Woman Hating (17 page)

In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity was Isis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous. So is Awonawilona, chief god of the Pueblo Zuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.

Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much older myth, describes in
Symposium
3 types of original human beings: male/male, male/female, female/female. These original humans were so powerful that the gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynous ancestry did not stop him from becoming the Macho Kid, halved them.

The Aranda of Australia know a supernatural being called Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynes as the first beings, then split them apart, then tied them back together with hemp to make couples. It is essentially this story that is repeated throughout the primitive world.

Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestral images of one being with breasts, penis, and beard. Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participate in the same devotional tradition —we perceive that they are united in sexual intercourse, but it is also possible that they represent one literal androgynous body.

There are still devotional religious practices which harken back to the mythology of the primal androgyne — Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indian manifestations, clearly participates in that tradition. Possibly the rite of subincision, practiced in Australia, is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is the ritual slitting open of the underside of the penis to form a permanent cleft into the urethra. The opening is called the “penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “The subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that of a certain class of hermaphrodites. ”
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The drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, is sacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to speculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulation of what the Oedipal complex is and means serves the imperatives of a patriarchal culture, of Judeo-Chris-tian morality, and remains largely unchallenged. But the earliest
devotional
mother-son configurations are those of a Mother/Goddess and her Son/Lover. The son is lover to the mother and is ritually sacrificed at a predetermined time (mothers don’t have to be possessive). This sacrifice is not related to guilt or punishment—it is holy sacrifice which sanctifies the tribe, does honor to the offering, and is premised on cyclic fertility patterns of life, death, and regeneration. These rites, associated with the worship of the Great Mother (the first corruption of the Great Original, or primal androgyne) involved ritual intercourse between mother and son, with the subsequent sacrifice of the son. At one time both a son and a daughter were sacrificed, but as the daughter became a mother-surrogate, the son was sacrificed alone. This sacralized set, Mother/Goddess-Son/Lover, and the rituals associated with it, are postandrogyne developments: that is, men and women experienced separateness (not duality) and attempted to recreate symbolically the androgynous state of mind and body through what we now call incest. If it is true that the implications of the androgyny myths in terms of behavior run counter to every Judeo-Christian, or more generally sexist, notion of morality, it would follow that incest is the primary taboo of this and similar cultures because it has its roots in the sexually dynamic androgynous mentality. Indeed, it is not surprising to discover that early versions of the Oedipus story do not end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles leaves Oedipus overcome with fear, guilt, and remorse, blinded and ruined. In the earlier Homeric version, Oedipus becomes king and reigns happily ever after. Freud chose the wrong version of the right story.

Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne. Here is the substance of a cultural underground most directly related to us. According to the Zohar, the first created woman was not Eve but Lilith. She was created coterminous with Adam, that is, they were created in one body, androgynous. They were of one substance, one corporality. God, so the legend goes, split them apart so that Lilith could be dressed as a bride and married to Adam properly, but Lilith rebelled at the whole concept of marriage,, that is, of being defined as Adam’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in fact the first woman and the first feminist both. The Jewish patriarchs, with shrewd vengeance, called her a witch. They said that the witch Lilith haunted the night (her name is etymologically associated with the Hebrew word for night) and killed infants. She became symbolic of the dark, evil side of all women. Of course, Lilith, we know now, made the correct analysis and went to the core of the problem: she rejected the nuclear family. God, however, saw it differently — he had created Lilith from dust, just as he had created Adam. He had created her free and equal. Not making the same mistake twice, Eve was created from Adam's rib, clearly giving her no claim to either freedom or equality. It took the Christians to assert that since the rib is bent, woman’s nature is contrary to man’s.

How then can we understand the biblical statement that God created man in his own image —male and female created he them? The Midrash gives the definitive answer:
When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the first man, he created him androgynous.
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There is also a corresponding Jewish androgynous godhead. The very word for the godhead,
Elohim,
is composed of a feminine noun and a masculine plural ending. God is multiple and androgynous. The tradition of the androgynous godhead is most clearly articulated in the Kabbalah, a text which in written form goes back to the Middle Ages. The oral Kabbalah, which is more extensive than the written Kabbalah, originates in the most obscure reaches of Jewish history, before the Bible, and has been preserved with, according to occultists, more care than the written Bible —that is, the Bible has been rewritten, edited, modified, translated; oral Kabbalah has retained its purity.

The Kabbalistic scheme of the godhead is complex. Suffice it here to say that god is male and female interwoven. Certain parts are associated with the female, other parts with the male. For instance, primal understanding is female; wisdom is male; severity is female; mercy is male. Special prominence is given to the final emanation of the godhead, Malkuth the Queen, the physical manifestation of the godhead in the universe. Malkuth the Queen is roughly equivalent to Shakti. For the Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacrament is sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny. Just as the Tantrics are/were ostracized by the rest of the Hindu and Buddhist communities, so do the main body of Jews ostracize the Kabbalists. Now they are considered to be freaks —they have been viewed as heretics. And heretics they are, for in recognizing the androgynous nature of the godhead they undermine the authority of God the Father and threaten the power of patriarchy.

It remains only to point out that Christ also had some notion of androgyny. In Gospel to the Egyptians, Christ and a disciple named Salome have this conversation:

When Salome asked how long Death should prevail, the Lord said: So long as ye women bear children; for I have come to destroy the work of the Female. And Salome said to Him: Did I therefore well in having no children? The Lord answered and said: Eat every Herb, but eat not that which hath bitterness. When Salome asked when these things about which she questioned would be made known, the Lord said: When ye trample upon the garment of shame; when the Two become One, and Male with Female neither male nor female.
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In the next chapter I am going to pursue the implications of androgyny myths in the areas of sexual identity and sexual behavior, and it would be in keeping with the spirit of this book to take Christ as my guide and say with him: “When ye trample upon the garment of shame; when the Two become One, and Male with Female neither male nor female.”

CHAPTER 9

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley,
Island

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy. Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are “gender disorders, ” “criminality, ” as well as “sick, ” “disgusting, ” and “immoral. ” Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church,
ad infinitum)
are “human nature. ” Homosexuality, transsexuality, incest, and bestiality persist as the “perversions” of this “human nature” we presume to know so much about. They persist despite the overwhelming forces marshaled against them —discriminatory laws and social practices, ostracism, active persecution by the state and other organs of the culture —as inexplicable embarrassments, as odious examples of “filth” and/or “maladjustment. ” The attempt here, however modest and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, one which discards the fiction that there are two polar distinct sexes.

We have seen that androgyny myths present an image of one corporality which is both male and female. Sometimes the image is literally a man-form and a woman-form in one body. Sometimes it is a figure which incorporates both male and female functions. In every case, that mythological image is a paradigm for a wholeness, a harmony, and a freedom which is virtually unimaginable, the antithesis of every assumption we hold about the nature of identity in general and sex in particular. The first question then is: What of biology? There are, after all, men and women. They are different, demonstrably so. We are each of one sex or the other. If there are two discrete biological sexes, then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete modes of human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined. One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.

Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to develop new means of human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies of formation of gender identity in children provide basic information which challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity. That is not to say that there is one sex, but that there are many. The evidence which is germane here is simple. The words “male” and “female, ” “man” and “woman, ” are used only because as yet there are no others.

1.     Men and women have the same basic body structure. Both have both male and female genitals —the clitoris is a vestigial penis, the prostate gland is most probably a vestigial womb. Since, as I pointed out earlier, there is information on only 2 percent of human history, and since religious chronicles, which were for centuries the only record of human history, consistently speak of another time in the cycle of time when humans were androgynous, and since each sex has the vestigial organs of the other, there is no reason not to postulate that humans once were androgynous — hermaphroditic and androgynous, created precisely in the image of that constantly recurring androgynous godhead.

2.     Until the 7th week of fetal development both sexes have precisely the same external genitalia. Basically, the development of sex organs and ducts is the same for males and females and the same two sets of ducts develop in both.

3.     The gonads cannot be said to be entirely male or female. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey writes:

In their somatic organization, the gonads always retain a greater or lesser amount of the opposite-sex tissue which remains functional throughout life.
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4.     Chromosomal sex is not necessarily the visible sex of the individual. It happens that a person of one chromosomal sex develops the gonads of the other sex.
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Gonadal sex and chromosomal sex can be in direct contradiction.

5.     Chromosomal sex is not only XX or XY. There are other chromosomal formations, and not much is known about them or what they signify.

6.     A person can have the gonads of one sex, and the secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex.

7.     Men and women both produce male and female hormones. The amounts and proportions vary greatly, and there is no way to determine biological maleness or femaleness from hormone count.

8.     One hormone can be transformed by the body into its “opposite, ” male into female, female into male. In
Sex,
Gender, and Society, Ann Oakley gives this example:

... the fact that rapidly maturing male adolescents sometimes acquire small breasts —the substantial increases in testosterone which accompanies puberty [are] partially metabolised as oestrogen, which in turn causes breast development.
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9.     It is now thought that the male hormone determines the sex drive in both men and women.

10.     The female hormone (progesterone) can have a masculinizing effect. Dr. Sherfey writes:

We may have difficulty conceiving it, but natural selection has no difficulty using sexually heterotypic structures for homotypic purposes. For example, progesterone is the “pregnancy hormone” essential for menstruation and the prolonged pregnancy. It is as uniquely a “female” hormone as one can be. Yet progesterone possesses strong androgenic properties. It may be used to masculinize female embryos. In 1960, Jones (27, 63) demonstrated that progesterone given to human mothers early in pregnancy to prevent threatened miscarriages... severely masculinized a female fetus.
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