When my book By No Means Equal was being prepared for print the publisher emailed me to say that certain passages contained what he called "problematic concepts involving unsubstantiated derogatory claims aimed at targeted groups (women, people of colour, et al.)" which contravened their editorial policy, and that they wouldn't publish unless I removed them. The specific passages concerned nothing more offensive than there being fundamental differences between men and women, but I had to provide justification for statements I had made on that score. I watered my remarks down a little as a result and didn't object to doing so as the general point remained. But what really swung the argument in my favour and persuaded them to keep the rewritten section was an addition I made pointing out that differences between the two sexes are clearly signposted in astrology. Astrology seemingly helped me in this matter where everyday observation and common sense could not.
So, here I want to examine how astrology supports the traditional view of masculine and feminine while contradicting the modern attitude that the two sexes are so-called social constructs which are essentially interchangeable. As we shall see, and as everyone knew until recently, there is a profound difference between them, and it goes right back to the duality necessary for manifestation.
Astrology is not primarily a predictive tool nor a system that describes psychological patterns though it is both of those. Its real power is as a symbolic description of how the universe works and that is how I will be looking at it here. At root, it is built upon a system of polarity and shows the primal cosmic duality required to differentiate and bring a universe into being. The two forces involved are opposite and complementary and in their most basic form they might be conceived of as the expanding and contracting energies of creation.
In the architecture of the zodiac, the 360-degree wheel is divided by what we can think of as alternating currents of charge. This is the law of polarity which is what lies behind sexual difference.
First, there is the masculine principle of Fire and Air. This is the initiating and expanding force which moves outward from the centre, the source of the One Life, projecting energy, ideas and light into space. It is the archetype of the seed, the spark, the will and the active intellect. It is God’s initiating impulse and his first movement away from the still core of unexpressed being. In terms of the constellations of the zodiac, it is represented by Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius.
But this force must be balanced or it could never settle into form. Therefore, we have a complementary principle which follows on from the first as its opposite which means the first comes first just as Adam came before Eve in the old story which is myth based on truth.
In astrology the feminine principle relates to Earth and Water, capitalised because these are metaphysical realities of which the physical elements are simply correspondences in the lower world of base matter. Its constellations are Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces. This principle is the contracting and receptive force. It moves inward toward the centre, drawing energy in, containing it, incubating it and providing the matrix required for the idea to take form. It is the archetype of the soil, the womb and the deep waters. It is the reaction to the action. Without it the first action would never be grounded or limited and would simply be an endless explosion with nothing being formed.
Creation cannot take place if these forces are treated as like one another. If you have only expanding energy (Fire/Air), you have a chaotic explosion that can never form a body. If you have only contracting energy (Earth/Water), you have a static, inert mass that can never stir into life. Creation requires the tension of their difference but for any growth or development to take place, the first principle must drive the process and there must be a slight imbalance in that direction. Harmony does not mean perfect symmetrical balance as it might in a purely mechanistic universe. A perfectly balanced universe would be a dead, static machine with no capacity to evolve. If the second principle dominates there is retraction and eventual collapse to the base state of chaos, but if the first does by just the right amount, then there is ordered growth.
Traditional astrology supports the view that the sexes, based on the cosmic principles they embody, are complementary, possessing equal spiritual value but having different functions. The masculine principle initiates the law and projects the vision above the horizon, the day part of the horoscope, while the feminine principle grounds the form and stabilises the energies below the horizon, the night part. The irony of feminism, which is the attempt to flatten this duality and declare the two forces essentially identical or interchangeable, is that it undermines the unique power of the receptive principle. It tries to force the contracting, incubating watery element to behave like a projecting fire-spark and by so doing so destroys the harmonious balance that is required to ground spiritual force from the higher planes.
For order to prevail in the material world, the active impulse must govern the receptive form. This can be expressed by a metaphysical law which states that expansion must occur before contraction can give it boundary. If there is no initial outward projection, which means no vision, no law and no igniting spark, then the feminine force has nothing to contract around and will remain a vacuum. Always in the sequence of manifestation, the expanding masculine force comes first and the feminine responds to that.
This response has traditionally been expressed in terms of submission and while, from the standpoint of the metaphysics of archetypes, it is true that the feminine impulse must submit to the masculine, this submission is not a purely passive thing. It acts as the necessary wall of containment and resistance and so has its own strength and power. You might say the vessel must be strong enough to contain the burst of fiery energy and hold it in a stable and coherent form.
Disorder and chaos follow if the polarities switch roles. This is what tradition knew and what the modern world has forgotten. If the contracting force tries to behave like the driver or if the expanding force refuses to drive and collapses into passivity, the edifice of being fails. If the form-building force tries to act as the primary initiator, it builds structures that are rigid and devoid of life. Equally, if the masculine energy does not first project and then maintain the law, the created space becomes disorganised and chaotic.
I'm talking about this in terms of energies and forces as though it were simply a matter of cold, impersonal mechanics, but that is to make a point. I believe that behind these forces there are actual beings, angels perhaps, and that the root reality of man and woman really is Man and Woman.
