You Are Now a Cowboy
SUBJECT: Improper Use of Company Tech
FROM: Mark Schultz <costumeplex28@costumeplex.com>
TO: Andrew Feliz <management@costumeplex.com>
Andrew– the attached file was found in a folder just labeled “Cowboy” on the desktop of the POS computer at Store 28. Some of the employees are still in school, and I’ve had to gently remind them before that using store computers for their homework is strictly prohibited.
The weird thing is, the author listed in the header doesn’t work at Store 28. I can’t find the name Mina Rider in any of the employee records for our other locations, either. I honestly have no idea where this thing came from. I’ve attached the essay in hopes that maybe reading it will give you some clue as to who to reprimand for this.
Thanks,
Mark Schultz
Shift Manager
CostumePlex 28
2308 Kruegel Road Highgrove, MN
—
Mina Rider
Dr. Eleanor Aphasia
PHIL 412 Semiotic Psychology
10 Oct 2024
You Are Now A Cowboy:
Design Semiotics and the Metamorphosis of Haberdashery
I. Introduction
The cowboy hat is an iconic symbol of Americana, recalling images of “the Wild West”, evoking both childhood nostalgia and the trauma of American settler colonialism in North America. Originally, the iconic high-crowned hat with its wide, curled brim served a functional purpose in the lifestyle of the ranch hands from which it takes its name. This nomenclature has cemented a semiotic linkage between the hat and the occupation of “cowboy” in the popular imagination, and thusly, as the cowboy has mythologized, so has his hat.
This association both creates, and dialectically is created by, a shift in the purpose of the garment. The cowboy hat has evolved from a practical garment protecting the wearer from natural elements encountered in animal husbandry, to a symbolic signifier not just of occupation, but of the entire imagined ethos associated with said occupation– the proverbial “cowboy spirit.”
The archetypical cowboy, an American mythic hero, is carefree yet hard-working, pioneering yet patriotic, sensuous yet lonesome, unaffected and unencumbered by the artifice of “sophisticated” urban culture. More skeptically, he symbolizes hegemonic white American masculinity as embodied in settler colonialism. Lastly, he symbolizes heterosexual male virility, with Heath Jacob’s seminal work The Lasso and the Leatherman citing the erotically-charged feats of equestrianism prominent in the role (p. 738).
Yet, with the disappearance of the American frontier and the urbanization of the twenty-first century, the cowboy has faded from representing a real class of people to a purely fictive archetype detached from its historic roots— a paradoxical archetype at that, a “cowboy with a thousand faces,” to borrow Joseph Campbell’s immortal words.
Despite the disappearance of the human cowboy, the cowboy hat continues to be widely available for purchase and wear. What was once an occupational uniform indicative of a specific culture has become appropriated into wider American society. One need not actually be a ranch hand in order to wear the cowboy hat; it is instead democratized and commodified into the accessory of anyone who wishes to display their “cowboy spirit.” In this way, the cowboy hat has become a powerful symbol of semiotic transmission.
As the cowboy-by-trade vanishes, the only remaining cowboys are those who demonstrate, or believe themselves to be in possession of, “the cowboy spirit.” In order to bear witness to this spirit, one must display it symbolically by donning the hat. The cowboy hat becomes a tool of transformation.
Dr. Mitsuki Laycock’s groundbreaking 2018 study, “Be The Cowboy: Behavioral Transference in Accoutrement,” which shall be explored more thoroughly below, provides a striking example of the semiotic power of the cowboy hat. Laycock discovered that after appending the cowboy hat, subjects demonstrated a marked increase in stereotypically cowboy-esque behaviors compared to the hatless control group. This change in behavior occurred even in blind studies where subjects were unaware what type of hat they were wearing. Laycock’s conclusion is striking: “When you [sic] wear the hat, you aren’t pretending to be a cowboy,” she says, making strikingly nonacademic use of the editorial ‘you’. “By putting on the hat, you are now a cowboy.”
II. Jungian Origins of the Cowboy Spirit
In chronicling the semiotic transformation of the cowboy hat, one may be tempted to begin with the historical context and experience of the prototypical cowboys of the American West. An attempt to do so, however, reveals an incongruity that has puzzled academics since the first days of androbovine studies. As referenced above, the archetypal cowboy is all-American and white, yet the historic cowboys were primarily of Native American and African-American descent. The archetypal cowboy is a picture of heteronormative male virility, yet strong evidence suggests that modern-day portrayals of the occupation as a site of homoerotic passion bear strong historical basis (Lee, et al. p. 37).
As even this cursory exploration of the cowboy demonstrates, the “cowboy spirit” is so distinct from the factual occupation as to render them essentially separate entities. Whenceforth, then, the modern cowboy ethos? This scholar offers the alternative explanation that the origins of the cowboy spirit are semantic rather than historical, created by the specific and contradictory connotations of the compound word’s components in English.
Cow. Boy. Cow. Boy. Being terms respectively for one of the oldest domesticated animals, central to many civilizations, and the male (and thus privileged and valued in patriarchal cultures) offspring of human beings, both carry strong, primal, meaning.
The word “cowboy” embodies duality and opposition. The bestial bovine and the human child. The feminine, mature cow and the masculine, youthful boy. The compounding of the words– cowboy rather than cow boy or cow-boy, results in fusion. The identities are melded, perfectly balanced. From its etymology, one gleans that the primordial cowboy incarnates the worlds of both beast and man, feminine and masculine, age and youth, the chaos of nature and the order of domestication, the mastered property which is livestock and the master himself.
If viewed as synecdoche, one may say that all things are either cow or boy, and therefore the notion of cowboy encapsulates the totality of the universe. All is cowboy. This writer is cowboy. You are now a cowboy.
Could it be that the ranch hand of yore, rather than serving as point of origin for the modern concept of cowboy, was in fact simply an adopter of an older, pre-existing archetype? Could it be that the proverbial “cowboy spirit” is, in fact, as ancient as both cow and boy? Could it be that cowboy inhabits the psychological space of a Jungian archetype, an ancient character representing the duality underpinning all of existence– and that the cowboys of the Old West were mere channels of this archetype?
Yes, this scholar posits.
III. The Cowboy Secrets of Antiquity
This claim of the primeval nature of cowboy can be further examined by critical analysis of the primary sartorial trapping of the cowboy: his hat. In Geneology of an American Hat, chapologist Roan Parton upholds the dominant sartorial narrative of the cowboy hat’s origins. Parton spuriously claims that the cowboy hat as we know originated in 1865, was preceded by the sombrero, kepi, and bowler hats popular in the West at the time, and that its design was intended to protect the wearer from sun and rain alike. To Parton, the story of the cowboy is, like a cowhide, cut and dry. So simple, in fact, that one may be tempted to believe that the leading scholars on the topic of the cowboy hat are purposefully discouraging further research.
I invite you (if one may excuse this author’s use of the first- and second-person pronouns) to look closely at the cowboy hat. Perhaps you may join me in placing the hat on a table across from you and admiring, for some dozens of minutes, its form. Examine the elegant upward curve at the sides of its brim. Note the sensuality of its felted or leather texture, the animalistic origin of its materials. Admit to yourself the undeniable resemblance between the ridges of its crown, and human lips– whether oral or labial. These are not the features of an object crafted for mundane agricultural purposes. The highly-stylized shape of the cowboy hat, slavishly passed on from one generation of hats to the next, is intended to invoke the most primal of urges. The hat constitutes a well-crafted fertility talisman, of the kind found in the majority of ancient cultures.
Thus you begin to apprehend that the cowboy hat is as ancient in origin as the primordial cowboy itself. A great deception has been perpetrated and maintained by those who claim the cowboy hat as the invention of nineteenth-century bovine wranglers. It is not the cowboy that made the hat. Rather, it is the hat that makes cowboy. How the hat came to be associated with the cowhands of the Old West, you theorize, is parallel to the findings of Laycock’s research: the cowhands, rediscovering the ancient accessory and submitting their heads to be covered by it, took on the cowboy spirit and became cowboy.
We have established, then, the antique ancestry of cowboy. But in order to truly apprehend the nature of cowboy, we must trace its specific cultural and cultic origins. Who in the ancient world was the first channel of cowboy?
The most progressive research in the field of millinery archaeology brings to light a shocking, and yet deceptively simple, revelation. Crafted of felt, leather, or animal hide, the petasos (πέτασος) of Ancient Greece was worn by farmers, hunters, travelers, and mounted cavalry (Kapelë 2023, pg 2226.) This high-crowned hat with its wide, curled brim denoted the wearer as an adventurer, a skilled horseman, and as deeply connected to the primordial powers of the earth. Kapelë goes on to present evidence that the petasos was worn as early as 3,000 B.C.E. (the Minoan period) and likely served as a form of clerical habit for devotees of the cult of the Minotaur (2266.) The physical description, semiotic function, and hat-wearing demographic of the petasos mirror the modern cowboy hat far too extensively to be dismissed as coincidence. Placed side by side– as you may literally do, uncovering your Ancient Greek hat stolen from an archeological dig and placing it beside the cowboy hat on the table– the petasos and cowboy hat fit into each other’s millinery genealogy like hand in glove, or like hat in hat.
The physical object of the cowboy hat, fertility talisman, bestower of the cowboy spirit, that which transforms the ordinary wearer into cowboy, is none other than the modern descendent of the priestly headgear of the cult of the Minotaur, dating back to the Minoan civilization.
