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Title: Sex=The Unknown Quantity
The Spiritual Function of Sex
Author: Ali Nomad
Release Date: September 3, 2009 [EBook #29896]
Language: English
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SEX = The Unknown Quantity
THE SPIRITUAL FUNCTION OF SEX
A New and Startling Interpretation of the Meaning, Scope and
Function of Sex as Seen and Interpreted From the Inner or
Cosmic Standpoint. A Work That Should Revolutionize
the Thought of Today in its Relation to the Vital
Mystery of Sex in All its Aspects. It
Presents a Practical Solution to the
Sex Problems of Everyday Life.
_By_
ALI NOMAD
[DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL]
_Author of_
"COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT", "THE DEAD SPEAK"
"REVELATIONS OF THE HAND", "GHOSTS", "HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL"
"PERSONAL MAGNETISM", "PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY", ETC.
CHICAGO, U. S. A.
STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Copyrighted and Registered in Stationers' Hall, London, England.
(All Rights Reserved)
COPYRIGHT IN ALL COUNTRIES SIGNATORIES TO THE BERNE CONVENTION.
THE STERLING PRESS.
DEDICATED
TO THE CHILD OF TOMORROW
THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT
PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD
TO OUR READERS:
We feel justified in claiming this work marks an epoch in the advanced
thought of human evolution. Nothing has ever been written dealing with
the problem of Sex which is at once so illuminating, convincing and
satisfying. To our knowledge this particular view of the sex-subject
has never before been presented, and, perhaps it could not have been,
owing to the fact that it is only _now_ in these days of higher
thought, that such a view could be understood.
The author, Ali Nomad, is already well known to progressive readers as
the writer of "Cosmic Consciousness," or, "The Man-God Whom We Await;"
a work that has made its author famous by the reprint of its many
editions.
There are signs of a new order in the relation of the Sexes already
indicated upon the horizon of the World's consciousness as the result
of the present world-conflict. _Today people are as ignorant of the
subject of Sex as they are of God._ Both of these must be understood
if the race is to progress beyond its present stage. Otherwise we
shall pass into the long sleep of oblivion like all civilizations in
the past leaving future generations to grapple with the same world
problems.
True or _perfect_ marriage is the most important attainment in the
life of the individual.
The author demonstrates that perfect marriage is a scientific
possibility and that legal marriage and divorce simply conform to
civil laws. He very clearly outlines the reason why civilization makes
little or no progress in dealing with the social evil and other sex
problems.
The publishers place this book before an intelligent public,
believing, that more _real_ knowledge can be gained by its study, than
by any other known method, because
_First._ The reader is brought face to face with himself, and nature.
_Second._ The reader can demonstrate the truth of the propositions set
forth.
_Third._ The methods, rules, and laws have been verified by
intelligent men and women who have lived the life.
_Fourth._ "Sex," The Divine Principle which all human beings should
understand, has been presented in plain simple terms, and elucidated,
so that the reader _cannot_ fail to understand the true path of
moral progress.
This volume is not a romance, a fairy tale nor a dream intended to
entertain or amuse, but a scientific instruction which will elevate
the individual and the race, develop self respect, self control,
morality and love. If the propositions presented by the author are
correct--let the standards be changed; _if_ the propositions are
_incorrect_, they will not disturb the standards of today.
THE PUBLISHERS.
SEX--THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
The Spiritual Function of Sex
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL 19
Sex the fundamental basis of the universe; sex in organic
life; the law of attraction and repulsion in animal and plant
life; sex attraction and repulsion in human life; how
differentiated and why; some secrets of modern chemistry; the
cosmic law of involution and evolution; the symbol of the
serpent in a new light; what is "the power of the gods"
referred to in ancient mythology; some erroneous ideas in
regard to the sex function; the philosophy of restraint; the
inner sex-function and its outward expression compared; the
senses as avenues of inspiration; the creation of form and
sense-objects; what constitutes a "perfect and complete
being?" the theory of "counterparts" and its spiritual
significance; is procreation the highest function of sex;
what constitutes the fundamental law of love? the various
expressions of the love-nature from inorganic to organic
life.
CHAPTER II
FROM SEX WORSHIP TO SEX DEGRADATION 29
Sex the origin of all religious ceremonies; from
nature-worship to sex-worship; the history of Ancient forms
and ceremonies of worship; how sex-worship has survived the
ages; how it thrives today in modern religion; early stages
of civilization in relation to Sex; the antiquity of the
symbol of the virgin and child; its occult significance in
symbolism; the reality of the "bi-une God;" some secrets of
the Ancient Egyptians in regard to the function of sex; the
esoteric cause of the Egyptian talismanic and symbolical
revival today; the secret or esoteric meaning of the
swastika-cross; why Aum is always typified by a circle;
ancient forms of oath-taking and why; the source of
sex-energy spiritual; how and where the idea of
"blood-atonement" and vicarious sacrifice originated; the
beginning of sex-degradation.
CHAPTER III
PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE 53
The consecutive order from ancient sex-worship to modern
civilization; the real causes of race-advancement in the
cosmic tidal-wave, and what it portends; why conditions are
as they are today in regard to sex-life; the psychic forces
in their relation to sex-life; some fallacies in regard to
Eugenics; why Greek and Roman civilization failed; why and
how modern civilization need not fail; why women seek to
avoid motherhood; women of two types; the awake and the
asleep; the cosmic office of the Female Principle; its
relation to Creation; how the superman and woman will differ
from the undeveloped type; what is meant by "half-gods;" are
women of today lacking in the love-nature; will the race die
out? If so, why, and if not why not? How did the "Holy
Family" differ from other families?
CHAPTER IV
THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING 75
The relation of ancient marriage customs to religion; why
human evolution must necessarily be slow; ancient marriage
customs and their spiritual interpretation; why marriage
ceremonies have always prevailed; customs of all races
compared; why the institution has a permanent place in Social
Evolution; the symbolism of the visible world; why Science
and Mysticism agree spiritually; the origin of "variation"
the fundamental cause of woman's subjugation; when men defend
"outraged honor," is it a primitive or a primordial instinct?
the history of monogamy; the monogamic idea and the ideal
monogamy; the history and cause of polygamy; the evolution of
the "old-maid" idea and the psychic cause of this evolution;
the path of the virtuous woman in ancient days; the elevating
power in the dowry system; the two great purposes which this
custom has served.
CHAPTER V
THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION 93
Why the monogamic ideal of marriage is right; how, when and
where, will marriage be lasting; the basic principle of
sex-union; when the bonds of matrimony are truly "holy;"
attraction and cohesion two distinct phases of chemical laws;
ideas of a modern writer; how all morality has come from the
ideal of marriage; some erroneous ideas of spirituality in
relation to the sex-function; when and why Man becomes
immortal; the custom and the hidden meaning in the wedding
ring; the symbolism of ancient marriage customs; the esoteric
meaning of "orange-blossoms;" the veil; the ring; the crown;
why these have endured throughout the ages; the interior and
hidden meaning of Rosicrusian symbols in respect to the
sex-function; women admitted to the Order and why; the
mystery and marvel of the symbolic "dove;" why it plays so
important a part in marriage customs and lover's phrases; the
symbolism of the ark; the egg; the drinking-cup and other
persisting accompaniments to marriage customs.
CHAPTER VI
CONTINENCE; CHASTITY; ASCETICISM: THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE 103
The Ancient Greek and Roman idea of the sex-relation; why the
asceticism of the Dark Ages arose; why the Church instituted
celibacy; why the Church retained the pagan idea of "the
virgin;" the effect this has had upon the growth and power of
Christianity; lives of celebrated saints in the light of
Occult wisdom; why and in what way the essentials of
Christianity are like other religious ideals; who is "the One
True and Only God?" the interior meaning of the word
"chastity;" the difference between chastity and asceticism;
the unbroken line connecting ancient ideas of sex, with
modern; the attitude of religious systems toward women; why
women are supporters of the churches in modern days; the
"mystic bride" and the mystical meaning; William James
comments on the spiritual ecstacy of St. Teresa; Swedenborg
on "Conjugal love;" trances; ecstacies; and visions of
saints; the term "virgin," and its origin; the evolution of
sex-love to spiritual love.
CHAPTER VII
SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD? 119
Why we hear of "affinities" and "soul-mates" today more than
formerly; the great distinction between these two words; the
psychic forces behind woman's invasion of business fields;
the basis of "the unwritten law;" why affinity marriages
fail; the hidden reason girls look for a "rich husband;" the
final outcome; when and how women are "ruined;" the mystery
of the hermaphrodite; what is the true significance of the
term "androgynous?" mistaken ideas of morality in dress and
manners; what sort of beings constitute "the kingdom of God?"
the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics; the wisdom of the
"initiates;" the spiritual quality in folk-lore; the time
when "temptation" will be no more; when "naked and unashamed"
the race will re-enter the lost Paradise.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED 137
Science and mysticism the same at root; Christian mysticism
versus scientific postulates; the interior meaning in fairy
stories; personalities and principles in mystic revelation;
the esoteric meaning in Mythology; are there gods and
mortals? the ark in religious symbology; its interior
meaning; what were the "tablets of stone?" the reality of the
"cherubim" and the "seraphim;" the inner meaning of the
symbolical "ark of the Covenant;" is spiritual love devoid of
sex?; what is the symbolical "flaming sword?"; why the Jews
claimed to be God's "chosen people;" what makes for "immortal
godhood?"; the symbolism of the "life-token" stories; the
symbolism of the sleeping princess; a theory that solves all
the problems of life; the symbolical rites and ceremonies of
secret orders; the secrets of the Ancient Alchemists; the
Rosicrucians; the Free Masons; the Hermetics; their
initiation rites and ceremonies explained; what is meant by
the "Holy of Holies?" by the "secret chamber;" and the degree
of "mastership;" the sexual significance of the symbolism of
the "templars;" the red rose on the cross; the star and the
crescent; what is the inner meaning of "the radiant center;"
why the Catholic Church opposed the order of Free-masons; did
the Alchemists discover the secret of metallic transmutation?
what is meant by "the philosopher's stone;" why it was of
such a rare purity; why the early Church opposed all
reference to sex; the distinction between "discovering" and
"finding;" their spiritual meaning; what was the stone that
was raised at Babylon: was it a phallic symbol? why the
average "Knight Templar" fails to attain the powers and
privileges of esoteric Free-masonry; what is the "gate of
life?" the Arcana of the Hermetics and its sexual
significance; the symbolism of the double-headed eagle; why
the eagle was an ancient religious symbol; the antithesis of
"the eagle and the dove" explained; the "lamb and the goat"
symbolism; the God-ideas of the Ancients and their effects on
modern life; why "riding the goat" is the usual initiatory
rite and ceremony in secret orders; some secret plates of
Hermetic orders explained; what is the "magic solvent" of the
alchemists? the relation of Christian symbolism to the
Alchemical secrets; the inner meaning of "the sun and the
moon" in ancient literature; transmutation: exterior or
interior? what constitutes "the abiding glory."
CHAPTER IX
WHAT CONSTITUTES SEXUAL IMMORALITY? 159
Can there be standards of morality in the sex-relation; if so
what are they? is monogamy the ideal sex relationship? is
polygamy a future possibility? why matriarchal polygamy is
less degrading than patriarchal; why polygamy is not the
ideal sex relationship; the fallacy of legal marriage as a
test of sexual morality; why we "cannot wrong the universe;"
the one commandment of "the Most High God;" what is it? our
modern standards the result of phallic worship; why the Roman
Church has survived the centuries; the interior meaning in
the "Holy Virgin" idea of the Church; the vital point in the
Roman marriage restrictions; men inherently more faithful to
marriage vows than women, and why this is so; the bi-sexual
individual the most developed; the counterpartal union and
its relation to marriage customs; why "affinities" are so
numerous; sexual infidelity an impossible premise; what is to
become of present-day ethical standards of sexual morality?;
historic ideas of sexual immorality and their influence upon
modern civilization; modern effects of ancient Hebraic
customs; why suppression of prostitution must fail; why
prostitution is moral degeneracy; the Oriental versus the
Occidental view of prostitution; why modern ideas of sexual
morality are fallacious and untenable; can there be a
universal standard of sexual morality? why present-day ideas
of marriage are degrading; compulsion in marriage and
prostitution compared; how, why, and when, the sex-relation
may be exalted, reverenced and deified; mistakes of some
"Civic Leaguers;" why, when, and how, unfaithfulness in
marriage is wrong; the single versus the double standard in
sex.
CHAPTER X
THE PATHWAY OF LOVE 189
Love the Great Reality; Love the Alpha and Omega of Life;
Sex-love the basis of all other loves; Sex-love the true
spiritual love; what is love of an abstract God? Love the
perfect mathematician; the moral code and Nature; why we
cannot break the laws of God; why Love is depicted with
bandaged eyes; Eros and Cupid explained; why the Egyptians
depicted Horus with finger on lips; some symbolic caricatures
in modern civilization; how it is true that "love makes gods
of men;" why Religion has remained materialistic; Love, the
only vitalizing power in the universe; the arch-enemy of
Love; why Love never leads to disaster; why Love is always
pure; erroneous ideas of success and failure; what is real
degradation? the pathway of love from chemical attraction to
spiritual union; why spiritual mates must be the answer to
Life's puzzle; what constitutes actual infidelity? what is to
be done with sex relations that are not spiritual unions? Are
they immoral? too much made of the marriage ceremony and too
little of fitness; is it better to be "respectably bonded" or
spiritually mated? what will happen when we rid Society of a
belief in "impure" love; why marriage vows are inadequate;
puerile; and futile; when we find the "pearl of great price;"
why spiritual mates cannot be parted; why bonds and vows must
give place to mutual agreement; does spiritual union come
with love of God? what is the "bliss of Nirvana?" why the
libertine is a pauper in the realm of love; when we imbibe
the "nectar of gods;" why the "holy of Holies" cannot be
defiled; when the divine office of sex is prostituted; why
all sex relations may not be eternal yet moral; the mistaken
teaching of the church regarding sex, and the result; inane
ideas of Paradise; an appalling prospect of heaven; perfect
sex-union the incentive to aspiration; Humanity progresses in
spite of fear; prophecy literally true; the true business of
business; the final test; the Love that is merging, melting;
satisfying and how to attain it.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION 209
The spiritual cause of all physical activity; two words that
are of vital import today; did Jesus lie? is the kingdom
within an actual truth? the interior qualities and their
relationship to present day affairs; the fundamental
difference between mysticism and Christianity; the key to the
kingdom; the interior symbolism of "wireless telegraphy;" the
breeder of discord; the interior meaning of certain important
words; the survival of the fittest in its interior meaning;
the finer and ever finer forces at work; when the gods arrive
the half gods go; sex-force at the Center of Being; when
abnormalities and perversions of sex will be impossible; the
radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary function
of sex-force vitalization, not procreation; the art of
transmutation and the key to the gate of life; the esoteric
meaning of our "second childhood;" the present necessity for
physical old-age; the spiritual message in the doctrine of
sacrifice; the mystical formula for transmutation; the
mystery of the "Holy Grail" elucidated; the only method of
attaining godhood.
CHAPTER XII
"SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS" 231
The barriers between men and the "bliss of Heaven;" the
difference between mortals and gods; the character of a
bi-une Being; erroneous ideas of masculinity and femininity;
the change of the present day toward these ideas; God not a
hermaphroditic Personality, but a pair; some "laws of God;"
the ideal of union versus the idea of possession; the highest
manifestation of sex-love; the solar-man and the mental man
in sex; qualities of sex-force; is the divine man less sexual
than the physical? the divine fulcrum of Sex; how eternal
youth and life are possible; why you can not lose in the
"game of Love;" we cannot sin against the Eternal God; why
and when the "eternal equasion" is perfect; no mistakes or
flaws in the Cosmic scheme; how spiritual mates may find each
other; the true way of transmutation simple; why we have
"painted dolls of women;" the hearts of men; the highest
wisdom; some fallacies regarding the law of transmutation;
why the "inner vision" does not require a trip to the
Himalayas; why "brotherhoods" cannot insure you the way; all
beauty and joy the result of the divinity of Sex; life
mathematically just; when we shall "enter the kingdom."
INTRODUCTION
No phase of civilization can rise to the highest possibilities as long
as the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the most
important and the most sacred function of our being, is one of shame,
sinfulness, lust and uncleanness.
Even among those who are conscientiously trying to establish better
social conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like the
proper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidences
that our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sex
problem.
Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving their
attention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so long
neglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fettered
by the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart from
materia medica, or religion, is difficult.
Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of all
the delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which should
by right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surround
a union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share with
the one and only possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, there
is nothing of shame or apology--sentiments which alas, actuate the
so-called "modest" man or woman of today.
Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate for
public discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex is
too indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon public
attention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, the
opinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truth
and so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfied
with offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing these
effects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing that
all the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching and
thinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, and
hold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in its
rightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of this
universe, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies.
It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has to
be discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subject
must be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is our
contention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized and
understood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sex
were recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function _that
it is_, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before the
sun.
In the meantime the subject must be discussed from all points of view.
It must be permitted to thrive in the light and thus it will flower
into the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it.
In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex must
be aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal and
reverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex,
is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths and
transmitted to the children yet unborn.
"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings,
proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands,
health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes,
benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights
of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the
earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification
of itself.
"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his
sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."
Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet,"
only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental
perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and
everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal
future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to
encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of
all life--Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting
upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the
very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from
divine sources justifies such an idea.
Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until
the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be
that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the
more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.
In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the
subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued
pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention
that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred
function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before
the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in
celestial spaces.
THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER I
SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL
The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.
Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life
of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause
of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction
and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and
centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits--or
rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male
and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is _Life_.
The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth,
to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various
gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name
for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The
law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity.
"The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a
scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the
forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible
universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.
Sex is the algebracial X--the unknown quantity which defies analysis.
Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all
over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second
coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but
another form of the X--the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.
The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and
within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female
element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the
Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of
love is _union_. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the
struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of
union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union
must come from the Center of Life--from the spiritual Reality, which
the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.
Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the
upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the
earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and
social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in
the ascendant and love demands _union_--not merely matrimony.
The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending
law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth,
forming a circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral
convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the
adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and
transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a
circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood--victory over
death through _regeneration_.
It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but
without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical
sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all
instincts.
There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It
is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases,
sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the
continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex
has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor
giving in marriage" after death.
This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from
seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere
physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of
spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere
physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the
healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as
long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to
the mind as "spirituality."
Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem
of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its
spiritual function is not _less_ but infinitely _more_ than that which
we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.
Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a
million fold, refining, purifying and _intensifying_ the sex instinct
until it bears a relationship to the average instance of
sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism
bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life
in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the
musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the
spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not
mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of
life-manifestation.
We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the
mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each
blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and
purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into
the grand compositions of the Masters.
"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may
safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental
principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses
(senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always
where the line demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos.
Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex,
and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more
permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.
Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the
visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible
worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the
mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the
animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and
protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of
both sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter but
masculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rare
instances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean that
there is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves the
union in one _Whole Entity_ of the two distinct principles, and by
this fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the very
crux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the mere
physical expression of the law, but that the object of the
sex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male and
a female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being--the true
representative of the bi-une Being whom we know as God.
Absolute and perfect union is possible only at the center, the crux,
of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol
of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have
for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not
final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many
sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not
fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritual
counterparts.
Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it
expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species,
and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of
sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident
plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and
perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked
for and who we believe is here.
If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical
only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the
spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the
function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of
procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend
of life-manifestation.
Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we
find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs
deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and
almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of
Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally
rather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher
sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely
instinctive urge to perpetuate the species--the lowest expression of
Love--and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there,
and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the
fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs
other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we
see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the
god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the
stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.
In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find the
universal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oak
tree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon a
plant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be the
case, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is to
attract to itself _its own_; that which belongs to it by right of
Cosmic law and order and justice.
All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt to
appropriate and _possess_ that which, in the final analysis, in the
Absolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall have
mastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its true
spiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth's
creatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered the
instinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which would
protect and preserve, and _leave free_, will have gained supremacy
over selfishness and the desire for possession.
In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal.
Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of
sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that
Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as
babies.
Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression
than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note
with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge
is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the
mammals.
The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the
harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic
ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in
continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense
love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but
it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our
ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem
of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the
spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings
learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating,
which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their
progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease with sex-expression.
It permeates all their intercourse.
The trait which distinguishes the spiritual man from the animal man is
analogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep and
lasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing with
each other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other's
words; contacting, as it were, each other's _inner nature_, rather
than obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, in
the common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives which
their love has brought forth.
Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the
sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical
contact, to that of spiritual union--a wide gulf seemingly; but who
would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union
with the Beloved One means?
CHAPTER II
SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION
Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and
inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and
civilized, has been founded upon Sex--the inevitable, the inviolable,
the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.
Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An
intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will
not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an
unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more
worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of
birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed
planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life
from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only
shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be
"shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It
is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from
spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle
of Sex is unrecognized by them.
With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which
survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of
worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the
simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of
complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries
previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature
makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a
time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as
"The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something
higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of
Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the
evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.
It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after
all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The
vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen
to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural
and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater
than that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act of
procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the
Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman
issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child"
became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat
different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may
trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying
fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those
whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have
originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as
an object of worship.
Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this
symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and
reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also
enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although
defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.
The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all
symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the
ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance.
At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the
nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she
alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately
reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the
reproductive power.
Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began--a warfare which, if
it had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since in
race-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women have
continued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until now
the future offers a golden promise of _union_. As long as primitive
man kept to nature worship, deifying earth as the mother who brought
forth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religious
practices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent of
springtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the period
of gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature's
own laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasion
of thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and general
good-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing and
music and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this very
natural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness was
accompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation.
There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early
Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the
"Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of
Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her
androgynous character.
Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent
of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all
the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as
the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this
day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as
feminine.
Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine,
as were all deities; but later, when it was shown that the sun
apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in
succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a
deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled
and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from
her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level
of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.
While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of
life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from
the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder
and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the
mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon
the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this
ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law
is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we
contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have
prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily
persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was
yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really
fundamental.
From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved
a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle
an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female
sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and
sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of
generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet
from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves
dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative
organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the
most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.
The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the
Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it
must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful
miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back
over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to
fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get
lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more
exalted planes of our ideals.
From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), with
all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon
woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of
time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be
individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was
established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ
which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy.
In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part
the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note
today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed
stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of
deification--the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?
The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the
phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni
worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were
celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian
festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature
worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic
worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.
There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called
Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of
Ceres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to have
noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the
entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the
rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins
distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted
to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.
Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor
of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that
the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male
belonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is to
say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this
ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time
would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive
and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the
question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that
purity and peace would reign upon earth.
This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation
to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have
been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because
phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that
not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the
Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man
violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This
gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted
sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much
that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the
pure and perfect union of male and female--the only ideal that will,
or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.
The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis.
For a period of several days during the time set apart for the
festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature
of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue
of inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth and
honor.
Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether
expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent
worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those
qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach
immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say
what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs
only to those who are pure in heart.
From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy
communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of
the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the
phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol.
Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian
supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism.
Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a
spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and
reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of
every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times
will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how
obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently
associated.
The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy,
underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of the
Central African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above the
din of our modern commercial civilization. The prejudiced and the
superficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremonies
records only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences of
depravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of the
idea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race which
has sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world's
evolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races are
today emerging.
All mystic truths are expressed in symbolism. It has been said that
these truths are "veiled;" this is true only because the observer has
not yet learned to speak the language. The universal language is
symbolism. In the early Egyptian, the Indian, and the Hebrew
religions, the fundamental idea was the two generating principles (or
we might say the two aspects of the One principle) of generation. The
two in spiritual _union_ represented the Infinite--the Deity. The
Hebrew word "Elohim" is plural, and means male and female united,
forming the One Perfect and Complete Being. This union is the "Holy of
Holies" of the ancient mystics and alchemists. We see its reflection
and its persistence today in the Catholic service of the Mass, where
the priest raises the Eucharist as the "Holy of Holies" in which is
generated the Christ-man, and before whom all human devotees bow the
head that they may not look upon the perfection and beauty of its pure
radiance. Neither is the priest supposed to touch the chalice with
uncovered hands. He prepares himself by fasting and prayer before he
mounts the altar upon which this "Holy of Holies" is hidden from view.
The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations is
easily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols of
yoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, although
it is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it is
only through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man can
be born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is either
concealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek and
Roman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. This
debasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and is
unquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Roman
empires.
If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson that
neither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but only
different; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but that
each little group and class of humans has its particular contribution
to the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing the
mind from the shackles of ignorance--that darkness which obscures our
inner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-called
civilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women of
this century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we are
different and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individuality
is our contribution to the work of the cosmic law, which is seeking
to lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestial
light.
The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important place
in a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is one
of the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximately
four thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlier
ideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres," the emblem
of the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacred
character of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterized
as feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleur
de lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, and
they are called feminine, although really androgynous.
The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has
been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is
supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But
close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel
in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are
tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and
seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new
plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new
life. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not as
pronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone are
both present in the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and not
feminine alone.
Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as the
representative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life and
energy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle in
the Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although in
reality bi-sexual.
The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which the
male principle has dominated, as the one true and only God--the giver
of life, the energizing power of Creation--and the lily and the
Eucharist are both representative of the Female principle.
Historians mark the beginning of the worship of the _One True God_,
defined philosophically as the "Monistic" God-idea, from the building
of the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in the
earliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anything
suggestive of "confusion of tongues." The name unquestionably came
from "babil" meaning "the gate of God." Thus only is its meaning
obvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam and phallus
which obtained at that time. It is also evident that the phallic
worshippers borrowed the simile of "the gate of God" from the
worshippers of the yoni, who based their claim to truth upon the
indisputable fact, that out of the womb comes the life of plant, and
animal, and man.
The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel show
conclusively that it was a monument to the victory of the phallic
worshippers over the yoni, proving that the "one true and only God"
was male. From that time also God has been alluded to as "He,"
although in the Oriental countries, and particularly among the Hindus,
we find repeated allusions to the Deity as "The Divine Mother," and
all the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because of
this fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions and
philosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retained
the divinity of the female principle in theory, but not in fact.
Sex-worship is contemptuously alluded to in modern literature as
"strange and erotic ideas," or words equally condemnatory. But this is
an absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that the
mystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder;
and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomes
erotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth," and
when the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. It
becomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight for
supremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of union
shall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form of
religious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle of
birth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will the
family be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, be
worshipped.
The trinity in unity has been a widespread and persistent part of all
religions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal has
a permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is often
obscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seeking
the light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscured
truths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions," will
reveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modern
concepts.
But while we note a vague recognition of the female element in all our
modern religious systems, the general acceptance of the God-idea as
monistic and the gender of this monistic God as masculine betrays the
domination of phallicism over yoni worship and also over that of the
two principles in conjunction--the bi-une Deity. The tree is
universally accepted as an emblem of life-energy. The upright shape of
the tree; the sap which rises at certain periods from invisible
sources; and the fact that the germinal power of the seeds of the
fruits and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make the
tree symbolical of eternal life. The tree is either male or female,
except in certain instances where it is, like the lotus, androgynous,
such for example as the ash, which is the "sacred" tree of
Scandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, it
has been regarded as "sacred." The same idea is found throughout all
myths, and all religious symbolism, namely: _the attainment of
god-hood is reached when both sexes are united in one Being._
The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a
subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the
history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to
that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held
sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our
own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and
its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest,
in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The
Latin name for the pine is pinus.
Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that
step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its
spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its
root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the
life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the
male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity
contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally
became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the
spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race,
became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused
any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.
Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father,
Son and--Holy Ghost."
The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what
of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity
composed of three male beings?
It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the
female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian
Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their
reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the
Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are
evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the
God-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instruments
of the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the male
principle as the only true God.
So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modern
thought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardly
notice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerful
hypnotist.
Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand the
symbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblems
which constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems are
the pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika.
The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with their
protruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with the
mound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, which
venerated both sexes as co-equal. It is easy to realize why the Jews
were driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worship
the Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing the
phallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in the
God-head.
It is also significant that side by side with the present-day Feminist
Movement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptian
architecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art,
which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on its
artistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not with
acclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and so
closely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged the
centuries and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancient
civilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to the
Egyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, is
in vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobacco
and what not (so essentially an American custom) we find the
modernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika.
The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every country
and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally,
originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes
have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the
whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizing
its antiquity and its universality.
The two sex principles, joined in the center of the four arms or legs,
of the cross, accomplish that which is said (and truthfully if taken
on the physical plane only) to be impossible of accomplishment--they
square the circle. A circle is emblematical of completeness. Aum, the
Absolute, the Omniscient, is always typified by a circle. To "square
the circle" means esoterically to have reached godhood, and this can
be accomplished only by the male and female _united_ in spirit. The
swastika is essentially a bi-une sex symbol although it has been
sometimes called male and sometimes female, according to its shape,
which varies with the various meanings ascribed to it. Primitive man
was not prolific in language, and one symbol expressed many ideas
according to its varied form and position.
The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of the
generative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power was
conceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still
"testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substituted
for the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognition
of the Creative Principle, we note that the Bible is made up of
"testaments," which stand for its "sacredness."
Evidently it was only after the advent of the male God that oaths and
vows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's word
was reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of the Supreme Creative
power of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential of
union, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and it
is estimated that about six hundred years B.C. the level of debauchery
and vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies were
nothing more than orgies of sex-degradation.
The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility and
power evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced woman
to the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than a
receptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and a
man's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy--an ideal
which is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is bounded
by nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man.
Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? What
did it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answer
the idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret of
the generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as old
age conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened and
the supply insufficient.
This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, they
argued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) left
him. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generation
realize, although we know that old age with consequent cessation of
physical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even our
supposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energy
dies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place where
they realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know that
old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the
functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is
the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not
do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy
into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute
the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to
pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay
down his body and take it up again."
There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciously
leave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, while
they visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is no
more than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attained
that we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itself
confer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but that
these may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service--not as
payment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailing
law, which gives what we demand.
What we demand we naturally work for. If we serve Love, we get the
coin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed by
Jones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith.
Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed to
transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal
instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty
idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as
before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the
Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live
through many years of life without having loved some person or some
thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost
every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision.
The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.
From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood
was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the
logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which
reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and
engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the
"sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as
a final act of propitiation.
The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings,
and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of
orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible
as he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes and
holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by
police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of
the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the
idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.
In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death,
even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races
observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and
the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at
certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What
more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of
sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of
the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies?
And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God,
they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.
And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed;
but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to
sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the
aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came,
that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world,
and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and
trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had
been rigorously suppressed.
And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so
they conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read of
repeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freely
on the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people.
At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that the
only Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the final
debt of transgression and set men free from death, that they might
have eternal life, which to them meant life in the physical body.
It is not at all possible that Jesus had any such idea of his mission.
He was far too illumined for that, even judging from the meager
accounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story of
his mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea of
blood-sacrifice as _payment_ for the privilege of physical virility,
so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, could
not die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuries
and is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christian
churches in this civilized century.
And yet there is an esoteric truth underlying this universal idea of
sacrifice, and when we come to this in a subsequent chapter, we will
better understand how and why it has persisted throughout the
centuries.
CHAPTER III
PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE
From the study of ancient sex-worship to our twentieth century systems
of religion; our scientific discoveries; our intellectual standards of
philosophy and social ethics; and above all, perhaps, our marvelous
commercial order, connecting, as it does, the entire globe, seems a
far cry; but it is only another link in a chain and fits into the past
as accurately and as inevitably as the morning follows the night.
There is an erroneous idea current that public institutions, such as
law-courts, religious creeds, educational systems, reform movements,
et cetera, are causes of race-advancement. As a matter of fact they
are not causes but results. They do not determine progress; they
reflect it.
Causes start from the Center and radiate outward. We may realize this
more readily if we will remember that if we throw a pebble into a pool
of water, it starts innumerable little waves which traveling outward,
reach a point some distance from the central source, and if we were to
see the outermost wavelet only, we might imagine that the disturbance
begins and ends far from the place where the pebble was thrown.
This illustration explains the difference between the materialistic
and the metaphysical points of view. The former notes the result, and
the latter the cause of existing conditions. The mystical viewpoint
takes into account the fact that there is a cosmic law which acts like
a tidal-wave. Materialists call the action of this law "Evolution,"
assuming that its impetus comes from our physical activities. It is,
in fact, from the Center or spiritual source of life that all power,
all evolution, emanates. The spiritual is the intensity of power; the
physical is the attenuated.
The term, "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporous
space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent
reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago,
"The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our
mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we see
the effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods of
locomotion; our architecture; our commerce--in all the avenues of our
active civilization.
We wish to emphasize the point that every so-called advancement; every
discovery; every improvement in moral ideals as well as in mechanics,
and in those things that add to our physical comfort, comes from the
center of Life.
The external but _reflects_ the action of the Cosmic Law which
uncovers the vast areas of consciousness and frees the human soul from
the hypnotisms, and the limitations of the animal-mind.
Animal force is still strong in the world to-day, but it is not as
strong as it appears to be, because much of the seeming indifference
and cold-heartedness of the people, taken en masse, is due to the
hurried, feverish and insistent demands of our external life.
Underneath the surface, in the realm of the sub-conscious activities,
there is developing the spirit of unity; of sympathy; and a
consciousness of our innate relationship. This realization comes to
the surface in times of great stress and peril.
The whole trend of modern life symbolizes or reflects the _ideal_ of
unity, albeit the tooth and claw and growl of the animal in Man may be
seen and felt and heard in the vain effort to postpone the inevitable
dethronement of the animal force, which would dominate the weaker and
appropriate for the personal self, the creation of brain and hand,
much as the house-dog, satiated with over-feeding, buries the bone he
cannot eat lest some hungry brother-dog shall get it. Nevertheless,
despite the animal greed that still shows in our modern life, there is
plenty of evidence that we are on the upward spiral that leads to
unity--the effect of love.
The superficial observer, dominated by that instinct of fear which
seems to be so ingrained in our animal nature that we are all slaves
to it in some form or degree, sees in the present-day conditions a
menace to what he believes to be the moral life of the race, and
particularly as these conditions apply to the modern woman.
He sees women coming out of the seclusion of their "rightful sphere"
and meeting men on terms of equality. He sees what he terms "immodest
dress;" defiance of traditional ideas of etiquette and conduct; he
notes what appears to be a disregard for the faith of our fathers;
and, above all, a distaste for that special function of
woman--child-bearing. The superficial observer, both male and female,
feels great alarm.
But let us not be dismayed. Present day conditions, particularly as
they relate to the female principle of Creation, but reflect the
inevitable reaction from a one-sided course. The pendulum swings back
again and ultimately we will strike a balance; from domination to
unity; from struggle to harmony. Even American commercial life admits
the value of a vacation time.
Present day conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in a
well-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything that
disturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm to
the undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern life
which directly affect women, or in which we may say, the Female
Principle is especially concerned, we note a determined and united
demand for freedom.
Woman's demand for political equality is but a shadowgraph as it were
of the real demand which is the demand of the Divine Feminine
throughout all manifested life, for recognition of equality, in the
plan of creation. It is a symbol of the ideal of unity which finds
expression in the commercial world in trusts and labor unions; in the
"let us get together" plea of the various advocates of reform; of all
those enterprises which are seen to most directly affect the entire
human family.
That there are women who are blind to this fundamental idea of their
demand for political equality is true; and it is also true that there
are perhaps as many men as there are women who recognize the need of
woman's political and social equality, but this only proves the fact
which we have already emphasized, namely that it is not women as
personalities, but the Female Principle throughout the universe that
is at the root of the modern Feminist Movement. The male principle is
not confined to the form of man, neither is the female principle
always expressed in the form of woman. Many men exemplify more of the
maternal instinct than do certain women; neither must it be assumed
that this type of man is effeminate; or that the woman of Amazonian
physique is more masculine in thought and habit than is the little
frou-frou specimen of womankind who looks appealingly into the eyes of
her male escort, beseeching protection from the rude stares which she
has premeditatedly invited. Qualities are sexless and universal. It is
only in their specific combinations that they adequately represent the
masculine or the feminine gender.
Blessed are they who have learned the art of discrimination.
Broadly speaking, women are behaving in a manner which upsets all
precedent and promises ultimate emancipation from restraint.
But is it not possible that women no longer need restraint if they
ever needed it? Is it not possible that the world has grown up, and
that both men and women may safely be allowed the freedom of
self-government, with all possible mutual aid in the work of
establishing an upright, free, and trustworthy science of right
living?
That which is always in the future is never ours and if we are ever
going to be free and happy and well-conditioned there is no reason why
we should not make it soon.
Woman's demand for political equality is sometimes used as an excuse
to lessen her dignity and her place in society. People who do this are
of the same type as those before whom Sex cannot be discussed
intelligently because they do not realize the sacredness of Sex. They
are a remnant of the ages which have passed and which have left their
mark, in the idea of a half-sexed God, the "He," the spouseless Father
who brought forth the visible universe apparently without co-operation
with the Female Principle. This type of person prates much about the
dangers of race-suicide, meaning thereby the increasing tendency to
childlessness and not as should be taken into account the death rate
among children who are born of diseased and unfit parents and brought
into existence without the necessary conditions of sanitation, food
and care.
Our national Eugenic societies are hampered by false ideas of what
constitutes morality, being bound to uphold the tradition that the
child that is born of married parents, no matter how diseased in body
and deficient in mind, is better-born than is the offspring of
unmarried parents, even though the latter may be a model of physical
health and mental efficiency. Eugenics will remain limited in scope
until such time as the entire world adopts "in spirit and in truth"
the recent action of the European governments, and recognizes the
legitimacy of all children however born.
And although the action of the European governments was born of
nothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiers
might be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the human
race. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended to
all children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the cruel
and unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents.
Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and although
it seems a terrible price to pay for even so badly a needed reform as
this, Humanity has always paid dearly for its willful blindness. It
certainly should be evident to any sane mind that every child that is
born into this world has a moral and a legal right to be here.
Whatever may be said for or against parents, it is wicked stupidity to
brand an innocent child with the epithet "illegitimate." The lowest
animal has a right to be born. Many a beautiful and innocent child is
denied that right.
If it has taken one of the most bloody wars in history to establish
the right of birth, even so the struggle will not have been in vain,
because this right, once established in the hearts of all Humanity,
will forever do away with warfare. No doubt this assertion will sound
far-fetched to many, but the future will see the vindication of this
belief.
Birth is actually the most important function in life. If it is
immoral to be born, no matter what the conditions of such birth, what
possible chance have we to live morally? We cannot discriminate in
dealing with the great fundamentals of life.
This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws are
inviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child of
the beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of the
unmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into the
world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may
not be always polite, but she is always truthful.
As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth,
Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because
Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we
are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the
conditions of a part.
Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some
circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into
account our ideas of respectability.
The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate
for women to have children before they have been married?"
The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be
permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do
it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must
begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried
woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society
is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state,
because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of
maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries--both of which result
from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.
If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy
by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world
_desired by the mother_ is born in accordance with the highest
possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and
Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child
because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of
men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be
one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present
time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and
condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.
When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.
As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of motherhood, it is
inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of
child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who
would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more
perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make
motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might
not see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life.
We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We are
always seeking to check effects.
The average human being is little more than a phonographic record of
the dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious.
Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we will
find that the birthrate will increase among the "rich and
respectable," where now we note a determined desire to shirk the
responsibilities of parenthood.
We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will be
alarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is the
ideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationships
are neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established only
between free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choice
mean life and health.
The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from
self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases
tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious
selection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love is
inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of
all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however
well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical
aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the
effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease
and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no
real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to
Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher _ideal_,
rather than a higher _order_. The higher order can come only by
getting back to primal laws.
The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were
competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two
important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for
beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but
both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the
world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a
civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was
like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble,
and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but
freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.
Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was
unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of
force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal of
sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important
requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the
element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must
take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give
the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted
in, finally results in decadence.
We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of
those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of
education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are
embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious
example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a
marriage between a brother and sister--a custom which prevailed among
ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well
believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain
that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love.
Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.
In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to
exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established
that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions
only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and
intellectual.
Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of
"Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful
physical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul
and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we
instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.
Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual
behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end
and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid
maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's
rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.
Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish
and unselfish--are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer
rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women
living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if
they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of
semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light"
housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the
nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry
minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready
made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under
these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light
housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.
Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged
from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to
apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated
apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say,
notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a
cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something
back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day
life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem
deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always
upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.
This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates the
average woman, who is able physically and financially to bear children
and yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with the
planet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developed
and the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain falls
upon the just and the unjust alike.
Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change in
human ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an ideal
in which equality shall be more nearly represented and they give
themselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regenerating
work.
The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension of
it. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduate
from it or we return for another term, according as we have mastered
the studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and we
see that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth has
two aspects. One is from apparent selfishness and lack of the
temperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to women
as an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct.
The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to a
restless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of the
Feminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimes
we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the
cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically
termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and
they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind.
Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can put
into words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing is
not a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life.
Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle for
completeness knows intuitively, that even though she may never beget
mortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exercise
of her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, which
seemingly separates us from invisible areas. Moreover motherhood is
qualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made nor
unmade by the birthrate.
Two important considerations present themselves to the world today: One
is that woman--considered as the fecund receptive sex-principle--is
refusing the sex relationship on the old basis, however "respectable"
and well-intentioned that basis was. Generally speaking, it is evident
that the old basis of intercourse between the sexes has been, is
being, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied, refused, as the
approved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The other important
observation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this.
It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-conscious
limitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of a
condition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerable
divorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why are
women refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live with
their husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they less
courageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable of
love--either love of children or love of the father who begets the
children?
It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of love
than ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the first
time in the history of many generations, what we owe to the future.
Formerly men built entirely for self, and for the immediate present.
We can look back and trace the development of a race consciousness
from the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriers
between races and nations and sects and societies, as also between the
sexes, slowly dissolving.
Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying a
political, or educational or religions platform with an Occidental.
Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existed
between the Jew and the Gentile--now they exchange pulpits, and all
sects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women are
elected to political and educational offices. No matter that these
evidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are _promises_ of the
birth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when a
man's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediate
family only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at the
expense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate of
any other women and children.
To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of the
self interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and is
not, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated our
hair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were best
conserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is that
Love has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or more
altruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of love
is to expand; to grow; to _give_ of itself until unselfishness must
come with the final aim of love, which is _unity_ and not possession.
We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and more
inclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves the
higher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal of
love is possible to the woman of today than ever before. We must take
into consideration the average of the sex, at the same time not
forgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities of
both sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing and
unselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope,
the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealing
with principles and not merely with individuals.
Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal or
conjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may then
ask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusion
that women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demand
conditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind.
They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfect
race--a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and claw
and choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over the
possession of bones.
Ever and ever we have been promised the coming of the perfect man--the
"man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously
active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged
under the domination of the animal nature which subdues and
appropriates.
A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union.
Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite the
gods to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merely
reproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall be
something more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction.
This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according to
the development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union is
coming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type of
union, but also as the initiative of the promised time when the
kingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens.
All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief in
its efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surely
vain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keeps
his promises," which is simply one way of saying that the law of the
cosmos is reliable.
"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God," but both must agree
that whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. There
can be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in which
Love is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree of
logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also
so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on
the physical plane--a manifestation of life which even physicists are
bound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities.
We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of a
decreasing birthrate as we see it on the physical plane. There are
many other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and the
planets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is the
axis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony.
The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principle
is refusing maternity, and above all the _bondage_ of matrimony for
the important reason that the time has come for the rearing of the
Man-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex,
superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sense
gratification.
Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Why
should it not manifest in this most important of all our systems of
intercourse?
The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacred
or holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishment
for indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more than
half ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of a
cosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operated
with to advantage.
Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood.
Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony is
always marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children.
And there are many women with children who know not the first faint
dawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) love
which comes most often in the guise of motherhood, but which is
always present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other's
inner nature.
If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and the
rightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evade
motherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of all
life; if they will not rest until every child that is born into this
world is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is given
every advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moral
training, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only to
rival each other in the quality and the perfection of their
motherhood.
The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating the
birthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to prevent
conception, may be well meant as these things are consistent with
prevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to the
problem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule,
children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and provided
for.
Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparatively
every woman would be normal under proper social and economic
conditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because of
lack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because of
lack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modern
mo-loch, Public Opinion.
When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of his
children. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to be
free from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving her
free to be guided in the most vital and important function of her
life, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Love
will establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no other
power on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachments
nor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love is
the only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God.
Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will be
superseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and when
this comes to pass, Humanity will rise to that ideal.
CHAPTER IV
THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING
Any attempt to discuss subjects pertaining to the sex-relation with
intelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact that
sex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices,
reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted to
sex-worship and sex-degradation.
It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and to
make a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" of
matrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, so
to speak, the social institution of marriage.
Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which are
based upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to the
prejudices and "beliefs" of the average.
Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting and
fundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudices
must be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature's
confidence and be the sharer of her secrets."
The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark of theological
bias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previous
discovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend his
God"--as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it--were not
capable of self-defense.
It is due to this mistaken zeal on the part of the short-sighted ones,
that human evolution is slow, albeit it is likewise inevitable.
They are like those who, viewing the wrecking of a ruined habitation,
condemned by the Board of Public Safety, try to stop the process of
the workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have been
cleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable building
will be put up on the same ground; and anything from the old
architecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the new
building.
The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protect
them from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from their
brothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes a
desirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home,
rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study of
history should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changes
in human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods wait
upon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand for
improved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to be
bidden, "Enter, Friend."
As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals. Until there is a
more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite
certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does
duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor
thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many
complaints as a hypochondriac.
But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of the
fundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning of
recorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, very
satisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in social
and individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from a
study of the history of marriage.
There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all
phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees
all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the
exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external,
world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the
everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a
succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long
anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres
and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual
events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far
distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which
meets his eye.
Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according to
their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted
and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.
Humanity is ever seeking the Reality--the Noumenon, which we
intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.
The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages,
side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the
sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and
ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human
ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.
Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution,
obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of
forms is common.
And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change
and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family
species, as we have in the human family.
Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some
animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.
Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the
animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is
obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific,
to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is
greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild
and domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic
life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are
slaughtered for food.
The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the
male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and
rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself
very early among the various families, from motives of self-protection,
if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numerically
strong.
In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life,
and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some
species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist,
preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only
with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say
that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.
It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A
mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner.
It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a
creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided
in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power
undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it
may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no
temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habit
would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping
with the eagle character.
The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among
birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social
institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are
just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward
trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite
and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is
recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of
today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy
obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not
reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.
Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as
sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and
also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a
night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging
head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of
marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a
marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In
these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and
generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In
fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were
easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seems
to have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continue
the family.
Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the
very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had
no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family
was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female
heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he
would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her
family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became
the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.
Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually
acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his
"possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of
conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized
idea of "earning."
Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this
respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost
general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence
as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he
kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy
with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his
wife's person.
In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity
within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide
under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a
martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are
given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had
taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the
following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found
prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your
silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How
much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these
pestilential marauders?"
Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in
defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The
inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the
average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of
man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of
free-will.
Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the
possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more
ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.
Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what
constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same
idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much
investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another,
actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male
are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent
methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she
has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for
"outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions
through the safer channels of the law-courts.
The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a
part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral
code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to
themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense
being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of
satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably
respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her
neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual
matters, "as long as he provides well for me."
When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes
morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is
governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.
It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary
expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize
the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense,
which besmirch the path of Evolution.
Thus the tendency to æsthetic selection, always more pronounced in
the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false
valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.
In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove
many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not
like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her
claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare
bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we
may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman
of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the
"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which
critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized
our grandmothers.
Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating,
everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency;
and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the
right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by
capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.
One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the
world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman
approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal,
except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the
gens of the family.
These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal
status of women has been, as it is now, no more than what the
evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.
It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per
se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either
better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our
idea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women
in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which
would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it
has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best
has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of
personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in
him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at
first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically
conceded _his children at least_ first place; although the wife was
hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.
Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and
among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his _Evolution of
the Family_, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the
Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtless
the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle;
it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was
necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold
to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious
servant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she
might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the
Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no
other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her.
Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be
able to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the moment
of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."
The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia,
although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the
same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the
Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that
neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for
centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes,
where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has
been, and still is, deplorable.
In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most
inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her
husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male
children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and
mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she
allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice
for her.
This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous
woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of
women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class
was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of
power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law
unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced
prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on
terms of at least temporary social equality.
Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the
independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in
ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the
prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the
most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love
out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although
this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation,
inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with
so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the
evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served
two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;
and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the
aristocratic class from extinction through decadence.
As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a
degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages,
they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and,
as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of
wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the
freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of
their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I
have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and
houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils."
One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece
and Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their
civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically
was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in
which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of
procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished.
Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase
"between the devil and the deep sea."
Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for
the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took
her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the
transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily
to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she
would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse.
In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the
rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife
was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to
the eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in
a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our
social ethics.
It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct
influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred
years of Christian civilization among the white races.
Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have not
molded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, when
esoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union means
equality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; race
equality.
We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enough
to explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems to
be the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret to
say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the
construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect
to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas!
confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced by the professional
man.
The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is
judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of
foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of
what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge;
and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicity
of ideas and customs and creations.
Differentiation is the primal attempt.
Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first of
all she is different from, rather than identical with, men.
The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "feminine
frivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessing
that in her natural environment she does not consider herself his
equal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she may
deceive herself and others into thinking she is.
An individual is important to Society in proportion to his
originality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; some
hitherto unfamiliar view.
Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, a
consciousness of our unity with all life, we find that although
religious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasized
in the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity should
have been established, segregation has been the rule, and it is
without any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Church
that we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and her
co-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not a
consummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world.
That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in the
wake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction with
religious systems; and a determined disregard for what has been
presented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religious
creeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best they
have been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom is
the great liberator.
The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in America
and Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science,
mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" into
its literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the variety
of new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety of
names that we cannot here enumerate them.
Nevertheless, we are still many leagues short of realizing this ideal,
despite the preachments in its favor. Politically, the ideal of unity
is presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, and
Suffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "let
us get together on this," and in efforts at legislation that shall
control corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hours
of work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by the
rising sun of unity.
We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, in
order that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: What
does marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of the
social body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entire
Cosmos?
Has it any real place and purpose beyond that of procreation, or any
more spiritual function than the perpetuation of the human species?
CHAPTER V
THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION
Notwithstanding the patent fact that the institution of monogamous
marriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain that
any other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race.
Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promise
of the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfect
image of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for.
That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallen
far short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizing
that the ideal is right.
Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meeting
and the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfect
complementaries.
In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritual
counterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base of
union, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all the
laws of men be employed to keep them tied to each other in the body.
If two persons belong to each other by the inviolable law of spiritual
counterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep their
souls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in the
flesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"--the word meaning whole;
entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they may
be judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and any
attempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint of
exterior judgment must fail.
The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highest
ideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for that
reason insist that marriage as a social institution is always complete
and holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulus
of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical
attraction and cohesion--an instinct, which we share in common with
every form of life, from the lowest insect to man--shall they be
compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" in
the physical body?
We would say, "Heaven forbid!" only that the appeal is unnecessary.
Heaven does forbid, and that is why we see so many attempts to disrupt
these immature relationships.
"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passional
attractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all the
motions, growths, and activities in the physical and moral world,"
says a writer, and he adds: "The failure to attain the desired end,
and the warfare between uncongenial and repulsive elements is the
cause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in both
spheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would be
no storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If the
marriage between the individual will and understanding, between the
interior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regenerated
men upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriage
between the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise."
Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons of
opposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every other
activity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because of
this union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; all
morality comes from the ideal marriage--the union of Wisdom and Love.
To imagine that a function, so vitally important to our exterior life,
should have no place in the phases of life which we know as "higher,"
is a manifest absurdity, and comes from those attenuated concepts of
what constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; concepts
which, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord," have
temporarily defied modern progress.
There is no wide gulf between the spiritual and the material worlds,
although the material is but an imperfect reflection of the basic
principle of life.
Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature is a system of
nuptials," says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit or
Divine Life.
How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degrading
sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only,
we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types
of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that
Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret
of eternal and never-ceasing union of complementaries.
Take, for example, the symbol of the wedding-ring. This custom,
varying only in unimportant details, consistent with the prevailing
social custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days.
The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently by
both bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circle
of wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one," of the
finding by each of "the other half." The circle is always used to
express the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "without
beginning and without end."
According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of pure
gold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might not
acquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something more
than mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability to
sustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. It
symbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this priceless
blessing of perfect conjugal union, other than by his own efforts.
Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartal
union--which means actually "twain made one," comes only by dint of
strife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life.
Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that of
drinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life," at the completion
of a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of the
bride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; but
more generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Wine
drinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can be
enjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life--the
divine or spiritual sex-union.
This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness the
truth that only complementaries have the power to act and react,
without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfect
balance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction less
than the other, perfect balance is lacking.
Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was the
donning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly included
the bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to the
bride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greek
marriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads of
both bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged.
We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. We
have the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; and
the circlet which symbolizes eternity.
The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows
the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love;
which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal
truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until
we are _fit for the kingdom_.
The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremony
symbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritual
marriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life,
shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the wedding
veil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of the
physical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shall
know our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we have
found that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge of
our every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entire
panorama of the universe becomes an open book. There is no "visible"
and "invisible;" it is all One, with our own bi-une sex nature for the
pivotal center.
So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man that
we are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not sooner
penetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven," we say of
some self-sacrificing and loving soul, and the phrase suggests to
most of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all their
splendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning which
the splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes.
Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature is
in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are
symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant;
luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of
the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of
gems--diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?
It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is their
luminosity--their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the power
which we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has a
corresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have all
things which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell us
that all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Either
they tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not the
way."
The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown of
gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its
esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating
to the spiritual marriage--counterpartal union.
Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritual
body, the body also becomes sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, we
remember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weeds
are unregenerate flowers.
Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human body
is a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. The
changes produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything which
the experimental chemist has ever discovered in nature.
It is a fact well known to the pathologist that an unwilling wife,
however faithful she may be, if forced into the sexual act, may
present her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; nor
is this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized fact
that anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructive
thought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body.
In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriage
of Christian Rosy Cross," which is, when read with the key to its
esoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between the
sexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of the
Rosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets,"
which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicrucians
and other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union of
the male and the female principles throughout nature and culminating
in man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through the
perfect balance of sex.
It has been said that women were not admitted to the Brotherhood of
the Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there is plenty of evidence
to prove.
Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation of
the sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, it
became necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires of
Esoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; in
consequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the very
heart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory,
unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiated
into the secret code.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so far
succeeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women were
excluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of the
secret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by side
with this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbols
has been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixed
with frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to the
Virgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenith
of its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and,
either through fear of the influence of their work, or possibly
through lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, had
employed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power of
the Church.
This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter devoted to "The
Hidden Wisdom," and so we will leave it for the present.
One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in the
intimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove with
the ceremony of marriage.
The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. The
turtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for the
fervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for the
devotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if
either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to
death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are
happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a
symbol of peace.
Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure
prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from
ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying
over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth,
the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of
life. Let us also remember that they issued _in pairs_.
CHAPTER VI
CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE
From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function
was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages
of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost
general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex
function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in
common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par
with gluttony.
Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization
that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially
materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it
occupies today in fine stock-breeding.
Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude
toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the
history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was
evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather
erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it
sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.
In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the
normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he
experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we
must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the
sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a
revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.
Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy,
except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that
women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took the
best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of
wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the
orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all
these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and
beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it
came in the idea of asceticism--an instance where the remedy was worse
than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was
not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of
licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as
something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who
should have known better.
The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which
fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were
inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than
from any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note a
militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of
woman's claim to free expression.
While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church
instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy,
but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained,
from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy
Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the
inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted
children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their
comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath
the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are
gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes
to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old,
nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been
to hold to this central truth of all Life--religious, social,
national, and domestic--the truth that it is only by exalting the
maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour
of mankind.
And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be
the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church
itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"--the pure Love between one
man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour
that ever was or ever will be--the pure Christ-child that is born of
conterpartal union.
Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a
city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that
even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a
pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the
omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of his
discovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have been
swallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember also
that this central idea has been the foundation of all religious rites
since time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric of
Christianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, he
will see that it has merely been _revealed_, and the revelation will
prove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual and
the most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that Perfect
Love is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withhold
Heaven from us, if we have this perfect love.
Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every other
religious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true and
only God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears;
according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-une
God, will be our spiritual development.
We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when we
abandon it as unclean and unworthy and unholy; both attitudes are
abnormal, and unbalanced.
Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balanced
person is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balanced
individual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced and
therefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced and
healthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; this
fact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is now
considering, to wit: the earth's axis may be straightened, and, if so,
a uniform temperature will prevail on this globe.
Returning to a consideration of the subjects which head this chapter,
we find it necessary to clear the ground a little, in regard to a
definition of words.
The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in the
matter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of the
sex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The word
has come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from the
sex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, that
any indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, our
modern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestly
paradoxical that they are absurd.
On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful and
holy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as an
indecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh.
We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible only
because of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taught
that sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lower
state of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we are
told that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, where
there is no such "polluting sin" as sex-love.
We certainly do need balance.
The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the
undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid
of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our
minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person;
it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not
surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection
with the male. It is strictly a female attribute--nay, we may almost
say, "organ."
If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of
opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression,
or--which occurs more frequently--as a commercial expediency,
believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial
market--if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes
bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is
extolled.
This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a
bridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should
the evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature
was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the
arch-enemy of both sexes.
And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may
look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the
Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their
sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon
the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery,
among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of
that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the
deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related
by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen
years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by
her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had
"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the
same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered
quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always
over-crowded with similar sales.
Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings
keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage;
inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious,
blissful life.
Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed
to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price
for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual
deception has been the rule.
Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the
wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story
of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman
brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly
from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given
birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author
made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and
coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of
the clerical critics.
When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever
held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld
almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one
hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in
the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the _One primordial, and
indestructible key to salvation_--the birth of the god-man through the
recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.
But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there
is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to
regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in
sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic
aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently
described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."
If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it were
profane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view of
mysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would be
able to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack.
The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance and
ecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Either
they will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is due
the subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or they
must be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns all
sexual desire--that of eroticism and innate and ineradicable
depravity.
Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, the
paroxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to the
Holy Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedly
obnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtue
of prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to an
ideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual,
then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at once
both explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "the
mystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using the
terminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physical
union than the word "married") was the "bride-groom;" more than that;
she declared that she was married with a ring, set with precious
stones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring.
Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employ
when exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is
singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of
the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and
exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the
dilettante lover.
To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed within
themselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age of
sexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human love
spiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal to
that of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for the
intensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them into
such an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the bliss
of the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, and
were totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-called
practical life.
Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his
"Varieties of Religious Experience," says: "Her idea of religion seems
to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so
without irreverence--between the devotee and the Deity." Although this
estimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless be shocking to
the people who think they are pious, we take an optimistic view of it,
and suggest that the saint's idea of religion is far more satisfying
than that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most of
the female saints, became "the bride of Christ"--the _man_ Jesus, the
Christ, let it be remembered.
St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gave
herself up so wholly to this inward contemplation; to fasting, prayer,
and withdrawal from the outer to the inner life, that she lived as the
"bride of God," in such daily contact with Him as would fitly describe
any love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God"
indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses and
compliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover.
In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that he
selected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and
"consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning with
love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity." In consequence of this
vow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautiful
women.
Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were not
so, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as the
object of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, and
Theresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the Virgin
Mary.
"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse with her guardian angel,
who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun and
with a crown of glory on his head."
St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved with
extravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "a
young man of such radiant beauty and purity that he melted her soul."
The truth is that, in seeking to escape from the "sin" of human love,
as seen in the world, in the union of the sexes, they touched the very
main-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown to
the merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritual
sex-union.
Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints really
came into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms of
holy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequently
appear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?
The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must be
interpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in these
instances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology,
that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even though
the visions did relate to some person other than the members of the
Holy Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would have
been attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint.
They were practically compelled to include God and Christ in their
ecstacies to prove their respectability.
One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which
"flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularly
applicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described by
those who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborg
so constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights." This
phrase is "melting love." It is a feeling of melting or merging into
the other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed by
the two souls. In fact, it is _union_; whereas the lesser, or we may
say the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but _contact_.
If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives of
the saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we are
sorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages,
which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all we
may know of the "love of God," is by analogous comparison to what we
know of human love.
If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitably
arrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In which
event, the very word itself would have lost its significance.
The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects of
saintliness lies in the realization that neither the saints
themselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had any
conception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened and
unprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly ecstacies,
postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, be
objectionable, what can be said of the only other view which is
possible in the light of the evidence submitted?
Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we must
needs decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue.
For example, consider the character of a mother of the
self-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of the
human family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect the
generations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with an
unmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of the
opposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment;
upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of this
self-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even common
affection. Who is the more chaste?
Coventry Patmore says:
"Virgins are they before the Lord,
Whose souls are pure. The vestal fire
Is not, as some mis-read the Word,
By Marriage quenched, but burns the higher."
If purity of soul were synonymous with celibacy, the entire
constantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished;
but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward the
divine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purer
conception of love. As we approach a higher type of civilization, the
broader, deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. The
more spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and our
love-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual love
is less sexual than is physical love. Spiritual love is physical love,
_plus_ all the other phases of love.
The real objection to sex love on the physical plane is not based upon
its strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than an
attraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, it
has no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like the
electrical wire that is "short circuited," it expends itself in one
spasmodic combustion.
True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common and
erroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process of
subtraction.
We need go no further than to review the processes in the external
world of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of the
spiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea of
exclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called
"spiritual."
All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Where
formerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we now
harness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces of
electricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering between
two single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions of
persons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness, as we
approach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging;
drawing within.
The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to the
female pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in external
life. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid the
suction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, and
union between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth to
individual human life, and we have what?
_Counterpartal Sex-union._
CHAPTER VII
SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?
We have heard much in recent years of "affinities," and "soul-mates,"
and we are likely to hear much more in the future. So much that is
unsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that we
almost hesitate to employ them; but that is always the way with Fear.
It builds a high wall between us and Truth, and dares us to scale it.
We accept the challenge.
To begin with, the words are not synonymous, although frequently used
as such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes and
appetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages of
development may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highly
intellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend to
attract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtue
of mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only--that is, when it is
because two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskey
diluted; or their wine iced--we are apt to find the result in a
mistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for the
reasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which to
draw. The chemistry of the body changes with time and emotional
experiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from a
congeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived.
Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches a
state higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos.
Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to the
senses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; but
back of thought is desire; and back of desire is design--cosmic design
we may say--expressing itself discretively; in individuals.
Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of a
finer nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-conscious
attraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons of
the opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference for
each others' society which deceives the average on-looker into
thinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of fact
there may never have been any thought of such relationship.
A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, or
Margaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion of
men for many years without having entered into any more intimate
relationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past,
and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirable
companionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seen
twice with the same man without having the neighbors speculating as
to a suitable name for the baby.
More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settle
themselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectual
affinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from the
old thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse,
and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexual
appetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane of
intellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or by
the force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking to
spoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature did
not intend it to be so.
A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beings
now accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes,
a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. He
was a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of a
degree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; she
was moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a month
of married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community,
remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval and
shocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendship
with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the
ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.
The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be
"yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual
predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire.
And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an
idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It
is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an
idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.
Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon
personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other
to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it
still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in
the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.
A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived
together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they
agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They
agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either
come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given
without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor
and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of
civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.
True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to
be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her
up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual
companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and
disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which
is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the
animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality
than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By
exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended
or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to
fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized
man vents his remaining savagery.
Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And
while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some
degree of mutuality, are a step higher in social development than were
the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic
exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where
woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an
"old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must
go through an evolutionary phase.
Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust,
these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and
mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they
evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual
affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency
than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was
heard so frequently as it is now.
The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since
women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage
bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more
frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically
independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have
been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences.
And it is at the _evidence_ of marital unhappiness that all the
criticism is directed.
If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce
tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to
the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal
moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother
is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood,
whether she is a wife or not.
This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many.
The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become
chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public
morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are
our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they
are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first
be demolished, before they are rebuilt.
The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one
single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals,
that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the
whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest
change in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we go
on year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word of
the Century. If "self-improvement," then social improvement. Mankind
is still in the making, as far as external conditions are concerned.
The complaint goes up from every side, that women refuse motherhood.
Girls who have been carefully reared, brought up in the most orthodox
movement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention of
finding a rich husband and not, emphatically, _not_ having any
children.
May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girls
who become mothers without first becoming wives?
We are wont to refer to unmarried mothers as "unfortunates" and
"ruined." But in what does the misfortune consist, and wherein are
they ruined?
Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because she
has loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any way
except that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nigh
unforgivable stupidity?
The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain
famous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respect
in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no
husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place
accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's
well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of
perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband,
but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"
We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example,
and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard
child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said
that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but
observation should convince us that in all too many instances the
first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime
against posterity.
We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a
husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We
endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we
insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the
greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the
sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the
unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one,
when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes
courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a
hypocritical world.
The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and
happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in
the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence,
alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will
be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no
power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may
temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.
What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention is
that affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we may
have many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possibly
have more than one soul-mate.
Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves that
make a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merely
similar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because of
curiosity or dissimiliarity.
They belong to each other because together they complete a perfect
balance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balance
the qualities lacking in the other.
In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, and
re-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, instead
of merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this external
plane of consciousness.
Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, because
the real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interior
nature exists independently of the physical organism.
Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This is
manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the
avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing
called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we
note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom
the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuries
the race-thought seeks the underlying cause for specific effects,
instead of, as heretofore, being satisfied to deal with effects only,
suppressing those that are unpleasant and extolling those that seem
agreeable.
The scientist expresses it thus: "Nature is giving up her secrets to
man." The metaphysician puts it this way: "The soul of man is
unveiling, and soon we shall know each other in Truth." The
religionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St.
Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "we
shall see each other face to face; not as now through a glass,
darkly."
This tendency to "get behind the scenes" as it were, to penetrate the
crust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature,
may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders of
denunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who are
not yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and
"respectability," women have insisted upon freedom of the body in
dress until at last the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad woman
excites little adverse comment. The fact has at last established
itself that the female form has legs.
This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted to
see exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman has
always known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the game
of enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her
"meal-ticket." She could always keep him guessing as to whether or not
she had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund of
curiosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed to
woman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donning
the matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have always
known this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageable
daughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped to
secure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressed
thus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of the
respectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is the
standard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would have
us retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies are
vile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an idea
of modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit has
fled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it was
founded upon the idea that woman was an instrument of the devil
himself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked,
and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innate
defilement.
The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admit
women to the communion table in the "holy sacrament." A fine chance
has any sacrament of being holy, with one half of it missing!
The old idea of womanly modesty consisted of blushing with shame and
embarrassment if by chance her ankles became exposed to the interested
and curious gaze of a male. Notwithstanding this ideal of modesty, the
designing and beguiling female managed to arrange just such a
contretemps every time there was an eligible male within sight; if
discovered, she either assumed a look of infantile innocence, or she
took the opportunity to coax a becoming blush.
To be sure, this does not accurately describe all women of "the good
old days." There was the other type.
Nature manifests in extremes. There was the type, fitting ancestors to
those women of to-day who are outraged and shocked at the present-day
fashions, which actually disclose the fact that women are
anatomatically endowed with legs and hips, quite in defiance of man's
inherited predilection for making this discovery under conditions that
would pamper to his satiating sex-appetite. They, poor creatures, were
dreadfully ashamed of being women, and they did all that was possible
to conceal the fact. They, doubtless, would gladly have amputated
their legs, if the ministers had so decreed, and they apologized to
the world every time an unforseen circumstance uncovered a portion of
these offensive legs. In fact, they denied the existence of "said
members," and alluded to them tentatively and with modest hesitation,
as "limbs."
"But," some will exclaim, "we cannot see any possible connection
between a regenerated race, and a fashion which permits the display of
the female figure upon the public streets, where men who are as yet
un-regenerated, and licentious, may leer and pass vile remarks, and
suggest lustful thoughts."
Few can see any connection between our so-called practical, everyday
life, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life as
something remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distant
future. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that we
postpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the human
family has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdom
come upon earth," they apparently have not had the slightest idea that
God would take them at their word.
They are like the old darky who called upon "de Lawd to strike him
dead if he was not telling the truth," when as a matter of fact he was
lying roundly. At that moment a bricklayer on the building above where
Rastus was standing, dropped a brick, which struck the old darkey on
the head, and he exclaimed "What's de matter, good Lawd, caint
you'all take a joke?"
The Kingdom of God, from all records, whether orthodox or heterodox,
has been described as the abode of angels; and angels have been
pictured as nearly nude as our silly "morality" would permit. No one
has as yet suggested that we compel the angels to wear hoopskirts,
although "September Morn" has been compelled, by police regulation, to
don a sweater.
The spiritual life awaits our cognizance, just behind the transparent
veil of our limited mortal consciousness. This is the message of the
"unveiling" of the female form. This is the time of woman's revealment
of true modesty; true ideals. The Female Principle, representing the
spiritual element in nature, hitherto shut in; covered up; hidden--is
coming out.
Men must learn to be able to look upon the female form without spasms
of either lustful desires; or contemptuous indifference.
There was a time when the presence of a female office-force in the
business section of a city was the signal for unwarranted familiarity
on the part of some of the male members of a corporation. There was a
time, when women first invaded the ranks of the "down-town" business
centers, that a woman's appointment to a responsible position rested
upon her claims to feminine attractiveness. Now, the only question
asked is, "Is she efficient?"
_That which she is, in her interior nature, is the final test of her
power._ When men have become inured to the knowledge, so long
concealed, that women have legs and that there is no more
seductiveness in them than in their faces, the love of man for woman
will undergo the same evolution that his estimate of her business
efficiency has undergone. He will judge her by what she is in her
interior nature; and his sexual desires, now manifested distractedly
in mere love of the female, will become concentrated in love of the
one woman to whom his soul turns in irresistible sex-attraction, as
unerringly as the needle turns to the pole to which it is magnetized.
Is this fact so unmanifest? Does not everything point to it?
A few years ago, a man and a woman could not pass a day together in
mutual conversation, and interest, without encroachment upon the one
emotion which they were supposed to hold in common--sexual attraction.
That was indeed the whole sum and substance of communication between
the two sexes, if we may except the rare instances which history has
made much of, because of their rarity--women of the French salons, who
have become famous for their wit and beauty, in neither of which
attributes did they outstrip the average self-supporting woman of
today.
But custom has slowly, but perceptibly, established the possibility of
a frank and non-sentimental companionship between the male and the
female, and the result is that both are much more clear as to the true
character of their sentiments toward each other. Neither is blinded
by the force of undifferentiated sex-attraction.
There must be some specific basis of mutual love; hence we have the
vogue of the "affinity," and by the term is instantly recognized a
special force of attraction, independent of undifferentiated sex
alone. It is known that there is at least an assumption of an interior
attraction, and we insist that affinity marriages, however incomplete
as yet, are still superior in motive to that of mere marriage, where
it is a case of _a_ male and _a_ female, united by propinquity; family
considerations; commercial interests; class association; or what not.
Affinities at least have the grace to presuppose a special
sex-attraction. They argue for the ultimate goal of special and
permanent selection, even if they fail to reach it.
That there will be many failures during the journey from the
sense-conscious life, to the soul-conscious life, is a foregone
conclusion. The pathway of Love has always been a thorny one, but
those who are on the high ground may look across into the rose-strewn
garden, and know that the little god is aiming his arrows at the
interior nature of those whom he would unite. He is not blind. His
sight is illumined and he sees that the soul can unite only with its
mate. True it is that "the course of true love never did run smooth,"
but let us hope that the time is coming when it will be less thorny.
_There are no mismates in soul-union._
This truth is the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics. It is the
hidden wisdom of the initiates; the alchemical mysteries of the
Ancients. It is told to us in the fairy story of the Sleeping
Princess--a story which is found in the folk-lore of every country of
the globe. It is the philosopher's stone, which when found, opens the
door to all wisdoms.
_There can be no mismates in soul-union._
Neither can there be any sexual "temptation," or desire outside of
this union, when once found.
"But never shall he faint or fall
Who lists to hear, o'er every fate,
The sweeter and the higher call
Of his true mate.
I hear it wheresoe'er I rove;
She holds me safe from shame or sin;
The holy temple of her love
I worship in."
A time when "the twain shall be" virtually, "one flesh" and the
"outside as the inside" is not a chimerical dream.
When the physical body is as much reverenced as is the spiritual; when
in fact, the soul is revealed (unveiled) to our mortal consciousness;
when the mind has been freed from its load of prejudices and fears and
doubts and belief in sin; then we shall, indeed, truly see each other.
We do not see each other now, unless perhaps we have developed that
spiritual insight which is not blinded by appearances, but which
contacts the interior nature. But the revealing, the uncovering
process has begun. We have come to the time so long anticipated; so
earnestly promised, when "naked and unashamed" we should "re-enter the
lost Paradise."
Well, the women, God bless them, are as naked as the tender morality
of our police officials will permit and as unashamed as it is possible
to be with the handicap of a puritanical ancestry, which was so
evil-minded as to suspect God himself of sin when He formed the
"wicked" body.
Prudists may howl; and legislators may legislate; but the course of
the Cosmic Law which would free us and bestow upon us Peace and Love
and Happiness without stint, has never been stopped, although it has
been obstructed.
Let us examine some points of the Hidden Wisdom, in the light of this
postulate, and see if the conclusion is not warranted.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED
As we have previously observed, there is what may be termed a
religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from the
standpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is in
everything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of the
same subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticism
itself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distance
view of science.
Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noise
over calling each other black, we find the scientist frequently
disdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equal
disapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from his
point of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of the
same pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at the
cause. In their final calculations they arrive at the same conclusion,
although they call it by different names.
The scientist says that everything proceeds from the one eternal
energy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with the
external. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest." In
reference to this definition of religious mysticism, perhaps the
phraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism,"
is the best possible exposition of the position of the religious
mystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religious
mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of the
living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attempt
to realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal in
the eternal, and the eternal in the temporal."
Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using other
terminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimately
say, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms of
discovery.
The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to
measure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrum
somewhere beyond."
The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of the
Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the
hypothetical base of algebraical science--the unknown quantity of
which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from
cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete,
perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have
deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercise
the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is a
most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with the
same superficial idea that they entertain in regard to puzzles, saying
"it is only a puzzle"--utterly ignoring the value of exercising the
inductive reasoning faculties.
Fairy stories are popularly supposed to be for the entertainment and
amusement of children. In reality they are the universal language of
symbolism. There is not a single fairy story which has not been handed
down from generation to generation, and, what is more suggestive, each
story is told with astonishing lack of variation, in every tongue and
throughout every nation on this earth.
The stories involving the turning of men into animals and their final
restoration to human form, as a reward for some service, some
sacrifice, typifies the two-fold nature of Man. He may live in his
animal, or exterior nature; or he may develop his spiritual, or
interior nature; through service; through unselfish love. Our limited
mortal consciousness is responsible for the tendency to personify
everything, instead of to realize the principles underlying all
expression. God and the Devil have been the personification of the two
phases of the principles of Evolution, from animal man to spiritual
man.
Romulus and Remus have been presented as an actual and specific
instance of twins; likewise Castor and Pollux. Almost every child
instinctively alludes to himself or herself, as either "the good
little me" or the "bad little me." "O, I didn't do that; it was the
bad little Dorothy," or "Harold," as the case may be, is the
child-like way of expressing the innate consciousness that there is
an interior and an exterior nature to all of us.
The union of gods with mortals, which forms the gist of Mythological
tales, symbolizes the god-like and the mortal qualities inherent in
human nature. Mortals raised to the abode of the gods; and the gods
descended into mortal life; symbolize the interchangeability of what
we term matter and spirit--the power of transmutation of the lower
into the higher life.
Volumes could be written upon the subject, and we will therefore try
to confine our reviews to the symbolical traditions which deal most
directly with the relations of the sexes.
In religious symbology, the story of the ark stands as the supreme
type of creation, through the conjunction of the sexes.
The cherubim are, when all is said and done, nothing more, nor yet
less, than spiritual children--the result of spiritual sex-union.
And in this later synoptic mysticism of the ark of the Covenant, we
are informed that "every gift within the tabernacle is willingly
offered." If we will but contemplate the volumes of wisdom contained
within that sentence, we cannot fail to conclude that every
infinitesimal particle of coercion in whatsoever shape and form,
individual, economic, ethical, or religious, must be excluded from the
regenerated, perfect, ideal sex-relation; otherwise we do not attain
it.
If the Ancients seemed to take some of these folk-lore stories too
literally, we of this "practical" age, do not take them literally
enough.
We have imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended in
the physical. This view is excusable in the case of the materialist,
if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for
the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life.
Since sex is the cause and the result of what we know of creation;
since it is the foundation of all the qualities that we know as
spiritual laws; friendship; unselfishness; fidelity; paternal
solicitude--it is absolutely certain that the most beautiful things we
know here must have a correspondence in the life hereafter. Of these
beautiful things in life, babies come first; with birds and flowers
and music as fitting accessories.
But to return to the ark of the covenant. The perpetual flame on the
altar (the center) is the undying Flame of spiritual love--and by that
we mean sex-love, let it be understood. If we seem to repeat this too
frequently it is because of the almost general habit of the race to
apologize for sex-love. The erroneous idea obtains, that spiritual
love is sexless. All too frequently we come across the phrase, "with a
love that has in it nothing of human love," the writer evidently
anxious to convey the impression of tremendous spirituality and the
consequent elimination of the sex function.
And so we emphasize once more, and we may do so again, the assurance
that the symbol of the never-dying flame upon the altar is typical of
the never-dying spirit of sex-love. Spirit is ever symbolized by
flame, as in the "flaming sword" of the archangel.
The Deity upon the seat of the altar symbolizes the bi-une
Sex-principle of creation.
The reason that the Jewish people have claimed that they were "God's
chosen people" is because, in their symbolism of the ark of the
Covenant, all Israel was grouped under the tabernacle. The formation
of the tabernacle proves that it typifies the mother's womb. The
tabernacle was guarded by the priests who _were sworn to purity_; thus
they symbolized the esoteric truth that the pure spiritual sex-union
bestows immortal god-hood.
Let us take another story, that of the life-token. This is best told
in the story of the Holy Grail, although it is found in all the
fairy-books of all nations, in the language and form befitting the
race to which it belongs.
In the original, that is in the earliest recitals of this life-token
story, we find that the thing left behind, as a _center_ (which is
always guarded and protected in various ways), was a tree. Here, we
have the phallic symbol as the life-token. But in the story of the
Holy Grail, the cup is the life token to be guarded; it is the sacred
symbol of the quest and it is of a design resembling the red rose of
the Templars. This time it is the yoni--literally the _chalice_ of the
_holy communion_; the centre of the radiant circle, which is the
answer to all the problems within the radius. It is the search for,
and the finding of, the balance in counterpartal union. It is the X of
Being, and only the purest and the noblest of the Knights of the
"Round Table" essay the difficult quest. The "mound of Venus" is
another name for the "Round Table."
Again is emphasized the necessity for purity, and this purity,
although including all the spiritual qualities: fidelity; bravery;
self-sacrifice; humanity; love of truth; culminates in sexual purity.
"Blessed are the pure in heart (the pulse of the soul) for they shall
see God." We revise this latter part, and we say "for they shall be
_gods_."
Let us consider the story of the "sleeping Princess." She is depicted
as a princess, first of all, because she is the daughter of a king; a
king is an earthly ruler, or exalted person. Esoterically, she is the
daughter of the exalted God, and she is the soul. Sometimes this story
is told in the male gender, but everywhere the essential points are
the same.
Wagner, who is known as a Mystic, has illustrated the story in
Brunhilde and Siegfried. Brunhilde is an immortal--a goddess, who
renounces her immortality to become a woman.
She sleeps on the top of a high mountain and she is surrounded by a
circle of flame; and here she sleeps, despite all efforts to arouse
her, until awakened by the touch of Siegfried--the one human being in
all the universe who could awaken the sleeping princess.
The high mountain symbolizes the highest love of which we are capable.
To reach the soul of the exalted woman, typified in the fairy-story by
the word princess, and later, by Wagner, as the goddess, man must be
her mate. _No other can enter the womb of her soul_, though many may
effect an entrance to the outer court.
This truth, as absolute as life itself, solves all the problems of the
mystery of love and its joys and sorrows. No soul can wholly,
unreservedly love the "wrong" one. Though we may love and die of the
pain of unrequited loving, yet love is its own self-justification, and
its own reward. The pathway of love leads up the mountain top, but no
one who reaches the summit shall fail to find that for which he seeks.
The soul of man, and of woman, has been playing a game of blind-man's
bluff--a fitting name for the game it is, too. Unable to see anything
but the exterior nature, and longing for success in the search, we
have frantically grabbed here and there, and appropriated that which
we grabbed, with a self-complacency and an egotism of which little
Jack Horner would be ashamed.
In the symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders, such as the
Ancient Alchemists; the Hermetics; the Rosicrusians; and in modern
times, the Free Masons, we have this story of the search for the
ultimate balance of soul union, told in language veiled unless we are
fit to know; but openly enough if we are fit. And in all these orders
(alleged guardians of the hidden wisdom) we have varying degrees of
initiation; and in each degree the initiate must undergo certain
trials to prove his fearlessness; his fidelity; his fitness, in other
words, for the final revealment of all, which is the initiation into
the "holy of holies;" the "secret chamber" and the degree of
"mastership."
In the order of Masonry, the highest degree is that of the Templar.
The symbol of the Templars is the red rose on the cross, together with
the star and the crescent. The star preserves the esotericism of its
nomenclature, in whatever sphere it is used, namely, the power of
radiating light. It stands for the radiant center. The Knights Templar
sought the radiant center to complete their half circle, and when they
should have found, they were to become radiant with the light of
spiritual power. That they originally at least, understood the way of
this initiation, is evident by the symbol of the rose and the
cross--the combined phallus and yoni.
This fact is the underlying cause of the open and hereditary enmity of
the Church of Rome for the modern order of Freemasons. The Church
sought to specialize in the persons of the Virgin Mary and her Son the
eternal principles of the "way of the cross." The temporal power of
the Church could be built up only by offering a complete system of
salvation within the church itself. At the same time, the utter
degradation of Sex, which had reached its depths under Roman
civilization, called for as complete a reversion of the ideas of the
Ancient sex-worshippers, as was consistent with the truth.
Hence we find the extreme attitude of the Church opposing all
reference to sex as other than a part of the temptations of the Evil
One, although they did retain the central truth typified by the Holy
Virgin Mother, and the pure and perfect child.
The Alchemists are supposed to have been imbued with the desire and,
to some extent, at least, were regarded as having the knowledge of how
to make gold. This gold-making was always accomplished by
transmutation of the baser (lower) metals; also, the knowledge of how
to accomplish this transmutation was possible only to one possessing
"the philosopher's stone."
If we will but remember that this "philosopher's stone" was of such a
purity that it was almost impossible to find it; that, although
several initiates claimed to possess the stone, yet no visible proof
of its existence, or of gold resulting from lead or copper, was ever
offered; and again if we will realize the fine distinction between the
words "found" and "discovered," and take note that the word "found" is
used almost invariably in connection with those who claimed to possess
the stone, we will arrive at the obvious conclusion that the secret of
the Alchemists was of an interior nature. We "discover" outside of
ourselves; we "find" within. Above all, the "stone of great purity" is
the same that was raised at Babylon, supplanting the yoni, which is
to say, the phallic symbol.
A philosopher is one who is wise in his interior nature; his wisdom is
of the esoteric quality; we do not apply the term "philosopher" to
either great educators, or great financiers; but to those whose
activities are turned within.
The force which is manifested in the lower desires and passions, when
transmuted into spiritual channels, opens the door to the golden light
of illumination.
To become in reality a Prince of the Rosy Cross bestows the exaltation
and the power, typified by that of an earthly prince--one who is
exalted above the common man.
It is doubtful, indeed, if many of the ancient alchemists attained to
this exalted degree in its true significance; and we may readily
believe that in an age in which wealth was so eagerly sought; temporal
power so much desired; where deception was almost general; that few
lived the requisite purity of life to have accomplished the
transmutation; so today there is not one in a thousand of the many who
have taken the degree of "Knight Templar," who recognizes its esoteric
meaning.
But words have a trick of trapping us, and we note that the word
"taken" is invariably used in referring to modern Masonic initiation.
Verily they have "taken" the degree in its outward semblance. They
have not attained to its powers and privileges.
Nor can they do so, when they exclude the very "gate of life" from the
order. They may become masons (builders of the temple), but how can
they become Architects, when they have not entered the tabernacle?
In a search for hidden meanings, and for a secret tradition which is
believed to be discoverable in Kabalistic and Hermetic literature, we
find, if we possess true insight, the one indubitable truth,
subordinating all the other symbols, namely that of the supremacy, the
finality, of the sublimated sex-union, resulting in immortal
mastership.
Most modern interpreters of the archives of these ancient philosophers
ignore the sexual significance of the arcana, but a glimpse at the
symbols will readily convince the initiated of their identity with
sexual symbology.
For example in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi
(Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate
used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes
"had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The
sexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but this
may be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of the
alchemical symbols, or it may be due to a materialistic tendency on
the part of the compiler.
The plates, however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed to
Basil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "The
Great Hermetic Arcanum," the supreme and significant point of the
illustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through which
the initiate travels in his search for the supreme god-head, two
doves, holding in their beaks a crown. The doves are perfectly
matched. The crown is balanced between them, and the figure tops the
circle, under the heading "regeneration."
In another plate, which the author presents as "the Philosophic Cross,
or Plan of the Third Temple as prophesied by Ezekiel," we note again,
that the crown of the symbolical temple represents the red rose upon a
cross, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle with
outstretched wings, shielding her little brood, and on either side a
tree and a flowering rosebush.
Here is the symbol par excellence of generation. The creative function
of the male and the female in procreative conjunctivity.
The employment of the eagle as a religious symbol may be traced back
to the civilization of the Hittites.
Only a few years ago, two English archæologists discovered a
double-headed eagle in Asia. This was identical with those seen
perpetuating religious rites and ceremonies of the sex-worshipers. An
eagle holding in its talons a serpent is an emblem well known today.
The origin of the adoption of the eagle as a religious, though not
necessarily a "sacred," symbol by prehistoric races, may easily be
imagined, if we consider that the eagle is a bird of tremendous power;
and that it soars to unreachable heights; and that it unquestionably
was at some time seen to swoop down and carry off the serpent,
possibly even during their ceremonies of serpent-worship.
This idea becomes quite convincing when we also remember that the
ceremonies of the serpent worshipers were carried on, as far as
feasible, upon the mountain. We allude to this stage of religious
history as "serpent worship," but when we realize the points of
analogy between the serpent and the phallus it is apparent that the
serpent was only the nature-emblem of generation, as manifested by the
male principle.
"The eagle and the dove" is a phrase employed today to illustrate the
law of antithesis, and it is more than probable that the eagle
represented the lower nature of the sex-relation, in juxtaposition to
the higher, as the dove is emblematical of the spiritualized aspect of
sex-love. We have an analogy to that of the eagle and the dove in the
Biblical allusion to "the last day; when God will separate the 'sheep
from the goats,'" Here again is a pertinent reference to the sex
nature. The goat is a symbol of sensuality and lust, principally
because he has perverted sexual proclivities, notably that of
coercion. For this reason, Classical Mythology employs the satyr, a
creature half man and half goat, to typify the lowest form of the sex
call in man.
On the other hand, the lamb is the type of gentleness and affection,
and although in outward appearance the lamb and the goat are not
dissimilar, their natures are antithetical.
In estimating the God-idea of the Ancients, many mistakes have arisen
by confounding religious symbols with the "sacred" symbols. The
race-mind was in its kindergarten stage, and all ideals were instilled
by means of pictures--a method which even the present hour finds most
effective.
In modern theological symbolism we have God and the Devil; Heaven and
Hell; angels and demons, to illustrate by antithesis.
They all belong to religious symbology, but only those which teach
spiritual ideals are denominated "sacred."
"Riding the goat," alleged to be the almost invariable initiatory
prelude to fitness for membership in all secret orders, means, first
of all, that the would-be initiate must have control over his lower
sexual desires. If he cannot control the goat instincts within his
nature, he stands small chance of taking the higher degrees of
spiritual regeneration, through transmutation.
In another symbolic chart presenting the secrets of alchemical
transmutation, we find depicted "The Gate of Eternal Wisdom," and we
are further informed that this "gate" also brings "knowledge of God."
The design of this cave-like aperture should betray its esoteric
meaning. It is situated under a mound, upon which trees are planted.
The inscriptions on the corrugated walls of the cave, are evidently
designed to resemble seven lotus petals, and are set forth as the
seven mysteries. Inscriptions warning against profanation of this
sacred gate, and also promising eternal life and glory to the true
initiate, inspire the intrepid and deter the doubtful. Of these
latter, several are outside the entrance. Two are on the steps leading
to the mouth of the cave but their attitude bespeaks doubt of their
worthiness. Only one has penetrated to the radiant center of the
aperture, and there is room for but the one to enter the radiance of
the solar gate, which truly bestows a knowledge that is "of God."
Sex Symbology is a subject that calls for a large volume devoted to
this special side of it, and we cannot hope to do more here than to
touch a few of the almost universal proofs of the contention which is
the purpose of this book, namely, that the supreme goal of life,
typified in every religion, every philosophy, and in the intuitional
knowledge of the human mind, is spiritual sex-union; and that this can
be accomplished only by counterparts; the two halves of the bi-une god
seed uniting in one immortal and complete pair--a man and a woman.
Not, we must again emphasize, not in a hermaphroditic personality, but
in two perfect complementaries--mates; not _one_ but _a pair_.
In another exposition of Hermetic secrets we discover the amazing
statement that "the alchemist is found working throughout, in
conjunction with a woman of the art; _they begin and they attain
together_."
This should be plain enough. Small chance, indeed, either would have
of attaining alone. But if this suggestion is not sufficient (and
either from design or from failure to comprehend the significance of
it, the translator seems to have missed the point), we are introduced
to a symbolical figure-study, which shows a Chalice in which the sun
and the moon are personified (the solar-man and the solar-woman), with
the god Vulcan (fire) seated between them. Underneath this "twain-one"
symbol a mortal man and a mortal woman are kneeling on either side of
a cone-shaped and dome-tipped furnace, which is lighted by a feeble
candle. But their attitude of prayer bespeaks the hope that this
earthly flame will be transmuted by their prayers and aspirations; by
their reverential attitude toward the divine character of the function
of mating, into the immortal and unquenchable flame typified by the
god of fire himself.
In another series of symbolical plates, purporting to be the story of
Metallic transmutation, but representing, above all, the story of
manifestation from the Divine to the human and again to the
spiritualized and perfected Adam and Eve--(the solar man and the solar
woman), we again see that from generation to regeneration the work is
accomplished by man and woman in conjunction.
These plates bear the hall-marks of Christian appropriation of
Hermetic symbolism, as peculiarly applicable to the Church, but the
central doctrine of salvation through sex-regeneration, is retained.
Whether consciously or not, is a question.
Modern commentators and translators of alchemical literature insist
that such documents are palpably related to the secret, or secrets, of
metallic transmutation. That they prove the search for, if not the
existence of, a "magic solvent" that resolves the baser metals into
gold; but, as far as known, such a compound has not yet been
discovered or, if it ever was, it has since been lost and evades all
attempts at rediscovery. But if we read these alchemical treatises as
they relate to transmutation of sex-love from the pro-creative
function to regeneration through spiritual or counterpartal union
(solar mates), we have the key to every statement.
A writer tells of an instance which is recorded among alchemical
archives, where "an unknown master testified to his possession of the
mystery" (supposedly of metallic transmutation), but it is added that
"he had not proceeded to the work because he had failed to meet an
_elect woman_, who was necessary thereto." In other words, applying
this statement in its obviously logical sense, the unknown master knew
the esoteric meaning of the alchemical postulate, but not having met
his female complement, he could not testify to the results of this
transmutation. An "elect woman" would hardly be necessary in the work
of metallic transmutation.
Small wonder that the "alchemist" abandoned the work of turning lead
and copper into gold. If he had found the key of keys, he cared little
whether lead were lead, or whether gold remained gold, or melted into
thin air. The golden light of illumination showed him all things in
their purpose, and gold as a metal meant no more to him than did the
so-called "baser" metals.
Commenting upon this statement, the translator observes: "Those
Hermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if a
record of spiritual experience, present, like the literature of
physical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism: the marriage of
sun and moon; of a mystical king and queen; a union between natures
which are _one_ at the _root_, but diverse in manifestation; a
transmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein."
If we will remember that the solar-man was personified by the Ancients
as the sun; and the solar-woman by the moon, we have the first and
salient points of the original Hermetic secrets, however much they may
have degenerated from their spiritual to their physical application.
The probabilities are that owing to the disapproval of the Christian
Hierarchy, only the most veiled terminology was permissible. This view
is more logical than is the one that the esoteric meaning was lost
sight of.
The marriage of an hypothetical or "mystical king and queen" bespeaks
exaltation of the two conjoining persons, male and female, but this
exaltation is in consciousness, and not in mere personality. The
terms "king" and "queen" are nothing more or less than symbols of an
exalted (spiritualized) state.
And, in passing, we may here mention the fact that the language of
lovers testifies to this intuitional realization. "My queen!" exclaims
the enraptured lover, although in social station his beloved one may
be only a scullery maid; and certainly, neither the beauty nor the
goodness nor the wisdom of earthly kings and queens would be
sufficient to inspire the comparison.
It is ever the soul calling for the mate who, when found, will exalt
the "twain-one" into the immortal powers and immortal wealth
imperfectly symbolized by earthly rulers, making "right royal queens
and kings of common clay."
The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between two
natures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation." And
the alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promised
that, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out of
which all manifestation is composed," it only remained for someone to
discover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substances
in a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, could
be dissolved into its constituent parts and re-solved again in the
proportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared to
say could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would not
even be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interior
transmutation, because having attained to the radiant center, he
would realize the "glory of the worlds," and gold, as metal, would be
to him of far less value than the emerald of the grass; the pearls of
dew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; the
laughter of children.
How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think it
worth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even consider
the ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of his
labors.
But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure and
unquenchable love--that were indeed worthy of ages of research. For
are we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek and
find? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the glory
of the world? Is it fame, or wealth, or lands, or gems or kingdoms?
Love is the only glory worthy of the name.
"For Life with all its yield of joy and woe
And hope and fear--believe the aged friend--
Is just our chance at the prize o' learning love."
When we realize the esoteric meaning of this aspect of the ancient
alchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole,
manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to the
fourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "transmutation which
follows this union and the abiding glory therein," is the inevitable
and logical sequential answer.
An _abiding_ glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability.
Transmutation is not synonymous with, extinction, or elimination, or
abandonment. We _transmute_ the lower into the higher, the exterior
into the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sum
and substance of the "Ancient Wisdom."
There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane of
life, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to assume
that Sex is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, or
any other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are not
distinctively separable anyway. They are merely _names_ which we use
to distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness.
The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariably
misinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption of
individuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, sexless Thing;
but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than that
bringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided,
would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than
bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting
the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article.
The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable.
It takes two to make a pair. Mistake it not, and further, there is no
_abiding glory_ in this world or in the next or in any other sphere,
that is not founded upon the deep, intense and eternal love of man and
woman.
CHAPTER IX
WHAT CONSTITUTES SEX IMMORALITY?
The average mind, nurtured in apprehensive awe of that race fetish
called Public Opinion, is inordinately afraid of words.
"Atheist," "infidel," "ungodly" are epithets which have been used as
mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of
religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the last
century.
These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the
undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown
that the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for the
old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the
contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood than
that which the early Church postulated.
Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance against
Evolution.
Ignorance is fearful of the unknown, and the knights of Enlightenment
have ever had to fight their way through the ranks of abuse and
criticism and misrepresentation.
Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate of
rational thought hesitates to claim affiliation; and yet the goal of
our highest endeavors must be a state of Society where Love, the god,
is free from the mire of corruption, and the bonds of slavery.
Let us not be afraid of so harmless a thing as a word, remembering the
case of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignation
because someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat." She did not
know what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved.
When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we will
not be so fearful of its sound.
To whom is this epithet most frequently applied?
Is it to the average man who is known to be a Lothario in matters of
sex? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one who
is "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no way
affects his social standing.
Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalized
prostitution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning of
free-love that the term is never used in connection with what modern
reform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obvious
reason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound and
murdered as in this phase of woman's degradation.
Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type of
defiance of traditional sex-ethics there is always the spirit of
self-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing.
We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the young
woman who has, what the world calls, "sinned," because, forsooth, she
pays the price of her deviation from social standards (when
discovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, or
by sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it is
evident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuates
her conduct.
It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to those
who openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge in
the sex-relationship, independent of the marriage ceremony. It matters
not whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is the
demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and
morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to
traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing
the term "free-love" with an unpleasant odor.
Public opinion puts a premium upon deceit.
Such intimate matters as marriage and divorce are really no concern of
any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.
The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little with
Truth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence of
divorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring to
live apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets before
they may act upon such a decision.
Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of
the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from
the world because she loved a man well enough to pay that price.
She might have insisted that the man obtain a divorce from his wife,
to whom he had been married seventeen or more years, and thus win the
approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material
things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of
her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care
for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the
story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent
club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if
any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.
Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed to
think that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, she
might in time be worthy of their forgiveness.
Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with England
of being a nation without a sense of humor.
Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angels
fear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions upon
other people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue.
The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or
unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly
indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity
for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly
brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man
with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of
self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of
pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for
her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not
alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken
her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real
love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the
fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It
should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that
a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved
to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable
position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.
But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it is
small wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings.
If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, we
would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces
are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their
outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands
of Convention.
The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women,
because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to
personal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and until
women of the self-respecting and educated class began to openly
emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the
phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women
the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.
All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality
sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sex
promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium
that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the
claim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defiance
of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its
standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.
The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other
advanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life,
has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free
choice.
Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shielding
her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and
abhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretly
indulges her sex-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she is
forced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequently
these instincts are abnormally strong because of pre-natal and
inherited influences.
Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the average
woman, are disastrous to the sex, and through them to the race,
because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds and
fetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement.
Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physical
disease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression of
the sex-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through the
compulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercial
prostitution, is death to the best development of the race.
Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through the
religious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord and
Master" have been compelled to develop a craftiness and an artificial
"modesty" which, in most cases, passes for femininity, and deceives,
as it is intended to do, the average man.
For centuries, a woman's only profession was matrimony. Her education
for this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance of
all that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of her
nature--the function of sex. In the occasional instances where she had
inherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she must
at least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of every
emotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his sex-nature in her
task of "catching a husband," it is small wonder that women have
developed the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently both
treacherous and cruel.
Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting and
conserving power of the bi-une sex-love, that she has broken through
these mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defiance
at the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification of
her own sex-nature, and her right to her own person, despite the
epithet of "free-love."
Woman's partial emancipation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone to
her head," as it were, and we see many women confounding license with
liberty; mistaking passion for Love; and exchanging restraint for
debauchery.
The average woman is either almost entirely lacking in sex desire or
she is abnormally active in that function. In truth, the same state of
affairs prevails here, as in so many other phases of our modern life,
namely, there is no balance. We are a civilization of extremes; we are
one-sided, abnormal; distorted. We are seeking the pivotal point of
our destiny, which is the soul, but few have reached that point. Those
who have not, are groping through the jungles of the mental plane of
consciousness, upheld on the one hand by the upward trend of their
being, which seeks the level of the soul-conscious state; and held
back on the other hand by the trammels of the sense-conscious type
from which the race has developed to its present condition.
Those instances where women indulge in excesses are comparatively rare
in proportion to numbers, and they loom large in perspective because
of their very incongruity with our ideals of womanly conduct. The vast
majority of women may be safely trusted to use their sex-freedom, when
it shall have truly arrived, for the purpose of finding that one and
only mate which their souls instinctively know to be our rightful
heritage--the proverbial "pearl of great price" which insures
immortality in the bliss of union with our Beloved.
Love, when freed from the illusions of sense; from the shackles of
commercialism; from the bonds of error regarding the meaning and
purpose of marriage; freed from selfishness and licentiousness; will
solve the question of sex-promiscuity. This for the obvious reason
that Love seeks its own. If left free to seek, it will find.
But, if sex promiscuity is far from being free-love, if the doctrine
of sex freedom is fraught with many dangers under our present social
system, it must be conceded that no one method of social evolution,
thus far devised, can be recommended as ideally perfect. The best that
we can hope to do is to emphasize the importance and the sacredness
and the innate purity of the sex-relation, while conceding to both
sexes all the personal liberty possible.
And above all, we should avoid condemnation of those who claim the
right to freedom, lest we cover up a condition which can but be the
better for being open to the light. Particularly should we shield
women from the charge of immorality, and licentiousness, when we see
them straying down the by-paths of the senses, in their quest for
freedom, remembering that the centuries of repression and submission
and consequent deception have left their mark upon woman's
temperament.
Man has for ages boasted of his sex virility; of his conquests in what
he has termed "love." Not infrequently a man's choice of a wife is the
result of much seeking in the garden of Life; and much sipping of the
honey from the various flowers that grow therein. Often, indeed, a man
frankly tells the woman he would marry that he knows he loves her
above all other women for the convincing reason that he has tried so
many and none have held him. Should a woman make the same confession
and draw the same conclusion, he would be horrified.
It must be admitted, then, that the term "free-lovers" is applied only
to those who defy Public Opinion and claim their right to respect and
morality despite their defiance of Society's false standards of
morality. These standards are false because they are based upon
criticism and censure of results instead of upon motives.
Society ignores, if it does not actually encourage, frivolous
flirtations, and frowns most harshly upon instances of real love. It
sets the seal of disapproval and ostracism upon those who, because of
circumstances or possibly because of indifference to man-made laws,
take their affairs into their own hands and refuse to exhibit either
penitence or shame when the world discovers that they neglected the
marriage ceremony. If two persons truly love each other and there is
nothing to interfere with their undergoing the publicity of a marriage
ceremony, well and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle
with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are
innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to
overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where
absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other,
prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as
these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose
something by persecuting those who are independent enough and honest
enough to act from motive, rather than from custom, and who insist
upon maintaining their self-respect, in the face of criticism.
Self-respect is not related to braggadocio.
It must be admitted that as yet there are few persons who have the
courage to endure martyrdom for their convictions, which is, perhaps,
just as well, because the majority are unable to distinguish between
brazen shamelessness and unashamedness. The average woman will stick
to the safe habit of dissembling.
Women have learned the lesson of the cat too thoroughly to jump
immediately from the back-yard of Deception to the front porch of
Truth.
In this one respect at least, however much she may indulge her desire
for frankness in other directions, a woman will lie valiantly,
self-protectingly, and continually, even though she follow in secret
the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the
hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and
satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it
would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary.
But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement;
whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be,
that what is virtue in man is vice in a cat?"
We are not told in the story what conclusion she arrived at, but we
can imagine that her conclusion was that which women have arrived at,
in a similar situation, to wit: man is unjust and unreasonable, but he
is also stronger than I am, and therefore, while I shall follow his
example, I shall take good care to hide the feathers.
In the meantime, we are crossing the bridge that leads from the
jungles of our animal nature, where prowl the beasts of deceit; greed;
selfishness; sensuality; vanity; avarice; and domination; to the
Heights, illumined by Love set free.
Let us not jostle and crowd each other too harshly, while we are en
route.
But, of course, we are confronted with the pertinent query as to what,
if any, absolute standard of morality there can be in matters of the
sex relation. Freedom is so easily misconstrued into implying
sex-promiscuity; and monogamy, the final survival of the various
systems of marriage, has in its modern as well as in its ancient
aspect so much of coercion; and coercion is cited as the insuperable
obstacle to attainment of the supreme state of spiritual sex-union,
that the would-be initiate becomes confused, and is lost in a maze of
paradoxes.
Moral distinctions are too fine for the undeveloped man-animal, and
that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The
objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their
failure to die after they have become senile.
Moral standards are as unstable as the shifting sands of the sea.
"Our moral sentiments," say Letourneau, "are simply habits incarnate
in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act
reputed culpable at Paris, or at London, may be, and frequently is,
held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin."
And Emerson, the intellectual Seer, says: "There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us
can wrong the universe."
It is a colossal piece of impudent presumption, when we come to think
about it, for Man to ask the Supreme, Absolute, Infinite Power to
forgive him. But, if we cannot wrong the universe, we can and we do
wrong ourselves and each other as mortals.
That is the whole gist of the story. We are constantly wronging
ourselves and each other and calling upon God to support us in our
strife when God cannot know aught save the call of Love.
The growing, evolving race, has found it necessary to establish
certain loosely defined codes of morals and of social ethics, in the
same way that man has bridled the horse that he may control him;
incidentally, we may observe that where this bridle formerly included
"blinders," it now permits the horse to see whither he is going.
Perhaps a brief survey of the standards of sexual morality which have
upheld (or down-held, just as we look at it) the human race until now,
may be illuminating.
It has been disputed, if, under the matriarchal system of polygamy,
the moral condition of the people was higher than under the
patriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can be
reached upon this point, save and except that any condition, however
primitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must be
better than that in which she is the object of coercion. This is
evident, because the degree of coercion can never, under any
circumstances, be as great with the male as with the female.
Therefore, matriarchal polygamy is comparatively more nearly moral
than is patriarchal polygamy, and when all is said and done, historic
morality is comparative.
But from the standpoint of modern idealism matriarchal polygamy seems
to be a very low estimate of moral conduct; and from the standpoint of
sexual idealism it is a low standard; a standard only a degree higher
than that of patriarchal polygamy--a standard which is the lineal
descendant of the ethics of the marriage-by-capture period of human
evolution, and from which we are today by no means free, owing to
economic, religious, and ethical conditions.
There is a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the unorganized
brotherhood of the Enlightened, that laws are made for the guidance of
the masses. Unbridled ignorance is a dangerous force; as dangerous as
an unbridled horse, unless it be that the horse exhibits intelligence
enough to know where it is headed for and how to avoid obstacles en
route.
And even as the laws of a community are made for the intellectually
undeveloped, so the commandments were compiled for the spiritual
guidance of the uninitiated.
We trust that it will not shock the sensibilities of the "pious" when
we affirm and maintain and insist that the ten commandments are not
"from God" in the letter of the statements, as postulated by Theology.
They bear all the earmarks of the ancient Hebrew race-mind, which
placed a man's "neighbor's wife" in the same category with "his ox and
his ass and his house" and his other property and possessions.
There is but one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, and
that is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot break
it if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying to
live in defiance of its immutability.
"We cannot wrong the universe!"
Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are at
present the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship,
engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea. Both the Hebrew
and the Roman customs maintained the inferiority and the consequent
subjugation of woman, despite the fact that the Roman Church exalted
the Virgin as a personality; but the postulate of the Church that Mary
was so exalted by a miracle, which never could be repeated, killed any
forlorn hope which might have lurked within the female breast
regarding a possible emulation of her example. No other woman might do
more than cringe and crawl and beg and whine; or cajole and wheedle
and buy the Holy Mother's intercession, which intercession, even if
successful, could at best but secure her an eternal job in the
Heavenly hierarchy, where, sexless, companionless, mateless, anæmic,
she could look all day at a male God whom she could never presume to
reach.
Rather a lonesome outlook for eternity, and it is small wonder that
woman got discouraged at the prospect. The miracle is rather that she
endured it so long.
But the Roman system had at least one virtue. It instilled into the
mortal mind of its people a sub-conscious realization of the ideal of
monogamy; not an ideal monogamy by a long way, but a monogamic ideal.
They are quite different; but inasmuch as it is an outward semblance
of a more spiritual conception of marriage than that of polygamy, it
is the highest ideal yet realized for the many, and does duty in our
present day and age, as consistent with our superior civilization.
Monogamy at least pretends to be a marriage by mutual consent; and
even in the pretense there is the germ of a hope; but it would be
folly to deny that underneath this appearance of marriage by mutual
consent we see the remnants of the traditional idea of the right by
purchase, and therefore we have the jealousy that arises by virtue of
our property rights.
The right by purchase assuredly underlies our present-day marriage
system, although it is disguised as economic necessity; as a religious
sacrament; and as a suitable or a brilliant "catch"--a type of
marriage by capture which forms the ideal of our own upper-class women
and which the housemaid copies in her limited way.
Viewed from the surface evidence, the average woman of today is, as
Kipling says, far "more deadly than the male." She is more
unscrupulous in her methods; more unreasonable in her demands; more
devoid of sentiment or sympathy; more fickle in her desires and more
nagging in her complaints. But, when all is said and done, we must
admit that woman is only expressing her inheritance. When she becomes
balanced, the sexes will meet on common ground.
Woman's demand for better physical environment; for more comfort, and
more justice; presages, after all, a higher and a more satisfactory
idea of the marriage relationship. Underneath this materialistic
demand, there is the silent voice of the soul calling for a more
ideal marriage relation. It is the materialistic expression of a
spiritual urge and will in time rise to higher ground. It is a demand
for a better state than that which our grandmothers enjoyed, or
endured.
We have seen in the history of marriage, that the estimate of sexual
immorality has been based, all too frequently, upon woman's disregard
for the rights of her husband in her person.
For centuries the burden of sustaining a sexual moral standard has
rested almost wholly upon the shoulders of the women; and it is
therefore natural that the present-day defiant attitude of many women
toward the traditional standard should be viewed with alarm; and there
is more in this thought of alarm than the mere anxiety on the part of
man to hold woman to her appointed task of guardian of marital
morality.
Although men may wander from the home and fireside, it is a peculiar
fact that they generally hold to a mental string by which they may
find their way back again, very frequently the more contented to be
there for their wanderings. But with a woman it is different. Once a
woman has broken loose from the ties that have bound her to her
inherited post of morality-preserver, she seldom goes back again, but
keeps on her way until she finds that for which she seeks, or gives up
the search of her own volition.
Is this, then, evidence that it is a woman's first duty to "stay put"
when matrimonial exigencies have placed her in a specific "pocket" of
the matrimonial billiard-table?
We believe not; and this belief is founded upon the fact that the
female principle, which is, we admit, the centralizing, centripetal
force in the cosmos, is not always manifested in the form of woman.
The balanced individual is bi-sexual, even as the balanced "twain-one"
is bi-sexual. If man was all male principle, and woman all female
principle they would not be complementary, but antithetical. Each must
be balanced within himself and herself before they can merge into each
other.
Affinities are numerous, but mates are found but once; otherwise, the
problems that are being discussed here would never have arisen.
If, then, as has been shown in the fact that only counterpartal unions
are real, eternal and spiritually indissoluble; and that only true
mates can thus unite, and when thus united have no desire to wander,
what becomes of our ideas of sexual infidelity?
Since the very law of the Cosmos has seen to it that we cannot be
untrue to the only one who seemingly has a right to our fidelity in
the sex relation and since this union can become general only by
freeing love from bondage, what becomes of the laboriously built up
ethics of our social intercourse?
Are they to be abandoned as of no value?
We can almost hear the storm of protest which the righteous reader may
feel in duty bound to let loose at such a suggestion, if for no other
reason than that protest is the accepted way of proving one's own
virtuous tendencies.
In the early seventies, a woman named Virginia Woodhull brought down
upon her defenseless head the un-Christian-like abuse of the Christian
public by announcing a doctrine which seems to have been nothing more
dreadful than that of an equal standard of morality for men and women.
The poor woman died broken-hearted, it is said; and yet nothing that
we can unearth regarding her personal life and habits would seem to
have warranted the cruel gibes that were hurled at her. The dear old
lady lived a most continent, even ascetic life.
But the world has made rapid strides since that time, and we trust
that the urgent need of something reasonable and feasible upon the sex
question will inspire the reader to an unprejudiced review of this
chapter. We would that it were possible to supply a modicum of
understanding with each copy of this volume; but since it is not, we
must take our chance with the average. Let us reason together:
Expediency is the mother of morality in social organizations, which
have, of necessity, unstable, ever-changing standards. These standards
represent, for some, ideals yet to be attained; while for others they
become mere mileposts on the path of Evolution. The individual
reaches, and then passes, an accepted ideal; gradually when a
sufficient number, constituting a majority, have reached this ideal,
it ceases to be a standard for the social organization, and another
ideal is substituted.
The laws of the cave-man called for self-restraint exercised toward
his own immediate clan, and this necessity for self-restraint was
based upon nothing higher than the law of self-preservation; but
gradually the sphere widened; from clan to nation. So do our ethical
and moral standards enlarge. Traditional concepts are not necessarily
wrong, but they are almost sure to be inadequate to evolving Mankind.
Formerly, sexual morality consisted of the reservation of the person
of a sister to the use of her brothers. Any infringement upon this
moral code was punished by death to the woman and to her out-clannish
lover.
And we have today an analogous example, although we are glad to say,
it is not the highest standard; still, if one's husband or wife
violates the marriage vows, it is more condonable, if the
co-respondent be of the wealthy class; and in monarchies it is
accounted an honor to have been selected as the king's favorite.
The institution of prostitution which exists everywhere today has its
standards in the different countries; and the white races seem to
think that their morality is superior to that of the Orientals because
the social standing of prostitutes in the Orient is not irretrievably
lost; they are permitted, in the event of marriage, to resume social
equality with other women. Among white people, prostitutes have no
other recourse than to sink lower and lower, until utter degradation
is reached.
We believe that the Oriental view of the situation is a far higher
standard of morality than is our Occidental attitude.
If there can lawfully be such an organization as is now being proposed
as desirable in large cities, namely, a "morals police," it certainly
should be instigated by a more sane purpose than that which is at the
root of our present police guardianship.
Attempts at suppression of prostitution have hitherto been conducted
on the principle that the women of that class are objectionable to the
sight of our mothers and sisters and wives, and the sinfulness of the
hopelessly "fallen" ones has been the theme of press and pulpit. And
all the time the women of the half-world have resented this attitude
as being unjust, and unfair, and hypocritical, and untenable. They
have known that if the act of selling their bodies to men is a crime
against the community, then more than half the feminine world is
criminal. And they have contended that since the "respectable" women
were neither contacted nor exploited by them, they cannot see wherein
they offend society, provided the laws of sanitation and segregation
are complied with.
In other words, they have said that it is none of Society's business
whether they sell themselves to one man or to a number, since they
must pay the penalty. And their attitude is relatively right. It is
none of Society's business whether a woman is a prostitute or not,
considered as an offense against Society. That is the wrong attitude
toward this condition of our social disorder.
No prostitute offends you or me. She, poor creature, offends herself,
and we offend her and ourselves by permitting social conditions that
make for such degradation. We are conniving with her to barter her
birthright of freedom and real love for food and shelter, and taint
and tinsel, whenever we encourage marriage on any other ground than
that of true love, and when we regard virtue as a matter of physical
contact.
If we judge from the many plays which we see on the boards; if we are
influenced by the press and the pulpit; we must acknowledge that the
general idea of sexual morality is an absurd one. The inference is
that one special organ of a woman's physical body is the sole
custodian of all virtue and all morality. The accepted idea seems to
be that if a woman is married her body is then the property of her
husband. Her emotions, her mind, her heart, her happiness, her
preferences do not count for anything. The one act is made
all-important. On the husband's side, if he provides for his wife and
family, he is justified in exacting the sole right to the wife's body,
and although his own heart and caresses may be given to another, he
justifies himself, and the wife not infrequently feels satisfied, as
long as he provides well for her. What is this but prostitution? The
principle is the same as in the case of the recognized prostitute,
although the conditions are easier for the woman, and less cheapening
of her womanhood, but the difference is only in degree.
Now, a singular idea of fidelity, a direct antithesis to the one just
mentioned, prevails among prostitutes, when married either by law or
by selection.
They may surrender their physical body to another, for money, and
according to their idea they may yet remain true to the husband or
lover, because the matter is a business transaction. The other man has
only what he has purchased, namely, the physical body. But should the
woman permit another man to arouse in her a sexual response; should
another invade her mind, absorb her thoughts, or engage her heart, the
husband is outraged and the woman realizes her unfaithfulness.
All of which goes to show that up to the present time sexual morality
has in itself no absolute uniform standard by which it can be measured
and satisfactorily and convincingly presented to all persons, as have
other phases of morality, such as honesty, justice, mercy, generosity,
friendship, fidelity to country, and self-sacrifice to the good of
humanity.
And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexual
morality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality.
Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, but
as has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined by
local conditions.
Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexual
morality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remote
probability, albeit it will arrive some day.
First of all, the sex relation must be absolutely free from sale;
coercion; or barter; whether within the respectable "sale" of
matrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from any
erroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced,
deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to the
sexual embrace of human lovers.
An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture.
If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the
physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many
women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry
from mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if we
listen to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate our
souls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedly
cultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness of
mind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor to
uplift the moral tone of the world.
These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration of
Sex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protect
myself against my enemies"--and so it is in this instance.
Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why that
name, anyway?) are infected with the bacteria of sex-degradation.
They really require a lengthy process of mental disinfection, before
attempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexual
uplift.
A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largest
city in the United States recently declared in public print, of the
beautiful and chaste painting "September Morn," that it was "lewd,
filthy, and suggestive of unclean things." This type of woman is
intrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting them
with the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of the
Father-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"
Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted in
our souls, namely:
Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing in
the universe--because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. The
righteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man's
customs; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement,
indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thought
which may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency to
confusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us see
if we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction.
One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem is
sadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension of
the average, we may at least do so for some.
One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement that
the sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in the
conclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then it
is right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live as
they do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, and
while pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretly
carry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"
Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is the
sex-relation right or wrong?"
The men will declare that it is "right sometimes and wrong sometimes."
The women, almost as a unit, will do the same. Occasionally a woman
will be found sufficiently illumined to give a sane answer.
Following up the thoughtless answer with the request to illustrate,
and the reply will be something like this: "Well, if people are
married it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" and
even as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that it
is puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, few
have the temerity, and fewer yet have the capability, to utter Truth.
It would be as sensible to say that it is right for the sun to shine
sometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right for
the sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all that
is needed.
Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, is
entirely "up to us." The sun does its part. It is fulfilling the
inexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right.
But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The
law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it
may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases,
diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world.
How is it possible to have a perfect flower--a healthy, normal and
wholesome sprout from a diseased root?
The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the
only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be
done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy,
sacred--the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite
different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their
sex-relations.
To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of
marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring
back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing
that can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyone
knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and
the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the
lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.
Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does the
prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would
not sell herself for money.
Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted
ideals of sex?
If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.
These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from
love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex
as a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day and
good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.
Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one
standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now
persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand,
that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been
found?
A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the
woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?
History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded
in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best
that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention
from ourselves.
Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that
a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made
regulations, are not in danger.
Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than
they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval,
should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the
highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high
the price of such devotion.
CHAPTER X
THE PATHWAY OF LOVE
Love is the Great Reality.
Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to
love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of
love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it
is at the same time the only liberating force.
Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a
people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of
the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the
wake of seeming victory.
There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that
Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and
the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there
are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the
wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns
supreme.
Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate
us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the
limitations and attractions of the animal-man.
Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life. "There is no other God
but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe,
apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and
presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but
always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.
Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by
that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:
"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and
evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the
tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and
philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every
home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of
immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of
love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless
things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay.
It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without
that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but
with it--earth is Heaven and we are gods."
It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been
recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life
are worthless.
It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of
commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be
bartered for.
Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and
magic solvent which transmutes all baser emotions into the higher,
the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not
sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or
altruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had
developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex
instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as
we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most
instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty
than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of
animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the
earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with
us but happily in decreasing numbers.
But even among animals we find evidences of something vague,
indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we
term a tendency toward _selection_; and in the animal also, through
the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again
we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of
humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the
maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love,
is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than
with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the
evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the
family.
If maternal love were confined strictly to the female parent, and the
procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only,
we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent
reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female,
since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.
As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the
life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a
larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above
even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.
Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this
abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may
tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of
the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of
the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to
which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some
perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower
into its full possibilities.
And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more
than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that
we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved any
_human being_ with as great a love as we are capable of.
If any one holds the mistaken idea--and it is one that is very
generally held--that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer
phase of emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in
order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all
other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being
in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat.
The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted
with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break
the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God,
whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or
something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry
whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he
does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may
permit him the same liberty.
God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take care
of Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot be
killed by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying.
Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes of
seeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfect
mathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or a
woman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neither
is Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned with
appearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within.
He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with the
material at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeks
to unite lovers in their interior nature, but as each of the would-be
happy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he is
handicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness of
Love, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over His
eyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, the
Egyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger on
his lips, to typify the truth that true love is not noisy, blustering,
jealous, burning, ranting, protesting. He is silent; soft; melting;
blissful; magnetic; _uniting_.
Our noisy civilization, seeking happiness in Things, mistakes
protestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriages
are consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depicted
Cupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is a
slander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could see
one. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what one
knows," declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern bride
and bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards of
living, to know dollars better than they know Love, their perverted
vision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even the
dollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united in
love, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united then
indeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty.
But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, married
couples have learned or they are learning, that there is an interior
nature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected.
In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road to
the heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Love
never faileth."
It has been said that "love makes gods of men," and we have taken this
phrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth,
because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced their
natures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, and
are immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God," and the pilgrimage
is ended.
There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, that
universal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot." It
comes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate
quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means
always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my
seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing."
Life is a succession of experiences in the quest of immortality.
Immortality would be a curse instead of a blessing if attained alone.
Even the attainment of so unworthy an ambition as riches is a mockery
if unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle to
the one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to share
it. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, he
whose love nature is supposed to find satisfaction in making others
happy--can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unless
there is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; or
lacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness which
he does not find here.
Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material plane
for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love;
a love where intellect, spirit and sex finds its perfect mate."
Verily, love is the only vitalizing power in the universe; and when
denied the interior union which should exist between a conjoining
pair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship as
much of the divine nectar as they will accept.
_There is no impure love._ I repeat: There is no impure love. The
impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he
fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the
Slough of Despond to the Heights of Bliss.
If love be always pure, if it be always the uplifting, unifying,
constructive power of the universe, what becomes of the apparent fact
that men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, women
have lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk to
depths below that of the brute creation?
What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appears
to love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate love
for all that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that love
is always pure when it leads to such disaster?
Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever the
erring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently dragged
from his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of human
conflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; He
unites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity of
union.
Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation of
egoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes a
man to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loves
with jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence with
the baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he must
be taught the lesson of the Yoga sutras "not this way; not this way;"
and the more worthy he is of redemption, the more certainly will he be
caught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereas
by seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path of
inwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safely
trust his redemption.
If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through what
appears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity have
temporarily supplanted Love. But there is another side to the
question. Society has very erroneous ideas of success and failure; and
in looking at these opposite ends of the same pole, Society may be
standing on it's head.
A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worth
repeating.
A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities of
social life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercial
world, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that he
had married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life of
the Islanders. English society, when his name was mentioned at all,
spoke of him with hushed voices and with a "what a pity y' know"
manner as of one who had sunk below the depths of ordinary failure.
Subsequently a friend visited Samoa and found the young man enjoying
life and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversation
the visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been rather
wild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impart
agreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "Sir
Arthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon the
self-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity;
and he was such a decent sort, too." So we may see that there is much
in the point of view.
Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trust
this test, because no one can be happy in any other than the
progressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been a
satisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to the
possessor if it shuts out love; and if love be present, wealth holds
but an inconsequential place.
However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force of
attraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the union
of two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced,
there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the question
inevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are not
yet perfect?"
If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate for
each man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the only
truly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of
"temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all the
marriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident that
soul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to be
abandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?
It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deception
and dishonesty are immoral.
Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage.
Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray a
confidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and it
is the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether applied
to the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges.
Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not impose
upon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not to
break them; but if vows are not to be broken, they may, thank Heaven,
be dissolved.
And surely the marriage ceremony of the future will not impose vows or
promises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to the
necessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at its
very highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated,
nothing more than announcement to the society of which they are
members, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, as
well as inwardly, in sexual union.
We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of the
fitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether too
much confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, and
altogether too little as to whether they are spiritually united.
Possession! that is the word that spells unhappiness, in married life;
each wants to possess the other; neither one tries for the spirit of
union. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit.
Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathway
leads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promises
staring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitute
mutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If we
cannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith and
should cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action we
would have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husband
and wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame of
mind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be no
further opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world of
a belief in sin and immorality, the sooner will Love reign.
It is said of the sages of India that they can live in the jungles and
the ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?
They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desire
to crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love and
compassion that there is no point of connection between them and the
destructive instinct in the beast.
When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away from
the tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent and
the eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure and
perfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet it
and when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear,
all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fear
of "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though
"seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween thee
and me," the call of soul to soul will be felt and answered. Byron says:
"There are two souls of equal flow,
Whose gentle streams so calmly run,
That when they part--they part? Oh no,
They cannot part, those souls are one."
With a sentiment such as this between two beings, what need for vows
and promises, and bonds?
It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, even
feverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implying
that they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although this
conclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and the
faculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty that
prevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, and
above all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to impute
personal motives to such as would, if permitted, lead them to a freer,
and consequently a purer life, impel the writer to deny that which is,
finally, the very point at issue.
In the interest of Truth, we are compelled to state that we would do
away with "bonds." We would substitute therefor mutual agreements,
subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutually
helpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of the
crippled human race. We need not always walk lame.
It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surest
way to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind him
that he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out to
him the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man has
so little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, when
assured that God-hood means a bliss so great that he can hardly
imagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of births
and deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself.
Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritual
union--with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or any
other impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?
No, but with his mate.
On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There
is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love
in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love
flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little
pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights
and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."
Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the
perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly
tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these
same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead
of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for
union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to
exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the
"Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin;
they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the
golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly
the opposite direction.
Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most
certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most
certainly not.
We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have
concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or
uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral
in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is
adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance;
sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual
immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit
that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based
upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a
convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own
realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is
immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent
of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for
position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual
helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish
gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money;
or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of
an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine
office of sex.
But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet
all may, if we desire, be moral. And all moral and sexual
relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the
time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth
need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.
If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that
sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from
pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love
of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in
soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the
restraints of marriage.
But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect
of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the
other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and
has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the
happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative
of perfect mating.
If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable
finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne
endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing;
only to lie at His feet"--the prospect appalls!
Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too
short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is
the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!
But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we
realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by
experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin
to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and
sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood,
immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate;
sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying
aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and
bliss, there is an incentive to aspire.
Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be
"taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or
feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment
has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the
doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has
known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has
dwarfed our stature.
In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise
patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods."
Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and
earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss
being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and
when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps
death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd back
at its summons to inhabit their perfected world."
We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful
words--elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always
in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be
ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These
prophetic utterances are literal truths.
Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we
will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise--the
body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior
nature.
While we are building the business which sustains our physical body;
while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion or
whatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior nature
which we are now, and which we will be when the life of the body
ceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business were
their only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing the
same methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate from
the same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands or
falls in the final test, by the motives; the desires; the sentiments;
the sympathies; the generosities; the forgiveness; the kind impulses;
the pities; the charities; the tolerances; we feel while we are
apparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these little
impulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seemingly
important business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which we
climb to the spiritual heights where the bliss of true and perfect,
melting, merging, liquid-love, of the one and only mate awaits us.
One thing more. This also is a secret. Perhaps you will not even
believe it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of our
crazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they are
also, and above all, idealists.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION
External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we have
builded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortal
senses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal which
prompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one who
looks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead of
merely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells its
interior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It is
said that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; but
to those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; what
seems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which is
limited to sense consciousness.
There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give the
key to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered.
The word "union," or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase of
our busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. This
word, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word
"agreement," or "combination" or "partnership," formerly used. Union
means something more interior, than do these other words, even when
applied to commercial issues.
The business man says to his partners "let us unite on this question."
They are already partners, but unless there is a unity of thought and
ideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. We
have labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity of
effort; a merging of interests; a welding together into one
thought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness of
meaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the words
lodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organization
of men in social or commercial combination.
In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there may
be no quality of union, although there is the outward bond of
fellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know more
of a subject than appears on the surface. We want to know the within.
We want to fathom the interior meaning; to get below the surface, or
the appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import--the word
_within_. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footsteps
toward home.
The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but the
Christian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those who
would listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was truly
spiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed,
but only to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandments
already in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the one
and only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begat
him: "That ye love one another."
Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets and
through all the channels of the physical senses to look within. That
which you are--not what you appear to be to the eyes of the
sense-conscious--but that which you are in your interior nature, is
what counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to write
salable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in the
commercial game; but when the word is impartially considered
efficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability is
measured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wise
judgment--interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin be
white or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are of
imposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within that
constitutes true efficiency.
So the kingdom whatever it may be whether of heaven or hell; of love;
or of power; or of ambition; the kingdom is within. The source of your
power is in the interior of your nature.
If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to the
Cosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again to
those who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in on
this," has been said to one who was left out of some supposedly
desirable thing; or "you are not _in_ it," meaning that you are not up
to the required standard. Even as the walls of a building only
imperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that which
the building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physical
appearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature.
"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritual
teacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The character of
the heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are at
variance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within,
we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom--interior
vision.
Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exterior
and their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled up
like a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grain
of true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message from
knowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and we _find_
wisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interior
meaning.
The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is a
difference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to the
interior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience.
Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with the
interior; it penetrates the outer and seeks the interior; but never
does the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never does
he mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message.
Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life were
the only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of the
thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the
visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that
civilization is insane.
If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this
which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in
his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example,
is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advanced
civilization?
With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly
to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of
wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and
hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are
ostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing,
embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution of
man's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to
which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell
us that man in his interior nature--in his reality--is not a creeping,
crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into
ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.
Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, did
it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind
regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly
intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in
motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a
corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the
power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute
strength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively puny
strength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force of
the elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire--an
interior quality.
Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make us
happier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather than
their so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to man
his power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it to
do his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above and
beyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put upon
modern inventions and accomplishment is the message which these
mechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not a
machine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not a
miserable worm of the dust, but a winged god.
Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanical
marvels is the knowledge of each other which has resulted from
intercommunication between nation and nation. The great breeder of
discord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man of
the cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he did
not know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know;
his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous and
dangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country are
like ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even though
they may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet of
nuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down.
Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideas
of "alien" races and "foreign" nations.
Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanical
inventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other human
beings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings,
emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like our
own, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reach
the heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet been
established, it is because the majority of Mankind are still only
sense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which the
past few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that the
slow-moving mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all this
knowledge must come in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seeks
love as the only eternal reality. Not because God has commanded that
we shall do so; not because of a sentimental ideal, but because any
other course is futile, foolish, silly and does not "get us anywhere"
as the slangologists rightly express it.
Thus everything in the busy commercial world, seemingly bent upon
perpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symbolic
language of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. These
two words are really complementary, because it is only with the
interior nature that unity can be established.
We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships,
corporations, combinations from the outside. These are external
expressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of the
interior nature only.
With the more intimate knowledge of each other which
intercommunication between nations makes general, each little
segregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at the
conclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" on
any proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much less
costly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than by
going to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains of
the majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thought
that perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained by
peaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained nor
appeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wise
observation that fundamentally, cosmically there is no place for
enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the
whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and
segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can
permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped
and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these
thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things,
than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.
The world has been living through a nightmare. The warfare which
belongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has been
carried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight like
tigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well,
using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devices
and the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this type
of warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose between
transmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blind
indeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who use
the sword shall perish by the sword." How else can it be? There is but
one force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use it
to destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of law
that we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum in
arithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is no
limit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate.
The fact is dawning upon an increasing number of thinkers, that even
as brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there is
still a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its power
that nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. That
power is love, without which though we have all else we are but as
"sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."
Even as the ferocious man-eating animals have disappeared from the
earth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the erotic
pomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to their
chariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourged
slaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of the
amphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged
"civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolution
of our own "false gods." Transmuted into pure and perfect love and
peace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate and
destruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward the
maintenance of a balanced world--a world in which Love and Wisdom are
united.
We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude
are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic
Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the
decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why
cannot we trust God?
In the external world, then, the idea that a part of this sphere is
inherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies; that
the female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy--all these
ideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the coming
civilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it to
our individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the human
organism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Before
we can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to a
balanced and sane state within our own organism.
We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the various
expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social
body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain
unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may
safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have
conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our
chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the
clutches of an abnormal appetite.
Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physical
appetites to the finer, and interior desires of the soul,
abnormalities and perversions of sex-force will be impossible.
Sex-force is, at the Center of Being, unpolluted. It is pure, perfect
and harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it is
balanced.
In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly every
one is lop-sided, and unbalanced. Alienists declare that almost every
man and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An age
of specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness." But
the source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where we
consciously unite with that interior source we will no longer be
unbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, at
the center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There is
no chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy.
There is equilibrium.
It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness that
equality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life will
appear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer men
can imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-powering
and at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy.
The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable from
sex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine the
mechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail to
comprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior being
until we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortal
and glimpse the heights of the immortal life.
No one can give to another this interior wisdom--this philosopher's
stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the
pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and
promise that the results are mathematically proportionate to effort,
and effort will be backed by individual desire.
We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side
of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for
purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is
contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize.
Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary
function.
Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they
are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they
remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek.
All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman
who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the
ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual
alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found
the key to the gate of eternal life.
As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old
age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into
interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express
the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become
transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts.
It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters
that quality--be it much or little--so that we may not go into the
interior realms a spiritual pauper.
Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so
old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship,
and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in
the soul life.
There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any
degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and
love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines
through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that
when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that
the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.
This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a
mental recognition of age.
"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth
and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdom
that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual
love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.
But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay,
they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves
this one, without having attained that which he craves.
This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no
appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law
is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of
immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."
"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be
such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they
not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual
sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"
The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its
reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very
nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his
unreadiness for _Illumination_. The desire for self-gratification,
though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical
to attainment of spiritual consciousness.
There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine
of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or
gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories
in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing
by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spirit
becomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of our
willingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existence
seems a sacrifice.
"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him pass
on" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it as
clearly as it can be stated.
Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expect
to enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to the
letter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruism _is_; it is not mere
recognition of a word.
We may presuppose another natural and instinctive query: "If then only
by union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal life
and love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever all
ties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, and
search for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found the
answer to all life's problems?"
Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We should
remember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitful
quest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), he
learned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom he
gave the cup of cold water _without any consciousness of doing a good
deed_; without hope of thereby finding the grail.
He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any good
will not find it though he should give away every farthing to the
poor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips;
though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all day
and all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of self
and of _obtaining_ something so long will he miss the _attainment_.
Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute or
reversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not trying
to say that they should not be broken; or that they cannot be broken
with impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished. They simply
cannot be broken--they are unbreakable.
We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, or
in any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any more
than we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing to
it; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest nor
scribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. No
one can break the law of your being any more than you can break that
of another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in the
intervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Wherefore
then, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousy
and wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to a
marriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?
If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that the
object of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres there
is only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by any
possibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place once
found no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said in
previous chapters of the word "found;" it is from within.
How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, so
magnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama of
life; to establish such marvelous diversity within such simple unity;
to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile has
been the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need not
worry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God are
loaded." Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we may
cheat in the game of life.
We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility of
offending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so far
as it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us." We can delay
arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we
will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied
longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain
wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of
his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless
areas of infinite bliss and wisdom?
We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothing
more phenomenal than withdrawing from one room to another. The soul
may strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing can
free it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. The
broader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfold
in its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine we
become, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual and
attract our own.
It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession as
one's own counterpart defeats the very effort. We are not to seek; we
are only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shall
have done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though the
two halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers which
the sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves and
the bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate to
thee." We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest we
lose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyes
glued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realms
of vibration "whence cometh our light."
Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that is
spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate
on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to
thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or
winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the
great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his
embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the
heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there
anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
circulation through all men as the water of the globe is all one sea,
and truly seen its tide is one."
Here then are specific and trustworthy statements for the further
enlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraical
propositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortal
godhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Source
of Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but we
must claim it if we would consciously realize this truth.
God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and in
truth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not one
hermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, even
though each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperament
and qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point because
there has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon this
definition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctively
masculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and he
or she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness.
Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Woman
is not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear for
courage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality;
helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when he
spares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; when
he unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy from
weakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentleness
with vigor.
No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore you
are not to try to enforce your ideas of morality upon others. Who has
constituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concern
yourself with establishing happiness upon this earth.
You are to see to it that your love is big and broad enough;
all-inclusive enough to wish to see every one happy from your
immediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You need
not worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. You
are to render love and service to this world with all your heart and
all your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of your
desires.
No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is
rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say
the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from
the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without
regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither
do we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained to
a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment
and hatred.
There is no one formula which fits all cases--other than that given in
love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as
we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it
may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to
them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other
motive than personal selfishness, you may be doing yourself an
injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining,
then you are doubly mistaken in your course.
The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it
may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word
"unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the
wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or
her. There is just one big world of difference between these two
points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and
Hell.
CHAPTER XII
"SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"
Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure and
satisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing and
feeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-fold
is the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who are
themselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others.
This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, and
which they will not believe or trust.
Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs us
heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and
turbulent pleasure."
And finally, as regards the sex-function, we would like to impress
upon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom will
understand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation of
sex-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love that
is of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in the
region popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circumscribe the
sex-function, as a secondary and by no means compulsory consideration.
When the sex force has become diffused throughout the entire being,
radiating from the solar man, and permeating the mind and thus
entering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mind
physical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and is
found to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. Sex is not
confined to the specialized sex-organs. It permeates the entire being.
The person who has no conception of his reality other than as a
physical entity has not so much as touched the area of spiritual
ecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the gods;" and so
infinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not do
so until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains upon
the sense-conscious plane and seeks by sexual perversity and
debauchery and sexual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection of
joy which he intuitively knows evades him.
Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and just
and merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies," that it cannot
be defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It is
forever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope to
express the creative power, the sexual realization of a god, through
the functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of the
animal.
Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do not
imagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your puny
physical powers would suggest. Neither should you imagine that the
sex-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking in
love-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right and
normal in itself; the attitude of the average man and woman invests it
with all its uncleanness.
But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged
in respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed
against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church
denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it
in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less
than the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divine
fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor
little bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as the
hope and savior of Mankind.
If you would have eternal youth and eternal life and love and wisdom,
accept this truth, because nothing else can, or will, save you from
the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and we
would like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; no
misconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we are
here stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple and
unescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time and
ignorance.
The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapters
we will again state it, so that there may be no mistake: If the
balance is found in counterpartal sex-union--the one man and the one
woman uniting on the solar plane--would not this balance be maintained
if only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; in
other words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on the
one hand and extreme impurity on the other?
Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there
are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the
union is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one must
be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is
possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would,
really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we
may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of
the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of
serfs; but doubt not that _eternal equation_ is perfect.
There is still another query: If true sex-union is of the soul, what
is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of
death, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thus
circumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel
each one to earn the prize of eternal life?
The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The
realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than
is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of
untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize
values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he
might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a
million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was,
he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow
wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.
If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne of
angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the
crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common,
everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is
the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and
the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without
thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and
love of the spiritual realms.
The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of esoteric
wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such
effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the
principal benefit of a college education is to teach the student that
he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of
years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not.
If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were
well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the
price of transmutation only after exhausting every other method, what
does it matter, so that he finally learns it?
_Learn to look into the hearts of men._
At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a
moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with
segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the
hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the
heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving
picture.
You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue
rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a
clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress
is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse,
perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if
you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that
her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming
experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has
donned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries of
grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to
comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted
to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and
happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and
the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be
carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our
fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be
heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for
their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll
of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on
having two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If she
is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the
more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your
help and sympathy.
"_Learn to look into the hearts of men._"
Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder
doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just
an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and
longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if
the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria or
the intermezzo.
And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold
street-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside.
But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their
appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize with
them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the
manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the
condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in
crime.
You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with
his misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if you
would transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to
immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to
sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without
sympathy walks to his own funeral."
Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to
find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden
Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you
must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the
lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personality
that conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard this
personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is,
or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as
we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes
unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut it
off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should the
men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a
later century?
You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in
order to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There is
nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot
learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of
the world.
There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater
than love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is no
God holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will
readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that
appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;
think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the
lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the
expression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gave
to it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to do
so.
Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the
Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with
the specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illumination
from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you
turn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of the
toad,' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula and
still blesses it with His fruitful presence."
And finally do not make the too common mistake of confounding
brazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation.
Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life has
come because of the divinity of Sex. If you have been wise enough to
know this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect to
that function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading the
subject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would
"cast pearls before swine;" you will not countenance jokes and ribald
songs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you will
fold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart's divine altar, as
something too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of the
un-tender day.
If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of Sex, you
will desire unity and disdain possession, knowing that whatever of
Heaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality of
spiritual realization of the function of Sex. You will respect the
physical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of the
universe, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. You
will teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; that
nothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inward
honesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire.
If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love and
we shall surely enter therein.
Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal gods.
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
2. The following misprints have been corrected:
"attaing" corrected to "attaining" (page 12)
"Morever" corrected to "Moreover" (page 67)
"Doubless" corrected to "Doubtless" (page 85)
"esctacies" corrected to "ecstacies" (page 116)
"aproach" corrected to "approach" (page 116)
"mutality" corrected to "mutuality" (page 123)
Incomplete sentence "We have already" removed on page 140.
"iadequate" corrected to "inadequate" (page 179)
"magnectic" corrected to "magnetic" (page 194)
"instintctive" corrected to "instinctive" (page 224)
"phenonenal" corrected to "phenomenal" (page 226)
"anoher" corrected to "another" (page 234)
"estoeric" corrected to "esoteric" (page 235)
"and and" corrected to "and" (page 240)
"advaced" corrected to "advanced" (in ad for the "The Dead Speak!")
3. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.
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