Breaking the first rule | My fight club story

My masculine initiation and our revolt against chestless Catholicism.

Post inspired by The Lost Ritual and a thread on the topic by Luke Burgis

The term "rite of passage," coined by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 work "Les rites de passage," refers to a ceremonial process intended to transform the boy (traditionally) fundamentally altering an individual, and turning them into a man. Modern society lacks rites of passage which leading to a sense of stagnation and skepticism regarding personal change. Public declarations of transformation are often met with doubt, reflecting a broader societal skepticism towards genuine personal growth.

And yet

My initiation story

Monty preached to us from a knoll, barefoot in the buffalo grass. A bonfire blazed behind him, casting the figures of the boys beside me in an orange hue.  

My best friend Monty was hardly an intimidating figure. Tonight, he wore a black t-shirt featuring the original Star Wars movie cast. A black bandana tied up his greasy hair behind him. He was a philosophy nerd, but tonight, he was a god. 

His words cut the crisp December air:

"Archer, insulter, flaunting those proud curls, you who pine for women's attention!"

Ben, a two-hundred-pound Titan of a man, prowled among us, punctuating Monty's performance with back claps and shoulder checks. Jeremy, a black bulldog with a smile that had even upperclass Women’s hearts fluttering, shoved back.

We could almost taste the dust and the salt of the plane of Troy opening before us. 

Monty’s voice began to crescendo, "I wish you'd face me like a man in armor, for then your bow and quick-falling arrows would offer no aid.

But no, you boast like a boy because you grazed the sole of my foot with your arrow. This wound is just a scratch. It's as though a woman or a clueless child  struck me, for the thrust of a feeble and worthless man is dull and blunt."

It was the close of our first semester at a small classical University.

Just a few hours earlier, the freshman class has put down their pens and stacked their blue essay exam notebooks at the desks of bow-tied professors. The Illiad, Western Civ, and Latin 101 were officially behind us.

The underclassmen had gathered on the edge of the Florida swamp in reclaimed tomato farms turned soccer fields. The bonfire was an annual tradition, but this year, something different was happening, something which caused the women around us to whisper in sputtering conversations and look on at what was quickly becoming a spectacle.

Save for a few bootlickers and friend-zoned suckers, nearly all of the undergraduate men were gathered before the flames in roiling ranks, roaring passages from the Illiad into the night. 

We were a motley, awkward bunch. Homeschoolers with mismatched outfits, youth group kids with vacuous smiles, do-gooders, seminarians in slacks and grey polos two sizes too big, Lord of the Rings LARPERS, a smattering of Spanish-speaking soccer players, and me, a short, skinny emo rocker who was trying too hard.

We had no idea how much we had in common until we’d landed in this alternate reality in the middle of the swamp. We had discovered something in the pages of ancient texts.

We were all aware of something missing from our souls. We were disenchanted. We were steeped in the malaise of ease. No battles to fight, no stakes to win, no ideals to strive for. We’d all been domesticated.

Dan, the homeschooled Iowa boy next to me, was domesticated. His overbearing homeschooling mom hid him away from the world, and now he could barely speak when in the company of a woman.

Mike was domesticated. He was a perfect youth group kid turned celibate seminarian, whose soft-spoken manner made him a favorite of the grey-haired ladies. They just KNEW he’d make a great priest.

I was domesticated by a 5A Texas public school where my wildness and creativity were leached away one bullshit assignment after another. “Make sure to write your assignment on 8.5x14 paper in blue pen only.”

And we’d all been marooned here, 30 miles from the nearest house party, on a campus with nothing to do, and told to read the Illiad. What could go wrong?

Monty continued at the top of his lungs: 

Men used to be like this. I don't know about you, but I'm done being a p**sy."

At that moment, Monty was Lycurgis handing down the law that bound the Spartans together. Our souls burned with pain, joy, and conviction all at once.

At that moment, to the dismay of the feminine bystanders, Ben bellowed and drove his hulking mass into Jeremy's gut, plowing him into the ground. In seconds, this “fun party” descended into chaos as our herd of boys tore up the field in an all-out brawl with no rules, goals, winners, or losers. 

The cries of protest from our den mothers rang out immediately. The cries of women, and faculty mingled with a clamor of martial contest. Boy collided with boy. Flesh thudded against earth. Bystander gasped to bystander.

It must have been something like what the Greeks and Romans portrayed when they spoke of towns being carried away by a Dionysian revelry.

Of course, the University would not condone this savage behavior (not good for the optics, you see), and the campus police were soon among us, tearing apart combatants and unsuccessfully attempting to give citations.

Zach, a slippery rugger from an all-boys boarding school relaxed the rear naked choke he'd wrapped me in and whispered almost gently as he slipped away, "Tomorrow. Same time same place"  

The campus security carried the day, but that night was just the beginning. 

