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
Androgyny: The Mythological Model
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.
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
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/God-
dess-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 t
he Oedipus story do
not end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles
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171
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 o f the right story.
Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne. Here is the substance o f 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. T hey were o f 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 o f marriage,, that is, o f being defined as Adam ’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in fact the first woman and the first feminist both. T h e 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
o f the dark, evil side o f all women. O f course, Lilith,
we know now, made the correct analysis and went to the
core o f 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 fe
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male created he them? The Midrash gives the definitive answer: When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the first man, he created him androgynous. 10 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
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173
androgynous nature o f the godhead they undermine
the authority o f God the Father and threaten the power
o f patriarchy.
It remains only to point out that Christ also had
some notion o f 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 o f the Female. And
Salome said to Him: Did I therefore well in having
no children? T h e 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 o f shame; when the Tw o
become One, and Male with Female neither male nor
fem ale. 11
In the next chapter I am going to pursue the implications o f androgyny myths in the areas o f sexual identity and sexual behavior, and it would be in keeping
with the spirit o f this book to take Christ as my guide
and say with him: “When ye trample upon the garment
o f shame; when the Tw o become One, and Male with
Female neither male nor female. ”
C H A P T E R 9
Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking,
and Community
Nothing short o f 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
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175
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 o f 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 o f every assumption we hold about the nature o f identity in general and sex in particular. T h e first question then is: What
o f biology? There are, after all, men and women. They
are different, demonstrably so. We are each o f one sex
or the other. If there are two discrete b
iological sexes,
then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete
modes o f human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined.
One might argue for a liberalization o f sex-based roles,
but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.
Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to
develop new means o f human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies o f
formation o f 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 o f sex difference
into the radical biology o f sex similarity. That is not to
say that there is one sex, but that there are many. The
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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 o f 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