Ancestral trauma #10 – identity warfare
Numbers 31 is one of the most disturbing passages in the Bible. The Israelites defeat the Midianites. Every adult male is killed, towns and encampments are burned, women and children taken captive. When Moses sees the women have been spared, he is enraged. He orders the execution of every male child—and every woman who has had sex. Only virgins are to be kept as slaves. This is identity warfare—a deep ancestral trauma coursing in the gutters of humanity’s collective unconscious.
What is identity warfare?
Identity warfare is founded on the premise that whenever there is trauma, there’s a loss of identity and of independent capacity.
Conventional warfare aims at territorial and military victory. The enemy is defeated, land and possessions taken, the survivors submit. Identity warfare goes further. Its aim is not merely to defeat an enemy in the present, but to destroy or permanently diminish their capacity to know who they are, so thoroughly that they—and, critically, their descendants—can never effectively resist again.
Historically, identity warfare was about inflicting trauma so severely that a people no longer know who they are:
- Kill most of the men, terminating their genetic lineages
- Turn enslaved virgins into baby factories for their victorious enemies
- Eliminate the leaders, elders, storytellers and other prominent members
- Destroy the symbols of group belonging, such as sacred books or sites
- Impose one’s own symbols of belonging, such as circumcision
- Traumatise into subservience, which becomes genetic
Circumcision, whether chosen as a symbol of identity or imposed on slaves, inflicted trauma. Moses Maimonides (ca. 1175), rabbi of Cairo, wrote that “the true purpose of circumcision was to give the sexual organ that kind of physical pain as… to lessen the power of passion.” [1]
Identity warfare is not only historical; it’s been practiced into recent times. During the Rape of Nanking in 1937, Japanese troops killed 20,000 Chinese women—many with a bayonet through the vagina.
The Yugoslav Wars—a series of wars in the Balkans between 1991and 2001, following the breakup of Yugoslavia—included many aspects of identity warfare: “The Yugoslav Wars were marked by many war crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and mass wartime rape.” (Wikipedia)
The ‘seat of the self’
Identity warfare reveals a truth that humanity has long sought to avoid: our sense of identity resides in our generative centre—the genitals, pelvis, and reproductive organs have long been recognised in Jewish theology, Greek philosophy, and Hindu Tantric mysticism as the ‘seat of the self.’
The words we use to describe origin, identity, selfhood, and biological continuity share a single root. Genesis, genitals, gene, genealogy, genetics, genital, gender, genus, genius, and generate all derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *gene-, meaning ‘to give birth, to beget.’
This is not accidental. It encodes a belief that the site of generation—the reproductive organs—is simultaneously the site of origin, identity, family, and kind. To speak of one’s genus (one’s kind or species), one’s genealogy (line of descent), one’s genes (biological inheritance), and one’s genitals is, etymologically, to speak of the same thing: the body that generates, continues, and defines the self across time.
In the ancient world, this was understood not merely biologically but cosmologically. To strike at a people’s generative capacity was to strike at their relationship with the divine, their covenant with the future, their very reason for existing. It was, in the deepest sense, to strike at the root.
This is why the instructions in Numbers 31 are so precise about who survives.
Why is identity warfare important?
Because the Bible is the founding document of Western civilization.
And because all of us, regardless of genetic lineage, have ancestors who went through cycles of identity warfare over the last 6,000 years, ever since the Neolithic Age ended and peaceful hunter-gatherer societies gave way to the Chalcolithic (copper), Bronze and Iron Ages, all founded on advances in weapon making.
The trauma of identity warfare is encoded into each one of us. It’s why huge populations of peace-loving people appoint strongman leaders who still rush headlong to war. America’s recent, disastrous military adventurism in Iran is a classic case. Cowed by a state’s own internal policing mechanisms, the trauma of age-old identity warfare keeps humanity stuck in a loop of endless violence.
We are all unknowingly living with a diminished sense of identity from these age-old atrocities; we are complicit in their recent repetitions while we carry this coding. There is only one solution: identity reclamation through trauma release.
Next steps
For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.
References
[1] Quoted in DeMeo, James; Saharasia (1998)