CHAPTER 7 THE FUNCTION OF EVOLUTIONARY LOVE Introduction After exploring the need for creating new urban environments for our mental and physical well-being, as well as examining the archetype of the nuclear family house which is causing our disease, let us now turn to the inner structure of love and its intimate connection with space. As previously stated, the metaphor which both artists and scientists are using to describe this emerging reality is the concept of a planetary superorganism, Gaia, named after the Greek Goddess of the Earth. However, this concept has not as yet fully evolved. After reading James Lovelock's book _The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth_, Michael Allaby's book _A Guide to Gaia: A Survey of the New Science of Our Living Earth_, and Dorion Sagan's book _Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth_, it is fairly obvious why their Gaian worldview has not brought about the revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness this planet so desperately needs: Their religious formula for the reproduction of Gaia through technological advances in urban structures such as Biosphere II, is, in fact, the same Judeo-Christian formula which is causing our ecological and social demise. Feminist authoress Starhawk, who has authored many books on the Goddess tradition was in Northampton lecturing on "Magic, Vision, and Action: Creating Peace in a World at War" (1991). Following her lecture in which she spoke about the Gaia theory, I told her about my trouble trying to communicate with some of the Gaian scientists who refuse to acknowledge me as a creative thinker within the movement. She advised me to forget about the scientists who are unwilling to take the theory to its ultimate conclusions. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest we turn away from science and technology, a virtual impossibility in the contemporary world. Archie J. Bahm writes in _The Philosopher's World Model_, "Since present global predicaments result partly from deficiencies caused by scientists and others who hold false or inadequate philosophies of science, nothing is more central to our quantum-leap system gestalt than its philosophy of science" (111). Therefore, it is a moral duty to try to bring the arts and sciences together in a harmonious relationship so that it becomes possible to create a powerful mass movement to eliminate the destructive Christian-Newtonian era. It would seem this union is the one way to avoid cosmic tragedy on both the global and the personal level. The challenge of the artist today is to lead us back to the religious symbolic truth of the female powers which the scientific cult of rationalism and realism has suppressed, resulting in our inability to live in peace on the biosphere, within ourselves and with others. The task of this chapter is to suggest directions for achieving this harmonious relationship. The Ways of Aphrodite and Eros According to Dallas Kenmare in his book _The Philosophy of Love_, "It would be safe to say that all our troubles originate in a misunderstanding of sex...and it is not an exaggeration to assert that, traced to its source, almost every human tragedy is a tragedy of love" (14). The evil of ancient and modern civilization has been caused by our frustration and failure to understand the meaning of sex. In _The Art of Loving_, Erich Fromm proposes that "love" in the modern world is a highly indivi- dualist, marginal phenomenon, not the social force it is meant to be since love is the only power which can solve the global problems. Through trying to understand these problems we create religion. William Irwin Thompson writes, "Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather, religion is the form spirituality takes in a civilization; it is not so much the opiate of the masses as it is the antidote for the poisons of civilization" (Thompson 1981, 105). Francesco Alberoni's points out in his book _Falling in Love_ that love is a collective movement between two individuals who are involved in the sublimation of sex and the caprice of the imagination. He writes, There is a very close relationship between the great collective movements of history and falling in love. The forces they both liberate and put to work are of the same type; they involve many similar experiences of solidarity, joy in life and renewal. The fundamental difference between them lies in the fact that the great collective movements are composed of large numbers of people and are open to still more (Alberoni 1983, 4). This leads me to believe that true love can no longer exist without the involvement of collective forces. Without the collective forces liberating Aphrodite and Eros to conduct the building of arcologies, Gaia will not be able to maintain us. Richard Register writes in his book _Ecocity Berkeley_, An ecocity is an ecologically healthy city. No such city exists...The garden is the paradise of nature, and the city is the paradise of culture. Or at least they could be. Today, both are out of balance (Register 1987, 3). What is needed now in order to gain the balance between the individual and the collective is the meeting of the biological and the religious so that the global civilization can fall in love with nature and redesign the cities into evolved ecostructures. Through the ovarian insight, the birth of biospheric cities can be delivered into a world of peace. Witness Dorion Sagan's statement, From the viewpoint of long-term evolution, it seems incontestable that we must ground ourselves and our products in the ancient ways of Earth if we are to survive. As a global civilization we must fall in with nature as one would fall in love (Sagan 1990, 68). Since the end of the Neolithic age and the development of agriculture which led to the rise of patriarchy, the principles of material equality, justice, and love have failed to govern the social order. To have conviction in the power of love requires us to have faith that Aphrodite and Eros can build arcologies to fulfill our most noble aspirations and rebuild the world. In Arthur Blaustein and Roger Woock's book _Man Against Poverty_, there is reference to Paul Goodman who said, "Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love" (Blaustein 1968, 195). The scepter of justice commands us to build arcologies so that the eternal flame of romantic love does not go out. According to Mary Daly, the problem is that sexism has divided the human psyche. She points out that "love cut off from power and justice is pseudo-love, power isolated from love and justice is unauthentic power of dominance, and justice is a meaningless facade of legalism split off from love and real power of being" (Daly 1973, 127). These divisions have caused "love" to be restricted to the private sector as "power" reigns over the political order, summed up by the cliches: "Man is the head, woman is the heart," and "Woman is; Man does." Power split from love not only makes love impotent, but sex becomes an obscenity, a force causing us to destroy ourselves. In Plato's theory of love, there are different kinds of erotic understanding. The lower kind, body eros, is based on the lust of the flesh. The fruit of such sexual energy are physical offspring. The higher kind, soul eros, is based on the ideal of the beautiful bearing spiritual offspring which Plato considers to be more immortal and beautiful in nature. These offspring, in the forms of works of art, science, and philosophy become humanity's greatest and most virtuous output. The best women and men are they who subordinate everything else to true love. This degree of Aphrodite and Eros is sent to save life from extinction by returning sex to its sacred purpose. Rollo May points out that when "the release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of civilization is assured" (May 1969, 98). When this happens, people become indifferent to art. Many artists prostitute their talents in order to make money to eat. Sex, at the end of the twentieth century, has degenerated into nothing more than a release of bodily fluids and the deadly social diseases it has brought to us. Modern children, who are born with an innate understanding in the power of love, lose their organic-cosmic understanding when contact with materialistic dogma robs them of their natural faith and philoso- phic inquiry. Modern science has voided life of conscious purpose and profound meaning. Without the maturity of love, the mental adolescence of today's world leaders will continue to drive the world into apocalyptic ruin. Modern civilization has lost touch or never understood its connection with the primordial forces. Sex has became a social arrangement divorced from its mythological sacred purpose which is to provide moral leadership. When society has forgotten the role love plays in our cosmology, moral catastrophe plagues the world as we are witnessing now in everyday life. If we continue to ignore Gaia's wisdom and tolerate exponential growth of population, the superorganism will exterminate us. Philosophic Aphrodite and Eros are the most important and central part of a living cosmology, giving us an ancient religious orientation. According to Alan Watts, "Religion without sex is a rattling skeleton, and sex without religion is a mass of mush" (Watts 1971, 80). True lovers yearn for metaphysical reality, which means that the elegant ritual dance between Aphrodite and Eros belongs at the heart of worship. Through the sanctification of romantic love, which is the greatest human drama of the superorganism, the holocracy can then continue to rejuvenate its divinity, century after century, as the universal chord of romantic love reveals itself. Holocracy is the total system of whole things in nature, the original whole which is made up of the smaller whole parts. To restore the sexual act to its former significance, philosophic lovers, whose mission is to embody Gaia's reproductive metaphor, must become the "royal artists" who create the new planetary ethos. The two lovers up-date the romantic story providing it with enough novelty and variation to preserve its influence and charm. The sovereign power of love can in no way be based on heredity privileges which have always degenerated into an artificial aristocracy. When love guides the world, the romantic stories will change generation after generation, renewing the holy mysteries of the life-force. The basis of education will then become a living cosmology, teaching children that the life-force is love. Youth are taught that by pursuing one's unique contribution in life, i.e., the work one loves to do that brings forth one's unique self, then romantic love will fall into place. Work is no longer done to serve an end, such as for financial security or a comfortable retirement, but to realize