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By Root 761 0

like the Christ story, well, you didn’t really think the Christians made all that up, did you? They retold a very, very old story in a way that bridged a gap between Jews and pagans. Miss Harrison (as she was always called) ruffled more than a few Victorian feathers with her tales about the derivative (and religiously inferior) Christian version of Jesus and Mary. Like Mick Jagger, Miss Harrison is not without sympathy for the Christian story, she just sees it from a broader perspective—after all, the devilry itself is much older than Christianity. One of the things that has always impressed me about Mick Jagger is how wide his sense of history is and how very damn smart those lyrics are—not just to “Sympathy for the Devil,” but in so many of the songs he wrote. He has a very keen intellect, sees things as they are, in my opinion.

And Mick knows, obviously, there is no reason to bother with being anti-Christian. You cannot successfully oppose the kind of story Christianity tells; it always just pops up again. It is the Dionysian story. The followers of Apollo hijacked it, as they always do, but it’s the story of Dionysus. The Christian version of that story is a lot less objectionable than other versions we might have been saddled with. Nietzsche was right when he complained that Christianity is a puny, slave morality that renders the human race effeminate and opposes all that is mighty and virile in humans. That’s exactly what I like about Christianity. I have always thought that slaves know more than their masters, and that over-weaning masculinity needs to be opposed with as much vigor as it takes to keep the boys from killing each other with all their stupid pointy toys.

Won’t You Guess My Name?

Miss Harrison’s main discovery about the Rolling Stones is in her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. The opening chapter is actually about Mick Jagger. One of his earliest songs is called the “Hymn of the Kouretes,” where the island boys who serve the goddess strut around their golden child, Kouros (that was Mick’s name back then), at the bidding of the goddess. The goddess likes it when the boys come to admire her perfect boy, and she gives the Maiden permission to lose it when they do. That was the gig. And that’s how you book it. Ask your Mother.

Over several millennia, Mick had a lot of names. He was called Dendritis, and Nuktelios, and Isodaites, among other names, and later Bacchus, of course. It seemed he always had new albums and tours, but Mick finally surfaced in ancient Greece as Dionysus, and that was when he got the name we call him today. It takes Harrison over five hundred pages to tell the story of how Mick showed up to trouble Athens, but all her books are up on-line for free, so at least it won’t cost you anything to read about it. Dionysus was eventually accepted among the Olympians, sort of like the irony of Mick Jagger becoming a Knight of the Realm. The appearance of Dionysus among the Greek gods was a real revolution, but that’s a story for another time.

The story for today is about how Kouros and the Kouretes (that was the original name of the Rolling Stones) behaved themselves. They actually got along without too much strife back when they started out, but soon the males split off into those who like that kind of music and aren’t bothered by an omnisexual, ecstatic orgy, and the males who saw that sort of behavior as weak and womanly. Those manly men didn’t like being kept at the perimeter of the villages of women, and they started forming their Sour Grapes Clubs out in the woods and caves, and daring any of the girly-men to come and try their little fairy dances out where the real men are—the men who don’t need women, the men who hate women for excluding them; the men who would beat women if they could get them behind a closed door; in short, the manly men. They want all the men to be like them.

But here’s the thing. You really don’t want to underestimate the girly-men. If you do, you may end up with Keith’s boot in your face or his knife between your legs. Make