cannot be expressed discursively” (p. 50) but is “known” as the lover is known in sexual consumption (p. 44). Subject and object fuse in a communication comparable to the discharge of lightning, possible “only between two beings at risk” (Bataille, 2001, p. 29). Elsewhere, Bataille (1930) describes automutilation among so-called madmen, at the “imperative order” (p. 61) of the Sun, as the trace of a “not only generally human, but also very primitive” (p.69) impulse: “the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself” (p. 67). Sacrificial mechanisms cause a “radical alteration of the person which can be indefinitely associated with any other alteration that suddenly arises in collective life” (p. 70). As examples, Bataille names the death of a relative, initiation, and the consumption of a new harvest, to which we add menstruation, childbirth, and hunters or warriors who shed blood. These events are often treated similarly, employing seclusion, purification, and sacrifice. Automutilation is a clear expression of this sacrificial impulse. Examples include the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians, the Hamadsha brotherhood of Morocco, Aboriginal Australian mourning rites described by Durkheim (1915) as a “frenzy of beating, lacerating, and burning oneself” (pp. 368–369), also used as a remedy for drought, or to make animal species multiply, etc.

In Bataille’s (2005) analysis, the Lascaux cave paintings of bison and birds are a necessary homage to the animal victim. Michael Taussig (2019) sees a similar attitude in Naskapi hunters of Newfoundland who dance, sing, and smoke tobacco over a corpse of an animal, as witnessed by Frank Speck in the 1920s. Here, the dead animal is like a dead brother or sister. Among the Nuer of Sudan, after male initiation, the father gives his son an ox described as “the ox of perfection... the young man’s friend and companion” (Evans-Pritchard, 1956, pp. 250–251).¹⁴ The youth takes an “ox-name” and devotes much care and attention to the animal, therefore, “when Nuer give their cattle in sacrifice they are very much, and in a very intimate way, giving part of themselves” (p. 279). Evans-Pritchard concludes, “one can only give oneself; there is no other kind of giving” (p. 279).

A common belief across many cultures is that killing forms a bond between the murderer and the victim, which sensitizes the community to the consequences of killing. Taussig (2019) asks if a lack of this sensitivity in the United States is related to police killings of African American men and the ‘living dead’ in mass incarceration.

The Thonga of South Africa believe that the spirit of a slain person will haunt the killer and try to take revenge on him. Driven insane by “a thirst for blood” the killer may attack “his own family and stab them” (Junod, 1912, p. 478 as cited in Taussig, 2019, p. 8). The killer is ‘hot’ or ‘toxic’ and must be secluded until he is purified of the murderous pollution (pp. 478–481). Among the Nuer, “a mysterious blood bond” is formed when one person slays another with a spear: “the blood of the victim” passes “at death into the body of the slayer” driven “by a mission of vengeance” (Hutchinson, 1996, p. 106 as cited in Taussig, 2019, p. 9). For the Murngin in Northeast Australia, in the act of killing “the spirit of the dead man enters the body of the killer and gives him double strength and actually increases his body size” (Warner, 1937, p. 152 as cited in Taussig, 2019, p. 11). In Polynesian beliefs, a warrior absorbs the magic power of “all those whom he had killed” (Handy as cited in Taussig, 2017). The magic power of the killer, as well as that of his spear, increased with each death inflicted. The warrior assumed the name of his victim, “ate some of his flesh and wore as part of his war dress a part of the body, such as a bone, a dried hand, or a skull” (Handy as cited in Taussig, 2017). With the Amazonian Arawete, the killer’s stomach fills with the blood of the slain and “he vomits continuously:”

He does not eat. He seems in a state of death himself. He mimics death. He becomes death… He drinks the tea used by women for menstruation and childbirth… the slain man’s spirit… exhorting him to revenge and kill his own people (Viveiros de Castro, 2009, as paraphrased by Taussig, 2019, p. 12).

Among natives of the Northwest Pacific Coast of North America¹⁵ the Cannibal Society occupies the highest seat of honor, and yet, as Benedict (1934) maintains, they “felt an unmitigated repugnance to the eating of human flesh” (p. 178). The Winter Ceremonial was primarily a series of initiation rites, given to ‘tame’ the Cannibal “of the power that destroys man’s reason” (p. 177). First, the initiate “was snatched away by the spirits and remained in the woods in isolation” (p. 177) where he prepared a corpse as his ‘food’ in the dance (p. 179). An alternative ontology emerges in the ambiguity of performance. Their cultural experience defies our categories of reality and imagination. Called from his seclusion in the woods, suddenly the Cannibal jumps down through the roof of the house, attacking the onlookers and biting their arms (p. 178). The Winter Dance is a theater of transgression whereby pure negativity is at once included in society and yet remains untamed, retaining its radical, anti-social intensity: “count was kept of the mouthfuls of skin… and he took emetics until he had voided them. He often did not swallow them at all” (p. 178). More polluting than the flesh of an onlooker was that of a corpse, traditionally held by a naked woman co-initiate who danced before the ravenous Cannibal (p. 178). Four separate exorcisms are required to tame him. The final and most powerful required the menstrual blood “of four women of the highest rank,” (p. 181) used to ritually ‘smoke’ the face of the Cannibal. By the fourth dance with this polluting substance “he was tamed and quiet, his frenzy gone from him” (p. 181). The Cannibal is then secluded for four months, and when he finally emerged, “he feigned to have forgotten all the ordinary ways of life. He had to be taught to walk, to speak, to eat” (p. 179). Returning from his excursion in otherness, normal life became unfamiliar.

