Boudewijn Koole, Man en vrouw zijn een: De androgynie in het Christendom, in het bijzonder bij Jacob Boehme (English title: Man and woman are one: Androgyny in Christianity, particularly in the works of Jacob Boehme), Utrecht 1986, with extensive `Summary in English', [with extensive Notes, Bibliographies, as well as Indexes on I. Subjects and names II. Citations of Boehme III. Citations of the Bible IV. Authors]; 341 pp.; = diss. Utrecht 1986 (Further see: Bibliography (on androgyny and related subjects))

   [Short overview:]
1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research
2. Androgyny according to seven authors
3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective Notes


[Complete overview:]

1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research

[Preliminary remarks]

2. Androgyny according to seven authors

[Two lines in the sequence of chapters]

Chapter 1 Prologue: androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective

Notes

1. Introduction:
main findings and points for further discussion and research

The main objective of this study is to explore androgyny in Christianity, to uncover new material and make it available for public debate. It offers not only an introduction to androgyny in Christianity, but also to the - mostly unknown - authors on the subject, who are important for the history of Christian Gnosticism, Mysticism, Pietism and Theosophy. This is particularly the case with Jacob Boehme, who is generally regarded as very inaccessible and difficult. Although this study does not explicitly describe the structure and function of androgyny from a systematic point of view, it provides the basis for such a description. The same is true with regard to the relation between androgyny and the official Christian doctrines. This study does not deal with the Jewish traditions of androgyny (with the exception of Philo of Alexandria) although very important relations between Jewish and Christian traditions are clearly visible; nor does it discuss the Islamic traditions. Questions of historical dependence are also not dealt with extensively; the third part of this Summary contains a sketch of some important historical perspectives. The first part of this Summary lists the main findings and points for further discussion and research. This list is not exhaustive, but to be viewed in connection with the rest of the Summary.

1.1 History and description of androgyny in Christianity

This book offers an overall view of the history of androgyny in Christianity and makes it possible to define its essence more accurately. We can define androgyny - unity of 'man' and 'woman', 'male' and 'female' - as a symbol of complete identity, which can involve aspects within one individual or the relation between different persons, as well as the unity of the cosmos, viz. the unity with God. Our conclusion is that androgyny is elaborated in two ways: 1. unity is found in the mutual completion of male and female; 2. unity is found in the dissolution of male and female as one-sidednesses. In this regard different levels can be distinguished: the material, the spiritual, and the divine level. Some forms of androgyny can be described in terms of one of these two attitudes on all levels; others combine, for instance, the first attitude for the material (and eventually the spiritual) level, with the second attitude for the divine (and eventually the spiritual) level. Another conclusion is that in a number of cases androgyny is connected with 'holistic' views, which try to combine separate aspects of reality and take interest in the concepts of mediation and equilibrium (Christ as the true Androgyne and Mediator!).

1.2 History of Gnosticism, Mysticism, Pietism, and Christian Theosophy,
insofar as androgyny developed within them

Androgyny was not popular in the mainstream of dogmatical institutional Christianity, but rather in the circles of artists, liberals, and pietists, of Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and alchemists. In this book we discuss androgyny in connection with the Christian theosophist Jacob Boehme (seventeenth century), with a theoretician of medieval mysticism, John Scottus Eriugena (ninth century), and with the Gnostic Christians of the first centuries. Research into the historical roots of androgyny confirms the view that later Christianity has often represented a narrowing of several different streams flowing from its time of origin, which were fed by, among other things, the confrontation of the Jewish religion with the Greek and other surrounding cultures and religions. It is becoming increasingly clear nowadays that in the first centuries of Christianity choices were made which, in the form of later unconscious prejudices, determined Christian thinking and Christian culture for a long time to come, and which also were choices between alternatives which perhaps are still of value even now, and knowledge of which is in any case an enrichment of our self-understanding.

1.3 Christian counterparts of the psychology of C.G. Jung,
and a basis for comparison with eastern religions

This book shows that the psychology of Jung not only has roots in alchemy, but that the concept of the bi-sexuality of the soul is very old and belongs to the oldest Christian heritage. At the same time this book provides the basis for a comparison of androgyny in other, particularly Eastern religions, with androgyny in Christianity (in which comparison also the Jewish and the Islamic traditions should then be involved).

1.4 Androgyny as a plea for the woman and the female
in the context of a patriarchally stamped Christian thinking

This book explores partly the position of woman in Christianity and Western culture. The history of androgyny is closely connected with views of sexuality and of the social relations of man and woman. Following my teacher, Professor Quispel, who has said that Gnosticism, Mysticism and Pietism have distinguished themselves within Christianity in the sense that woman could develop herself within them for her own sake, I want to stress that androgyny - unity of 'man' and 'woman', 'male' and 'female' - cannot be thought of without the peculiar value of the woman. At the same time, I have to note that Christian thinking in general has been marked by the assumption that man has a higher position than woman, that man is the starting-point and woman the derivative. We can now interpret androgyny as a corrective to this one-sidedness, although we must admit that androgyny in Christianity has nevertheless from its beginning shown the traces of a patriarchal thinking. Therefore it seems legitimate to conclude that an other, better position of woman in Christianity (at least on the ideological level), or offering a Christian contribution towards a greater equilibrium between man and woman in our culture, will only be possible through a much more fundamental change of Christianity than is usually contemplated. A number of androcentric presuppositions, i.e. presuppositions which have the man as starting-point, or make him so, are present in Christian thinking; and it is precisely these unconscious presuppositions which accustom the legitimation by Christian thinking of one-sidedly patriarchal relations. Of course the spiritual movements, mentioned above, are present to give indications of the direction in which important aspects of deep transformations could be sought and achieved.

1.5 Androgyny as a cultural ideal
and the necessity to review the position of reason and science

This book confirms the view that Christian thinking and Western culture have been largely determined by the strong mutual legitimation of faith and reason, or the mutual confirmation of the superior God and the superior intellect, a confirmation which was accompanied, as is now becoming evident, by the confirmation of the superiority of man above woman. This could lead to the conclusion that a greater equilibrium between man and woman not only needs a fundamental change of Christian thinking (insofar as Christianity is concerned), but also a review of the position of reason and science in our culture, particularly with regard to the relation of rationality and spirituality. Our analysis of the described authors can provide some important perspectives and elements for such a review.

1.6 Essential insights regarding androgyny

Whether one considers these conclusions - particularly with respect to the eventual necessity of fundamental change - as a reason for pessimism or for hope, is a possible subject for scientific discussion as well as a question of personal values and judgments, and perhaps too of the fact of whether one is a man or a woman.

1. androgyny in Christianity is a symbol for spiritual transformation, for the way that leads to unity with God, and which always deeply affects personal experience;

2. androgyny does not neglect oppositions - neither those outside man, nor those within man - but nevertheless stresses their essential unity;

3. this unity entails things which can be expressed by words as well as things which cannot.

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2. Androgyny according to seven authors

The sequence of the chapters of this book, which are summarized here, follows two lines.

First there is the line from the nineteenth century (Von Baader and Gunning) via the seventeenth century (Jacob Boehme) and the ninth century (John Scottus Eriugena) back to the first century (Philo of Alexandria), and from there back again - forward in time - to the second century (the Gospel of Thomas) and the second or third century (the Gospel of Philip). This line proceeds from the known to the unknown. Particularly the chapter on Philo serves here also as a partial introduction to the chapters on the Gospels of Thomas and of Philip.

The second line is one from a positive view of sexuality (Von Baader and Gunning) via some negative ones (with Philo and the Gospel of Thomas as extreme examples) to a positive one again (the Gospel of Philip). It will be shown that Boehme holds an intermediate position in more than one respect. At the same time, it is clear that Philo is on the one hand to be compared with Eriugena because of the continuities in their interpretation of Genesis 1-3 and their rationalistic tendency, and on the other hand with the Gospels of Thomas and of Philip with which he has an important context of concepts and language in common.

Chapter 1
Prologue:

androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

Although the starting-point of this study is androgyny in the writings of Boehme (chapters 2 and 3) and we do not deal with androgyny in Christianity after Boehme because E. Benz has done this already in his book Adam (Der Mythus vom Urmenschen) (München-Planegg 1955), we first must mention Boehme's influence on the important Dutch 'ethical' theologian J.H. Gunning, Jr. (1829-1905), because Benz does not mention Gunning and because this aspect of Gunning's theology has been hitherto neglected even in the Netherlands. Boehme's influence came to Gunning mainly through F. von Baader (1765-1841), whose views on androgyny are also mentioned briefly.

Gunning finds in the androgyny of the first man support for monogamous marriage, with a special accent on the spiritual union and the overall equilibrium between male and female. The aim of such a union is the mutual restoration (reintegration) of an original (but disintegrated) human nature. This restoration is a counter-image to the 'dying' of the marital partners 'in each others arms' during the sexual act (death as a kind of sleep). For Christians, death implies resurrection. Nevertheless Gunning also assigns a high value to un- married, socially and spiritually developed (single) persons. Other elements stressed by Gunning in this context are: 1. man as 'microtheos' and his relation with Sophia, the Wisdom of God; 2. the continuaton of the Revelation as the task of man; 3. man's possibility of heavenly procreation and his loss of this, which is then replaced by earthly procreation; 4. the cosmic, universal meaning of (the androgynous) Christ; 5. the expectation of a new body and a new earth; and 6. androgyny as an ideal for society. Gunning calls his thoughts a 'theosophy', a way of thinking in the tradition of Boehme. Thus also in the Netherlands we are not alone in our interest in androgyny and in Boehme, even in theologically very influential circles.

After this introduction of androgyny according to Gunning and Von Baader, a short outline is given of our own study: with the supplementary aim of first describing the subjects our study does not deal with; and second, of putting forward a number of questions connected with the study of androgyny, to keep in mind while reading this study.

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Chapter 2 Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:

introduction

The starting-point and first objective of this study is androgyny in the works of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), the shoemaker, visionary, and writer of influential but mostly neglected mystical works, who lived in Görlitz, on the river Neisse (now in Eastern Germany). His influence extends from German Idealism and Romanticism and a wide range of European literature and art (Blake!) to pietistic circles in the churches and esoteric ones outside them, from Germany and the Netherlands to England, France, Russia and the United States, even, here and there, to this very day.

First we give an introduction into his life and works and some of the main aspects of his theosophy, as the direct context of his ideas on androgyny. The word 'theosophy' was then not very different from 'theology' but during the rise of rationalism the word got a pejorative meaning; later the modern 'theosophical movement' used it for a different - mainly Eastern, that is not-Christian - content. Boehme's indebtedness to traditions such as alchemy and the kabbalah is clear; although they do not at all suffice to explain the very personal way in which he combines important theological and philosophical themes with psychological depth, and connects an explanation of nature and world with the most important theme of the rebirth of man. The essential thing for Boehme is that his insights - for himself as well as for his readers - should not function outside the Will and the Revelation of God, but only in relation to and taking part in these.

Boehme's system implies a theodicy, and his theosophy implies for the reborn man - when in a state of enlightenment - the possibility of an almost full knowledge of Divine Revelation, including both man and nature. Boehme's work is always aimed at the rebirth of himself and his readers.

According to Boehme, androgyny is closely related to the evolution of man and the world, first 'in' and later 'out of' God. God looks for partners - in Himself and outside Himself- with whom to play the game of Revelation, of coming-into-being and becoming (Self-) conscious. There is only one cosmic drama which implies the coming- into-being of God, man, and the world, and which implies also the coming-into-being of all sorts of opposite qualities, their growth (birth) from one phase to the other till ultimately all oppositions are again united in God as God, at the same time, becomes fully Self-conscious. Among these oppositions we find, e.g.: spirit and matter, man and woman, eternity and time, good and evil, anguish and joy, dark and light. In short, evil and sin play in this whole the role of the antithesis without which a thesis cannot evolve into further being and consciousness, i.e. synthesis: the process of God's Self-Revelation (including the totality of Creation and Restoration, materially as well as spiritually).

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Chapter 3

Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:
man and woman in God and in the creation

Among the aspects at every stage of God's Revelation, i.e. evolution, is the cooperation of the male and the female. In this sense, male-female unity is the essential characteristic of the first man, who is the image and likeness of God. The first man is composed - in his soul - of the two fires in God, the dark and burning fire (male) and the light and joyous fire (female). The male side of God is God the Father, whereas God the Son is the female side. The Word and the Spirit are the ways in which the Revelation is further extended to the realms of the created world. In this creative process everything comes forth from a conjunction of oppositions, from a 'marriage'. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is the personification of God's growing Self- consciousness, pregnant with the models of the world to be created: yet nevertheless herself chaste, and spiritual.

The first man, Adam, is married to Sophia. He is created by God for the explicit task of replacing the fallen Lucifer, one of the leaders of the angels' choruses, and to help God to fulfill the goal of His (Self-)Revelation. To this end, man is imbued with all the gifts of heaven and earth, and in him is everything united. The four elements, whose quintessence he is, are in equilibrium in him, and so, as microcosm, he is in full harmony within himself and with God. The way in which man should respond to God's purpose should, therefore, be through heavenly procreation - bodilessly or 'magically'.

This, however, is prevented by Adam's fall, his longing for the material world and the weakening of his divine consciousness, as a result of which he falls asleep, and Eve is made out of his female side. From the moment that man and woman are so divided, they are in danger of falling into further sin, and - seduced by Lucifer (in the form of the snake) - they do sin, thus destroying the equilibrium between all oppositions and creating the conditions experienced in the actual situation of man and world. The most important characteristic of sin is the choice of one's own way of being 'like God', that is, without being in harmony with God's will. This is the same as directing one's consciousness only to the lower levels of reality.

Instead of to the heavenly Sophia, he is now married to the earthly woman, Eve. Procreation is now in the first place earthly, animal-like, and in constant danger of being unspiritual. The weakening of the heavenly consciousness now accompanies the growth of sexual consciousness. The inner as well as the outer struggle to renew the equilibrium and the original nature has begun. From the beginning (God's promises in Paradise), the saving Word and Love of God play their roles in this process, often personified in Sophia, who helps individual souls.

Boehme elaborates this vision into an extended exegesis of the history of the patriarchs of Israel and of the redemption by Christ, Himself the true and (as far as he is human) restored Androgyne, born of the virgin (!) Mary, and through Whom every man can be reborn to unity with God. This exegesis contains his views of the differences between circumcision and baptism, sacrifices and the eucharist. In the end, the unity of all redeemed people and the whole world with God will be restored, which implies a new heavenly body and a new heavenly life after this earthly life and the Resurrection of the dead. Then, not only will the androgyny of man and his total identity with God be restored, but the (Self-)Revelation of God will also then reach its full development - thanks and in relation to Christ and Sophia: the Wedding of the Lamb can then take place.

Although Boehme's view of earthly sexuality is negative, and although he interprets the actual domination of man over woman as a consequence of the Fall, Redemption, according to Boehme, in fact comprehends the restoration of 'the sin of the male'. Through Christ the equilibrium is restored. In terms of inwardness, man and woman are equal now, but externally the restoration will follow the Resurrection (just as we all still have to die corporally, although our spirit is reborn already). This final Restoration will even imply the 'domination' of the female over the male, i.e. of the light (flame) over the fire (burning): the eternal joy of heavenly Light.

From the viewpoint of God, the game of Revelation came to a dead end when the first man lost his heavenly consciousness and 'imagined' himself into the earthly reality, and was continued in man and on earth only as an underground stream while no more seen and practiced by man. This 'reverse' is, in turn, reversed in the reconciliation through Christ: the retarded process of Revelation could then resume, once again consciously realized and practiced by man.

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Chapter 4

Androgyny in John Scottus Eriugena

Eriugena (ca. 81- ca. 877), the 'Irishman', was the leader of the palace-school of Charles the Bald (ninth century) and the author of, among other works, the famous Periphyseoon (De divisione naturae). He derived the idea of androgyny from the Greek church fathers, particularly Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, whose works he translated into Latin (together with the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite). In fact, the model of thinking about the Creation is largely and in many details the same in a tradition from Philo to Eriugena. This model implies that Gen. l is the description of the 'first creation', which regards the heavenly ideas or models for the Creation, and Gen. 2-3 of the 'second creation', which regards the concrete earthly creation as having become necessary because of the Fall of man, and brought about in advance by God because he foresaw the Fall. Gen. 1:27 ('male and female' God created man in His image) is then an anticipation in the story of the 'first creation' of the situation following the 'second creation'. Maximus the Confessor had already elaborated this model into a system of divisions of reality (at every level a division into two categories) with God at the top and the visible earth at the bottom, in a hierarchical order. The last division was that between man and woman, caused by the sin of the first man.

Eriugena built this model and its implied traces of androgyny into his Christian view of the evolution of the world from before Creation to the eventual unity of all man and things in God. His view was at the same time an explanation of the Holy Scripture and a logical basis for the seven 'artes' (the sciences, including music) of his days. In logical terms, his Christian world-view was only a by-product of the logical foundation of the seven 'artes', a foundation which involved a synthesis of the biblical and the scientific truth (a mutual legitimation). This synthesis was mainly illustrated with reference to Gen. 1-3.

Characteristic for Eriugena is the notion of descent and ascent as corresponding with each other (e.g., from Eternity to Time and vice versa; cf. also Creation and Fall on the one hand, Redemption and Restoration on the other). The last phases of the descent include the Fall of man from his heavenly consciousness into the world of earthly passions, whereby man takes the sense-perceptible world as such as real instead of reducing it to its primordial causes, the ideas in God. A consequence of this is that man is divided into the two sexes, and that all sorts of variations and oppositions in earthly life become visible. Earthly matter, inclusive of the human body, is merely accidental (although not given without a purpose: man should use it to his purification). This implies that, for Eriugena as well, the Fall entails the loss of resemblance to the angels, of a heavenly body and heavenly procreation, of which the earthly is only a surrogate. According to Eriugena, sin contains two elements: a wrong choice by man's Free Will (against God's will and intellect) and a choice (against reason) for the lower passions; or, alternatively, pride (instead of submission to the will of God and man's harmony with God) and passions (instead of the use of reason).

Eriugena does not think that man's heavenly, eternal part (the model of his being-an-image-of-God) as such is damaged by the Fall. Only his blessed state is thus affected: and (re-)union with God is now much more difficult. In principle, the Fall into the sense-perceptible world was not wrong, but has come too early: man should have first grown wise enough for it. But, in the end, the true union of intellect and sense-perception will be restored (in this context woman is - already in Paradise - the symbol of the perfect sense-perceptible world, man of perfect reason, and the snake of the evil passions). Eventually evil will be reduced to nothing; but the unbelievers will still have enduring knowledge of their own sins.

For the Fall is, at the same time, the deepest moment of the descent and - by God's grace and pedagogics - the beginning of the possibility of the ascent, by which man can become again the middle of all extremes and one with God - through Christ, the true Middle, the Mediator.

Paradise is not regarded as historical (because man has never really been in this state, but sinned immediately), but as giving - in retrospect - a view of the ideal future.

The restoration of all divisions also implies, for Eriugena, the end of all differences and variations of men and things. He stresses the unity of mankind.

His view is rational, not to say rationalistic: man plays his role in Creation and Redemption mainly through the use of his intellect, by linking it to God's intellect. The Fall is man's loss of the right use of his intellect, and through the Restoration he reunites everything in himself and himself with God. The return to God is also a return from the Fall into the sense-perceptible world to the submission of this world to the intellect and to pure contemplation. After the Resurrection the continuing purification of concepts and ideas will take place until they are again identical with the divine ones. Eriugena can even say that 'being' is the same as 'thinking' or 'being thought'.

Nevertheless everything depends for Eriugena on the Free Will which gives direction to the intellect (upwards to God or downwards to this world) and on God's grace in Christ.

Eriugena was not a pantheist because he makes a clear distinction between becoming God according to grace (which is possible for the believer) and according to nature (which will never be possible to any human person).

In Eriugena we discover no tendency to consider woman as equivalent to man. Sexuality is allowed for procreation but not for pleasure (although pleasure is granted as unavoidable).

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Chapter 5

Androgyny in Philo and its context

The roots of Eriugena's interpretation of Gen. 1-3 lie in Philo (ca. 20 B.C. - ca. 50), and Philo is also important as an illustration of the motifs which play a role in the androgyny in the Gospels of Thomas and of Philip. Therefore we deal here first with Philo. In reference to Philo, we can also particularly illustrate his opposition against androgyny, from which we can conclude at the same time that the roots of androgyny as well as the opposition against it are very old indeed.

Against the background of Hellenistic Alexandria with its large Jewish community and many cultural and religious traditions (including the mystery religions), Philo tried in his works to reconcile the Jewish religion and Greek culture for readers who could be Jewish as well as Greek. He propagated Jewish monotheism, but interpreted it in a strongly Greek-philosophical way, so that Greek education was incorporated. Particularly interesting is the way in which he interpreted the (Jewish) myths by means of an allegorical method: to read in them the deeper sense of the (Greek) Logos. Although he avoided making enemies (not wanting to alienate his readers from his 'new' interpretations!) and seldom openly used their names, one can assume that he was combating the views of some Jewish groups with 'gnosticizing' tendencies (with which he shares a similar tradition of language and ideas). All this is important because Gen. 1-3 is very central for Philo, and because he refers to the concept of the androgynous first man.

Although Philo always remained faithful to the Jewish Law, the role he attaches to the Logos and the role that he allows the intellect are so large that this becomes the framework for a new stream of thinking which not only deeply influenced Christian theology and Western culture in general, but also explains his attitude towards the concept of androgyny, and his generally Encratitic views of the subject of sexuality (enkrateia = abstinence; for Encratism see the next chapter).

