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

231

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, Abélard and Héloïse, 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,"

243

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.