ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the lyrical splendor of the golden bough to consider that of a golden army at the headwaters of the Putumayo River in southwest Colombia, upriver from the publicized atrocities inflicted on Indian rubber-tappers by the Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company of the Arana brothers at the beginning of the twentieth century. It emphasizes something of the various tones which in multifarious and gorgeously aesthetic ways constitute this representation, yagé spirits and the Colombian army, for instance. Fascism is an accentuated form of modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of repression of mimesis—the ban on graven images, gypsies, actors; the love-hate relationship with the body; the cessation of Carnival; and finally the kind of teaching which does not allow children to be children. But above all, fascism is more than outright repression of the mimetic; it is a return of the repressed, based on the "organized control of mimesis.".
