Dear Cat,

Since you were displeased by my naughty antics over at Encyclopedia Dramatica, I offer you some healthy medicine, gleaned from my current work on Edward Warren's Defense of Uranian Love, which Dr. Kaylor is reprinting.

I have recently come up with the working hypothesis that three Volumes of DUL correspond to the three volumes of the Divine Comedy. Our hero, an "EveryPedophile," goes through the Hell of Pedophilia in Vol. I, the Purgatory of Pedophilia in Volume II, and the Heaven of Pedophilia in Volume III, in which the beautiful boy disappears and is subsumed into the Love of God, just as Beatrice disappears as a guide to "Dante." (You, Cat, will doubtless have plenty of your own stories to tell about the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Pedophilia!)

What I am really doing is an analysis of DUL against two different theoretical systems: drawing a comparison between the Jungian topology of the development of the Self from a set of conflicting psychic impulses, and the "physical" travels of Dante's pilgrim through Hell/Pur/Heaven. This is exciting because I can SEE MYSELF (and you, Cat, and everybody else who posts here!) as PILGRIMS marching across the Spiritual Landscape that DUL marks out. Sadly, the Bible is weak on pedophile images; sadly, the classical stories, although strong on BL stories, are weak on Christian Teleology: A God who loves us personally, offers us a way to be connected to him, and pulls us onward to our True Home in Heaven.

I contrast two passages from DUL:

On page 106, at the End of Vol. I, our hero observes: "Such and many more savage reproaches resound in the boy-lover's ears. They do not distress him, because he never dreamt of separating himself from the earth, his mother, and because he had always found in the flesh the visible counterpart, if not the origin, of spiritual desire."

But on page 131, (The begininng of Vol, II, corresponding to the Purgatory in which EVERYPEDOPHILE voluntarily suffers in order to be purged of his boy-directed lusts....) Warren cites a fragment of Euripides, in which a boy LOUDLY articulates his swing from a mother-derived to a father-derived gender identity:

"For the son's feeling, cf. Euripides, Fragment 887: 'But know that this will be no custom of mine: I will not always call you my "Mommy Dearest!" Both for the sake of Justice and for the sake of your children I especially love him who begot me, more than all other mortals! I set this as a boundary, and don't you even think of crossing it: I grew from him! No male would want to claim a woman-born identity: a boy is his father's son!' "

Clearly we have gone (psychically) from a state of blissful and permanent symbiosis with the mother, to a proud boyish independence in which EVERY connection with the feminine is THROWN OFF!



Likewise, Marie-Lousie Von Franz shows in her book on /The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man/ that she can be a good egg, supportive of those male "detours": (Although in her earlier book, Puer Aeternus she sometimes sounds like the mother-witch who keeps screaming, GROW UP! GROWUP!!)

"Lucius has throughout the story only one main motif: he wants to experience the mysteries of the dark side of the feminine principle, of witchcraft, magic, and ghosts. That this is his main purpose shows that Apuleius probably had an enormous mother complex which took the *f*o*r*m* the mother complex often takes, that of being threatened by an overwhelming power, namely the archetypal feminine principle. If a man is too much impressed by the figure of his mother, whether by her fault or by his own disposition, she interferes with his contact with reality, with women, usually inhibiting or eating up his chthonic sexual personality. He may, being oversensitive, not have a strong enough masculine brutality to escape the mother and fight his way to freedom. Instead he escapes into the intellect where generally she cannot follow. In poetry or complicated philosophical systems, for example, he builds up a masculine world in which he can live his own life freely with masculine friends. I call this the escape from the mother into the stratosphere: one leaves the earth, takes an airplane and goes twelve thousand meters above the earth, where the old lady cannot reach, and one feels a man and free, but this has naturally some disadvantages. This is a very widespread type of young man who has a *f*o*r*m* of the puer aeternus problem, namely, as soon as he wants to touch the earth, either to have sex, or to get married, or to do anything that means descending to the earth again, there the old lady stands, awaiting him at the airport, and he still has to fight her. This is not as negative as it looks, because at least in this excursion into the intellectual world where the mother has no say, he has acquired a certain amount of freedom, courage, insight, and so on, which later might enable him to come down and conquer his mother complex on the level of reality. So this detour is not a waste of time and nonsense, for if a man knows how to return at a certain moment it can be a good thing."

Good old Marie-Louise Von Franz! In the Puer Aeternus, she had been rather dismissive of the masculine escapes into fantasy/mathematics/cblf/philosophy, whatever)

Cheers, Cat! Hope you get something out of this....

---Didaskalos