Sex & Death

Men identify with their penises.

Men know the Power of the Penis. No man ever stops reveling in its power, regardless of what he publicly says. Women know this instinctively, and therefore they distrust the man who says he doesn't revel in its power.

The penis is unthinking and uncaring. It is the most self-centered flesh in this biology. The man lies and tells the truth at the same time. "The devil made me do it." That devil in a blue dress . . .

A male is geared toward irresponsibility. He is -- he must be -- taught to regulate and control and accept responsibility for his penis's indiscretions. Not all men learn. More is the pity. More is the shame. More the tragedy. All men share the shame, the pity, the tragedy.

A man, in order to be accepted by his culture as a man, is geared toward assuming responsibility for what his penis creates (or procreates). A man who thinks with his penis, who lets his penis do his thinking for him, is a man without a brain. Men all know that.

The penis is power.

Lenny Bruce admitted, on behalf of all men, that "men will fuck mud." That a man with his penis damaged in a bicycle accident would put the moves on a nurse in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Pan is the problem. Pan, the untrustworthy god, thinks with his penis. The early Church condemned Pan, took his hooves and slapped them on the feet of its chosen worst enemy, the devil. Satan has the feet of the male libido.

Pan gave Satan his horns, too.

Feeling a little horny, are we?

“Well, the devil made me do it.”

 

Pride is an erection. It is power. It is a vector that points the way with force. Each must learn to use the power. "Beware the dark side of the Force, Luke."

Sex and death. One topic.

When Horus battled his uncle Seth in Egyptian religious mythology, he lost an eye, but managed to castrate his uncle. The earth god Geb declared Horus the victor of the match and therefore king of all Egypt. The Hindu god Shiva was the Giver of Life; as such, he is depicted with an erect phallus.

The Roman god Priapus is the foolish little god who is always erect. The Roman god Priapus was the cultivator of the garden. The garden itself is equal to a beautiful woman. Priapus -- "Cultor Hortorum" -- was always erect.

The Arabs have more names for the penis and the vagina than any other culture. Over three dozen for each! (Sir Richard Burton listed many in The Perfumed Garden.) The Crusaders brought those dirty metaphors and analogies back to Europe. Curiously enough, romantic love blossomed!

Skyscrapers are icons of white male erections. Eternal shafts. Penile shafts. White males architects who get their peckers up. Architecture as schoolboy games. "My pecker's bigger than yours!" Ah, the masculine skyline!

In 1933 King Kong climbed the Empire State Building, and every adult "knew in their hearts" the story behind the deed. In the 1976 remake, when King Kong climbed one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, signals got crossed. The audience instinctively knew the story was false and (to quote Samuel Goldwyn) stayed away in droves.

 

Man is created in the image of God. Or perhaps God is created in the image of Man. This has been choice fodder for philosophers for millennium.

The author is the creator. Bernard DeVoto was blunt. "A novelist sinks a shaft into his unconscious self.” A novelist is "a key to unlock meaning.” Elmore Leonard says, "The reader is looking through a keyhole. He is not aware of writing."

 

In the court of Queen Antoinette, the ladies of the court wore pastoral dresses on swings. They wore no underwear. And they would swing so high!

From Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "Now that he was standing over her, he grabbed her under the knees and lifted her slightly parted legs in the air, so that they suddenly looked like the raised arms of a soldier surrendering to a gun pointed at him.”

Goethe was not the first to compare maidens to castles under siege by soldiers. Just one of the first to make the notion rhyme. "And then the soldiers march away."

To the Chinese in the Ming Dynasty, the vagina was both the gate of life and the gate of death. Both womb and tomb. Thus is solved the ancient riddle: What is the room you leave without entering and the room you enter without leaving?

The Hawaiian demi-god Maui grabbed the sun's penis and made the day last longer. Every man can visualize the anguish involved in that metaphor.

See the penises on the stick men going off to war in the burial caves at Keahole on the south Kona coast on the big island of Hawaii.

Keep your swords high, gentlemen!

 

In all countries, in all times, the erect penis, as is the full belly of a woman, is the visible manifestation of fertility.

The Mesopotamian kings had to have ritual intercourse annually with a temple prostitute inside the Temple of Esagila to help insure the fertility for the next growing season.

