Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom—–Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring

© 2005 Jonathan Zap

Note: This is a working copy of an unfinished treatise on androgny as the key to unlock many of the mysteries of: the 6,000 years of feminine-hating dominator societies that continue to rule our world, key forms of religious extremism, the torturous enchantments of romantic relations, gender identity, how to regain a wholeness that we lost when we become fractured into a form that allows the matrix to bind us, and the core meaning of the ring symbolism and other aspects of the Tolkien mythology.  That’s a fairly tall order and I am open to your feedback as to whether I seem to b e succeeding with such (grandiose?) ambitions.   Given the density of the subject matter you can expect writing with a lot of density, but I’m hoping that it is readable  for you, the perceptive reader, —let me know if it is for you…..—-the title is just a working title, it will almost certainly change , but the word “Androgyny “will be in there somewhere….Also the introduction—here just a paragraph—–will be a page or two when finished… At a few points, especially at the beginning, I have some questions or comments for the unfinished draft reader.  Some people have liked the way it is written, one very intelligent person, but who says he doesn’t read much any more, found the vocabulary and phrasings unnecessarily difficult. That’s a concern, because I want this to readable, not for everybody, but at least for perceptive readers I don’t want to be creating unnecessary stumbling blocks. Most of my nonfiction writing has departed from the scholarly voice, but here I have gone back to it and that may be a mistake from the point of view of accessibility.  The scholarly voice can also become a narcissistic affectation and I value feedback on whether that seems to be happening.

ANDROGYNY , ALCHEMY, EVOLUTION AND THE ONE RING

© Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap

(the single introductory paragraph that follows is more of a working outline of a roughly four part structure)

Androgyny is the key that unlocks many of the most difficult paradoxes and delusions of the interlocking realms of eros, religion, psychology, gender relations, spirituality and sexuality. This treatise on androgyny will begin with a discourse on what androgyny is and isn’t, its history and role in human development individually and historically. The second part will employ androgyny as a key to unlock the ring symbolism of the Tolkien mythology which will expand the meaning of androgyny and illustrate its extreme relevance to the present human predicament individually and collectively. (This section, and many other Tolkien allusions scattered throughout, may be a problem for people who are completely unfamiliar with the Tolkien mythology. I could give a synopsis of the story as an appendix, but that seems like a poor way for someone to be introduced to Tolkien) The third part will discuss the five thousand year era of patriarchal, dominator  societies, theories about their origin, and the millennia long campaign against women and the feminine. It will consider evidence of a cycle shift underway, as well as dreams and mythologies that reflect a metamorphosis of gender.  The fourth and last part will suggest ways to integrate androgyny into our psyches and lives.

My understanding of androgyny is greatly indebted to June Singer, a fellow Jungian, who has done by far the best formal study of androgyny. Our lives paralleled a little bit, June Singer is apparently Jewish and from New York . I met her briefly at a Jungian conference in New York in the Eighties, and in the introduction to her book Androgyny she particularly thanks Werner Engle, a colleague of Jung whom I also knew as well as his nephew Jonathan Goldberg, also a Jungian analyst, who is a close friend of mine. I was talking to Jonathan Goldberg when June Singer approached us at the conference.   I believe her book on Androgyny (Androgyny: The Opposites Within —an earlier edition had a different title: Androgyny Toward a New Theory of Sexuality ) is one of the most important books of the 20^th century.   (Note:  Just visited with Jonathan Goldberg when I was last in New York , he told me that June Singer died just this year and more about her relationship with his uncle, Werner Engle.)

Another book on androgyny which deserves some pioneering credit for probably being the first published book to have the word androgyny in the title is Toward a Recognition of Androgyny by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. It was published just three years before Singer’s book. Unfortunately, it is no where near as insightful or useful. Ms. Heilbrun, who was an English professor at Columbia (an advocate for suicide as a conscious choice, she exercised her escape clause a year or two ago) seems to find the Western academic canon of literature to be the only part of the phenomenal world worthy of attention. For example, she makes the absurd statement that, “… America has not produced a novel whose androgynous implications match those of The Scarlet Letter …”  Has Ms. Heilbrun, or anyone, read every novel produced in America since The Scarlet Letter debuted in 1850? I don’t think so. She just assumes that anything that hasn’t come to her attention as an English professor can’t possibly have merit, and typical of the parochial academic literary critic doesn’t even bother to consider the whole genre of fantasy literature, which is actually the mainstream of literature, and in which she would find much more about androgyny than she or Nathaniel Hawthorne ever dreamed of.

Rather than putting her work into my words, I am going to introduce June Singer’s work on androgyny through a collection of quotes. This is no substitute for reading Androgyny: The Opposites Within which is a real master work. Quotations are presented in italics, where words are underlined that is her emphasis not mine.

(These quotes will probably be paraphrased in a finished version.  Most are so well phrased that rewriting them hasn’t seemed like a priority yet.)

Androgyny may be the oldest archetype of which we still have any experience.

Find it in Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Platonic tradition, but expunged from Judeo-Christianity

The androgyne will not be discovered by turning outward into the world, but by turning inward into ourselves. It is a subtle body, that is to say “nonmaterial”…androgyny is a state of consciousness that is far from ordinary, and therefore it threatens many people’s state of equilibrium. Second, androgyny threatens many presuppositions about individuals’ identity as men or as women, and hence threatens the security of those people, including most of us.

The androgyne approaches the problem with the recognition that true change begins primarily within the psychic structure of the individual. Here is where the androgyne differs fundamentally from the bisexual. If the concerns of the bisexual are mainly interpersonal, those of the androgyne are mainly intrapsychic.

The androgyny principle is intuitively experienced as the key that unlocks the prison of sex and gender—a key that is available to anyone who has the courage and imagination to make use of it.

Dionysus is kept in the women’s quarters and disguised as a girl in order to keep him from being discovered by Hera. He is treated and educated like a girl and he grows up to be effeminate. Unable to differentiate feminine from masculine functioning in himself, he scarcely knows who he is. Like an eternal youth he wanders over the world, changing shape, going mad, drinking himself into insensibility, living the abandonment of total nature and, like nature, experiencing the cycles of death and rebirth.
Dionysus is not the true androgyne any more than Hippolyte was, for he has not come to peace with his feminine side. His masculine and feminine aspects are not fused, they are merely confused…
Dionysus as god of madness, ecstasy, drunkenness and frenzy—was given to wild outbursts of excitement, performed preferably before an audience.

This description of Dionysus also tells us that many of the rock stars described as androgynous, like the young Mick Jagger, were channeling the Dionysus archetype, but not androgynous as Singer defines the term. Singer very incisively points out that our culture tends to provide representations of only the immature, confused and acting out face of androgny. This type of person, where masculine and feminine are confused, Singer terms “ hermaphrodite ,” and she reserves the term “ androgyne ” for those in whom masculine and feminine are fused and integrated.

Singer quotes James Hillman in The Myth of Analysis ,

….the peculiar tendency in our own culture to suppress these androgynous images. I noted that when such images do appear, they show themselves not so much as true androgynes, with their compensatory masculine/feminine aspects working in harmonious relationship to one another, but rather as the imperfect, incomplete, distorted image of the hermaphrodite. Such an image is the double-sexed Dionysus, whose borderline nature makes it impossible to tell whether he is “mad or sane, wild or somber, sexual or psychic, male or female, conscious or unconscious.”

In popular speech people continually confuse androgynes, hermaphrodites, and bisexuals. For example, in Dan Brown’s run away best seller The Da Vinci Code, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, is lecturing a group of prisoners on Leonardo Da Vinci:

… Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”
“You mean like chicks with dicks?” someone called out.

Brown may be contributing to the confusion somewhat by using the terms “male” and “female” which imply anatomical differences. Jungians use the terms “feminine” and “masculine” to refer to the complimentary archetypal principles which the Chinese called “yin” and “yang.” Masculine and feminine, yin and yang, exist in all human beings. It is not uncommon at all for a particular female to be far more masculine than a particular male. A couple of years ago I gave a talk about Tolkien and androgyny and began by carefully explaining this distinction. Despite this, at the end of the talk I was amazed to get several comments (especially from women in the audience) who thought I was stereotyping men and women when I was referring to masculine and feminine. People are so used to being stereotyped by their gender that even these archetypal terms can generate automatic defenses. So let me state one more time: masculine does not equate with men, feminine does not equate with women, these are archetypal qualities all humans possess and from the point of view of androgyny need to be acknowledged and integrated parts of all self-actualizing people.

(Question for the reader:  Someone who just read this draft, said that even though I explain this difference between archetypal masculine and feminine and the usual use of these terms to stereotype males and females, that it was still confusing to read these terms and have to translate them in her mind.  She suggested that I substitute “yin” and “yang” for “feminine” and “masculine.”  I am continuing with masculine and feminine temporarily, but if others find these terms to be dissonant than I will switch to yin and yang.  Please let me know your feeling about it.)

The first mention of the androgyne in Greek Philosophy is in Plato’s Symposium . Aristophanes is speaking:

[The] original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two, as they are now, but originally three in number; there was a man, woman and a union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which once had a real existence, but is now lost, and the word “Androgynous” is only preserved as a term of reproach.

Aristophanes describes the original humans as spherical, and containing both genders, but Zeus, wanting to humble them, divided them in half,

Each of us, when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and is always looking for his other half…the intense yearning which each of them has for the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

The movie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a wonderfully creative and funny film about a transexual entertainer, includes an animated version of Aristophane’s mythology of the androgyne. In an interview, the movie’s creator and star compares Hedwig’s blonde wig to the One Ring of the Tolkien books! The non-androgynous person (Hedwig would have to be considered an hermaphrodite) will crave another to complete them in the obsessive way that Gollum seeks to be reconnected to his Precious. As Singer puts it,

In the hope of achieving the feeling of love, this mystical joining of two beings into primordial oneness, people will do the most ill-advised things, beyond all reason. The loss of love can drive people to murder or suicide. …The archetype of the Androgyne is at the base of much of the anxiety that surrounds love, and especially it is connected with the emotions of jealousy, because it points to the fear of being torn asunder from that other.

(Lack of androgyny can lead to infatuation with another) person who is required to be present for the rounding out of one’s own personality—-who is, in fact, required for one’s very existence.

Singer relates the loss of androgyny to the Perennial Philosophy and the densifying precession of four ages which have involved a fall from light, wholeness and androgyny (for parallels see The Mutant Vs. the Machine…, A Splinter in your Mind and Clock-Time Metastasizes toward 2012 ). Singer writes,

…as we examine more mythological systems we will observe a consistent theme in which each succeeding world is of a lesser quality than that which preceded it. We saw this in the Greek system, with its progression from Golden to Silver to Bronze to Iron ages.

The four fold structure of mythology: ….Creation and the created world we know and live in belongs to the fourth stage. By this time the Primal Androgyne has either fallen from the spernal sphere to earth or the androgynous figure has split in two—and then perhaps into many parts—lost its immortality, and finally become human.

From my point of view the ultimate outer form of the androgyne would be that of a mercurial shape-shifter. Inwardly, the androgyne is a shape-shifter and inter-dimensional traveler connected to the axis mundi. As a changeling, the outer manifestation of the androgyne would alter to accord with the vicissitudes of psychic intentionality and circumstance. Singer points out that the Gnostics had a similar idea about Christ:

Another Gnostic conceptualization of the Son of Man is that he is Aipolos, the pole (also a pun on the Greek word for goat herd, the one who must turn in all directions).This figure is symbolized by Mercurius, the ever-elusive trickster who is of essence but whom one cannot grasp; also Proteus, the shape shifter, in whom every quality exists in potentia.

Although the New Testament tells us virtually nothing about Christ’s appearance, he has almost always been depicted as rather androgynous, though it is more likely that he was short, stocky, and swarthy with lots of body hair. Popular Science recently funded a study on what Jesus most likely looked like. They consulted experts in anthropology and came up with a computer composite image that would be much more likely to draw the attention of airport security than the approval of many Christians used to the androgynous, Nordic Jesus. How he is imagined to look, however, may be far more appropriate from the point of view of archetypal projection, since he has always been the bearer of an androgynous message. It is always amazing to me how right wing Christians (a recent president comes to mind) manage to take the prophet of “turn the other cheek” and “the meek shall inherit the earth” and turn his message into macho, “Onward Christian Soldiers” posturing. It is especially the Jesus who was edited out of the New Testament (mostly by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine) who expresses an alchemical gnosis of androgyny.

… .from the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas:
..Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into as single one, so that the male will not be male and the female (not) be female…then shall you enter (the Kingdom).

