The Warrior Messiah:: the Cultural Roots of European Imperialism

Based upon the "hero-sacrifice" of Jungian psychology, Eliade's "eternal return" concept, Lévi-Strauss' structuralism and Lloyd's structurism, this monograph argues that the "warrior messiah" complex, as a tension-laden militant and evangelical cultural construct, will characterize Europe's evolving political consciousness from its primordial paleolithic days down through the centuries, always shifting and adapting, to underpin the mentality that drives the engine of European imperialism.  Psychological and physiological evidence supports the belief that human beings comprehend their place in the cosmos through dualistic symbols and binary relationships.  The bellicosity of the warrior counterpoises the pacifism of the messiah in a dualistic construct that becomes a fundamental complex in the primitive "western" psyche. The serious student of European imperialism must not only study the chronological and ideological components of European history that contributed to imperialism, but also must understand the physiological systems and subliminal psychological structures that impelled its very "nature" and became encapsulated in codified constructs.