wotan5

Secret Agent Man

And among the waves of death she gives birth to a manchild,
with pains of Hell;
he springs from the crucible
O wondrous counselor with power

�The Thanksgiving Psalms,� Dead Sea Scrolls, Psalm 5

Here comes the Sun
Here comes the Son
It�s all right �

-- the Beatles, �Here Comes the Sun� (blessings upon you, o wondrous George)

Already he is astride his mount, already he streaks through the polluted, stagnant atmosphere, bringing the darkness alive. Hail son of the philosophers! Hail homo noeticus! Hail arc of the staff and scale! Hail Mercurius, filius quadrivium! Let corruption be washed with fire.

America is the battlefield of the opposites, but it also is the land blessed by the Queen of Heaven. Now gather her knights, under banner of their Captain.

America's values and institutions are phylogenetic, reflecting both the development of the human body and the evolution of the species, which began with the feminine and the maternal. Our bodies gestate from a foundational female state -- physical "maleness" is secondary, its characteristics an out-growth, perhaps even an afterthought or mutation. Similarly, consciousness grew from a group-think cosmology that was strictly feminine, that of Mother Right, the assumed primacy of the maternal. Put alternately, while in material state we are each, and collectively, essentially feminine beings, with variants of masculinity branching like tendrils from matter. The dominant religious scenario of the West assures us that the feminine emerged as byproduct of the masculine, from �Adam�s rib.� In fact, just the opposite is true: men in materia are extrusions of the primal feminine, and masculinity, far from dominating human evolution, is yet a pup at the feet of Great Mother Earth.

Men strut and prance in their positions as lawmakers and corporate honchos, but even this tiny percentage of men merely orbit a center of female power they dare not acknowledge. The center of American culture is woman � motherhood, the nuclear or post-nuclear (male-less) family, and the institutions which, while �led� by men, serve the feminine. Men make the laws, but they are neo-matriarchal laws. Men brutally enforce collective values, but they are neo-matriarchal values.

Writing on fatherhood and initiation, Joseph Campbell notes: "[W]e remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her." (Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 11.) In America, the sacred cow is the maternal, and long ago the culture left behind the notion that �father knows best.� Now, father knows nothing, if he's allowed to hang around at all.

It is the business of the �wondrous counselor� of Psalm 5 to overturn this. He is not a �nice guy.� He is Fight Club�s Tyler Durden, kicking ass and writing names in the Big Book. He doesn�t do the correct thing, the safe thing, nor the conventional thing. He is Abraxas. He does the necessary, effective thing � which means he usually ends up bloody and dead. But he gets the job done.

Both the politically correct/feminist Left and the religious/puritanical Right in fractured America create, and exacerbate, our self-devouring culture wars. Both express, through brutality, intimidation, censorship and coercion, the exact same condition of totalitarian fundamentalism. They are the Toxic Twins. The Left paints matriarchy as an idyllic, egalitarian, optimal state of human organization. In fact, matriarchy was � and is � bloody, coercive, self-serving and driven by vengeance as much as nurturance. As the American neo-matriarchy of the past four decades has illustrated clearly, under the Empowered Witch�s �egalitarianism,� one gender is far more equal than the other.

Authentic masculinity is no longer conserved, valued, or even permitted in America, with the exception of organized athletics, and to a lesser degree the arts. A misguided � some say perverted � version of masculinity exists in science. But there again, it lacks connection with its individual and collective anima, and thus is able to dissect, measure, and study the world, to fashion tools of power from it, but not to empathize with it, nor love it. No computer, no matter how intelligent, will re-animate Earth. Technology is merely a useful appendage. It is the combined love of women and men that will bring Earth to wholeness and life. All Creation awaits us.