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.
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As men began to know power, that power directly related to the exclusion o f women from community life, the myth o f feminine evil developed and provided justification for laws, rites, and other practices which relegated women to pieces o f 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) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’ai
Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation o f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender o f the noun is feminine) because o f woman’s generative function.
Am ong 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 o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cult
attached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to the
union o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. T h e culminating religious rite o f the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union o f 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
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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
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
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169
older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f 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.
T h e Aranda o f 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 o f 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.
T here are still devotional religious practices which
harken back to the mythology o f the primal androgyne
— Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indian
manifestations, clearly participates in that tradition.
Possibly the rite o f subincision, practiced in Australia,
is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is the
ritual slitting open o f the underside o f the penis to form
a permanent cleft into the urethra. T h e opening is
called the “ penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “T h e
subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that o f a certain class o f hermaphrodites. ” 9
T he drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, is
sacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to
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speculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulation
o f 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