Subject: Original Egyptians
From: fjyurco@midway.uchicago.edu (Frank Joseph Yurco)
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 18:23:34 GMT
To all who have posted on this subject:
The original Egyptians were Africans. Yet, contrary to claims of some,
in Africa, you have the same sort of wide diversity as there is in Europe
and Asia. So, the claim that because the ancient Egyptians were Africans,
a priori, they must have been black is just so much false speculation,
driven by the American social construct of "black" and "white". In brief,
the American social construct is: if one in eight great grandparents was
African, then the individual is black. This originated with the old
southern black slave codes, to deal with the problem of children of
African-Euro-American mixed unions. It has nothing whatever to do with
the facts of biology, and the reality of any continent's population.
Thus, with the wide diversity of the African continent, yes, the Egyptians
were of the North African variety. As some posters have noted their
language, Egypto-Coptic belongs among the north African languages, classed
as Afro-asiatic. Rightly, it was noted that Nubian and Meroitic do not
belong to this language family, but Omotic and other Ethiopian-Somali
languages are Afro-Asiatic. Ethnically, down the Nile today there is
an extremely wide diversity, from the various brown shades of Egyptians,
to the darker Nubian-Sudanese, and the very blackest people in Africa,
the Silluk, Dinka, and Nuer. The Egyptians dealt extensively with the
peoples of Nubia and Sudan, and in the Late-Old-Middle Kingdom, vast
numbers of Nubians were recruited from Yam-Kerma, to serve as soldiers
in Egypt. They were renowned as archers, recalling Nubia's ancient name
Ta Seti, "Land of the Bow". Even some of very dark Sudanese appeared
in Egypt, occasionally. The group of ladies buried behind Montu-hotep II's
funerary complex at Deir el-Bahri had several of such very dark women,
including Kemsit, Sadhe, and Ashayet. Also, the Egyptians very
occasionally encountered a Twa, as when Harkhuf got one from the Chief of
Yam, and excitedly reported this to Pepy II. As Pepy's return letter,
that Harkhuf proudly placed in toto on the wall of his tomb at Aswan,
notes, the last Twa the Egyptians had seen was one brought from Punt,
by one Bawerdjed, who lived under Pharaoh Djed-ka-re Isesi in Dynasty 5.
So, the Egyptians were quite cognizant of the peoples south of them.
The Yam Nubians did not speak Egypto-Coptic, and so, all the Aswan
governors wer also bi-lingual, and titled translators. As Uni's auto-
biography shows, when such mixed Egyptian-Nubian military units went
into action, there had to be translators along with the army. Eventually
some of those Nubians settled in Egypt and intermarried, or brought
along Nubian wives. Gradually, they learned Egyptian, had funerary
stelas made, and so, as Henry Fischer's article in Kush 8 (1961) noted,
they became a reular presence in the population of southern and middle
Egypt.
Thus, yes there were contacts and even migration from the south into
Egypt, but the earliest predynastic cultures arose distinctly in
southern Upper Egypt, between Nubt and Nekhen, and a distinct Delta
group of cultures also. In late Naqada II-Early III, the A-Group arose
in Lower Nubia, that is, First to Second Nile cataract area. These
A-Group were a mixture of Abkan indigenous Nubians and Naqadan Egyptians,
and when their first writing appears, it is Egypto-Coptic, and their
iconography was pharaonic, as the Qustul cemetery excavations showed.
That is the furthest south Egyptian culture went. The Khartoum Meso and
Neolithic culture was distinct, in pottery, and in other traditions. Only
in the remotest Pre-Dynastic, is Badarian pottery somewhat akin to
Khartoum Neolithic. The strongest migration patterns in the early
Predynastic were east-west. As the Sahara dessicated slowly, many
Saharamns migrated into Egypt and Nubia. So, those are the common
ancestors of both the Badarians and the Khartoum Neolithic, and indeed,
Saharan pottery is similar to both Khartoum Neolithic and Badarian.
So, the idea that the Egyptians came from somewhere way south of Nubia-
Sudan, is again, just speculation and mis-information.
Most sincerely,
Frank J. Yurco
University of Chicago
--
Frank Joseph Yurco fjyurco@midway.uchicago.edu
Subject: Re: Grokking the analogues back of supposed history -> Love is the Law, Love under Will
From: Pharaoh Chromium 93
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 21:35:55 -0500
CHAPTER XVI
LOVE AND HATE
The world of studentship has never followed with seriousness or
constancy the mighty implications of the ascription of masculine gender
to spirit and of feminine to matter. With the expectation of finding
that an examination of the relationship between male and female will
yield an enlightening theoria of universal creation, the challenge to
inquiry now is to face the data frontally and not only with an open
mind, but with an eye keenly fixed to see what is there. Even then it is
necessary to use the clues and threads of discernment that have been
provided us by ancient insight. It is found, then, that there will be no
mistake in undeviatingly reading spirit or spiritual reference for the
male symbol or personation, and matter or the physical for the female
emblemism. The fact that this usage will prove its unfailing pertinence
and dependability, in all cases with astonishing precision, will come as
itself a revelation of no minor moment to those not conversant with the
almost mathematical faithfulness and reliability of these forms of
ancient symbolic method.
The place to begin the examination is at the point of the breaking apart
of the unity into the duality. As to this, it must constantly be borne
in mind that in spite of an act of bifurcation of itself, Deity does not
destroy its eternal oneness. It has not become two, even though it has
cleft its being into two aspects. It has not become itself and something
else not itself. This is logically impossible. It has converted itself
into a duality. It has not become two, in any sense exterior to itself.
It has evolved a twoness within itself. God can not, dialectically,
project anything outside himself, since he is all there is. All things
are and remain inside the being of the Su-
230
preme. God can no more become two than man is two, from the mere fact of
his having, or rather being, both a spirit and a body. God--and man like
him--is a unit, although he is composed of dual energies. The conflict
and tension between positive and negative polarities is ever necessary
to bring the life of God forth to view in concrete worlds. So life has
to set up this stress and pressure within itself. How could Being lay
hold of and so move substance to form its creation if it could not
oppose one arm of itself, so to say, against another arm, so as to be
able to get a grip on the material to be moved into place for the
creation? Figuratively speaking, how could it create if it could not
oppose thumb to fingers, left hand to right, lever against fulcrum,
conscious design or will against objects, mind against matter? Tensional
opposition of the two pulls of a polarized duality is as inevitable as
the fact that a coin must have two sides. There could be no existence,
no things, if there was no front and back, up and down, in and out, to
and fro, movement and inertia. Duality, presaging the subsistence of a
strain between the two portions, is an inexorable postulate of conscious
being, and sprang into appearance as soon as life emerged from the
unseen into the visible stage and took organic form.
The interaction begins the moment the two sides are established as
distinct units in the being of the whole. It takes the form of the only
thinkable action that two things can exert toward or upon each other,--a
mutual tugging and pulling. They are set in relation to each other in
much the same way as are two balls of lead tied to opposite ends of a
string and whirled around on a central pivot, with the significant
difference, however, that the "string" is not a "dead" connection, but a
living stream of dynamic forces that are determined by the powers
exerted, positively from the one end and negatively from the other. The
pushing and pulling become the great natural laws of attraction and
repulsion. They are the first and cosmic form of the meaning of the
Battle of Armageddon. As the twoness in tensile opposition is the
necessary condition of the stability of anything, the law is that two
opposite poles attract
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each other and two similar poles repel each other. This must be so, if
anything is to cohere and remain itself. If the two opposite poles
repelled each other, the atom and the universe would collapse. Rather it
could not have come into existence in the first instance. Positive and
negative poles must fly into each other's arms, embrace and multiply, if
there are to be worlds.
We have here the ground of one of the most relevant of ancient
philosophical pronouncements. Empedocles' declaration that the world was
engendered and activated throughout by the two forces of Love and Hate.
Love is seen as the attraction and Hate the repulsion. And by this
naming and characterization it is possible for the limited intellect of
man to understand dialectically why the prime essential nature of God is
denominated Love. As he is unit being of all being, the constant motive
of all his expression is the universal attraction of the two portions of
his own Self for each other.