its sacred purpose in the survival of life (Whitmont 1982, 102). The love experience can be the most free and lofty experience of all, for to love is to act freely. Therefore, the love cosmology is founded on the principles of freedom: the freedom to do and be who one is. In an unfree society, people are coerced into doing and being who they are not, distorting their divine selves. In _The Ways and Power of Love_, Pitirim Sorokin writes, "Compulsion is the negation of love" (78). The paradox of the modern world is that "We race to _save_ time in our ungratifying jobs so we can _kill_ time in our leisure" (Whitmont 1982, 102). A World of Juno and Genius Plato and other philosophers pointed out that wisdom is one of the most beautiful evolvements of human juno and genius. In the conception of ideas, Aphrodite and Eros are seekers of the world- arranging beauty. Hence, Aphrodite and Eros are lovers of wisdom, a philosopheress and philosopher whose roles are to convert our souls back to a primordial union. The lovers become the educator-rulers who conduct the superorganism's paradisiacal will. Through the embodiment of their love, the World of the Miraculous can be created, for love, the simplest of concepts, is "the mystery from which all miracles are born" (Kenmare 1942, 96). When erotic love is understood, everything else is clear. Love ties us together like nothing else can, the deepest emotional drive which makes us selfless and altruistic. It makes us strive to reach our highest ideal in order to produce happiness in another. Sorokin writes, It goes without saying that the finest, the noblest, and the happiest human society is the society of individuals bound together by a love relationship...It is the happiest society because loving and being loved is the highest form of happiness in human relations. It is the most peaceful and harmonious society; it is also the most creative, most beautiful, and noblest (76). The philosopheress and philosopher seek the conscious birth of the Gaia worldview, whose world soul is erotic love, so that the idealist child remains an idealist adult. In the introduction of _Mythopoesis: Mythic Pattern in the Literary Classics_, Harry Slochower writes, The fateful import of the myth for our day stems from the fact that it is pivotal to the idea of One World. It can determine whether this world is to be one of unity and totality or one of uniformity and totalitarianism, whether the powers of men are to be freed or shackled (16). Kenmare claims in his book, _The Nature of Genius_, that geniuses have a different kind of love than most people. Their passionate desire for philosophic Aphrodite and Eros is the preeminent mark of their juno and genius. For lovers of wisdom, adventures of the mind are the only kind of intercourse they find appealing, building partnerships in which work and love are one and the same. Carl Jung writes, creative geniuses must be considered in a class part of an entirely different _kind_ of psychological make-up. There will be little genuine progress, and little peace among men, until these fundamental differences are recognized and accepted" (Kenmare 1942, 70). Sorokin points out that without the creative mission of these junos and geniuses, the ones who have tapped into the supraconsciousness, becoming the main mission of humanity, the human race is "bound to degenerate and die out" (487). In accepting the problems of the world, the greatest social responsibility also brings about the greatest personal joy, a divine state which only love can shower upon the mortal heads of the junos and geniuses. After one has experienced the philosophical joy of metaphysical sex, body eros is unfulfilling without higher eros. Bodily union separated from Aphrodite and Eros is a profound violation of the flesh. The great musical genius Beethoven declares, "Sensual enjoyment without a union of souls is bestial and will always remain bestial; after it one experiences not a trace of noble sentiment but rather regret" (Kenmare 1942, 148). The Metaphysics of Sex In order to achieve unity between the artists and scientists a global vision of the reproduction of the planet is called for. Reproduction requires us to engage in philosophic eros. In planetary reproduction, biology and morality, sex and love, nature and idealization, must unite since there can be no creation without union. Through union we understand the great mysteries of life, the renewal and fertility of the animal and plant kingdoms (Kenmare 1942, 128). Therefore, it would follow that planetary union is not asexual or sexless as the Gaian science writers advocate, but sexual in nature. In other words, Gaia works its miracle of planetary birth through sexual union. Since human love leads us to divinity, the rebirth of the planet is a holy process involving both female and male energies in a partnership. Lynn White, in his famous essay "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," firmly teaches us that Christian dogma and its transcendental God, who has the power of virgin human conception, is responsible for the ecological breakdown our technology and science has caused. He writes, "More science and more technology are not going to get us our of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one" (White 1974, 28). Creating a new religious myth of creation requires the utter destruction of the existing structures of thought which means destroying the concept of the sexless virgin birth. Joseph Campbell thought that the scientific cosmology in the Bible was scientifically outdated even before the text was put together in the last centuries B.C. and first A.D. He writes, "To be effective, a mythology must be up-to-date scientifically, based on a concept of the universe that is current, accepted, and convincing" (Campbell 1970, 145). In this sense, the myth of Immaculate Conception is the most dangerous scientific lie! In the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Eve disobeying God's command of not picking the fruit off the Tree of Life, curses the first woman and man on Earth with the knowledge of good and evil. The Serpent Goddess is seen as Satan who is responsible for their demise. Whitmont writes, "Good becomes what is practical and collectively approved. Bad is what brings about visible harm or damage and is not in keeping with custom" (53). Consequently, sex-knowledge is associated with evil. Blaming woman for the fall of man from paradise made Eve, Adam's spiritual twin, his first enemy. Since sex-knowledge was considered evil, the mutual ecstacy of erotic union is no longer permissible. Their love for each other became a crime of disobedience, and their children were afflicted with their "original sin." Their paradisiacal bliss and supernatural powers were taken from them as they became ashamed of their own bodies. Work then dominated over pleasure. "Her desire became his dominion" as she became his submissive, unhappy wife (Trible 1978, 160). Lost was the inner, spiritual, and poetic connection they once had. She was now his external possession. In God's kingdom "eros was superseded by agape." Spontaneous attraction was replaced by orthodox laws. Human and animal sacrifices were performed to vent man's violent, destructive, and sadomasochistic urges and to "renew" himself of the sin and guilt for taking part in "evil" acts. Those who found themselves outside the dominant group became scapegoats: animals, slaves, nonconformists, dissenters, prisoners of war, law breakers and anyone outside the group or offenders against the group. In a word, outsiders were considered enemies (Whitmont 1982, 68). God was a jealous God who demanded Eve to love Him with all her heart, mind, and soul; before the Fall, Eros was inclusive, but after the Fall Eros was repressed. "The love between the two welcomes the love and companionship of many." Consequently, after the Fall, love became a commandment enforced by His will. Ever since, Eve has tried to convince Him that using physical force, electric shock treatments, or psychological drugs on her was not going to stop her from longing for the time when her Word was sacred. While the Greeks believed the ideal of the beautiful defined the highest communal good, the Hebrew God commanded one to love Him above all else. Following His commandments was the way to the good world. But it was impossible for Eve to love a world where men ruled over her. God had prevented sexuality and destroyed equality between the sexes. Consequently, the war between the sexes began. To return to the child-like beautiful state of the Garden is possible only with the proper understanding of love and sacramental sex act. The new Eve is the temptress who dares Adam to become "consciously aware of one's depth and of life as an undivided whole" (Whitmont 186). She uses the serpent power of the Word to convince him that the survival of the planet depends on the construction of her Neutopian vision and that the greatest social need of the epoch is for him to sow the seed. In order to work her miracle, she uses dialectical progression rather than dualism. She points out to man that the apostles of true love had neither wealth, military armies, communication networks, nor any other means of worldly influence, but still their creative love made the world more conscious of its human potential. Their power came not from appealing to envy, greed, selfishness, or lust, but by becoming examples of living spirits in the flesh. She asks him to recall the fact that the greatest conquerors and revolutionary leaders do not compare "with these apostles of love in the magnitude and durability of the change brought about by their activities" (Sorokin 1954, 71). Through their love, they could redirect destructive energies into a creative direction of building the ecocities of eroticism. As Phyllis Trible asserts in _God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality_, all nature extols the love of female and male. All animals serve love. And the way to achieve this remarkable harmony is for his "desire to become her delight." As spiritual equals no one tries to dominate the other or treat the other as a possession. She is no longer called his wife and the bearer of his offspring, but their "sexual play intertwines with work." However, she makes it clear to him that a love story can not exist without an emotional relationship between woman and man. She can not create the new religion alone. Kenmore writes, sex is one of the most sacred aspects of human life, sex is a vital element in the divine-human emotion of love between man and women--a vital element in this is love, but not the whole. The truth, is always, a paradox. The spiritual and romantic element plays a greater part than actual sexual desire (Kenmare 1942, 121). Poetry as Leader Mythic events differ from historic events in that the former is found in the subjective reality of the poetess, whereas the latter is found in the so-called objective, rational world of the politician. I say poetess here, instead of poet, because in Adrienne Rich's essay "When We Dead Awake: Writing as Re-Vision," she writes "Political" poetry by men remains stranded amid the struggles for power among male groups; in condemning U.S. imperialism or the Chilean junta the poet can claim to speak for the oppressed while remaining, as male, part of a system of sexual oppression. The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else (Rich 1985, 154). The microcosm is discovered through subjective reality. Objectivity is only a shallow, false, and destructive misinterpretation of the workings of nature, separating the individual from their soul-making capabilities. It is the poetess who possesses universal understanding and creates mythology, not the politician or the poet who have focussed on the history-making which has caused world despiritualization. In other words, "one cannot, then, stand outside love and see what it really is. The only objective perspective of love, Freud seems to suggest, is one that works its way through love" (Lear 1990, 181). Love is an inner power which transforms one into a poetess or a poet whose purpose it is to create the Gaian mythology. In the _Philosophy of Leadership_, Christopher Hodgkinson discusses the four archetypes of leadership: the careerist, the politician, the technician, and the poet. He writes, "The special role and influence of the poet is reserved for the mutative leaps in the unfolding of human affairs." Starhawk points out that magic is discovered through poetry, for our erotic dance of energy is expressed through the poetic play of the Word. Gaia becomes the creative Word. Through the Word consummation between the poetess and poet, which comes before the actual sex act, the world is re- spiritualized. The Word calls prophetesses and prophets to look within and bring purpose to life. They become the revolutionary mythic leaders of the historic moment of planetary metamorphosis, the humanization of nature. All their actions are poetical, the ultimate action against war, modern science, and the military/industrial complex. Consequently, the poetess and poet are the creatress and creator of the planetary culture of the One World Mind. Since poetry, magic, and religion are intertwined, it is no wonder why the superorganismic chooses poetic personalties to in- still with charismatic powers in order to achieve its superorgasmic will. In striking the microbial chords, which go deep into our being, poetic juno and genius manifest the collective dream and the fulfillment of the superorganism. The true poetess and poet subsume the lower archetypal levels of leadership by acting on the highest ethical plane...the salvation of the biosphere. The poetess and poet, as Emerson states, comprise "the Messiah who forever returns to dwell among fallen men, to lead them to the Kingdom of Heaven." Let me correct Emerson: the return of the Gaia Messiah is to lead us to rebuild the earth's environment where people can learn to know themselves and fully realize their potential. Virginia Woolf also realizes that great poetesses do not die. She writes, "they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh." She believes that when we free our selves from our separate lives, and have the courage to write exactly what we think, we then connect ourselves to the common life of humanity and become the world soul. Woolf writes, "We escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality" (Todd 1977, 173). Since all consciousness is one, the spirit of the Word recognizes itself throughout time. It is the same Word with the same clear idealistic mission. Norman O. Brown writes, "It is all one book; blossoms on one tree" (110). Since the Word is the medium for religious energy to be manifested, we must see the "religious history of humankind as a global continuum" (Heisig 1989, 174). For language to regain its power it must be based in experience, which is why consummation of the Word must be followed by rediscovery of the secret knowledge of sex. In other words, _the Word is not a substitute for life_. The Word can only suggest to us the way to act in order to fulfill our lives and achieve immortality. The One World Mind The politician believes the mythopoetess to be the ultimate threat to the dying social order...and she is because she has the power to call man to the ultimate commitment of which he is capable. By going to the source, the poetess finds truer stories to tell which can annihilate the false perceptions of the materialistic perspective. This is the reason why the voice of the One World Mind has been persecuted and suppressed throughout history. The voice of the One World Mind has the power to unite the divisions and, therefore, create a just, ordered world (as detailed in my poem _The Way to Neutopia_, 1989). Thomas Berry writes in _The Dream of the Earth_, No adequate scale of action can be expected until the human community is able to act in some unified way to establish a functional relation with the earth process, which itself does not recognize national boundaries. The sea and air and sky and sun- light and all living forms of earth establish a single planetary system (Berry 1988, 43). Scientists who are skeptical of religious energy have good reason to be if they look at what past religious superstition has done to men such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno for standing for the truth of their scientific convictions. But scientists must realize that churches and their institutions have also persecuted visionaries who didn't go along with the established line. Scientists and mystics come to the basic truth through different methodologies: scientists through quantitative research in the forms of logical propositions or mathematical formulae, and mystics through qualitative intuition in the forms of pictures, images, riddles, rituals, stories, and symbols. But they are motivated by the same questions: What is the good world? What is the meaning to life? What is love? And yet these are the questions that threaten the established doctrines. This is why the root of science is philosophy and not the other way around. Max Planck reiterates this point: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and, therefore, part of the mystery that we are trying to solve" (Weber 1986, 8). Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan have given us a new creation story in their saga on the evolution of life on Earth, in _Microcosmos_. In all the world's past myths including ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, India, Greece, the early Christian, and the Native American, stories were told about "a lost paradise together with an eschatological view of history in which the end of time re- actualized the beginning of time" (Sanford 1961, 5). The story of human being's relationship with bacteria takes us not only to the beginning of the primordial stew and to the end of egocentric man, but to the beginning of life on new worlds as we delve deeper into the mysteries of our genetic codes. In the past when science and technology changed human rela- tionships with nature, changes in ideology have also been radically altered. For example, before the Neolithic times people had been at the mercy of nature to provide them with food. After the discovery of agriculture, people's relationship with nature changed as they became co-creatresses in the food supply. Male hunters were not as important to the survival of the species when their communal bins were filled with the grains the females had harvested. Males began to trade products and produce weapons to protect their wealth. With the invention of warfare came the overthrow of the ancient Goddess traditions and the split up between art and science. Science was said to be free of values, a neutral force with no ethical considerations. At the threshold of the colonization of new worlds by spreading the bacteria of the life-force, we are again at a turning point which requires us to perceive nature in a different and radical way. It is time for us to see love as the basic force of the natural sciences. However, the story of our bacterial evolution cannot be consummated until a new sexual union between the true Queen of the Universe and the King of the Microcosm opens the doorway to the One World Mind. Through the new/old relationship between woman and man, a global renaissance inspired by Aphrodite and Eros can overturn the deadly culture of the global shopping mall and the nuclear power industry. Radhakamal Mukerjee writes in _The Social Function of Art_, As humanity faces death and void in both physical and social or moral planes, it is natural that a new art will be born accepting the challenge of death by its mystical vision of mankind [sic] that will triumph over the present blood-bath of the nations...As this vision spreads from the aesthetic to the social, political and moral realms, universal humanity will be reborn, the earth will enjoy an eternal spring, and sorrow and despair will be conquered by art (29). The art which humanity so desperately needs is the art of romance. Romantic love meets the requirements of an art form rather than a science since it supersedes the facts. "It is not interested in the literal truth of science but rather in the symbolic truth of art" (Fromme 1965, 240). It is romance which will overthrow our present oblivious world state. Love is the paradigm shift which realigns our personalities and values causing a great religious conversion into the world-wide Gaian state of consciousness. Summary In this chapter we have discussed the nature of love and the role it plays in our evolutionary survival. At the threshold of sending life to other planets, we need to understand the workings of love so that we get back in touch with the meaning of life. Love between the sexes manifests a new cosmology which is in balance with the higher orders of life and is radically different than the structures created during the epoch of dysfunctional relationships between the sexes. The order of love reveals itself throughout the ages through artistic symbolism and poetry rather than by scientific inquiry. CHAPTER 8 THE VIRGIN MOTHER AND THE DIVINE CRONE Introduction Motherhood as a metaphor of the planet is sexist and dangerous to both women and men, just as God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or Sky Father is a sexist and unscientific expression of the deity and leads to gender stereotyping. Patriarchy cannot exist without matriarchy and vice versa. Seeing the Earth as our mother perpetuates the matriarchal-patriarchal social system which does not foster a mature partnership with Gaia, but traps us in the isolation and alienation of the nuclear family housing unit with its unnatural property laws. Both systems are models of domination which will only lead us down the oily highway in the present direction of human extinction. Breaking the Incest Barrier Lovelock, Allaby, and Sagan each discuss the reproduction of the planet in a similarly sexist way. The common denominator of their theories is that the planet is on the verge of reproduction through a technological virgin birth. Allaby states in _A Guide to Gaia_, Yet the mother figure survives, even in the modern world, and if the image of the divine virgin who gives birth to and then protects and nourishes a male divinity sounds familiar, this is not coincidence. There is much of Gaia in the Virgin Mary (7). If the Earth is reproducing itself, therefore, it is doing so asexually...Asexual reproduction occurs in many species and especially among the prokaryote on which the Earth relies so heavily. There is no reason why the large organism should not employ a similar method (154). Lovelock writes in _The Ages of Gaia_, Many, I suspect, have trodden this same path through the mind. Those millions of Christians who make a special place in their hearts for the Virgin Mary possibly respond as I do. The concept of Jahweh as remote, all-powerful, all-seeing is either frightening or unapproachable. Even the sense of presence of a more contemporary God, as a still, small voice within, may not be enough for those who need to communicate with someone outside. Mary is close and can be talked to. She is believable and manageable. It could be that the importance of the Virgin Mary in faith is something of this kind, but there may be more to it. What if Mary is another name for Gaia? Then her capacity for virgin birth is no miracle or parthenogenetic aberration, it is a role of Gaia since life began....(206). Sagan, who is incidentally a sleight-of-hand magician, is more subtle in his description of the reproduction of the planet. He is even more revealing in his aversion towards recombinant sex. One can clearly see the same virgin birth formula in these passages from _Biospheres_, Human beings have fortuitously become involved in the destiny of the Earth, as agents or midwives of its sexless reproduction (159). Arising from Mother Earth we find ourselves incestuously involved in her reproduction (9). The reproductive metamorphosis of planet Earth is more like the complex, associative, mediated reproduction exemplified by the birds and the bees than it is like the immediate reproduction of amoeba or the sexual reproduction of people. If the biosphere uses humanity to produce technology to reproduce itself, then biospheric reproduction would appear more complex, though no less an example of reproduction, than other reproductive acts in nature (103). For these three men the Earth is a virgin-mother who has the power to reproduce herself asexually through advanced biospheric technology. In order for the planet to be considered a living organism reproduction absolutely needs to take place. Their theory is that Gaia is using us to build biospheres capable of launching the five biological "kingdoms" into the heavens in order to colonize planets such as Mars. Lovelock thinks that if people would view the earth as the Virgin Mother who is the "source of everlasting life" they would stop raping her. But for the last 2,000 years, the Virgin Mother has not had the power to stop the plunder of its creatures and resources to bring about a millennium of peace on earth. Marina Warner writes in her book _Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth of the Cult of the Virgin Mary_, "The Virgin Mary is not the innate archetype of female nature, the dream incarnated; she is the instrument of a dynamic argument from the Catholic Church about the structure of society, presented as a God- given code" (338). The Divine Role of the Crone In Barbara G. Walker's book, _The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power_, she explains the problem of the Christian family formula and why the Virgin Mother has not had the power to stop the plunder of the Earth. In the ancient Goddess religion there were three phases of the Goddess: the virgin, the mother, and the crone. The Crone is the female counterpart of the image of the wise old man with a long white bread who commands the band of angels. The word Crone was derived from the word crown which represented her moral judgment and rulership ability within the community. She is the culture-bearer, the prophetess of the One World Mind. The Crone is symbolized as the dark moon, a menopausal woman of experience and age. However, I feel it is a misconception to believe that the Crone has to be an old woman. The important characteristic of the Crone is that she is wise and has the self- esteem to form her own value judgements and listen to her own inner voice. She has discovered her natural sovereignty and does not succumb to male desires. One of the reasons why the Crone has been viewed as a menopausal women is not only because of the experiences she has lived through, but because her child bearing years are behind her. Now, she no longer has to compromise her ideals by following the Word of man in order to receive the sperm necessary for childbirth and her initiation into motherhood. Christianity combined the virgin-mother phases of the Goddess in its mythology, but eliminated the divine prestige of the Crone, then made her into a disrespectful "hag." Males no longer found her attractive so she was not sexually useful to him. He overlooked the supreme function she plays in planetary reproduction. Walker writes, "the Crone phase was too darkly threatening to be so handled" (13). What was threatening about the power of the Crone? Walker thinks that it is because she is the birth giver and the death bringer, "the wounder who heals." Christianity and the other virgin birth religions fear sex and death, as well as negate the cosmic law giving role of the Crone Goddess. On the microbial level, Margulis and Dorion Sagan state in _Microcosmos_ that "while genetically fluid bacteria are functionally immortal, in eukaryotes, sex comes linked with death" (93). Without the knowledge of the microbial world, death does look like the final end. But it is not. Barbara Walker quotes Rosemary Radford Ruether, Male eschatology is built on negation of the mother...The escape from sex and birth is ultimately an attempt to escape from death for which women as Eve and Mary are made responsible. Male eschatology combines male womb envy with womb negation (82). Christian theologians claim before, during, and after the birth of Jesus, Mary's body stayed "intact." After her death, traditions say her body never decomposed or gave off offensive smells, but stayed in perfect condition. In denying the continuity between life and death, males try to avoid the great mysteries of the unknown, denying our connection with the universal recycling of life. During the prehistorical times of the reign of the Goddess, death was part of the natural life cycle. The basis of the prim- ordial fertility rites was death and decay which were seen as a process where energy was transformed from one state to the next (Gadon 1989). Certainly, we can see the negation of sexual repro- ductive birth through the words of Sagan, Lovelock, and Allaby. Allaby fears the Crone energy so much that he does not mention the word Goddess once in his book on Gaia! The Relationship Between the Hera and the Hero The most difficult task of the hero, proposes Carl Jung, is to break away from mother. As a civilization we must break away from our asexual, incestuous relationship with Mother Earth, and begin a new relationship with Her in order to reach a mature steady-state relationship with nature. But in order to break our infantile bond with the planet, the birth of the myth of the hero is necessary in order for men to have a model of an eternal man who is no longer afraid of death and sex or envious of the prophecies of the womb. The hero's call is to establish a new relationship with woman based on the mysterious forces of erotic mysticism. His task, then, is to become a love-maker, to put an end to the war between the sexes. No longer can man cling to his mother thinking that she will save him. Nor will his father save him. Male unconscious infantile bond with Mother Earth is the reason why we continue thinking the planet will continue to supply us with natural resources and recycle our polluted air and water without regard to population. Dorion Sagan admits, "People are not in charge right now. For the most part, we are just a tunnel-visioned, self-serving species, highly dangerous to ourselves and to a few other species, and fascinated by the technology we image in our own" (Sagan 1990, 19). Thus, we live in a state of world anarchy. The new heras and heroes must achieve independence from the mother-father in order to widen the narrow restrictions of the nuclear family, so their message speaks to the entire world. The new mythology must be sexual if we are to understand Gaia and live by its ancient wisdom. G. S. Kirk writes in the _Nature of Greek Myths_ that "all myths are about nature and natural phenomena, or in other words, myths must always refer to some cosmological or meteorological event" (50). The cosmological event which is presently occurring is our maternal break from Mother Earth through the SEEDS of the biosphere achieved through a mature sexual partnership between the two sexes. (It is interesting to note that the word "savior" means _one who sows the seed._) According to Jung, the incest desire is not to co-habitat with the mother, but to be reborn from her, becoming a child again through her parental shelter. This parental shelter is the single family house, the structure which is causing our environmental demise. Incest is the way man finds himself back into the womb without having come to terms with a mature sexual relationship. Incestual man may never find a metaphysical soulmate whose womb encompasses the entire biosphere. Here we can see the rejection of the judgmental powers of the Crone in favor of the unconditional love of the Mother who may condemn or condone but plays no part in the dispensing of justice. In Christian mythology the incest relationship is finally fulfilled after the Virgin Mary's death. She ascends to heaven where she becomes the Queen of God's kingdom, married not only to God, but to her son-god Jesus Christ. Jung says in _Symbols of Transformation_ that the hero is reborn when the love he feels for his mother is transferred to his wife. He writes, "The first birth makes him a mortal man, the second an immortal half-god" (322). More than other