Singer adds,

Androgyny is the act of becoming more conscious and therefore more whole …

Singer follows Jung’s lead into alchemy, recognizing it as a science of human transformation, with much to say about androgyny. The Taoist I Ching , which employs an alchemical metaphor throughout, emphasizes the need for the conscious person to follow the path of “reverse alchemy” to regain their original essence. Acquired conditioning, beginning at birth, separates us from our original nature and wholeness, and the conditioning acquired from any culture is always full of gender role conditioning. Aristophane’s myth goes further and suggests that human incarnation, incarnating into a gender specific body, is itself a departure from wholeness. Recent research demonstrates that a good part of gender differences which were believed to be culturally conditioned, turn out to have very strong biological underpinnings. Regaining androgyny, therefore, may be more difficult than even the heroic efforts necessary to break free of acquired conditioning. Some gender limitations may be over-determined, with part of their determinative influence locked down even into our DNA . To become androgynous may be analogous to trying to break the source code of the matrix, which is multi-layered, including both social and genetic coding.

The alchemists, and consciousness pioneers like Jung and Gurdjieff, understood that their work was “contra naturum , ” it was against the enormous inertial mass of nature or matrix ( “matrix” actually means mother). Gurdjieff even said that the work to not be mechanical was “ against God .” At first glance it would seem that such an effort would be the supreme violation of the Taoist principle of working with, rather than against, cosmic forces. But as I’ve written elsewhere (see The Taoist Path on the web site) it is our “ true will ” (a phrase I am borrowing from Alistair Crowley) which is our deepest inner refraction of the Tao and the aspect of the Tao to be followed above all others. True will is the inner core of our harmony with the cosmos, and this will is to be followed no matter what resistance is met with socially, politically, and even biologically.

The alchemists seemed to know what was at stake, and how deep into the rabbit hole they really had to go to regain their freedom and original wholeness. To break free of the matrix they first had to break down existing structures, to regain the prima materia out of which structures are created. Mixing alchemical and computer metaphors, this would be a cauldron of ones and zeros, undifferentiated potential for informational or psychic structure. Psychically, psychologically, spiritually this requires the dark night of the soul which some, in both tribal and modern contexts, seek to bring on with the use of ordeal poisons and/or hallucinogens. A series of paintings in Alex Grey’s visionary book, Sacred Mirrors , illustrates this process. We see a healer or potential shaman ascending a mountain. At one point he seems to be blown apart into a horrifically surreal explosion of body parts. This is a brilliant visual representation of the dark night of the soul (what the alchemists called the “nigredo” ), the death of an ego identity, the necessary destruction of structure to create new form. Some initiates voluntarily choose to bring this on by self-created initiations—–fasting and wilderness isolation, hallucinogens, etc. There are advantages to the self-initiated metamorphosis in that it is consciously chosen, but there are also grave dangers.

A few years ago, at the Penny Lane coffee shop in Boulder , a very enthusiastic young woman told me how she was involved in a new education program for kids which would involve “tribal initiations in the wilderness.” Although not wishing to deflate her enthusiasm, I felt forced to tell her that actually she was talking about arts and crafts in the woods, that tribal initiations were impossible for any legally constituted school in our society because you would have to be willing to have some initiates die or go insane.

Self-initiations must be dangerous. If the self-initiate is fortunate, the danger proves lethal to ego structures but allows other healthy tissue to survive and reconfigure. But many self-initiations, just as those induced by the tribal collective, are shattering to the body or sanity of the initiate.  There is always the danger that the self-initiate has presumed upon their inner strength, and like the naïve, young hero ends up devoured.

Another form of initiation is not self-initiated but is induced by the shocks that life supplies. (see Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ) Shamans often have histories of medical emergencies and/or other brushes with death in their youth. Another form of shock that could induce initiation is love shock. Someone with a great inner potential for consciousness may seek wholeness in the conventional way, through infatuation with another incomplete human, and in the shattering aftermath may sacrifice an identity and become more whole. An outcome of wholeness is relatively rare, and the more likely course is that one seeks another love object or becomes a depressed version of the former self.

The alchemists are self-induced initiates and well aware of the depth, scope and acute peril of what they undertake. Their endeavor could aptly be described by Galadriel’s words to the Ring Fellowship: “Your quest rests upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and you will fall to the ruin of all . ”

What follows are a number of interesting quotes from Singer’s exposition on androgyny and alchemy:   (probably to be paraphrased in a finished draft, certainly introduced better)

Gnosticism is Mater Alchimica, the Mother of Alchemy.

There was thought to have existed before Creation a chaotic prime substance. This was referred to in alchemy as the prima materia.

The intent of the alchemists, or so many believed, was to gain control of the prime matter and recombine it so that they could fashion substances of their own choosing and design. In other words, they would initiate their own process of creation. …they admitted that their work was an opus contra naturam. In this monumental task they were forever inveighing against hubris. …

…each metal had a masculine or feminine association that corresponded with the planetary power: gold-sun-masculine, silver-moon-feminine, copper-Venus-feminine, iron-Mars-masculine…

The alchemists worked in male/female pairs in a process referred to as the alchymical wedding

The crux of the process is the engagement with the prima materia, and this is symbolized in the problematic figure of “mercurious” in whom all things were supposedly combined. The opposites are present in him at the start of the process, but not yet differentiated.

Mercurius, also called Hermes, is not only the receptacle of the prima materia and the symbol for it, he is also the agent of transformation.

Mercurius is frequently depicted as an hermaphrodite, an image designed to reflect the nature of Divinity, which is “All in One.” The mythical teacher Hermes Trimegistus, in revealing his secrets to Asclepius, says: “God has no name, or rather he has all names, since he is at once One and All. Infinitely rich with the fertility of both sexes, he is continuously bringing to birth all those things which he planned to create.” The young healer god then asks: “What, you say that God has both sexes, Trismegistus?” “Yes, Asclepius, and not God alone but all beings animate and vegetable.”
The elements with which the alchemists work are seen through the dark glass of symbol and metaphor as bipolar constructs: “Sun-moon,” “sulfur-salt,” “King-queen,” “heaven-earth,” “fire-water,” “living-dead,” “open-occult” and, of course, “masculine-feminine.” The work on the soul is an integral, though not always stated or understood, part of the process. This means being able to commit oneself to the work, to put into a secondary space the purely personal and ego concerns (the psychological concomitant of the earth-centered world view) and to see oneself as part and parcel of the entire universe. The image to be held before one is that every act by every person has an effect on all, changing the delicate balance that keeps the universe in motion. Therefore, it was considered necessary by the alchemists to so conduct their work and their lives, which were really the same thing, as if the salvation of the world depended upon it.
The breaking down of substances into the prima materia would bring about the stage called the nigredo, which is characterized by the utter blackness of the original chaos. It is a period of destruction and despair, and it is absolutely essential to the process. It has its parallel in mystical literature as the “dark night of the soul”…akin to what is experienced by an individual as deep depression, either suffering a physical illness or beset by a dis-ease, a weariness of soul…The kind of healing they seek is what the word “healing” essentially means; that is, “to be made whole…The object of this stage was to bring about a condition where a new union could take place between opposites which have been broken down through the agency of operations personified in Mercurius.”

From the Zohar (the classic Kabbalistic text) :…when they (the masculine and the feminine) unite, they look as if they were one body. From this we learn the masculine by itself is like only one part of a body, and the feminine also. But when they join together as a whole, then they appear as one real body.
….Therefore we know: what is only masculine or only feminine is called only part of the body. But no blessing rules over a faulty or incomplete thing, but only over a complete place, not one that is divided, for divided things cannot long endure or be blessed.

The Gnostics and the Hindus, among others, saw the reality we experience as matrix or “Maya” —a deception or delusion. The awakened androgynous person is able to transcend this delusion:

The Indians saw the world as a construct of the Great Goddess whom they call Maya, who measures out time and space, both in an important sense delusory.

…the embodied Self is freed from the enchantment of the flesh and passes into the sate of rapture known as samadhi.

The paths of Kundalini Yoga, Tantra, T’ai Chi and Chi Gung are Eastern alchemical paths that open the possibility, for advanced initiates, to reconfigure themselves energetically and restore their lost androgyny:

What is so strongly potent about Kundalini is the realization which it brings of the possibility for some individuals to come to a unity within themselves, a unity consisting of the interplay of energy and matter, the feminine and the masculine, the bodily experience and the spiritual experience. This path is difficult, arduous and demanding, but Kundalini Yoga offers one possibility for achieving one’s androgynous potential. It requires a rigidly ascetic discipline; it leads its adherents to the experience of our temporal world as illusory and of little value in comparison with the attainment of non-dual awareness of the “undivided Whole,” the non-separability of the created and the Increate.

…the Buddhist Tantra stressed the androgynous being of the transformed, enlightened individual…

The I Ching and Taoism are both centered on the principle of androgyny which is perfectly expressed in the T’ai chi symbol or yin-yang, where the masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) each contain their opposite and are dynamic parts of a unified whole. The sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the sixty-four possible combinations of yin and yang lines into patterns of six. (for more on the I Ching see I Ching Readings and Dream Interpretation ). Singer writes,

If there were a ritual dance of the androgyne, T’ai chi as performed by this master could be that dance. It is neither a masculine dance nor a feminine dance. It has the strength and grace of both…The moving outward portion of the cycle belongs to the phase of the Masculine, Yang, the moving inward to the Feminine, Yin.

T’ai chi, the dance of life, can be done with the whole body, it can be turned into a work of calligraphy on a sheet of white paper, it can find its way into the art of painting, into music, into the cultivation of a garden, and into the act of love. Always it is the art of asymmetrical balancing, in which the flow between the opposites is so exquisitely smooth as to be almost indiscernible. The energy is never spent; it is always put forth and then drawn back. When the dancer stops he has more vitality than when he began.

Singer discusses the two hemispheres of the brain, connected by a dense bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum, as parallel to the dual nature of human beings (Keep in mind as left and right are discussed that in right-handed people, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, the right hemisphere the left.),

In the early part of the present century, most brain research emphasized the superiority of the left hemisphere functions of the brain, primarily the intellectual, verbal, analytic capacities that tradition has associated with the masculine mind.

In a study of the myth and symbolism of left and right, G. William Domhoff finds that the left is often the area of the taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the feminine, the intuitive and the dreamer.

In Fritjof Capra’s book, The Web of Life , he emphasizes the dialectic of two great forces in nature—-the integrative and the self-assertive. Our society obviously idolizes the self-assertive tendency while more earth-based cultures emphasize the integrative. Singer discusses Arthur J. Deikman who seems to have had a similar conception,

Arthur J. Deikman, in considering the infinite variety and rapid shifts of psychological and physiological states in an individual, concluded that there were two primary modes of organization: an “action” mode and a “receptive” mode. The action mode is the one that is organized to “manipulate the environment, while the receptive mode is organized around intake of the environment rather than manipulation.” He points out the need for recognizing the relativity of the different modes, rather than assigning absolute primacy and validity to the one with which we are most familiar; namely, the “action”mode.

Singer introduces Robert Ornstein’s research into the nature of consciousness,

Ornstein expressed the view that it is the polarity and the integration of these two, the intellectual and the intuitive, that underlie some of the highest achievements of mankind

Singer and Ornstein would be the first to acknowledge that these two terms, intellectual and intuitive , are an oversimplification, but the need to efficiently language this distinction forces us into a certain degree of reduction. Recognizing this difficulty Ornstein has prepared a chart to illustrate some of the ways the distinction between day-night, masculine-feminine consciousness has been understood by a variety of sources from the ancient to the modern:

THE TWO MODES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Tentative Dichotomy

The emphasis on words may abstract the living realities of these forces. Understanding how these forces work in you and others is necessary to ground this distinction. Using myself as an example, it took me a while to recognize the androgynous nature of my own mind as I was brought up in a family and culture that emphasizes the intellectual, analytical, and verbal modalities as the leading edge of perception and that which validates insights. When I was younger I identified with that side of mind and didn’t recognize what now seems obvious—–intuition was always the leading edge of my mind, the analytic and verbal followed behind processing the information streaming in from intuition. I have also noticed that others frequently misperceive me in the same way that I misunderstood myself— because I was brought up to favor a mode of detached analysis, people hearing me talk, or reading what I write, often have the false impression that what I am communicating is the result of a sequence of analytical thoughts. Actually the primary process is intuitive and analytical thinking and verbalizing come in as a secondary process. Since the “finished product” is often a set of words presented in a tone of detached analysis, the secondary process is the more visible and manifest and seems to be the driving force. Now that I have recognized that my mind is a melding of intuition and analysis I have also shifted to discussing ideas (at least some of the time) in a more intuitive, surreal style ( Stop the Hottie! , and Vision at Chichen Itza are examples). One of the general implications of my particular case is that the process of becoming androgynous is largely a matter of inner recognition rather than transformation. I was always more intuitive than intellectual, but recognizing that allowed me to transform, to become more who I always was in my essence, and that process is not finished, as I age I notice that I am becoming more and more comfortable with allowing intuition to be the leading edge.

Often I find that the most intelligent young people I meet have identified with their thinking process. My intuition reveals that they are more powerfully intuitive, but some inner bias in them causes them to discard intuitions. My intuition senses their intuition as active and online, and it used to shock me when I would catch on that they were not reading or accessing their intuitions, because they have a prejudice that this source of information is not as valid as thinking. I find myself trying to communicate to these unrealized intuitives how much more empowered they would be if they learned how to meld intuition and intellect so that intuition was the leading edge (see also discussion of the hierarchy of psychic functions in Part II of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ).

A less intelligent sort of person I frequently run into in counter cultural circles has rebelled from the intellectual and analytical altogether, dismissing it as a patriarchal constraint. They believe themselves to be beyond the intellectual when they are actually not up to its mark, so they prefer to scorn that which they desperately need, but in which they are desperately incompetent. This rebellion does not, of course, empower their intuition but rather turns their psyches into a lunar landscape of complete confusion where discernment is entirely lacking. They falsely believe they are involved in occult or metaphysical study when actually their minds consist of a mushy hodgepodge of fragmented urban legends, “can you top this” bits of pseudo-esoteric lore, New Age clichés, etc. Their “study” mostly consists of narcissistically excited bull sessions in which they proffer bits of this inner refuse to anyone that will join them in kind or even pretend to listen to them. They personify what Singer identifies as “hermaphrodites” rather than androgynes. The androgyne values and is skilled in intuitive and intellectual abilities.

Singer credits Ornstein with recognizing that the passing age is characterized by its tendency to polarize the left and right, the lunar and solar modalities of consciousness. You are either a “serious” scientist or thinker or you are an artist, mystic or freak. But the present dilemmas and Swords of Damacles hanging over our heads will not be understood or addressed by those who work out of only one hemisphere of consciousness.  We need people, like Jung, who had both hemispheres firing, the androgynous mind, to comprehend what is happening to us.

A radical surgical treatment for grand mal epilepsy involves severing the corpus callosum ( the dense bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain). It was discovered that these two hemispheres, each of them connected to a different eye, were forced to work independently so that when patients who had undergone this procedure closed one eye they could read words but not comprehend pictures, and if they closed the other eye they could recognize pictures but not name what they were seeing. Singer makes an excellent point that this surgical procedure can be viewed as the ultimate symbolic act of the age of Pisces, the Age of Polarities. The Internet, which in just a few years has come to be a global central nervous system, may be seen as a technology of the Aquarian Age since it wires everyone together and since it involves word, sound and image it has the potential to engage both hemispheres and to wire many billions of brains or psyches into one interconnected system.
(For more on hemispheric dominance and precession of ages see section later in this essay on the One Ring and language and also on The Alphabet vs. the Goddess .)

Although we are already experiencing aspects of the Aquarian Age, the Age of Pisces still seems to be in power, especially politically. Singer quotes the following classic lines from Yeats to describe the situation at the end of the age of Pisces, the situation we still seem to be in:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity .—-W.B. Yeats

Singer suggests that Systems Theory may be a mythology of the Aquarian Age which she expects to be an age of androgyny. Although as a Jungian Singer recognizes mythology as a far more substantial thing than the way most people hear that word (many people hear it as a bunch of nonsense and superstition ), I think that Systems Theory might more aptly be called a paradigm of the Age of Androgyny. Singer writes,

As we move into the Age of Aquarius (which may come to be designated as the Age of Androgyny), no one would be surprised to discover that a new myth is emerging. Naturally it manifests as have all the other myths, in the guise of a “sacred truth”; only this time the truth is designated as science: The Systems View of the Universe. Systems theory does not announce itself as a mythology; no mythology ever does.

Indeed, Systems Theory does seem like an inevitable evolutionary correction of Western thought and science which has gone to such extremes in dividing, reducing, and compartmentalizing knowledge and investigation. Systems Theory recognizes what the I Ching long before recognized, that everything is a pattern of energy and change embedded in other patterns of energy and change interwoven with all patterns of energy and change and harmonizing with the principles of energy and change found everywhere.

As Singer puts it,

…. the universe is not lying in fragments at the feet of the philosopher. Nor are the polarities “worlds apart” in reality. The world is characterized by a remarkable degree of consistency and coherence. If we do not see it that way, it is because of the limitations of our own capacities—the elephant is not divided into pieces because the blind men are only able to sense its parts.

Inner and outer are not the irreconcilable opposites which they were for Descartes and are for many in science,

Inwardness, called “psyche,” and outwardness, called “world” may appear to be in opposition to one another. From a more encompassing viewpoint they may be seen simply as two systems, one subsystem contained within another larger system.

….We need to recognize that we are members of an interrelated series of systems which all obey the same principles and have a common theme.

Some people in the New Age, particularly those who have dabbled in Eastern practice, have swung with the pendulum to a new extreme or one-sideness. They will monotonously insist on the oneness of everything no matter what is being discussed, and use this obvious reality as a way of leveling all difference, distinction and discernment. This point of view can be even more limiting than the tunnel vision of the reductive thinker, since at least the reductive thinker is still thinking about and investigating something , no matter how much they may miss of the infinite context of the something. This type of New Ager, however, takes oneness as a truism that relieves them of the need for thinking, discrimination and discernment and pulls it out of the hat, like the most tired of magician’s rabbits, whenever any issue requiring discernment appears. Recognizing that individuals or groups that are in conflict are part of the same oneness is crucial, but it is also crucial to recognize their individual differences and what sets them apart. The great American pioneer psychologist William James wrote around nineteen hundred that besides the oneness of things, anyone who glances at the phenomenal world should also be struck by the eachness of things, we see a world of unique individual trees and people, for example, and not a homogenous mass of treeness or undifferentiated pool of humanity. The androgynous mind recognizes that there is both oneness and eachness, these are the two poles of the paradox that must be held in mind to understand both interrelation and individuality.