The two nodes of his wholeness can do nothing else but "love" each
other. At the same time the two similar poles in the countless units of
his multiplied manifestation can and must likewise "hate" each other.
Love is the law of God's being--when he has thrown himself into the dual
expression--since the two elements then are constrained by the unabating
attraction toward each other. So then Love becomes the fulfilling of the
law, for no other activity of life transcends or nullifies this first
law of mutual attraction within the framework of the universe. It is
operative in every unit of life, in every fragment, in every organic
system from the atom to the super-galaxies. God can not help loving--and
hating--once he has sundered his totality into spirit and matter.
Then spirit must "love" matter, and matter spirit! Soul must love body
and body soul! Man, intellectual and spiritual, must love the world of
matter. The voice and hands of pious unintelligent religionism may fly
up in horror at the philosophical determinations that spring immediately
into view in the wake of the obvious dialectic. And well they may, for,
properly understood and held in a
232
balanced rationale, the true envisagement of the elements of the problem
enforces a view of these things that does indeed undo and reverse the
poor twisted attitudes of orthodox befuddlement. The first dawn of
welcome sanity to break upon the dark night of centuries of pitiable
error is this cock's crow of the resurrected voice of philosophy
proclaiming once again that spirit does love matter.
A happy release of the human spirit from unnatural constraint under
false mental postures will ensue for common consciousness when it can be
freely postulated in thought that the soul does love the body, and that
man, spiritual, does love the world with sufficient strength that he
comes into body to enjoy its delights and meet its tensions. The
strength of the blind pall that has afflicted the clearness of
philosophical vision can be seen by merely reflecting upon the fact that
for centuries the collective brains of the scholarly world have studied
the Biblical assertion that "God so loved the world" without once
discerning the relevance of the central statement there advanced. And
God not only loved the world, but he loved also the flesh with a force
that impelled him to throw the whole of his might, in recurrent cycles
of countless years each, into the effort to expand his own being by
plunging his consciousness into bodies of flesh and matter. For the
physical universe is the Logos made flesh. No exterior force compelled
him to become fleshed; so his act must have sprung from his own volition
or desire for such an experience. These conclusions are the ineluctable
products of the reasoning process working upon the premises given. As
man and woman love each other, so spirit and matter love each other. In
nature this "love" complies with every characterization of Plato's grand
predication of balance, moderation and harmony amid all the divine
elements in play. In man, where free will coupled with initial ignorance
comes in to disturb the balances, disturbance and confusion have crept
in. These will be corrected as intelligence awakens.
Plato in The Phaedo and The Symposium has dissertated upon this matter
of the genesis and nature of love, in a dramatization that has misled
shallower thought into a mistaken interpretation
233
of his figure. To depict the cleaving asunder of God's unit being into
the duality, he says that the soul of man splits apart into two, each
part carrying one half of the potentiality of complete being. One part
manifests in male body, the other in female, and the two separate
halves, each suffering the want of completeness in itself, longingly
seek their complementary halves in the world, to unite with them and
thus be made whole. Obviously expounding but at the same time hiding the
true esoteric meaning of his allegory, Plato clearly concealed his
deeper sense under the individual and personal representation. It is
surely not in the purview of Plato's philosophy to deny unitary
completeness to the human ego, whether in man or woman. It is always in
his system a full unit, being itself a fragment of the divine Oversoul.
It can not be fractional, a mere half-unit. It is complete and perfect
as a seed unit of divinity. Plato is dramatizing under the human
allegory the truth that the collective being of life splits apart into
the two poles and that their force of attraction for each other
ceaselessly causes each to seek the other throughout the ranges of life.
The individual soulmate idea drawn from Plato's allegory is a flat
misconception. If it was his real belief that the soul in a male body is
only one half a former complete soul, with the other half living
somewhere in a female body, what a tragedy life would present in the
nearly complete failure of the two halves to discover each other! Nature
would not be party to a scheme which in her operative order registered
close to ninety-nine percent failure. Plato's imagery is, as is the
sportive punster play on the meaning of words in The Cratylus, neither
amusing diversion nor literal seriousness, but high-pitched allegorical
and dramatic truth, playful on the surface, but grandly meaningful in
the cryptic intent.
Plato almost indubitably drew this form of portrayal from a line in the
Egyptian scripts which says that "the soul makes the journey through
Amenta in the two halves of sex." Many reports are to the effect that he
visited and studied in Egypt. It is conceded in general that Greece
derived the substance and genius of her great philoso-
234
phies from Egypt. The possibility of reading anything measurably close
to the true meaning of this passage has been killed in the first place
by the utter failure of Western scholarship to locate the Egyptian
Amenta in the proper world. The meaning has been thrust clear out of its
true world and over into another realm where it can have no pertinence,
through the stupid translation of Amenta as the region of spiritual
consciousness after death. It must be asserted as a discovery of an
age-old error and a datum of the most momentous significance in all
antique research, that Amenta is the life on earth, or earth itself, and
not any heavenly abode. Amenta is the home of the living mortal, not the
realm of the shades of the dead. And this is said in the face of the
datum of comparative religion that it was expressly denominated the land
of the dead.
The seeming contradiction is resolved into agreement when it is known,
what all studious zeal has never yet uncovered, that the ancient
philosophers and "theologians" by a trope of occult significance
designated the souls living on earth as "the dead." To them the life in
mortal body brought "death" to the soul. "Who knows," cries Socrates to
Cebes in the Gorgias, "whether to live is not to die, and to die is not
to live? For I have heard from one of the wise that we are now dead and
that the body is our sepulcher." And Paul says that "the command that
meant life proved death" to him. In the wake of Egyptian formulations of
truth Greek philosophy very distinctly regarded the soul while on earth
in fleshly body as suffering a death, from which, to be sure, it would
be reborn in its periodic resurrection "from the dead."
The Egyptian statement, therefore, concisely affirms that the soul makes
its pilgrimage through the cycle of bodily existences "in the two halves
of sex." Yet all the ancient philosophy stands on the positive assertion
that the soul is one and indivisible. It is that in a human which makes
him the individ-ual. Therefore the division must refer to the
incorporation of unitary souls in male and female bodies. Half the souls
are in male, half in female embodiment. As the Greeks say, "souls are
divided about bodies." That is, souls are
235
distributed out amongst bodies. For again they say that it is the
function of gods to "distribute divinity." Jesus, in taking a loaf and
dividing it, distributed the fragments in the Eucharist, and thereby
dramatized the same idea.
Sex appertains to the vehicle of outward embodiment, not to the soul
itself. There are not male and female souls. The soul is in large part
still detached from complete immersion in the flesh of the body. It
projects only a tentacle of itself down into body. It is the opposite
qualities of positive and negative in the mind, the emotions and the
physical senses of the corporeal appurtenance that are drawn by the law
of polarity toward each other across the boundaries of sex. Only in this
world and only then in the realm of bodily affections and proclivities
is sex manifest. In the heaven of higher consciousness where soul
resides in its native habitat there is neither marriage nor giving in
marriage, for the soul is without sex. It is androgyne, the type of the
original male-female unity in embryo, not yet male and female.
Those marvelously preserved repositories of hoary truth also tell us
that at the inception of the human race, in the initial stages of the
soul's incorporation in bodies that grew ever less tenuous and finally
fully fleshed, the race itself was hermaphroditic in its generative
mechanism, and that only after thousands of years did it effect the full
segregation of sex in two bodies of opposite polarization. A few verses
in Genesis are a shorthand brief of this long process.
The sane purport of Plato's subtle indirection is that the soul of
humanity collectively, the World-soul of Plotinus and the Oversoul of
Emerson, goes through its Amenta of experience in this world about
equally split between male and female bodies, and that each half longs
for union with the other under the law of attraction of opposite
natures. But there is another yearning of the soul which is not
specifically activated by the law of sex. It transcends sex. It is just
the longing of one unit of soul consciousness for another unit. Sex does
not affect it, engender it or minister to it. It is that higher
236
divine attraction which urges the lonely unit to seek union with the
whole group. It is the longing of the part to be united with the
integrity of the whole. The part, the fragment, is driven by the divine
impulsion to seek reunion, after each separation, with the whole. It is
cut off from this communion while in the flesh by the walls of the body.
It can communicate with kindred souls only across a gulf. If, however,
soul in male setting can find this congenial response from soul in
female body, both Platonic and romantic love can have play. That union
is doubly blessed. With common humanity it is the physical attraction of
opposite sexuality centering in body that is the main bond of
attachment. Generally this is quite quickly reduced in force, so that
there is then the possibility that the higher Platonic mental and
spiritual affinities can come more fully into expression. Sex attraction
still constitutes the strong dynamic in romantic love.
It is difficult to depict the overwhelming power of this romantic
attraction in the psychic realm of mortals. It manifests as a positive
hunger on the part of one for the other. It is a veritable
chemicalization within the blood, and surges through the nervous system
and suffuses the brain. It is a ferment and unrest, an urge that impels
toward embracing, or merging oneself with, the opposite pole. One can
know its carking and corroding virulence only if one has experienced
it--as who has not? Vicariously we can see its potencies reflected in
the behavior of animals in seasons of mating.
Total repression, thwarting and denial of fulfillment almost disrupts
the vital economy of the organism. Animals show suffering and
abnormalities in health. Humans sometimes pine away. To such a wreckage
of her powerful drive for happy expression nature attaches almost fatal
penalties. If, through unsound and unbalanced religious ideologies or
fervors, the soul too stoutly restricts the body's order of animal
normality (for the body is an animal, as Plato says), it has its own
resources and its own ways of striking back at the unwise master. Its
own suffering or derangement entailed by the
237
too rigid denial of its due expression reacts to the detriment of the
soul, whose servant it is.
There is a fell quality to the mating urge that gives it the force of a
natural and unimpeachable authority, which appears for a time to sweep
away every obstacle and override the obstructing power of every
consideration, whether of advantage or injury. It carries a virtual
cosmic sanction with it. Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, Dante
and Beatrice, Hero and Leander, if not just honest John and plain Jane,
feel that the world must stand aside and make way for the course of this
true love. Flesh almost trembles and is consumed under the pulse and
throb of the insatiable longing. It is nature's, life's, God's imperial
order to the two individuals to unite their opposite forces and thus
achieve its burning desire for multiplication of being and expansion of
consciousness. It is its immitigable mandate thrilling out through every
tide of blood and nerve impulse, that it may have more abundant life in
the whole of its body. As Schopenhauer so elaborately and forcefully
depicted, it is the will and idea of the world enacting its program. To
insure beyond all possibility of failure that its evolutionary
development should have an unbroken continuance, it impregnated its
creatures with an enormous profusion and overplus of virile tendency. So
dynamic is the voltage of this charge that it wholly disqualifies the
rational element in most cases and drives blindly toward its goal,
unhindered by any rational deterrent. It hypnotizes or paralyzes the
reason, so that no consideration from that side may block it. It puts to
sleep every sentinel that might be standing guard to challenge its right
to advance. And it haloes its objective and emblazons its pathway to it
with the most radiant aura of exaltation, and the most exquisite
redolence of delight that life provides out of its armory of
enchantments.
Life has laid upon all its creatures this royal charge, which none may
dodge with impunity. This is the law of sex in its physical area.
But, because philosophy has been decried and contemned, man has been too
oblivious of that other manifestation of sex within the
238
boundaries of his own personality between two other lovers, namely his
soul and its body. This is beautifully portrayed, in addition to the
many fine Biblical allegories of it, by the great Greek myth of Eros and
Psyche. Eros is the higher spiritual soul, or Love, who descended to
earth to unite with the mortal body and its animal-human soul. He hovers
over her as she lies asleep, as yet unawakened to conscious recognition
and deployment of her powers. Nothing can awaken her except the impact
of those higher vibrations of a supernal consciousness from above, which
are superinduced by her experiences in the flesh. So Eros bends down and
arouses the sleeping faculties with his kiss. "Virtue" such as passed
from Jesus into the woman who touched the hem of his garment flows down
from the Oversoul when the connection with the latter is established and
slumbering potencies spring into conscious activity from the touch.
The prime office of religion and the entire rationale of culture is
intimated in this allegory. For the central radix of both religion and
culture is this power of the higher Ego in each person to awaken and
transform the dormant faculties and capabilities of the lower human
self. The sons of God were instructed to descend to earth, take wives
from the daughters of men and raise up seed from them. It is all an
allegorical representation of the union of these divine sparks, our
souls, with the animal bodies, which, since they are to be the wombs of
birth for the divinely fathered and humanly mothered Christ-child in
every human breast, are typified as "women," the daughters, not of God,
but "of men." The parenthood of the new-born sons of God is divine on
the paternal side, but natural, earthy, on the side of mother-body.
Heaven, as Plato hints, furnishes the seed of spiritual being for the
composition of man, while earth furnishes the body, the soil or womb in
which the divine seed is to be nurtured to its growth. In the Orphic
hymns the souls says: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but
my race is of heaven alone."
So the two component halves of man's life are male and female
239
and the evolution of man is just the long romance, the wooing, winning
and wedding of the two. The allegory, however, must not be permitted to
strangle the reality which it adumbrates. For more and more clearly it
can be seen that this is what has happened time after time in history
and is the fatal feebleness of the human mind that has ever in the end
defeated the spirit of culture. Allegory has been misconceived and
flouted again and again and is still derided and decried in the seats of
the intelligentsia of the modern world. The truth is that, while it is
the ultimate bed-rock method and road to the keenest apperceptions,
there exists but rarely in the individual and never in the mass the
downright perspicacity requisite to apprehend its true illumination. As
was the case in the Italian Renaissance, the general faculty to discern
not only the beauty but the enlightening power of meaning released to
the mind by symbols, was wanting and allegory failed once more. Yet it
was not allegory that failed; it was popular crudity and crassness of
mind that caused failure, as it always will. The world sadly needs to
recover the lost faculty or genius for the interpretation of allegory
and for the discovery of the wealth of meaning brought out by analogy.
For the magnificent truth hidden in the ancient scriptures under glyph
and symbol will not yield its purport to the world as long as the
general mind remains dumb to the intimations of allegory and symbol.
Clear down to the present the scholars have sniffed at allegory. This
gesture is due to their inability to honor it and live with it in
sufficient warmth of companionship to catch its more subtle and
recondite power of instruction. The chief requirement is that the eye of
the mind should be trained to hold the allegory not as opaque but as
diaphanous. The condemnation and death of allegory have come through the
mind's incapacity to look through it as a lens and to descry the objects
in focus in that unseen world where truth abides in its noumenal aspect.
What must be seen, then, under the allegory of the two natures in man
wooing and wedding each other is something that demands in the seeing a
pro-
240
found and subtly discerned set of values and meanings that lie
altogether in a plane of cognition far above sense. The idea of marriage
in the reference is but the initial push, the springboard that sends the
thought off on its quest of realities that can be limned only in the
highest poise and concentration of the thinking faculty. Two things, two
forces, meet, intercommune and finally wed. But how is one to think of
the soul wedding the psyche and creating a new birth through her? How,
must first be asked, can mental and spiritual entities or radiations
meet and wed?
Here is the reality to which the allegory leads the mind, and mind must
be able to follow from signpost to destination if tropes and symbols are
not to leave failure in their wake perpetually. The highest exercise of
the great faculty of imagination must come into play if the figure is to
yield enlightenment. One must imagine, the, while keeping always in view
the assumptions and principles of known natural and scientific data,
that two powers like the soul and the psyche will wed each other by
coming to an identity of vibratory energies, by striking a
synchronization of conscious states which virtually make the two forces
one instead of two. They become alike and flow together into a unity.
Their currents of influence are finally reduced to a mathematical
harmony in the wavelengths. This is the most plausible explanation open
to brain thinking on the part of man, and while doubtless still below
the plane of positive empirical knowledge as to how the subtle forces of
mind operate, it soars well above the stolid immovableness of mass
ideation that can think of no marriage save a personal and physical one.
And just this difference measures the enormous gulf that perpetually
runs its fatal chasm between the truly cultured minority and the cruder
mass majority. That gulf is the most impassable obstacle to the progress
of the race.
Spirit and matter, soul and body, each reducible in thought to ultimate
whirls of atomic energy, are thrown by Deity into the relation of
juxtaposition and vibrational impact in quite literal sense. The close
relation presupposes, in its degree and kind, as actual an
241
intercourse between the two elements as that between man and wife, if a
new birth is to be engendered. Love, now conceived as between soul
vibration and sense vibration, then presides at the very genesis and
growth of all culture. For culture is, in essence, the increasing
receptivity of the animal to the behests and influences of the higher
Ego and its becoming enamored of them. Not only does sex force play
between bodies of opposite polarity, but it flashes back and forth
between spirit or mind, masculine, on the one side, and the feminine
psyche within the same body, be it man's or woman's. The marriage spoken
of allegorically in the New Testament and other scriptures is the union
St. Paul glorifies as between soul and its own mortal body. Dr. Hinkle
is found confirming this delineation in a very direct and indeed
remarkable way. Speaking of the presence of feminine characteristics in
the sensitive nature of artists, she declares (The Recreating of the
Individual, p. 346):
"The union between these masculine and feminine entities in the psychic
organization of the artist partakes of the character of the sexual act,
although it is an unconscious process of the nature of which the artist
is unaware. But it possesses all the physical signs of the activity of
libido sexualis, and of the nature of his feelings he is quite aware."
It is significant that the psychoanalyst here avers that the
manifestations of sexual character are sufficiently in evidence to
warrant their description as sex symptoms. But this author goes even
further and denominates the interplay of forces polarized as masculine
and feminine as actually a "psychic coitus." She writes (p. 346):
"I have referred in previous chapters to the separation of the sexual
impulse from its reproductive purpose in the human race, with the
consequent overthrow of nature's limitations and its use freely in the
service of pleasure instead of purpose. As a consequence of this use, in
which reproduction really plays no part for the male, there has been
produced a transference of libido sexualis from the physical to the
psychical realm. Here the artist reveals its transformation into a
subjective phenomenon where a psychic coitus occurs, having for its
constant aim not pleasure but purpose."
242
If the psychiatrist can speak of an intercourse between male and female
components within the psychic range, at last the esoteric meaning and
the amazing truth of an ancient allegory interspersed throughout all the
revered scriptures receives the authentic voucher of its veracity. Only
after some twenty-five hundred years are we beginning to catch up with
what our wise forefathers knew.
A further corroboration of the validity of the marriage symbol on the
plane of psychic energy is given by Dr. Hinkle. She applies to the
higher Ego, the superconscious or evolving deity in man, the term used
in Platonic literature--the puer aeternus (the "eternal boy," or
everlasting youth, he who is ever young). She says (p. 349):
"In every case, however, the production of an art work is preceded by
what can be called a psychic coitus between the puer aeternus and the
soul within himself, and when, through some psychic interference or
weakness, this idea does not take place, no art child will be produced."
She goes so far as to label this orgiastic paroxysm in the sensibilities
"a symbolic incest relation" and "an autoerotic process," the capacity
for which sets the artistic or creative genius apart from more stodgy
mankind.
Thus the allegory of primitive truth is again tardily vindicated. Even
an artist must be capable of imitating the actions of the gods in their
fabled intercourse with one another and must be able to consummate a
marriage culminating in intercourse between two polarized entities
within his own scope of being, if he is to bring forth a child of his
art. Simply this on a magnified scale, and carried on through all the
later stages of the individual's evolution, is all that was connoted in
and by St. Paul's allegory of the wedding between the lower psyche, the
bride, and the higher self, the Christ, the Lamb of God slain on the
altar of matter from the beginning of the world-aeon. Naturally the man
who had not effected this marriage within himself, and therefore had no
wedding garment on, was thrown out of the symbolic ceremonial. That
wedding garment is verily the immortal shining body of "white raiment,"
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being nothing less than the augoeides, or body of radiant solar
effulgence that clothes "the glorified and the elect,"--the garment of
the redeemed. What occurs in miniature in the daily life of all creative
genius is but the transpiring in small cycle of the great aeonial
marriage and climactic blissfulness of soul and sense in the large cycle
of human evolution.
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