men, Jung writes, the hero finds his mother in the woman he loves. When he finds his mother's symbolic equivalent he is born again. Jung continues, In this tie to the maternal source lies the strength that gives the hero his extraordinary powers, his true genius, which he frees from the embrace of the unconscious by his daring and sovereign independence. Thus the god is born in him. The mystery of the "mother" is the divine creative power" (336). I question whether the way of rebirth is through the dual mother and what the hero does is to transfer his maternal need to another woman who is the "symbolic equivalent" of his mother. This leaves his mate with no power of her own denying her unique merit and diminishing her divine role. It puts the evolutionary importance of the woman's metaphysical union with the hero on the biological level with that of the mother. Because the incest barrier is not broken in Jungian theory, the hero is unable to go to explore the unknown forces beyond the symbolic truth. He is trapped in his animal instincts. Unable to understand the primal reason for his erotic union with the Crone, he is stuck in the mind-set of the transcendental God. If his marriage with his soulmate does not happen, the hero will continue to degenerate through his incestuous relationship, running away from the Second Coming of Woman which is his only chance for salvation. When we fail to individuate, because of "childish laziness or timidity" or from the fear of death, neuroses can develop and even destroy the individual. Since, according to Freud, our society is based on an incestuous relationship with the Virgin Mother, the entire civilization is neurotic, if not on the verge of collapse. It seems vital to our species that the son be liberated from the incestuous relationship and from his subordination to God the Father. Since under patriarchal rule the son is unable to surpass the father's authority until after his death, the father is but another stumbling block to the evolutionary consciousness. The hero's liberation from Mother Earth and God the Father seems to be the key to the maturation our planet so urgently needs in order to create a sustainable civilization and a functional cosmology. The ultimate goal of the Gaia Theory is to create homeostasis between the sexes. Matthew Fox writes, The scientific word for justice today is homeostasis, which is the quest for balance and equilibrium that is found in all organisms and even in the universe itself. Mysticism is about returning homeostasis to the human mind (Fox 1980, 63). Plato thought that such a state rested in health, beauty, medicine and music. To become the leaders of a new social system, the hera/hero must revolutionize the traditional patterns of motherhood; the hero's mother is not only a part of this pattern, but a slave to it, and unwittingly perpetuates it. The relationship must then shift from mother/son to hera/hero. This shift not only opens up new pathways for biochemical interaction, but opens up a metaphysical communication beyond the incestuous bond between mother and son. Consequently, the reproduction of planet Earth is not based on the sexless relationship between mother and son, but is based on a philosophic sexual union between lovers of the opposite sex. By being liberated from the parents the new wo/man becomes the center of a new social system and so, the Gaian revolution is born as he falls in love with the pythoness of peace. Jung writes, "The hero who sets himself the task of renewing the world and conquering death personifies the world-creating power which, brooding on itself in introversion, coiled round its own egg like a snake, threatens life with its poisonous bite, so that the living may die and be born again from the darkness" (382). Throughout the world the snake has represented the power of renewal. The serpent is the kingmaker. Without this revolutionary partnership emancipating our libidos from incest, Mother Earth, the main symbol of woman's psychological domination and castration of men, will continue, as well as, Father Sky's external domination and intellectual belittlement of women. The female is trapped in the image of biological reproduction as her spiritual mission, resulting in the suppression of the Goddess of wisdom within her, while the male enslaves himself to the mother/son incest fantasy which prevents the god of wisdom within him from ever achieving the manhood needed to make love with the Great Goddess. The romance between the hera and hero is the story of the inner process of maturation of both the female and male counterparts. Without the sexes physically connecting with each other, neither one can be saved or find the wisdom to save our species and all the others. Returning to the Garden In Carol P. Christ's essay, "Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections," she writes, Patriarchal religion has enforced the view that female initiative and will are evil through the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary. Eve caused the fall by asserting her will against the command of God, while Mary began the new age with her response to God's initiative, "let it be done to me according to Thy Word" (Luke 1:38) (Christ 1982, 81). Mary who is worshipped for her physical ability to birth and nurture the male deity, becomes a second-rate citizen, a saint, not a Goddess, lacking the will to release the power in her own self. She becomes a non-being, the obedient wife of the Son of God. For one to be human is to be the Son of God, a male, not a female. Mary is subordinate to the word of the male deity who worships her primarily for her womb. All women are seen similarly. Feminist theologians have pointed out that when God announced that Mary had been chosen to carry the baby Jesus she had no choice as to whether or not to accept or reject his Immaculate Conception. When Mary asked the angel how she could become pregnant in as much as she was a virgin, the angel replied, "The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of God shall overshadow you; so the baby born to you will be utterly holy--the Son of God" (Luke 1:23, 36). One of the definitions for the word "overshadow" is "to make insignificant by comparison; dominate." Therefore, Mary was denied her natural sovereignty of having consent to the sex act. Consequently, his insemination was an act of rape. In modern terms, she is artificially inseminated, even denying her the pleasure of an orgasm. In Vladimir Solovyov's book, _The Meaning of Love_, he points out that in biblical stories love between the sexes does not play an essential role. The "fathers of God" are those who arranged the births and sexual combinations. Solovyov writes, "Love is of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ." Christ is a product of faith, not of love. He continues, In sacred, as well as general history, sexual love is not a means to, or the instrument of, historical ends; it does not subserve the human species. That is why, when subjective feeling tells us that love is an independent good and that it possesses an absolute value of its own for our personal existence, then this feeling corresponds also in objective reality with the fact that a powerful, individualized love never exists as an instrument of service for the ends of the species, which are attained apart from it. In general history, as in sacred history, sexual love (in the real sense of the word) plays no role in, and shows no direct influence upon, the historical process; its positive significance must have its roots in individual life (32). It is apparent from this that the biblical stories are not simply stories of love between the sexes, but also accounts of blind obedience, incest, rape, and murder. Men's Part in Reproduction Men do great harm and disservice to themselves when they view the earth as the virgin mother and fail to see the _necessary_ part they play in the reproductive process. In Christianity, the church replaces the womb of the virgin mother, dividing sacred and profane places. This schism results in the building of unhealthy, fragmented cities. For Christians, enlightenment is not found through erotic mysticism, but through direct communion with Christ. Kenmare writes, It is precisely because the Church as a whole has failed to understand sex in its totality, has isolated sex from love (not love from sex), that by far the greater majority not only find no appeal in the Christian teaching, but positively fear and shun it, believing it to be full of prohibitions and hard rules against which the innate warmth and instinctive needs of the personality has no choice but to rebel (Kenmare 1942, 180). Although these may be an adolescent rebellion from the church, often times they go back to the church after failure in life. This return is mainly due from their lack of understanding about the nature of love: they seek consultation from the church since they have no alternative to which they can turn for guidance. Gaian and Neutopian thought give us an alternative worldview. It is interesting to note that alternative is from alter, in Latin, meaning second or other, and natus, birth or nation. Gaia is not only the antichrist, but the antichurch. Mary Daly believes antichurch should be thought of in a positive way since it is not trying to capture equal ground in sexist space, but bringing into the world a rebirth of the Second Coming of Woman. Her theory challenges the credibility of myths contrived to support the structures of patriarchal alienation (Daly 1973, 139). It is no wonder that the status quo experiences no authentic religious experiences when the majority marry for social convenience and the begetting of children, and not for love. Their mindsets are locked into the existing social systems. A return to the biospheric garden "can come, but only and always through a proper understanding of love and a deep sense of the sacramental" (Kenmare 1942, 121). Agape, the love of humanity without the embodiment of Aphrodite and Eros, is not the way to enlightenment because the microbial life-force is incarnated in the flesh. Alan Watts says that the division between sexuality and spirit has caused us to be dangerously insane and on the verge of global suicide. He writes, "Obviously, only those who believe that the world of spirit is more real than the world of life, biology, and sex will gamble on detonating the atomic bomb" (Watts 1971, 111). Moveover, a union of Aphrodite and Eros which is narrowly focused on the flesh results in deadly narcissism. Without understanding its divine social purpose, the inner necessity and evolutionary reason for copulation in the relationship will end in failure. Erich Fromm writes, One can often find two people "in love" with each other who feel no love for anybody else. Their loves is, in fact, an egotism a deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness; yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind [sic], they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is an illusion. Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind [sic], all that is alive (Fromm 1956, 47). Since Aphrodite and Eros are basic to the inner understanding of the microcosm, and are the force which guides us to our soulmates, the liberation of women from domesticity and the architectural pattern of development it has created is imperative if we are to control the population and save the species. The fecund Virgin Mother who was raped by God the Father must be replaced with the image of a creative, intelligent Crone who is in touch with her unique gifts and bears important social roles for the betterment of the Superorganism. With love between the sexes living by the ancient wisdom of bacteria, galactic gardens of peace will open up to us. The dangerous myths which have shaped our world have indoctrinated girls to believe it is their female duty to bear children and boys their heroic duty to go to war to protect the motherland. It is time for us to acknowledge the vital role the child-free woman plays in the survival of the human race. Edward Carpenter writes, "Sometimes it seems possible that a new sex is on the make--like the feminine neuters of Ants and Bees--not adapted for child-bearing, but with a marvelous, and perfect instinct of social service, indispensable for the maintenance of the common life" (68). Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene As we understand the shortcomings of worshipping the Mother Mary as Mother Earth, we begin to understand the Second Coming of Women in terms of Mary Magdalene, a Crone who was the first heretic of Christianity after Peter formed the church hierarchy without her vital sexual knowledge and holy wisdom. It was Mary Magdalene, not Mother Mary, who possessed the way of creating peace on Earth! Let me now engage in the mythopoetic enterprise. Magdalene, the new Eve, was the female counterpart of Christ, the new Adam. Through their love they shared intimate knowledge which may have been the reason for the release of the holy myth- making forces of their life stories. Like Christ, she was both a receiver and a revealer of gnosis, the insight of self-knowledge. Being the companion of Christ made her not a saint, as the Church proclaimed, but the prophetess of the religion. Magdalene taught that ultimate reality was found through self-knowledge and faith was a result of trusting one's own experiences. For her, divination was revealed through the intuitive and creative forces of self-discipline. She taught that in order to find love, one must surrender one's ego to the great works of the superorganism, the building of the New Jerusalem, an arcology of love. To her, Christ was not the Lord, but a spiritual guide to the New Ordered World. Mother Mary, on the other hand, was a pawn of rational knowledge. Faith to her was blind obedience and acceptance of the literal biblical tales apart from one's own personal experience. Mother Mary believed that people who heard voices or saw imaginative visions related to the unseen ESP capacities, or swayed with the changing tides and rhythms of life were schizophrenic. Under her rule, reality was limited to the visible world. In her church, revelation was relegated to the unconditional acceptance of the laws of the clerical hierarchy. This meant obeying the customs and traditions of the tribe over one's personal needs, desires, and urges. In order to receive the blessing of the tribe and family, one had to prove one's usefulness by way of acquisitions and achievements. For Mother Mary, the resurrection of Christ was a material phenomena which could be observed as an historical event. It symbolized "one's will over the natural forces," whereas Magdalene taught that the resurrection occurred within the imagination of the individual, a spiritual and unique process in which one rediscovers the way to the true self. When Magdalene was first to see the resurrected Christ, Peter became envious of her privileged position as a teacher of prophecy, miracle worker, and the gnosis which she shared with Christ. She became a target of his jealousy and doubt. The apostles referred to her as the "sinner" who anointed Christ. To Peter, Magdalene was inferior to Christ since she was a women, and as a woman, associated with matter and evil, she must repent in order to become "white and good." Christ, on the other hand, being male, was associated with what was good and spiritual. Whitmont sums up the problem, As the reasoning light of the mind grabs the world in its outer, concrete manifestation, the inner _gnosis_, with its magical, instinctual attunement of fundamental survival needs and collective dynamics is lost to consciousness. The world of the Feminine, of the Goddess and her consort Dionysus or Pan, yields to the God whose name is "I am that I am" (68). Mother Mary's womb became the church of orthodox external knowledge, void of the mysteries and joy of erotic union. Mary Magdalene became the outsider, a homeless "prostitute," albeit the sleeping beauty with the "forbidden knowledge" surrounded by an ugly, violent world. Excluded from the Christian hierarchy, she spent the rest of her life alone in the desert. In whatever particular bodily form she has appeared throughout the ages, her universal message has always tried to destroy the counterfeit spirit. The counterfeit has always divided up the world into the realm of light where the soul ascends to meet the "true God" in his "Kingdom of Heaven" and the realm of evil matter where the corrupt human body is imprisoned on Earth. Even Christ tried to make Magdalene into a hero when he told Peter, "See, I shall head her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." By discrediting her divine wisdom by dismissing the role of female prophecy and by declaring her his follower instead of his equal, Christ made a fatal mistake. Since Christ was unable to understand the place of erotic love in religion, he preached the practice of celibacy (Pagels 1989b). He declared his soul married to the Church and that followers of the gospel should give up their sexual relationships to carry out his Word. This gave Peter the authority to become the spokesman of the group and allowed him to "exercise exclusive leadership over churches as the successors of the apostle Peter." Elaine Pagels writes in _The Gnostic Gospels_, "For the second century, the doctrine served to validate the apostolic succession of bishops, the basis of papal authority to this day" (6). But even with all his magical powers, Christ was unable to make Magdalene into a man. Marjorie M. Malvern writes in _Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphoses_, "As a female she rules over the present world, which is like to her, and counts as the first prophetess; she proclaims her prophecy with all amongst those born of woman" (39). Magdalene could not give up her knowledge of sexual love since it is the fundamental mystery necessary for regeneration. The Secret Sexual Knowledge Aphrodite can not conceive without Eros' magic phallus. Without the mysterious forces of erotic love, the reproductive act is often reduced to prostitution, pornography, masturbation, and rape which teaches nothing about the miracles of life. The only other alternative is artificial insemination which eliminates and alienates the male from the sex act. Mircea Eliade writes, "Except in the modern world, sexuality has everywhere and always been a hierophany, and the sexual act an integral action and also a means of knowledge." Consequently, without philosophic Aphrodite and Eros working for Gaia, the technological virgin birth of the biosphere could actually cause our species to spread its egocentric diseases of war, lust, and greed throughout the galaxy. In order to stop this destructive process, we must come to terms with our creatrix. We are part of the microcosm. Our bodies are the temples where microbes live. This is why it is a grave violation to the life-force to pollute our bodies, or kill another human being, or to separate sex from love, or death from life. When we realize our bodies are systems of organisms working to maintain health and supply us with energy, we begin to be aware that we live to serve the microbes who have been responsible for our immortality. Many male writers advocating the technological asexual birth of the planet are reproducing the same patriarchal-matriarchal formula which has caused our downfall in Gaia's garden. Christian agape seeks union with God in an asexual way, divorcing itself from sexual and earthly responsibilities. Agape fails to note that the superorganism which has produced us has made us into sexual creatures. The bacteria speak to us through philosophic Aphrodite and Eros. In his essay, "Bacterial Writing and the Metaphysics of Sex," Dorion Sagan examines the ideas that seeing the Earth as an inseminable female is found all over the world and is the very root of the Indo-European civilization. In places where the terms were reversed, and Father Earth and Moon Mother was perceived, the unscientific division of gender relationships still prevailed. Sagan writes, "the asexual organism is not more female than male; Adam was not, in a simple reversal, extracted from Eve's rib. If females are not primordial, males are not redundant" (127). According to Sagan, the sexism of the religious explanation of the universe penetrated into the mytheme of science. Females were characterized by the plant world and males by animals. When Anton van Leeuwenhoek first looked at his own sperm under a microscope, he called it spermatazoa combining the two Greek words for seed and animals. The sperm became the activists of life. The redundant ovaries became the passive receptacles and vegetable nutrition for the incoming sperm. Socially, this stereotype created the idea that the assertive woman is one who intuitively knows the mysteries of life without having to seek nor assert knowledge of the natural world. If a women does attempt to verbalize her knowledge she is seen as taking on male characteristics. In biological terms, women are seen in terms of asexual reproduction which Dorion Sagan points out can be seen in the use of the words "daughter cells," used to describe an amoeba after mitosis, even though their "sexless" acts do not create daughters or sons. He calls this a metaphysical bias which suppresses the right to differentiate. Christian Clones By ignoring the erotic impulse, agape love for the Christ figure is also dangerous because it disallows people from finding their unique characters as they become clones of Godhead who are reborn through the virgin birth. Yes, all is superorganism, but agape leads to global totalitarianism when people are unable to break the incest barrier with the Virgin Mother and must obey God, the Father. In contrast, Aphrodite and Eros find their unique and mature selves by connecting with Gaia through inward understanding and taking on a greater responsibility for their outer world, their environments. They use a symbolic language which neither causes dogma nor superstitious traditional rituals. The union of Aphrodite and Eros leads to a personal and social freedom which is only found by connecting with the superorganism and being self-disciplined towards its creative will. Thus Aphrodite and Eros can liberate us by restoring meaning to our lives. Freedom is found only when we become whole. William A. Saler, Jr. points out in his book, _Existence and Love: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology_, Man is also, and all too often, afraid of his freedom, particularly the freedom to exist within the infinite boundaries of love; thus he seeks to escape from it (208). The greatness and mystery are too much for him. Thus man is often a compromiser, choosing little freedoms for trivial possibilities as cheap compensation for authentic freedom which he is too frightened to pursue (210). Man declares the greatness of love and the new world it creates to be a fantasy. In deceiving himself that love does not exist, he "spins deceptions about himself. In the web of history he is caught and hung by his own deceptions" (Sadler 1969, 210). By ignoring the Great Goddess of Wisdom and commercialism and science for religion, as Christianity and Capitalism do, we are denying ourselves our connection with the life-force. This can only cause personal and social anarchy. The "almighty buck" seems to be the economic theory of laissez-faire capitalism which began the exploitation of nature through property rights and challenged the idea of communal ownership of the Earth. With it came the rise of the professionalism which manifested rationalism and scientific domination. Professionalism introduced and made people slaves to credentials giving the professional class privileges over the peasantry. Professionalism was a neo-feudalistic change which replaced the charters, grants and titles of the Middle Ages with a system where credentials and formal documents (degrees, license, diplomas, certificates) were issued by the State. Without official documentation one faced unemployment and homelessness (Hodgkinson 1983, 102). In _Love in the Machine Age_, Floyd Dell writes, "the middle class has been and still is bringing up its sons and daughters as if their lives were dominated by the requirements of land and property. It is blunderingly seeking to perpetuate the psycho- logical attitudes which were necessary to the land--property regime--the adult childishness which hampers the social and eco- nomic arrangements of our time" (22). Under capitalism, parents keep their children chained to the bondage of inheritance rights which are diametrically opposed to creating arcologies of human love. Neither totalitarianism nor anarchy are organic social struc- tures which give us the individual power to work in unison with the superorganism. Both systems are immature: one makes people submissive to authority and the other puts no restrictions on personal wishes in respect to the collective vision, leaving humanity without creative leadership (Kao 1975, 143). Warren Bennis writes in _Why Leaders Can't Lead_, "As a person cannot function without a brain, a society cannot function without leaders. And so the decline goes on" (66). In Neutopia, there is a balance between centralization and localization allowing people to express their gifts in collective ways. The public needs the artists and scientists as much as the artists and scientists need the public. One becomes part of the feminist hagiarchy of creative junos and geniuses by virtue of her or his inward development. Through works of love and wisdom we find our natural leaders. Through philosophic Aphrodite and Eros we discover our royal artists, the futurists who synthesize the arts and sciences to create an aesthetic Gaian life-style. Through the "One-Joined-Together," the vital leadership of life can flow throughout the world. The Brain Cells of Gaia Even though Michael Allaby calls the planet the Virgin Mother, he refuses to acknowledge Gaia as an intelligent organism with a moral consciousness, denying the Crone her essential function within the biosphere. He writes, The Gaian concept has no moral dimension unless you make the false assumption that Gaia is an intelligence, and in that case it is far from benign. This Gaia has no concern for human welfare, moral or even physical...For us to cast ourselves in the role of the planet's conscience is rather like criminals appointing themselves judges, and only judges at that (Allaby 1989, 147). Allaby goes on to say that we are on a spaceship as part of the crew, a crew unable to guide its destiny, but with the power to destroy the world. He says that we are like delinquents who are rebellious against a captain, in whose judgments we have lost faith. He asks, "As individuals, are we tempted through our vanity and desire for knowledge, like Adam and Eve, so that mankind as a whole, mainly through its science and technology, has come to represent Satan, individual men and women the occupants of the Garden?" (88) This is a good question for Allaby to address to himself since in his book he advocates the use of nuclear power to run the technology which dominates women and nature. For Allaby, Gaia seems to be a complicated heartless machine-like orb who rules us by fear since it can survive without us, but we cannot survive without it. He points out that prokaryote, who have been around billions of years before the development of plants and animals, are much more important to planetary life than we are, since they are the regulators of the planetary functions. Allaby compares Gaia to an automobile who has no need for a moral conscience. He says that the driver needs conscience, but it is ludicrous to think the car does. But it was only a few particular human beings who made the decision to build cars and that has turned out to have such a destructive impact on the environment since traffic deaths and pollution through auto emissions have caused havoc to the entire health of the planet. Richard Register writes, The fact is, if we want to leave any energy reserves and a reasonably healthy biosphere to our children, we will need to change the _whole system_ so that cars are no longer an integral part. We will, in other words, have to completely rebuild our cities on ecocity lines (Register 1987, 10). Unlike Register, Allaby's mind is still locked into the Newtonian scientific worldview because he thinks science is value free! By denying the role of the Crone, Allaby also denies himself the role of the sage. He fails to realize that we are the microcosm! He even suggests that it is better for us to not question humanity's role within the planetary scheme of things. He writes, "at best we have no part" (147). In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathunde's essay "The Psychology of Wisdom: an Evolutionary Interpretation," the authors state, "the wise person is the one best equipped to judge and to keep the commonwealth in order. The ultimate requirement for ruling is knowledge of how to optimize the well-being of the whole" (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 33). Of course, the whole is the biosphere, Gaia, the superorganism. The ancient philosophers thought that the beauty of the divine order was so attractive that one would be compelled to follow its path and to submit to its pattern. Now, even more so than in Plato's time, the seeking of wisdom, "the process by which people try to evaluate the ultimate consequences of events in terms of each other," is absolutely essential to our planetary survival. Sagan, in his book _Biospheres_, seems to hold a different opinion than Allaby of the nature of the biospheric intelligence. He finds comfort in thinking the superorganism has a superior intelligence to human beings which is responsible for planetary evolution. Gaia has survived several massive extinctions in Earth's past and would certainly survive a nuclear world war and ecological collapse if humans are too stupid to avoid species termination. He says understanding this "superior being" of which we are a part, would require "new techniques of unconscious resonance, new means of speaking" (100). Sagan sees us as "the collective witness and main actor in a participatory spectacle of sexual-symbiotic fascination" (123). At least he questions the possibility of humanity being the vital brain cells of the planet constituting moral decision-making. He writes, "I contend that the biosphere, _through me_, may be writing or helping to write these words. But if I can say this, the very notion of an "I" separated from the biosphere comes under question" (21). Sagan believes the "biosphere uses us to accomplish its own ends," to which end he says is the planet's reproduction. He writes, It may be that the time has come, from a biospheric vantage point, for us to glimpse a new role for ourselves; no longer isolationists, selfishly rearing technology for our own ends, but integrationist--connectors and vectors of disparate parts of the biosphere--no longer murderers but intermediaries and matchmakers among the millions of species participating in the life of the biosphere" (105-104). Thus humanity plays the role within the biosphere as the decision- maker, the brain cell of Gaia. Power of Ideas Since ideas do not come through committees, sects, or nations, but through the individual, who, for Sagan, is the main actor? Is the midwife to the Gaian world view the collective, the individual, or both? Since biologically speaking there is no individual, since our bodies are made up of a community of different organisms, the answer must be both. But how is the superorganism organized? What relationship do the parts have to the whole? Humanity advances through the work of particular idealistic individuals who influence others with their ideas. Walker Abell, in his book _The Collective Dream in Art_, points out that inspirational ideas are a receptacle for a collective psychic charge which arises from the unconscious or subliminal regions of the mind. At the moment of the inspiration, the artist works as a conductor of the collective forces of the superorganism to make them conscious. Erich Neumann writes, "The Great Individual, on the other hand, who really is a great man in the sense of being a great personality, is characterized not only by the fact that the unconscious content has him in its grip, but by the fact that his conscious mind also has an active grip on the content" (Neumann 1954, 426). The juno and genius are they who are most consciously aware and sensitive to what is going on in their unconscious which they strive to express with their ideas. The ideas enter into the imagination and animate symbolic visions to which humans then must give embodiment. This release of the accumulative psychic impulses is established when there is an "appropriate connective between its subjective source and an objective outlet" (Abell 1957, 332). The conscious mind is not the generator of the ideas, only an interpreter or agent of the inspired messages (Walker 1961, 35). "Major artists are such, precisely because responsiveness to collective motivation, charges their creative activity with the full force of the master tensions of their epoch" (Abell 1957, 332). These seekers of a deeper cultural reality other than the repressive market economy, become free from personal competition when they seek union with others on the creative quest to build a planetary science and culture of love. Abell writes, "Originality tends to unite one with one's more sensitive contemporaries, and separates one only from one's predecessors--that is to say from the exponents of cultural situations that no longer exist" (333). There are many different kinds of cultural and scientific agents, each fulfilling their destinies within the broad channel of planetary transformation. But it is Aphrodite and Eros who become the vortex of the lovolution. To join the lovolution is finding oneself within the global drama, playing a role and _living_ for a cause, rather than "losing oneself" and dying for a cause. When the multitude is exposed to great ideas they enter into their dreams. But in essence, it is the individual who must absorb the idea and act it out. Giordano Bruno states, "A creator is one who makes others create." Without a creative following the leader cannot lead (Bell 1957, 334). Aphrodite and Eros empower the collective by providing the vision, wisdom, and immorality to live in harmony with Gaia. The history of utopian thought has attempted to discover the organic social system of nature. However, it seems that we have not as yet discovered the formula to lead our way back to the garden. In order to rediscover ourselves we must come together to study the Earth as a system. But what then is the power that will unite us? Since the historical roots of our environmental crisis are religious, the answer to the problem must be religious, thus the manifestation of the Gaian religion. In order to change the system, we have to have a story more powerful than the existing mythology. The religion of Aphrodite and Eros binds us back to this the mystical power. It demands we enter the mysteries, shut our five senses, and return to our origins! We must beware of the folly of thinking of ourselves as the stewards or engineers in control of the environment. The ecological crisis, which we have caused ourselves, is already the result of thinking that we are the superior members of the biosphere whose transcendental God created nature for humanity's exploitation. However, in _Biospheres_, Sagan points out that the destructive use of technology which we are witnessing now might have been a necessary part of the metamorphosis. The Judeo-Christian duality between people and nature allowed scientific investigation and technological development to flourish. During pagan times, the people saw guardian spirits in all forms of nature, every tree, plant, stream, rock, etc. The Judeo-Christian revolution over paganism destroyed the pagan animism which saw nature as a living revolution in which people were a part. This psychic revolution in the way people perceived nature ushered in the way for human beings to exploit natural resources with indifference to the consequences which resulted from development. Gaia is the Supreme Being(s) Could the unseen microbes be the supreme beings which the ancient pre-Christian nature worshipers saw as guardian spirits in all forms of life? Margulis and Sagan's description of the microbial world in _Microcosmos_ could be read to correspond with Lawrence E. Sullivan's description of supreme beings in the _Encyclopedia of Religion_. He says supreme beings can see and know everything and are present everywhere. We are made in their image even though they remain invisible to us. They are viewed as being the foundation of all life, owning all that exists, the fertilizers of vital forms of the universe. Sullivan writes, "As the foundation of all that is real, they may be the sovereign upholders of the world order, rulers of all beings, and even providers of moral commandments and socio-ethical mores" (167). To those who are transgressive, supreme beings punish in passive ways, by famine, epidemics, and drought. The ancient wisdom against engaging in promiscuous sex can now be reaffirmed as sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS show us that the ancient morality had a biological purpose. Sorin Sonea and Maurice Panisset write in _A New Bacteriology_ that bacteria are the "life-promoting stability of the chemical features surrounding the living world" (8). The majority of bacteria are benevolent and compose the essential organisms which make up a global community. Bacteria are responsible more than any other living group to the fertility and stability of the planetary ecology. Not only are we surrounded by them, but we are made of them. They are our first ancestress. When we are in harmony with them, we serve them. Since bacteria are the foundation of life on earth, they are not unintelligent beings. They are the mysterious creative force in love, the hidden matchmaker behind human evolution. Could it then be said that bacteria are the voice within the unconscious mind? Furthermore that they have manifested the deity of the Virgin Mother and transcendental father so that we would develop the technology for their galactic reproduction? If the answer is yes, it is not surprising that bacteria have symbolized themselves throughout our religious history as the image of the Virgin Mother. Percy Shelley is quoted in _Romantic Art Theories_, "Only in artistic creation did the unconscious soul of nature merge with the conscious soul of man [sic] to produce works in which nature becomes spirit and spirit ennobled and redeemed nature" (75). Since religion is the art of sexuality, it makes sense that bacteria may compose the unconscious soul of nature revealed in a sense through the spiritual symbols of humanity, i.e., the madonna and child. It is urgent that we be aware of its religious significance so that more evolved religious symbols of the true nature of love will ennoble and redeem human nature. Since our new knowledge of the bacterial superorganism pro- mises to open up infinite possibilities for the creation and improvement of genes, we are beginning to have a new, mature, even divine relationship with the microorganisms as human beings become the co-creators of life forms and new worlds. Through the superorganism's desire for reproduction, we become equal partners with the microcosmic Great Goddess of life. Gaia perfects us and now we are perfecting Gaia. This is not only a technological partnership, but a spiritual one as well as we begin to educate our population to the spiritual nature of the superorganism and begin to direct the building of biospheric arcologies. Gaia can create global order out of world chaos. It is calling us to develop what Buckminster Fuller called "a world computer data base" and G. H. Wells called the "World Encyclopedia." It is certainly a meaningful coincidence that Sorin Sonea and Maurice Ranisset describe the superorganism as being a "computer with a large data base," and these earlier futurists expressed the same concept in their writings. The intelligence necessary to know how to ethically guide the world data base comes through those engaged in philosophic Aphrodite and Eros whose union makes them the mistresses and masters of the whole. A mature relationship with the microcosm requires that we develop a new understanding about the role of sex. There is a reason why we developed egg and sperm cells in the individual sexes. Sexual reproduction should not be thought of as a biological waste of time and energy which should be eliminated, even if asexual forms of reproduction by human cloning or parthenogenesis are now becoming human possibilities through advances in biotechnologies. It could cause de-evolution. Trying to artificially breed people for intellectual or physical traits using eugenics goes against the natural wisdom of the microbial romance. Aphrodite and Eros are the best determinants of who should breed with whom. Breeding for any reason other than for love is an injustice to the law of life, making the sex act an act of death. In _Morality and Eros_, Richard Rubenstein writes, "Love is the great opponent of death-in-life" (111). Through the use of advanced technology, messages and information about the ways in which the superorganism works within us can be broadcast universally. Peter Russell points out in _The Global Brain_, "From an evolutionary perspective, perhaps the ultimate purpose of technology has been to enable society to make the shift" (173). It is no longer unreasonable to think that humanity's crones and sages are indeed the consciousness of Gaia. Summary In this chapter we have discussed the danger of using Mother Earth or the Virgin Mother, as a metaphor for the planet. The Virgin Mother does not have the sexual wisdom necessary for our planetary salvation. The two sexes becoming the Unshakable One leads to an understand of the One World Mind and the occult powers it generates. We have seen that what is needed is a creative hero who has conquered his fear of sex and death by taking into his heart Aphrodite's eternal love. In order to do this, he must individuate by breaking free of the incest bonds with his biological parents in order to become a spokesperson for Gaia. Gaia, the microbial life-force of the planet, seems to be the Supreme Being(s) throughout time. It reveals a new morality of life to us in the form of revolutionary archetypal energies which artists then make known to the public. and that the symbol of the fish is a worldwide symbol for the Goddess. In the Greek language the words for fish and womb (delphos) are synonymous. Delphi was the place "believed to be the navel of the earth, the connector to the womb" (Gadon 1989, 44). The Christians incorporated the fish symbol into their own system as the vesica pisces which the early Christians chose to symbolize Christ. Matthew Fox writes in the preface to the Cosmic Christ, that he received his inspiration on March 16th under the sign of Pisces.