MANNERBUND AND HOMOSEXUALITY

MANNERBUND
ASPECTS OF MALE MYSTERY CULTS (published in New Imperium magazine March 2006)
Alisdair_Clarke@hotmail.com

Homosexuals have a long and honourable tradition as culture-bearers, and for fighting for and defending their tribes and later, nations. Now, when the survival and evolution of Western Civilization itself is at stake, the duty of all brave, aware, truthful and well-meaning gay men is self-evident. Homosexuals must act as white blood cells, ready to attack any invasion of the Western body politic.

Theory of Mannerbund

The consequences of the Neolithic agricultural revolution at first resulted in a mean and squalid life for Europeans. Archaeological studies of skeletons show that the first farmers had more nutrition-related diseases, and died younger, than their Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. Labour was intensive, people barely scratched a subsistence livelihood form the land, in contrast to hunter-gatherers who had spent little more than an hour a day working for all their requirements. Social organization was basic; nuclear families in huts wallowing in drudgery had no time for politics and higher civilization.

As farming techniques slowly improved, groups of men were able to escape the social domesticity and relentless toil to start to build alternative social and political structures that went beyond the basic demands of the nuclear family, reproduction and subsistence farming. A new, superior and more complex human organization became possible. Defence of the tribe against other marauding MANNERBUND was the chief priority, acting as a catalyst to further refinement.

As the radical Italian traditionalist Julius Evola states, “It was this MANNERBUND, in which the qualification of “man” had simultaneously an initiatory (i.e. sacred) and a warrior meaning, that wielded the power in the social group or clan. This MANNERBUND was characterized by special tasks and responsibilities; it was different from all other societies to which members of the tribe belonged. In this primordial scheme we find the fundamental ‘categories’ differentiating the political order from the ‘social’ order. First among these is a special chrism – namely, that proper to ‘man’ in the highest sense of the word (vir was the term employed in Roman times) and not merely a generic homo: this condition is marked by a spiritual breakthrough and by detachment from the naturalistic and vegetative plane. Its integration is power, the principle of command belonging to the MANNERBUND. We could rightfully see in this one of the ‘constants’ (i.e. basic ideas) that in very different applications, formulations and derivations are uniformly found in theory or, better, in the metaphysics of the State that was professed even by the greatest civilizations of the past.” (Julius Evola, MEN AMONG THE RUINS. Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, USA 2002). So, the MANNERBUND provides the very foundation for Western civilization. Evola again, “Anti-militaristic democracy is the expression of ‘society’ which, with its material ideals of peace or, at most, of wars waged to maintain peace, is opposed to the political principle that is, to the principle of the MANNERBUND, the shaping force of the State that has always depended on a warrior or military element, that cherished less material ideals, such as honour and superiority.” (MEN AMONG THE RUINS, as above).

MANNERBUND IN MYTH AND LEGENDS

The earliest Aryan myths, from India to Ireland, mention homosexual warrior bands. In the Indian Rig Veda, composed after the Aryan invasions (c1500bce) and the earliest of Hindu sacred texts, they are called gandharvas (divine youths) and maruts (storm gods, sons of Rudra the ithyphallic proto-Siva). Maruts, although they “adorned themselves like women” are essential in helping Indra to destroy the Soma-demon Vrtra, performing “joyous deeds in the ecstasy of drinking Soma”.

Centaurs and Western Philosophy

Gandharvas are a band of semi-divine men united in initiation. They are sometimes described as having horses’ heads and men’s bodies, and are educators of heroes. They are like centaurs in Greek mythology with the bodies of horses and the torsos and heads of men (the repeated reference to horses shows the importance of this animal in all Aryan cultures).

Chiron is the most famous of the centaurs, who nurtures and educates the homosexual hero Achilles using the gifts of wisdom and bone-marrow. Bone-marrow, though nutritious, is more probably a metaphor for semen: both are white and contained within the phallic bone. Chiron was also tutor to Asklepios, who is the son of Apollo and the Hellenic god of medicine. It seems more than likely that the men-only academia and symposia (originally, drinking bouts) of the Classical period, frequented by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, were vestiges of MANNERBUND customs.

Wolf Cults

That Greece had its own man-wolf cults (witness Lycaon, Tyrant of Arcadia – whence the word lycanthropy) is well-documented, but the pre-historical Classical legend relating most closely to the MANNERBUND is that of the Luperci. These were young men who gathered around Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome who had been brought up by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber.

One of early Rome’s more notorious legends concerns Romulus leading his Luperci’s to the abduction and subsequent rape of the Sabine women. The women were from a neighbouring tribe; the rapes were planned not for fun but very specifically to increase the numbers of the Roman tribe. Centuries later, during the height of the Empire, the Lupercalia was still celebrated as a fertility festival by gangs of naked young men running through the streets of Rome brandishing whips.

Those deadly enemies of the Romans, the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine, shared at least one similarity with the Imperium; their wolf-cults. Called Ulfhednar (=”wolf-skins”, because that is what they wore), they were composed of cult bands of warriors dedicated to Woden (Odin), who himself keeps two wolves, Geri and Freki (=”greedy”).

As late as 930ce King Harald I Haarfager (=Fairhair) employed Ulfhednar as his bodyguards. The Ulfhednar were not alone. Other Teutonic warrior-fraternities that we still know about include the Boar-warriors (the Sutton Hoo helmet found in East Anglia and now in the British Museum is crowned with the image of a boar), who fought in wedge-shaped formations called Svinfylking, and most famously of all the Berserkir (=”Bear-shirts”, from whom we get they expression “going beserk” – because that’s what they did in battle, usually naked).

These brutal MANNERBUND left their legacy to medieval Europe in heraldry and in the names of their chiefs, later kings of the earliest European family of nations. Bearskin hats are still worn by royal guards in Britain and Denmark.

Another lasting legacy to Europe from the MANNERBUND are the runes; runes are believed to be first spread around Europe by a group known as the Heruli, which means literally “belonging to the marauding band”. “Heri” means marauder, and it is from that word that modern English gets the verbs “to harry” and “to harass”. The Heruli were accused by the contemporary early church of practicing homosexuality, and Connell O’Donovan and Kris Kershaw have shown how their naming practices, cultic and runic practices, origin myth and the homosociality of their warrior culture strongly indicate they belong within the tradition of Aryan MANNERBUND.

Of particular relevance to Teutonic MANNERBUND generally and homosexuality are the observations of Germanic scholar Margaret C. Ross (Hildr’s Ring: A Problem in the Ragnarsdrapa, Medieval Scandinavia 6. 1973) concerning the Jardarmen ceremony, a rite of blood-brotherhood in which young male initiates were passed under three strips of turf, referred to as “earth torques”. The torque is a choker-ring, popular with Celts and Teutons, and Ross says that as the Jardarmen rite is “connected with ceremonies of fostbroedralag (foster-brotherhood), one might suggest that its significance in the initiation ceremony was anal rather than vaginal in that the boys might have participated in a rite of communal sodomy to mark their entry into adult male society”.

Legendary Celtic Mannerbund

A Celtic king whose name betrays its totem-animal-based MANNERBUND origins is that most illustrious king of all: Arthur (from Artois – bear). Arthur had his Knights of the Round Table, an idealized model of Imperial democratic governance; the full homosexuality of which is brought out in Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal.

Finn is the leader of a similar warrior-band, this time Irish; the Fena. As Peter Lambourn Wilson writes in PLOUGHING THE CLOUDS (City Light Books, San Francisco 1999), “The Fena are not as other mortals. Like Maruts and Gandharvas, we might call them demi-gods. Their feasting, drinking, hunting, brawling and fucking represent the raison d’etre of the Indo-European MANNERBUND – but their shape-shifting, their ambiguous relations with fairyland, and their poetic frenzies mark them as ‘divine youths’”.

Foster-brothers Cu Chulainn and Ferdia are two lovers in an Irish MANNERBUND who, due to the machinations of Queen Mebd of Connacht, are forced to fight on opposing sides. As Cu Chulainn says:

fast friend, forest companions
we made one bed and slept one sleep
in foreign lands after the fray.
Scathach’s pupils, two together,
we’d set forth to comb the forest.

After the first day of battle they met and kissed, but were denied sex although “their charioteers slept by the same fire”. This pattern is repeated on the second and third day, until on the fourth day Cu Chuliann slays Ferdia, exclaiming to the companion who he cradles, “O Ferdia! Your death will hang over me like a cloud forever”. The story recalls the lament of Achilles for Patroclus at Troy.

These relationships were by no means uncommon, as the evidence surviving into non-mythological, non-legendary, historical time demonstrates.

MANNERBUND IN HISTORY

In 371bce the Sacred Band of Thebes was formed in Hellas. This military unity, consisting of 150 pairs of male couples, was based on the belief that men fighting alongside their lovers would rather die that shame one another. The Sacred Band was annihilated thirty-three years later by Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, himself homosexual, at the Battle of Chaeronea. British historian Arnold J. Toynbee holds this defeat as responsible for the first fatal breakdown of the Hellenic civilization.

Celtic MANNERBUND made a number of successful raids into the Mediterranean world, sacking Rome in 390bce and Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi around a century later, before finally the tables were turned by Julius “Queen of Bithynia” Caesar. These raids gave Classical writers a chance to observe the behaviour of the Celts at close quarters. Aristotle wrote that, “The men are inclined to let themselves be dominated by women, this is not an unusual tendency amongst energetic warrior races. Apart, of course, from the Celts, who respect manly love quite openly, so to speak.”

Diodorus Siculus was even more explicit, describing Celtic warriors as sleeping on animal skins flanked by male lovers, “they abandon without qualm the bloom of their bodies to others [and] don’t think this is shameful”.

Norman nobles and the royal Norman court in London were regularly criticized by the Church for homosexuality, which perhaps developed from the Jardarmen rites of their not-so-distant Norse forefathers. Rufus (William II), England’s last homosexual pagan king, came in for particular opprobrium, partly because of the colourful, form-fitting clothes he favoured for himself and his butch companions.

Prince William was the nephew of Rufus: when he drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120ce Xian zealots believed the catastrophe to be divine punishment for on-board homosexual orgies.

[Sailors, specially pirates, have often taken on the appearance of floating MANNERBUND fuelled, in the famous words of Churchill’s assistant Anthony Montague-Browne, by “rum, sodomy and the lash.” Herulians were the earliest recorded Viking pirates, conducting raids along the Atlantic coast from Portugal to Denmark even before the final collapse of the Roman empire. Their social structure is best described as an anarchic democracy. This free-booting MANNERBUND spirit was once more unleashed in the Caribbean with the discovery of the New World. Companies of ships one again formed their own tiny democracies. Science Fiction author William Burroughs imagines an alternate utopian reality developed by swashbuckling homosexual pirates in CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT.

The enduring myth of Jason and the Argonauts is the supreme example of a maritime MANNERBUND, but instead of working as a free, independent collective, the Argonauts have a very specific function to perform for their civilization. So in the figure of Jason is combined the MANNERBUND archetype and the Faustian/ Promethean archetypes of the West.]

Normans were also notorious for their savage efficiency in battle, again a likely hang-over from the brutal MANNERBUND of their Scandinavian ancestors.

Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaw men living in the greenwood forest is perhaps the furthest we can track the traditional MANNERBUND into the very early modern period. As the leading authority on this people’s hero states, “One final characteristic of the early tales smacks of the household and of service: none of the outlaws has a family. Much is a miller’s son, but there is nothing of the miller. The treacherous prioress of Kirklees, Robin’s near-of-kin or cousin, is the only relative in the whole cycle. There are no parents, no wives and no children. Apart from the prioress, women scarcely figure at all.” “There is no Maid Marian. Marian only made her way into the legends via the May Games and that not certainly until the sixteenth century. It was not simply that Robin’s devotion to the Virgin Mother left no room for other women. It saw rather that there was no place for them in the context of the tales.” (J.C. Holt, ROBIN HOOD, Thames & Hudson London 1989). Of course Will Scarlet, Much the miller’s son and Little John are in there from the start!

Mannerbund in the future

By the end of the Nineteenth century, the process of abstracting MANNERBUND from the real world to the ideal world, to the realms of European Romanticism, was completed. In the Anglo-Saxon world we have the theories of Edward Carpenter (“Towards Democracy”) and the poems of Walt Whitman, notably the Calamus cycle in The Leaves of Grass. Here, Whitman talks of an “adhesive love” between men to build an organic, non-individualistic American republic.

A brave, more practical attempt was made by Hans Bluher and Wilhelm Jansen, founders of the Wandervogel during the Kaiserreich. Bluher’s romantic idealism was to meet with great success in his homeland over the following decades, cross-fertilizing with the unbroken spirit of returning WWI troops in the Freikorps. Lord Baden Powell watered-down many of Bluher’s ideas for a tame, still sadly Xian, British Empire. He also made the error of believing that ideals of honour, bravery and adventure were for malleable youths only and not full-grown men.
Perhaps the only place in Western culture where the MANNERBUND still thrives is also the most hopeful for the future; in the stories of Robert Heinlein, William Burroughs, comics and the internet: science fiction.