Woman Hating (16 page)

But if she will stop long enough to look within, she also may become aware of impulses and thoughts which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed feminine being within her. For the most part, however, a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be. And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros which is within her, and the world without, and through her own womanly adaptation to the world to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle.
¹

Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ” Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian point of view.

It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance that male and female are pitted against each other and that
conflict
is the dynamic mode of relationship open to male and female, men and women, when they meet:

These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.... So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed.
²

These male and female sets are defined as archetypes, embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure of reality. They are polar opposites; their mode of interaction is conflict. They cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and of course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values” are other. (Women have never understood that they are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) There is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two halves of the same whole. One is not superior, one is not inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order, ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. 
It is the so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological, physiological,
and economic oppression of those who are biologically women.
Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth of feminine evil.

The identification of the feminine with Eros, or erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human sexuality. The essential information which would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions of sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which describe the creation of the first human being as male and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history. With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture are gross perversions of original creation myths which molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-conscious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality, male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised by a culture which posits other values, and though those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been ostracized and persecuted.

With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is myth, and why does it have such importance? The best definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in
Myths,
Dreams,
and Mysteries:

What exactly is a myth? In the language current during the nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anything that was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam, or the invisible man, no less than the history of the world as described by the Zulus, or the 

Theogony of Hesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many another cliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this, too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, according to primitive Christianity, everything which could not be justified by reference to one or the other of the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ” But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged us to go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christian polemics against the pagan world. We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the myth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” and archaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to express the
absolute truth
, because it narrates a
sacred history
;
that is, a transhuman revelation which took place at the dawn of the Great Time.... Being
real
and
sacred
, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently,
repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token, a justification, for all human actions. In other words,
a myth is a true history of what came to pass at the beginning of Time,
and one which provides the pattern for human behavior.
²
 [Italics added] 

I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect. It is not only in primitive and archaic societies that myths provide this model for behavior —it is in every human society. The distance between myth and social organization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, in advanced technological societies, but myth still operates as the substructure of the collective. The story of Adam and Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moon and Mars, and the Christian version of the primitive myth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the most technologically advanced communications media.

What are the myths of androgyny, and how do we locate them behind the myths of polarity with which we are familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yin and yang.

Yin and yang are commonly associated with female and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that it appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free description of phenomena, describes cosmic movement as cyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang (masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin (female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identifications reduce the concepts too often to conceptual polarities: they are used to fix the proper natures of men and women as well as the forces of male and female. These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that (1) all people are composed of both yin and yang, though in the man yang properly predominates and in the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one looks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation of yin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half of the universe.

The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however, are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called
The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted meanings of yin and yang:

Out of the Tao, and the
Tai-chi
[“the great ridge pole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principles of reality, the one pole being the light (yang) and the other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). Among European scholars, some have turned first to sexual references for an explanation, but the characters refer to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the north side of a mountain and the south side of a river.

... Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennants and, corresponding to the character of yin, is the south side of a mountain and the north side of a river. Starting only with the meaning of “light” and “dark, ” the principle was then expanded to all polar opposites, including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang have their common origin in an undivided One and are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the basis for these ideas.
⁴

Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night which then slowly changes into day. When men began conceptualizing about the nature of the universe, the phenomena of light and dark were an obvious starting point. My own experience is that night and day are more alike than different —in which case they couldn't possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.

Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We know that at one time men were hunters and women were planters. Both forms of work were essential and arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that they could not run, go without food for long periods of time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It is probable that very early in human history women also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival of the species that they develop into planters — first to supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant and woman mortality. We see that the first division of labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the man in the process of impregnation, women were invested with a supreme magical power, one which engendered awe and fear in men. As they developed skill in planting, they embodied even more explicitly fertility, generation, and of course death. The overwhelming mana of women, coupled with the high mortality which went along with childbirth, could well have led to practices of protection, segregation, and slowly increasing social restriction. With pregnancy as the one inevitable in a woman’s life, men began to organize social life in a way which excluded woman, which limited her to the living out of her reproductive function.  As men began to know power, that power directly related to the exclusion of women from community life, the myth of feminine evil developed and provided justification for laws, rites, and other practices which relegated women to pieces of property. As a corollary, men developed the taste for subjugating others and hoarding power and wealth which characterizes them to this very day.

Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is the realization that these concepts did not originally attach to sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (first being) of the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T’ai Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation of yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender of the noun is feminine) because of woman’s generative function.

Among the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called male-female polarities are called
yabyum;
among the Indian Hindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantric sects of both traditions, one finds a living religious cult attached to the myth of a primal androgyne, to the union of male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. The culminating religious rite of the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union of man and woman which achieves, even if only symbolically, the original androgynous energy.

This is the outstanding fact when one looks at
yabyum
and Shiva-Shakti:

The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to the passive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did the opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principle to the passive male pole, and the dynamic principle to the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhist did it the other way around.
⁵

The explanation for this major difference, this attachment in one case of the feminine to the passive and in the other of the feminine to the active, is that these attachments were made
arbitrarily.
⁶
Two convictions vital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywhere the feminine is synonymous with the passive, receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definition of the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comes from the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity, receptivity, etc.

In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology, the phenomenological world is not created by god as something distinct from him. It is the godhead in manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “... the image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in terms of an essentially psychological reading of the problem of creation. ”
⁷
In a description of that androgynous being, we find: “He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself into two parts; and with that there was a master and a mistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ”
⁸