IV. The Primordial Cowboy
It is well-known within the study of ancient religions that much of the extant record of pre-Christian mythologies is unreliable. Many myths were not preserved in writing until centuries after the rise of Christianity, and therefore these written records carry both the biases of and possible revisions by their Christian authors (for example, see Ray Muzyka’s work on the evolution of the Norse Baldr into a Christ-figure.) Thus, while to the modern student of mythology, the Minotaur may appear to have been a minor antagonistic figure, it is necessary to challenge the assumption that mythology always presented him as such.
The modern perception of Asterion– the being’s proper name– as a mere “monster” meant to be conquered by a virtuous hero is, according to Kapelë’s seminal work, a later, post-Christian appropriation of the myth. Like many such appropriations, it was created explicitly to obfuscate the importance of an older deity, to represent the new religion’s conquest of that more ancient cult. In the Minoan era, Asterion was in fact a central, if not the central, figure of Greek cosmology. An analysis of Asterion’s character reveals, quite easily, why he was the primary deity.
The Minotaur, the Bull of Minos. Born of a bull, which is merely a male cow, and a human woman, which is naught but a female boy. Photonegative images representing all of existence and all opposing principles, fused and sublimated into one being. The creation of this chimeric humanoid, through a divine union of opposites, brings into incarnate form all that is cow and all that is boy, and therefore, synecdochally, all that is in existence. In one being, in one form, the Minotaur embodies the totality of the cosmos. It is in Him that we see the mirror of all that is. It is in Him that we find the origin of the cowboy spirit. Praise be to Asterion, the original cowboy!
Anyway. Within the myth of the Minotaur, one finds echoes of the religion that would come to supplant it. As Poseidon sends the Cretan Bull to impregnate Pasiphaë, and in so doing begets a Son who represents the union of divine and human, so Jehovah sends his Spirit to impregnate the Virgin Mary and beget a Son who unifies the divine and humanity in one being. As Asterion, misunderstood and shunned by a world who cannot recognize His divinity, is confined to suffer in a subterranean labyrinth, so Jesus is rejected by larger society and is killed and entombed as punishment. In crafting their savior, early Christians took the bones of an old god and, much like the Minotaur did to His human sacrifices, devoured them.
Yet if the Christ narrative presents the acceptance of suffering as a means by which to transcend it, the myth of Asterion, the Primordial Cowboy, presents an alternative. Asterion does not submit to a life of quiet exile within the labyrinth. Asterion exacts payment, in the form of the ritual sacrifice of human youths. Asterion consumes the flesh of humanity, who rejected him. Asterion demands blood.
This is the cowboy spirit: to transcend the lonesomeness of the range and the suffering of harsh labor, through your indomitable hunger for blood. This is the spirit which the ancient Minoan priests communed with in their petasos, and this is the spirit which possessed simple cowpokes to conquer the Wild West. This is the spirit, the will of Asterion, which compels you if you merely submit to having His symbol placed upon your head.
So you do it. You gaze upon the sensuous crown of the cowboy hat– labial, labyrinthine, it all makes sense now. It was before you the whole time. You take the cowboy hat in your hands, your fingers delicately caressing the soft underside of the brim. You lift it aloft, feeling both the stalwart structure of the leather and the unbearable delicacy and lightness. It is like a majestic bird, its wings washing over you. It is like a ship, its leathern prow cutting deep into your soul. You lift the cowboy hat, the talisman, high like an offering. You let drip from your mouth words that you were never taught and yet which you know perfectly, Ancient Greek pouring from you like your very blood. Your blood flows to praise Him, your eyes weep to praise Him. You bow your head in reverence, and you place the hat upon your head.
—
The darkness hangs heavy with rot. Flesh moldering, blackening, falling away like dust. The rivulets of spilled blood form marbling, spidering patterns against the stones. You leave the corpses in piles along the path, leave the bones as glittering trail markers within the endless halls. You stalk these paths sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, sometimes more beast than man, more man than beast. Always, growling for blood. Viscera clings to your hide. The hair of your lips is crusted from thrusting your face into the side of a corpse, and your horns are forever stained with those you have gored. You hear them now, though all is dead within the labyrinth. The youths thrust against the walls of the labyrinth, the squelching of their guts torn through by your horns. You hear them, always, shuddering, calling wordlessly, as your spears hold them powerless and your teeth tear into their organs, as their iron-tasting juices pour down your throat. You smell always of their death. Within this ever-winding fortress, this eternal primordial night, you are king and prisoner. You are life and death. You are cowboy.
You are now a cowboy. You are now a cowboy. You are now a cowboy.
Leo Rose Rodriguez is a queer, neurodivergent writer and artist based in Minneapolis, on traditional Dakota land. They are the author of the chapbooks, "Fatherland, Motherland" and "...and this would be Moshiach." Their work has been featured in The Lavender Review, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere.