When the One becomes Two

In May of 2024 I published on this blog a short series of excerpts from Coleridge's Table Talk which is a collection of his conversations with friends round the dinner table recorded for posterity. One of them ran like this.

"Most women have no character at all," said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better,  saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Everyone wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife, — creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.

I added a brief commentary saying that if the highest state of matter is to reflect spirit perfectly you can see what he means here. This extended Coleridge's insight to the metaphysical plane but that is the only place the solution to the war between the sexes can be found because it is here that the division into two poles of being first takes place. This is where it works as it should.

The modern version of female rebellion against the male dates back to the early 19th century. It might be seen as a consequence of masculine leadership, backed by all order-based religion, tipping over into tyranny or else of man's prior rebellion against God. However, the reality is that it goes much further back to the Garden of Eden. It is nothing new, and though it may be provoked by male oppression that is not the cause of it. The basic cause is female ego which is not to say that male ego is not involved in the sex war for it surely is but that is not the primary reason for seeking to overturn an order ordained by God from the beginning. Men have certainly abused that order, though, ironically, less so in the culture in which the modern rebellion arose than practically all others, but that does not make the order itself invalid.

With that in mind let us consider the following.

Premise: The feminine can only blossom and flourish when it submits to the leadership of the masculine. Societies can only blossom and flourish spiritually when this is the case.

Proviso: This leadership must be a loving one or authority becomes authoritarian. 

Qualifier: This does not mean women must submit to men at all times for there are certainly areas in which women should take the lead and men should follow. Nonetheless, in overall terms the feminine should submit to the masculine if order is to be maintained just as in the broader sense a man's soul should submit to God, all souls being feminine to God - feminine soul, masculine spirit.

First Principles: In terms of absolute reality the masculine force relates to being and the feminine to becoming and change.

In terms of manifestation the masculine or active force acts and the feminine or passive reacts. The feminine principle is subordinate to the masculine principle though both are parts of one co-existing whole. You can say they are spiritually equal if you understand that in the context of their differing functions in a hierarchy of being. In the real world there will inevitably be permutations and variations depending on individuals and their circumstances but underlying these there must always be cognisance and acceptance of the basic form if society is to function as it should and men and women to realise their proper spiritual purpose.

Dion Fortune was told this by one of her Masters as related in The Cosmic Doctrine. "You will be given certain images (which) are not descriptive but symbolic, and are designed to train the mind not to inform it. Therefore, you may think of the Unmanifest as interstellar space*; and of the Logos as a Sun surrounded by its Solar System of Planets; and of the emanations of the Logos as rays. The Unmanifest is the only Unity. Manifestation begins when duality occurs." He goes on to say that the prime duality is space and movement. That is one way of putting it. There are others. For instance, movement is time. Space is darkness. Movement is or is akin to light. This is the root of male and female and it goes back to the beginning of things. Here you will see that the male acts on the female who is passive as is space. God moving on the face of the waters. The mystery of time and space is the mystery of masculine and feminine. Space is all potential but it waits to be fecundated. Time, which is movement, fecundates. Only when we understand metaphysics will we understand the mystery of the two sexes and to do this we must detach ourselves from an exclusive association of sex with its expression in human beings. That must be seen in the light of metaphysical principles which are the realities behind them.

* In fact, the Unmanifest is not interstellar space which only comes about when the Unmanifest manifests but this is the best image the human mind, based on forms, can grasp.