-- Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae, pp. 304-306
Hurricane Camille has done her homework. The center of the galaxy is a black hole, the unseen Father. The rarest entitiy in the universe is an authentic male.
As the Gnostics correctly held, spirit � masculinity � has no home in matter, on Earth. The feminine does not merely rule the material world, she is the world, as is recognized across cultures and eons in cosmology and myth. Spirit is imprisoned in fields of gravity, buried in darkness under mountains of stone, scapegoated, shacked, lost in materia.
It is the obligation � and the necessity � of the feminine to make welcome the masculine to matter, to make the guest welcome in her planetary home. When the feminine fails in this, or worse -- when the feminine marginalizes and betrays the masculine, annihilating and outlawing spirit -- all hell breaks loose. The purest elements of the masculine respond in quintessentially masculine manner, by maximizing differentiation, consciousness and individuation.
Authentic masculinity isolates, withdrawing from values, institutions, matter, body, and relationship, all of which are overtly and covertly hostile to it. The most volatile and vulnerable elements of the masculine shear off, and instead of effecting genius and contributing to the Whole, instead turn to bloodshed, mayhem, and self-destruction, from schoolyards to prisons, from the streets to the house next door. The feminine, and its civilization, responds by stepping up repressions of masculinity � by digging a deeper hole, adding more man-cages, constructing yet another level of hell.
Jim Morrison, in �Riders on the Storm,� supports Paglia�s observation. Thrown into a world of existential materialism, where everything that is, is feminine, pure male energy is an impoverished wanderer, the outcast Azazel, Satan bound eternally in the Pit. �Girl, you gotta love your man,� Morrison implores his sisters: �Take him by the hand, make him understand. The world on you depends.�
This suggestion was ignored by the Baby Boom generation of females, whose vision and interests never reached beyond the self-aggrandizements of personal power and complete cultural control.
The consequence of maintaining the masculine in chains, however, is dire. Morrison's fractured male, cast out, morphs into the �killer on the road, his brain � squirmin� like a toad.� When the blood sacrifice of masculinity is ignored, demeaned, and mocked, the masculine sheds the skin of civilization and turns the knife around, usually on himself -- but sometimes also on others.
The Christos, Jesus of Nazareth, is one of those �pure males� about whom Paglia speaks, a hero of solarity, of consciousness � a Son of the Sun. Simultaneously the fulfilment of Hebrew messianic prophecy, and the embodiment of the Judaic scapegoat and fallen angel Azazel, Jesus was a whole (holy) man because he had firsthand experience of both heaven and hell. As in the prefix of his occult title, Azazel, he travelled the full length of the opposites, from A to Z, twice. Like all great heroes in myth and legend, he had decended to the inner sanctum of the Mothers, and had risen in spirit to the Father�s House. In shamanic terms, he gained advanced knowledge of the Lower and Upper Worlds. Every sacred tradition, both East and West, has a corrolary, although the linear (above/below) motif is the specialty of the West.
Jesus was a finished being, having integrated feminine and masculine elements, the prerequisite to heroic status, authentic Selfhood. He was, and is, a boddhisattva, an enlightened being who � although knowing fully the gruesome consequences � returned to incarnate amongst humanity out of pity and love for the dubious little worms we usually are.
Hero�s quest, shamanic journey, hermetic initiation, construction of philosopher�s Stone, Odyssey, alchemical opus, quest for the Holy Grail, psycho-perambulation of the Self -- these are one phenomenon. This is the process by which individual and collective entities experience the full range and effects of the antipathies, the opposites, and thereby become complete human beings, partly animals and partly deities, or angels if one likes. In Western antiquity the experience was called �visiting the seven houses� (planets).
The process is a series of spiralings, or cimcumambulations, around a central linear axis, or tree, sometimes referred to as the axis mundi, the Cosmic or Sephirotic Tree, though it is a phenomenon that transcends strictly planetary/material bounds. Thus both the ascent/descent traditions of the West, and the circular/spiral traditions of the East, are combined into a singular experience, simultaneously personal and collective.
For the masculine, the sojourn begins from pure solarity, pure masculinity, the core of stellar solarity, and descends into matter. As anyone versed in astral travel knows, the boundardy of emotional and gravitational influence of the Earth begins at the furthest point of the moon from Earth � the dark side of the moon.
The Sun may be thought of as humanity�s Intermediate Father, although he has an inner feminine aspect, as Earth also has a secret, inner masculinity, the sol niger. The Sun is an extraordinary entity, sentient beyond the wildest dreams of any single human individual, and sensitive to every fart on the planet. Sol is a superb hero of heaven, balancing himself with unimaginable skill and courage between his own internal nuclear fission, and the crush of external black gravity. Maximum creativity and stability thus result, and his lambs throughout the solar system are fed.
His marvellous sacrifice provides a cosmic model for coniunctio. Through gender, human beings -- in their individual characters and collective organizations -- both carry and seek to liberate the opposites, and thereby contain and transcend the antagonisms and attractions of duality. It is therefore understandable why the ancients worshipped Sol � though worship of any such entity, even one as brilliant as the Sun, is an error. He is a great Lord, yet still a local King only.
Yet science, of course, knows better � nought but an inanimate ball of hydrogen spinning through the sky. Humans, we imagine, are the supreme containers of consciousness in the cosmos.
How we do puff up.