Phallic worship is an integral part of the Shinto religion. The ancient Peruvians held sacred orgies at the summer solstice, just one of a series of yearlong orgies.

The penis is God's handiwork. Oh, some urologist could carefully, methodically explain all the various components that enable the penis to perform its functions, but the truth is always simple not complex: A cock is a cock and cannot be mistaken for anything else.

According to the Egyptian creation myth of the world, the sun god Atum-Ra (who was also known as the Lord of the Penis) masturbates, spilling his seed. The first couple was Tefnut (we call him Adam) and Shu (she became Eve).

Zeus thought about sex. The power of the penis is such that Athena sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus. She is more intellectual, for all that. While Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, was born from the foam that breaks on the shore.

In the Hindu legend of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, Vishnu acquires the ambrosia which confers immortality upon a chosen people.

It is said that the father of the Pharaoh Cheops once had twenty naked young women row the royal barge around, while he sat and watched. The High Priest had urged him to take his mind off his work.

Women curse men for their bestial aspects. Men rarely disagree. Each man knows what women curse is too often the truth. For most men, it is the woman's tone of voice that weighs heavily.

Ulysses and Circe spent too much time together. She turned his crew of men into a herd of swine. Women understand men are pigs. What crimes against femininity did his crew commit? Did they have to commit any to be condemned en masse?

Superman is the Man of Steel. As a man, he is fully cognizant of the power of his Penis and therefore his need for self-control around Lois Lane. If he doesn't stay limp, he could really hurt her. Clark Kent is limp. He knows the power of his penis.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is a male masturbatory fantasy. Each man knows his crowning glory is the stately dome of his Oedipus edifice. As the penis grows, vague thoughts of femininity coalesce into a more coherent, more identifiable female who is "the nubile woman who dances before the king."

Coleridge claimed the poem came to him in a dream, that a visitor to his house woke him from that dream, that this was all he remembered after the fact. Who came that night, and broke the spell? Why should he lie? Why should he explain?

The poem climaxes prematurely for most literary critics, but they never say why out loud. But each man knows he reaches orgasm quickest when he does it alone. One in the hand comes quickest.

 

The Minoans worshipped the Great Mother of Asia Minor, whose symbol of divinity was a woman with bared breasts. Perhaps the West's preoccupation with breasts began here. But she holds a writhing snake in each hand.

Chalkstone caves of Crete were places of worship in Minoan religion. The labyrinth actually imitates these limestone caves, and not the Palace of Knossos.

Men were excluded from the religious rituals. That is, they were excluded unless they were in masks of animal forms to present offerings to the gods. Possibly in their religious services, the high priest wore a bull-shaped headmask and thus could be considered a bull with the legs of a man, or a man with the head of a bull. What is metaphor and what is literal become one.

King Minos' wife slept with the high priest. She had an illicit child. The bastard was kept out of sight because his existence was a direct threat to Minos' regency. The minotaur lived in the labyrinth built by Daedelus.

Theseus was after the king's daughter Ariadne. In order to get the daughter, he would have to kill the father. But he may have only been using Ariadne for her special knowledge. Once he sees that she would betray her own father, her half-brother, her country, he realizes she would have as little compunction to betray a husband. Such is the fate of all betrayers.

How many stories do we see man in battle against some animal / monster over the naked woman?

See Theseus in the labyrinth, one end of a string in one hand and a sword in his other, prowling through the darkness, searching for a monster half man and half bull, for a battle to the death. See Theseus with what Guy Davenport calls, "his heroic ecstasy of purpose."

That Theseus comes upon the Minotaur when it sleeps, when its sexual powers are at rest and unconscious, is important. This is when he slays the sleeping beast.

In mythological motifs, the labyrinth represents . . . is . . . a woman. The Minotaur is a male bull invading the female tunnels. To interrupt the Minotaur -- to come upon him in his sacred acts of impregnation -- meant death.

To interrupt was to die!

In "Little Red Riding Hood," the wolf has consumed Grandma and now is in her bed. St. George and the dragon: any time a lance punctures a monster, and a beautiful woman is the goal, well, go figure. But monsters are like springtime. They are reborn each year.

In Crete, the Minoan athletes vaulted over bulls. Hemingway immortalized the running of the bulls in Pompona. Picasso identified with the bull.

Remember the unicorn, a classic tale of penis envy. Remember only a virgin can catch a unicorn. How do we sanctify the bands of matrimony? How do we keep the young girls virgin?

We all know the secret behind Beauty and the Beast. It takes a Beauty to cure the Beast. The monoceros and the unicorn and the virgin.

The rhino Stonewell was mourned at the San Francisco Zoo when he died some years ago. He was the oldest living black rhinoceros in captivity and lived to his thirty-seventh year. He sired ten offspring and was a grandfather many times over, according to his keeper.

After his death, while describing Stonewall's fertility, keeper Jane Tollini told The San Francisco Chronicle, "He didn't have a tooth in his head these past few years, but he still managed to put a bun in the oven every season." He never failed to mate with his longtime companion Ellie, but then he needed his alfalfa pre-chopped.

Progeny is our immortality.

 

Long before St. George, the patron saint of England, slew the dragon, the hero's sword has been thought to be an extension of his penis. Remember it was Sir Lancelot (Lance-a-lot) who was more manly than King Arthur's sword Excalibur, who wooed Guinevere away from King Arthur and his sword Excalibur.

Fencing duels were automatically understood to be penises banging together, like rams butting heads in the springtime.

Many mythologists suggest the dragon itself is the monster of sexual adequacy, of sexual aggressiveness, of sexual self-consciousness. The hero must over come the dragon to prove his manhood. After fearsome battle, the hero's sword penetrates, there is much blood, the monster is dead, and the hero wins the maiden's hands, her heart, her torso, and other limbs. The hero's quest is the quest each virgin male makes for sexual initiation and a willing mate.

A matter of sexual life or death.

In the caves of Cro-Magnon Europe the boy is introduced to the secret world of men. Bar mitzvahs and confirmations and boot camp continue this initiation ritual. A boy learns what it takes to be a man.

Check out the Bible. In "Song of Songs" (aka "the Song of Solomon"), the Beloved is described like the mares set free to drive sexually insane the stallions who pulled the Pharaoh’s war chariots. You pull me out of battle, baby.

When Cleopatra raised her sails, Antony fled the battle. Did she flip her skirts, or was the battle really lost?

A sexually aggressive woman . . .

 

The Lorena Bobbitt trial once again disclosed the gap between the sexes. The titters and tee-hees alone showed the American immaturity when sexual crimes are at stake.

The media kept saying "John Wayne Bobbitt," "John Wayne Bobbitt," John Wayne Bobbitt," so that the association with the late cinema cowboy tied it all into the master narrative of American masculinity.

Madison County, Iowa--where the bridges are--is the birthplace of Marion Morrison, the USC footballer who became the cinematic persona John Wayne.

The Bridges of Madison County, Iowa, represent the Freudian train entering the tunnel, the gap between men and women which must be bridged by the male, and the covert nature of adultery itself.

Shakespeare was obsessed with a wife's infidelity. Othello, Hamlet, and so on, all show a deep mistrust and distrust of women. In his will, he left his wife "the second best bed in the house." Was he the Cuckolded Bard?

 

The arrow penetrates.

Tristam always enters the queen's bedchamber with his arrows. King Mark finds him and Isuelt in the woods with a sword between them and mistakenly believes they haven't consummated. Or did he put the sword between them?

Cupid carries a bow and arrow. Robin Hood is always linked with Maid Marian, and as soon as his worldly power is restored, they marry. William Tell has to fire the arrow off his son's head.

Death and sex in a single moment.

Progeny is our immortality.

 

Men identify with their penises.

What women have suspected forever is true. Men are not qualified to speak about (or even worse, to pontificate about) women's issues. Thus, a man's opinions about abortion, say, either reflect the dominant woman's point of view closest to him or represent some knee-jerk reaction he heard somewhere else, has never thought about challenging, and is merely parroting.

The closest that men get to voicing true opinions at a time like this is if they may be the possible father or grandfather of the aforementioned fetus. At a time like this, their opinions are still too suspect to be worthwhile.

 

No man is welcomed into a Women Studies Program. He is the enemy. By definition. He seeks to contain their power.

Women Studies Programs cannot view the penis as anything but the Enemy. But the penis will never care about them. The penis will only care about itself. It is, by definition, the Selfish Organ.

