tim@unc.UUCP (12/14/83)
To me, sex is a very high sacrament, and I disagree strongly with those who say that the assignment of gender to a thing is purely a matter of the physical. The symbolism of sex is very rich, and since when discussing absolutes (like the creator of the Universe) we are forced to admit that we are dealing only with symbols, not the thing itself, it would be surprising if sexual symbolism were not convenient. In particular, consider the creation of the Universe to be a sexual act. In the initial state, we have an unknowable creator and an unfathomable void. It is convenient to describe the process by calling the creator male and the void female. The creator is thus conceived as emitting the seed of the new Universe into the void, and all of the new Universe is the child of the creator and the void. This is a very satisfactory way of looking at creation in a way that is relatively independent of dogma. All religions acknowledge the existence of the Universe, even if some would rather call it an illusion. The existence of a thing means that it was created, although not necessarily by sentient beings; the model as given does not imply sentience of the creator or the void, or deny it. A Judaic/Christian/Islamic form of this belief would have the male creator identified with the Big Daddy God of the dogma, and the void relegated to a state of non-sentience and complete passivity. This is not the only possible monotheistic version, of course: one could have the female aspect predominant, and the male seen as simply a passive partner from whom the seed of the new Universe was derived. This is a somewhat less easy conception to grasp, and it doesn't flow quite as well as the male-first version since activity is more naturally a male attribute when viewed in a sexual context, but analogues can be seen in Dianic Wicca. I dislike both of these forms because I am not a monotheist. I feel that the number one is essentially nothing more than a mask for the number two. One cannot exist by itself -- the fact that it has been counted shows that there is both subject and object, and thus two. (I am not ashamed to say that I enjoy Qabalastic speculation.) One can pull sentience from the original model entirely, and go for a series of repeated sexual acts resulting finally in human experience, that is, the Universe. In this case, both the initial creator (the yod, if you will) and the void (the first hay) are non-sentient, "automatic" forces which provide the Universe with its initial existence by mating. Parts of the new Universe form into male and female sentiences (vau and final hay). So what we have is a pre-creation that brings a sentient male and female into being. (Alternately, the new female can be viewed as the same as the old [particularly if we use the YHVH formula], and the new male as being the whole of the fruit of the pre-creation.) These beings then mate and can be considered to be in a state of permanent sex, which is the foundation of the Universe of human experience. This latter model finds some strong parallels in the yab-yum imagery of Tantric Buddhism and in many of the Hindu sex cults. It can also be easily reconciled with evolutionary views. Look at how a believer in evolution views the creation of the Universe (by which I mean the Universe of human experience): it is an evolutionary process, in which the original matings of chemicals by chance eventually result in matings of multicellular organisms, and so on up until humans are produced from the mating; at this point, the human world has been created. The sexual model of the Universe also easily fits into the framework of Thelemism (a religion born in 1904, which I have accepted). In fact, the primary scripture of Thelemism, the Book of the Law, provides an overtly sexual worldview. I'll now discuss the Book, which is divided into three chapters, for Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Khuit respectively. The first chapter is "the manifestation of Nuit", an Egyptian goddess of the sky whose name is used for literary convenience. Nuit is Infinite Space, and the union of all souls, or Wills or stars, as we call them. By herself, she is not active, not fruitful -- in short, beneath the level of experience. Containing all, she partakes of nothing by herself. She is unrestricted in the true sense -- an Absolute composed of all possibilities, but nothing which is completely unrestricted is real. (Remember that we are looking behind reality when we consider the creation of the Universe.) She is conceived of as lusting for Hadit. The second chapter of the book concerns Hadit, modeled here as a single point which is capable of experience. Hadit is difficult to talk about in any satisfactory way, so I'll let him describe himself: "I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star." [AL 2:6] In the Thelemic cosmos, "Every man and every woman is a star" [AL 1:3] (another allegory, using "star" in the celestial sense). The core of each star is identical: Hadit, the ability to experience, sentience itself. Hadit goes on to say "I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down my head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one." [AL 2:26] This is an explanation of experience, which would take a long time to explain -- for now, I am simply noting that the sex is there. The third and final chapter concerns Ra Hoor Khuit, the child of Hadit and Nuit, and sort of the Thelemic version of everyman. Each of us can be considered an avatar of Ra Hoor Khuit, since each of us is a child of Nuit and Hadit. By "a child of Nuit and Hadit" is meant a fusion of the capacity to experience and of a set of realized possibilities. This latter is usually called "memory", but in fact all that we are that distinguishes us from others is part of our shell of realized possibilities. The process of incarnation (that is, living) is essentially a process of growth. We add new experiences to our ever-growing set of realized possibilities, until finally (after an incalculable amount of time goes by) our personal set encompasses all of Nuit, and we enter a Nirvana-like condition (although, properly speaking, this is destruction and nonexistence, not any sort of condition). That is not really the goal of Thelemism as I practice it -- in my opinion, getting there is most of the fun, and I'm not likely to make it all the way this incarnation anyway. There is also the possibility that Nuit should be considered an unattainable ideal, but the process of striving for Nuit in itself is morally useful. Such considerations are secondary to the task in any case. How does this all fit into the creation of the Universe? It hearkens back to the multiple-coupling model described before Thelemism. The Universe is no longer conceived of as primarily a created entity, but as a growing entity. The growing had a root in the coupling of Nuit and Hadit, but what was created was only a potential Universe. Each of us carries a Universe with us, each of us is a Universe, and all of our Universes are growing together. This is the meaning of the principle attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: "That which is above is in that which is below". The Universe and ourselves are not really different -- each of us is indistinguishable from his or her Universe. The macrocosm is asserted to be identical with the microcosm. The Universes themselves have some common ground, due to their growing together, although there is no reason to think that there are not other beings and other Universes which are non-coincident with our own, or that we might not eventually come to share enough common ground with those beings so that contact could be established. That concludes my discussion of sex in religion for now, but there is a great deal more that could be said. In particular, use of yab-yum imagery in Buddhism is a fascinating subject, as are the techniques of Tantric ritual (which have been published more in this century than in any other, thanks to the new reasonableness of public attitudes about sex discussion that have resulted from reliable contraception). The derivation of Will and Thelemic morality from the sexual model above is also interesting. Sex is a topic that never loses its appeal. -- Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA)
djhawley@watmath.UUCP (David John Hawley) (12/16/83)
In "That Hideous Strength", the last book in the reasonably well known
science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis (a well known christian, now dead),
he uses the idea of masculinity as a relative quality.
For example, God is more masculine than the angels, who are masculine than..
.. than men who are more masculine than women. I haven't read the novel
recently, so I can't remember more than a vague idea of what he was talking
about; maybe he was taking about authority, or dominance (in essence,
not by force).
Does anyone in netland know where this idea of his came from ?
David Hawley