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" is a highly individualist, marginal phenomenon, not
the social force it is meant to be since it 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"
(Aberoni 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
philosophic 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 dominate 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 interwines 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 focused
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 a 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 instill 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 and style. 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 to 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 sunlight 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
relationships 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 a role to 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 primordial 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 reproductive 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 under-
stand 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 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 coming 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 the hero does is to transfer his maternal
need to another woman who is the "symbolic equivalent" with
her 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 at 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, who is lacking a will to power within
herself. 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 when since 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 why 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," where as 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 truth 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, porn-
ography, 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 underneath 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 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 substituting 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 "almightily 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 mani-
fested 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 psychological attitudes which were
necessary to the land--property regime--the adult
childishness which hampers the social and economic
arrangements of our time" (22). Under capitalism, parents
keep their children chained to the bondage of inheritancy
rights which are diametrically opposed to creating
arcologies of human love.
Neither totalitarianism nor anarchy are organic social
structures 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 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 consciousness.
He says that the driver needs consciousness, 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 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 Sonen 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
promises 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 reproduc-
tion, 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.