To insult a woman with words that relate directly to her sex organs is to insult all women. Each woman sees herself as unique.

To insult a man with words that relate to his sex organs is somehow different. Men recognize their essential masculinity can be defined by a sex organ that frequently demands its own autonomy.

Once upon a time there was a legendary Hollywood mogul whose wife was actually the power behind the throne. His wife was in a terrible accident, had to be cut free with the Jaws of Life. While she was being wheeled into surgery, she grabs the surgeon's arms and squeezed it in panic. "Oh, please don't let them cut off my dick!" she begged.

There is power in the penis.

Women Studies Programs teach that the people in power don't want the people without power to gain power. Any power.

Many popes during the Dark and Middle Ages treasured the sacred prepuce of Jesus Christ. In fact, there were no fewer than a dozen sacred prepuces reputed to Jesus Christ.

That's why Manhattan lawyers wear their ties so tightly. It keeps their foreskins from slapping them in the face.

We all "know" the difference between God and an attorney. God never thought he was an attorney.

The most successful lawyers all walk around like Clark Kent, smug that they know beneath their clothes they're all pricks.

That's why lawyers are called pricks.

 

God punishes Eve (in Genesis 3:6) with the pain of childbirth. Saint Paul thought in 1 Timothy 2:13-15 that childbirth saved women from the blame of the Fall.

A girl knows the instant she has become a woman. For boys, such knowledge comes much slower, incrementally, with great conflict and even greater confusion.

"Daphnis and Chloe" by the Greek Longus reiterates the differing passages each gender makes from virginity to successful marriage. The male's primary duty is to learn to control and regulate his male organ. The woman's primary duty is to be wary of the male organ.

The word "penis" never appears in Shakespeare. But Shylock demands his pound of flesh, and every student from junior high onward on KNOWS WHICH POUND THAT IS. (This is probably the only Shakespearean thing not taught in classrooms that each student actually learns.)

Shylock wanted his pound of flesh; the judge Portia rules it's his if no blood is shed when it's handed over, if the owner isn't killed when it is cut off. The power is not transferable.

Portia was a woman disguised as a man. There is much irony here.

Joseph Campbell introduced us to "the Hero of a Thousand Face" in his book by the same name. (What a coincidence!)

One common interpretation has it that the hero of a thousand faces is undergoing a sexual initiation in these quest stories.

Joseph Campbell said the hero has a thousand faces, but apparently the hero has a single dick. And he thinks with it.

Men are geared toward irresponsibility. Their penis has a mind of its own. It takes over and scatters rational thoughts. It can and often will demand not just its host's but concomitantly its own downfall.

"Men will fuck mud," Lenny Bruce observed.

And guilty men are speechless when confronted by irrefutable proof of their penile guilt, because the penis has no mouth to speak.

To the Chinese, jade was and still is the most precious of stones. Jade was the semen of dragons. The penis was "the flute of love." The vulva was "the cup of love." The vagina was "the gateway of jade."

Women wore soft leather bikini panties in ancient Rome.

A penny for your thoughts.

 

Women, from the moment girlhood ends, are continually confronted with the double-edged sword of their own sexuality.

A Mexican woman, a close friend of my wife, grew up in a Michoacan village where a young girl's first period began, and for three days it never stopped. Not until the hemorrhaging had brought on death.

Our friend related the horror of the girl's funeral. All her classmates wore white, their first Communion dresses. All knew by then the cause of death and all feared for their own lives.

The great Mother Goddess is both the Goddess of Life and the Goddess of Death. She is depicted as both and at the same instant. Black is the color of life: the soil, the womb, the underworld. White is the color of death: bones. Red is the color of blood, of life.

In Europe, She is the monolithic Great Goddess. She is pre Indo-European. She's been around for almost thirty centuries, maybe goes back over a hundred centuries of prehistory.

Snakes and breasts are both her symbols. Six thousand years before Christ, her joined symbols were revered from Hungary to Knossos. Her divine eyes were snakes coiled tightly. The baby snake is the umbilical cord, Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas says in her masterwork The Language of the Goddess, "the bridge, an umbilical cord linking the subterranean womb with the living world.”

The Great Goddess was the Snake Goddess on Crete, the Aegean islands, Greece itself for a time. Her power waned. Men came bearing weapons -- long swords -- demanding she give up all power to them.

The snake is the symbol of Ancient Egypt's throne. Cleopatra clasped an asp to her bosom and died. She was the last ruler of Egypt. She died bearing tribute to both her throne and the Great Goddess.

Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas writes, "In a number of books by religious historians, mythologists, and psychologists, she has been described as the Great Mother who gives birth to all things from her womb.”

There is Death in childbirth. A given.

Any woman knows this so.

Art can be a gasp! The voyeur gasps with shock because his senses have recognized truths he didn't get before and now they have been "illuminated" for him.

Stories, songs, art are rituals of sex and death.

The vulva is important. There are engravings of vulvas on the rocks in French caves that date back thirty millennium before Christ. Is it only graffiti? Could be. They co-exist with the Venus statues, the goddesses of fertility.

A young man was buried thirty thousand years ago in the mountains of what is now northern Iraq. For the first time in the history of Humanity, flowers were placed upon his grave, and those flowers were Humanity's first rejection of the cold chemical universe. The fossil record of those flowers scream through time and space that Humanity believes there is more that mere existence.

 

Sex and death. Death and sex. They are a single topic.

Joseph Campbell said the one reason to have a religion is to transcend death. We cannot transcend Death. Wistful thinking, that's all.

Movie Magic is all we're left with.

Each of us six billion humans is positive s/he is unique. Why can't I live forever? In the 1990 movie Flatliners, Death is induced, and then shoved back. Like the Limbo, how low can you go . . . and still come back?

Mortality is a desperate obsession with us. If Man can land on the Moon, why can't we defeat (or at least postpone) Death? Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.

We are angry at Death. Death is too final.

Sex stops death. We hang in the grimace of orgasm as if it were the rocket's parabola. Orgasm is the Brennschluss point.

In the 1988 movie Beetlejuice the babyboomers don't want their status quo to change. Hey, they got a nice life. Why should Death go and ruin things? You don't gotta move out when you die. You just take over the attic.

In Frank Capra's 1946 It's A Beautiful Life, Jimmy Stewart's guardian angel shows him what his town would be had Jimmy never been born. Shows him his place in the scheme of things.

How self-absorbed we all are. In the 1998 movie City of Angels, a guardian angel (played by Nicholas Cage) falls in love with a mortal (played by Meg Ryan) and gives up his immortality. Our species is so vain, "we probably think this song is about us." But she still dies in the end.

Is it any wonder the big sleeper movie of the 1990 summer was Ghost? Sex and death on a date night. We no longer believe in God, but true love lasts forever. Death gets defeated at the box office.

Welcome to Fantasyland.

The soul exists after death. Don't be afraid of Death.

Robin Williams would break loose from heaven and travel to hell to be with the woman he loved in 1999’s What Dreams May Come.

Steven Spielberg is Peter Pan.

The concept of Redemption is a Leap of Faith. Eternal life can be won. Humphrey Bogart tells Lizabeth Scott, "Just say Geronimo and leap."

Death. This is the Jumping-Off Place.

Hollywood desperately tries to grant us our wishes. Die Hard II led the way in body count with 280 deaths in a plane crash. But after Lockerbie . . . yawn!

The Baby Boomers felt The Big Chill. One of their own took his own life. Once they got over that, they turned on their music, and the soundtrack kept away the demons.

Death, where is Thy sting? If you have a soundtrack, you will live forever. That's why they're called Golden Oldies.

Sex and Death. Indiana Jones Sails Up the River of Death. The last Indiana Jones movie was a blatant rip-off (or homage) to the story of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Both center around the hopelessness of watching someone you love die.

We all love to look in the back of ambulances.

How do we face our own death?

The old poem has the young boy asks the old man, "What happened to your leg?" The old man answers, "A bear bit it off." And the young boy wonders.

We can see how it happened.

We are all good ol' boys telling stories around the campfire. We tell stories to keep back the unknown and the night.

Homer was blind. He couldn't see his audience. He told his war story not knowing if anyone was listening. The audience stayed because of the power of the story, because the story held them spellbound.

Homer was the first to have it written down. Out of the folk tales comes an author. Who speaks with "author-ity."

The young boy whispers, “I see dead people.” And Bruce Willis wonders --

In John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," the young boy sees his face reflected back from a mirror a thousand times. The hero of a thousand faces sees himself a thousand times over. Why is he there? The young man says, "So the boys can all see up their skirts."

We are all anonymous in the crowd.

In John Barth's night-sea story, the sperm who reaches the egg first becomes the Messiah. The sperm that swims fastest gets a qualified immortality. In The Horse Whisperers, the cowboy dies, but he leaves the woman pregnant.

We live in a freeway society. We all swim.

Walt Disney's movie Tron puts you in the game. Like Job we learn only to appreciate (that is, fear) God's power. From Job we do not learn to appreciate God's love.

God is dead, said Nietsche. In our secular society with its separation between church and state, we no longer believe in God. But will you love me tomorrow?

Our love is gonna last forever.

Until the Titanic sinks.

"You go first."

"No, you go first."

Are you waiting for the sequel to Titanic?

Are you waiting for the sequel to The Sixth Sense?

 

Ten thousand years ago Jerico was one of the earliest towns in the world. One of the first cities. It is the first city to be invaded whose name still penetrates our cultural consciousness. It is the oldest city still inhabited.

The Semitic nomads hated it.

Joshua sent two spies into Jericho to study the lay of the land. The men spent the night before the attack in a brothel. Then the town's walls were torn down and the town was invaded.

The inmost cave is the vagina, where the inmost fears are faced and the boy sees the man he will become.

In scripts this moment is built in to the structure. At this moment the hero "gives up" or "lets go."

This is the moment of orgasm.

Read Matthew 27: 46. Jesus Christ on the Cross cries out, "My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?"

All bodily functions give out one final burst at death.

In California the lemmings have reached the sea. The lemmings are male sperm, and Mother Ocean is our home. The eight thousand year, six thousand mile trek westward, is a demographic sexual surging of an idea, a narrative, a story.

Today one out of every eight Americans is a Californian. Manifest destiny is a sexual conquest. Just don't stand in its way.

Every hero begins as a virgin, and his desire to conquer is a passionate drive below his consciousness and will accept no defeat on its rush to impregnation. There will be no accommodation, no compromise.

The white man rushes into the wilderness accompanied by his faithful ethnic sidekick. The white man ravishes all; a real estate developer he is. The ethnic sidekick is no sexual threat to the white man's heroic sperm. But what if a woman came between the white hero and his ethnic sidekick? What if they both fall in love with the same woman?

The dominant narrative is male. The boy leaves his mother, seeks out a lover, overcomes obstacles, screws his lover, and the boy becomes a man.

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.

A girl knows the instant she becomes a woman. In the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, "I lived long enough to call myself a man."

One aspect of the Garden of Eden seems consistent: every plant in the world was said to grow there. One aspect heard continually throughout the state of California: If it grows anywhere in the world, it can (and therefore does) grow in California.

There is a Paradise in California. It is near Chico. It’s the home of Macintosh apples and John Birchers.

Where are we going? What are we racing towards? The cold chemical time of the universe. The end of entropy.

According to the cold-eyed laws of physics, a journey is defined as distance multiplied by duration.

A story is told of William Faulkner's last days as a Hollywood scriptwriter. That after he walked out, a page was found in his typewriter. He had written, "Boy meets girl" five hundred times, one right after another. At the end of the page was a single question mark.

In the caves of Neanderthal Europe, the boys were introduced into the secret world of men. Bar mitzvahs and confirmations and bootcamps continue this never-ending education.

A boy learns what it means to be a man. Ezekiel 18:20 tells us that "a son shall not share his father's guilt."

The penis can be an unspeakable horror, too, emblematic of the vile and vicious wasteland that lies between Othello the Moor and Hannibal the Cannibal.

 

No man is welcome in a woman studies program.

According to the Egyptian calendar, the month of Athyr (somewhere between October and November) celebrates the goddess of both tombs and carnal love. The French call the orgasm "petit mort," the little death. Lovin' you is almost like dyin'.

French archaeologist Andre Parrot, while excavating in the ancient city of Mari, discovered a scene on a cylinder seal of a man kneeling at the foot of a tree, while a coiled snake gnawed at his genitals. Parrot was troubled by what he discovered. So should all men be troubled.

There is power in the penis.

Death & sex. Sex & death.