The next night, boys from all over campus quietly slipped away from dorm lounge movie nights and other campus social events for a war council on the edge of the Everglades under the star-studded Florida sky.

We set an audacious vision:

• To cast off passivity, to take over the campus, and to transform its culture from the inside out

• To stop organizing our lives around competing for women's affection

• To reclaim the manhood we felt we'd lost

Ben dubbed it "The Man Project" to a hearty and mirthful reception. Programs were considered. Ground rules were laid.

The rough outline was this:

Every week a man from our number would present an invitation to the others, who would spread the word until every trusted man on campus had an invitation. This was the exchange:

Zach would slide up next to me after Lit Trad. He'd say:

"10pm. Are you in?"

He'd wait for me to commit before revealing the details:

"I'm in"

He'd tell me the location and the game we'd be playing:

"Behind the library. Last man standing. Tap Out. Pass it on."

Then, that night, we'd gather at the isolated moonlit location. The man who called the Man Night would read a section of poetry or scripture, and admonish us on some topic of manhood: Grit, magnanimity, honor, responsibility, discipline...etc.

We would fight.

We would close with a thundering invocation to the Queen of Victory.

We'd gather in a pre-designated dorm room for beers, back claps, and a discussion of our program of insurgency.

We were sworn to secrecy at the risk of having membership revoked. No woman or untrusted man was to know. If we committed to attend, we were sworn to follow through at risk of voiding our membership.

Suppose I showed up in class the next day with a cut above my eye and a wrist wrapped in a bandana. I'd simply respond to any inquiries about the nature of my misfortune with a short "I fell." 

I look back on that first night at the bonfire and can feel Zach's arm around my throat choking me as I fought to escape the vice of his body lock. I remember feeling like I was going to die. Darkness crept in around my eyes, and spittle fell from my mouth as I gasped for air.

But that night, a part of me woke up. A part that had gone deep into hiding.

The Longhouse

That part was locked away behind a desk, behind motivational posters, behind tests that tested only obedience, behind the public school uniform of conformity, behind the edgy “bad boy artist” mask I wore for approval.

That part was angry, it was enraged, and it was ALIVE. I realized that I had been living until the warrior woke up in me. I had just been behaving.

This continued week in and week out until the end of my Senior year. I ran the numbers. I must have fought 100 fights before I graduated. The man project was the most formative initiative I've ever received. The men I fought with are my closest friends to this day. 

And now, despite having careers, families, jobs, aches, and many more layers of flab, we still fight. Every time there's a wedding, we gather the night before in torchlit fields, and we fight. Every time, I feel that fire flicker again. The story must be told because I want that fire to burn in me always,  I need it. All of us need it. 

What I learned

We live in a culture that has lulled the wildness inside us to sleep. The machine has micro-managed our every thought and action through layers of law, corporate policy, financial systems, and cultural norms that have left us drooling, consumed by the black mirrors we worship.

We are a people whose history has been hidden from us lest we remember that we are dangerous. The Man project began my journey to reclaim my wild, uncontrollable, explosive humanity, and I’ve been fighting for my soul ever since. 

I’ve been fighting for my uniqueness. To stay human. To stay alive.

I don’t know what can be done about society, but I believe every small act of rebellion against homogenization counts. The machine wants us to exchange our selves for empty comfort and our souls for to go along to get along.

And I know, my dear readers that some of you are calling for “prudence,” we cannot simply become men by beating each other up, and yes, I will give you that. There is far more to the process.

But then again, William Blake said: “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by incapacity. The hour is late. Extremes are warranted. Any man or woman who wants to preserve their soul must contend against the furnace that melts us down to be re-shaped into consumers, wanting whatever the machine tells us to want, and doing what it tells us to do. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist, or even conservative to get behind this. You need to want to be you.

The journey toward humanity looks like reclaiming ritual, initiation, myth, and ceremony. We’ve been starved of these things that take us from one state of being to another. They are necessary in the process of becoming, but they are natural to us; only modern man, with our skepticism, our fear of rejection, and years of conditioning, has held nature at bay. 

The path to becoming is through rituals like this one we created, and ritual is strange, otherworldly, and weird. So we hide behind our laptops lest someone call us LARPERS or bystanders whisper in scorn. But ritual and initiation are as natural to us as singing, dancing, or lovemaking, and nature never stays in its cell for long.

So, how do you create a ritual or a rite of passage? 

You don’t set out to. You ride the swell, just like we did. 

And yes. All of this really did happen.

“Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret”

“You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.”

Horace 

I will continue to write about rituals, especially initiations, in search of clues that could guide us toward crafting initiations for ourselves and our loved ones. Want help building initiation rights? Reach out: www.sherwoodfellows.com/contact