Quite often the same person who is a proponent of the oneness of things will unconsciously switch to reductive dualism and the next minute be preaching to the choir of like minded friends about the badness (and implied otherness) of corporations, environmental destruction, etc. One of the first challenges I face when trying to explain my evolutionary theories is to get people to step out of the box of literal ego judgments that is sure of what’s good or bad for evolution. If I were talking to Christian Fundamentalists (which I’m not, of course) this limiting dualism would not be so objectionable, because there is no false advertising involved. What is really maddening is talking to the New Ager who if they are not preaching about the oneness of things are telling you about the badness and wrongness of everything they don’t like (always something human associated) which they will inevitably damn with their harshest of epithets, their version of the Mark of the Beast, the fiery brand of “ unnaturalness. ”  Whenever you hear the words “ natural ” or “ unnatural ” being used you are almost certainly in the presence of sloppy thinking. The Fundamentalist tells you that homosexuality is unnatural though it is displayed by thousands of species, and the same people who condemn the simple-mindedness of the Fundamentalist will tell you that everything modern man does is unnatural. Let’s get this one concept of interrelation straight: Nothing is outside of nature. Therefore nothing is unnatural or supernatural . Mother nature created a technology extruding primate, so if what we’re doing is “wrong” you might as well blame M.N. as G. M. for pollution and other human pathologies.

Of course, what I just said is still only one side of the paradox, there is a meaningful discrimination to be made between, for example, eating a toxic diet of processed foods and eating a diet of live, organic whole food. But furless primates who choose to eat poison are still part of nature, part of the Tao, and what doesn’t make sense to someone’s preferences, may make perfect sense if understood out of the judgment box and seen as part of an unexpected web of connections. (For more on the false use of “natural” and the paradoxical nature of evolution see Chaper V of my book The Capsule of Intentionality and Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ).

Singer quotes one of the original systems theorists, Buckminster Fuller:

What seems to be important at the moment is never what is really going on. For the bee, it is the honey that is important; for Nature, what matters is the cross-pollination the bee effects in going after the nectar. So also, 99 per cent chromosomically programmed humans have been doing the right things for the wrong reasons. What we think of as side events are really Evolution’s main events. How events and discoveries will cohere is unforeseeable. The one sure thing is that cohere they will. The “Planner” incarnates the human mistake of supposing that Universe is waiting for human beings to make the major evolutionary decisions.

Of course, the honey for the bee is also important for nature, but the principle is sound. As Singer points out,

Fuller is the generalist par excellence…One of his favorite priniciples is synergy , a word that means the unexpected interaction of parts in combination.

Jung, himself a master generalist, decried the growing prevalence of soulless experts which increasingly characterizes our society (see “Crossing the Great Stream …” an article I wrote for Holistic Education Review ). The “expert” is almost the opposite of the androgyne. The focus on expertise in academics and science tends toward that well known syndrome of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The androgynous mind is a generalist mind, it may have expertise in certain areas, but will not become so married to its expertise that it will be unable to see the gestalt of things, it will instead be able to thrive on the serendipitous synergy of different fields of knowledge. This is what characterizes a great Renaissance thinker, and androgyne, like Leonardo Da Vinci who was creative in arts and sciences. Another of the great Renaissance androgyne is William Shakespeare. His androgyny is not reducible to his bisexuality (the classic love sonnets were written for a male youth), it is his ability to project himself empathically and with great penetration into such a wide spectrum of human types of every age and gender. Shakespeare pioneered the rediscovery of androgynous “ Green Worlds ” (see  A Splinter in Your Mind ). When the characters in As You Like It find themselves in the Green World of the Forest of Arden, gender bending ( a boy plays a girl who plays a boy who pretends to be a girl) becomes the key to unlock their various neurotic dilemmas. Although androgyny may seem to be worked out interpersonally, remembering that Shakespeare created all the characters from within you can see As You Like It as manifestation and realization of his own intrapsychic androgyny.

There is a strange way in which my interest in androgyny, the Tolkien Mythology and Singer’s book intersect, and oddly enough it has to do with masturbation (hereafter I will omit the word masturbation and instead use auto-eroticism which is not a euphemism, but a more accurate term, as masturbation defines only a physical act of manipulating genitals while auto-eroticism encompasses a type of eros with much larger implications.)

For most of the time I have had a connection with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, since I was twenty or so, I had been extremely uneasy about the ring symbolism of the trilogy. Since the ring is a circle, and the circle is the classic symbol of wholeness and the self (the Sankrit definition of God is: “ A circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere ”) I was rather suspicious of the need for it to be destroyed. I was aware of Tolkien’s orthodox Catholicism and felt that it might be the source of Tolkien’s antagonism toward any human, or human-like individual possessing a symbol of divine wholeness. I felt that Tolkien’s hostility toward the ring came from a problem with what I call “ location of the Godhead .”

I am minimizing here the use of the word “ God ” because it is so forever contaminated by anthropomorphisms and emotionally charged projections of such variety that using the term only invites confusion and tends to widen the gap of miscommunication between the person employing the term and their audience. Instead I am using the term “ Godhead ,” which has various dictionary definitions, but I am using it to mean that which is divine and the source of divine emanation . Like all definitions this is imprecise and circular, but hopefully the meaning will emerge.

The healthy, androgynous way to locate the Godhead I believed, and still believe, is to see it located everywhere.  Again, this is like the Sanskrit definition of God as, “ A circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is no where .” In the Eastern salutation “ Namaste ,” one is acknowledging the divinity of the other person. It is not just in them, but in oneself and in everyone and everything. In other words, everything that we experience is part of the “ mind of God .” Viewing everything as the Godhead may be the position most in accord with the findings of physics. Once the monad , or indivisible constituent of reality, was believed to be a small particle. This was first postulated by the Greek atomists and continued until Einstein when matter was shown to be not a particle but  a special case of energy. Matter turned out to be mostly empty space and a more congealed form of energy. The universe came to be recognized as a flow of patterned energy. Now many physicists are saying that the universe is more accurately considered a flow of information. Physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Amit Goswami go a step further and say that if you posit the monad as consisting not of matter, energy or information, but of mind, of consciousness, then all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics vanish. This is what I believe—-everything is the Godhead and everything is composed of consciousness.

