In the Beginning was the Word ~ The Laboratory

- Chapter Ten -

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

site index

Though 21st Century Schizoid Man is certainly Orwellian, first and foremost, the 21st Century Schizoid Man is "A Modern Prometheus" (the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). As noted earlier, the "night sounds", while suggestive of the womb, are also "technological" and "scientific". So the "womb" here is the laboratory (a perfect symbol of the differentiated Thinking function) and the "night sounds" precede the birth of a creature in whom Eros (the Feeling Function) has been denigrated, repressed and finally exiled from conscious thought. He has, in a sense, been reborn as something new, an inhuman monster, the "monster" on the album cover, the 21st Century Schizoid Man.

"It was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which first suggested that the modern Man of Science was the creator of his own shadow; that his creation was itself doomed to be monstrous because of his short-sighted megalomania."

- T. Rex Meets Frankenstein

"...a mechanogenesis sprung from the synthetic womb, the matrix, of industry and technology:The Machine, as Picabia put it in one of his titles, was La Fille Nee Sans Mere (1916-17), the Daughter born without a Mother - a modern counterpart to the myth of the Virgin Birth, in which Christ the son, was born without a father."

"In the Hebrew myth nature and the goddess are sacrificed to the miracle of Yahweh’s inventive mind. (The Greek tale of the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus has a similar inversion.)"

- Eve: the Mother of All Living Things

"...I deem it to be a remarkable fact that man, as long as he regarded himself as a creature, interpreted his existence in the image of God, his creator; but as soon as he started considering himself as a creator, began to interpret his existence merely in the image of his own creation, the machine."

- Victor Frankl

"The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are created by the ultimate fantasy of masculine creativity: male parthenogenesis, that is, the desire on the part of men to possess women's power to give birth. Male scientists seek to create life artificially rather than through the usual sexual process. They, in a sense, reproduce themselves, but in Titanic shapes. Their brain-children are the embodiment of male power and superiority over the mothers.
The Greek gods also suffered from such womb envy. Take Zeus swallowing Metis to claim sole parenthood for Athena, born subsequently from his head. Or his other trick of snatching Dionysus from the ashes of poor Semele and sewing the godling into his thigh to gestate. Indeed it is arguable that one of the perennial themes of patriarchal tradition is the usurpation of female reproductive power by men. In the Western tradition the act of usurpation usually results in the death of the mother. In this way, the patriarchal god gets his revenge on the old Goddess cults with their annual sacrifice of the Goddess's consort. Turned on its head, the myth-ritual now sacrifices the (devalued) female in order to permit a claim of male supremacy."

- T. Rex Meets Frankenstein

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