Menstrual blood is a quintessential embodiment of sacred ambiguity as it fuses Death and Life into a single substance. In ancient Athens, Artemis was offered the blood of first menses as well as the clothing of dead women and women who had given birth (Caillois, 1959, p. 47). The Dakota word wakan, meaning sacred, is used for both the Bible as well as menstruation, considered “the supreme impurity” (p. 36). This coincidence of purity and impurity is demonstrated in the restrictions set on divine rulers who were treated in ways akin to menstruating women. For example, in Japan, the emperor was prohibited from touching the ground or exposing himself to the sun (p. 41). In Zapotec culture the king underwent a prolonged seclusion of 16 years (p. 41). Arabic cultures ward off Djinns and the evil eye with a mixture of excrement, menstrual blood and bones of the dead. To this medicine is added the “remains of the sacrificial victim” charged with “the sins of all the people” (p. 46). Thus the “ultimate defilement” anoints the altar, transferred through the scapegoat’s blood (p. 46). The more repugnant and dangerous the substance, the more efficacious the remedy.

Victor Turner (1967) argues that much of the symbolism of the liminal persona is drawn from death, decomposition and menstruation (p. 96). This is because “transitional beings are particularly polluting, since they are neither one thing nor another; or maybe both” (p. 97). It is in this respect that some boys’ initiation ceremonies explicitly liken newly circumcised boys to menstruating women (p. 96). Taussig (1999) tells us with regard to male initiation of the Gahuku of Papua New Guinea, the men are “motivated... by a need to exorcise the polluting effects of women, no less than to imitate menstruation” (pp. 211–212). In Aboriginal Australia, the Rainbow Serpent ritual-myth expresses a powerful desire to become-other. Men become women, women become serpents, the serpent becomes a rainbow, menstrual blood becomes red ochre¹⁶, all of which is synchronized with the periodicity of the natural world. Chris Knight (1988) connects this ritual-myth with menstrual synchrony worldwide, which he sees as “a source of female power in society” (p. 232). When menstrual synchrony breaks down, Knight argues, “its formal structures may have been preserved ritually by men” (p. 232–233). In Australia this results in “male-controlled versions of the Rainbow Snake” (p. 233), expressed in secret initiation rites where men ritually ‘menstruate’ together.

Some of these myths go like this: two sisters, often described as “incestuous,” menstruate together.¹⁷ Their blood attracts a Snake who emerges from a waterhole and swallows the sisters. They are renamed, “having been swallowed,” (R. Berndt, 1951, p. 35 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 238) at which point they become one with the great ancestral Mother. Following this narrative, male initiates must “die” and “be reborn,” as men take the youths “into their collective ‘womb’—which may be a deep pit” and then “regurgitate” them, transformed (Knight, 1988, p. 250). This symbolic womb is depicted as a “monsterous, cannibalistic Mother or Snake” (Knight, 1988, p. 250), though, it is said “to have been killed and replaced with a more benevolent male-controlled… substitute that does not permanently kill those it ‘swallows’” (Hiatt, 1975 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 250). While these male myths can be seen as justification for the usurpation of women’s menstrual power, Knight (1988) notes that they are “rich with ambivalences and a sense of tragedy at the loss of the original Mother/Snake” (p. 250).

The Alawa of Arnhem Land tell of the mythical Mungamunga girls who practice menstrual synchrony, which Knight (1988) links to a periodic repudiation of sexual intercourse and coincident solidarity of women. In one song the girls say to a man, “I’ve got blood; you wait for a while” (R. Berndt, 1951, p. 164 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 238). In another, a Mungamunga girl escapes two men by diving into a lagoon, metaphorically returning to a symbolic womb where the women are bound by the same blood flow, hence the incestuous relation (R. Berndt 1951, p. 174 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 238). Among the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land¹⁸, menstrual synchrony is “stressed in the string figure origin myth” Knight, 1988, p. 235). As the stories go, the sisters begin to menstruate together and make loops of the other’s blood, “after which they put the string loops around their necks’ (McCarthy, 1960, p. 426 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 235). Other versions emphasize that ritual dancing was used to synchronize their blood flows (R. Berndt, 1951, p. 22 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 235). Noteworthy is the affirmation of menstruation expressed when the two sisters “decided to go into the waterhole and become a rainbow… They wanted to be a snake, like the rainbow, when she is standing up in the waterhole and makes lightning” (Groger-Wurm, 1973, p. 120 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 238). Other myths link the wet season with menstruation and being under the guardianship of the serpent (Knight, 1988, p. 240). Knight urges caution: scientific rationalism can never approach a genuine understanding of “the innermost mysteries of secret rites and cults” (p. 242). The rainbow snake connotes cyclical time, alternation, metamorphosis, and change, “perpetually incorporating within itself its own opposite: it would be wet season and dry, the highest and the lowest, male and female, and so on” (Knight, 1988, p. 244).

Perhaps most appalling to a Western mind is the ritual practice of cutting the penis. In general, subincision makes “a penis that is also a vagina” (Róheim, 1945, p. 171 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 248). The Pitjandjara call the subincision hole a “penis womb” (p. 247). The blood with which Djungguan dancers paint themselves and their emblems is “more than a man’s blood—it is the menses of the old Wawilak women” (Warner, 1957, p. 278 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 249). As regards reenacting the myth of the Wawilak Sisters, a Yolngu man said: “really we have been stealing what belongs to them... Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business… all the dreaming business came out of women.” (R. Berndt, 1951, p. 55 as cited in Knight, 1988, p. 251).

While we have drawn primarily from examples of blood ritual beyond Western culture, varieties of blood magic exist in the West, as does magic more generally, the history of which has been subject to a long and violent repression. In pre-modern Europe, menstrual blood was a powerful ingredient in bewitchment and thus was considered spiritually, physically and socially threatening (Nissen, 2017). Menstrual blood was used in erotic magic, both to bind (Matteoni, 2009) and to break love spells (Couliano, 1984), and also featured in Catholic women's mysticism (Nissen, 2017). Blood magic possessed the power to heal (Matteoni, 2009), was crucial in the making of pacts with demons or spirit familiars (Matteoni, 2009; Wilby, 2006), and was prominent in childbirth and midwifery (Ehrenreich & English, 1970). Further complicating this field of study is the degree to which phantasies of the ruling-class (Cohn, 1973) dominate the image of witches in modernity, except when the witch image ignites revolutionary, mythological feminine power to resist the domination of inner as well as outer nature (Bovenschen, 1978). Consider the rampant misogyny of Biblical prohibitions ascribing sin and danger to menstruating women, and the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Kramer & Sprenger, 1487) which makes statements like, “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman” (p. 43), or “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil” (p. 43), or “midwives…surpass all others in wickedness” (p.41), and we can form some idea of the reign which patriarchy has held over Western blood magic.

Is menstruation a primordial form of sacrifice? Roger Caillois (1959) asks, “what deadly power is not attributed to this terrifying flow?” (p. 46). How can we retain the negative sacred, in its chaos and devastating horror, without simply recapitulating the legacy of misogyny and male dominance?¹⁹ A possible answer: by honoring the continuity between pure and impure, self and other. In many traditional cultures, the negative sacred is respected as dangerous impurity but not permanently so, for it can always reverse and become its opposite. Whereas Western order relies on a rigid dichotomy of mutual exclusion, other cultures envision fluid boundaries of taboo and transgression, diverse ritualized forms of mimetic identification and becoming-other. But we are afflicted by the phantasy that the negative can be banished, never to return, a phantasy which can have catastrophic consequences. There is a need for periodic disruption. How can we honor the destructive forces of the chaosmos²⁰ and, in this way, rediscover “the regenerative processes of disorder” (Clifford, 1981, p. 559), “a darkness shining in brightness, that brightness could not comprehend” (Joyce, 1922, p. 28)?

The notion of the sacred which we are trying to ignite by illustrative gestures is not intended to produce “new ideals.” Instead, we suggest that an important balancing force and mitigating factor against eco- and difference-hating toxic idealizations is to root ideas/images to their base, situating them materially and ecologically, as a lived experience of affective force located in a body, community and place. It is important to make a distinction between ideology and mythology, the former being a means of social control occluded by ideational content. To put it simply, ideology is top-down, whereas mythology comes from the bottom up. Myth is the collective imagination of a community rooted in place. Regarding nineteenth-century Lakota ontology, Posthumus (2018) tells us that “mythical virtuality was akin to a beneficial cognitive simulation and had a very real (re)generative, (re)creative, and (re)constitutive effect on the dynamics of cosmological, social, and personal construction in actuality” (p. 124). Both top-down and bottom-up models/processes are important and can be mutually reinforcing in a balanced way. But in modernity we are witness to an absence of myth and loss of contact with the sacred (Bataille, 1994). Not all ideology is explicitly religious, and not all religion, nor religious experience, is overrun by ideology. Though the latter often traffics in religious passions and symbolism. While Freud’s critique that religious ritual can appear stereotyped suggests something with the enterprise is amiss, and/or being deployed as neurotic defense (in our view, against recognition of death, decay, the body etc.), his description of religion as “a universal obsessional neurosis” (Freud, 1907, pp. 126–127) may be more difficult to overlay onto varieties of indigenous spiritual life, with the latter being less monolithic, often polytheistic, and having, in general, less emphasis on top-down or transcendent models or conceptions of power.

Alas there is no guarantee that the practices which honor sacred experience are incorruptible, (i.e., pure). They are not. They deal with volatility, their structure can be fragile, moreover they can be usurped by, or codified into perverse systems of exploitation (capitalism, fascism, colonialism, i.e., systematized catastrophe). Blood magic goes against dominant Western values, as does any form of magic, for it fundamentally opposes the so-called 'enlightened' worldview, operating in defiance of the disembodiment endemic to Western culture. Contact with the human body, especially blood, is a transgression of that disembodiment, a re-embodiment. Yet the diabolization of the body and its 'impurities' continues today; remember Trump's comment about Megyn Kelley having “blood coming out from her wherever” (Rucker, 2015), after she questioned Trump over his history of offensive statements about women at the Republican Party presidential debate, and his constant assault on Hillary Clinton as “nasty”, with chants of “lock her up!” (Woolf, 2016)—these sentiments are puritanical, their fervor fueling the engine of a quasi-fascistic movement, which is only gaining momentum. In short, we don’t propound any utopic vision for humanity, but we do gesture toward ways that sacred experience can be safeguarded against hijacking by psychopathic tendencies if it is imbued with and held in balance by the values we have discussed (reciprocity, reversal, mutuality, relatedness, self-sacrifice, becoming-other). These can potentially keep the sacred from assuming a megalithic ideal form.

Ritual opens human life to an experience beyond all meaning, language, identity, morality or any other stable hierarchy of value. It binds people and nature through flows of intensity and spirit, but these crucial rhythms are in our day interrupted, brutally. As Freud (1930) notes, “The organic periodicity of the sexual process has persisted… but its effect on mental sexual excitation has been almost reversed” (p. 99). This repulsion of sexuality, and specifically menstruation, is linked with a broader, and more devastating disgust with the erotic periodicity of the world, the polymorphous coitus of the cosmos. The West has sought to erase the stain of menstruation all together. Durkheim (1912) contends that “the periodicity of alternating sacred and profane times… is increasingly flattened out in modern social life” (p. 500 as cited in Ptacek, 2015, p. 91). This breaking of cyclical time creates an “irreversible time” that Guy Debord (1967, p. 114) called a paralyzed history, a paralyzed memory, a false consciousness of time.

BLOOD AND VENGEANCE

We have come to understand mass shootings as perversions of blood ritual, in that generosity, giving-of-the-self and becoming-other have turned into their opposites: a walled off, vengeful self, hell-bent on annihilation of the other (see Strozier, 2002).²¹ Vengeance is a primary motive for mass shooters. When they began shooting, the Columbine killers said, “This is for all the shit you put us through. This is what you deserve” (Larkin, 2007, p. 6). As Bob Herbert of the New York Times claimed, the Virginia Tech shooter and others like him, were “young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody” (Kimmel, 2010, p. 137).

The problem with trying to identify determinative elements in individual shooters’ histories is that psychological typology tends to miss broader cultural determinants. Some mass shooters grew up in homes in which terrifying domestic abuse was witnessed, but many did not. In Langman’s (2009) study, out of the ten school shooters investigated, only three suffered physical abuse at home. But if we include peer bullying, along with more ‘imaginary’ threats such as monsters, demons and mad scientists (e.g., the Heath, Edinboro shootings), we find that the majority of shooters felt attacked, whether in reality, phantasy or some combination. The Charleston shooter more than likely witnessed his father abuse his stepmother as his life more generally fell apart: his divorced parents struggled with finances; his mother was evicted, he repeated the ninth grade, his father’s business closed. And yet the New York Times writes “nothing in the records… offer a clear explanation” (Robles & Stewart, 2015). The shooter’s father and grandfather both lived in Black neighborhoods, his father was known to invite Black and Hispanic employees to parties and the killer himself had Black friends. Several former neighbors said the same thing: the family was “normal as normal could be.” Yet other neighbors reported that he had told them of his intention to kill. The situation is stranger and more enigmatic than what can be captured by a mere psychological profile. It is a situation in which you, reader, are implicated. Maybe the killer’s stepmom holds the answer: “Something on the computer drew him in—this is Internet evil” (Paddock & McShane, 2015). As stated by his defense attorney in court, “Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet. That’s it” (Hersher, 2017). Similarly, Susan Klebold claims her son committed the Columbine murders “in contradiction to the way he was raised” (Brooks, 2004). Are we not like this mother, “living in an extreme state of denial” (BBC Newsnight, 2016) to our own ‘unhomelikeness,’ the murderous vengeance seething just below the surface of our society?

Kimmel (2010) found that, “the rush to develop a psychological profile of school shooters left us without a sociological profile of the ‘shooters’ school’” (p. 132). Prior to the Columbine shooting, the perpetrators tried to tell teachers and administrators “the way those who were ‘different’ were crushed,” but the adults “turned a blind eye” (Kimmel, 2010, p. 136). Along with Larkin (2007), Kimmel points to a “toxic climate” (p. 137) combining brutal harassment, gun culture, gender culture, school culture (“jockocracy” [p. 140]), celebrity culture, the rise of “paramilitary chic,” Evangelical superiority, and most importantly, “the belief in violence as restorative” (p. 137). As Kimmel explains, these boys were

mercilessly and constantly teased, picked on, and threatened… because they were different from the other boys… Theirs are stories of “cultural marginalization” based on… enactment of codes of masculinity. And so they did what any self-respecting man would do in a situation like that—or so they thought. They retaliated… It was not because they were deviants, but rather because they were over-conformists to a particular normative construction of masculinity (Kimmel, 2010, p. 134).

Blood rituals may involve violence, but they also act as mechanisms of reciprocity and redress which stop the spread of violence. Identification with the victim, purification rituals, and adoption of the killer into the victim’s family are redressive mechanisms utterly lacking from modern mass shootings²². Vengeance killing is a way to discharge the affective intensity of death, but this can lead to further bloodthirst, requiring purification of the killer and the “absorption of alien blood into one’s own” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1947, p.11). But mass shooters are unable to perform the becoming-other of blood magic, for they are possessed by a culture-bound phantasy of aggrieved entitlement and restorative masculinity (Kimmel, 2010).

Thus the ‘lone-wolf’ theory “fails to hold true,” writes Petersman (2019), as mass shooters, like other terrorists “are part of society.” The ‘lone-wolf’ theory is complicated by the fact that some killers had accomplices (Columbine, Jonesboro), some were encouraged by peers (Bethel, Red Lake), and even more disturbing and difficult to account for, the role of social media. Violence obsessively played out in phantasy might become derealized, so that by the time the killer acts, reality is already shattered. As one shooter proclaimed after being apprehended “None of this is real” (Langman, 2009, p. 82).

THE UNCANNY RETURN AND THE MASS SHOOTER

The psychological consequence of surrender, the terror of self-abolition (Bersani, 1987), is too much to bear in a culture, such as ours, based on hyperbolic self-inflation, where the underside of this inflated self is a vast, unwanted emptiness, and lack of faith in the presence of the other. With little capacity to integrate this feeling into our lives, it registers as a catastrophic nameless dread that merely overwhelms. Eigen (2004) writes, “the ability to be disturbed is part of sensitivity” (p. 72). A corollary: the inability to tolerate disturbance leads to further insensitivity. Another corollary: efforts to disturb can be attempts to re-sensitize the self.

Might a shooter wishing to blow people away to make room for his own inflated ego, also wish to suck people into himself to fill an emptiness with no bounds, a void with no creative jouissance, a dead womb-self that feeds on boundless destruction? What if the assault rifle was, in unconscious phantasy, an all-powerful vacuum, an extension of a voracious mouth that sucks in others, trying desperately to full-fill a wish to obliterate intolerable false self-feeling through the total incorporation and annihilation of the other? Perhaps it’s a perverse attempt to approach feeling real. Afterall, ours is a consumer spree-culture of shooting and shopping, habituating us to short-lived, disposable ways of relating to the world and each other.

The shooter is in a dual position, consciously empowered ‘above’ his victims, but unconsciously ‘below’ them in his phantasy of their contact with the sacred. His envious attack (Klein, 1975) destroys a source of good feeling as a defense against the dreadfulness of its lack. For example, the Sandy Hook shooter, in first murdering his mother, and then using her gun to kill children at the school he once attended, was perhaps attacking a lost or never-achieved, nor achievable, innocence, envious of a primordial union with the world that childhood represents; in the case of various shootings in places of worship, what is attacked is an envied holy communion of fellow worshippers with god; in the case of attacks on revelers at social gatherings (Pulse Nightclub and Las Vegas), what is attacked is an envied state of communal ecstasy. In phantasy, these victims are engaged in activities that allow for cosmic contact, channeling sacred feeling unavailable to the attacker, and therefore they must die. Sinking his teeth into the certainty of their destruction counters his own fleeting, fading, absent life-feeling. He vampirically feeds off the destruction of that from which he is barred. The way the shooter intrudes into these scenes, the way his bullets pierce the flesh of his victims, and the way the recorded images of this violence pierce our own lives, spreading through our social media feeds, betrays a puncturing quality, a punctuation through which life-force both enters and quickly drains. Therein occurs a thwarted transfer of feeling, in and of itself a repetition of past trauma. The adrenaline rush of the killer breaks open a channel of ecstatic experience otherwise unavailable to him, but it does not connect him in any sustainable way; rather it is solitary, murderous, cruel and monolithically toxic in its destructiveness. And it is relevant here to highlight, too, mass shootings in Western civilization taking place beyond America’s physical borders, those which fall under the rubric of ethno-fascist attacks; for example, the 2011 Norway attacks, the 1994 Hebron massacre, and the Christchurch mosque shootings, much like the Charleston church shooting, express the sacred-envying dynamics just described, but also enlist these in the service of, and synergize them with, organizing phantasies of violence purifying and fortifying ethno-national identity, with such identity circumscribed absolutely by ideologies of blood.

What other meanings are hidden within these acts? A yearning for recognition, a release of something pent up, disconnected, an attempt to reinvigorate a circulatory flow? Where does this blood thirst come from? What is it? It seems the failure to fully honor something with sacred value can transform it into something psychopathically killer. This fact is demonstrated in the oldest extant poem of Anglo-Saxon culture, suggesting roots running deep through layers of our history and into reservoirs of the mythic. In the Old English epic of Beowulf (Heaney, 2000), we are presented with the “prowler through the dark” and “fiend out of hell” (p. 9), Grendel. His presence is often coupled with vivid depictions of wild plants and animals, waters and winds. Grendel is himself a bloodthirsty intrusion from the wilds of the surrounding marsh, a menacing other, “the dread of the land” (p. 51) personified, wreaking havoc upon a gilded age of wealth celebrated in the great mead hall—an edifice built in defiance of cyclicity and death, intended to last forever. Grendel’s attacks on the communal revelry are acts of envy, a consequence of his being unwelcomed by men. He is made into a monster, an excluded other, a monsterman reminding the merrymen that there’s no food without slaughter. He reminds the revelers of bone-cracking, bloody breakdown, and dismemberment that contribute to transformations and reversals of being: the feasters become the feast, bodies and roles are turned inside-out. But this re-minding force is unwelcome, unable to fully penetrate the “cloud-murk” (p. 49) of man, and in its exclusion it intensifies, and terrifies.

Grendel’s envious and cannibalistic rampages are an ontological obscenity (Bersani, 1987), utterly confounding the revelers. Grendel, starving for recognition, is like a prototypical mass shooter, a bloody disruptor who demands we make sense of his actions. If an ability to be disturbed is part of sensitivity (Eigen, 2004), to what is Grendel trying to sensitize us?

Grendel is the diabolization of nature, and our link to it, returned with a vengeance. It is this diabolic presence which conjures Beowulf, who after fighting three incarnations of the monster (Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon), drawn each time further into the wilds, finally dies entwined with the monstrous other in a sort of conjugal embrace. Perhaps it is this reciprocity that elevates Beowulf to the status of hero and re-memorializes his more-than-human adversaries. The slain dragon, a symbol of cyclicity, returns to the “flow and backwash” (Bersani, 1987, p. 211) of being. Its treasure, too, returns to the land from which it originated along with Beowulf’s burned bones. The bond between beast and human, body and earth, blood and gold, is consecrated through death and a ritual giving-back. Both the dragon and Beowulf balance tendencies gone awry, canceling each other out. The story can be read as restoring the basic value of giving and receiving disrupted by the accumulative effects of polarized exclusion, re-establishing human synchrony with the world. It is also a warning about the psychopathic violence that results when the human soul is unplugged from nature’s periods, that is, when the sacred is denied. Beowulf’s final adversary, the dragon, unites horror with the majesty of the natural elements (variously called sky-roamer, barrow-dweller, fire-breather). Despite the mutual-balancing of the story’s end, and the re-establishing of something sacred, we are left with a sense of doom; Beowulf’s death invites mass murder, pillaging, and human catastrophe, seen in visions by a mourner at his funeral. The story shifts away from mythic symbols linking humans to the wild and becomes a description of historical facts. The story itself is a fight between pagan and Christian attitudes toward nature, as it was likely written down by a monk who makes his own explanatory intrusions.²³

There are countless ways the visions from the poem’s end have been realized throughout history. It appears we have difficulty learning from experience, which according to Bion (1962, 1977), issues from the capacity to think, itself only possible when we are able to immerse ourselves in experience, to tolerate its inherent frustrations. But how can we hope to tolerate experience when revisited by countless horrors? Freud (1914) writes that what cannot be remembered is repeated, acted out through a form of anti-remembering that re-lives, instead of lives with, trauma. Eigen (2006) notes how identifications with the aggressor feed into mass hallucinatory processes that fuzz, dull and numb, de-sensitizing us with “a kind of psycho-social soundproofing” (p. 4). A cloud-murk of toxic particles billows from our psyches, polluting our senses, seeping into our ideas, emotions, technologies, air, water and soil. The resulting inability to make sense of traumatic impacts creates wave after wave of shock, perpetuating horror in ever more catastrophic and uncanny forms, yet we are unable to see or feel the magnitude of it all. Unable to think, accretions of overwhelming stimuli, psychically undigested, must be evacuated. According to Bion (1962), this happens through an excess of projective identification, dominated by omnipotent and envious phantasies. The material consequences: an island of plastic the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean; extreme floods, massive wildfires; one million species on the brink of extinction.

Thinking, memory, imagination, dreaming and generally speaking alpha-function, are for Bion (1977) part of a psychic digestive process transforming the stuff of raw psychic life into that which sustains contact with the staggering complexity of how it feels to be a human alive in the world. In short, it allows life to be more fully experienced. Ritual, and specifically those involving blood magic, provides alpha-function on the level of culture, a means of dreaming through which conscious and unconscious, self and other, life and death, human and nonhuman can make contact. In many cultures the periodic menstrual flow of blood that begins at menarche and ends with menopause has provided a rhythmic opening and shutting of this threshold into a sacred realm where the dissolution and entwinement of self/other and life/death is more vividly felt, and therefore less prone to denial and other forms of phallocentric hierarchical subjugation. Periodic access to these dimensions is a vital component of human being. Chris Knight (1988, 1991) has theorized that menstrual synchrony may be the very origin of culture. Similarly, Silvia Federici (2019) underscores the power of women throughout history in commoning reproduction, in bringing human life out of self-centered oblivion and cultivating an attitude of cooperative responsibility to each other, the land, the forests, the waters and the animals. The denial of this power generally, and of menstrual synchrony specifically, is an act of violence resulting in the contagious spread of ever more violence.

Are mass shootings the hauntings of historical trauma (Santiago, 2019, 2021), of slavery and genocide? A reliving of countless Tulsas, Jamestowns, Wounded knees, Tuskegee studies, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fires? We might consider these our nation’s chosen traumas (Volkan, 1999, 2019), and the mass shootings, then, as reproducing the damaged mental representations that issue from them. The mass shooting is yet another means, public and spectacular (other than the private though large-scale “depositing” articulated by Volkan) through which the affects, attitudes, and destructive images pertaining to these originary traumas are transmitted from one generation to the next. Paradoxically, beyond its destructive effect, the chosen trauma has an “unseen power to link the members of the group together and give them a sense of persistent sameness” (Volkan, 1999, p. 46). Thus, there is a kind of perverse solidarity provoked by the mass shooter: by being on the receiving end of his violent projections, we all become potential victims caught in his sights, reduced to the violated and brutalized other upon which the Western subject depends (but only in a dissociated or actively hostile state.)²⁴ Indeed, the archetypal image of the Western gunslinger exerts tremendous force within the American psyche, and has had a very real influence on American domestic and foreign policy for well over a century. Richard Slotkin (1973, 1998) highlights how this archetype feeds an organizing phantasy of American identity—with roots deeply embedded in the Puritan attitudes discussed above—that violence is regenerative, and that American life must be sustained through the violent persecution, at home and abroad, of the devilish other.

This latter point touches on a more fundamental cultural ill that the shooter, with his state of mind and horrific act, represents to us. The Western subject suffers from a pervasive soul blindness (Kohn, 2013), a kind of “cosmological autism” (Kohn, 2007, p. 9), with a self radically cut-off from all others and from the human--more-than-human ecology of selves with which we are interdependent. Searles (1970) conceives of the autistic mode of relating as a defensive distortion of symbiotic relatedness. It is with the latter that our culture struggles, failing to recognize interdependence and bi-directionality as primordial fact. From within the autistic state any contact from the outside (i.e., an other) is intolerable, as it threatens the subject’s narcissistic equilibrium by forcing him to submit what is known and relatively structured for what is radically alien and disorganizing. Any such intrusions from outside register as uncanny, often persecutory, and thus need to be ignored, destroyed or expelled as quickly as possible. This autistic state, and the impingements to its going-on-being against which it defends, are instantiated just as much in the mentality and behavior of the shooter vis-à-vis his victims as in the reactions and attitudes of his victims vis-à-vis the shooter. The latter point is less obvious and resists conscious integration: our position as victim in relation to the shooter, who threatens horrific interruption of our daily lives, equals that of the cosmically autistic subject unable to tolerate recognition of his deeply entangled relationship to the other qua abject intrusion.

Thus, we argue, the mass shooter is not an anomaly of American culture, rather, he epitomizes many of its core aspects, ever-present but dissociated from daily life. Presented to us in uncanny form, he is a bizarre object (Bion, 1977) of the American psyche, magnifying our most grotesque tendencies for domination. But the shooter’s paranoia has a kernel of truth, illuminating an intuition we so readily deny: that “everything is connected” (Pynchon as cited in Bersani, 1989, p. 102), and more and more by human systems of control. Often roiled with shame, and hyper-plugged-in to the virtual “web” of life that leaves them socially and sensuously dislocated, shooters plot their revenge while obsessing over past mass murders, ghoulish in the pallid glow of a computer screen. A social yearning inherent to the act may further be evidenced by the fact that shootings tend to happen in clusters, and that shooters tend to mimic each other. Hungry for recognition, they feed and are fed by the spiritual pollution of murder that spreads virally through “media contagion,” and through online communities that mirror and incubate their hostility. Mass shooters are often obsessed with their own purity and hatred for the impure which calls for total destruction of the other. This is American exceptionalism taken to its logical extreme: a rugged individualism with an AR-15, a disavowed impotence and dependence, turned outward, projected into the flesh of others through bullets and fire. It is a perverse form of contact, fueled by social isolation and a wish for notoriety. They strike out blindly for (and against) the world of intimacy, with none of the art, theater, or ritual that hold open a space for the other. Theirs is an anti-gesture of hospitality, a last-ditch effort to hold the door open, which ironically seals it off forever.

Quality of memory plays an essential role in determining the quality of any given experience. In the absence of sense-making rituals and their corresponding mnemic potency, we have murky accumulated masses of undigested facts, which semi-organize into compulsive repetitions that puncture our collective psycho-social numbness with fleeting yet overwhelming shocks in a broken attempt to remember traumatic impacts. Ritual provides the possibility of a mutually permeable contact-barrier (Bion, 1977) that synchronizes and syncopates the relationship between human life and the natural world into a mythopoetic physis that integrates each, including the tensions and conflicts of difference. This contact allows for a lived awareness of cyclical rhythms and reciprocal flows among the flurry and flux of life. It does not exclude exclusion, but neither does it absolutize it. In the West, however, our distance from the sacred and from the body-as-nature is ubiquitous, evident in the corporatization of medicine, and its approaches to birth, death and physical illness—events which are often far removed from families' direct experience, leaving little opportunity to directly participate in these profound moments. In our culture death and becoming are denied, and with them the inextricableness of human and nonhuman, of self and other. Such relatedness entails breakdown, surrender, destruction, and the continual giving away that is fundamental to all life. Welcoming these dimensions of being means unleashing experiences that can flood and disturb. Their denial, however, short-circuits a more robust contact and involvement with the inner and outer cosmos. Our culture is in an uncanny position without the dreaming-mediation provided by ritual, for without dreaming, Bion (1977) says, we can neither go to sleep, nor can we wake up.

CODA

The mass shooter betrays aspects of the inner soul of America. Represented and expressed at one register are repetition compulsions (and expulsions) of colonial violence, crystallizing various toxic attitudes, such as puritanical intolerance for otherness, which are fundaments of mainstream Euro-American culture; at another register can be identifications with the aggressor of personal trauma (domestic violence, child abuse, bullying); at another register is a perverse rugged individualism run amok. There are other registers, other meanings, all mixed in, interrelated, influencing each other. Easy access to, and fetishizing of, guns are both consequence and catalyst. A distorted relationship to time and place is another, which we link to a lack of rituals around blood magic that make room for and meaning of the negative sacred. We’ve attempted to explore the ways many cultures honor through blood ritual a fluid and sacred bipolarity (e.g., inside-outside, life-death, giving-receiving) and how these blood rituals can function to bind and synchronize people to nature's periods, and rhythms. In our own culture this fluid bipolarity is largely disturbed and repudiated, and as a result we are locked into a defensive flight from ecological realities whose denial returns them to us in various forms of killer vengeance as we hurtle toward climate catastrophe (see Kassouf, 2022).

A year and seven months before the terrifying act, one of the Columbine shooters wrote in his journal: “Being made a human without the possibility of BEING human.” (Langman, 2019, p. 6). The passive voice suggests paranoia: something or someone is orchestrating his alienation. We must ask, being made by whom? The nuclearized family? The school system? The social order? History itself? Are the shooters possessed, not by an evil tiger spirit like Malaysian natives running amok,²⁵ but by the rottenness inside Western culture? What would this diagnosis mean in terms of accountability? What is gained or lost when we move from pathology to demonology (Santiago, 2021)? A shift from the individual psyche to the relationships which compose that psyche, perhaps, but we suffer from a more total state of dissociation, with no end in sight to the homicidal mania it yields. The shooter writes of “infinite sadness” (p. 6) and wanting to “find love” (p. 6). He describes himself as “the most miserable existence in the history of time” (pp. 5–6). In an entry from two years before the shooting, he wonders “how and when I got so fucked up… When Dylan Bennet Klebold got covered up by this entity containing Dylan’s body” (p. 2). His sense of disembodiment is familiar to us. We too are possessed by the social, as images and words of virulent hatred take on a life of their own. By his own account, the Charleston shooter was triggered by the murder of Trayvon Martin, which prompted him to type in the words “black on white crime” into Google: “I have never been the same since that day.” It was his duty to “take it to the real world”: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.” (Strauss, 2015). As materiality and virtuality become further split, virtuality takes on a regressive quality, not only reflecting but producing the destructive realities discussed here. As Blanchot (1982) says, “man is unmade according to his image” (p. 260). Can mass shootings somehow be a perverse and futile attempt to combat the increasing disembodiment through the materiality of blood? It is this materiality that is the link between various fields (menstruation, childbirth, initiation, sacrifice, hunting, war, mourning, harvest) thought to be distinct by the Western mind. Until we are ready to face our collective denial in the mirror of history, we are doomed to repeat the sentiment expressed by the Las Vegas shooter’s brother: “It’s like an asteroid just fell out of the sky. We have no reason, rhyme, rationale, excuse... there's just nothing” (Marino, 2017).

Notes

• 1 Michael L. Melmed, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University where he works with traumatized toddlers, children and adults, and teaches and supervises clinicians engaged in this same work. He is a psychoanalytic candidate in the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. His areas of interest include the relationship between sense-perception, imagination and trauma. He maintains a private practice in New York City.

• 2 Christopher Santiago, PhD, is a sociocultural anthropologist, artist and poet who has taught at several universities and completed years of fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his research focuses on peasant resistance to transnational gold mining in Cajamarca, Peru. He also investigates the phantasm and disenchantment in modernity. Santiago has been an active member in the Brooklyn music and arts scene for over a decade. He exhibits his visual art in galleries throughout New York State. Santiago is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at The College of Staten Island, CUNY.

• 3 “Referring back to the spirit of the great reformers, one can even say that by accepting the extreme consequences of a demand for religious purity it destroyed the sacred world, the world of nonproductive consumption, and handed the earth over to the men of production, to the bourgeois” (Bataille, 1949, p. 127).

• 4 “Whatever is not quite assimilated or infringes the commands in which the progress of centuries has been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and arouses a compulsive aversion” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1947, pp. 147–148).

• 5 We see Fascism and Colonialism as intertwined, like Fanon (1963): “What is Fascism but colonialism at the very heart of traditionally colonialist countries?” (p. 48). It is exactly this type of international anti-fascist, anti-colonial solidarity that our paper promotes.

• 6 In the context of the Holocaust, Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) write, “When all the horror of prehistory which has been overlaid with civilization is rehabilitated as rational interest by projection onto the Jews, there is no restriction.” (p. 186). Absolute exclusion and persecution of the other unleashes a violence that is limitless and taboo shattering.

• 7 “I can’t take anymore. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where man fabricates ideals—it seems to me it stinks of nothing but lies” (Nietzsche, 1908, p. 47).

• 8 “My genius is in my nostrils” (Nietzsche, 1908, p. 326).

• 9 “The emphasis is not on the receiving but on the giving, on the sincerity of intention. It is a question, Nuer say, of the heart or, as we would say, of disposition” (Evans-Pritchard, 1956, p. 279). Taussig (1980) cautions that exchange of this sort is always marked by ambiguity: “One is as likely to be eaten by the gods as to be fed by them” (p. 195).

• 10 Victor Turner’s (1967, p. 97) formulation for Douglas’ insights regarding dirt as matter out of place.

• 11 The etymology of the word sacred carries within it this bipolar ambiguity. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sacred.

• 12 “Ayllu is like a weaving, and all the beings in the world— people, animals, mountains, plants etc.— are like the threads, we are part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone, just as a thread by itself is not a weaving, and weavings are with threads, a runa [indigenous Quechua person] is always in-ayllu with other beings— that is ayllu” (de la Cadena, 2015, p. 44).

• 13 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1941) writes, “To sacrifice and to be sacrificed are essentially the same” (p. 359). Similarly, Sylvain Levi (1898) observes that, “The only authentic sacrifice would be suicide” (pp. 32–33).

• 14 Between the cutting of lines on the boy’s forehead and his ceremonial emergence from seclusion he is known as cot [hornless cow or ox], and the Nuer call the cutting of their favorite oxen’s horns, “the cutting of the marks of manhood” (Evans-Pritchard, 1956, p. 256).

• 15 Anthropologists mistakenly named these people the Kwakiutl, though this is only one band of the Kwakwaka'wakw. It is not an overstatement to say that Anthropology owes its very existence to these people, first in the work of Boas (1930), and then Benedict (1934) and Lévi-Strauss (1963).

• 16 Adorno and Horkheimer (1947), writing about a tree invested with mana, reveal the apparent contradiction that magic makes possible: “it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical” (p. 11).

• 17 These sisters are variously named the Wawilak, Wauwalak, Wauwelak, etc.

• 18 Formerly known as the Murngin.

• 19 Menstrual taboos do not necessarily equate with male dominance. Sanday (1981) writes, “There are nearly as many [menstrual] restrictions in societies where the sexes [sic] are equal as in societies where sexual [sic] inequality prevails” (p. 105). See her book, chapters 1 and 5 for ethnographic examples.

• 20 “Chaosmos” is James Joyce’s(1992) neologism, combining chaos with cosmos. Deleuze and Guattari use this term to elucidate their concept of the “plane of immanence” (1994, p. 208).

• 21 Charles Strozier (2002) writes: “The notion of the apocalyptic, as I use it in this sense, is any idea or image that is total, absolute, and world ending while at the same time part of a yearned-for process of renewal. From the outset, Americans have imagined ourselves saved by the blood and regenerated and redeemed through violence (p. 287). … What may be the single most important fact of the [Columbine] massacre is that Eric and Dylan deliberately chose Hitler’s birthday, April 20, on which to carry it out (p. 289). …. Keep in mind that that Nazi period in German history between 1933 and 1945 was by far the most important secular apocalyptic event of the 20th century. The goal was to create a thousand-year Reich and to do it by killing entirely all forms of so-called life unworthy of life, lebensunwertes Leben, to regenerate the Aryan race in the blood of vast human sacrifice (Lifton, 1986). Apocalyptic myths, almost by definition, embrace violence as sacred and idealistic (Lifton, 1979; Lifton and Markusen, 1990; Lifton and Mitchell, 1995). As a Christian fundamentalist woman I interviewed in my own field work (Strozier, 1994, p. 89) put it: “You cannot go over it, you cannot go alongside it, but you must go through it. You must go through the blood” (Strozier, 2002, p. 289).”

• 22 Some practices of remediation and redress include Aztec warriors wearing the skins of their captives for twenty days, such as during the Feast of the Flaying of Men. The warrior's kin lamented as they ate the maize stew and the flesh of his captive, but the captor was excluded from this festivity, remarking “shall I perchance eat my very self?” (Clandinnen, 1985, p. 72). Among the Wendat/Huron (Brébeuf, 1636), murderers sit with their victims' corpses draped above them for days, overwhelmed by the stench, in order to come to terms with the consequences of their actions, taking in the Other through smell. The Iroquois (Sanday, 1981, p. 28) and the Amazonian Atchei (Clastres, 1977, p. 261) are two groups where victims' families will adopt the killer: the killer “dies at the same time as his victim” (p. 261). Only the grieving mother can “cause him to be reborn” (p. 262, emphasis in original).

• 23 Our reading of Beowulf is generously influenced by Stephen Jenkinson and the Orphan Wisdom School, to whom we are deeply grateful.

• 24 Bataille identified this denial at the heart of modernity as a curse: only by excluding the slaughterhouse are the “good people” able to “bear their own ugliness,” in this way, they “exile themselves” in a world “where there is no longer anything terrible” (Bataille, 1997, p. 22). The headline, “A suburban high school turned into a killing field,” (Sackur, 1999) epitomizes the uncanny return of the repressed.

• 25 Since its “discovery” two centuries ago by colonial figures like Captain Cook, amok was thought to be a symptom of so-called primitive culture (Saint Martin, 1999). Psychiatry followed suit, classifying the amok as a culture-bound syndrome: “culture was considered the predominant factor in its pathogenesis” (p. 66). Westernization supposedly eliminated these cultural factors, making modern occurrences “almost unheard of” (p. 66), but then why is mass violence increasing in industrial societies? What will it take to turn the clinical-cultural gaze onto ourselves?