No phase of civilization can rise to the highest possibilities as long as the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the most important and the most sacred function of our being, is one of shame, sinfulness, lust and uncleanness.
Even among those who are conscientiously trying to establish better social conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like the proper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidences that our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sex problem.
Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving their attention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so long neglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fettered by the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart from materia medica, or religion, is difficult.
Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of all the delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which should by right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surround a union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share with the one and only possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, there is nothing of shame or apology—sentiments which alas, actuate the so-called "modest" man or woman of today.
Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate for public discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex is too indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon public attention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, the opinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truth and so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfied with offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing these effects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing that all the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching and thinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, and hold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in its rightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of this universe, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies.
It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has to be discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subject must be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is our contention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized and understood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sex were recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function that it is, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before the sun.
In the meantime the subject must be discussed from all points of view.
It must be permitted to thrive in the light and thus it will flower into the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it.
In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex must be aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal and reverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex, is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths and transmitted to the children yet unborn.
"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes, benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification of itself.
"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."
Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet," only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of all life—Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from divine sources justifies such an idea.
Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.
In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in celestial spaces.
The Author.
The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.
Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits—or rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is Life.
The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth, to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity. "The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.
Sex is the algebracial X—the unknown quantity which defies analysis.
Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but another form of the X—the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.
The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of love is union. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union must come from the Center of Life—from the spiritual Reality, which the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.
Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in the ascendant and love demands union—not merely matrimony.
The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth, forming a circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood—victory over death through regeneration.
It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all instincts.
There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases, sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor giving in marriage" after death.
This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to the mind as "spirituality."
Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its spiritual function is not less but infinitely more than that which we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.
Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a million fold, refining, purifying and intensifying the sex instinct until it bears a relationship to the average instance of sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of life-manifestation.
We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into the grand compositions of the Masters.
"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses (senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always where the line demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos. Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex, and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.
Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of both sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter but masculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rare instances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean that there is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves the union in one Whole Entity of the two distinct principles, and by this fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the very crux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the mere physical expression of the law, but that the object of the sex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male and a female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being—the true representative of the bi-une Being whom we know as God.
Absolute and perfect union is possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritual counterparts.
Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species, and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked for and who we believe is here.
If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend of life-manifestation.
Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally rather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely instinctive urge to perpetuate the species—the lowest expression of Love—and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there, and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.
In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find the universal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oak tree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon a plant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be the case, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is to attract to itself its own; that which belongs to it by right of Cosmic law and order and justice.
All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt to appropriate and possess that which, in the final analysis, in the Absolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall have mastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its true spiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth's creatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered the instinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which would protect and preserve, and leave free, will have gained supremacy over selfishness and the desire for possession.
In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal. Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as babies.
Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the mammals.
The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating, which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease with sex-expression. It permeates all their intercourse.
The trait which distinguishes the spiritual man from the animal man is analogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep and lasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing with each other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other's words; contacting, as it were, each other's inner nature, rather than obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, in the common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives which their love has brought forth.
Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical contact, to that of spiritual union—a wide gulf seemingly; but who would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union with the Beloved One means?
Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and civilized, has been founded upon Sex—the inevitable, the inviolable, the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.
Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be "shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle of Sex is unrecognized by them.
With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as "The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.
It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater than that of human beings—a power manifesting itself in the act of procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child" became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as an object of worship.
Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.
The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance. At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the reproductive power.
Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began—a warfare which, if it had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since in race-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women have continued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until now the future offers a golden promise of union. As long as primitive man kept to nature worship, deifying earth as the mother who brought forth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religious practices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent of springtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the period of gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature's own laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasion of thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and general good-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing and music and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this very natural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness was accompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation.
There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the "Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her androgynous character.
Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as feminine.
Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine, as were all deities; but later, when it was shown that the sun apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.
While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really fundamental.
From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.
The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more exalted planes of our ideals.
From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), with all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy. In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of deification—the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?
The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.
There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of Ceres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to have noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.
Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male belonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is to say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that purity and peace would reign upon earth.
This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the pure and perfect union of male and female—the only ideal that will, or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.
The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis. For a period of several days during the time set apart for the festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue of inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth and honor.
Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs only to those who are pure in heart.
From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol. Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism. Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently associated.