Sculptures of Scars: Lessons From Ovid’s Unmanned Poet

I recently heard an exchange between Matt Walsh and a young man who identifies as a woman, filmed at a university lecture hall.

The student was unable to define ‘woman’ without circularly including the word itself in that definition, but that’s standard fare. What he did argue was that a woman is a person who, among other things, is affirmed as such by the women around her (or him).

Apparently, the women in this boy’s life had, in a mass-media-induced state of critical somnambulism, repeated to him what they ingested from prevailing propaganda, satisfying themselves into a sentimental paroxysm of narcissistic virtue-signaling. 

A porn-brained haze that desensitizes the young and normalizes sexual and categorical promiscuity probably contributes to a generalized acceptance of pseudo-gender identities and sexual orientations. This meets with perverse fixations to encourage them to extremes of deviance, enriching surgeons and pharmaceutical companies who bare the sin of folding flesh into new shapes, perfecting the verisimilitude of genitals sculpted in scars.

The oligarchs of a late-capitalist entropic culture are unable to suffer any limit, be it borders or genders. The project to reduce subjects to perfectly self-determining consumers has long championed the sacrifice of children to longer careers for women. Now, to the death of the unborn, they add the mutilation of the immature—a new grotesque item on the list of their litany of civilizational sins.

The fact that our children are being taught ‘gender fluidity’ and that pre-pubescents are being turned into eunuchs in the name of ‘gender affirmation’ should elicit from the human heart a ferocious cry for the love of wholesome limits and unalloyed repulsion at the infernal transgression, entropy, and dissolution of the human condition now promoted by the elite class.

But like any crime—however novel its means—this phenomenon is not entirely new.

In the first century, Ovid wrote of a hellish morning-after, dawning on a young Roman who had gone to Anatolia, expecting to connect with the mother goddess, Magna Mater, an idol of misunderstood nature, a terrible seething chaos whose release was interpreted as a warm embrace by her priests. 

That is, before the burning started. 

There, according to Ovid’s poem, away from the urban sprawl and stifling laws of his Italic homeland, the Roman hooked up with a family of wayward souls, the radical hippies of his day, the woke-militants whose call to “awake” is parodic, in truth signaling a falling asleep into the murky fog of formlessness, of rejected form and proper limits.

Alas, in ritual drug-fueled stupor, reaching a peak of emotional excitation, with the air of like-minded cultists under his wings—a community of supportive vessels channeling the hunger of their goddess—enthusiastically ‘affirming’ his ‘identity,’ the young Roman did what was done in such witches’ Sabbaths: he castrated himself.

This parallels the contemporary tendency towards a secular, pseudo-worship of ‘nature’ (and the discourse around ‘spontaneity’ and ‘being oneself’) in the context of establishment-approved environmentalism, which nonetheless combines seamlessly with thorough approval of artifice in altering the human condition.

Of cool Sulmo, my homeland … 

Alas, how far it lies.

Alienation from the past, from our own families, from those whose footsteps we have strayed from, is key to social control. The more the young feel as though they cannot relate to their own parents and inherited homeland, the more they will be peons for outside interests.

Eunuchs will march and thump their hollow drums, 

And cymbals clashed on cymbals will give out their tinkling notes: 

Seated on the unmanly necks of her attendants, 

The goddess herself will be carried with howls through the city centre’s streets. 

Lavish displays of a new humanity, ‘pride marches’ were, then as now, an inversion of the religious procession,

He mangled, too, his body with a sharp stone, 

And trailed his long hair in the filthy dust; 

And his cry was, “I have deserved it! 

With my blood I pay the penalty that is my due. 

Ah, perish the parts that were my ruin!”

There is an element of atonement for sin in all this. Masculine nature is too harsh and brazen for the cult, whose desire is that young men repent for the history of patriarchy by spoiling their masculinity with a hacksaw effeminacy. 

But take no pleasure in curling your hair with the iron, 

Or in scraping your legs with sharp pumice-stone. 

Elsewhere, Ovid writes of one “neither woman nor man” (nec femina, nec uir). They curl their hair and shave their legs, these devotees of the hateful mother, but find bitterness at the end of that road; bitterness where there was once revelry—because that revelry was not their own. 

It was the revelry of those who resent order and coherence of forms, and any limit put upon an appetite grown perverse.