Many Christians (and orthodox Catholics would especially tend toward this) do not view the Godhead everywhere but see a very uneven distribution of it, mostly they locate it in God the Father and his son Jesus. This relocation of the Godhead into two male identified figures is part of a strange evolution of mythologies:

Joseph Campbell’s five-volume study of mythology, published under the general title of The Masks of God, contains in each of its volumes an extraordinary record of the ancient  shift from matriarchy to patriarchy.  The shift is schematized by Campbell in four steps as follows:
1. The world born of a goddess without consort,
2. The world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort,
3. The world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male warrior-god,
4. The world created by the unaided power of a male god alone.
(Heilbrun/ Toward a Recognition of Androgyny )

Many forms of Christianity (but not Gnostic Chrisitanity!) moved toward a massive schizoid split, and the split fractured every layer of reality—–cosmologically, spiritually, psychologically, sexually—-it split men from women, masculine from feminine, light from dark, mind from body, Christian from non Christian. This split was caused by the drastically uneven distribution of the Godhead. God the Father and Jesus became ever more divine and perfect, the “ sunnum bonnum” and all darkness, through ever more tortured reasoning, became the fault of Satan, humans through “original sin,” female witches, the Jews… As white light came to glow around father and son, man and human nature (though created by God and in his image) became blacker and blacker. Divinity was almost exclusively in the two male Gods and humans were dust and corruption. One apotheosis of this insane split was American Puritanism. A classic expression of this madness are the hellfire and brimstone sermons of the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). The schizoid split in Puritans became so extreme that it resulted in the most pathological projections. Women were burned as witches (nothing new there, Europe had burned several million) and human beings were so dark and repellent that God could scarcely hold himself back from damning them to eternal punishment in hell for even one more moment. Here are some excerpts from Edward’s most well known sermon, “ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God .”

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. …There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell. …Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; …He will not only hate you, but he will have you, in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets. …It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts…and you will absolutely despair…You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite….this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. …The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them. The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own…

Jung, a Christian and the son of a Protestant minister, had the courage to ask himself a question that few Christians have ever had the courage to ask themselves. Why has more blood been spilled in the name of Christianity than anything else in human history? Jung considered this question in his book, Aion, and basically concluded that by removing all darkness from creator and messiah a schizoid split was created which required a feverish need for shadow projection, a need to locate darkness in some human group that would serve as scapegoat. Once you created an all white light Jesus, then unconsciously you needed to create as his twin Anti Christ to counterbalance this one-sidedness. From my point of view an Anti Christ is a person who locates the Godhead in themselves, but not in others. The rest of the universe is merely real estate and livestock to be exploited.

For more than twenty years I suspected that the need to destroy the ring came from the schizoid disempowerment of locating the Godhead outside the self. As an orthodox Catholic Tolkien would tend to think that recognizing divinity in the self would swing the pendulum of enantiodromia to the other one-sided extreme of Anti-Christ. Even today I believe that this is a factor in his ring symbolism.

When I was twenty I recognized a parallelism between the need to destroy the One Ring and its corruption of any ring bearer with the harsh Catholic taboo against auto-eroticism. Freud pointed out a crucial difference between what he called “primitive” man and modern man in their perception of sexual energy. The primitive worshipped the mysterious fire within, while the modern man worshipped the beloved, the object on whom the fire was projected. In other words, our eros had become configured or conditioned so that we project power outwards, just as in Christendom divinity was projected outside the self onto an all perfect God or messiah, sexual fire was projected onto an idealized, external love object. From the age of Chivalry to Victorian times, and even to this day, a classic form of this projection was for a male to feel his desires “unworthy” of some idealized woman whom he thought “too pure for this world,” certainly too pure to have any sexuality of her own, etc. This form of schizoid eros parallels the schizoid projection of the Godhead as outside the self and residing in an all white light divine figure. To the extent that the feminine was recognized as divine at all it was in the inflation of Mary, mother of Jesus (who in the Bible Jesus treats rather contemptuously) into a demigod, a distant third in the otherwise male field of three that comprise the Catholic Trinity. But the earthy and dark side of the feminine were edited out and she became the “white Madonna,” a virgin mother too pure for sex, etc.

What makes auto-eroticism so horrifying to this schizoid mind set is that the human personification of Godhead, the beloved, is not necessarily projected into the external world but is generated by a single individual. The auto-erotic individual is generating both subject and object, and is partaking in the potential sacrament of orgasm without the mitigation of individual power by an external person, institution of marriage, Church delivered sacrament, etc. No control system wants the individual to be so empowered and able to close the circle within themselves. In the Catholic Church, to this day, birth, marriage and even death require priestly sacraments, i.e. authorization by external authority. A control system wants you to always be seeking fulfillment, love, security, salvation outside , out in the society and institutions that it controls, so that you become an object of control within the system. This is the prime commandment of the matrix, Thou shalt not exercise the ability to generate your own reality, but shall abjectly submit to the reality created for you. George Bernard Shaw seemed to understand this when he said, “ The mark of the reasonable man is that he adapts himself to the world he finds himself in. The mark of the unreasonable man is that he expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men .” The “ reasonable ” person is the one who submits to the matrix, the control system, the “ unreasonable ” person is the androgyne, the person who is aware of themselves as cocreator. 

I believe it is appropriate to redefine masturbation and autoeroticism to parallel the way Singer has redefined hermaphrodism and androgyny . The conventional form of masturbation common in our culture involves the same kind of projection of power outside the self as in much interpersonal sexuality. An idealized beloved (or in contemporary society, now so much more geared toward materialism and hedonism—-a “ hottie ”  see Stop the Hottie! on the website) becomes the focus of the magic of eros. As in the hermaphrodite, this type of masturbation is more characterized by the confusion of masculine and feminine rather than the integrated fusion of them in the androgyne. Auto-eroticism, as I am redefining it, means androgynous auto-eroticism, and that means that the individual is conscious of themselves as the creator of the fantasy and the fantasy itself, is aware of themselves as both subject and object, lover and beloved, masculine and feminine, and whether they generate a lover of the opposite or same sex, no one at all, or any other possibility, they are consciously closing the circle (wielding their own ring of power). The androgyne in an auto-erotic experience realizes that they have the power of the shape-shifter to be in any body they deem appropriate as well as to generate a lover in whatever form is desired. They also realize that their point of view is not bound to the subject, but may travel back and forth between the created lovers if they feel so drawn.

Orgasms that are not merely the result of genital stimulation may in some cases be experienced as a sacrament, as a participation mystique with the universe where one emerges into an energy body that is interpenetrated with the universe. That such a sacrament could be an experienced by an individual without permission or reference to outside power and authority is horrifying to a control system which demands that power be projected outside.

I am not trying to disproportionately glorify the autoerotic experience as compared to the interpersonal sexual experience or the person who abstains from any form of sex. All experiences may be sacred or profane depending on the experiencer and the context. Indeed, for some an excessive indulgence in the autoerotic could be a version of the dark side of the uroboros archetype, the snake swallowing its own tail. A given individual, at a given time, might need the interpersonal to be more powerful to pull them out of themselves, etc. What I try to emphasize whenever I talk or write about eros is that ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! If there is one obvious fact about human nature and human eros that is most neglected, it is respect for its fantastic variability. Human situations need to be examined from a much more case specific point of view.

I also find it interesting that masturbation taboo is to a partial extent multicultural. Singer points out the prohibitions against masturbation in numerous cultures and spiritual disciplines including Taoism, kundalini Yoga and Tantra and states that it has no basis in human anatomy, suggesting that is based on archetypal material. From the point of view of the Eastern energetic alchemies of Tantra and Chi Gung, ejaculation by males is in most cases viewed as extremely detrimental. While these systems have, in other ways, a very sophisticated understanding of human energy, when it comes to male orgasm they seem to view the energy system not as an open flow of energy, but as a closed system with limited resources which each ejaculation permanently diminishes. But the body creates seminal fluid to be ejaculated and not to be indefinitely retained where it can putrefy and cause infection. Dr. Andrew Weil (go to drweil.com and type “masturbation” into the search engine) reports on an Australian study which finds that men who masturbate are 30% less likely to develop prostate cancer than those who don’t! Anybody who knows how hard it is to find detectable statistically significant correlations with many health factors will tell you what a gigantic differential this 30% is.

I am not suggesting that there is no truth to the position of Tantra and Chi Gung on ejaculation, but I am asserting that it is a one size fits all formulation. Indeed, excessive ejaculation can be draining, particularly when conditions are more yin and less yang. Aging makes one more yin, and therefore older males need to ejaculate less than younger males. Also, during winter, which is much more yin (longer nights, less warmth, etc.), ejaculation may be more depleting than during the height of summer which is far more yang. Again, the case specific points of view, as well as general formulations, need to be considered. When ejaculation is interpersonal, rather than autoerotic, there are all sorts of other factors to be considered. There are significant numbers of people of either gender who are able to drain another person’s energy (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites, Vampires) . Excess ejaculation, like an excess of anything, can be detrimental, but the phobic, horrified, over-the-top warnings and prohibitions against masturbation indicate schizoid projections.

One of the aspects of June Singer’s book that most resonated with me were her very parallel findings on autoeroticism. Singer implies a parallelism between androgyny and autoeroticism as both are subject to taboo and secrecy:

If androgyny has remained submerged over the centuries, then masturbation has been similarly ubiquitous and nearly as secret.

Especially fascinating is that Singer connects autoeroticism to the Tree of Knowledge in almost exactly the same way as Terrance McKenna connected it to hallucinogens. Terrance would sometimes refer to the expulsion from Eden as, “ history’s first drug bust .”

From earliest childhood on into youth and maturity, masturbation is an act of self-assertion, the object of which is a movement in the direction of independence.…Masturbation and the prohibitions against it can be viewed in connection with the legends that are told about the Tree of Knowledge. Here, also, the issue is the potential independence of the individual from the more powerful Other. There is the prohibition against eating the fruit of that tree because if Adam and Eve do eat of it, they will learn the secrets of carnal life, which are allied with the secrets of creativity. This knowledge would make them like the gods; that is, powerful and independent….The God who prohibits eating the fruit of the tree which enables humans to know good and evil may be afraid they will begin to believe that they can become self-sufficient if they can meet their own sexual needs through self-manipulation.

Singer connects autoeroticism with the individual partaking of a forbidden independence and power. She quotes a patient:

That was the first time I remember that I ever masturbated to orgasm.  It was a great feeling.  For the first time I was feeling in control of my sexuality .

Those seeking to shame and discourage people from masturbation portrayed it as having the most dire consequences for physical and mental health. As recently as the Fifties young men were told that they would go blind or insane. The parallels between these absurdly over-the-top and blatantly false warnings and the Refer Madness type propaganda used to scare young people away from marijuana and other hallucinogens are quite striking. Engaging in autoeroticism or hallucinogen use is in either case asserting your power to be your own alchemist, to engage in highly mood altered energetic practices outside of social sanction or control.

Singer points out that autoeroticism can actually be a practice that engaged in the right way can produce healing and lead toward wholeness and creativity.

Masturbation can provide a person with the intensely felt experience of being the lover and the beloved at the same time. The experience can be a total one if accompanied by fantasies that are healing; that is, “making whole.” It provides also a stimulus for creativity, reminding us of the Egyptian creation mythology in which creation proceeds from a masturbatory act. Here giving and receiving, activity and receptivity are combined. There is great freedom in knowing that one can be whole in one’s inner life, and that this wholeness need not depend absolutely upon a relationship with another person.

The difference is that the masturbation that belongs to the androgyne’s experience is performed consciously; the reason for it is understood and accepted; and it is entered into with the fantasy which allows the soul to participate in the experience of the body without guilt or shame.

An aspect of autoeroticism that associates it with the Tree of Knowledge and that would particularly “anger the gods” is that the individual is exercising his or her power to “ subcreate .” “ Subcreation” is a term introduced by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories as his way of acknowledging that the fantasy writer is generating a creation, a subordinate reality within the larger creation of God. Tolkien’s creation of this term, and the way he employs it, reflects a certain ambivalence toward creation, and may partly explain his dark view of the One Ring. Tolkien needs to acknowledge that fantasy writing at its highest level is a profound act of creation, a birthing of a parallel reality. But as an orthodox Catholic who locates the Godhead more outside than inside, he is careful to put “sub” before it and emphasizes that the fantasy creation is a derivative subset within God’s creation. Tolkien tells us that subcreation is a natural human right and divine, but also warns about hubris and the tendency for power to corrupt and to be used wickedly,

Fantasy is a natural human activity.

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Are there any ‘bounds to a writer’s job’ except those imposed by his own finiteness? ….humility and an awareness of peril is required…
The right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality; hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.  If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: ‘inner consistency of reality,’ it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the world does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.