The Ascent of Men.
This is a post about YOU.
Or your son.
A. N. Other man in the modern world.
What is it to be a Man?
At the beginning of the year I made a podcast. My first. It was about me and about men.
I have had a lot of feedback from it and will write much over the next few days to incorporate some thoughts from that feedback.
I had been asked by my friends Christian J and John Dias, of MGTOW fame and well known and respected Mens’s Rights Advocates to explain my odd choice of MRA ‘name’; what significance it carries. You will all know of these men.
Christian has been a warrior from down-under for many years and has a particularly blunt and uncompromising stance against Feminism. He is actually a very nice man who loves his four daughters and even his ex !
John is a star of the MRM and the brains and brawn behind Misandry Review, which collates pertinent articles from across the web and plonks them in your email inbox. An invaluable service from a fine man. He is a Knight who serves.
I spoke of how I write under two names. Percy and Amfortas. They are related in a Great Allegorical Story of our Western Cultural era, one that is passing into oblivion, but remain Archetypes of all men. In that sense they are meaningful as an MRA.
All men have their story, no matter how different those men are or what their circumstances are. The stories are all similar. A man is a man.
Let me tell you about Percy and Amfortas and you will see what I mean. Charge you goblets gentlemen and pour a glass ladies.
Who defines a man?
The Greeks attempted to define what being a man is about through myths and stories, just as we do through television, plays, academic ramblings et al. But they were hampered by an early and barely glowing form of consciousness about the ‘self’.
They didn’t have the range of ‘languages’ and ‘jargon’ that we have. Thank goodness. The messages were clearer even if quite incomplete.
The wholeness and completeness of a man’s life journey was only slowly dawning on them and they had a peculiarly Asiatic tone. They looked East far more than west.
There were many stories about men as it was difficult to pin down his many aspects in just one tale. It wasn’t helped by Homer who struggled with integrating a whole person. His heroes had arms and legs which seemed to act independently of the man, and Gods seemed to have far too great a sway in a chap’s decisions and fate.
And oddly these heroic men were all ‘stageless’. Achilles was the same man when he was a boy. He was a ‘complete’, very much one-dimensional being without much discernable growth.
It is how many women quite blindly see men even today.
How many times has a chap heard woman dismiss and demean men with “Men !!!™ They are all just little boys”. They like that as it implies that they can feel superior and control men like they were children.
But while men looked ‘outward’ to the world – he was a traveler and explorer, an adventurer and one who overcame problems with his ingenuity – he barely looked inward at himself.
This was really odd as they had pretty well nailed down all the detail, all the major stages and attributes of a woman’s life in the myths of Psyche and Hera – the girl and the woman. Just two stories and brilliantly connected and integrated.
Psyche is a lovely young girl who absorbed some of the negative aspects of ‘femininity’ just as young men get negative aspects of ‘masculinity’. She suffers for it, just as modern girls are suffering.
Hera, the Mother Goddess, is in her typical ‘nasty’ mood most of the time but has some sound lessons about men and women. Not surprising as it is she who writes the rule-book for them !
All men – and woman – would do well to read these two stories as they tell most of what you need to know about women. I am sure some women will argue with this – they have ! I bet most have not read them though.
Women were well known in all their aspects two and a half thousand years ago. Personally I think that this is a natural response to the direction of a man’s interest. He looks at her and figures her out, before he has much of an idea about himself.
Men, the gender accused of being incommunicative, described women well while women were as incoherent in their communication as today. Just as noisy as well, of course. From a man’s point of view. And if women want to argue with that – they have, again – I ask them to simply ask themselves why.
Why are the ‘natural communicators’ making such a pigs ear of making themselves understood? Why is there so much conflict when women are so skilled at conflict resolution?
Women were seen as lovely when young and unspoiled and comparatively complex, though made quite dangerous and devious – by other women. The ‘women’s mafia’ is in fine fettle today.
Men are very complex, but not seen that way. They were ‘bound’ by Gods, including Powerful female Gods, but seen then as bits and pieces. If you read the Illiad, there is no reference to ‘I’. There was only a little personal ’ego’ or thoughfulness or self-direction. It was all ‘rules’ from above.
So it was another millennium and a half before Wolfram von Eschebach got around to looking very closely at men who were undergoing the transitional period of recognizing their consciousness and breaking free from women and their ways which had held sway through female Gods. The start of what might be called western ‘Patriarchy’.
It is relevant and still going on.
At that time in what we now call the end of the dark ages, men were beginning to discern themselves, just as they were changing. Men were starting to look at themselves and inside themselves.
There have been subsequent changes over the last thousand years and these were documented in stories too. The Three Great describers of men as they have moved through two dimensional to three and latterly to a complete four dimensional man are Parzival, The Man of La Mancha and Faust.
I recommend any young man reading and comprehending all three before they are twenty. It should be mandatory man-education. I will tell of many of the books that I have found useful, as an addendum below.
Wolfram’s story ‘Parzival’ is the modern man’s journey, and in it young Percy the ‘Wannabe’ meets, quite briefly, his Uncle Amfortas, a man who holds all the keys to what being a man is for. The story tells what a man is about as well as for. These are MRA issues. Far more so than Feminism.
We have to wait another eight hundred years to find what a man wants, in Faust. By ‘wants’ I mean in his complex heart. It is largely Altruistic. That story is the last – latest – great attempt to look into the heart and soul of man and his journey through the landscape of his internal world.
Every man can look at young Percy and see the kernel of his ‘being’ in the world, in him. Any man can. It is a story of the inner ‘Landscape’ of a man.
Percy’s life is one of toil after an initial start of ‘great promise’. He has no Father in his life – like many of today’s boys, regrettably – and is raised by his mother Hertzeloyde (whose name translates as heart’s sorrow).
Mark that. It is an important sign.
She does not want him to engage the world at all, but should it befall that she fails to stop him, only on terms that she determines.
She means well. Some feedback indicates that I am being taken to condemn her. I do not. One can ‘feel’ for poor Hertzloyde. She is a doting mother, but she has created a personal, tight-knit Matriarchy, a ‘Society’ set in a forest, on a farm, a ‘natural’ world, quite deliberately in order to protect him from the world – not so much because she loves her son – she does – but because she is heartbroken.
This is a key issue in today’s 21st C world. Wolfram makes this point that we all start out under the direct and untrammeled control of a woman, our Mother and that she is a closed-off, sorrowful being. This is our ‘Society’. It is the one we have with a vengeance today where cosseted matriarchy rules its childish subjects all through life.
But a matriarchy cannot ‘contain’ a man once a chap attains his true manhood.
There is no room for a man in a matriarchy.
I say, she means well, – and here the feedback from both men and women reached a pitch – - but as with most women what she says and does is not always what she means and Parzival cannot guess the reasons for this ‘society’ he is raised in. She doesn’t tell him of his heritage. Truth about herself and her feelings, and about society, are unattractive to her.
How often do men have to struggle with the female mind that says ‘You know what I mean’ and five minutes later say, ‘That’s not what I meant’. Or that worst of all conundrums when a chap asks what is on her mind and is told ‘You know’, when clearly he doesn’t. Women consider themselves mind-reading empaths, and expect men to just ‘know’, as well.
It was men’s battles, you see, that took her husband, a Great Knight and King, named Gamhuret. She adored him. He protected her and provided for her. He gave her a comfortable life with Status. She loved him deeply. Something all men want. She made a home for him. A place of comfort and solace. He fought in her name. For her. She was his Purpose and his Comfort. He was hers.
As it should be. As it could be.
It was a ‘negotiated’ benefit for them both and lead to a healthy, happy Kingdom.
But he died in battle for her, protecting what they had together.
This has been the way of men for ten thousand years.
She hated thereafter all that men do, even if it had been for her benefit.
How like feminists today. It is irrational, but pain does that.
What is the cause of today’s women’s pain? Read on !
Women’s Rules.
Almost Incidentally, but ultimately significantly, there was also another woman in Gamhuret’s life; another wife, Belcane, a foreigner. It reminds me of the MRA trend to looking at foreign climes for better wives. But it was before he met Hertzloyde. He had another purpose and another comfort.
Herzeloyde does not trust women. They can all ‘steal’ men from her, even temporarily, just like the world does. This despite the fact that it was she who took Belcane’s husband. ! Using her ‘women’s wiles’ and seductiveness.
How very like Today’s woman who is so hypocritical and projecting !
Except today most women push the men away first. Women today, like Carly Simon sings, “Gave away the things they loved and one of them was …. YOU.
Also like the song, they turn it around as an accusation.
Women are distrustful of women; They try to control the lives of women, through Feminism, and restrict the lives of men, to the point of incarceration.
One wonders about the ‘Heartbreak’ of the Modern Woman. Like then, men fought to protect women and provide for them.
I see the wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries having played a major part in the rise of modern Feminism. So many men died or came back maimed. Women have a huge guilt built up over hundreds of years of men’s clear sacrifice and struggle to provide and protect, and like Herzloyde, it is an unbearable guilt and is projected out onto men. It is men’s fault !
Feminism’s roots are in female Guilt. Neurotic and poisonous.
Eventually as Percy, the ‘Innocent Fool’, untutored in the ways of the world reaches mid-teens and his manhood arises in him, he ‘sees’ the world of men pass by his farm and determines to follow. It is not so much a ‘break free’, as a ‘need’ to grow.
He leaves home, taking with him the lessons he has gained from his limited experience. This has consisted mainly of play, often against animal ‘prey’ that he hunts and which gives him sound hunter skills. And also those lessons learned from her – his mother – lessons, from a woman’s perspective. Lessons which will inadvertently damage his life.
Hertloyde’s lessons were not deliberately designed to hurt him. She just saw things from a woman’s point of view.
She has ‘Rules’ you see; one set of ‘rules’ for him for dealing with men and one set for women – a double-standard if you like.
He is to treat every woman he meets – she says – as though she were a Princess. (How things change and remain the same !) His relationship to them is to serve their sexual purpose, provide ‘things’ to them. Woo them and root them, any and every he meets. Very permissive. !
There is very little about ‘understanding’ women or ‘intimacy. It is ‘materialistic’. Indeed, she tells young Prcy nothing at all about women.
As for men, he is not to show compassion for men. Not even ask much about them. No asking ‘What’ or Why’ or even ‘How’. Men’s curiosity should be directed only toward women she thinks.
She calls her Rules ‘politeness’, the roots of the Chivalric code as she wants it to be. Chivalry was being developed at the time of Wolfram’s writing and women had a BIG say in its detail, which is why it has always worked more for women’s benefit than men’s.
He is to fight men all his life. So knowing them and recognizing himself in them, maybe even seeing his father in them, is a nono !
One other thing. He is made to promise to wear his mother’s silk shift under his armour. No he isn’t a Transvestite Knight. 
It keeps the ‘feminine’ between him and the rough clothes he wears – and later the cold steel. It will prove later to stop the rust chafing his skin. There is possibly sound reason in men having some softness close to them.
So young Percy left home, and his mother died of heartbreak.
A man must leave the home of his birth, of his childhood, but women will die, our civilization will die, unless men and women can negotiate these stages with far better consciousness and understanding and far fewer lies and blame.
Finding Men’s Rules.
Percy has to take manhood, through fighting, as there is no one around to give it to him. He understands this from his mother, the one who doesn’t like fighting !
Odd how that works. Women say they don’t like fighting but a major tactical game they play in today’s society is ‘Let’s you and him fight”, where they set the police and the Courts and ‘Anger management’ ‘experts’ to do her dirty work for her.
And he has to fight, literally, to gain acceptance into the men’s world and to maintain what little nascent Integrity he has in it. Men seem to be all too willing to follow these archaic rules although he was advised against it by older and wiser Knights.
He must be his own man. It is his first step. One most of us falter on. Young Percy has no idea how to go about it but with a total lack of finesse he is spectacularly successful right from the start.
Successful, after a fashion. He becomes a Knight in less than a month, through both his own stumbling ineptitude and fortuitous efforts, and it is at great cost to another man, who, on cue, he picks a fight with and kills.
Manhood is passed from one man to another, but often at great cost. You see, he has no way of determining one man from another. As with so many boys today he has never been taught about good men. Virtuous men. Even his father’s goodness has been hidden from him.
He does not know what a good man is. He sees only armour and ’strength’. The man inside the armour is an unknown to him. He is quite unaware of what is inside himself. He does not know himself.
What do we, as modern men, teach our boys?
It has been taken over by women almost holus bolus, from infancy to University.
Young Percy is a farm-boy. The sort one finds all over the Men’s boards. He has no ‘logic’, although he claims its superiority, just as many young men in the MRM are all passion and hubristic claim but who could not tell a syllogism from pidgeon shit.
Parzival kills a reasonably good man. An honourable man. And he steals his armour. A good man gone, replaced by an untested and rather dim lad. Good men come into the MRM and are hacked at by farm-boys all too often.
Our generation has seen the severe limitation and dismissal of good men and our education system has produced farm-boys. All too willing to find fault with good men, painting them all bad.
We all have to start somewhere. But oh, the damage we do. I do not know anything of the men I have killed. Not even their names.
So here he is, setting out as a man, with no idea who he is and a set of rules devised by his mum.
I will tell what happens when you have recharged your goblets and read the next blog entry.
This is Amfortas.
Think upon this post.
Ask, Who Does the Grail Serve.
Addendum.
What literature ought a man to read? What has had the most profound effect on my attitudes and thinking.?
The story of Parzival, of course, but not just in isolation. I could give you a list of a hundred fine books. You could spend a day just looking at the titles on my bookshelves and twenty years reading them.
I was advised at the age of 21 to read a particular book – “ Insight: A Study of Human Understanding” written by Bernard Lonergan SJ – and it took me until I was 45 to work my way through it. That’s 24 years. It was a big ask for a lad who wasn’t even 24 yet. I had to read several hundred other books along the way just to get past successive pages. That’s a long time and a lot of reading. The trick is to understand what it is that is being taught. It’s no trick of course. It’s damned hard work.
Are young men prepared to do that work?
Then there is ’Faust’ by Goethe: the only story that asks the question (another that no-one bothers to ask) ‘can the Devil be redeemed.’ How can we overcome Evil without becoming Evil ourselves?
It is the natural Fourth-Dimensional Man successor to Don Quixote’s three-dimensional man, and as with the old Spanish madman, denotes a change in human consciousness and a broadening of masculinity.
Then there is David Hodgson’s book ‘The Mind Matters’. He is an Australian Supreme Court Judge, by the way, who has a firmish grasp of quantum mechanics. And if you don’t think that QM has any bearing on our MRA matters, then read David Bohm’s work in that field. We live in an Explicate Order of Reality, (as shown by quantum mechanic equations) which is dependant upon a wholly different Implicate Order of Reality. The Princess of Lies comes from that Implicate Order to infect our material world.
For lighter reading, more pertinent to MRA tactical issues, there is Dr Eric Berne’s oldie but goody “Games People Play”, wherein most of the female hysteria-strategies are laid out for all to see.
It is a man’s personal defence manual.
And for deep and essential analysis of pretty well every MRA issue a young man MUST read Warren Farrell’s ‘Myth of Male Power’. It is the Strategic Primer. Follow it up with Mark Prendergast’s ‘Victims of Memory’. It is more specific but shows the power of the Lie and Hysteria when applied to men and the utter destruction of our Court processes.
In terms of the very wide perspective of Man’s place in Nature and our relations to God, I have real all the slim volumes of Fr Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who was not only the most highly decorated man in the first world war but a paleontologist, a theologian and a visionary. It was he who foretold the coming of the Internet a full 50 years before it arrives and saw it as an evolutionarily essential part of man gaining full consciousness.
Amfortas is a Psychologist and Men's Rights Advocate living in Tasmania; the mania inflicted by Feminist-Socialism. He is the Past-Chairman of mensnewsdaily.com Ask, Who Does the Grail Serve. | More from Amfortas
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