Woman in the Middle
Google Man in the Middle and you will find millions of articles about a kind of cyber attack.
Google Woman in the Middle and you will find news of the Women’s Olympic middleweight boxing final, in which Lauren Price of Great Britain beat Li Qian of China, and the eponymous Sunday Times bestselling novel by Milly Johnson.
I have titled this article Woman in the Middle, partly as feminist quip, partly as it is a defence, not of cyber attacks but of the role of The Middle in the V crisis. You may read V as virus or vaccine, according to preference.
I woke this morning to a message from a Facebook friend who had seen if not read my article on graphene oxide, which attempts to carve out space in the middle using the Doctrine of Maybe. That is, more or less, to try one’s best not to judge a situation, especially one does not know everything about. Which is the kind of situation that prevails in an infowar. This is as much a war strategy as it is a philosophical stance.
We never really know the providence of any situation. [Alan Watts]
This Facebook friend is firmly and unequivocally anti-vaxx. Their messages tend to be served with lashings of QAnon memes. That is a statement of fact, and not intended to dismiss the messages by association.
The message this morning urged me to forget my ‘neutral’ position. One is either pro or anti vaccination. There is no middle ground. Graphene Oxide has been injected into people without their consent. Which is a war crime.
They have a point.
But if we are to take up arms, i.e. in the first place offer our arm to the needle or not, encourage family and friends to do the same, we had better know what we are doing or not doing, lest we risk being used by one agenda or another. That is what tends to happen in an infowar.
The QAnon phenomenon if nothing else raised the spectre of Q in the midst of the collapse of the American Empire. That is, Q for Question. Scholars of the phenomenon tracked its birth in the FourChan message board owned by US Veteran, pig farmer and part time pornographer Jim Watkins, and its growth in the EightChan and EightKun message boards, where it became a Hydra.
Let us quickly revisit. The Hydra is a serpentine creature from Greek mythology, residing in the lake of Lerna, also the site of the myth of the Danaids, the fifty daughters of Danaus, who fled Egypt to Argos (home of the Argonauts) to avoid the decree of Danaus’ twin brother Aegyptus that all fifty girls should marry his fifty sons.
Danaus later accepted the decree, provided Aegyptus and his sons come to Argos, in order to help protect the city. This they did and the marriage was brokered. But Danaus had ordered his daughters to murder their husbands on their wedding night. This they did, all save one, Hypermnestra, whose husband Lynceus respected her desire to remain a virgin.
For her disobedience, Hypermnestra was thrown in jail and later saved by the goddess Aphrodite. Her husband went on to avenge the murder of his fifty brothers by killing Hypermnestra’s father Danaus.
The story is a marvellous example of the weave of history and mythology. We note the resonance of warring brothers Danaus and Aegyptus with the Sumerian template of Enki and Enlil, and the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. We wonder what the numbers fifty and forty-nine esoterically refer to.
But our note to carry forwards is the emancipation of Hypermnestra, and its colocation in Lerna, thought to be the entrance to the Underworld, and as we have said, home of the Hydra.
Hydra was the child of Typhon and Echidna. Typhon was a son of Gaia. Echidna is described by the historian Hesiod as a terrifying creature ‘half woman, half snake.’ Others list her as the daughter of Styx, goddess of the river that wound through the Underworld. We might describe Hydra and her parents as dragons, and therefore with a nod to that scholar of the dragoons, David Icke, as Reptilian. Gaia is of course the Great Cosmic Mother, whose parthenogenic orgasm birthed the world, including Ouranos (Uranus) the Sky God, with whom she bore the Titans, most of whom, for their transgressions against the nascent Order, were cast into Tartarus, a crack of doom like that on Exegol, where Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) visits Emperor in JJ Abrams’ triumph of Saturnian visualisation in Star Wars IX.
But our concern here is the Hydra. Its abode beneath a lake locates it in the subconscious, which we may associate, along with grandmother Gaia, with the feminine. Each of its many heads when cut off were immediately replaced by two, signifying anathema to the Herculean work of the Logos, that great cleaving of Light from Dark, of conscious from subconscious, of masculine from feminine, man from woman. Order from Chaos.
Like its single-headed progenitor the Flat Earth conspiracy, QAnon has questioned the Logos of the status quo. It’s many heads, from JFK to Donald Trump, from the CIA to Vladimir Putin, only sprout more when cut off. Trump didn’t win the election. There was no military coup. But fear not, Biden is Q. And so on.
And so it is when it comes to V.
The Charles Eisenstein essay I have mentioned before, Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed, is the third and final part of a series on philosopher Rene Girard’s work on the primordial roots of violence in human society. Eisenstein sees that violence in the scapegoating of the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement. The word scapegoat comes from the ancient business of sacrificing a goat in order that ills within society be extracted. The ritual violence of the sacrifice serves as an outlet for festering grievance. In mythological or spiritual language, the blood that flows appeases the gods or demons that foment violence. Girard concludes that such rites may be sadly necessary. After all, they work.
The suppression of the anti-vaxx movement by mainstream forces like Facebook and Google has largely forced it out of society onto alt platforms like Odysee and Rumble, where it grows heads and intertwines with other monsters like the gun lobby, the pro life movement, homophobia, islamophobia and antisemitism.
Mid-right voices like the Telegraph have found themselves dragged into the swamp. Charles Moore expresses doubt over the integrity of the Herculean BBC when it comes to reporting on whether SarsCov2 was invented at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and takes up arms against the Chinese Communist Party.
Elsewhere in the paper, liberal voices are raised against the ‘findings’ that a double jab will not prevent you becoming infected or infecting. Annabel Fenwick Elliot’s column comes closer than any mainstream publication to date to defending the anti-vaxx movement.
Covid-19 is a hydra. Biologically speaking as much as politically. There is plenty of smoke—much of it smokescreen—from fires behind the scenes. We know that the Pentagon is conducting Gain of Function virology research. It is not Flat Earth conspiracy to wonder if they exported that research to Wuhan. Claps for patriotism. We might also wonder if they also exported the lab breakout. And from there onwards, wonder is the word.
We cannot know anything in wartime. When the very means of going about knowing something are assailed, it is very difficult to know anything unless we were there. And even then.
What conspiracy theories reveal is that reality is a conspiracy. Realising that invokes Girard’s primordial fears. We may choose to go to war about that, attacking conspiracy, defending reality. We may have to visit Exegol.
And amidst the drainings of swamps and hewing of heads, I suggest we take a moment to bow our own—a nod at least or a touch of the forehead—to the woman in the middle.
