Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom-----Androgyny,
Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring
© 2005 Jonathan Zap
Note: This is a working copy of an unfinished treatise on
androgny 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.
ANDROGYNY, ALCHEMY,
ELVES
©
Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap
(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
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
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.)
Androgyny may be the oldest archetype of
which we still have any experience.
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.
Singer quotes James Hillman in The Myth of
Analysis,
….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.”
“You mean like chicks with dicks?” someone called out.
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.
….from the Gnostic
Gospel According to Thomas:
..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 adds,
Androgyny is the
act of becoming more conscious and therefore more
whole…
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
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
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)
Gnosticism is Mater Alchimica, the Mother of
Alchemy.
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 TWO MODES OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
A
Tentative Dichotomy
|
WHO
PROPOSED IT? |
|
Many
Sources
Day
Night
|
|
|
|
Oppenheimer
Time, History
Eternity, Timelessness
|
|
Deikman
Active
Receptive |
|
Polanyi
Explicit
Tacit |
|
Levy,
Sperry
Analytic
Gestalt |
|
Domhoff
Right (side of body)
Left (side of body) |
|
Many
Sources
Left hemisphere
Right hemisphere |
|
Bogen
Propositional
Appositonal |
|
Lee
Lineal
Nonlineal |
|
Luria
Sequential
Simultaneous |
|
Semmes
Focal
Diffuse |
|
I
Ching
The Creative: heaven
The Receptive: earth
Masculine, Yang
Feminine, Yin |
|
I
Ching
Light
Dark |
|
I
Ching Time
Space |
|
I
Ching
Verbal
Spatial |
|
Many
Sources
Verbal
Spatial |
|
Many
Sources
Intellectual
Intuitive |
|
Vedanta
Buddhi
Manas |
|
Jung
Causal
Acausal |
|
Bacon
Argument
Experience |
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:
Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the
falconer:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of
passionate intensity.----W.B. Yeats
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.
As Singer puts it,
….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).
Singer quotes one of the original systems theorists, Buckminster
Fuller:
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
1.
The world born of a goddess
without consort,
2.
The world born of a goddess fecundated by
a consort,
3.
The world fashioned from the
body of a goddess by a male
warrior-god,
4.
The world created by the unaided power of a
male god alone.
(Heilbrun/
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny)
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 is a natural human activity.
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
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
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
“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….”
Saruman makes a proclamation of power,
“For I am Saruman, the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman
of many Colours!
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.”
Gandalf replies,
“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.”
Gandalf incisively responds,
“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.
Singer contrasts the typical romantic experience with that of the
androgyne,
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.
Tolkien describes Denethor as follows:
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.
Amongst hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo come from the most androgynous
ancestry,
The harfoots had much to do with
Dwarves…
The
Stoors…were less shy of Men…
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.
In the Hobbit, Tolkien tells
us,
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
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
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.