Man of Blood

This 3rd type of masculinity, Man of Blood, is probably the least politically correct one, and yields two archetypes dealing with sacrifice:

the 5th archetype:  the Priest

and the 6th archetype:  the Warrior

Realizations and conditional necessities

Any artist or craftsman wanting to realize any work in our moving and changing universe will have to confront what we call ‘conditional’ necessity. For example, a craftsman wanting to create  something needs a suitable material and appropriate instruments. These may be available in the nature around him, they may not be. He might have to get them from somewhere else. They are not necessary by themselves, but because of the idea that has inspired the craftsman initially and the project he has developed starting from the idea.

The material necessity and the necessity of instruments are part of the general ‘circumstantial’ or conditional necessity - which integrates all conditions, dispositions and available materials in the environment and the time where the worker wants to realize his idea. The knowledge of everything implied in this conditional necessity is the ‘know-how’, that mediates between the will to achieve and the accomplishment of the work. Know-how implicitly recognizes both the opportunities and the limitations of nature, that are usually known by experience. This natural law can also be analyzed by a separate speculative science, independently of any realization.

It seems to me that the realization of craftsmanship or art in itself does not define an archetype. Surely, a worker must efface himself when the work is finished. The work must handed over to the one that will possess it, or must be exposed to the public that will contemplate and comment it. Work gives to man a very fundamental education of realizing something respectable and then effacing himself in a worthy way. But the ‘know-how’ and the realization do not lead necessarily to something that has anything to do with the absolute truth or with Gods wisdom. Moreover, the idea that man can come up with is never adequate to a divine reality. In a certain will, the craftsman and the artist are at the same level as the master, who is relative to the judge. But whom are they relative to?

Surely, if a craftsman or an artist is motivated by love, his know-how is subordinated to his personal wisdom and part of his mediation. The same can be said about the scientist studying the nature of the physical universe for the sake of finding the hidden face of the Creator. Maybe to a certain extent, that is insofar the craftsman’s know-how proceeds from a scientific universal knowledge of nature, he can be close to being mediator while creating something, but in this case like the king he is second to the judge, who has full science and discerns while awaiting divine wisdom. He doesn’t put enough of himself into his mediation, and he can not efface himself radically enough, to be an archetype.

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The 5th archetype: the Priest

Man insofar as he is realizing something can only be counted among the archetypal mediators, if his realization is religious, transcendent in its meaning. The achievement of his realization, where he effaces himself, must be entirely relative to something beyond any individual realization or creativity.  Whatever he realizes, it must not correspond to any human idea and must most radically call another more perfect mediator from 'above'. The idea of a human realizer acting as a religious mediator must be a kind of denial of all human ideas and concepts, a symbol seemingly absurd in itself. 

Traditionally and naturally, signs of death are man's strongest way to express that he understands the metaphysical tenuousness of his life. Specifically, the most convincing such sign is an actual killing. This sacrifice is a religious realization that manifests adoration, which is the only approximately adequate response to understanding the creature’s dependence of the Creator. 

In practice a sacrifice is either the real killing of animal life valuable to man, though inferior to his, symbolizing his own human life, or the symbolic offering of a part of his own human life by an ascetic exercise (‘mortification’). In both cases the ‘victim’ incarnates all the knowledge that is given up at the solemn instant in the evolving of human science, where man has to recognize: ‘It is impossible that this does not exist, therefore it must exist’. It is a fearsome but necessary passage, an absolute condition for receiving any revelation of divine wisdom. The archetype of the mediator realizing a sacrifice obviously is the PRIEST.

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The 6th archetype: the Warrior

A extreme case of conditional necessity occurs, when to a community a life threatening enemy appears. The only realization possible is simply to allow the community to survive. It is non-optional, it mobilizes all instrumental means of power and eclipses all other formal and final necessities. There is no time to reflect or to act, only to react.

In fact a mortal enemy of the community man is responsible for implies circumstances that not only reduce to nothing man’s possibilities to contemplate peacefully, judge equitably, spend time with his beloved ones or to create something, but that also lead to certain death if the enemy is not prevented from accomplishing his lethal intentions. The condition for survival is crude and simple: the enemy  must be rendered harmless, even if this means killing him. This implies risking one’s own life. Thus the WARRIOR is the archetype of the man, who mediates against death at the risk of dying himself.

Inflicted death surely can not be according to the creating wisdom of God, so self-defense is the only righteous cause of war. But while taking the risk of becoming a victim himself the warrior touches something in the eternal wisdom of God with absolute certainty. The warrior really is an archetype. And it can even be examined, whether before the revelation of God's wisdom war is the typical religious exercise of a community, where men have communion in the readiness to sacrifice their own life for a superior good.