In his book 'On the Creation of the World according to Moses' - of which a summary is given - Philo, by way of the exegesis of Gen. 1-3, presents his views of God, man and the world. God is eternal and unchangeable; the creation, on the contrary, is visible and temporal. Man (only his intellect, not his body and the irrational part of his soul) is an image of God's true Image: the Logos, God's 'intellect'. The creation is modeled after the heavenly ideas (!) described in Gen. 1; the concrete creation is described in Gen. 2-3. The differentiation of the genus man (in Gen. 1:27) in the species male and female is an anticipation of the (only later) actual man and woman. Philo describes man as a microcosm, with reason as his most valuable talent. He makes a sharp distinction between the 'heavenly' man (also called 'true' man, and man 'after the image of God') of Gen. 1:27 and the 'earthly' man of Gen. 2:7, who is mortal, material and soon divided into man and woman. For the first 'earthly' man, the blessed father of all men, was an androgyne. With the coming of the woman, i.e., with the division of this androgyne into man and woman, the disaster of earthly life began: the Fall of man. According to Philo the paradisiacal garden symbolizes the leading part of the soul confronted with the choice between the good and the evil (in everything) - a choice to be made by the discrimination of the soul, symbolized by the Tree of Knowledge. What happens is the seduction of sense-perception (the woman) by the passions (the snake), and consequently of reason (the man) by sense-perception (the woman). Then punishment follows: life is to become a heavy task for man (a relatively light punishment: death would have been more adequate). From all this, Philo deduces God's existence and reign over everything, God's unity and the unity of the world (which correspond with each other); namely, by interpreting Jewish mono- theism in the categories of Stoicism (world-soul) and Platonism (dualism of matter and ideas, demiurge etc.).

From the way in which Philo treated androgyny we may deduce our first conclusion: that Philo's basic material implied the androgyny of the first man, created by God, and that Philo deliberately reduced this androgyny to a characteristic only of the first actual man, the 'earthly' man of Gen. 2:7, making by this reduction the 'heavenly' man of Gen. 1:26-27 a-sexual. This becomes evident from the remarkable fact that he nevertheless relates the androgyny of the 'earthly' man to the 'heavenly' man, namely by calling the androgynous (first) 'earthly' man explicitly the one concrete species of the two genera (!) male and female of Gen. 1:27 (so in Leg. All. II, 13).

From Philo's treatment of androgyny and our recapitulation of it we also deduce our second conclusion: that the reason of Philo's reduction of androgyny lies in the contradiction which in his view exists between the androgyny of the 'heavenly' man and the a-sexual - because abstract - character of the higher world of intellect, ideas, Logos and God; precisely the world to which he wished to give a foundation in Gen. 1.

Philo's position is thereupon illustrated in reference to the way in which he formulates his spiritual ideal, particularly the motifs of 'becoming one', 'becoming a virgin' and 'becoming male', as well as the relation of God and the soul, and his description of the community of the Therapeutes - with particular attention to the use of sexual metaphors in this context. Philo established a hierarchical scheme 'God - intellect - sense perception - matter' in combination with the superior status of man in relation to woman (although Philo made the exception to regard woman as equivalent to man on the pure spiritual level as well as on the level of procreation).

1. Philo's use of sexual metaphors actually supports an Encratitic point of view.

2. Philo's free use of sexual metaphors for divine matters can be explained by their frequent use in Philo's surroundings and by Philo's explicit limitation of this use to the level of allegorical interpretation.

3. This, however, leads to a conflict where Philo wants to base his high valuation of intellect and 'logos' (the cornerstone for his allegorical method) on the allegorical explanation of Gen. 1, all the more because Philo's basic material contained the androgynous Anthropos. This becomes clear from the fact that Philo acknowledges the mythical character of the Pentateuch, but strongly denies it to the text of Gen. 1.

4. Consequently there is a conflict in the concept of the 'logos'. Although Philo tries it, it is not possible to base the position of the 'logos' without using the 'myth'. Therefore the opposition between 'logos' and 'myth' (the evaluation of 'logos' over 'myth') cannot be as absolute as Philo states it. 'Logos' is nothing without its material, i.e. the myths.

5. Nevertheless the findings of Philo - the effect of his handling of the relation of 'logos' and 'myth' on the image of God (transcendance), the man-woman-relation (patriarchate), the relation of spirit to body or matter (dualism), the relation of faith and reason (mutual legitimation) - became and remained representative of large parts of Christianity for a long time to come.

Parallel to the fact that Philo's evaluation of the logos as superior to myth did not stop the actual use of myths, we must add here that Philo's view of the intellect does not imply a closed border between reason and transcendance (as is the case with the 'methodological atheism' of modern science); on the contrary, Philo's intellect is open to transcendance in view of his high esteem of contemplation - as a result of which he has also become of great importance to the flowering of contemplative spirituality in Christianity.

In this chapter we finally mention the possibility and the need for further research on androgyny in the Hellenistic Age, its contexts and roots. Particularly the new findings of Nag Hammadi make this research promising, but it is far from finished. In this context we also mention the occurrence in several texts of the reading 'him' instead of 'them' in Gen. 1:27.

Of particular importance is the motif of the (androgynous) 'Anthropos', mainly in Gnostic literature. This Anthropos (Man) goes back to Ezech. 1:26 in the vision of God's glory (Hebrew: kabood) - where on the throne sits 'the likeness as the appearance of a Man' - and already occurs (as Greek 'phoos', 'man') in the work of the Jewish-Alexandrian tragedian Ezekiel in the second century B.C. It was this Anthropos which was replaced by Philo's Logos (both being identified with the first light - in Greek also 'phoos' - of creation, and with the Image of God). The Anthropos was in the first place a 'heavenly' Man!

In this chapter a separate paragraph deals with the difference between our views and those of R.A. Bear jr. in his book Philo's Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden 1970), which also mentions most of the material dealth with in this chapter. Baer did not discover Philo's use of the microcosm-macrocosm-scheme, which brings him to an unnecessarily complicated and artificial interpretation of the difference between Op.M. 134 and 135; and although Baer has seen that there is a relation between Philo and his 'gnosticizing' opponents, he does not elaborate upon it.

In this context we draw our third conclusion: that Philo and Gnosticism differ precisely on the issue of their treatment of the notion of androgyny (in connection with their interpretation of Gen. 1:26-27 and Gen. 2:7): the prominent role of the Logos according to Philo is a deliberate alternative to or even a deliberate replacement of the androgynous Anthropos.

Our suggestion is that these differences between Baer's views and ours are due to the fact that Baer simply shares Philo's high preference for logos over myth, without showing that Philo with this view (which became nearly normative for later Christian thinking) rejected alternatives, which valuated androgyny (or sexuality as such) much higher.

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Chapter 6

Androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas

Because the Gospel of Thomas is strongly characterized by its Syriac-Christian surroundings and because Syriac Christianity as a distinctive branch of Christianity had its own separate life for centuries alongside the Greek and Latin branches, we first describe some characteristic aspects of this Syriac Christianity, particularly its Judaic-Christian background, its mainly eschatologically motivated ascetism, and its generally Semitic character.

Because the Gospel of Thomas is also strongly influenced by Encratism, we also sketch the most important backgrounds of Encratism. Of particular importance is the Jesus and Judas

question of how the Greek or Hellenistic Encratism was remodeled in Alexandria into Jewish and Christian Encratism, by combining it with the explanation of Gen. 1-3 as the 'fall into sexuality', with the original (androgynous) nature functioning as the ideal. We also refer to the relation of Encratism to Gnosticism (which requires further research), and mention particularly the importance of Encratism for Catholic Christianity which was strongly influenced by it, although it condoned marriage for the procreation of children as opposed to absolute Encratism. Encratism has always remained an active element in Christianity.

In the short introduction to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is seen as the teacher who reveals the secrets, the knowledge by which man can now find eternal life by becoming one with Jesus as well as with himself and with the All. From this, a distinction opens up between eternal life and the world of lies and worldly matters, notably family and trade. One should become an itinerant preacher, living on alms; the Kingdom of Heaven is a richness to be distributed. This implies suffering.

Turning to androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas, we can discern that Adam was originally one, but became two. This division implied death and sexuality and being divided within oneself. The self and particularly the light are symbols of the original unity. This reminds one of the so-called 'light body' of Adam in Jewish literature: his garments were the Light of God's glory (Hebrew: kabood). After the Fall, Adam is clothed in darkness and an earthly body. The Fall brings about the opposition between spirit and flesh, life and death, Kingdom and world. The innocent - sexually unconscious - children represent the original state. When one 'tramples the garments of shame', one discovers the original oneness.

The return to the origins implies the renewal of the revelation of the Light of the Father through the 'images' which his sons are. This implies the reunion of man (the 'sons') with his heavenly counterpart (remember that Adam was the Image of God and wore the garments of Light). This return is brought about by Jesus, who is the Light and the All, and implies the restoration of the wholeness of man and the world. The return is also caused by one's rebirth from the true Mother, the Holy Spirit.

The ideals of unity and oneness are combined in the ideal of the monachos, the 'solitary': 'Blessed are the solitary and elected ones', who are the only ones who will enter the Kingdom of God. It is very probable that monachos is the translation of the Syriac ihidaja [to be written with a dot beneath the letter h]and has the technical meaning of 'solitary, elected, bachelor' This 'solitary one' stands above sexual differentiation and is undivided as regards the direction of his soul to God.

This ideal of the return to an original oneness is illustrated by the famous Logion 22.

The last Logion, i.e. 114, describes the process of 'becoming male', in order to 'become a living spirit' as the way in which women can also take part in the Kingdom of Heaven.

We can conclude that androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas functions within a strong Encratitic context. The return to the original androgynous state is the end of sexuality, and the attitude towards the practice of sexuality is obviously negative: procreation and marriage are denounced. Where the end of sexuality is described als the end of the female - as in Philo - we experience the influence of a patriarchal context.

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Chapter 7

Androgyny in the Gospel of Philip

First a short introduction is given into Gnosticism, its Jewish origins and Christian existence. Particularly Valentinian Gnosticism - to which the Gospel of Philip relates - is mentioned, with the important role it attached to the divine syzygies (couples), which by their reunion restore the divine Fullness (Pleroma), and with its three levels: pneumatic, psychic and hylic. Gnosis (knowledge) is the redemptive knowledge of one-Self and implies the reunion of all syzygies, as well as of the ego with its heavenly counterpart or 'guardian angel'. Sexuality and androgyny form important parts of Gnostic mythology.

The Gospel of Philip could have originated in Antioch (ca. 200), possibly with Axionicus of Antioch as its author, and could have been built up from catechetic material or parts of sermons, having as their subject the inauguration into the secrets (including the sacraments). There is a strong opposition in the Gospel of Philip between the visible world and the hidden (spiritual, inner and true) world, of which the visible is only an image. Through gnosis one comes to know the secret true names of the realities (instead of the misleading names of earthly language), in which the author initiates his readers as once Christ did his disciples. In the end, the hidden Truth will be revealed and the Light will stream out to 'every son of the bridal chamber'. This happens by way of spiritual begettings instead of earthly ones, which implies the restoration of 'virginity'. Some characteristic citations complete the introduction to the Gospel of Philip.

The Gospel of Philip ascribes the loss of androgynous unity to the failure of 'Adam and Eve' to unite themselves spiritually ('in the bridal chamber') with each other and with God, which brings about sexual differentiation and death. Adam fails to beget spiritual children, but Cain is produced (from the communion of Eve and the snake). Where there is no real androgynous union, the male and the female demons have access to the isolated female and male souls and have communion with them. When man again becomes complete, reunited, there will be no more death, as is the case for the sons who are begotten spiritually by the Perfect Man, Christ.

Christ Himself is begotten by the spiritual union of the Father and the Virgin (the background of the theophany on the occasion of Christ's baptism), which produced the 'light body' of Jesus. On the cross Christ separated the world below from the world of God, the Fullness (Pleroma), leaving his earthly body behind, namely, by restoring the separation of the beginning. Christ begets his spiritual sons through the sacraments (including also the 'anointing', the 'redemption' and the 'bridal chamber').

The secret lies in the spiritual union of man (which is only an earthly 'image') with his heavenly counterpart, his guardian angel. This restores his mastery over the demons, over passions and over nature. This reunion is also described as the ascent to God through the spheres, as the knowledge of God, as being clothed with the Perfect Man and with heavenly clothes. This implies a knowledge of one-Self, a restoration of man's true and eternal identity with him-Self in and through Christ.

The most important symbol of this is the union of the bride and the bridegroom in the 'bridal chamber', which has its earthly image in marriage; its hidden meaning is revealed to the knowing believers (the pneumatics).

Next we deal with the evaluation of (earthly) marriage in the Gospel of Philip. It is obvious that as a part of the visible world and only an 'image' of the true reality (the 'bridal chamber') marriage involves all the negative aspects of earthly life: matter, passion, evil, death. In this aspect the evaluation of marriage runs parallel to that of Encratism and of Catholic Christianity. But for the Gnostics, who experience the spiritual reality which places them above (although yet still in) the visible world, marriage nevertheless can and even should be an 'image' of the spiritual reality of the 'bridal chamber', in a positive meaning. This is the particular contribution of Gnosticism to ideas about marriage: not only is spiritual reality described in sexual symbols, but even can earthly sexuality also become a positive phenomenon when expressing this spiritual reality. Underlying this could very well be the positive identification of human and divine sexuality in early Hermetism (with its Egyptian background), which was gradually spiritualized in later Hermetism and Gnosticism (which in turn evolved in the directions of Encratism and Catholic Christianity). The ambivalence of the Gospel of Philip in its attitude towards marriage is understandable given its position in the midst of these phenomena. This interpretation finds support in the statement of Theodotus, a pupil of Valentinus, that procreation was still needed to complete the predestined number of Gnostics, and in the sayings of Irenaeus and of Clement of Alexandria, which stressed the positive value attached to marriage by the Valentinians.

The position of women in the Gnostic communities was relatively free compared with that in the Catholic Christian communities, although the dominance of male over female is part of the Gnostic mythology in which it runs parallel to the Encratitic views.

The most important conclusion is that androgyny in the Gospel of Philip is related to a symbolism that uses sexuality in a positive way, and that the evaluation of marriage is positive (compared with that of Encratism and even of Catholic Christianity) given this Gospel's characteristic viewpoint that marriage can and should be an image of spiritual reality. This shows the influence of the myth of the hieros gamos. In principle, marriage is not restricted to the procreation of earthly children, but has a spiritual meaning.

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A general comparison of the different authors
in historical perspective

The historical roots of androgyny in Christianity are pre-Christian, for they go back to the Jewish creation stories and beyond, and to the view of man as a microcosm in the Greek tradition. Both traditions are connected with each other in the Hellenistic age, notably in Jewish and Christian Gnosticism which remodeled the first forms of what we now call 'androgyny'.

The de-sexualizing which is characteristic of Gen. 1 (very probable in its present form a reaction to a view or a milieu which saw divine and human sexuality as parallel to each other) was thereby undone partially or totally: the thought that the first man united in himself male and female (which was possibly still recognizable in the text) was elaborated in a variety of ways, in which the partially suppressed but elsewhere still living motifs of the hieros gamos were involved, notably in the form of the spiritual union of God and the soul, sometimes in combination with the union of the male and the female (in couples or syzygies) in God. This revival was probably favoured by influences from Egyptian religion via Hermetism which so passed into Jewish and Christian Gnosticism, albeit in the form of a spiritualization. Nevertheless human sexuality was thereby positively evaluated with respect to its relation with divine sexuality (particularly in Valentinian Gnosticism, as in the Gospel of Philip). Motifs from the context of the Great or Mother-Goddess and from the Sophia-traditions could also have an important function.

In keeping with the de-sexualizing of the image of God which we can see reflected in the books of the Old Testament, and which was connected with the establishment of Jewish patriarchal monotheism, the attitude towards sexuality was mainly negative in Christianity. The strong eschatological tendencies which could lead to Jesus' liberation from a patriarchal law of divorce (in favour of the woman and the - monogamous - marriage) as well as from marriage as such, in combination with a certain radicalisation of morality, but particularly with Encratitic influences, resulted in a preference for celibacy above marriage (as in Syriac Christianity, notably the Gospel of Thomas; but see already St. Paul in I Cor. 7), and in a principally negative view of sexuality. It is not to be denied that these two opposite views of sexuality and continence have been an important subject for discussion in the Christian movements of the first two centuries. It has also to be stated that both views could imply a liberation for women in the form of higher evaluation in comparison with the current patriarchal traditions. This 'struggle' came to an end (for the time being) in the victory of Catholic Christianity over both extreme views. As we can see from the Gospels of Philip and of Thomas, both the positive and the negative attitudes towards sexuality can be related with or even reduced to the same combination of Gen. 1-3 and androgyny.

The negative attitude of sexuality has, however, yet another root. Together with the developments already mentioned, still another development took place: the transcendentalization of the image of God. Philo supported the transcendance of God in relation to Creation with a strong position of the Logos and vice versa: the mutual legitimation of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy. The Jewish myths were allegorized on that occasion (which implies that they were de-mythologized); but at the same time, the position of the Logos was founded in the 'myth' (!) of Gen. 1. According to Philo, the Logos was the true Image of God, and man the image of this Image.
By this interpretation Philo provided not only the foundations for later Christian dogmatics (and contemplative spirituality) but also for the Jewish and Christian forms of absolute or moderate Encratism: good = spiritual = a-sexual = male, and bad = material = sexual = female. Philo deliberately continued the de-sexualization of the image of God. To this end, Philo combined Platonic dualism with Platonic and Jewish views on the relation of man and woman. Although Catholic Christianity adopted the toleration of marriage as its main position, from Philo's views it is understandable that for Christian thinking the negative attitude to matter, body, sexuality and woman remained in principle the determining one, and that this negative attitude was inexorably connected with the prevalence of intellect (above the passions and the sense-perceptible world) and of man (above woman).¹ So one should not be surprised that we discovered Philo's views - particularly his explanation of Gen. 1-3 - to be a deliberate alternative to Gnostic or Gnosticizing views which linked the notion of androgyny with a positive attitude to sexuality.

Androgyny in the Christian traditions is thus closely connected with the androgyny of the first man, i.e. with the 'Adam' of Gen. 1-3, the Image of God, who was divided into Adam and Eve. The advent of sexuality and death is presented as a consequence of the loss of the original heavenly and divine consciousness (symbolized by Adam's sleep), i.e., the loss of contact with the highest level, or the narrowing of consciousness. The history of the world and of humanity began with an androgynous Man, the Image of God, which was obscured by the 'Fall' into the earthly level of this Man, which was split into the two sexes.

Philo already knew this heavenly Man, in Greek: the Anthropos, and replaced him with the Logos. But traces of this Anthropos, which can be found in Ezech. 1:26 - in the vision of the glory of God (Hebrew: kabood) - and which played an important role in Gnosticism, are already as old as the work of the Jewish-Alexandrian tragedian Ezekiel in the second century B.C. This heavenly Anthropos, clothed with the Light of God, became the background of the Christian elaborations of androgyny in the Gospels of Thomas and of Philip, in Encratism and Gnosticism (as well as of the Adam Kadmon-figure in the Jewish tradition, which is not dealt with here). Philo saw (the first) man as a microcosm; and already in Philo we can see traces of Plato's myth - from the Symposium - of the splitting of the primordial androgynous men, meant to symbolize the origin of 'eros'.

In all further forms of androgyny in the Christian tradition we find the connection with Gen. 1-3 as the basis of the concepts of God man and the world (in their mutual relations): the purpose which God had with Adam as ruler over the world, and so forth.

In Early Christianity we see that the restoration of the image is very important: through baptism, or the anointing before baptism, the Christian is reborn, he finds his original nature or identity, the unity with God. This 'spiritual' or 'religious' identity also entailed for the oldest Christians the foundation of a new social identity (cf. Gal. 3:28). Whereas Gnosticism elaborated upon this a mythology in which there was room for the role of sexuality (particularly in the symbolism of the 'bridal chamber' and of the 'spiritual begettings'; cf. the Gospel of Philip), we see in Encratism that the role of sexuality diminishes (cf. the a-sexual character or the spiritual unity of the 'monachos' in the Gospel of Thomas).

Within the frame of the theological or philosophical systematization in later Catholic Christianity, we can discern - in accordance with the views of Philo - a depreciation of the myths themselves in favour of their allegorical interpretation.

Nevertheless, Philo not only failed to eliminate androgyny completely, but his interpretation of Gen. 1-3 (the division into a 'first' and a 'second' creation, of the 'world of the ideas' and the 'concrete world') as well as traces of androgyny, were even to be found up to Eriugena, for whom androgyny still was a central element of the Christian doctrine of Sin and Redemption. When in the Middle Ages this doctrine was elaborated into a theologically, philosophically, juridically and politically established system, which as it were legitimated itself, its mythical basis could be reduced still more and androgyny vanished even as an ornament. After its underground existence (notably in the context of alchemy), androgyny appeared again in the works of Jacob Boehme who was also inspired by the Jewish kabbalah.

The elaborations of androgyny in Eriugena and Boehme share a number of characteristics including: 1. the combination of religious truth and a 'scientific' knowledge of nature and world in systems which recapitulate the Self-Revelation of God in Creation, Revelation and Redemption, which should further man's participation in God's Self- Revelation, and which imply at the same time a theodicy; 2. the important role of man as a microcosm in connection with the origin and the resolution of all antitheses in man and nature; 3. a striving after the most complete identity of God with man, yet with the preservation of the distinction between them; 4. a distinction between the revealed and the hidden side of God; 5. the 'Fall' from the heavenly to the earthly level is accompanied by the loss of 'heavenly procreation' (in favour of an 'earthly' one); 6. the use of Neoplatonic elements.

Eriugena's system is of a rational and optimistic character (in respect to evil as well: if the will gives the intellect its good direction, then the intellect can manage it alone). Androgyny has in his views an a-sexual character, and the relation between man and woman is seen as strictly patriarchal. In all this Eriugena is strongly akin to Philo.

Characteristic of Boehme is: 1. his elaboration of the dialectical process of the oppositions and their resolution into a new equilibrium; 2. the influence on his conceptions of alchemy and the kabbalah; 3. the inner revelation to the reborn people, who - when in an enlightened state - can (almost) fully know God, man and world; 4. his accent on the necessity, the way and the means to achieve rebirth, inclusive of the dialectics of resignation and will; 5. androgyny of and within God (the two fires and their relation), the role of 'conjunctions' and 'imaginations' (comparable to the role of the syzygies and the motifs of the hieros gamos in Gnostic mythology) as the foundation of all the processes of reality, as well as Sophia's relation to the soul; 6. the important role of evil in the process of Creation, Revelation and Redemption - at all levels, of material nature as well as of human existence and of God; 7. the combination of a 'Gnostic' spirituality with an 'Encratitic' attitude to (earthly) sexuality; 8. his nevertheless very positive view of the woman and the female, as well as of the body, in the eventual Restoration.

Although this study does not deal in length with the notion of androgyny in the time after Boehme, we mention here that androgyny was not an element in those circles in which the modern scientific world-view of Descartes was dominant, but rather where religious piety, artistic symbolism, or esoteric wisdom formed a favourable climate for it, as a conscious or unconscious counterweight against the 'Enlightenment'.

In the very positive attitude to marriage - with androgyny as its foundation - and the relatively positive appreciation of corporality in Von Baader and Gunning, we find support for the view that with androgyny in Christianity a positive as well as a negative attitude towards sexuality and marriage can be combined. Boehme's ideal of marriage as a spiritual union formed the starting-point for this attitude of Von Baader and Gunning, as well as for the 'Encratitic' consequences which Gichtel and Arnold drew form it²: the rejection of earthly marriage as incompatible with the marriage of the soul with Sophia.³

In all cases androgyny in Christianity is a symbol of perfection, namely of the perfect unity of man and God, of man with him-Self, of God within Himself.⁴ In all cases the Light (of God's glory) is one of its most important expressions. In every case Christ fulfills the role of the Restorer as a counter-image to Adam.

We can further note that the symbolism of androgyny is congruent with a Gnostic climate (as in the Gospel of Philip and Boehme), and that it is reduced in a climate of de-mythologization or rationalization, where the role of the intellect is more prominent (cf. Philo and Eriugena). These climates differ as well in the views of the evil, of its role and how to fight against it.

The unfamiliarity of modern readers with androgyny is due in part to its connection with the pre-modern view of the world, which was pushed aside by the scientific view of reality. Conversely, modern interest in androgyny often accompanies the search for alternatives to the rationalistic consciousness of science, which is then experienced as too determinative for our culture.

In most cases, the Christian spiritual symbolism we encountered in the context of androgyny, shows the traces of processes of spiritualization: e.g., the spiritualization of the sexual symbolism in Gnosticism, the appreciation of spirit above matter under the influence of Platonic dualism from Philo onwards, and the resulting ambivalent attitude towards the earthly, which was mainly negative, but sometimes positive. In this context we note too, that matter can on the one hand be presented as temporal; and on the other hand, yet can play a role at the heavenly level (cf. the 'heavenly corporality').

The Christian authors on androgyny expressed, however, the conviction that the fundamental unity of the whole reality is so simple and at the same time so strong that it can entail or resolve all contradictions, antitheses, and oppositions, even the strongest ones.

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Notes [only of this Summary!]

1. For a much broader context (a.o. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel) see now: Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason ('Male' and 'Female' in Western Philosophy), London 1984 (about Philo: 22-28). [Return to text.]

2. Cf. E. Benz, Adam (Der Mythus vom Urmenschen), München-Planegg 1955, 101- 134. [Return to text.]

3. For (partially) parallel views in the kabbalah (the refusal of the man-woman- relation as well as the glorification of it) see: G. Langer, Liebesmystik der Kabbala, München-Planegg 1956, 75-84 ('Der tragische Konflikt der beiden erotischen Richtungen und seine Folgen für die Gemeinschaft') as well as the preceding chapters in that book. Return to text.]

4. (Note added to the original text, 24 November 1997.) Perfection as concept is in a certain sense probably also a reduced or at least remodeled expression of mutual completion and reproduction as older form of it; that is to say, this reduction or remodelling is, within this context of androgyny, parallel to the reduction of the myth of androgynous wholeness into hierarchic leveled separations and oppositions as for example between God and man, intellect and sense, man and woman (see above). Insofar as perfection and completion imply and express consciousness, their distinctive forms are still to be discerned and described (cf. among many others scientific consciousness with consciousness in the psychology of Jung, the last being - through its roots in alchemy - the modern descendant of the old completion/reproduction model). [Return to text.]

            URL: http://www1.tip.nl/~t770268/androgbibl.html
            Version 3 = latest revision of 13 September 2000 (Version 1: 18 Nov. 1997)
            © 1997-2000 Boudewijn Koole; copying admitted in case acknowledgement is provided

Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom
Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring

Note: This is a working copy of an unfinished treatise on androgyny as the key to unlock many of the mysteries of: the 6,000 years of feminine-hating dominator societies that continue to rule our world, key forms of religious extremism, the torturous enchantments of romantic relations, gender identity, how to regain a wholeness that we lost when we become fractured into a form that allows the matrix to bind us, and the core meaning of the ring symbolism and other aspects of the Tolkien mythology. That’s a fairly tall order and I am open to your feedback as to whether I seem to b e succeeding with such (grandiose?) ambitions. Given the density of the subject matter you can expect writing with a lot of density, but I’m hoping that it is readable for you, the perpceptive reader, ---let me know if it is for you…..----the title is just a working title, it will almost certainly change , but the word “Androgny “will be in there somewhere….Also the introduction---here just a paragraph-----will be a page or two when finished… At a few points, especially at the beginning, I have some questions or comments for the unfinished draft reader. Some people have liked the way it is written, one very intelligent person, but who says he doesn’t read much any more, found the vocabularly and phrasings unnecessarily difficult. That’s a concern, because I want this to readable, not to everybody, but at least for perceptive readers I don’t want to be creating unnecessary stumbling blocks. Most of my nonfiction writing has departed from the scholarly voice, but here I have gone back to it and they may be a mistake from the point of view of accessability. The scholarly voice can also become a narcissistic affectation and I value feedback on whether that seems to be happening.

(the single introductory paragraph that follows is more of a working outline of a roughly four part structure)

Androgyny is the key that unlocks many of the most difficult paradoxes and delusions of the interlocking realms of eros, religion, psychology, gender relations, spirituality and sexuality. This treatise on androgyny will begin with a discourse on what androgyny is and isn’t, its history and role in human development individually and historically. The second part will employ androgyny as a key to unlock the ring symbolism of the Tolkien mythology which will expand the meaning of androgyny and illustrate its extreme relevance to the present human predicament individually and collectively. (This section, and many other Tolkien allusions scattered thoughout may be a problem for people who are completely unfamiliar with the Tolkien mythology. I could give a synopsis of the story as an appendix, but that seems like a poor way for someone to be introduced to Tolkien) The third part will discuss the five thousand year era of patriarchal, dominator societies, theories about their origin, and the millennia long campaign against women and the feminine. It will consider evidence of a cycle shift underway, as well as dreams and mythologies that reflect a metamorphosis of gender. The fourth and last part will suggest ways to integrate androgyny into our psyches and lives.

My understanding of androgyny is greatly indebted to June Singer, a fellow Jungian, who has done by far the best formal study of androgyny. Our lives paralleled a little bit, June Singer is apparently Jewish and from New York. I met her briefly at a Jungian conference in New York in the Eighties, and in the introduction to her book Androgyny she particularly thanks Werner Engle, a colleague of Jung whom I also knew as well as his nephew Jonathan Goldberg, also a Jungian analyst, who is a close friend of mine. I was talking to Jonathan Goldberg when June Singer approached us at the conference. I believe her book on Androgyny (Androgyny: The Opposites Within---an earlier edition had a different title: Androgyny Toward a New Theory of Sexuality) is one of the most important books of the 20^th century. (Note: Just visited with Jonathan Goldberg when I was last in New York, he told me that June Singer died just this year and more about her relationship with his uncle, Werner Engle.)

Another book on androgyny which deserves some pioneering credit for probably being the first published book to have the word androgyny in the title is Toward a Recognition of Androgyny by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. It was published just three years before Singer’s book. Unfortunately, it is no where near as insightful or useful. Ms. Heilbrun, who was an English professor at Columbia (an advocate for suicide as a conscious choice, she exercised her escape clause a year or two ago) seems to find the Western academic canon of literature to be the only part of the phenomenal world worthy of attention. For example, she makes the absurd statement that, “…America has not produced a novel whose androgynous implications match those of The Scarlet Letter…” Has Ms. Heilburn, or anyone, read every novel produced in America since The Scarlet Letter debuted in 1850? I don’t think so. She just assumes that anything that hasn’t come to her attention as an English professor can’t possibly have merit, and typical of the parochial academic literary critic doesn’t even bother to consider the whole genre of fantasy literature, which is actually the mainstream of literature, and in which she would find much more about androgyny than she or Nathaniel Hawthorne ever dreamed of.

Rather than putting her work into my words, I am going to introduce June Singer’s work on androgyny through a collection of quotes. This is no substitute for reading Androgyny: The Opposites Within which is a real master work. Quotations are presented in italics, where words are underlined that is her emphasis not mine.

(These quotes will probably be paraphrased in a finished version. Most are so well phrased that rewriting them hasn’t seemed like a priority yet.)

Find it in Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Platonic tradition, but expunged from Judeo-Christianity

The androgyne will not be discovered by turning outward into the world, but by turning inward into ourselves. It is a subtle body, that is to say “nonmaterial”…androgyny is a state of consciousness that is far from ordinary, and therefore it threatens many people’s state of equilibrium. Second, androgyny threatens many presuppositions about individuals’ identity as men or as women, and hence threatens the security of those people, including most of us.

The androgyne approaches the problem with the recognition that true change begins primarily within the psychic structure of the individual. Here is where the androgyne differs fundamentally from the bisexual. If the concerns of the bisexual are mainly interpersonal, those of the androgyne are mainly intrapsychic.

The androgyny principle is intuitively experienced as the key that unlocks the prison of sex and gender—a key that is available to anyone who has the courage and imagination to make use of it.

Dionysus is kept in the women’s quarters and disguised as a girl in order to keep him from being discovered by Hera. He is treated and educated like a girl and he grows up to be effeminate. Unable to differentiate feminine from masculine functioning in himself, he scarcely knows who he is. Like an eternal youth he wanders over the world, changing shape, going mad, drinking himself into insensibility, living the abandonment of total nature and, like nature, experiencing the cycles of death and rebirth.

Dionysus is not the true androgyne any more than Hippolyte was, for he has not come to peace with his feminine side. His masculine and feminine aspects are not fused, they are merely confused.

Dionysus as god of madness, ecstasy, drunkenness and frenzy—was given to wild outbursts of excitement, performed preferably before an audience.

This description of Dionysus also tells us that many of the rock stars described as androgynous, like the young Mick Jagger, were channeling the Dionysus archetype, but not androgynous as Singer defines the term. Singer very incisively points out that our culture tends to provide representations of only the immature, confused and acting out face of androgny. This type of person, where masculine and feminine are confused, Singer terms “hermaphrodite,” and she reserves the term “androgyne” for those in whom masculine and feminine are fused and integrated.

….the peculiar tendency in our own culture to suppress these androgynous images. I noted that when such images do appear, they show themselves not so much as true androgynes, with their compensatory masculine/feminine aspects working in harmonious relationship to one another, but rather as the imperfect, incomplete, distorted image of the hermaphrodite. Such an image is the double-sexed Dionysus, whose borderline nature makes it impossible to tell whether he is “mad or sane, wild or somber, sexual or psychic, male or female, conscious or unconscious.”

In popular speech people continually confuse androgynes, hermaphrodites, and bisexuals. For example, in Dan Brown’s run away best seller The Da Vinci Code, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, is lecturing a group of prisoners on Leonardo Da Vinci:“

…Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”

Brown may be contributing to the confusion somewhat by using the terms “male” and “female” which imply anatomical differences. Jungians use the terms “feminine” and “masculine” to refer to the complimentary archetypal principles which the Chinese called “yin” and “yang.” Masculine and feminine, yin and yang, exist in all human beings. It is not uncommon at all for a particular female to be far more masculine than a particular male. A couple of years ago I gave a talk about Tolkien and androgyny and began by carefully explaining this distinction. Despite this, at the end of the talk I was amazed to get several comments (especially from women in the audience) who thought I was stereotyping men and women when I was referring to masculine and feminine. People are so used to being stereotyped by their gender that even these archetypal terms can generate automatic defenses. So let me state one more time: masculine does not equate with men, feminine does not equate with women, these are archetypal qualities all humans possess and from the point of view of androgyny need to be acknowledged and integrated parts of all self-actualizing people.

(Question for the reader: Someone who just read this draft, said that even though I explain this difference between archetypal masculine and feminine and the usual use of these terms to stereotype males and females, that it was still confusing to read these terms and have to translate them in her mind. She suggested that I substitute “yin” and “yang” for “feminine” and “masculine.” I am continuing with masculine and feminine temporarily, but if others find these terms to be dissonant than I will switch to yin and yang. Please let me know your feeling about it.)

The first mention of the androgyne in Greek Philosophy is in Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes is speaking:

[The] original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two, as they are now, but originally three in number; there was a man, woman and a union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which once had a real existence, but is now lost, and the word “Androgynous” is only preserved as a term of reproach.

Aristophanes describes the original humans as spherical, and containing both genders, but Zeus, wanting to humble them, divided them in half,

Each of us, when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and is always looking for his other half…the intense yearning which each of them has for the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

The movie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a wonderfully creative and funny film about a transexual entertainer, includes an animated version of Aristophane’s mythology of the androgyne. In an interview, the movie’s creator and star compares Hedwig’s blonde wig to the One Ring of the Tolkien books! The non-androgynous person (Hedwig would have to be considered an hermaphrodite) will crave another to complete them in the obsessive way that Gollum seeks to be reconnected to his Precious. As Singer puts it,

In the hope of achieving the feeling of love, this mystical joining of two beings into primordial oneness, people will do the most ill-advised things, beyond all reason. The loss of love can drive people to murder or suicide. …The archetype of the Androgyne is at the base of much of the anxiety that surrounds love, and especially it is connected with the emotions of jealousy, because it points to the fear of being torn asunder from that other.

(Lack of androgyny can lead to infatuation with another) person who is required to be present for the rounding out of one’s own personality----who is, in fact, required for one’s very existence.

Singer relates the loss of androgyny to the Perennial Philosophy and the densifying precession of four ages which have involved a fall from light, wholeness and androgyny (for parallels see The Mutant Vs. the Machine…, A Splinter in your Mind and Clock-Time Metastasizes toward 2012 on my web site). Singer writes,

…as we examine more mythological systems we will observe a consistent theme in which each succeeding world is of a lesser quality than that which preceded it. We saw this in the Greek system, with its progression from Golden to Silver to Bronze to Iron ages.

The four fold structure of mythology: ….Creation and the created world we know and live in belongs to the fourth stage. By this time the Primal Androgyne has either fallen from the spernal sphere to earth or the androgynous figure has split in two---and then perhaps into many parts---lost its immortality, and finally become human.

From my point of view the ultimate outer form of the androgyne would be that of a mercurial shape-shifter. Inwardly, the androgyne is a shape-shifter and inter-dimensional traveler connected to the axis mundi. As a changeling, the outer manifestation of the androgyne would alter to accord with the vicissitudes of psychic intentionality and circumstance. Singer points out that the Gnostics had a similar idea about Christ:

Another Gnostic conceptualization of the Son of Man is that he is Aipolos, the pole (also a pun on the Greek word for goat herd, the one who must turn in all directions).This figure is symbolized by Mercurius, the ever-elusive trickster who is of essence but whom one cannot grasp; also Proteus, the shape shifter, in whom every quality exists in potentia.

Although the New Testament tells us virtually nothing about Christ’s appearance, he has almost always been depicted as rather androgynous, though it is more likely that he was short, stocky, and swarthy with lots of body hair. Popular Science recently funded a study on what Jesus most likely looked like. They consulted experts in anthropology and came up with a computer composite image that would be much more likely to draw the attention of airport security than the approval of many Christians used to the androgynous, Nordic Jesus. How he is imagined to look, however, may be far more appropriate from the point of view of archetypal projection, since he has always been the bearer of an androgynous message. It is always amazing to me how right wing Christians (a recent president comes to mind) manage to take the prophet of “turn the other cheek” and “the meek shall inherit the earth” and turn his message into macho, “Onward Christian Soldiers” posturing. It is especially the Jesus who was edited out of the New Testament (mostly by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine) who expresses an alchemical gnosis of androgyny.

..Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into as single one, so that the male will not be male and the female (not) be female…then shall you enter (the Kingdom).

Singer follows Jung’s lead into alchemy, recognizing it as a science of human transformation, with much to say about androgyny. The Taoist I Ching, which employs an alchemical metaphor throughout, emphasizes the need for the conscious person to follow the path of “reverse alchemy” to regain their original essence. Acquired conditioning, beginning at birth, separates us from our original nature and wholeness, and the conditioning acquired from any culture is always full of gender role conditioning. Aristophane’s myth goes further and suggests that human incarnation, incarnating into a gender specific body, is itself a departure from wholeness. Recent research demonstrates that a good part of gender differences which were believed to be culturally conditioned, turn out to have very strong biological underpinnings. Regaining androgyny, therefore, may be more difficult than even the heroic efforts necessary to break free of acquired conditioning. Some gender limitations may be over-determined, with part of their determinative influence locked down even into our DNA. To become androgynous may be analogous to trying to break the source code of the matrix, which is multi-layered, including both social and genetic coding.

The alchemists, and consciousness pioneers like Jung and Gurdjieff, understood that their work was “contra naturum,” it was against the enormous inertial mass of nature or matrix (“matrix” actually means mother). Gurdjieff even said that the work to not be mechanical was “against God.” At first glance it would seem that such an effort would be the supreme violation of the Taoist principle of working with, rather than against, cosmic forces. But as I’ve written elsewhere (see The Taoist Path on the web site) it is our “true will” (a phrase I am borrowing from Alistair Crowley) which is our deepest inner refraction of the Tao and the aspect of the Tao to be followed above all others. True will is the inner core of our harmony with the cosmos, and this will is to be followed no matter what resistance is met with socially, politically, and even biologically.

The alchemists seemed to know what was at stake, and how deep into the rabbit hole they really had to go to regain their freedom and original wholeness. To break free of the matrix they first had to break down existing structures, to regain the prima materia out of which structures are created. Mixing alchemical and computer metaphors, this would be a cauldron of ones and zeros, undifferentiated potential for informational or psychic structure. Psychically, psychologically, spiritually this requires the dark night of the soul which some, in both tribal and modern contexts, seek to bring on with the use of ordeal poisons and/or hallucinogens. A series of paintings in Alex Grey’s visionary book, Sacred Mirrors, illustrates this process. We see a healer or potential shaman ascending a mountain. At one point he seems to be blown apart into a horrifically surreal explosion of body parts. This is a brilliant visual representation of the dark night of the soul (what the alchemists called the “nigredo”), the death of an ego identity, the necessary destruction of structure to create new form. Some initiates voluntarily choose to bring this on by self-created initiations-----fasting and wilderness isolation, hallucinogens, etc. There are advantages to the self-initiated metamorphosis in that it is consciously chosen, but there are also grave dangers.

A few years ago, at the Penny Lane coffee shop in Boulder, a very enthusiastic young woman told me how she was involved in a new education program for kids which would involve “tribal initiations in the wilderness.” Although not wishing to deflate her enthusiasm, I felt forced to tell her that actually she was talking about arts and crafts in the woods, that tribal initiations were impossible for any legally constituted school in our society because you would have to be willing to have some initiates die or go insane.

Self-initiations must be dangerous. If the self-initiate is fortunate, the danger proves lethal to ego structures but allows other healthy tissue to survive and reconfigure. But many self-initiations, just as those induced by the tribal collective, are shattering to the body or sanity of the initiate. There is always the danger that the self-initiate has presumed upon their inner strength, and like the naïve, young hero ends up devoured.

Another form of initiation is not self-initiated but is induced by the shocks that life supplies. (see Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler on the website) Shamans often have histories of medical emergencies and/or other brushes with death in their youth. Another form of shock that could induce initiation is love shock. Someone with a great inner potential for consciousness may seek wholeness in the conventional way, through infatuation with another incomplete human, and in the shattering aftermath may sacrifice an identity and become more whole. An outcome of wholeness is relatively rare, and the more likely course is that one seeks another love object or becomes a depressed version of the former self.

The alchemists are self-induced initiates and well aware of the depth, scope and acute peril of what they undertake. Their endeavor could aptly be described by Galadriel’s words to the Ring Fellowship: “Your quest rests upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and you will fall to the ruin of all.”

What follows are a number of interesting quotes from Singer’s exposition on androgyny and alchemy: (probably to be paraphrased in a finished draft, certainly introduced better)

There was thought to have existed before Creation a chaotic prime substance. This was referred to in alchemy as the prima materia.

The intent of the alchemists, or so many believed, was to gain control of the prime matter and recombine it so that they could fashion substances of their own choosing and design. In other words, they would initiate their own process of creation. …they admitted that their work was an opus contra naturam. In this monumental task they were forever inveighing against hubris. …

…each metal had a masculine or feminine association that corresponded with the planetary power: gold-sun-masculine, silver-moon-feminine, copper-Venus-feminine, iron-Mars-masculine…

The alchemists worked in male/female pairs in a process referred to as the alchymical wedding

The crux of the process is the engagement with the prima materia, and this is symbolized in the problematic figure of “mercurious” in whom all things were supposedly combined. The opposites are present in him at the start of the process, but not yet differentiated.

Mercurius, also called Hermes, is not only the receptacle of the prima materia and the symbol for it, he is also the agent of transformation.

Mercurius is frequently depicted as an hermaphrodite, an image designed to reflect the nature of Divinity, which is “All in One.” The mythical teacher Hermes Trimegistus, in revealing his secrets to Asclepius, says: “God has no name, or rather he has all names, since he is at once One and All. Infinitely rich with the fertility of both sexes, he is continuously bringing to birth all those things which he planned to create.” The young healer god then asks: “What, you say that God has both sexes, Trismegistus?” “Yes, Asclepius, and not God alone but all beings animate and vegetable.”

The elements with which the alchemists work are seen through the dark glass of symbol and metaphor as bipolar constructs: “Sun-moon,” “sulfur-salt,” “King-queen,” “heaven-earth,” “fire-water,” “living-dead,” “open-occult” and, of course, “masculine-feminine.” The work on the soul is an integral, though not always stated or understood, part of the process. This means being able to commit oneself to the work, to put into a secondary space the purely personal and ego concerns (the psychological concomitant of the earth-centered world view) and to see oneself as part and parcel of the entire universe. The image to be held before one is that every act by every person has an effect on all, changing the delicate balance that keeps the universe in motion. Therefore, it was considered necessary by the alchemists to so conduct their work and their lives, which were really the same thing, as if the salvation of the world depended upon it.

The breaking down of substances into the prima materia would bring about the stage called the nigredo, which is characterized by the utter blackness of the original chaos. It is a period of destruction and despair, and it is absolutely essential to the process. It has its parallel in mystical literature as the “dark night of the soul”...akin to what is experienced by an individual as deep depression, either suffering a physical illness or beset by a dis-ease, a weariness of soul…The kind of healing they seek is what the word “healing” essentially means; that is, “to be made whole…The object of this stage was to bring about a condition where a new union could take place between opposites which have been broken down through the agency of operations personified in Mercurius.”

From the Zohar (the classic Kabbalistic text) :…when they (the masculine and the feminine) unite, they look as if they were one body. From this we learn the masculine by itself is like only one part of a body, and the feminine also. But when they join together as a whole, then they appear as one real body.

….Therefore we know: what is only masculine or only feminine is called only part of the body. But no blessing rules over a faulty or incomplete thing, but only over a complete place, not one that is divided, for divided things cannot long endure or be blessed.

The Gnostics and the Hindus, among others, saw the reality we experience as matrix or “Maya”---a deception or delusion. The awakened androgynous person is able to transcend this delusion:

The Indians saw the world as a construct of the Great Goddess whom they call Maya, who measures out time and space, both in an important sense delusory.

…the embodied Self is freed from the enchantment of the flesh and passes into the sate of rapture known as samadhi.

The paths of Kundalini Yoga, Tantra, T’ai Chi and Chi Gung are Eastern alchemical paths that open the possibility, for advanced initiates, to reconfigure themselves energetically and restore their lost androgyny:

What is so strongly potent about Kundalini is the realization which it brings of the possibility for some individuals to come to a unity within themselves, a unity consisting of the interplay of energy and matter, the feminine and the masculine, the bodily experience and the spiritual experience. This path is difficult, arduous and demanding, but Kundalini Yoga offers one possibility for achieving one’s androgynous potential. It requires a rigidly ascetic discipline; it leads its adherents to the experience of our temporal world as illusory and of little value in comparison with the attainment of non-dual awareness of the “undivided Whole,” the non-separability of the created and the Increate.

…the Buddhist Tantra stressed the androgynous being of the transformed, enlightened individual…

The I Ching and Taoism are both centered on the principle of androgyny which is perfectly expressed in the T’ai chi symbol or yin-yang, where the masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) each contain their opposite and are dynamic parts of a unified whole. The sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the sixty-four possible combinations of yin and yang lines into patterns of six. (for more on the I Ching see I Ching Readings and Dream Interpretation on my web site). Singer writes,

If there were a ritual dance of the androgyne, T’ai chi as performed by this master could be that dance. It is neither a masculine dance nor a feminine dance. It has the strength and grace of both…The moving outward portion of the cycle belongs to the phase of the Masculine, Yang, the moving inward to the Feminine, Yin.

T’ai chi, the dance of life, can be done with the whole body, it can be turned into a work of calligraphy on a sheet of white paper, it can find its way into the art of painting, into music, into the cultivation of a garden, and into the act of love. Always it is the art of asymmetrical balancing, in which the flow between the opposites is so exquisitely smooth as to be almost indiscernible. The energy is never spent; it is always put forth and then drawn back. When the dancer stops he has more vitality than when he began.

Singer discusses the two hemispheres of the brain, connected by a dense bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum, as parallel to the dual nature of human beings (Keep in mind as left and right are discussed that in right-handed people, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, the right hemisphere the left.),

In the early part of the present century, most brain research emphasized the superiority of the left hemisphere functions of the brain, primarily the intellectual, verbal, analytic capacities that tradition has associated with the masculine mind.

In a study of the myth and symbolism of left and right, G. William Domhoff finds that the left is often the area of the taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the feminine, the intuitive and the dreamer.

In Fritjof Capra’s book, The Web of Life, he emphasizes the dialectic of two great forces in nature----the integrative and the self-assertive. Our society obviously idolizes the self-assertive tendency while more earth-based cultures emphasize the integrative. Singer discusses Arthur J. Deikman who seems to have had a similar conception,

Arthur J. Deikman, in considering the infinite variety and rapid shifts of psychological and physiological states in an individual, concluded that there were two primary modes of organization: an “action” mode and a “receptive” mode. The action mode is the one that is organized to “manipulate the environment, while the receptive mode is organized around intake of the environment rather than manipulation.” He points out the need for recognizing the relativity of the different modes, rather than assigning absolute primacy and validity to the one with which we are most familiar; namely, the “action”mode.

Singer introduces Robert Ornstein’s research into the nature of consciousness,

Ornstein expressed the view that it is the polarity and the integration of these two, the intellectual and the intuitive, that underlie some of the highest achievements of mankind

Singer and Ornstein would be the first to acknowledge that these two terms, intellectual and intuitive, are an oversimplification, but the need to efficiently language this distinction forces us into a certain degree of reduction. Recognizing this difficulty Ornstein has prepared a chart to illustrate some of the ways the distinction between day-night, masculine-feminine consciousness has been understood by a variety of sources from the ancient to the modern:

The emphasis on words may abstract the living realities of these forces. Understanding how these forces work in you and others is necessary to ground this distinction. Using myself as an example, it took me a while to recognize the androgynous nature of my own mind as I was brought up in a family and culture that emphasizes the intellectual, analytical, and verbal modalities as the leading edge of perception and that which validates insights. When I was younger I identified with that side of mind and didn’t recognize what now seems obvious-----intuition was always the leading edge of my mind, the analytic and verbal followed behind processing the information streaming in from intuition. I have also noticed that others frequently misperceive me in the same way that I misunderstood myself--- because I was brought up to favor a mode of detached analysis, people hearing me talk, or reading what I write, often have the false impression that what I am communicating is the result of a sequence of analytical thoughts. Actually the primary process is intuitive and analytical thinking and verbalizing come in as a secondary process. Since the “finished product” is often a set of words presented in a tone of detached analysis, the secondary process is the more visible and manifest and seems to be the driving force. Now that I have recognized that my mind is a melding of intuition and analysis I have also shifted to discussing ideas (at least some of the time) in a more intuitive, surreal style (Stop the Hottie!, Vision at Chichen Itza on the web site are examples). One of the general implications of my particular case is that the process of becoming androgynous is largely a matter of inner recognition rather than transformation. I was always more intuitive than intellectual, but recognizing that allowed me to transform, to become more who I always was in my essence, and that process is not finished, as I age I notice that I am becoming more and more comfortable with allowing intuition to be the leading edge.

Often I find that the most intelligent young people I meet have identified with their thinking process. My intuition reveals that they are more powerfully intuitive, but some inner bias in them causes them to discard intuitions. My intuition senses their intuition as active and online, and it used to shock me when I would catch on that they were not reading or accessing their intuitions, because they have a prejudice that this source of information is not as valid as thinking. I find myself trying to communicate to these unrealized intuitives how much more empowered they would be if they learned how to meld intuition and intellect so that intuition was the leading edge (see also discussion of the hierarchy of psychic functions in Part II of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler).

A less intelligent sort of person I frequently run into in counter cultural circles has rebelled from the intellectual and analytical altogether, dismissing it as a patriarchal constraint. They believe themselves to be beyond the intellectual when they are actually not up to its mark, so they prefer to scorn that which they desperately need, but in which they are desperately incompetent. This rebellion does not, of course, empower their intuition but rather turns their psyches into a lunar landscape of complete confusion where discernment is entirely lacking. They falsely believe they are involved in occult or metaphysical study when actually their minds consist of a mushy hodgepodge of fragmented urban legends, “can you top this” bits of pseudo-esoteric lore, New Age clichés, etc. Their “study” mostly consists of narcissistically excited bull sessions in which they proffer bits of this inner refuse to anyone that will join them in kind or even pretend to listen to them. They personify what Singer identifies as “hermaphrodites” rather than androgynes. The androgyne values and is skilled in intuitive and intellectual abilities.

Singer credits Ornstein with recognizing that the passing age is characterized by its tendency to polarize the left and right, the lunar and solar modalities of consciousness. You are either a “serious” scientist or thinker or you are an artist, mystic or freak. But the present dilemmas and Swords of Damacles hanging over our heads will not be understood or addressed by those who work out of only one hemisphere of consciousness. We need people, like Jung, who had both hemispheres firing, the androgynous mind, to comprehend what is happening to us.

A radical surgical treatment for grand mal epilepsy involves severing the corpus callosum (the dense bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain). It was discovered that these two hemispheres, each of them connected to a different eye, were forced to work independently so that when patients who had undergone this procedure closed one eye they could read words but not comprehend pictures, and if they closed the other eye they could recognize pictures but not name what they were seeing. Singer makes an excellent point that this surgical procedure can be viewed as the ultimate symbolic act of the age of Pisces, the Age of Polarities. The Internet, which in just a few years has come to be a global central nervous system, may be seen as a technology of the Aquarian Age since it wires everyone together and since it involves word, sound and image it has the potential to engage both hemispheres and to wire many billions of brains or psyches into one interconnected system.

(For more on hemispheric dominance and precession of ages see section later in this essay on the One Ring and language and also on The Alphabet vs. the Goddess.)

Although we are already experiencing aspects of the Aquarian Age, the Age of Pisces still seems to be in power, especially politically. Singer quotes the following classic lines from Yeats to describe the situation at the end of the age of Pisces, the situation we still seem to be in:

Singer suggests that Systems Theory may be a mythology of the Aquarian Age which she expects to be an age of androgyny. Although as a Jungian Singer recognizes mythology as a far more substantial thing than the way most people hear that word (many people hear it as a bunch of nonsense and superstition), I think that Systems Theory might more aptly be called a paradigm of the Age of Androgyny. Singer writes,

As we move into the Age of Aquarius (which may come to be designated as the Age of Androgyny), no one would be surprised to discover that a new myth is emerging. Naturally it manifests as have all the other myths, in the guise of a “sacred truth”; only this time the truth is designated as science: The Systems View of the Universe. Systems theory does not announce itself as a mythology; no mythology ever does.

Indeed, Systems Theory does seem like an inevitable evolutionary correction of Western thought and science which has gone to such extremes in dividing, reducing, and compartmentalizing knowledge and investigation. Systems Theory recognizes what the I Ching long before recognized, that everything is a pattern of energy and change embedded in other patterns of energy and change interwoven with all patterns of energy and change and harmonizing with the principles of energy and change found everywhere.

….the universe is not lying in fragments at the feet of the philosopher. Nor are the polarities “worlds apart” in reality. The world is characterized by a remarkable degree of consistency and coherence. If we do not see it that way, it is because of the limitations of our own capacities—the elephant is not divided into pieces because the blind men are only able to sense its parts.

Inner and outer are not the irreconcilable opposites which they were for Descartes and are for many in science,

Inwardness, called “psyche,” and outwardness, called “world” may appear to be in opposition to one another. From a more encompassing viewpoint they may be seen simply as two systems, one subsystem contained within another larger system.

….We need to recognize that we are members of an interrelated series of systems which all obey the same principles and have a common theme.

Some people in the New Age, particularly those who have dabbled in Eastern practice, have swung with the pendulum to a new extreme or one-sideness. They will monotonously insist on the oneness of everything no matter what is being discussed, and use this obvious reality as a way of leveling all difference, distinction and discernment. This point of view can be even more limiting than the tunnel vision of the reductive thinker, since at least the reductive thinker is still thinking about and investigating something, no matter how much they may miss of the infinite context of the something. This type of New Ager, however, takes oneness as a truism that relieves them of the need for thinking, discrimination and discernment and pulls it out of the hat, like the most tired of magician’s rabbits, whenever any issue requiring discernment appears. Recognizing that individuals or groups that are in conflict are part of the same oneness is crucial, but it is also crucial to recognize their individual differences and what sets them apart. The great American pioneer psychologist William James wrote around nineteen hundred that besides the oneness of things, anyone who glances at the phenomenal world should also be struck by the eachness of things, we see a world of unique individual trees and people, for example, and not a homogenous mass of treeness or undifferentiated pool of humanity. The androgynous mind recognizes that there is both oneness and eachness, these are the two poles of the paradox that must be held in mind to understand both interrelation and individuality.

Quite often the same person who is a proponent of the oneness of things will unconsciously switch to reductive dualism and the next minute be preaching to the choir of like minded friends about the badness (and implied otherness) of corporations, environmental destruction, etc. One of the first challenges I face when trying to explain my evolutionary theories is to get people to step out of the box of literal ego judgments that is sure of what’s good or bad for evolution. If I were talking to Christian Fundamentalists (which I’m not, of course) this limiting dualism would not be so objectionable, because there is no false advertising involved. What is really maddening is talking to the New Ager who if they are not preaching about the oneness of things are telling you about the badness and wrongness of everything they don’t like (always something human associated) which they will inevitably damn with their harshest of epithets, their version of the Mark of the Beast, the fiery brand of “unnaturalness.” Whenever you hear the words “natural” or “unnatural” being used you are almost certainly in the presence of sloppy thinking. The Fundamentalist tells you that homosexuality is unnatural though it is displayed by thousands of species, and the same people who condemn the simple-mindedness of the Fundamentalist will tell you that everything modern man does is unnatural. Let’s get this one concept of interrelation straight: Nothing is outside of nature. Therefore nothing is unnatural or supernatural. Mother nature created a technology extruding primate, so if what we’re doing is “wrong” you might as well blame M.N. as G. M. for pollution and other human pathologies.

Of course, what I just said is still only one side of the paradox, there is a meaningful discrimination to be made between, for example, eating a toxic diet of processed foods and eating a diet of live, organic whole food. But furless primates who choose to eat poison are still part of nature, part of the Tao, and what doesn’t make sense to someone’s preferences, may make perfect sense if understood out of the judgment box and seen as part of an unexpected web of connections. (For more on the false use of “natural” and the paradoxical nature of evolution see Chaper V of my book The Capsule of Intentionality and Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler on the web site).

What seems to be important at the moment is never what is really going on. For the bee, it is the honey that is important; for Nature, what matters is the cross-pollination the bee effects in going after the nectar. So also, 99 per cent chromosomically programmed humans have been doing the right things for the wrong reasons. What we think of as side events are really Evolution’s main events. How events and discoveries will cohere is unforeseeable. The one sure thing is that cohere they will. The “Planner” incarnates the human mistake of supposing that Universe is waiting for human beings to make the major evolutionary decisions.

Of course, the honey for the bee is also important for nature, but the principle is sound. As Singer points out,

Fuller is the generalist par excellence…One of his favorite priniciples is synergy, a word that means the unexpected interaction of parts in combination.

Jung, himself a master generalist, decried the growing prevalence of soulless experts which increasingly characterizes our society (see “Crossing the Great Stream…” an article I wrote for Holistic Education Review on the web site for more on this). The “expert” is almost the opposite of the androgyne. The focus on expertise in academics and science tends toward that well known syndrome of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The androgynous mind is a generalist mind, it may have expertise in certain areas, but will not become so married to its expertise that it will be unable to see the gestalt of things, it will instead be able to thrive on the serendipitous synergy of different fields of knowledge. This is what characterizes a great Renaissance thinker, and androgyne, like Leonardo Da Vinci who was creative in arts and sciences. Another of the great Renaissance androgyne is William Shakespeare. His androgyny is not reducible to his bisexuality (the classic love sonnets were written for a male youth), it is his ability to project himself empathically and with great penetration into such a wide spectrum of human types of every age and gender. Shakespeare pioneered the rediscovery of androgynous “Green Worlds” (see a Splinter in Your Mind on web site). When the characters in As You Like It find themselves in the Green World of the Forest of Arden, gender bending ( a boy plays a girl who plays a boy who pretends to be a girl) becomes the key to unlock their various neurotic dilemmas. Although androgyny may seem to be worked out interpersonally, remembering that Shakespeare created all the characters from within you can see As You Like It as manifestation and realization of his own intrapsychic androgyny.

There is a strange way in which my interest in androgyny, the Tolkien Mythology and Singer’s book intersect, and oddly enough it has to do with masturbation (hereafter I will omit the word masturbation and instead use auto-eroticism which is not a euphemism, but a more accurate term, as masturbation defines only a physical act of manipulating genitals while auto-eroticism encompasses a type of eros with much larger implications.)

For most of the time I have had a connection with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, since I was twenty or so, I had been extremely uneasy about the ring symbolism of the trilogy. Since the ring is a circle, and the circle is the classic symbol of wholeness and the self (the Sankrit definition of God is: “A circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere”) I was rather suspicious of the need for it to be destroyed. I was aware of Tolkien’s orthodox Catholicism and felt that it might be the source of Tolkien’s antagonism toward any human, or human-like individual possessing a symbol of divine wholeness. I felt that Tolkien’s hostility toward the ring came from a problem with what I call “location of the Godhead.”

I am minimizing here the use of the word “God” because it is so forever contaminated by anthropomorphisms and emotionally charged projections of such variety that using the term only invites confusion and tends to widen the gap of miscommunication between the person employing the term and their audience. Instead I am using the term “Godhead,” which has various dictionary definitions, but I am using it to mean that which is divine and the source of divine emanation. Like all definitions this is imprecise and circular, but hopefully the meaning will emerge.

The healthy, androgynous way to locate the Godhead I believed, and still believe, is to see it located everywhere. Again, this is like the Sanskrit definition of God as, “A circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is no where.” In the Eastern salutation “Namaste,” one is acknowledging the divinity of the other person. It is not just in them, but in oneself and in everyone and everything. In other words, everything that we experience is part of the “mind of God.” Viewing everything as the Godhead may be the position most in accord with the findings of physics. Once the monad, or indivisible constituent of reality, was believed to be a small particle. This was first postulated by the Greek atomists and continued until Einstein when matter was shown to be not a particle but a special case of energy. Matter turned out to be mostly empty space and a more congealed form of energy. The universe came to be recognized as a flow of patterned energy. Now many physicists are saying that the universe is more accurately considered a flow of information. Physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Amit Goswami go a step further and say that if you posit the monad as consisting not of matter, energy or information, but of mind, of consciousness, then all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics vanish. This is what I believe----everything is the Godhead and everything is composed of consciousness.

Many Christians (and orthodox Catholics would especially tend toward this) do not view the Godhead everywhere but see a very uneven distribution of it, mostly they locate it in God the Father and his son Jesus. This relocation of the Godhead into two male identified figures is part of a strange evolution of mythologies:

Joseph Campbell’s five-volume study of mythology, published under the general title of The Masks of God, contains in each of its volumes an extraordinary record of the ancient shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. The shift is schematized by Campbell in four steps as follows:

Many forms of Christianity (but not Gnostic Chrisitanity!) moved toward a massive schizoid split, and the split fractured every layer of reality-----cosmologically, spiritually, psychologically, sexually----it split men from women, masculine from feminine, light from dark, mind from body, Christian from non Christian. This split was caused by the drastically uneven distribution of the Godhead. God the Father and Jesus became ever more divine and perfect, the “sunnum bonnum” and all darkness, through ever more tortured reasoning, became the fault of Satan, humans through “original sin,” female witches, the Jews… As white light came to glow around father and son, man and human nature (though created by God and in his image) became blacker and blacker. Divinity was almost exclusively in the two male Gods and humans were dust and corruption. One apotheosis of this insane split was American Puritanism. A classic expression of this madness are the hellfire and brimstone sermons of the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). The schizoid split in Puritans became so extreme that it resulted in the most pathological projections. Women were burned as witches (nothing new there, Europe had burned several million) and human beings were so dark and repellent that God could scarcely hold himself back from damning them to eternal punishment in hell for even one more moment. Here are some excerpts from Edward’s most well known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. …There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell. …Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; …He will not only hate you, but he will have you, in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets. …It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts…and you will absolutely despair…You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite….this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. …The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them. The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own…

Jung, a Christian and the son of a Protestant minister, had the courage to ask himself a question that few Christians have ever had the courage to ask themselves. Why has more blood been spilled in the name of Christianity than anything else in human history? Jung considered this question in his book, Aion, and basically concluded that by removing all darkness from creator and messiah a schizoid split was created which required a feverish need for shadow projection, a need to locate darkness in some human group that would serve as scapegoat. Once you created an all white light Jesus, then unconsciously you needed to create as his twin Anti Christ to counterbalance this one-sidedness. From my point of view an Anti Christ is a person who locates the Godhead in themselves, but not in others. The rest of the universe is merely real estate and livestock to be exploited.

For more than twenty years I suspected that the need to destroy the ring came from the schizoid disempowerment of locating the Godhead outside the self. As an orthodox Catholic Tolkien would tend to think that recognizing divinity in the self would swing the pendulum of enantiodromia to the other one-sided extreme of Anti-Christ. Even today I believe that this is a factor in his ring symbolism.

When I was twenty I recognized a parallelism between the need to destroy the One Ring and its corruption of any ring bearer with the harsh Catholic taboo against auto-eroticism. Freud pointed out a crucial difference between what he called “primitive” man and modern man in their perception of sexual energy. The primitive worshipped the mysterious fire within, while the modern man worshipped the beloved, the object on whom the fire was projected. In other words, our eros had become configured or conditioned so that we project power outwards, just as in Christendom divinity was projected outside the self onto an all perfect God or messiah, sexual fire was projected onto an idealized, external love object. From the age of Chivalry to Victorian times, and even to this day, a classic form of this projection was for a male to feel his desires “unworthy” of some idealized woman whom he thought “too pure for this world,” certainly too pure to have any sexuality of her own, etc. This form of schizoid eros parallels the schizoid projection of the Godhead as outside the self and residing in an all white light divine figure. To the extent that the feminine was recognized as divine at all it was in the inflation of Mary, mother of Jesus (who in the Bible Jesus treats rather contemptuously) into a demigod, a distant third in the otherwise male field of three that comprise the Catholic Trinity. But the earthy and dark side of the feminine were edited out and she became the “white Madonna,” a virgin mother too pure for sex, etc.

What makes auto-eroticism so horrifying to this schizoid mind set is that the human personification of Godhead, the beloved, is not necessarily projected into the external world but is generated by a single individual. The auto-erotic individual is generating both subject and object, and is partaking in the potential sacrament of orgasm without the mitigation of individual power by an external person, institution of marriage, Church delivered sacrament, etc. No control system wants the individual to be so empowered and able to close the circle within themselves. In the Catholic Church, to this day, birth, marriage and even death require priestly sacraments, i.e. authorization by external authority. A control system wants you to always be seeking fulfillment, love, security, salvation outside, out in the society and institutions that it controls, so that you become an object of control within the system. This is the prime commandment of the matrix, Thou shalt not exercise the ability to generate your own reality, but shall abjectly submit to the reality created for you. George Bernard Shaw seemed to understand this when he said, “The mark of the reasonable man is that he adapts himself to the world he finds himself in. The mark of the unreasonable man is that he expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.” The “reasonable” person is the one who submits to the matrix, the control system, the “unreasonable” person is the androgyne, the person who is aware of themselves as cocreator.

I believe it is appropriate to redefine masturbation and autoeroticism to parallel the way Singer has redefined hermaphrodism and androgyny. The conventional form of masturbation common in our culture involves the same kind of projection of power outside the self as in much interpersonal sexuality. An idealized beloved (or in contemporary society, now so much more geared toward materialism and hedonism----a “hottie” see Stop the Hottie! on the website) becomes the focus of the magic of eros. As in the hermaphrodite, this type of masturbation is more characterized by the confusion of masculine and feminine rather than the integrated fusion of them in the androgyne. Auto-eroticism, as I am redefining it, means androgynous auto-eroticism, and that means that the individual is conscious of themselves as the creator of the fantasy and the fantasy itself, is aware of themselves as both subject and object, lover and beloved, masculine and feminine, and whether they generate a lover of the opposite or same sex, no one at all, or any other possibility, they are consciously closing the circle (wielding their own ring of power). The androgyne in an auto-erotic experience realizes that they have the power of the shape-shifter to be in any body they deem appropriate as well as to generate a lover in whatever form is desired. They also realize that their point of view is not bound to the subject, but may travel back and forth between the created lovers if they feel so drawn.

Orgasms that are not merely the result of genital stimulation may in some cases be experienced as a sacrament, as a participation mystique with the universe where one emerges into an energy body that is interpenetrated with the universe. That such a sacrament could be an experienced by an individual without permission or reference to outside power and authority is horrifying to a control system which demands that power be projected outside.

I am not trying to disproportionately glorify the autoerotic experience as compared to the interpersonal sexual experience or the person who abstains from any form of sex. All experiences may be sacred or profane depending on the experiencer and the context. Indeed, for some an excessive indulgence in the autoerotic could be a version of the dark side of the uroboros archetype, the snake swallowing its own tail. A given individual, at a given time, might need the interpersonal to be more powerful to pull them out of themselves, etc. What I try to emphasize whenever I talk or write about eros is that ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! If there is one obvious fact about human nature and human eros that is most neglected, it is respect for its fantastic variability. Human situations need to be examined from a much more case specific point of view.

I also find it interesting that masturbation taboo is to a partial extent multicultural. Singer points out the prohibitions against masturbation in numerous cultures and spiritual disciplines including Taoism, kundalini Yoga and Tantra and states that it has no basis in human anatomy, suggesting that is based on archetypal material. From the point of view of the Eastern energetic alchemies of Tantra and Chi Gung, ejaculation by males is in most cases viewed as extremely detrimental. While these systems have, in other ways, a very sophisticated understanding of human energy, when it comes to male orgasm they seem to view the energy system not as an open flow of energy, but as a closed system with limited resources which each ejaculation permanently diminishes. But the body creates seminal fluid to be ejaculated and not to be indefinitely retained where it can putrefy and cause infection. Dr. Andrew Weil (go to drweil.com and type “masturbation” into the search engine) reports on an Australian study which finds that men who masturbate are 30% less likely to develop prostate cancer than those who don’t! Anybody who knows how hard it is to find detectable statistically significant correlations with many health factors will tell you what a gigantic differential this 30% is.

I am not suggesting that there is no truth to the position of Tantra and Chi Gung on ejaculation, but I am asserting that it is a one size fits all formulation. Indeed, excessive ejaculation can be draining, particularly when conditions are more yin and less yang. Aging makes one more yin, and therefore older males need to ejaculate less than younger males. Also, during winter, which is much more yin (longer nights, less warmth, etc.), ejaculation may be more depleting than during the height of summer which is far more yang. Again, the case specific points of view, as well as general formulations, need to be considered. When ejaculation is interpersonal, rather than autoerotic, there are all sorts of other factors to be considered. There are significant numbers of people of either gender who are able to drain another person’s energy (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites, Vampires on the website). Excess ejaculation, like an excess of anything, can be detrimental, but the phobic, horrified, over-the-top warnings and prohibitions against masturbation indicate schizoid projections.

One of the aspects of June Singer’s book that most resonated with me were her very parallel findings on autoeroticism. Singer implies a parallelism between androgyny and autoeroticism as both are subject to taboo and secrecy:

If androgyny has remained submerged over the centuries, then masturbation has been similarly ubiquitous and nearly as secret.

Especially fascinating is that Singer connects autoeroticism to the Tree of Knowledge in almost exactly the same way as Terrance McKenna connected it to hallucinogens. Terrance would sometimes refer to the expulsion from Eden as, “history’s first drug bust.”

From earliest childhood on into youth and maturity, masturbation is an act of self-assertion, the object of which is a movement in the direction of independence.…Masturbation and the prohibitions against it can be viewed in connection with the legends that are told about the Tree of Knowledge. Here, also, the issue is the potential independence of the individual from the more powerful Other. There is the prohibition against eating the fruit of that tree because if Adam and Eve do eat of it, they will learn the secrets of carnal life, which are allied with the secrets of creativity. This knowledge would make them like the gods; that is, powerful and independent….The God who prohibits eating the fruit of the tree which enables humans to know good and evil may be afraid they will begin to believe that they can become self-sufficient if they can meet their own sexual needs through self-manipulation.

Singer connects autoeroticism with the individual partaking of a forbidden independence and power. She quotes a patient:

That was the first time I remember that I ever masturbated to orgasm. It was a great feeling. For the first time I was feeling in control of my sexuality.

Those seeking to shame and discourage people from masturbation portrayed it as having the most dire consequences for physical and mental health. As recently as the Fifties young men were told that they would go blind or insane. The parallels between these absurdly over-the-top and blatantly false warnings and the Refer Madness type propaganda used to scare young people away from marijuana and other hallucinogens are quite striking. Engaging in autoeroticism or hallucinogen use is in either case asserting your power to be your own alchemist, to engage in highly mood altered energetic practices outside of social sanction or control.

Singer points out that autoeroticism can actually be a practice that engaged in the right way can produce healing and lead toward wholeness and creativity.

Masturbation can provide a person with the intensely felt experience of being the lover and the beloved at the same time. The experience can be a total one if accompanied by fantasies that are healing; that is, “making whole.” It provides also a stimulus for creativity, reminding us of the Egyptian creation mythology in which creation proceeds from a masturbatory act. Here giving and receiving, activity and receptivity are combined. There is great freedom in knowing that one can be whole in one’s inner life, and that this wholeness need not depend absolutely upon a relationship with another person.

The difference is that the masturbation that belongs to the androgyne’s experience is performed consciously; the reason for it is understood and accepted; and it is entered into with the fantasy which allows the soul to participate in the experience of the body without guilt or shame.

An aspect of autoeroticism that associates it with the Tree of Knowledge and that would particularly “anger the gods” is that the individual is exercising his or her power to “subcreate.” “Subcreation” is a term introduced by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories as his way of acknowledging that the fantasy writer is generating a creation, a subordinate reality within the larger creation of God. Tolkien’s creation of this term, and the way he employs it, reflects a certain ambivalence toward creation, and may partly explain his dark view of the One Ring. Tolkien needs to acknowledge that fantasy writing at its highest level is a profound act of creation, a birthing of a parallel reality. But as an orthodox Catholic who locates the Godhead more outside than inside, he is careful to put “sub” before it and emphasizes that the fantasy creation is a derivative subset within God’s creation. Tolkien tells us that subcreation is a natural human right and divine, but also warns about hubris and the tendency for power to corrupt and to be used wickedly,

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Are there any ‘bounds to a writer’s job’ except those imposed by his own finiteness? ….humility and an awareness of peril is required…

The right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality; hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: ‘inner consistency of reality,’ it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the world does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.

But Tolkien also discusses another realm of reality where subcreation is more powerful and divine. He calls this realm “Faërie”,

An essential power of Faërie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy.’

In Faërie, imagination and manifestation are melded and this seems to locate the Godhead, the source of manifestation, closer to the individual, because in Faërie their imagination is like the mind of God, it has the power of instantaneous manifestation. Even more than the hallucinogen experience where the experiencer is typically the recipient of vision rather than the conscious creator of it, the auto-erotic realm may be seen as existing closer to Faërie than the ordinary realm. The person able to generate a vivid auto-erotic fantasy, which produces measurable physiological effects on the fantasizer, is asserting the essential power Tolkien attributes to Faërie----the power of making immediately effective by the will the vision of ‘fantasy.’

To be “effective” the manifestation does not have to have weight or occupy three dimensional space. This imaginal effectiveness is a forbidden power that will typically make the gods that rule society and the collective baseline of human consciousness jealous, competitive, angry and fearfully vindictive.

For more than twenty-five years I saw the need to destroy the One Ring as analagous and parallel to the Catholic taboo on autoeroticism which was unconsciously recognized as too much power for the individual and an internalization of the Godhead. In the Lord of the Rings movies, which I think were brilliant visual amplifications of the Tolkien mythology, we see Frodo (personified in a more youthful and androgynous form than anything in the book suggests) secretly and guiltily stroking the One Ring as he lies in bed at night in a way that is obviously intended to evoke guilty masturbation. This view was reinforced by Tolkien’s ambivalence about subcreation, which he affirms but also thinks might be too much power for fallen man, man too close to being Godhead.

On Christmas Eve. of 2002 I watched the first Lord of the Rings movie, magnificently realized by Peter Jackson and an army of gifted people. But this was not the first time I had seen the movie, far from it, it was more like the eighth or ninth time, and my second viewing of the extended DVD version. Early on in the movie, there was a fifteen minute period where, unexpectedly, a flood of intuitions and realizations about Tolkien’s mythology and the meaning of the ring cascaded through my mind. The view I had of the need to destroy the ring seemed to fold in on itself and reverse.

First, I had an intuition that seemed to reinforce my earlier point of view. I saw that the ring was an androgyny symbol, a multi-layered T’ai Chi symbol, or yin-yang. The ring’s yin or Feminine aspect is its coital roundness meant to be penetrated by a finger. Its Masculine aspect is its solar goldness. This I had already realized, but now I saw that like the black yin dot in the white yang, and the white yang dot in the black yin, its Feminine aspect was carried in its geometric shape, and geometric shapes are part of the dimension of pure form associated with the masculine. Its masculine aspect was its goldness and that was carried by its materiality, and materiality is associated with the feminine. The next layer of the One Ring as Tai’Chi symbol is that it is composed of both matter, the most dense, heavy and impervious of metals, grounding it into the feminine realm of corporeal, gravity-bound bodies, but it is also composed of language, and when exposed to the yang element of fire words of power glow as fiery runes, and both language and fire are etherialized elements and aspects of the masculine.

Next in the chain of intuitions was a realization about Sauron’s relationship to alchemical gender. His form, brilliantly realized in the movie, is a red eye of fire on the top of a tower. This form is the perfect realization of masculinity completely untempered by the feminine, the furthest position possible from androgyny.

Jung identified two poles or types of masculine power. The first type is the lower or chthonic phallic masculine energy. This type of masculine power is identified with male genitals, machismo, the linebacker, the stud…but it can also be identified with an animal like a bull. This type of masculine energy is closer to earth and the animal realm and therefore is the far more feminine type of masculine energy. The higher, or solar phallic, masculine energy is associated with the power of the mind, the will, the penetrating gaze, the sword of discernment, Apollo, the larger head rather than the smaller head, etc. The best animal representation of this power I can think of is the bald-headed eagle (whose coloring emphasizes its head) which soars above the earth and has the sharpest, highest resolution eyesight of any animal. (For more on these two poles of phallic power see “The Psyche as an Oscillating Entity in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure” on the website)

In the books, a human personification of the virtues and weaknesses of lower phallic power is Boromir who is described as, “…taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms; fearless and strong, but caring little for lore, save the tales of old battles.” He has plenty of phallic courage, but his mind and will are weak, and he is easily corrupted by proximity to the ring. Lower phallic power is perfectly embodied in the movie version by the great Orc that Saruman manifests out of a pit of slime in the earth. This Orc embodies pure physical aggression, looks like a linebacker crossed with various animal essences, and doesn’t know anything more than it needs to. It has no will of its own, no solar phallic power, and it is completely ruled by Saruman, who after Sauron is the other entity that is most completely ruled by the solar phallic. Saruman also lives in a great phallic tower (hence the title, The Two Towers), has a “mind of metal and wheels” and “…does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.“,” and, like Sauron, is ruled by an electrified will to power.

When Jung was a child he had a disturbing vision. He entered a tree that was like a cave and found himself in a great chamber. On a throne sat a huge column, it was a very anatomically correct penis, but it was gigantic and at its top was an eye, the head surrounded by a glowing aura. Consider how close this purely archetypal vision of the solar phallic is to Sauron, an eye of fire atop a great tower. Sauron’s glyph is a red eye. Sauron is the embodiment of the Luciferian will to power. He is so one-sidedly removed from the feminine and the earth that his physical form is virtually non physical. Corporeal, flesh-based bodies are mostly water, all fetuses begin as female, but Sauron has no water, no feminine, to the extent that he is physical at all he is an eye of fire. Sauron’s Ringwraiths cannot abide water, his Great Captain has a head made of fire, cannot be slain by any man, but is slain by a woman. Notice how much the power of phallic penetration is evoked in this description of Sauron,

One moment only it stared out, but as from some great window immeasurably high there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye; and then the shadows were furled again and the terrible vision was removed.

The eye, as the most ethereal of outer physical organs, and most closely linked to the mind, is closest to the solar phallic. The next closest outer physical organ is the hand, the cutting edge of the mind, with its phallus like fingers. Saruman’s glyph is the white hand and castration of power is represented in the Tolkien mythology by finger amputation. Sauron has his ring finger amputated which castrates him utterly at the height of his power, and Gollum bites off Frodo’s third finger (his phallic middle finger, not the usual ring finger) which leads to Sauron’s second castration.

The phallic aspect of the One Ring is apparent in a number of ways. During the twenty minute or so cascade of insights on Christmas Eve., 2002, I saw an image of the One Ring---glowing, with fiery letters revealed----on an excited, erect penis. This image was, as you might imagine, rather shockingly unexpected at the time, but makes perfect sense to me now. On the literal level the One Ring behaves much like a penis. Far more than ordinary metal, it expands when hot, shrinks when cool. Islidur, writing in his journal, tells us of his first moments of contact with the ring:

It was hot when I first took it, hot as glede, and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it. Yet even as I write it is cooled, and it seemeth to shrink, though it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape. Already the writing upon it, which at first was clear as red flame, fadeth and is now only barely to be read.

In a later journal entry, Islidur no longer describes the ring as an uncanny object, it has now become for him his beloved, his precious, what he covets above all other things. His coveting is fearful, obsessively addictive, jealous and painful. Islidur especially fears that his beloved will be unfaithful, that the ring may be lusting for the heat of Sauron’s hand:

The ring misseth, maybe, the heat of Sauron’s hand, which was black and yet burned like fire, and so Gil-galad was destroyed; and maybe were the gold made hot again, the writing would be refreshed. But for my part I will risk no hurt to this thing: of all the works of Sauron the only fair. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain.

What helps to make the One Ring perfect as an object of almost universal attraction and obsession is its androgyny. As a plain circular ring it has the shape of a zero, but it is also the “One” Ring. Its shape is coital and, if we believe Islidur, it misses the yangness, the heat of Sauron’s hand. The two magics the Ring always provides have a T’ai Chi orientation. Optical magic is about light, the masculine principle, but the black yin dot in the white yang of optical magic is the ability to erase light, the negative optical magic of invisibility. Healing magic is about the body which is an aspect of the feminine, materiality, corporeal vulnerability. Our bodies are mostly water, all fetuses begin as females and all bodies are subject to aging which makes them progressively more yin until they encounter death and decay which are entirely yin states (for the body, not necessarily for the spirit). The white yang dot in the black yin of healing magic, is that the bodily effect of contact with the Ring is an increase in “unnatural” yang, masculine, obsessive vitality, a demoniac energy to gain or keep possession of The Precious, and a dessicating longevity that eventually turns the ring bearer into a wraith.

Geometric shapes are an aspect of the masculine or yang principle, but the Ring’s shape is a circle, and circularity is feminine or yin. That is the black yin dot in the yang aspect of form. Materiality is feminine, and in its materiality it is gold---the most solar and yang of materials, and that is like the white yang dot in the yin of materiality.

The Ring seeks the alpha male, which is Sauron, so it can be said to be a manifestation of the power principle (“One ring to rule them all.”), but it can also be a manifestation of the feminine and the unconscious because it seeks union and has an uncanny fate that the power principle can’t account for. The Ring has the fate of a seductive lover who has the negative power of betrayal, but can’t ultimately choose its relationships or destiny. Like most lovers sent by the unconscious it brings pleasure and pain, feelings of power and inflated pride, but also feelings of humiliation, degradation, powerlessness. It is associated with jealous lovers who are infatuated, and are ruled by possessiveness. The Ring gives and takes----it promotes the longevity of its lover, giving them an uncanny vitality that persists even if the ring leaves them. Gollum, though separated from the Ring for decades, still possesses an intense wiry strength, agility and speed. But the Ring is an unfaithful lover, Gollum does not misplace the Ring, “….the Ring betrayed Gollum.”

The Ring as seductive lover is not merely its strategy to gain power, it is also a process of mysterious eros that involves synchronistic encounters and relationships that neither the Ring nor its maker ever intended. Consider some of the major turning points in its history: The Ring and Sauron become separated when Islidur slays Sauron via ring finger amputation, an obvious castration equivalent, that unmans Sauron---- disembodying him and breaking his power . The Ring becomes the possession of Islidiur the man who slayed its previous lover. But the possession quickly becomes that which possesses, Islidur comes to worship the ring and it seduces, entraps and betrays him to his death. After this particular vengeance is spent, the Ring and its maker seem to sink into a long depression. The Ring, once the companion of a powerful magical entity, and then the captive of a King, becomes the beloved of an obscure Halfling, a Hobbit named Smeagol. Smeagol has a lustful, corruptible nature, and within moments of encountering the Ring on his birthday, he becomes possessively infatuated with it, and seeks to legitimize his claim by defining the Ring as his “birthday present.” Moments later he murders his best friend, the finder of the Ring, so he can secure his possession. Tormented by guilt and shame, ostracized by other Hobbits, his dark path leads to a long, long lifetime in an underground world where he lives near a pool of slimy water which is surrounded by a maze of Orc tunnels. He now becomes “Gollum” and he and the Ring stagnate underground for centuries chewing on cold fish and Orc meat, a meager, cold life of sneaking and murdering and no companionship except the ring which Gollum calls “my Precious.” The Ring and Gollum, essentially, enter into the long depression of a stagnant, dysfunctional relationship. They are literally sunk into a depression in the earth, encompassed by the yin aspects----dark, cold, wet. Eventually, the Ring and Sauron come out of the depression and awaken together. Their lust for power reanimates, and the Ring betrays Gollum falling from his finger onto the floor of an Orc tunnel where it would most likely be picked up by an Orc, of course, which would be a quick shortcut back to Sauron. But, as Gandalf points out, the power of light may play a role in the Ring’s fate as well, and it was found by “the most unlikely of persons” Bilbo Baggins. Like Helen of Troy or Cleopatra, the Ring is like a lover with great powers of seduction, but who cannot ultimately control his/her fate.

The vision I saw of a glowing Ring on an excited penis has many levels of meaning. There is a fever of sexualized power feelings in the image, but it is also an image of enslavement, the Ring can be seen as a phallic manacle which has absolute power over the genital impulse. The Ring as glowing manacle on an excited penis is the perfect emblem of infatuation. The enslaved, excited penis is like an arrow showing the direction of power draining out of the self and toward the external object of infatuation. This version of enslavement was very concisely stated by the seductive sorcerer in the movie Labyrinth, played by David Bowie: “Love me, fear me, obey me, and I’ll be your slave forever.” This is the aspect of the Ring which means that the power of darkness is ascending unless the Ring can be dissolved in the Cracks of Doom. The more that one has lost the original wholeness of androgyny, the more likely one is to become enslaved by a Precious, and darkness ascends unless this identification can be broken. Our world, the global culture which has created history and which mostly rules the human realm at the time of this writing, can also be emblemized by an excited penis pleasurably/painfully manacled to a Ruling Ring of Power. What characterizes the dominant human culture is the seeking of external objects----consumer goods, hotties, territory, worldly power. Extremely few humans have achieved an androgynous inner independence where they locate wholeness and fulfillment within rather than without.

What manacles the excited penis is not merely a ring of metal, it is the One Ring, a ring that is also a spell of power wrought of language, an artifact of the technology of alphabets and writing. In the vision, as in the books and movies, when the Ring is hot it is revealed to have fiery letters, “words of fell power.” An alphabet manacled penis may be an emblem of the fall from androgyny, an emblem of five thousand years of patriarchal, dominator culture, also known as history or his-story. According to Riane Eisler in her seminal book, The Chalice and the Blade, there was an age of androgyny during Paleolithic times, before the fall into history. Relations between the sexes were egalitarian, there was goddess worship, and life-affirming values, emblemized by the chalice, were celebrated. But this age was wiped out by dominator cultures that worshipped the One Male God to rule them all, and the sword became the worshipped emblem, skill in violence and conquest were celebrated, and this trend continues right up to a monotheistic president landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit. How did such a dramatic change occur? One intriguing theory is put forth by Leonard Shlain in his book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess. According to Shlain, the switch over to dominator culture was always preceded by the adoption of a written alphabet. Written alphabets, as objects of perception, cause a shift in hemispheric dominance emphasizing the left hemisphere. This is the hemisphere that can deal with abstracted language, and it is also the hemisphere associated with linearity and hierarchy. It is the masculine hemisphere, the one which would be inclined to build a dominator society. As Shlain points out, quickly following the adoption of a written alphabet goddesses are eliminated, women are forbidden to preside over religious rituals, or even to participate at all and quickly they become second class citizens. A text of some sort becomes the ruling principle (“In the beginning was the word…”), and that text could be religious---the Bible, the Koran----or secular----the Communist Manifesto, the “rule of law.” Clerics would even come to prefer garments of black and white, the colors of pen and ink. The excited penis manacled by words of fell power continues to thrust its way into every aspect of human affairs. Language abstracted war like primates continue to dominate a planet which they see as made up of real estate and livestock there to be conquered and exploited. The manacle of abstracted language, taking the forms of propaganda and ends justify the means rationalizations, allows this destruction to occur. The words of fell power include many abstracted phrases of the Twentieth Century like “inferior races,” “justified use of force,” “collateral damage,” “pacification,” “neutralize,” “Department of Defense,” “non-operative personnel,” “body count,” “final solution” and “ethnic cleansing.” The Ring in the vision also acts as a “cock ring,” it keeps the intention engorged with blood, a manacle of metal and language keeping the Tower of Babel erect, keeping excited, acting out masculinity in its state of inflation, its five thousand year erection continuing into our present era of Viagra and violence.

The quest of the Ring fellowship is the quest of a few individuals who seek to throw this Ring into the Cracks of doom and bring down the phallic towers of power and oppression. The tower, phallic in shape, which leaves the ground at an abstracted distance below, is the unsurpassed emblem of the dominator culture. This is the reason that phallic possessed Islamic terrorists would want to bring down the Twin Towers of a competing dominator culture. This was an act of castration. Dan Brown’s Davinci Code, a book that is essentially about the rediscovery of androgyny begins with jokes about the phallic Eiffel Tower.

One of the most emblematic scenes in contemporary mythology occurred at the top of a giant Ferris wheel, which was probably used as the tallest object around. It was a key scene in the classic film noir, The Third Man, which was written by Graham Greene and starred Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. The setting is Vienna right after World War II. Joseph Cotton plays Holly Martin, a writer down on his luck who has arrived at the invitation of his lifelong friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) who offered him a job. Harry Lime is a personality of immense charisma who has great powers of charm and persuasion. When Martins arrives he finds that Lime has supposedly just been murdered, but there are so many conflicting details that he knows that something very fishy is going on. Martins meets Lime’s lover, a beautiful, intelligent woman who remains under Lime’s spell no matter what terrible things she learns about him, and his many betrayals. Martins soon discovers that Lime has faked his own murder to avoid arrest. Lime has become a black market racketeer, and one of his scams involved stealing penicillin from military hospitals and then diluting and selling it on the black market for 20,000 pounds a vial. The diluted penicillin has resulted in numerous deaths, especially of children, and there is a hospital ward of children dying horrible deaths as a direct result of the diluted penicillin. Martins refuses to believe his friend capable of such appalling evil until he is shown all sorts of incontrovertible evidence. As they stand at the top of the Ferris wheel, Martins confronts Lime with his terrible deed. Essentially, Martins, with World War as the appropriate back drop, is asking the question of the age, how such a talented, charismatic masculine force could do such appalling things. Martins asks,

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” Lime replies with the view from the tower,

“….victims? Don’t be melodramatic. (Lime gestures at the people walking far bellow them.) Look down there, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare, free of income tax, old man, free of income tax, the only way you can save money nowadays…”

A minute later Lime points out that he is only emulating the morality of governments,

“Nobody talks about human beings anymore. Why should we? They talk about the proletariat and the people, I talk about the suckers and the mugs, it’s the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.”

Lime has merely adopted the patriarchal morality of the day, the point of view of the one eyed penis tower manacled by abstract language----people become statistics, the living world becomes a chess board, the ends justify the means.

This “tower” consciousness is exemplified in the Tolkien mythology by The Two Towers, and their associated dictators Sauron and Saruman. Two Towers represent two solar phallic powers emblemized by the Red Eye of Sauron and the White Hand of Saruman. Each has their own army of genetically engineered Orcs which bear one of these two glyphs. Saruman’s orcs may be superior to Sauron’s in that they can better stand to be in the sun. They wonder which master is the more powerful,

Is Saruman the master or the Great Eye? We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man’s flesh to eat.

Towers are emblems of both solar phallic and chtonic phallic power. Neither solar phallic nor chthonic phallic power is good or bad in itself, like all forms of power they may be used for good or evil. The most complete embodiment of solar phallic power in the Tolkien mythology is neither Sauron nor Saruman, but Gandalf the White. Consider this description of him,

A gleam of sun through fleeting clouds fell on his hands, which lay now upturned on his lap: they seemed to be filled with light as a cup is with water. At last he looked up and gazed straight at the sun.

While the Orcs and Ringwratihs can scarcely abide the sun, Gandalf the White can look straight at it, and his hands are filled with light. Sauron’s solar phallic power is not associated with the sun but with the inferior version of it---fire, even his thoughts are described as “fiery.” Fire is the inferior energy, on the earthly plane it is the release of solar energy stored in a plant based fuel—wood, fossil fuel, and far less intense that the nuclear fire of the sun.

When we first hear of Saruman, Gandalf the Grey acknowledges him as his superior, Saruman the White, highest of the Ishtari, the race of wizards:

“Saruman the White is the greatest of my order…Saruman has long studied the arts of the Enemy himself, and thus we have often been able to fore stall him.”

A danger for the one-sided solar phallic personality is that it all too easily becomes obsessed and possessed by what it studies and this has already happened to Saruman. When Gandalf discovers that Saruman is a traitor, it is also learned that he is no longer white. Gandalf narrates,

…’I have come for your aid, Saruman the White.’ “And that title seemed to anger him….”

White!” He sneered “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

“In which case it is no longer white, and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

To understand why whiteness is superior to many coloredness we need to reverse our associations of political correctness which would identify white as Caucasian and many colors as diversity. Tolkien is referring to white as an optical property, not a racial one. White light is a fusion of all colors, and corresponds to Singer’s definition of androgyny where Masculine and Feminine are fused. From the point of view of this optical metaphor, many coloredness is a confusion of the diverse elements analogous to Singer’s definition of the hermaphrodite. Gandalf’s response to Saruman shows his recognition that Saruman has left the path of individuation, of wholeness, and has descended into psychological fragmentation. Access to the source of consciousness, white light in this metaphor, has been shattered into identification with the ten thousand things.

The solar phallic personality who has undergone such a fragmentation typically seeks to compensate with a Luciferian will to power which presents as a deluded will to bring order and control to everything in the external world. Similarly, Darth Vader, in the Star Wars mythology, hides his shattered, fragmented self in body armor and seeks to seduce his son with a reasonable sounding entreaty, “Join me and together we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the Galaxy.” This is the same psychological force which motivates so many of the political power figures of our day who disguise, even to themselves, their unbridled lust for power, their hysterical attempts to compensate for inner chaos, by attempts to control the external--- as patriotism, international order, etc. Rationalizations (in the form of inner and outer propaganda) parading as “righteous” and “reasonable” are used to justify the darkest means. As Saruman puts it to Gandalf,

The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see… There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power….the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.

This line is extremely close to the logic of so many modern power figures. Saruman becomes even more transparent to Gandalf when he refers to the ring:

“Why not? The Ruling Ring? If we could command that, then Power would pass to us.”

“Saruman…only one hand at a time can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!”

Gandalf recognizes the limitations of the monodimensional power- obsessed personality. It has no access to the feminine, to eros, and therefore there can only be a ME! and never a we. This is the Anti Christ configuration where the godhead resides only in that particular ego which gazes out at a universe of livestock and real estate there for it to exploit. But this monodimensionality is also its greatest weakness and leads to its defeat and destruction. Gandalf, who has solar phallic power, but is also an androgyne, is able to project his awareness into the mind of Sauron, but Sauron cannot project his monodimensional mind into the androgynous mind of Gandalf. Gandalf uses the superiority of his awareness to recognize Sauron’s blind spot and creates a strategy that ultimately defeats Sauron. Gandalf recognizes that Sauron weighs everything according to the one scale available to his mind---- self-serving power:

“For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power, and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it….This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.”

The scale of power allows Sauron to very accurately judge all other power-oriented personalities, but he is blind-sided by the androgynous psyche which is able to play out a Taoist strategy of conquering by relinquishing power. This is the strategy of Christ (but not of so many who purport to be his followers!) who stated that “The meek shall inherit the earth.” It never occurs to Sauron that anyone who came into possession of his precious One Ring would relinquish it and destroy it. He is blind-sided by a principle that he cannot anticipate because it has no place in his one-sided psyche.

Another of Sauron’s vulnerabilities is that his power is altogether given over to an external object. Only the androgyne, who has followed the path of wholeness has restored any of the inner power which both slave and master give over to the outer world. The slave projects power onto the master, the control system, the dogma, the outside godhead, the master projects his power onto the outside objects he desires to subjugate. Both are altogether given over to the outer world, the matrix, and just as sadism and masochism are two sides of the same coin, masters and slaves are merely the active and passive faces of bondage to the external.

This one-sided extraversion is apparent in many modern persons. For example, both Bush presidents have stated proudly and repeatedly that they never “psychoanalyze themselves.” W has stated proudly that, “I never look in the mirror except to shave.” For those who refuse Socrate’s wise commandment, “First, know thyself” the whole world is a distorted mirror of the psyche they do not know and everything is seen as through a glass darkly. They may seem to have power, but it is of a delusory, mechanical sort that uses them, that easily possesses them and wisely has chosen them as voluntary hollow men, empty vessels, psyches proud to surrender inner vision, the only kind of vision which allows the possibility of having any individual will or choice. Without inner vision one is absolutely ruled by a constellation of the inner and outer forces continuously pressing on us.

Sauron, though he is such a powerful sorcerer and stands right at the threshold between the spirit realm and the external world, is still absolutely given over to the external. He has one eye only which looks outward only. It takes two eyes to see the depth of things, and those eyes must be connected to two active hemispheres, a mind that has access to both masculine and feminine for there to be depth vision. The eye of fire stabs outward, but it cannot endure to penetrate itself with inner vision. Its power is bonded to the outer also, and Sauron has given over a great part of his power to an external object, his Precious, and all his will is given over to recapturing it.

When a psyche is one-sided, particularly when its one-sidedness is masculine, then it will seek to hurry or push itself through time in a vain struggle to obtain some external object, person, goal that it falsely believes will bring it wholeness (see Clocktime Metastisizes toward 2012 on web site) This configuration of pushing through time with eyes of fire and white hands of greed, is not limited to evil wizards, but is actually endemic in our culture in countless mundane versions. A man who is typically one-sided and deficient in the feminine watches the clock till it is quitting time and he get with his girlfriend. Or he counts down the days to the next vacation when he can have a brief interlude in a tropical environment by the ocean. People of both genders in our culture are hurrying toward an imaginary future where they will reach their ideal weight, find their ideal mate, and obtain the fundamentalist materialist version of salvation, “success”---a blessed stare where one can buy many things. But as Jesus put it, “What if a man should gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”

As I watched Lord of the Rings on Christmas Eve of 2002, my perception of the ring as a symbol of wholeness folded in on itself and reversed, and I saw that the key aspect of the ring was the ring as “The Precious,” the coveted external object which glows with the false promise of wholeness. I saw that Sauron needed to give power to the ring, because it was like his umbilicus, his point of connection to externality, a psychoid object that was made of both matter and language hovering between the realms of spirit and matter. As a being with no feminine part whatsoever, his will to seek an external object was absolute and of flaming intensity.

Sauron’s predicament may seem inhumanly extreme, but it is actually a purified version of the typical predicament of the modern person. Anyone who is not in touch with their inner wholeness will become obsessed with a ring of power and may be devastated by its loss. That ring of power may be money, house, car, celebrity or other position of worldly power. The ring of power that most closely approximates the power of the One Ring, however, is the object of romantic or sexual infatuation, the beloved or “hottie.” (See Stop the Hottie! on the web site) More than any material object or external goal, another person hovers like the One Ring at the threshold of the realms of inner and outer, spiritual and material. A person, like the ring, is made of both matter and language, and is the occurrence in the outer, phenomenal world best suited to arrest our gaze, mesmerize us, turn us into an obsessed ring wraith. A person of great physical beauty can particularly become a potent projection screen for our lost wholeness. Their feminine, masculine or androgynous beauty can cause them to emblemize the principle we are lacking, so that they light up in our imagination as the magical key to restore our lost wholeness. When this obsession takes hold then we become like ring wraiths, and are consumed by an unloving monomania where the ends justify the means----“all’s fair in love and war.” While we seek in the outside world for wholeness with fiery eyes and the white hands of greed, we become, like the ring wraiths, or Gollum, ever more withered and eviscerated and what animates us is no longer real vitality but obsessive passions—greed, hate, jealousy and fear.

Am I speaking against romantic and/or sexual relationships? Of course not. What I am saying is that fulfilling relationships and eros are only possible if there is some degree of androgyny, which is the only way one can actually know another person rather than flat projections. If you approach another person from the deluded belief that they will complete you and make you whole than you erect an enormous barrier between you and authentic relationship with that person which will have to be worked through before a fulfilling relationship can be established. Usually people don’t have the will to work through this barrier and after their projected idealization collapses, disenchantment and betrayal sets in and they are off to a new fantasy, a new ring of power they hope to find wholeness in. It is crucial to realize that if you approach another person with the intention of that person completing you, then the very first step on that path is betrayal, a betrayal by you of your own soul, and you should therefore not be surprised if the theme of betrayal will continue to characterize this delusory quest.

As Aristophanes suggests in Plato’s Symposium, since we are incarnated in this realm bound anatomically (usually) to one gender only, we tend to look outward to regain our lost wholeness. As social, gendered mammals this has a certain validity. But since we are also androgynous psyches or spirits, this validity is only one side of the paradox. Loving and bonding to others is a key part of our destiny, but we are not fully capable of this without a return to our inner wholeness. In the unfeminine squareness of the 1950s a man would stereotypically introduce his wife: “And here’s the little woman, my better half.” I never cease to be amazed at how revealing are the most seemingly simple of unconscious statements. The above introduction manages to be patronizingly undervaluing and sentimentally idealizing at the same time, as well as revealing the essential flaw in the relationship. Multiply two half-persons and you get a quarter not a whole.

Imagine the following thought experiment. You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!

Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the “primitive.” The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was secondary. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (in what modern slang calls the “hottie”) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. For example, a man sees Brittney Spears on television and says, “She’s so hot!” Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixellated phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the hottie.

When we are infatuated with another person, we see them as our energy source and our way to gain wholeness. The best thing that can happen to us on a path of illusion is disillusionment, which is often extremely painful. The problem is that we attribute the pain to the disillusionment, but not to the original illusion. We don’t usually see that we have betrayed our own soul by seeking wholeness in the outer world. Typically we think that if the other person had behaved more to our liking that we would have found what we were looking for. If our disillusionment with the other person becomes complete, then we will look to another person to find our salvation, and put another face on the same illusion.

Unfortunately, all too often the expectations that the other person would fill the void in one’s own personality were frequently not met, because people rarely behave as we imagine they will or as we need them to behave.

Often, when the inner psychic process is unconscious, its expression becomes sexual in nature on a purely personal level. This means that the experience of loving is felt almost as something autonomous: people “fall in love,” something “happens” to them, and suddenly they are caught in a web of emotions that envelop the self and the other person. The attention is on the individuals and the magical interaction between them. This is “romantic love,” about which the novels, plays, operas and movies are written. It is engaging, enchanting, ennobling, inspiring and exhausting. Although it has also the capacity to bring about a sense of peace and well-being, romantic love also tends inevitably toward entropy because the energy in it is discharged little by little until the passion dissipates itself. This is because romantic love becomes a closed system when the two involved in it merge their psychological reality into one, bound closely in a relationship that revolves about its own center.

While the experience of androgynous love includes the inward reflectivity that helps to gain self-knowledge, it goes beyond the self-enclosed. It also extends beyond the interpersonal relationship we call “romantic love,” although it may very well include the most tender and deep feelings toward a particular person. Androgynous love is essentially transpersonal in nature. This is its distinguishing feature, whatever else it may include. The transpersonal dimension of the so completely human experience to which we refer as “love” is the intimate knowledge, made conscious in every cell of our bodies and beings, that we are nourished into life by the “stream of androgyny.”

The One Ring of the Tolkien mythology is emblematic of the human tendency to covet wholeness and power from an outside object. It is especially the one-sidedly masculine characters who become most vulnerable to becoming possessed by the ring. We have already discussed the one-sided masculinity of Boromir who is described as “…taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms; fearless and strong, but caring little for lore, save the tales of old battles.” Not surprisingly, he is the member of the ring fellowship who most easily falls under the spell of ring lust. In violation of everything he has agreed to at the ring council, he presses Frodo to give him the ring. Frodo responds,

“ Were you not at the Council? … Because we cannot use it, and what is done with it turns to evil.”

But Boromir is not to be deflected by reason and with increasing mania he continues to press his case,

For themselves they may be right. These elves and half-elves and wizards, they would come to grief perhaps. Yet often I doubt if they are wise and not merely timid. But each to his own kind. True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. …We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. And behold! In our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say; a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader? What could not Aragorn do? Of if he refuses, why not Boromir? The Ring would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!

Tolkien switches to description, rather than verbatim dialogue to describe Boromir’s continued monologue. He makes it clear that Boromir is in a yang, excited state----he paces, and speaks in an ever louder voice, and like other characters possessed by the ring he becomes more egocentric, his talk a monologue that becomes ever more unaware of whom he is speaking to. His manner is stereotypical of a romantically obsessed man prior to committing some crime of passion.

Boromir strode up and down, speaking ever more loudly. Almost he seemed to have forgotten Frodo while his talk dwelt on walls and weapons, and the mustering of men; and he drew plans for great alliances and glorious victories to be; and he cast down Mordor, and became himself a mighty king, benevolent and wise.

And then Boromir, whose hands are trembling in what sounds very like sexual excitement, commits a crime of passion which breaks the ring fellowship,

He laid his hand on the hobbit’s shoulder in friendly fashion; but Frodo felt the hand trembling with suppressed excitement.

“I am a true man, neither thief nor traitor. I need your ring…but I give you my word that I do not desire to keep it… Fool! Obstinate fool! Running willfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Numenor and not Haflings. It is not yours save by unhappy change. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!” His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed; a raging fire was in his eyes.

Frodo escapes, and then, like many abusive lovers, Boromir is filled with remorse and tries to get the object of his infatuation to come back,

….What have I said? …What have I Done? Frodo, Frodo! Come back! A madness took me, but it has passed. Come back!

In sharp contrast to Boromir is his brother Faramir, a character that Tolkien identified as like himself. Faramir is competent in arms, but does not delight in them. Faramir has androgynous qualities and is able to resist the power of the ring when he has it within his grasp. His father Denethor, however, worships only the masculine principle. He is another solar phallic possessed tower dweller, his wife dies of despair in this antifeminine atmosphere, and he identifies with his chthonic phallic son Boromir and treats his more evolved son, Faramir, with contempt. Significantly he tries to sacrifice both himself and his son Faramir to the yang element of fire.

Denethor marries late a woman of great beauty and gentleness but within 12 years she is dead. “But it seemed to men that she withered in the guarded city, as a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock. The shadow in the east filled her with horror, and she turned her eyes ever south to the sea that she missed. …In this way (palantir) Denethor gained his great knowledge…but he bought the knowledge dearly, being aged before his time by this contest with the will of Sauron. Thus pride increased in Denethor together with despair, until he saw in all the deeds of that time only a single combat between the Lord of the White Tower and the Lord of Barad-dur, and mistrusted all others who resisted Sauron, unless they served himself alone.

Hobbits are able to resist the ring more than most because they have a kind of earthy androgny. Gandalf says about them, “Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree roots. I think it likely that some would resist the Rings far longer than most of the Wise would believe.” Unlike men, the hobbits have no tendency toward one-sided masculinity. To some extent this is also associated with a rural mediocrity as they do not go in for adventures or advanced learning. But this also gives them a sustainable way of life and they avoid the obsession with warfare, machines and towers. Tolkien tells us,

At no time had the Hobbits of any kind been warlike, and they had never fought among themselves. Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough.

They do not and did not understand or like machines… (except of the simplest sort such as a hand loom)

The craft of building may have come from Elves or Men, but the Hobbits used it in their own fashion. They did not go in for towers.

But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind, and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.

A gender swapping quirk that the hobbits share with the elves is that they call the sun “she.” Like the elves, the hobbits live in their own “green world” and have separated themselves from historical time,

Shire-reckoning and Year One of the Shire begins with crossing a river. At once the western Hobbits fell in love with their new land, and they remained there, and soon passed once more out of the history of Men and of Elves. While there was still a king they were in name his subjects, but they were, in fact, ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside.

The Fallohides(the least numerous, were a northerly branch. They were more friendly with Elves than the other hobbits were, and had more skill in language and in song)…the Fallohidish stain still noted among the greater families, such as the Tooks and the Masters of Buckland, were fairer of skin and also of hair, and they were taller and slimmer than the others’ they were lovers of trees and woodlands.

It was often said…that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife…still something not entirely hobbitlike about them.

Goldberry (Mrs. Bombadil) says: “I had not heard that folk of the Shire were so sweet-tongued. But I see you are an elf-friend; the light in your eyes and the ring in your voice tells it. “

Tolkien tells us that: Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.

And as their fellow hobbits describe Bilbo and Frodo, “…Bag End’s a queer place, and its folk are queerer.”

One of the most effective changes made by Peter Jackson in adapting the books for film was the casting of a young, androgynous Elijah Wood as Frodo. In the books, Frodo is turning thirty-three when we first meet him. He doesn’t leave on the quest for another eighteen years after Bilbo’s departure and is fifty-one when he begins the quest, which is well into middle age even by hobbit standards. He is described as having a middle-aged paunch and Merry and Pippin joke about how the walking may be help him to work that off. Our archetypal expectations are somehow better fulfilled by a younger-looking, more androgynous character in this role. In the film he resolves the conflict in the council by volunteering to take the ring, and then adds humbly, “But I do not know the way.” This combination of decisiveness and humility has a Taoist androgny, he knows what he knows (what fate requires of his essence) and knows that he does not know as well. The casting of large-eyed, androgynous Elijah Wood makes Frodo seem by far the most elvish hobbit, which reinforces the rightness of his being chosen as ring bearer.

The elves are the race whom we most expect to be androgynous. Tolkien, in his notes and in references in his letters, seems to come close to recognizing the androgynous nature of the elves, but then seems to withdraw from that recognition. At one point, in a letter, he states:

It is the view of the Myth that in (say) Elves and Men ‘sex’ is only an expression in physical or biological terms of a difference of nature in the ‘spirit,’ not the ultimate cause of the difference between femininity and masculinity.

Tolkien is saying that anatomy is not destiny, genitals do not cause sexuality, it is rather a function of the spirit and the body is a secondary expression of this difference. This is a quarter step toward recognition of androgny. Tolkien takes another quarter step toward recognition of androgny in the following note on elves which recognizes an androgynous inner indepence:

They are not easily deceived by their own kind; and their spirits being masters of their bodies, they are seldom swayed by the desires of the body only, but are by nature continent and steadfast.

As if these partial recognitions made him uncomfortable (and Tolkien was extremely conservative, even a bit priggish in his personal life) Tolkien then takes a full step back from the brink of androgny. And talking about the Eldar he splits them definitively into the “neri” (males) and “nissi” (females) and states that this is an absolute distinction that transcends even the life of a particular body:

There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a ner can think or do, or others which only a nis is concerned.

According to the Eldar, the only ‘character’ of any person that was not subject to change was the difference of sex. For this they held to belong not only to the body..but also to the mind…equally that is, to the person as a whole. (even if their body dies, they will come back as same gender)

Since the 1970s I have been studying an unfolding contemporary mythology, and associated emergent archetypal images, which reflect an approaching event horizon in human evolution (see Chapter V of The Capsule of Intentionality on my website and the two DVDs I did with John Major Jenkins and Lost Arts Media---Dialogs about Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking Toward the Event Horizon). In the various permutations of this new mythology, the ones who make a break with the old human form are usually large-eyed, androgynous-looking adolescents. The Japanese anime classic Akira is an example. Akira is a large-eyed, androgynous looking male youth whose body parts must be kept stored underground in a massive vault at absolute zero, because if any of his cells reanimate, his mutant power is sufficient to overthrow the entire military-industrial complex---the patriarchal world order. Anime has settled on this form in general---large eyed, androgynous----and its characters look less and less like actual Japanese. The ubiquitous representations of the “Grays”--- a stereotyped extraterrestrial with large eyes and willowy androgynous body is another presentation of this form. In the Sixties the counter cultural celebrities who became visual icons were mostly all androgynous like the skinny, large- eyed London model Twiggy who launched the anorexic version of female beauty. The male icons were mostly androgynous rock stars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger. In Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece, Dune, the Kwitsaz Haderach, the first example of a new human form, is a fourteen year old boy, Paul Atreides, who brings down the Emperor and a galactic patriarchal power structure. There are countless other examples. The casting of large-eyed, androgynous Elijah Wood as Frodo is, therefore, an archetypal updating of Tolkien’s mythology. This is the visual form we expect of the one who will throw the ring of power, the alphabet manacle, into the Cracks of Doom, bringing down a patriarchal power structure and ushering in a new age.

It would of course be a literalizing of an archetypal projection to think that we must look toward a large-eyed androgynous adolescent form for our salvation. If we interpret this representation, however, we see a number of evolutionary themes. Larger eyes may be seen as a visual representation of a massive evolutionary change that is well underway----a movement from an alphabet or text based culture toward a more visual one. Terrance McKenna has written much about this shift (see Chapter V, The Capsule of Intentionality) and Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess has extreme relevance. Etherealized bodies are a representation of movement away from assigned corporeality in an age of plastic surgery and genetic manipulation. They emblemize our desire to transcend our gravity bound mortal bodies (see The Glorified Body on the website). And as we move from an iron and coal industrial age to a digitized, pixilated information age, our technologies become ever more etherealized. While adolescents are more likely to be hermaphrodites than androgynes (as June Singer defines the terms) they are usually the best visual representations of androgyny as a human type. Also adolescence is a difficult, acting out, rebellious phase of human biological metamorphosis and that is a powerful parallel resonance to the present state of our species.

Usually represented as a double faced head or a body topped by two heads, the Androgyne deals with the two essential facets of life, masculine and feminine or male and female. However, its double meaning also encompasses the simple distinction between sexes and relates to the primeval state of the being.

In the "Symposium" of Plato, Aristophanes builds up his speech about love on a myth. In bygone days, only androgynes used to exist. They were composed of two beings of opposite sex, placed side by side. Boosted by their double nature, they wanted to challenge the Gods and therefore Zeus decided to punish the androgynes by splitting them in two. They gave birth to human beings looking just like us. According to Aristophanes, love would be nothing else but a feeling of nostalgia towards our ancient nature and a desperate quest for our lost unity. The union of beings or opposites would portray an attempt to re-find the missing link through the search for soulmate.

The Androgyne, alpha and omega of the manifested being

It follows from the myth that the Androgyne represents, at the same time, both united aspects of the being. Either the opposites are merged within the potential state of the not yet manifested being or the manifested being has realized their re-integration and rejoined the primeval Unit.

Originally, the Being stood beyond the opposites merged into the Unity. Established above polarities, it was neither masculine nor feminine and far away from the physical features of the hermaphrodite. In reality, he was standing outside of any physical level, at a proper spiritual level.

Splitting of the Being symbolizes the polarization of the primeval Unit, at the source of the manifestation of any thing. A polarization between light and darkness, day and night, Heaven and Earth, hot and cold, fire and water, yang and yin, masculine and feminine as well as between opposites feelings: happiness and misfortune, fear and aggressiveness, sadness and anger, doubt and credo etc.

Within many traditions, the primeval Unit used to be represented as a Cosmic Egg of "spherical" form, the less differentiated as it does not give any preference to any direction coming out from the centre. The differentiation of the primeval Unit, under its manifested aspects, has to go through duality, which is associated to the fall. The original Adam was an androgyne who only became male when giving birth to Eve, from one of its ribs.

During its manifestation, the human becomes male or female and goes through successive cycles of death in an existence state and re-birth into another state until being liberated from the duality perception proper to the manifested world. Life is a whole and living it fully brings you to transcendence. Then, Heaven meets Earth, opposed polarities disappear and antagonisms are transformed into complements merged within the primeval Unit. Opposites such as doubt and credo are overcome by trust. Similarly, the resolution of the antagonisms like sadness and anger is accomplished within compassion. As for the dilemma between fear and aggressiveness, it can only be solved by love and sharing. Restoring the primeval state is the matter, for instance, of the Yoga which means union (of opposites).

Both reverse movements may be found in Androgyne representations within different traditional forms.

The Androgyne representations

The dyadic representation

Diverse traditions offer plenty of examples of representations taking the appearance of dyads:

In Hinduism, for instance, Shiva is an androgyny God tenderly embracing Shakti, his own energy

depicted as a female Goddess (see the picture). The erotic sculptures of Khajuraho Temple show such "couples", the real meaning of which has sometimes been forgotten.

In the Chinese tradition, the brother and sister "couple", Fo hi and Niu koua, is represented unified by their snake tails, symbol of the cosmic force and its twin currents. One of them allows the manifestation of the primeval Unit into its dual form, particularly feminine and masculine. The other corresponds to the return of the manifested being to its original and unified form. This representation recalls the Caducei, another androgyny symbol. Regarding this point, see the double spiral on this site.

Originally merged within the Cosmic Egg, Izanagi and his young sister, Izanami, play a similar role in the Creation myth of Japan. Reaching down from Heaven alongside the rainbow, Izanagi thrust his jeweled spear into the sea and lifted it; a brine dripping from it, thus creating the first island of the archipelago. The couple built up the august Heavenly Pillar and a shelter. To celebrate their sacred union, they circled around the august Heavenly Pillar, Izanmi to the left and Izanagi to the right, as both snakes of the Caducei.

The God Ptah of Pharaonic Egypt, the womb where the primordial energy spreads, was both "father" and "mother" of all Gods. Each of them symbolizes certain aspects of the original God.

The Dioscuri, sons of Zeus, encompass the same meaning. Born from the love of Zeus transformed into a swam and Leda, Castor and Pollux emerge from two eggs. One gave birth to Castor and Clytemnestra, the other to Pollux and Helena. The symbolism is obvious. Moreover, most of ancient Greece deities were androgynes.

Representations of bisexual entities
The first picture below, not identified, offer a good example of such an entity.

The cloudy belt symbolizes the Cosmic Egg. Its division into two halves portrays the polarization of the primeval Unit. The egg contains a character potentialized according to masculine and feminine aspects and distinguished alongside a vertical axis. The Zodiac signs, outside the egg and representing the Cosmos, let us know that this axis links both equinoxes, probably a reference to the time when the annual cycle started with Spring.

The male side is associated to the Spring-Autumn semester and the female to the complementary semester, Autumn-Spring. The midpoint of both semesters stand on a horizontal axis linking Winter and Summer solstices. Summer solstice represents the start of the descent phase of the sun towards the south celestial pole whereas Winter solstice corresponds to the beginning of the ascent phase of the sun in direction of the north celestial pole.

The meaning attached to both character attitudes is derived from this celestial vision. The feminine and right hand holds a vase turned "downwards" from which a bird emerges in the direction of the sun descent phase. This bird is connected to the descent current from Heaven to Earth. The masculine and left hand grasps a vase oriented "upwards" from which a bird flies away in the direction of the sun ascent phase. It corresponds to the ascent current from Earth to Heaven.

The meeting of both currents can only produce a neutral non polarized element, the result of the combining action of two complementary principles. Consequently, this image represents, at the same time, the primordial Androgyne as well as the way back of the manifested being to its primeval non differentiated state.

Expressed in other words, both descent and ascent currents depict respectively the active or sulfured and passive or mercurial principles of the Hermetic tradition.

The hermetic Rebis (res bina or double matter) is composed of a body crowned by two heads, one masculine, the other feminine, as on the second picture below dating from the beginning of the 17th century.

A bird, representing the immutable Principle in comparison with the moving manifestation, sits motionless on the right hand. The left hand holds a vase from which three snakes are emerging. The central snake symbolizes the vertical axis or World Axis around which winds both cosmic force currents in reverse directions. As the former picture, the last one represents, at the same time, the primordial Androgyne and the return path to this state. This last aspect is reinforced by the presence of the tree on the right, which depicts the seven degrees of the hermetic initiation. The first six are represented by couples of faces symmetrically located on each side of the trunk as they still refer to the manifested or dualistic world. The last one, symbolized by the Sun situated at the treetop, identifies the being who has re-integrated the primeval Unit. The Moon, taking the shape of a boat on which the Androgyne is standing, indicates that the latest dominates the inferior waters characterizing the dualistic world. It corresponds to the walk on waters common to various traditions, notably Christian.

The Emerald Table, body of the Hermetic doctrine, describes the Rebis as generated by the Sun and Moon. However, Moon is always subordinated to Sun as she is only reflecting his light. Therefore, she represents the passive or feminine principle whereas the Sun portrays the active or masculine principle. This seems to contradict the meaning drawn from the first picture where the feminine and masculine aspects were respectively associated to the active and passive principles.

In fact, the second picture personifies a terrestrial vision, mainly characterized by the initiation degrees linked to the way back to the primeval state or to the passage from Earth to Heaven. The first picture, on the contrary, starts from a vision centered on the north celestial pole symbolizing the fixed point or the immutable Principle around which the manifested world is turning. It rather points out the passage from Heaven to Earth. Moreover, the character of the first picture represents the One (split) in two when the second is more about the two (re-unified) into One. Celestial and terrestrial approaches are reversed just like the vision in a mirror where right and left swap places. This is the meaning given by the Emerald Table formula: “what is up (in celestial order) is like what is down (in terrestrial order)” and conversely. In other words and according to the selected vision, the feminine principle, which is passive at the terrestrial level, may become active at the celestial level.

Notice that the bisexual representation of the Androgyne extended its domain beyond the animate beings. In the Latin tradition, for instance, an alloy such as brass, composed of copper (female) and tin (male), was treated as androgyne. Brass objects were used within purification rites considered as a restoration of the lost harmony.

Synthesis

As in and out of the Being manifestation, the Androgyne is an universal symbol of the unified state. Beyond polarities, particularly masculine and feminine, it represents the one who has overcome life sufferings within the world of oppositions and re-integrated the primeval Unity where he is coming from. The passage through the world of duality is a necessary step to become fully conscious of the lost reality. However, to push the Being's sexual identification to extremes, notably through the clitoris excision regarded as a survival of the penis or the foreskin circumcision as a survival of the vulva, does not increase our consciousness one iota. The duality is not a result of the manifested world, but is derived from our perception of that world. As long as we stay divided inside ourselves, we will not be able to accept the world as it is and ourselves as we are in reality, that means unified. The moment we become aware that we have all the treasures of the world within ourselves, that nothing is missing, all fears, cravings and illusions attached to our dualistic perception of things and beings will disappear. We will start to live like a whole and become truly an individual (from the Latin individuum or indivisible) or a re-integrated being. Sure, it can be frightening to be alone, even without being lonely. However, it is just a twist of fate towards the original state.

Bibliography

The Lord Who is Half Woman
Ardhanarishvara in Indian and Feminist Perspective

by Ellen Goldberg
State University of New York 2002, £15.75, 194pp, p/bk. ISBN 0-7914-5326-X

Ellen Goldberg's book is the first extensive study of Ardhanarishvara: the Lord Who is Half Woman. She examines the influence of Ardhanarishvara through iconography, mythology, devotional poetry and the role of Ardhanarishvara in Hatha Yoga practice. She also provides a critical analysis of the image in terms of the gender construction of 'male' & 'female' and androgyny across cultures.

In the first chapter, Goldberg critically examines the representation of Ardhanarishvara in temple iconography. She points out that Ardhanarishvara should be understood as a symbolic representation of theological norms and doctrines - and that in general, iconography functions as a meditational and devotional aid for devotees. She analyses different representations of Ardhanarishvara - looking at differences in features such as the number of arms, or mudras dispalyed. For Goldberg, Ardhanarishvara represents
"a paradigm of sacred human knowledge - a symbolic cultural landscape, formulating, regualting and legitimising religious and ideological presuppositions including gender, on the one hand, while also providing a diagnostic paradigm for mapping the transformations of human consciousness through the subtle conjunction of the male and female form."

The second chapter - Ardhanarishvara and Hathayoga - deals with Ardhanarishvara in Hathayoga practice - how the often convoluted concepts relating to various elements such as nadis, chakras, kundalini, etc., move the practitioner towards an inner reconciliation of "all apparent dualities". Citing the work of Susan Bordo, Goldberg asserts that through the various practices of Hathayoga, "culture is made body" - so Hathayoga practice cannot be seperated from "a systematic network of patriarchal insitutions that oftentimes promote images of male dominance and female subordiantion." Goldberg points out that women's bodies are not considered the "normative models" on which yoga practices are based - that few, if any of the Hathayoga classics have been written from the perspective of female practitioners. An example of this trend that springs to mind is the 16th century Sat-Cakra-Nirupana Tantra, translated by Arthur Avalon as The Serpent Power wherein all references to the esoteric anatomy of the yogin are couched entirely in male terms. Goldberg is rightly wary of metaphysical claims to sameness which, on examination, show one-sided (male) gender assumptions, and "subtle mechanisms of negation and absorbtion."

In the third chapter, Goldberg turns to an examination of Ardhanarishvara in devotional poetry - in particular, Tamil devotional poetics, and also the Ardhanarishvara Stotra, which has been attributed to Adi Sankara. Goldberg demonstrates, through her analysis, how Tamil Saivite poems uses highly stylised representations that relate to the rules of temple iconography. Whilst the poems are primarily devotional - invoking for the listener the presence of the deity through the poet's ecstatic experience, Goldberg asserts that these 'verbal icons' also encode normative patterns of gender & behaviour. She analyses these patterns in terms of a dialectical relationship between nature and culture.
Goldberg also provides a translation of the Ardhanarishvara Stotra and subjects its imagery to a thorough analysis to uncover its gender markers. She asserts that rather than uncritically accepting "the illusion of equality in androdgynous images" (be they Western or Eastern) what is required is a critique of their 'subtle' gender constructions.

In chapter four - An Indian and a Feminist Perspective of Androgyny, Goldberg draws on the work of Wendy Doniger (Women, Androgynes and other Mythical Beasts) and Kari Weil (Androgyny and the Denial of Difference) in order to present a general overview of the image of the androgyne. She also provides a critical review of Feminist responses to the concept of androgyny, such as the 'psychological advocates' of androgyny such as Sandra Bem and June Singer; the critics of androgyny offered by Mary Daly and Adrianne Rich, and the "third phase" critiques of Toril Moi, Kristeva and Luce Irigaray - who highlight the problem of an androgyny which promotes wholeness or sameness by negating difference. This is a useful chapter for anyone interested in the cross-cultural analysis of the androgyne, although Goldberg maintains, justifiably in my opinion, that the image of Ardhanarishvara cannot be understood outside of its cultural context. Interestingly enough however, she also feels that feminist theory "could benefit from Indian philosophy's living application and experiential understanding of androgyny."

The final chapter Sakti and Parvati: A new Interpretation - Goldberg proposes a 'new' reading of the relationship between Siva and Parvarti. She reviews the major elements of her thesis thus far - how the androgyne acts as an encoded cultural motif both in terms of cosmogenesis and human processes. She also notes that "issues of equality" between men and women is an entirely modern concern (although I do feel it is worth recalling that many of those interested in Indian religious concepts often use them in such a manner as to assume an 'equality' which, on examination, may not actually be present). Goldberg also cites Diane Hoeveler's analysis of the androgyne in the Romantic literary tradition, particularly her observation that the British Romantic poets created their female alter-egos, only to 'destroy' them by the end of the poem. Goldberg finds a similar pattern in Hathayoga practice whereby the practitioner absorbs and 'purifies' the feminine only to eliminate 'her' in the final stages of laya (NB: David Gordon White's Kiss of the Yogini traces the gradual internalisation of the divine Yogini into 'feminine energies' within the male body is a useful reference in respect to this process).

Goldberg turns her attention to the Indian concept of Sakti and Parvati's role as heroine - as tapasvini. She recounts the story of how Parvati wins her self-chosen husband, Siva, through her Tapas, which Goldberg sees as a sign of her agency and independence (noting that Parvati pursues Siva despite strong disapproval from her family). Turning to Sakti, Goldberg briefly reviews the historical development of this concept, from its earliest appearence in the Vedas through to the Sixth century Dev-mahatmya by which time Sakti is seen as fully autonomous and the primary source of All.

Overall, The Lord Who is Half Woman is a fascinating work and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone with a serious interest in androgny, Tantra, or gender studies. I can only echo Jeffrey J. Kripal who, on the back cover, says that "It has the potential to become a classic Indological work." - Phil Hine

Reproduced gratefully from: http://www.philhine.org.uk/books/review_ardhan.html

The following dream about 2012 was reported to me by a young woman who originally contacted me because of her interest in androgyny. She had recorded the dream in her journal a few months before becoming acquainted with my work.

I was standing on the stoop of the house I grew up in with Kurt Cobain, and we were talking like old friends. I asked him, "What's going to happen in 2012?" And he said "Nothing." Then, he took me somewhere where we saw a monument, an overhead view as if we were flying above it. I thought the monument had something to do with Kurt. Then he showed me people making a time capsule. The time capsule was a huge concrete cylinder, and people were putting tee-shirts in it. The tee-shirts had slogans on them. Finally, I saw Kurt's face morph into the face of Jesus, and then Jesus' face morphed into the face of a black man. And this black man was preaching to a group of people. And I realized that Jesus speaks through many different types of people.

The dreamer had previously described Kurt Cobain as someone she considered an androgyne. The K C figure appears as psychopomp, or soul guide, a mercurial shape-shifting Christ. KC/JC seems to be a manifestation of the dreamer’s higher self, an inner androgyne, and that’s why they talk like “old friends” on “the stoop of the house I grew up in.” KC tells her that “nothing” will happen in 2012. There are many layers to this answer. One layer may be a suggestion to stop counting down to eschaton or end of time, because that only binds you to linear time and keeps you from the dimension of eternity. This relates to discussions I’ve had with Mayan Scholar, John Major Jenkins, who describes 2012 as “the center of time, not the end of time.” (We talk about this in the DVDs we did together, Dialouges about Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking Toward the Event Horizon available on my website and also see Clock Time Metastisizes Toward 2012 http://alignment2012.com/clocktimeto2012.html
for some more thoughts on 2012 and the perceptual cage of linear time.) Looking toward a particular date for a Rapture or transcendent event, or even for a longed for vacation, keeps you imprisoned by linear time.
Several centuries ago, Meister Eckart expressed the timeless wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy:
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
According to Jenkins, 2012 may mark a time when our perception of linear time gives way to an awareness of eternity. When you are aware of eternity, “nothing happens,” because everything has already happened. Your awareness shifts from doings and happenings to timeless being. If you are expecting 2012 to be a fire works of earth changes and big happenings you may be in for a Y2K-like anticlimax. So far, every eschaton prophecy ever made has resulted in a disconfirmation. And KC, who in the waking life is a dead celebrity, but in the dreamtime is alive and in the world of her childhood, has obviously transcended linear time.
Another layer of KC’s statement that “nothing happens” in 2012 is the aspect of nothing as no-thing and as a state of nothingness. Jenkins, in his books, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and Galactic Alignment, makes the case that 2012 was a date recognized by the Maya as the time of a rare astronomical alignment, the time when we align with the center of our galaxy. At the center of our galaxy, as in the center of many galaxies, there is believed to be a black hole, a no-thing, and when things cross the event horizon into this singularity their thingness is irrealized. Epigraphers have translated a Mayan hieroglyph related to galactic alignment as “black hole.” Jenkins documents this at: http://www.alignment2012.com/fap11.html
Galactic alignment was recognized by a number of cultures (the Maya, the Egyptians, the ancient Hindus, the Western Alchemists) as a time marker of when the era of densification, of ever more immersion into things (materialism, industrialism, consumerism) gives way to a Golden Age where spiritual light replaces the density of thingism.
Then it seems as if KC takes her out of her body and they fly above a monument, getting an overhead view of it. This immediately reminded me of the Great Cross of Hendae which Jay Weidner has studied so extensively. See http://jayweidner.com/TimeRiver.htm. According to Weidner, and a mysterious figure named Fulcanelli, this stone monument is a time capsule in several senses, it is a time capsule preserving the alchemical knowledge of alchemical stone masons, and it is also a time marker locating the galactic alignment of 2012 as the “end of time,” the time when the Iron Age or Kali Yuga ends, and a new Golden Age begins.
To read something I wrote last year on Jay Weidner, the precession of the ages, 2012 and the Tolkien mythology see : The Mutant Versus The Machine, the End of the Iron Age, and the Galactic Alignment of 2012
http://alignment2012.com/aligment2.htm
The dreamer says that she thought the monument had something to do with KC, who later in the dream becomes JC, whose symbol is the Cross. This creates still another correlation to the Great Cross of Hendae. Since the dreamer is taken out of her body to do a fly over of the monument, it may suggest her dreaming psyche associating 2012 as a time of flying free in her spirit body and being released from the limits of corporeality (the dreamer had previously related her many dissatisfactions with her corporeal existence).
Next KC shows her people making a time capsule. The time capsule is a concrete cylinder, an object of high density and weight. Whatever is put in a time capsule immediately becomes an artifact of the past, of what is passing. The time capsule is prepared after passing a monument that marks the end of the cycle of densification. What the people are putting into the time capsule are t-shirts bearing slogans. T-shirts are an industrial age, non-individual, mass-produced article of clothing, a man-made outer skin easily shed. What are on the t-shirts are slogans, and slogans are typically clichés created by advertisers or political propagandists. The etymology of slogan is interesting, it is derived from an early 16th century Gaelic word “sluagh-gharim.” “Sluagh” means “army” and “gairm” means “cry” so it was originally a battle cry. Militarism is being put into the capsule as an artifact of the past. The sloganed t-shirts are an obsolescent skin being molted. They are artifacts of militarism, industrialism, propaganda, advertising, commercialism, mechanical thinking and mechanical, manipulative communication. The day I received the dream via email, I was busily preparing for a documentary that was being video taped the following morning entitled, A Logos Beheld---Visual Communication, Virtual Reality and the Evolutionary Event Horizon. When I received the email I had Leonard Shlain’s book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, open in front of me. The documentary is about work I began in 1977, when I was nineteen years old, related to a theory that verbal and alphabet based communication had reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac and were going to be replaced by a visual modality of communication and gnosis.
(see http://alignment2012.com/capsule5.html)

I had just been writing about Terence McKenna’s discussion of octopi---- cephalopods that communicate by altering colors and visual characteristics of their skin. As McKenna put it, “they wear their language on their skin.” Having finished the section on the octopi, the emailed dream arrived as I was writing a section on The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, http://www.alphabetvsgoddess.com/ a thoroughly researched and elegantly written book that provides voluminous evidence that the cycle of time we call history, characterized by dominator societies, slogans and battle cries, was triggered by the invention of alphabets, which caused the left hemisphere of the brain to become dominant. The left hemisphere of the brain is connected with text, linearity in thought and time perception, hierarchy, and dominance. The spread of television, movies, and especially computers, is radically shifting our hemispheric dominance toward the right hemisphere which is visual, holistic, archetypally feminine, and aware of time as circular. This hemispheric shift may correlate to a whole new cycle or era. What’s put in the time capsule are the sloganed t-shirts, the moltings of our mechanical, alphabetical and militaristic thinking and communicating.
Once we have put our alphabetical skin into the past, into the time capsule, we see an octopi-like emergence of visual communication and plasticity, a visual skin of communication, which transcends ethnic barriers as the dreamer’s androgynous higher self morphs into Jesus and then a black man. Philo Judeas, an Alexandrian Jew from 25 BC, a contemporary of Chrirst, said that we would have reached something like what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point when the Logos, the voice of God, was beheld instead of heard. As I have written in my study of androgyny and the Tolkien mythology: Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom---Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring
http://alignment2012.com/castingprecious-androgny.html
the ultimate external manifestation of the androgyne is the changeling or shape-shifter capable of a visual logos, an outer presentation that synchronizes with inner linguistic intentionality.
The Gnostic Christians, who were destroyed by the text-wielding Orthodox Christians, conceived of Christ as androgynous and changeling. June Singer writes in her book Androgyny, the Opposites Within:

Another Gnostic conceptualization of the Son of Man is that he is Aipolos, the pole (also a pun on the Greek word for goat herd, the one who must turn in all directions).This figure is symbolized by Mercurius, the ever-elusive trickster who is of essence but whom one cannot grasp; also Proteus, the shape shifter, in whom every quality exists in potentia.

The Jesus of this dream is Gnostic in another way. He is not the outside savior conceived by Orthodox Chrisitans, but a Gnostic inner Jesus, her dream character whom she talks to as a very old friend, the other side of herself.

In the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:

He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.

At the end of the dream she realizes that Christ Consciousness can appear in many people. In the age of densification the divine was externalized, and there was the search for the Chalice as object, the One Ring, the beloved of romantic infatuation (See Stop the Hottie!
http://alignment2012.com/stop-hottie2.html ) and Jesus misconceived as outside savior. In Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom… I talk about the mislocation of the Godhead that has characterized the passing age. From the point of view of the dream, 2012 signifies the return of gnosis, the molting of the alphabetical, militaristic, slogan-skin and the emergence of androgynous, protean, Christ consciousness.

I can be reached at jonathanzap@hotmail.com

Feel free to copy and circulate this article for non-commercial purposes provided the Web site and author are mentioned.

One of the most baffling phenomena concerning human gender disorders is androgyny, which is defined as being physically male and female in one. An androgyne is also referred to as a hermaphrodite. Many have mistakenly confused androgyny with bisexuality, which is a psychological condition.

Only in rare cases are humans born with both male and female sexes. Estimates reveal that approximately 1% of the population is born with these traits.

Many cultures view androgyny in a mythical sense when one of their offspring is born with this affliction, as something both to be obtained and dreaded. For example, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica Macropedia, the Dogon African tribe has a myth of creation, which they believe that androgyny is a sign of perfection (Vol. 5, p. 240).

The Greeks concept of the hermaphrodite and how the sexes were created and separated is described in Plato's writing "Symposium." In it, the character Aristophanes describes two humans joined as one, which Zeus decides to split in half. Each of these beings was globular in shape, with rounded back and sides, four arms and four legs, and two faces, both the same, on a cylindrical neck, and one head, with one face on side and one the other, and four ears, and two lots of privates, and all the other parts to match [see the website http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~mkozusko/634/hermo.html].

It should also be noted that many cultures' gods were androgynous. For example, the Hindu god Shiva is often depicted as half man and woman. In addition, both male and female hormones are found in both sexes.

This article will explain the origin and purpose of androgyny in accordance to the purpose, pattern and plan of Elohim who is male and female within Himself. Modern science has been unable to explain why this phenomenon exists. It will also show that androgyny symbolizes a spiritual principle that is three-fold and reflected on three levels: physical, psychological, and spiritual.

Most important is that all humans are androgynous with respect to our souls and there is a psychological component of androgyny that we all have to develop if we are to grow on a spiritual level.

In short, Adam with Eve in him is the model for us all, for our soul is the woman that is giving birth to the man-child Yahshua. Finally, this article will explain how various cultures have dealt with androgyny.

Throughout most cultures the dominant view of gender is either male or female not both. This is the interpretation, especially in the western cultures according to Judeo-Christian tradition, which is "the arbiter of "natural" behavior of humans (p. 1)."

Now any possibility of human gender other than male or female in this mindset is considered abnormal. Thus, the birth of androgyny in these cultures was abnormal. A child that has both sexes faced many problems. Growing and development is the first problem. But the greater problem is facing and living in a society which has its own set of values and norms, where everyone is either male or female.

In most cultures this represents a great psychological shock to the parents of the child. In past western cultures, especially Europe, these children were usually given up to the Church.

We will see later in this article that in some cultures androgyny are seen as bad omens and the children are usually killed. This occurs where societies are superstitious.

The irony of this situation is the profound ignorance that mankind, especially Christians who are supposed to have some knowledge of the scriptures, has of this phenomenon. The rejection of the androgyny shows that they have no understanding. Had the Christians understood Adam with Eve in him (Gn. 1:27), then they would treat androgyny with love and explain their purpose for being created.

Science cannot explain why humans are born with both sexes. But science can explain what causes androgyny in terms of some abnormality in the male and female sex chromosomes. Many people believe that androgynes are freaks of nature.

But there are no errors made in Elohim's creation. In fact, how can the creature with his very limited understanding of the creation say the workings of His Creator are flawed. Neither science nor man will ever understand this phenomenon because they reject the existence of Spirit and the principles within the Bible. Physical androgyny is a reflection of spiritual androgyny (Rom. 1:19-20) or as the ancient saying called the "Law of Correspondence" goes "as above so below."

An age-old question that men have always pondered is: was the chicken before the egg? Likewise, one may ask the question: which of the sexes came first? Many believe it was man. The truth concerning the matter is that Adam was created with both sexes, male and female, for the woman was taken out of Adam (Gn. 2:22-23).

What must not be forgotten was that Adam was created in the image or reflection of Elohim (Gn. 1:27)—the Creator. This means that the human body manifests many of the spiritual attributes of Elohim's spiritual body.

Elohim's spiritual body is both male and female in principle, then Adam's body must be created to reflect this. Basically, Elohim's spiritual body is made-up of nine attributes such as Intelligence, Wisdom, Knowledge, Love, Beauty, Justice, Foundation, Power, and Strength. In fact, each of these spiritual attributes is both male and female.

What this means is that all spiritual attributes have both a female and male counterpart. For example, Intelligence and Wisdom have a gender. Solomon makes this point when he assigns the female gender to Wisdom. He writes in the Proverb: "Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice (Pro. 8:1)?"

The male side of Intelligence and Wisdom is logic and critical thinking, while the feminine side is more intuitive and caring. Both are necessary for the creative process to work. There is no domination of one over the other, for they both are equal or exist as King and Queen. Clearly, this is a model of perfection or androgyny and it is the balance of the male and female principle in one.

Now the sexes were separated so that mankind might understand the operation of the principles and characteristics that the Creator Elohim, who is spirit, possesses (Jn. 4:24). Without the physical counterpart of the male and female principles, there is no way to understand the invisible spiritual operation and its creative process of conception. From these opposites, males and females, always comes a new creature. Many of the ancient secret schools and Greeks understood the importance of opposites.

It only has been in the last 200 years that a philosophy has brought out the importance of these opposites in any creative process. The German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) developed a philosophy called Hegelianism. The philosophy of Hegel states that every existent idea or fact belongs to an all-embracing mind in which each idea or situation (thesis) evokes its opposite (antithesis) and these two result in a unified whole (synthesis), which in turn becomes a new thesis. (see "Conspiracy: Fact or Fiction?" in the Vol. 8, #2 issue of the "PLIM REPORT").

In some cultures androgyny were killed due to superstition about them. In June Singer's book Androgyny The Opposites Within she quoted Mircea Eliade who pointed out the plight of the androgyny "… if the child showed at birth any signs of hermaphroditism, it was killed by it own parents. In other words, the actual, anatomical hermaphrodite was considered an aberration of Nature or a sign that the gods' anger and consequently destroyed out of hand…(p.14)" In these cultures the androgyny did not have to undergo the scorn and ostracizing of society, for they were killed. This also shows the culture's lack of understanding and ignorance.

There were no laws in the Law of Moses that dealt with the issue of androgyny. In all probability, though, there had to be some born among the Israelites. The androgyny's problem in Israel was that they would not be able to reproduce offspring.

This in all likelihood would prevent them from marriage. It was very important to Israel, especially males, to have a seed in Israel. Even if he died before he had a child, it was his brother's duty to take his wife and produce a son in his brother name (Deu. 25:5-6).

Exactly how Israel dealt with the androgyny can be seen in a similar situation with how they handled eunuchs. Moses wrote: "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Yahweh (Deu. 23:1; see Isa. 56:3-5)." Since eunuchs were banned from the congregation of Yahweh, then so the androgyny would also have been forbidden entry into the congregation of Yahweh. It is no doubt that they served other functions in Israel, as the eunuchs did (Est. 2:3, 14; Acts 8:27).

There are many instances documented in history that reveal the plight of androgyny. F. Gonzales-Crussi in his book Three Forms of Sudden Death wrote a chapter on "Sexual Undiffereniation" where he discusses the predicament of Marguerite Malaure, an adrogyne, who was raised as a girl. She was born in 1655 in France. Her parents gave her up to the Roman Catholic Church to raise and educate as an orphan. She was placed in the service of a very important woman as a maid. Unfortunately, Marguerite fell ill and was transported semi-conscious to the hospital in the town of Toulouse.

The doctor was shocked to find out that Marguerite was really not a female since she had both sex organs. She had lived 31 years as a female. Now the doctors after examining her, thought that she was more male oriented. The civil authorities demanded that she not dress as a woman, but appear as a male. The town folks in their ignorance and superstition constantly insulted and humiliated her as she walked down the street.

She left the town of Toulouse and went to Bordeaux where she again was found out arrested. The court demanded that she change her name to a male one and wear men's clothes. If she did not conform, she was whipped. She became destitute since she worked as a maid and because of her circumstances she was disbarred from this profession.

Being harassed by the town's people, she went to Paris looking for two renowned surgeons where she thought of having surgery to remedy this situation. But she got a hearing before the King and he assigned a commission to look into this matter. After considering all the evidence, the commission ruled that she was woman. Marguerite's life was a pure hell due to the ignorance and superstitious of the masses, the church, and medical doctors. Hers has been the typical dilemma of androgyny.

Many cultures throughout mankind's history understood androgyny in two forms-physical and mythical. They saw the physical androgyny and took it as a bad omen from the gods, but they also realized that the mythic androgyny was an ideal model that man should strive to attain. Mircea Eliade in her book Mephistophele and the Androgynes, which June Singer quoted in her book Androgyny: The Opposites Within, states: "…the hermaphrodite represented in antiquity an ideal condition which men endeavored to achieved by spiritual means of imitative rites,…" (p.13-14)."

This ancient view was also confirmed in the European Renaissance, according to the web-site entitled "Hermaphrodites: Gender Transgression, or Gender Transcendence?" It stated the following: "As these images might suggest, the Renaissance hermaphrodite was by no means necessarily clinically androgynous. Androgyny, apparently, was as much a figurative phenomenon as it was a literal or physical condition; it was the union -- either perverse or divine -- of the two sexes (http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~mkozusko/634/hermo.html)."

In reality, androgynes or hermaphrodites are three-fold by the pattern, which consists of physical androgyny, psychological androgyny, and spiritual androgyny. Now much of this article addressed physical androgyny. The reader must keep in mind that physical androgyny is just a physical reflection of this spiritual principle.

Many today are addressing psychological androgyny in their quest to integrate themselves as a whole. This is the result of both sexes, male and female, realizing that they each have psychological characteristics of the opposite sex that are not fully developed because society has defined the roles of women and men and the characteristics that each must manifest. For example, as June Singer points out in her book, if you ask a group of people to list some characteristics of females and males, many would give the following list of attributes.

June Singer explains the implications of psychological androgyny as follows. "The androgyny approaches the problem by seeing that true change begins primarily within the psychic structure of the individual. … those of the androgyny are mainly intrapsychic. The androgyny consciously accepts the interplay of the masculine and feminine aspects of the individual psyche. One is the complement of the other, in the same sense that the active, probing sperm is the complement of the waiting, yielding ovum. In conception, the two principles are combined; in the individual, the active and receptive natures coexist throughout the span of life (p. 15).". It is quite apparent that for males or females to mature they have to develop the attributes of the opposite sex. For example, men are beginning to see the advantage of the feminine intuitiveness and want to develop this attribute. Women also see the advantage of male logic and strive to develop this. Thus, we all have become androgynous psychologically.

Finally, most people being devoid of spiritual understanding perceive male and female in a literal sense. This prevents them from seeing the spiritual reality of androgyny. It is the spiritual component of androgyny that we all must achieve in order to have eternal life. Everyone knows that it takes the male and female principle in order to birth life.

The male principle of the psyche (soul) is the Holy Spirit, who is Yahshua the Messiah. Now the Yahshua the Messiah prayed a prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane where He asked the Heavenly Father Yahweh to make his disciples ONE as He and the Father are ONE (Jn. 17:20-23). Since our soul is feminine with respect to the Holy Spirit then when we become ONE with the spirit, we are a spiritual androgyny. The Messiah told the Pharisees that in the resurrection or in the spirit there is no giving in marriage, as it is in the earthy realm, for the souls are the same as angels (Mt. 22:30). Meaning that angels are androgynous. John saw this union revealed symbolically as the woman clothed in the Sun (Son-The True Male-Rev. 12:20). It is hoped that this article shed some light on this subject.

Summary in English of

[Short overview:]
1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research
2. Androgyny according to seven authors
3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective Notes


[Complete overview:]

1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research

[Preliminary remarks]

2. Androgyny according to seven authors

[Two lines in the sequence of chapters]

Chapter 1 Prologue: androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective

Notes

1. Introduction:
main findings and points for further discussion and research

1.1 History and description of androgyny in Christianity

1.2 History of Gnosticism, Mysticism, Pietism, and Christian Theosophy,
insofar as androgyny developed within them

1.3 Christian counterparts of the psychology of C.G. Jung,
and a basis for comparison with eastern religions

1.4 Androgyny as a plea for the woman and the female
in the context of a patriarchally stamped Christian thinking

1.5 Androgyny as a cultural ideal
and the necessity to review the position of reason and science

1.6 Essential insights regarding androgyny

2. Androgyny according to seven authors

Chapter 1
Prologue:

androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

Chapter 2 Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:

introduction

Chapter 3

Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:
man and woman in God and in the creation

Chapter 4

Androgyny in John Scottus Eriugena

Chapter 5

Androgyny in Philo and its context

Chapter 6

Androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas

Chapter 7

Androgyny in the Gospel of Philip

A general comparison of the different authors
in historical perspective

Notes [only of this Summary!]

The Androgyne, alpha and omega of the manifested being

The Androgyne representations

The dyadic representation

Representations of bisexual entities
The first picture below, not identified, offer a good example of such an entity.

Synthesis

Bibliography

The Lord Who is Half Woman
Ardhanarishvara in Indian and Feminist Perspective

Summary in English of

[Short overview:] 1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research 2. Androgyny according to seven authors 3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective Notes [Complete overview:]

1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research [Preliminary remarks]

2. Androgyny according to seven authors [Two lines in the sequence of chapters]Chapter 1 Prologue: androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective

Notes

1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research

1.1 History and description of androgyny in Christianity

1.2 History of Gnosticism, Mysticism, Pietism, and Christian Theosophy, insofar as androgyny developed within them

1.3 Christian counterparts of the psychology of C.G. Jung, and a basis for comparison with eastern religions

1.4 Androgyny as a plea for the woman and the female in the context of a patriarchally stamped Christian thinking

1.5 Androgyny as a cultural ideal and the necessity to review the position of reason and science

1.6 Essential insights regarding androgyny

2. Androgyny according to seven authors

Chapter 1 Prologue: androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

Chapter 2 Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:

introduction

Chapter 3

Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme: man and woman in God and in the creation

Chapter 4 Androgyny in John Scottus Eriugena

Chapter 5 Androgyny in Philo and its context

Chapter 6 Androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas

Chapter 7 Androgyny in the Gospel of Philip

A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective

Notes [only of this Summary!]

The Androgyne, alpha and omega of the manifested being

The Androgyne representations

The dyadic representation

Representations of bisexual entities The first picture below, not identified, offer a good example of such an entity.

Synthesis

Bibliography

The Lord Who is Half Woman Ardhanarishvara in Indian and Feminist Perspective

[Short overview:]
1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research
2. Androgyny according to seven authors
3. A general comparison of the different authors in historical perspective Notes

[Complete overview:]

1. Introduction: main findings and points for further discussion and research

[Preliminary remarks]

2. Androgyny according to seven authors

[Two lines in the sequence of chapters]

Chapter 1 Prologue: androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

1. Introduction:
main findings and points for further discussion and research

1.2 History of Gnosticism, Mysticism, Pietism, and Christian Theosophy,
insofar as androgyny developed within them

1.3 Christian counterparts of the psychology of C.G. Jung,
and a basis for comparison with eastern religions

1.4 Androgyny as a plea for the woman and the female
in the context of a patriarchally stamped Christian thinking

1.5 Androgyny as a cultural ideal
and the necessity to review the position of reason and science

Chapter 1
Prologue:

androgyny in the works of Gunning and Von Baader and the subject of this study

Androgyny according to Jacob Boehme:
man and woman in God and in the creation

Chapter 4

Androgyny in John Scottus Eriugena

Chapter 5

Androgyny in Philo and its context

Chapter 6

Androgyny in the Gospel of Thomas

Chapter 7

Androgyny in the Gospel of Philip

A general comparison of the different authors
in historical perspective

Representations of bisexual entities
The first picture below, not identified, offer a good example of such an entity.

The Lord Who is Half Woman
Ardhanarishvara in Indian and Feminist Perspective