From all this we should be able to see that the modern flattening of the sexes is a disruption of the primal duality necessary for manifestation because it attempts to resolve an inequality of value by enforcing an artificial identity of function. Modern feminism does not elevate the feminine archetype which is the maternal power of incubation and giving form to spirit. Instead, it adopts a masculine standard of success by encouraging the feminine principle to abandon its true role to mimic the role of the masculine thereby attacking the architecture that holds the universe together. This leads to the outer world becoming over-assertive, chaotic and loud, while the inner, subjective worlds are neglected. Duality is the law of the manifested world, but the two pillars must remain distinct, honouring their separate roles, if harmony and divine order are to prevail.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The One projects itself into creation in terms of a positive and negative pole. In human language, the word "negative" has a pejorative taint, but here the so-called negativity has its own proper qualities. On the one hand, it may represent privation, density and resistance, but it is also the power of receptivity and attraction, and it provides the form that allows for the revelation of beauty. Beauty needs the limitation of boundaries and contrasts. There is no beauty without form.
The Source, or God in himself, cannot be seen or experienced because there is nothing to oppose him. Pure unmanifest being is everything and everywhere but you could also say it is nothing and nowhere and so in order to know itself and experience its own potential it must bring a universe into manifestation. To do this it must start by creating a boundary which it does by projecting a field of limitation that then becomes like a mirror. This is the Primal Subject of I AM becoming subject and object or God making matter so that the original light of spirit has something to illuminate. This early matter is the primordial waters, an infinite sea of potential like the Nun of ancient Egypt or the Greek Chaos. Some systems regard it as the absolute root of being in itself, seeing it as Space, Darkness or the Void from which all things come, but they miss that this state can never become anything without the divine spark from outside to awaken it into life. Non-existence can never give rise to existence, and the cosmic womb without the light of God entering it from outside would remain barren. That is why we must see root reality not as darkness but as unmanifest light. Darkness does not exist until light is there to reveal it.
All is one and matter is simply spirit at its lowest, most crystallised vibrational frequency. I AM or God projects Spirit and Matter from himself, the Positive and Negative Poles, but Spirit is him in himself while Matter is his projected reflection. This gives spirit an ontological priority and means that in the course of manifestation the lower vessel must be emptied of its own personal distortions, which are those that derive from seeing it as real in itself, and become a pure channel for the source of the unmanifested light that projected it. The vessel must allow the light to shine without impediment which truth is what lies behind the teaching that says that spiritually the female must submit to the higher without, while the male must conquer the lower within. Of course, in human terms things are not so clear-cut as everyone has the Sun and the Moon in their horoscope, but still the woman must express this in terms of her femininity while the man must express it in terms of his masculinity.
We can sum this up by saying that expansion (the positive) creates the space, but there must then be contraction (the negative) to define the boundaries of that space. These are not two separate forces fighting for dominance but the right and left hands of a single Divine Will. Spirit does not fight Matter. Spirit becomes Matter to experience the joy of consciously returning home to itself.
At the level of the Source spirit and matter retract back into unity. However, the hierarchical division between the two poles must exist in manifestation if God's will and purpose are to be served and the units of consciousness he sends into the world to evolve and grow are to achieve their goal of returning to the Source as unique self-aware individualisations of the divine.
A certain logic looking at these forces in terms of abstract geometry might say that the two polarities of manifestation must be equal because they balance each other, and in a certain sense they are equal. But it’s important to remember that we are framing realities of the spiritual world in material terms here and we cannot restrict ourselves to just one approach to something that occurs simultaneously on its own level in different ways. This fact causes problems for the limited human mind and to get a fuller picture we can adopt a complementary approach.
If we think of our two forces not as expanding and contracting but in terms of solar and lunar principles, we see that the solar is the primary force while the lunar takes its light from that though it doesn't just reflect that light, it gives the reflected light its own unique quality to fit the nighttime when it reigns. The Sun represents the manifestation of Divine Will and active spirit while the Moon as the mother of form takes the powerful intense burning light of the Sun, which no one can look at directly, and softens it, giving it a quality unique to itself which illuminates the darkness of night. It is not just a passive mirror but an active translator. The Sun radiates its own light (expanding) and while the Moon is both receptive and reflective (contracting), what it reflects is modified by its own special character.
This analogy, which is actually an echo in the physical world of a metaphysical reality, shows that there is both an equality of masculine and feminine, the Sun rules the day and the Moon rules the night, but also a spiritual asymmetry because the source of the light of the Moon is originally from the Sun.
We have been talking about how God expresses himself in creation through duality and how the two poles of this expression can be identified as masculine and feminine aspects of reality. As mentioned above, some systems regard these as completely equal as you cannot have one without the other, but the drawback of these systems is that they must posit an originating state of non-being, absolute darkness or empty space which is completely undifferentiated, passive and static and from which the Yin and Yang forces emerge simultaneously like visible light and darkness which imply each other. The question then must be how and why does anything come out of an absolute non-being? What stirs in this unmanifest All to give rise to an expressed universe?
The Christian view of God as the eternal presence of I AM makes more sense because then there is a positive something to kick the whole process off. We know there is something and something must come from something. Even a sea of potential cannot become anything without something stirring it into activity. Creation is here initiated by the Will of God who wants to know himself through reflection (note the dual meaning of that word). I would regard the popular esoteric idea of an impersonal absolute as the source, an infinitely vast and undifferentiated space, as an intellectual attempt to trace existence to its presumed logical origin in non-existence. Zero must come before one, as it were. This is the view from below looking up. But from the perspective of a top-down spiritual view, a sea of potential projected by the Supreme Being as a field in which to know itself in duality, an object to original subject, using subject to mean pre-existing consciousness, makes much more sense. There is no empty space other than that a Supreme Being wills it from within himself, and an eternal subject explains the universe, why it is and what it is for far better than a Void without will, purpose or indeed anything at all. Ultimate reality here is not absolute darkness but unmanifest light which only appears dark to the dualistic mind.
In this scenario the Supreme Being is the always existing eternal presence who expresses himself in creation (or perhaps is always expressing himself since how can you say when time started for the timeless?) through a polarity of Spirit (the spark/will, consciousness) and Matter (the vessel/space, form) which provide the stage for the action, the action being the growth and development of consciousness.
To understand the sacred hierarchy of this reality, we must look to the universal shorthand that aligns the masculine pole with Heaven, Sky, and Spirit, and the feminine pole with Earth, Matter, and Form. In this top-down cosmological blueprint, the feminine is metaphysically subordinate to the masculine, not in intrinsic value but in causal order. Just as the Earth is the receptive matrix that relies on the Sky for light, warmth and rain, so Matter is the contingent reflection that derives its reality from the primary impulse of Spirit to reveal itself in duality. But without matter spirit cannot see itself.
Thus, we see that while the two poles are complementary within the theatre of manifestation, they are asymmetrical in their origins, with the Father initiating the creative current and the Mother deriving her form-giving capacity from that primary source. He represents the active unmanifest source, self-existent and transcendent, while she represents the receptive manifest field of space, substance and form. She occupies the lower position because she receives the spiritual impulse, giving it tangible existence. Form cannot exist without the initial impulse to shape it.
The failure to see this ontological asymmetry is the root of modern disorder. If you treat the reflection (Matter/Form) as identical to or interchangeable with the Source (Spirit/Father), you cut the universe off from its spiritual anchor. The world collapses into materialism and horizontal secularism which is just what it has done. Chaos and disintegration follow because the material cannot sustain its own existence once it severs connection with the spiritual.
This might be seen as a call to return to the patriarchal ways of the past before the 18th century when the feminine impulse began to reassert itself in line with the general historical movement towards greater freedom and individual agency. But there was a reason for this modern demand for recognition. Masculine leadership, though rooted in a metaphysical principle, had become corrupted as what operated legitimately on the vertical cosmic plane was distorted by the human ego and tipped over onto the horizontal plane where a greater complementarity should reign.
The historical failure was not a failure of the metaphysical blueprint itself but of human reaction to it as men used a vertical truth to justify egotistical dominance on earth. When this macrocosmic blueprint is properly mirrored within human society, it demands a relationship where men and women are equal in majesty but asymmetrical in function, modelled on the ideal concept of the union of Ruler and Realm. The masculine orientation is to embody the vertical axis, acting as the King or Sky by holding the spiritual line to God, establishing foundational boundaries for the proper function of society and initiating purposeful direction in response to cosmic law. The feminine orientation is to embody the horizontal matrix, acting as the Queen or Earth by receiving that spiritual impulse and channelling it into culture, community, beauty and life. The two cannot change places just as one cannot change the earth for the sky without destroying the ecosystem. The King holds the ultimate reigning authority because the Sky encompasses the Earth, while the Queen commands the cultivation of the realm because the Earth is where the kingdom is established.
The goal for the future is not to return to the social structures of the past when men used the vertical hierarchy and the idea that the masculine naturally rules to dominate to excess, but to rescue this eternal metaphysical principle from both its historical distortions and its modern, secular over-corrections.
We must acknowledge that while the two sexes are not interchangeable in their spiritual roles and the traditional vertical hierarchy is rooted in reality, modernity has a purpose which is to allow for greater independent spiritual freedom so that individual souls of both sexes may evolve into self-contained, sovereign outposts of Spirit. To do this properly they must reflect the dual reality of the vertical primacy of spirit over matter and the horizontal complementary of Yin and Yang, and understand how this should work out in the field of human relationships.
At the same time, we are all individual and individuals of each sex must respond to both principles within themselves, developing will, intelligence, compassion and so on. But this must be in the context of the form they instantiate. Then men and women can navigate the horizontal plane as spiritual beings who consciously honour the timeless cosmic dance where the King takes the lead in reigning and the Queen in nurturing and cultivating the realm. Otherwise put, the masculine rules the world of spirit and the feminine that of soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment