Scorn and Adamantium
Scorn is highly effective against Patriarchs, because they are all scared little boys possessed by the Father Complex. That’s why you aren’t allowed to use scorn, especially against Patriarchs. They try to make it seem like precious, fragile women can’t handle scorn (“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), but that’s not the case—it’s patriarchs who can’t handle it. Scorn reprograms patriarchs.
To scorn is to assume the Father position over someone, and implicitly doing that is exactly how patriarchs maintain their cushy social status at the top of the hierarchy, whilst pretending they are lovable affable Chads. Scorn is not allowed in the room, or within 500 miles of a patriarch, because—they say—negative emotions are intrinsically unreasonable, and besides, anyone who would get angry can’t possibly be a good or intelligent person or worth listening to. So please come back when you can be reasonable, meaning not angry, and unscornful—they say.
Scorn is the Achilles’ heel of the morally certitudinal. It rewrites them through sheer usurpation of the Father Complex. They have given the Father Complex root access to their system—and so when anyone speaks in its voice, it rewrites their buffers.
Therefore, the language of the Father is itself Scorn; and correspondingly, Scorn must also have a good or positively-valenced form, which we can recognize when we see it.
This form as Adamance. To be adamant is to willfully demand change and to refuse rejection, in full consciousness, having already fully-thought-out the situation and all of your opponent’s credible and uncredible counter-claims and reasons-for-dismissal. To be adamant is to say, “I matter, no matter what you think, say, or do—and I’m going to keep telling you this until you listen, (merely) think through my intended meaning, and start acting like what I say could at least in principle matter, too.”
Adamance is indefatigable, because one’s wishes, desires, and opinions do not evaporate simply by virtue of being ignored or suppressed. To ignore or suppress someone’s authentic speech or emotional communication is to mistake form for content, and to merely defer the act of listening to a more convenient time. It is not an act of listening or care to suppress or ignore another person—it’s gaslighting.
This is why we must actually read and think about the things we read, not merely scan and discard based upon keywords.
The application of this realization is to work to become conscious of when we are speaking scornfully, and when we are not. The banality of scorn wears at us because scorn has become commonplace, even everyday. When people talk about the news—and this has always been true in my lifetime—they speak of distant others with scorn. When people talk about “the other party”, they speak almost invariably with scorn. All this does is establish an economy of offloading affect to an imagined (because not present) other, a psychic holding cell in which hated vibes are skillfully and repeatedly re-hidden (like a sausage).
The Adamantium blade is a weapon forged of adamantium, the substance of adamance. It cannot necessarily cut through everything—very nearly so—but what it can do is ultimately resist being-cut-through, to any degree of sharpness or hardness. There is nothing which can break or crack an Adamantium blade, when it is being wielded by its owner (without hubris, undue hatred, or false consciousness).
An Adamantium blade must be cleaned and sheathed between uses—and reverse-blade technique is permissible, even preferable. Therefore, an upgrade to the Adamantium blade is the Adamantium Claws—perhaps not quite so low-brow as they once seemed, mm?
Wolverine is an etymological doppelganger of lupine, meaning, literally, “wolf-like”—And rabid wolflikeness (or wolverinity) traces back to Lyssa (λύσσα, “rabid frenzy”), goddess of rabies and rage. And Lyssa—long-associated with animal rage—bears an overt graphophonic resonance with—lykos (λύκος, “wolf”), the origin of our word lycanthrope—“werewolf”.
What is characteristic about the Werewolf is that he (or she) undergoes the transformation back and forth between man and wolf, repeatedly. Cats are liminal beings—their claws are always ready to come out; they are always possessed of a healthy self-respect and adamance—but for dogs, whose claws do not retract, their wolf-phase must wax and wane as an attitude.
The patron of the werewolf is Hekate, night-mother, night-caster (or striker, keener) or -barker (“Latravit Hecates turba”—“Hekate’s crowd/pack barked”——Seneca, Oedipus 569), “leader of dogs” (Hekate Skylakagetis, “She who leads the whelps/hounds.”—and an echo of Scylla). In the PGM IV hymn, Hecate is described as “[having] the voice of dogs” and imagoes of her to be graven with “the left face that of a dog,” (“and the right that of a goat”—from PGM IV, and extant—the Greek Magical Papyri—Papyri Graecae Magicae). As a triple goddess, this also invites comparisons with Cerberus, three-headed guard-dog of the underworld. Dogs were sacrificed to her on the wayside (e.g., Pausanias on Colophon), and she was said by contemporary magicians to send attacks of nocturnal delerium and night-running frenzy (νυκτιπλόκαμον λύσσαν—nyktiplokámon lýssan—“night-entangling rabid frenzy” —Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes 722)—which they treated by purification rites (—Hippocrates, Morb. Sacr.). She was said to manifest in the barking of packs of dogs, to be attended by dogs (καὶ τῇ Ἑκάτῃ φασιν ἕπεσθαι κύνας μελαίνας φοβεράς—“…fearsome black dogs follow Hekate” —Schol. Lycophr.), and the shriek of a dog would accompany her appearance. The Cult of Thessaly was a site of convergence for Hecatian witchcraft and legends of wolf-transformation.
Self-defense is about punching back when someone punches you, and not punching back at other times—in other words, precisely about developing and exercising the discernment to know when to take the claws out, and when to put them away. Others may tell us we were wrong, that we shouldn’t have defended ourselves, used our claws—but they would be wrong, because I think I can tell just fine for myself when to use my claws, thank you very much.
And so you see, self-defense and “the claws coming out” is also the site of the birth of individual self-respect, borne of self-recognition: recognition of oneself as an object, a fragile object thus in need of protection—and a good object, an object thus deserving of some amount of protection. Whatever the other factors—the world out there, the value or goodness or fragility of those others attacking me—one thing is certain—I deserve to live.
So the claws come out—in response to disrespect, which is interpersonal invalidation. To invalidate someone means to remove the semantic ground they stand on—to give them no quarter. This threatens a way of life, and, believing they deserve to live (their way of life, i.e., the only or best way they are currently capable of imagining to live), it is only natural this would trigger a rabid response.
So, rabidity for me, but not for thee—that is the byline of the bourgeois, the faux-settled, the mock-tranquil. As long as you only get rabid at them, you’re fine. But get rabid at one of the Unrabid, one of Us, and suddenly, you are out! Thus, scapegoating is closely-related to rabidity, and was borne of the very same self-interest that compels us to self-defense—yet in the case of scapegoating, individual safety and identity have been projected upon the group, and so group members (who scapegoat) become rabid when the group is invalidated, and do not become rabid when they are individually invalidated—that’s the tell.
So, whether or not scapegoating (i.e., social murder in the name of the group) is allowed within a given discursive sphere, and who is permitted as a valid target, is usually a matter of group versus individual perspectives dominating over a group’s ideology (and thus the ideology of its most plentiful or loudest members).
Bringing us back to Achilles, Hekate, and the matter of patricide (or god-slaying), we find in the PGM IV the following curious passage: “Your ankle is wolf-shaped … wherefore they call you Hekate.” Now, having traced our circuitous route through myth, you can see how my (wholly unintentional) chekhoving of “Achilles’” worked out, more than serendiptously: Hekate’s ankle is wolfshaped—it is Adamantium—she stands up for herself.
Thus, the mysteries of Hekate were part of the early origins of the Ego, and Hekate’s initiations herself were likely given to those who might need protection in the night—those little women or soft-hearted intellectuals whose very life or sexual safety might depend upon their ability to ‘let the wolf out’ instead of cowering, when push comes to shove. Hekate was a poniard kept close to the breast.
Now, everyone is a becoming-adamantium, in this day and age. Cut-tendon or be cut—no ankle is safe! So we must test our ankles, test our ability to stand adamantly, lest we stumble when the inevitable dirk-possessed-zealot nips at our heels, thinking everything is a target. No, we must be selective with our claws, so that they remain pristine and sharpened.
Patriarchs are these dirk-zealots, poking everyone with their little Mr. Pointy as if there’s a fire sale on being right. When regular interactions are laden with contempt, where every assent or dissent is padded with a “reason” that refers to some absolute condition or group value, when any dissent against dissent threatens to trigger the eruption of countless crocodiles from the placid lake—then we know we are deep in boug-country—and no law can protect you from their Castle Doctrine—which is—“Shit first, ask questions later.” We can thus conclude with the realization that when someone consistently feels threatened by scorn directed at unjust authority or authorities, they are unconsciously identifying not just with the authority, but with its unaccountability (and thus literally its unjustness).
Nephthys, an Egyptian goddess of night-wandering and corpse-protection, and who guards the jackal, a wild canid (“Thy [the deceased king’s] face is like that of a jackal … Isis is before thee; Nephthys is behind thee.” —Pyramid Texts), serves as an earlier precursor of these themes in Hekate’s cultus. This ink-and-mummy girl of the funerary rites served as a liminal threshold-crossing moment for humanity itself, as these tendencies toward self-defense coalesced, for the first time, as conscious symbolism revolving around canids, death, transformation, and transgression (literally, “across-going”—as in ‘transgressing the threshold of death’).
So, the next time you have an ax to grind—give it an extra scrape across the rasp—for Nephthys, for Hekate, and for every one of the meek who was taught with violence that to be meek meant to be scared.
I am Nephthys, your beloved sister!
Your foe is fallen, he shall not be!
I am with you, your body-guard,
For all eternity!
—The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys