Imagination is Vision

This is my response to Bruce Charlton’s recent excellent post  on Albion Awakening about why fantasy or myth can seem more real than reality.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/imagination-is-vision.html

Christmas Thoughts

The older I get the more I see that there are deeper spiritual truths in Christianity than any other religion. When I was younger I felt this but was under the fashionable impression that all religions said more or less the same thing and were just different ways of bringing man to God if one practiced them seriously enough. I still think that's the case (within reason, of course) but I also think that the salvific power of other religions was greatly augmented by the advent of Jesus Christ in this world and the spiritual impetus that advent gave to everything that could receive it. Thus it affected all genuine forms of spirituality and gave them a boost. It is no accident that the Mahayana form of Buddhism postdates Christ, and even Hinduism acquired extra spiritual force from Christ's arrival in this world and the spiritual power he released. This statement is clearly unprovable and would be rejected by Hindus and Buddhists alike but I make it because it seems to me to be the simple truth. It doesn't diminish other religions to say that they stand in the shadow of Christ. They remain what they are which are vehicles given by God, or those that act on his behalf (since God delegates), to helps souls in this world return to their source, but in them all there is still a veil over the fullness of truth. That veil was lifted by Christ. Other religions are effective in their own way but they are incomplete. Only in Christ is the truth made complete.

Apart from the person of Christ, in which all spiritual truth is embodied and through which it stands revealed more clearly than anywhere else, there are two principal teachings in Christianity which take it further than any other form of religion. These are the teachings of the Trinity and the fact that God is Love. You might say that other religions include these but I don't think they do in the same fully comprehensive way. Buddhism has its impersonal compassion but that is rather a mild thing compared to love especially in the context of the denial of the reality of the person. And those who try to force the Buddhist concept of the Trikaya or three bodies of the Buddha into the Christian Trinity are stretching things way too far. Buddhism denies God anyway which is its fundamental flaw. Likewise Hinduism has its trinity of gods in Brahma, Vishnu and Siva as well as the idea of existence as sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) but these have no relation to the Trinity as understood in Christianity as three persons in one God though they might be a reflection or distant echo of that truth. Even Hindu bhakti is not the same as agape in that it is an emotional thing, and love in the Christian sense is not an emotion but an act or condition of being.

My assertion that Christianity contains more of spiritual truth than any other religion might be dismissed as partisan were it not that a spiritually attuned and impartial mind should be able to see that in Christ there is a holiness just not present elsewhere as well as a truth more fully revealed than anywhere else. The light he brought illumined the whole world and spread even where his teachings were not outwardly known. I mean by this that the light of Christ radiated out on a subtle or immaterial level to be picked up by those sensitive enough to respond to it and then interpreted according to their understanding. It is also, as he himself said, through him, and only through him, that all men now reach God even if they do so through another religion than Christianity, which is quite possible. This is an inner truth that can be known in the heart even when not fully accepted by the head.

This truth is also why Christmas is important. The first Christmas was the time when the light of God entered the world. That the light was for the whole world is demonstrated by the visit of the three magi from the East, representing the pinnacle of previous spiritual knowledge, who came to pay their respects to the infant Jesus as the saviour of the world. They were not Jews but they came because they knew that the light embodied in this baby was universal. It repaired the damage done in the past and offered to all men the chance to free themselves from the bondage of matter not by effectively abandoning the relative world of individual beings, of love and beauty and goodness, all of which can only exist in a world of multiplicity and form, for the absolute of pure spirit as taught by the Buddha, but by reconciling the outer and the inner, the relative and the absolute, the One and the Many, through the holy mystery of love. This did not require rejecting suffering as the Buddha had done by rejecting the self that suffered, but fully accepting suffering and offering it up as a sacrifice to God. In this way the fallen self was redeemed and made holy instead of being jettisoned as a burden on existence. Thus was the purpose of creation fulfilled rather than being negated.

So Christmas marks the time when God's reason for creating man is revealed and its fulfilment made possible. And the holy purity of the new born baby reminds us that Christianity goes beyond other spiritual approaches in that it alone fully validates the person, the person that other religions reject as the source of ignorance and a blot on the pure whiteness of naked existence. Of course, even in Christianity the separate self must be given up, as Christ demonstrated at the crucifixion, but what is given up is the false self, the self that by the barriers of its self-centredness blocks out God. The true God-given individuality remains and is then revealed as a shining being of light, a unique son of God born of the holy marriage between Spirit and Matter. And the possibility that we can become this being of light is what Christmas is all about.

Gabriel fram heven-king

An old English carol telling the story of the Annunciation. On Albion Awakening.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/gabriel-fram-heven-king.html

The Left

Preliminary Note: 
When I speak of the left here I am referring to something primarily cultural. That's to say, the liberal, progressive, egalitarian ideology that most educated people today assume is how things should be in a sane and decent world. It's also a gross spiritual error.


What is the left? I usually avoid politics on this blog because I'm not interested in them except as something seen in the light of spiritual truth. As far as I am concerned a proper love of God and understanding of metaphysics would render most political matters irrelevant in that the way to live would become obvious. But increasingly nowadays what calls itself politics is used as a weapon against spiritual truth and that is why I must ask, what is the left? Is it merely a political point of view revolving around liberty and equality which believes in taking power from individuals and giving it to the State for the benefit of society, one that is espoused by the more intelligent amongst us as statistics appear to show, or is it, at root, something completely different? Let's get this idea that the more intelligent a person is, the more likely he is to adopt a left or liberal (the two are basically the same now) perspective out of the way first. This may be true up to a point but that's largely because the training of the mind in the modern world is heavily directed towards atheism and scientific materialism. That is the form of education we all receive so the further we go in education as it is today, the more we will be indoctrinated by that mindset. But those who are really able to think for themselves, which is surely a key factor in true intelligence, will see through the absurdity of materialism which, when properly analysed, is incoherent. It explains nothing and makes no sense and can only be entertained seriously if vast elements of what life is are expunged from reality.

Obviously the left is a political attitude outwardly but I believe its true origins lie in something deeper. I think that the real roots of what manifests in the world as liberalism or the left is spiritual. Not spiritual as in coming from God but spiritual as in coming from the so called dark forces (aptly sometimes described as those of the left hand path) which have set themselves up specifically against God and all that speaks of God, particularly the good, the beautiful and the true. I know that most people nowadays would scoff at such a notion but it has been understood in Christendom for as long as Christendom has existed and, if we dismiss it, our only grounds for doing so are that we dismiss the spiritual world entirely. I should stress that I am not proposing this duality of good and evil forces in a dualistic or Manichean sense. God is reality and there is nothing outside him. But there are fallen angels who, with their human accomplices, some consciously so, some just dupes and naive idealists, seek to corrupt and invert reality, and this world is their battleground.

Whether the ideology of the left was originally put through by forces favourable to God or satanic forces is beside the point now. It may well be the case that in the 18th century new ideas did need to come through to bring about a greater measure of social justice, but these were quickly co-opted and detached from any real spiritual framework which, if it ever existed, quickly became secondary to the material side of things. From this we can quite easily deduce that the movement was not a heavenly inspiration. It was directed towards things of this world to the, more or less, full exclusion of the next. Where there was a spiritual focus of some sort it was a spirituality that stood in the shade of social or worldly issues and was only considered in the light of those, the very reverse of what should be.

Sometimes leftism, so called, is regarded as a Christian heresy. However I think it’s more like a perversion of Christianity since heresies generally exaggerate certain aspects of truth while minimizing or neglecting others but leftism completely eviscerates Christianity of the supernatural which is its whole point so it cannot be said to have any real relationship to Christianity at all. You might say that it takes the horizontal part of Christianity while neglecting the vertical but the horizontal without the vertical is unsupported and so falls to the ground.

But, however we define it, the spiritual intent of the left, or that of the true powers behind the left, is very clear today when we see it trying to remake reality according to its anti-God agenda. It does this through such things as erasing the natural differences between the sexes, cultural relativism, destroying or inverting the hierarchy of truth and goodness, and placing excessive emphasis on reason as the best guide to life thereby tarring faith and intuition with the brush of superstition. And when we observe it trying to dismantle traditional institutions which have evolved with a spiritual purpose (for instance, marriage) both by attacking them externally and by trying to corrupt them from within, we have another pointer to the true agenda of those behind it. Many of those involved in all this are not aware of its true purpose but consider themselves to be acting in the name of progress. In some respects they might be, which makes the picture more complicated for those who only look at the appearance of things. But look beneath the surface and quite a different picture takes shape. Then you see that the establishment of secondary truths is being used as an excuse to destroy primary ones, and even these secondary truths are soon discarded when they've served their purpose.

A lot of the things the main drivers of the cultural and academic left believe and assert comes from their fear and hatred of God. This, of course, goes back at least as far as Rousseau, the French Revolution and Marx. They want to unmake reality and remake it according to their materialistic and atheistic theories so that God has no place in it. This is one reason they attack that fundamental truth of the two sexes so relentlessly.  If they can destroy something so basic and so universally acknowledged as that they have gone a long way towards driving the truth of God from the universe. Or so they hope.They can never succeed because eventually the false society they are creating will collapse either from external attack or internal despair, but they can do great image to the state of people's souls before that happens and that is the principal purpose of their unseen masters whether they are aware of this or not.

With the two sexes they have used the excuse that the similarities are more important than the differences to deny the fact of the differences and that these are intrinsic. And this is large part of the problem. The left, or a major element of it, is fundamentally dishonest and uses lies to advance its distortion of truth or else, more subtly, it uses lesser truths to force out greater ones. At one time I thought that people on the left were mistaken but honest and no doubt many are, but it's increasingly obvious that the main drivers of the revolution have always been people of bad faith in that their motivations are not what is claimed. Resentment of others and hatred of the good are often to be seen as the real origin of their position. Of course, the foot soldiers are not always like this but even they are, at best, spiritually blind and they often have something of their leaders' faults in them too. I am not here saying anything as crude as left bad, right good for all of us are sinners in our different ways. Nonetheless the fact is that the denial of God and of the true good is at the roots of left wing ideology.

I have said that mainstream leftism is fundamentally atheistic and so it is. But many people nowadays who have a vague and unformed sort of spirituality also embrace a left wing perspective so why, one must ask, is so much modern, as opposed to traditional, spirituality left leaning? The short answer to this is that it is human and this world centred.  It does not look to God the Creator as the summum bonum of human life. Nor does it acknowledge the fact that we are fallen and in need of redemption. It sees humans as they are now as basically good and perfectible if only they are treated nicely. There's no need to repent because you as you are already good and it just needs to come out. You might say I exaggerate to make a point but I see left-leaning spirituality as essentially self-seeking and interested in spirituality for its fruits not from love of God. Generally speaking, the left has no use for God who it typically sees as an oppressor. Which, of course, from the point of view of an egotistical rebel against truth, he is.

It is important to appreciate that none of this means that the right has any kind of exclusive handle on goodness and truth. A traditional attitude is always closer to understanding the reality of things than a modern progressive one but any approach to life that does not have a proper spiritual understanding at its heart can never be right. I've criticised the left because of its anti-Christian agenda which is plain to see. It either seeks to destroy Christianity from outside or corrupt it from within, and it's been very successful in both those tactics. The right has not been used to the same extent but a secular right, given power, would be just as materialistic as the left albeit in a different way. And I can certainly envisage a scenario in which a deformed version of the right could be used to advance an authoritarian form of religion that effectively rejects love and imposes rigid control with no room for dissension. But that is not what we have in the West in the 21st century. Not at the moment and not for the last 70 years certainly. Nonetheless while the left has distorted love by separating it from truth, flattening it out and 'egalitarianising' it then reducing it to the horizontal plane only, so the right could potentially similarly distort the idea of truth. Both, of course, can only corrupt realities because there is nothing else but these realities just as evil can only mar - it cannot make.

Everything requires balance, and you might think it is only the excesses of the left I have been talking about here. The truth is, though, that the excesses were built into it right from the very beginning. They were inevitable. It took very little time to go from seeking a degree of social justice to the rejection of God and the overturning of the natural order of being. Thus, while liberal ideas may have been of some use at one time, to act as a corrective and counterweight to past corruption of ideas about the nature of God and hierarchy, they should never have been taken as a basic philosophy of life in themselves. The best you can say about the left is that it is like a strong medicine which may be useful when the patient is sick but it does not form part of a healthy diet. Then it may turn into the poison that it now has.

Two Modern Saints

I've written a post about Tolkien and CS Lewis for Albion Awakening which sets out my belief that they had a mission from God which they fulfilled to perfection.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/two-modern-saints.html

God the Father

We live at a time when the differences between men and women are often dismissed as purely cultural with the implication, or even assumption, that there is no real difference between them. Of course, anyone not indoctrinated by the deviations of modernity, originally inspired by forces seeking to separate Man from his Maker, knows this is nonsense but it is increasingly hard for people to stand by their intuitions when outwardly they are bombarded by propaganda from the media telling them that these are misguided and scientifically invalid. And not just the media for now the worlds of science and education have also both set their faces against spiritual truth. This, it must be emphasised, is a choice. It is not a rational or reasonable attitude, based on an objective interpretation of the universe. It is a deliberate decision to deny truth, if not at the lower, rank and file levels of those who follow where they are led, then certainly at the higher levels that actually run the show. There is an all out assault on spiritual reality at the present time and one of the ways this agenda is pursued is by the deconstruction of the human form. If two things as radically different as man and woman are regarded as basically the same then they are both cut off from deeper levels of their being, and their nature can be reassembled to specifically preclude any spiritual (or true spiritual as a false spirituality might well be added to the mix) content or awareness. In saying this I am naturally not disputing that men and women are both the same as human beings but I am upholding the reality of two different and complementary sexes and saying that this is all important as it reflects an archetypal and divine truth.

This is why I regard feminism as one of the major weapons in the contemporary war against God. It is a sad thing when something is presented as a good, and deceives many into thinking it is a good, but is actually the very opposite of that. I tend to believe that many of those who are deceived by this in fact want to be deceived as they feel that their personal agendas (and their egos) can be advanced by the deception. Nevertheless, even if they are willing victims, they are still victims. It might be countered that feminism has done much good by releasing women from their inferior roles and giving them opportunities they would never have had, but the good it may have done is now far outweighed by the harm it does as many women are derailed from their true vocation as women and denied access to the inner realities of femininity. In addition, the relation between the sexes is reduced from a loving complementarity to something that has become far more competitive. Besides, inferior role? That is a matter of opinion and rather presupposes the truth of the feminist doctrine in the first place. Obviously the past was far from perfect but it was an imperfect version of truth. We now are aiming for a perfect lie.

I say that feminism derails women from their true vocation as women for several reasons. Firstly, it gives them a false idea of themselves, of what they are and what they should be. It presents them with a distortion of their own reality. I see this very plainly as a man. It is an obvious truth (obvious in the light of the reality of God) which anyone should be able to see if their vision has not been clouded by worldly propaganda. Wise women should be able to see it even more clearly than me or any man. But so many women today can't see it or won't. And this brings me to the second point. Feminism cuts women off from their own source of inner wisdom. By emphasising traditionally masculine qualities and types of intellect, and promoting doing over being, it makes women think much more along analytical/mechanical lines and be far less open to intuition and direct perception as traditionally they always have been. Women are being trained and encouraged to become more like men and less like women. They can't ever fully succeed in this and they lose a lot by deforming themselves in the attempt to do so.

The inevitable effect of all this is that individuals live increasingly in a world of ideology and theory rather than reality and truth and, as a consequence, becomes increasingly alienated from reality and truth. What is more, women are no longer able to provide a harmonious counterbalance to men to the mutual advantage of both, and the whole of humanity suffers. If we ask why this has been allowed to happen when it is clearly counter to the reality of what human beings are, a reality happily accepted for as long as we know, the answer is twofold. One, it has been encouraged by the dark forces who have their own agenda of spiritual destruction and it has found a fertile soil in our time of materialism and egalitarianism. And two, it finds ready victims in people motivated by egotistical rebellion against God whether they perceive that in these terms or not. We should also not forget the truth in feminism because, of course, there is some. It would never have caught on if that were not the case, but half truths are often much more dangerous than outright lies.

I have taken rather a long time to come to the point of this post but I wanted to set the scene before doing so. The point is why is God called Father? Is this a mere convention or an accurate reflection of reality?  Is it a 'patriarchal' distortion of truth or does it really say something about the nature of the Supreme Being? I will affirm here that is a correct description of God as Creator, one based on reality, and that is why I had first to set out my case against the chief proponent of the idea that it is just a convention which could easily be changed.

I will start with the fact that Christ called God the Father. Now there are many different religions and all contain elements of the truth but that does not mean that all are equally true. Given that they are descriptions of spiritual reality and spiritual reality is a) vast, and b) capable of ever deeper interpretation, we should expect that. Religions either come from the experience of an initiating teacher as in Buddhism or from revelation and Christianity is the most recent revelation and the one that comes from the highest level. What about Islam, you might ask? Islam may have been chronologically more recent but it is really just a revamp of the Old Testament so it is metaphysically and spiritually less developed. The revelation of Christ, which includes the revelation of the Trinity, is the most profound revelation of spiritual truth humanity has received to date. I'm afraid you either see this or you don't and if you don't you might consider what is stopping you seeing it. Of course, you could have a preference based on various factors, birth and background particularly, and that is fine. God has sent different religions to suit different types of people and all (all within reason) have the power to bring you to him, I believe. Nevertheless, as I stated earlier, they are not all equal and Christ is the revealer of truth above all others, both in his teachings and, especially, in his person. I would also say that, though all religions have an understanding of the sacred, it is in Christianity that there is the greatest sense of the holy.

So the fact that Christ called God Father is important. He specifically referred to him in that way and, if you want to say that this was just a cultural matter, you have to explain why in so many other ways (including that of giving far more attention to women than earlier Jewish prophets or Judaism itself) Christ went against the cultural norms of his time. You also would be disregarding the essence of who Christ was and denying that he had any real insights into spiritual reality.

But that is just my starting position. If Christ said one thing and all the evidence pointed in another way that would create rather a large problem. But the fact is it all points in the same way. If you define God as unmanifest, unacting pure spirit beyond Creation, this is obviously above any qualitative expression or idea of masculine and feminine. But then there is nothing we can say about it at all. All words, all descriptions fall back at that threshold of naked unqualified existence. We can't even call it God because that is something and pure spirit is not something. But once we are talking about God as Creator, as something that acts and has a will, and, as beings in Creation that is what we must do, then we see that he is indeed best described as Father and that the language of fatherhood sums up the relation of the Creator to creation better than any other. For the name of God that most defines him is I AM. He is the supreme subject to which the whole of creation is object, and this takes us right to the roots of the masculine/feminine divide showing us that it is there at the beginning of manifested being where it reveals itself in subject and object. Now, clearly God is God and encompasses all things so some of his qualities can be described in feminine terms, but if we are talking about his essence rather than his qualities, and if we are describing him as the Creator then he is masculine for he generates creation whether that be ex nihilo or from a feminine aspect that he projects from himself - prime matter, the receptive substance. But, at any rate, creation is generated by God not incubated in him, and, although an aspect of him is within it, in himself he remains transcendent to it, outside of it. Similarly all creation is receptive to him and he is positive to it. Consequently although motherhood can certainly be used to describe some of the results of creation, it cannot be used of the initial and fundamental creative act.

None of this means there are not aspects of the divine being that can manifest in feminine form. I think there are and have written about it here. But the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe is best understood as God the Father just as taught by Jesus and as demonstrated in a metaphysical sense by the fact that existence itself is, if it is anything, pure positivity.

To conclude, if considered as unexpressed being God is neither masculine nor feminine because there are no manifested qualities in unexpressed being at all. It is a state of complete inactivity. But when considered as the personal God and Creator he is masculine with the whole of Creation as his bride. And I am tempted to wonder whether this so called impersonal aspect is not just a creation of philosophers who have projected an idea in their heads into a reality. I don't dispute that something approximating to this exists but is it the absolute, as usually postulated, or is it just an aspect of the personal God that remains unexpressed, the ground of being for instance? That is to say, is it a part of him rather than him being a part of it? For if it were the supreme state how could the personal God ever have arisen? How could something have come from nothing or movement from immobility or light from darkness unless these things were already there or something was there to generate them?

St Dunstan

I have put a post about St Dunstan, the 10th century English saint, on Albion Awakening.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/st-dunstan.html

St Dunstan at bottom right.

Technology and the Smartphone

More and more people are uneasy about the dehumanising effects of modern technology, particularly the ubiquitous use of the smartphone to which the younger generation are, without exaggeration, addicted. I have felt extremely ambivalent about all this since the early days of the computer.  I remember being told by many people who identified themselves with New Age types of spirituality in the 1980s that computer technology was inspired by God or the spiritual powers or whatever form of hidden reality they believed in, but I instinctively resisted this. Ditto for the worldwide connectivity of the internet which was supposed to be a forerunner of spiritual consciousness. To me the whole technology was a parody of true spiritual understanding, Satan aping God as he likes to do but doing so in a crude and materialistic way since he is unable to do otherwise. As time has gone by I have become ever more convinced that modern computer technology is, to put it bluntly, demonically inspired, if not in its actual origin then certainly in its development and use and exploitation. How can it be otherwise since it substitutes breadth for depth, the exterior for the interior and makes everything so easy that it loses its flavour and nourishment? Those who understand will know what I mean. Others might perhaps ponder on the difference between material and spiritual progress and see that the two don't necessarily go together, and are sometimes at complete odds.

There is an often quoted passage from the book of Revelation which can be taken to be referring to the outcome of this form of technology without too much stretching of the imagination.

"And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshippers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.” (Rev 14:9-11)

Strong stuff that would probably be considered hate speech nowadays. But let's consider what it might mean in relation to modern computer technology. You can't call this technology evil in itself, and the use of it is not sinful as such though it can open the door to all sorts of temptations and distractions. Therefore it can undoubtedly lead to potential sins not to mention ever more separation from the spiritual world. Nonetheless, worshipping the beast and receiving the mark must entail more than simply using a computer or smartphone.


The devil is no fool. He works in stages, leading us from seemingly innocent pursuits and preoccupations more and more deeply into his net until we end up doing and thinking and feeling things we never would have done when we started. So once we have become so addicted to our smartphones that we cannot imagine life without them he will introduce another level and then another and so on until there will finally come a point at which we will be led to make a conscious decision as to whether to carry on down this path or turn back. Carrying on will, in some way, mean renouncing God and utterly rejecting spiritual truth. 

Perhaps by then we will only be able to engage in any kind of economic activity if we allow ourselves to receive some kind of 'tag', even an implant, to get which we might have to take an oath of commitment to something that, in effect, denies God. Things do seem to be tending in that direction. So the time may come when we will have to choose whether to continue receiving our habitual worldly benefits, or maybe receive even greater benefits which we might not be aware of now but which will seem very attractive then, or not, and if we wish to get these things then we may have to do something similar to swearing allegiance to the old Roman gods, only something far more serious in its implications because it will require not just an outer gesture as that did but a real inner act of submission. By then the establishment hierarchy will probably be devil worshippers of some sort, though it will be perceived far less crudely than that, of course. It will doubtless seem sophisticated and spiritually advanced though it will clearly lack Christ in spirit and probably in name too since the name of Christ is a holy one that cannot be defiled. But anyone wishing to receive the favour and privileges of the establishment, or even lead a normal life in the world with money, material comfort and all the perks of modernity, will have to make a similar commitment to the 'beast'. They will have to accept its 'mark' in return for being allowed full participation as a citizen of a global government.


Hysterical fear-mongering? Perhaps. It is only an imaginary speculation. Nevertheless the signs of the times are pointing in this direction for those whose spiritual eyes are in any way open, and who have paid attention to the warnings we have been given from tradition.

Male/Female Complementarity

I have an observation to make about the complementary role of the sexes which will be controversial nowadays but which I suspect most people know in their hearts to be true. Which is probably why it is so often resisted in this most irreligious of ages, irreligion being a manifestation of egotistic rebellion against truth.

In every pair of complements there is always one that is more fundamental than the other. One of which the other is the opposite in the duality of expressed reality; expressed reality necessarily being dualistic or nothing could be expressed in the first place. In the male/female pair this is the male. This statement is reinforced by the fact that God or spirit is almost always considered male (all souls are female or passive/receptive to God) and Nature or matter (mater) always seen as female. Those few metaphysical systems in which the Great Goddess is seen as absolute are clearly distortions of reality in that she is the Terrible Mother who may relate to her children with a fierce passion but she also devours them. There is no sense in these systems of the fundamental reality of the Good, the Beautiful and the True and that's because not only is the transcendent Father and Creator denied, reduced at best to a sort of emasculated consort or son, but even the true spiritual feminine is distorted, largely replaced with a semi-monster who must be propitiated with death and sacrifice. The Great Goddess is merely Nature writ large with all of the amorality of Nature seen purely as Nature. She is Matter translated to the status of Spirit but retaining her material/natural characteristics and hence she is a deformed version of ultimate reality, understandable only in the light of a primitive and debased religion which projected Nature onto the spiritual world because it was unable to comprehend the proper reality and transcendence of spirit.

In Indian philosophy the foundational masculine and feminine principles are described as purusha and prakriti and have a similar relationship to that of spirit and matter. Most other religions also relate the Father to Sky/heaven and the Mother to Earth/nature and a complementary but hierarchical relationship is either stated or implied. And it is interesting to note that in the Garden of Eden Eve was created as a companion to Adam not vice versa. This can be seen as expressing in real terms how, on an abstract level, positive and negative always exist together but negative exists as the balancing opposite to positive which is primary in that positive has to be conceived before negative can be, even if the coming into being of the two is instantaneous. The two of them must always exist together but still there is this primacy to one of them. It's the same with light and dark. For original light does not arise in darkness since there might be said to be no darkness until light is there to reveal it. Thus with the arising of light darkness comes too. I am not giving this as a literal parallel of the masculine/feminine duality but simply an example of how one half of a pair of complements will precede the other even when they both come about together.

Obviously what I say here can be (and will be by those who want to do so) dismissed as a rationalisation of the desire of men to dominate or have power over women but I think an objective view will see that it is far more fundamental than that. I don't dispute that this desire may well exist (as may its opposite) but it is better seen as a consequence of the fallen nature of both men and women and so a corruption of what I am talking about here rather than the reason for it. We should reject the corruption by all means but not the reality of which it is a corruption.

So my statement here will be controversial today when to dispute egalitarianism in any form is the major sin. It is also open to misinterpretation and misuse so I should add that it does not mean that man is intrinsically superior to woman. They are meant to be, after all, complementary equals. Furthermore, in the context of any two individuals, a woman may just as well be superior to a man as a man may be to a woman. Moreover, precisely because they are complementary, there are going to be situations where the feminine rightly dominates the masculine. But abstractly considered and on the whole, man is, or should be, the first among equals in the context of the two just as is the case with spirit and matter. And this is reflected, in an obvious physical sense, by the fact that man is on average slightly taller than woman. An apparently trivial, even silly, point that nevertheless does echo a more fundamental truth because the same patterns prevail throughout nature. Besides which nothing is meaningless in a universe created by God. Even the fact that we say man and woman, husband and wife, has a reason grounded in truth. The two are a complementary pair and go together, each balancing, rounding out, completing and fulfilling the other, but one comes first in the context of the pair. Not first in terms of seniority but primary in terms of the order of being and how being is manifested.

It is obvious how this relationship of slightly imbalanced balance in which hierarchy and equality both exist at the same time causes confusion and can be corrupted. It certainly has been in the past  which is the reason for the sorry state of affairs today. And that is why it has to be seen in the overall reality of the light of God. If both men and women walk in that light, truly so rather than in name only, there is no danger of distorting a natural but delicately poised reality. If they do not then human egos enter in and that is always a corrupting factor.

To illustrate what I mean by this think of the masculine and feminine principles as expanding and contracting forces. If the expanding (or differentiating) force is too powerful things will tear apart but if the contracting (or unifying) force dominates then they will be crushed, eventually breaking down and leading to a situation of complete stasis. However if the expanding force is stronger than the contracting by the right, not too large, amount, there will be a balanced state of growth. The law of the manifested universe is growth. It is the masculine principle that drives this but for growth to be stable this must be counterbalanced by the feminine principle with its nurturing and protective quantities. If these gain the upper hand, however, then growth will stall and eventually rewind. That is why matriarchal societies continue in the same way for centuries without any real development, eventually stagnating.

This instinctively known fact does not mean man should rule or dominate woman in the way it has been misconceived to imply in the past. It is meant to be a loving complementarity with each side supplying what the other lacks and each taking the lead in different, appropriate, situations - even if it is incumbent on both sexes to develop qualities associated with the other and express them in the context of their own being.  But it does mean that overall the male is the lead principle and that should be recognised if a loving and respectful harmony is to be maintained. At the same time, something like the old attitudes of chivalry and noblesse oblige should prevail because these guard against abuse and the turning of a good rule into a tyranny.

Everything depends on getting your metaphysics right. The modern world view is based on a materialistic understanding of the world. Therefore it is built on a false foundation and its ideas are based on unreality. Traditional societies had a more natural understanding, often unsophisticated but instinctively correct. They understood that the male/female duality was in some sense a reflection of the duality of Creator and Creation, God and Nature, Heaven and Earth and this meant something more than a crude equality.

Lest anyone think this is somehow devaluing women let me state my belief that it actually validates the feminine half of mankind far more than feminism, the modern dogma on this question, does for that seeks to deny woman her true worth and turn her into an imitation man.

I don't wish this post to be taken as saying that man is innately superior to woman because that would be a misunderstanding of its premise. I said this earlier but it's worth repeating. The idea is that, ontologically speaking and in terms of basic root reality and on the level of the archetypes (which, of course, should be reflected on all lower levels), one comes before the other even though, as a complementary pairing, the two always exist together. And in expressed reality you would have the King and Queen (in that order) on the horizontal plane but you would also have the Queen and her courtiers when relationships are vertically considered. This is the ideal to which we should conform if we wish to be true to how things are.

I've written more on this subject here.
God as Father and Mother

St Godric

I have put a post on Albion Awakening about Godric the hermit who was born around the time of the Norman Conquest and lived for over 100 years. He was also the composer of the first songs in English for which music survives. Or maybe I should say he received rather than composed these songs since they are supposed to have been given him in vision by the Virgin Mary amongst others..

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/st-godric.html

There Can be No Such Thing As Secular Morality

Most people in the modern world grow up in households in which the prevailing moral ideas are shaped by a type of secular humanism which might appear not too different to Christianity if it were a religion purely of this world with no sense of the next*. That’s not surprising since secular humanism has borrowed much of its moral position from Christianity, but it leads many people to think that secular humanism has taken all the important bits of Christianity and got rid of the superfluous stuff. The truth is precisely the opposite.

What is left out is the reality of the absolute and this is the foundation of all the rest. Without the fatherhood of God the brotherhood of man has no meaning, and the undoubted moral falling away in the West and elsewhere comes from replacing a morality rooted in spiritual truth with a secular morality that has no roots in anything real. The result is that each generation becomes further separated from the idea of spiritual truth and, as it does, its sense of a genuine moral order, founded on a real transcendent truth is diminished. 

Once you start to separate human intellect and will and feelings from their proper source in spiritual realities you lose the all important connection between the human being as he is here in this world and his true origin and purpose which is in higher dimensions of existence.

For the fact is that the basis for an objective standard of morality can only come from something eternal that is outside the human mind. This is God and it must be a personal God too because impersonal reality is just that, impersonal. An impersonal reality would be truth only but a full and complete morality must be based on love and truth equally and that means a personal God. Only if founded on a transcendent reality can morality itself be real in the sense of being the same at all times and in all places and not contingent on external factors. But any morality that comes from the human mind will inevitably be conditional and dependent on circumstances affecting that mind. In consequence it will be both mutable and relative. 


Secular morality denies religion so it has to look elsewhere to justify itself. Often nowadays it looks to science but science can only examine the realm of nature and nature cannot explain itself so science has nothing to say about true morality. This is an inversion of truth in which the tail is seen to be wagging the dog. No wonder it get everything back to front. And when it comes down to it the very phrase 'secular morality' is a contradiction in terms since secular means something of this world while morality if it is to be grounded in anything real necessarily implies something beyond this world, something that takes its origin from a timeless reality of truth and goodness. If there is not this reality then any system of behaviour is arbitrary and meaningless and one is not better than another from an absolute point of view. This leaves you with a morality that can change at any time and a changing morality is no morality at all.

The point I am making here does not mean that an atheist can never act from a moral position. Of course he can but what I am saying is that if he does, and that position coincides with what is generally accepted as goodness, he can have no real reason for doing so according to his belief of how reality is structured. Indeed, without some kind of sense of an absolute that overrides everything in this world and against which everything in this world must be measured how can the atheist actually define anything as 'good' as such? His belief, logically considered, must mean that there is no real moral difference between a Hitler and a saint. Each is just pursuing his own subjective preference and there is no real reason to say that one is better or worse than the other. Against what true yardstick would you be measuring this? The common good? But there is no common good if all we are is animated matter. Without an over-arching reality we are all just locked in our little selves with no true connection to anybody else. Consequently there is no real reason for me to care about you except for any advantage it might bring me. And that is why I say there can be no such thing as secular morality.

* Which a lot of contemporary Christianity is becoming but that's another story.