Everything we have come to know about the universe and the world we live in leads us to realize that the foundations of existence are built on sexual complementarities, rather than the absolutes of an ultimate atomic particle, or a lone creator.
Quantum reality is
based on wave complementing particle, from which spring every
phenomenon, from wave-particle interference (right) through the
wavelengths of the rainbow, to the particulate genetic code, embracing
both the identity of mass and energy and the loop-hole of quantum
uncertainty, thus giving rise to an indeterministic cosmic history
which makes free will and consciousness possible.
Quantum reality contains a series of other complementarities, such as those between the bosons (such as photons) forming radiation and the fermions (such as electrons and quarks) making matter, and that between particles and their time-reversing anti-particles.
A second aspect of
cosmology, central to sexuality, is the concept of cosmic symmetry-breaking,
in which the quantum forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism,
and the weak and colour nuclear forces differentiated. This is
linked to the overall explosive expansion of the universe in inflationary
cosmologies, due to an early anti-gravity phase emerging from
the big bang (fireball left).
In the biological realm, sexuality has likewise symmetry-broken into complementary female and male genders, the female contributing the greatest investment in both DNA and cytoplasm in the enveloping egg, and the male, cutting and running, with 'sneaky' sperms - little more than naked motile DNA packages. This applies particularly to mammals with XY-sex chromosomes, which bear live young and in which the female makes by far the largest investment in parenting and the males compete for her reproductive capacity.
Although men and
women look superficially alike, apart from a slight difference
in size, due to male competition, and the development of secondary
sexual characteristics, particularly in the female, our sex cells
(right) are as wildly different as wave and particle. This leads
to a massive female investment, in pregnancy, live birth, lactation
and child rearing which the male often fails to match and frequently
tries, out of mortal anxiety and paternity uncertainty, to repress
and control, through religious edict, moral code, social domination
and violent punishment.
The evolution of all animals bearing eggs and sperm is driven by heightened male competition, in a paradigm of female reproductive and genetic choice, in which each sex's reproductive strategy is in a prisoner's dilemma with respect to the other - partly cooperative and partly in conflict. This applies particularly to humans, where social complexity and a cultural emergence based on long-term pair-bonding during parenting is associated with striving to overcome paradox, rather than sexual dominance. Were sexual dominance an evolutionary norm, women would not have evolved to have concealed ovulation and enjoy ecstatic orgasmic social sexuality, both of which indicate a significant degree of female reproductive choice.
The evidence from studies of our closest relatives, the chimp, the bonobo and other great apes, shows that our sister species have existed in a state of reproductive paradox, in which strategies of each sex are compensated for by contrasting and complementing strategies on the part of the other sex, to the extent that, even in overtly patriarchal chimpanzee, where the alpha male has the lion's share of sexual opportunity, and the other closely-related males in the troop do their best to corral and monopolize the reproductive opportunity of the females, a good half of pregnancies are sired by females on covert safari with a consenting male of their choice. The bonobo also shows us that our close relatives have evolved so that female sexuality, female coalition and female reproductive choice have played a pivotal role in shaping their evolution.
The evidence of human
emergence tells likewise, with human females displaying concealed
ovulation, almost permanent sexual receptiveness, menstrual synchrony
and orgasmic ecstasy which, rather than being an evil deception,
forms the very foundation of attracting males into long-term parental
bonding, which is the signature of a slow-growing childhood capable
of coping with the explosion of human social complexity. Moreover,
founding African societies, such as the Bushmen (left) and Pygmies,
living in small autonomous family bands, also display features
of sexual paradox in reproductive choice, rather than the male
dominance that has emerged in military urban societies, despite
a desire on the part of Bushmen men-folk to act as elders who
try to control the cultural mores.
At a deeper level, the physical universe and subjective consciousness - body and spirit if you like - form an inextricable complementary partnership. Subjective consciousness is our only access to reality. Without it, we wouldn't know the universe existed. But without the physical universe, organisms, brains and hence minds as we know them would be impossible. The conscious mind is thus the cosmological complement of the entire universe and this is the mysterium tremendum, which motivates mystical and prophetic experiences, spiritual ecstasy, the shamanic vision quest, Vedantic and Buddhist Samadhi, and the gnosis of the Christ state. The numinous nature of consciousness is also manifest in the experiences of dreaming and the states induced by psychotropic power plants and its properties are immanent and immediate to each of us if we choose to let go our attachment to the material world enough to respond to it. Understanding how subjective consciousness comes about and its basis in the physics of the brain is a quest into the areas linking chaos theory, quantum entanglement, and neurodynamics. Chaos and order likewise have complementary properties in the emergence of complexity. The mysterium is something we each need to explore, as Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and shamans and sages have done the world over, from the !Kung Bushmen trance dancers to Maria Sabina the Mazatec mushroom benefactress. The spiritual inner sanctum is intimate and immediate by contrast with the indirect nature of religion, relying on priests, imams and religious submission and belief, all of which are subject to tyranny, self-deception, and the manipulative intrigues of people with a vested interest in social control.
However some of the
founding religious and spiritual paths do have just this 'marriage'
of complements at their very core. The Chinese Tao or Way, of
life and nature, is based on Yin, the 'receptive', feminine, Earthly
principle, and Yang, the 'creative', masculine, Heavenly principle.
However here we should not think the male Yang principle is superior
to the Yin, for Lao Tsu said:
This primal emphasis on the mother is significant, because it shows that, rather than a creator God with the feminine principle lesser or absent, the primal parthenogenesis, from which everything incestuously sprang is female, as we should suspect.
Likewise in the ancient
path of Tantra which goes way back to the Indus valley civilizations
of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, long before the Aryan Brahmins descended
like a wolf from the fold, the universe is actually born from
the act of intimate sexual love, in that the cosmic origin is
a complete state of sexual coitus, from which all the phenomena
of the complex nature of the universe emerge as Shakti begins
to dance the dance of Maya, or illusion, and the diversity of
objective reality dawns on the mind of Shiva beholding it. Shiva,
the male principle, is lifeless until aroused by the awakened
female principle of Shakti. This shows us that, rather than male
imposition, despite being the active sexual principle, it is the
female sexual energy and female reproductive choice, which is
the key to the Tantric creation. Shakti is a form of that ancient
creatress and destructress of time itself, dark Kali, reminding
us again that the feminine is not secondary, but primal. Budhhism
has adopted Tantra, so lies closer to the source than patriarchal
monotheism, though its practices are frequently patriarchal.
Many of the world's creation myths, such as the Maori origin, arise from the relationship of Earth Mother and Sky Father, pushed apart to make the complexity of life possible:
When we come to the monotheistic traditions, we find a rather tortured history, in which the feminine has been repeatedly cast out, only to reappear in another form, because the male, without the female, is dysfunctional, like a ship without a sail.
In Genesis 1 The 'Elohim - god in the plural make woman and man in 'their' likeness:
Nevertheless they are still given dominion over the living species:
By contrast in the
Edenic creation the Tantra of male and female in their likeness
has been overturned. The Lord Yahweh has become a lonely bachelor,
who breathes life into Adam first and only then decides as an
afterthought to make a woman, who although higher born from a
rib rather than mere dust, is immediately consigned to an unfair
fate tricked into eating the fruit of knowledge when she sought
life-giving wisdom.
Jealous of the powers of the creation he has breathed life into, Yahweh curses Adam and Eve in case they gain both life giving wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil from the two complementary trees, of division into dark and light, and the integration of life, yielding their fruit in paradise:
The jealous Yahweh has intruded into the sacredness of the sexual partnership, cursed the primal couple for discovering their own Tantra to make one wise, and broken the complementarity, giving the man complete domination both over the woman and to conquer an alien nature:
Nevertheless Adam admits that Eve was, from the beginning, the Great Mother of All:
Thus begins the Fall, which, like the Tantric origin, is a Fall from conjugal union into the manifold problems and complexities of the mortal coil, but with an additional patriarchal curse of dominion over woman and nature as punishment for the woman seeking life giving wisdom. Nevertheless Yahweh is still "one of us", implying he is not alone.
The co-eval nature of the feminine is affirmed in Proverbs, where we find Hochmah, or Wisdom laying claim to the primal origin:
The partnership of God and Wisdom is reflected in the hieros gamos (above) from earliest times to the love song of Inanna and Dumuzi:
It is also reflected in the partnership of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, one of the most renowned sexual meetings of all time, which is reflected in the pastoral symphony of the Song of Songs and is a sacred union between the Hebrew kingly messiah and the black but comely Arabian queen.
However although Yahweh was paired with Anath and Asherah at Gezer and at Elephantine, Yahwist intrigues in Josiah's reign finally resulted in the Asherah being thrown out of the Temple and burned in the Vale of Kidron and her priest's bones burned on their altars. The apocryphal text, said to have been discovered in the Temple, which initiated this violence, proscribed dire penalties against women for sexual indiscretion:
Nevertheless in Jewish midrash, another more abstract form of the feminine emerged in the form of the indwelling Shekhinah, the feminine face of God manifest on Earth in matrimonial concord, in the tent of Sarah, and in the Eagles wings, also carrying the pregnant madonna into the wilderness in Revelations. The Shekhinah was said to have retreated in the Fall in Eden and will return in the unveiling as sparks or shards that will come together in reunion in completing the mosaic of the shattered feminine.
The sacred union carried
on to the Babylonians and the Arabian Nabateans in the time of
Jesus where dhu Shara the Lord of Seir was paired with al-Uzza,
the mighty one, just as al-Llah and al-Lat are paired in ancient
inscriptions in Sinai.
The sacred union is also reflected in Yeshua's relationship with Mary Magdalene out of whom went seven devils, as in the galla of the descent of Inanna, perhaps also the sinner-woman taken in adultery, cryptically identified with Mary of Bethany, whom Jesus loved, along with Martha:
When he is anointed by Mary at Bethany, Jesus declares (Matt 26:13):
confirming that his messiahship is entwined forever in a heterosexual partnership.
There is however something very distorted about the outcome, leading to sacrificial violence and violent martyrdom. Jesus says Mary is anointing him to his doom in a final confrontation of dark and light, which will result in his crucifixion. Although Abba the father god is portrayed as a kind forgiving god by contrast with the jealous Yahweh of the Old Testament, the forgiveness comes at the expense of the sacrifice of his ostensible only-begotten son, something ancient and violent harking back to the fertility gods of male sacrifice of Canaan, but turned into the vengeful father God of the paschal lamb, in the guise of the suffering servant:
The intimate relationship with the sacred marriage is confirmed in many passages, from the women of Galilee all attending the crucifixion, the mission being supported out of their very substance, the anointing by a woman, the three Marys embalming the body and pronouncing the exaltation, and the cryptic hieros gamos of the Gospel of Thomas:
This division into light and darkness began with the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda the good god of light and creation opposed to "the Lie" of ignorance and darkness - Angra Mainu. Casting the light and dark in opposition drives the light male and dark female principles into cosmic conflict, as well as resulting in a final day of judgment between the dark, now become in Judeo-Christian apocalyptic thought the male Devil, or Satan.
Following on Yeshua's death, the Christian following centered on the Dionysian communion of soma and sangre - drinking the blood of the Christ and eating his flesh, split into two parties, orthodox and gnostic, one worshipping Jesus as the son of a compassionate God and the other assuming inner knowledge or 'gnosis':
The gnostics frequently described the father god as a jealous demiurge who had usurped power using the threat of damnation to those who didn't follow him. The feminine principle manifested in Sophia was said to have conceived by herself to produce a male legislator rather than the cosmic creator. This debate split the church until the orthodox repressed the gnostics, instituting a variety of contrivances, from the assumed physical resurrection, through the Trinity of Father, Son and the neutered Holy Ghost, to the awkward role of mother Mary as a mortal Semele, a virgin to God, usurping the mother Goddess role of Isis in the process. Unlike several of the gnostic movements, the orthodox church in the mold of Eve's sin cast women into an inferior status - to be seen but not heard:
The apocalyptic promise of the Kingdom of God coming with Power in the same generation did not materialize:
The inverted violence of the crucifixion, led instead to a paradigm of violent martyrdom, mayhem and murder until Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome. Following this, despite its ideal of brotherly love, Christian violence turned outward, in 600 years of Crusade, Inquisition, witch hunt and genocidal war. The fall of Byzantium ironically precipitated the renaissance and the flowering of the scientific age in the West despite the stringent efforts of the Catholic church to keep the people in bondage to God through diabolical and violent means.
With the advent of Muhammad the patriarchal Fall continued in new and troublesome ways. The heritage of al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat had continued from Arabian Nabatea to Mecca. The Ka'aba was a centre of pilgrimage sacred to all religions and the Hajj was an ancient fertility and astral pilgrimage centered on Mecca. The Goddesses were dearly loved by the Quraysh. Muhammad, having gained popularity in Mecca is reputedly according to Ibn Sa'd and al Tabari have decided verses acknowledging the daughters of al-Llah were inspired by Satan rather than Gabriel and turned against them:
He was then met with rejection and had to flee to Medina. His long-standing partner and benefactress Khadja died of malnutrition and the conflict with the Quraysh continued leading to Muhammad declaring jihad or holy war. At first Muhammad respected the Jews of Medina as fellow patriarchs and required Muslims to bow to Jerusalem, but faced with Jewish derision for his new religion, he turned instead to bow to Mecca. Medina was laid siege to and the Umma (a term which originally two and a half millennia earlier meant 'mother unit') were nearly defeated, until a change of weather led the superstitious Quraysh to leave.
In the process, the Jewish quarter had parlayed with the opposition, but had never opened their gates to the Muslim's enemy, for which the Umma could be have afforded to be grateful. However after letting them know their throats would be slit, Muhammad appointed a mortally wounded Muslim as judge over the fate of the Jews who ordered the men, numbering several hundred in all, to be beheaded in the souk and the women and children to be taken into slavery, implicitly including sexual slavery of the Jewish women.
Karen Armstrong in "Muhammad" acknowledges "It is probably impossible for us to dissociate this story from Nazi atrocities and it will inevitably alienate many people irrevocably from Muhammad" noting that scholars caution it is not correct to judge the 6th century by 21st century standards. However we have to be careful here, because 6th century standards of jihad and treatment of women still apply today. One is also reminded of Srebrenica where the same motives of wholesale killing applied viz to eliminate the Muslim men who might make a later attack.
The key point is that this genocide of the male Jews of Medina proved tactically unnecessary, because later Muhammad, outnumbered by the opposition sued for a peace treaty in the name of the Sakina or spirit of peace:
Karen Armstrong notes: "The sakina it will also be recalled, seems to be related to the Hebrew Shekhinah, the term for God's presence in the world".
The association with the Hebrew Shekhinah is reinforced by Quranic reference to the Ark of the Covenant:
However, gaining superior numbers and facing continuing friction, Muhammad abrogated the peace treaty, invoking takiya - faking peace to attain a later advantage, and marched victoriously on Mecca by force of numbers, smashing all the idols in the Ka'aba save only for pictures of Jesus and Mary and the ancient astral black stone, said by some to belong to al-Uzza, instituting Muslim supremacy, in return for accepting the ancient Hajj continuing, to ensure the economy of Mecca as a pilgrimage centre would continue.
Although Muslims claim women were treated better under the new patriarchal order, those who opposed the prophet were dispatched violently and punitively:
In "The Naked Face of Eve", Nawal el Sadaawi (R189) notes: "Sarah was a famous slave singer who aimed her barbed words against the Moslems. She was among those whom Mahomet ordered to be executed on the day of his victorious entry into Mecca. In the region of El Nagir, it was recounted that some women had rejoiced when the Prophet died and Abu Bake, the first of the Caliphs, ordered their hands and feet to be cut off. Thus women who dared to give voice to their protest or opposition could be exposed to cruel punishment. Their hands might be cut off, or their teeth pulled out, or their tongues torn from their mouths".
Each ancient temple was demolished or burned to the ground, and those who didn't convert immediately put to the sword. Nabih Faris translating al-Kabali in "The Book of Idols" notes that the banu-Umahmah were slaughtered and the women raped for defending dhu-al-Khalasah which stood half way to San'a, a woman cried:
It is thus said by al-Bukhari that the Prophet himself lamented: "This world shall not pass away until the buttocks of the women of Daws wiggle [again] around the dhu-al-Khalasah and they worship it as they were want to do [before Islam]".
This has led to a tradition in which women are treated as tilth (arable pasture), have only half the value of men in law, are chaperoned by male relatives, forcibly veiled, sometimes so no part of their bodies can be seen, and regarded as weaker beings to be protected and controlled by husbands or male relatives at all times. They are also subject to dire 6th century punishments such as stoning for adultery and the Quran specifically permits wives to be beaten in their bedrooms if their husbands fear their perverseness, which is an explicit admission of the right of a husband to force sexual advances. This is combined with dire penalties the sweeping law of zina (rape, adultery or fornication), temporary marriage, polygamy and arbitrary divorce to tip the balance of choice and control decisively in favour of the male and against the female.
Although Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam have sought reproductive and social control of women and female reproduction, today such prohibitions including those on contraception and divorce are largely flouted even by Catholic Christians. Deuteronomic stoning for adultery has long been abandoned by Jews, Christians no longer burn witches following Exodus and it is only in the Muslim world we find archaic laws prejudicial and violent to women, such as stoning, enforced by Sharia.
When we come to the question of God and nature we arrive at a complex of deep questions telescoping into the ultimate nature of self and consciousness. Although some religions believe in a cosmic creator God, or even a multitude of deities as in Hindu, others such as Buddhism embrace a cosmos in which there is no such agent. The Western tradition has been littered with attempts to prove, or to disprove god, either in the name of Christianity, or of doubting scientists and philosophers.
Scepticism is the founding principle of good science, sifting theories which don't stack up, from those that withstand disproof, or natural counter-example. No scientific theory is ever proven, but a host of ill-conceived notions are consigned to the trash-can of history. However, whether an agent or personality, standing apart from the natural universe, has motivated it or may be interacting with our lives and fates, or whether the universe, or conscious existence has an ultimate purpose, is a metaphysical question outside the factual and objective methodology of the natural science of how, rather than why. The existence of God is in logical terms an undecidable proposition, in the sense of Gödel.
Nevertheless, many of the aspects of religion and the belief in God are very human constructions, which are clearly fantasy, in conflict with the natural realm and with scientific cosmology. We now know that the Earth was not created in six days, nor were there plants on Earth before the sun was created, nor is Earth a flat domain between heaven and sheol only 4000 year of age. It is likewise extremely implausible that mother Mary was a virgin impregnated by God, or that if God had an only begotten son he would need to biologically resurrected to sit at the right hand of God in heaven. All these are however entirely consistent with the co-opting of other mythical tales, such as Zeus' impregnation of mortal Semele, to make Dionysus a son of God, born from Zeus' knee, whose soma and sangre also give immortal life, tales decried by Christians as pagan nonsense in contradictory denial of their own pagan beliefs. We have now moved beyond the times in which Galileo was excommunicated for observing the Earth was not the centre of the universe. We know that mutation and selective advantage affect both our own offspring and the food species we selectively breed, so to deny evolution to pretend God created the living species like tinker toys is a fallacy. This is crying out, as stone age thinking, in the era of the human and chimp genome projects, whose comparison displays unambiguously the digital signature of the evolution of humanity.
Heaven and hell are likewise unbiological, unphysical and unrealistic scenarios full of contradictions. Why does God have a son at all if sexual reproduction in heaven is unnecessary, as Jesus suggests? Islamic heaven on the other hand is a wildly sexy place in which every man has the sexual power of 100 men and makes love with 72 black-eyed virgins, some of them houris created just for male enjoyment. Why on Earth we would all need sexual reproduction in heaven and who the offspring would actually be is forgotten in the addictive rush to get in the sack with the unblemished virgins. The Tibetan Buddhist bardo, by contrast, sees a disincarnate reflection of conscious dream-time connecting us from death to birth in a cyclic reincarnation, something so radically different and with its own problems of who is incarnating who, that despite the desire for religious unity, it is impossible for these religious cosmologies to all fit consistently into a single universe, let alone a single species on a single planet. No one seems to have any idea why God, if he exists, should be so obsessed with the 'third rock from the sun' in a sea of countless stars and galaxies, that he should stake the whole of eschatological history, from alpha to omega, on a scorched-earth high-noon, coinciding with the Jewish rebellion against Rome, nor even with our own destructive adoption of weapons of mass destruction, and our rape of the living biosphere.
Several of the patriarchal arguments of monotheism also contradict biology. Take for example the claim that God says men have the right to control women because men are the stronger sex. This doesn't make biological sense - the fact humans have larger males actually happens because male humans have evolved to compete for the reproductive resources of women - like the gorilla or the elephant seal, although less so. This is not a good reason for men to dominate women reproductively. Nor is it good that male desire for reproductive certainty is allowed to enforce a degree of control, which results in second class status for women based on feminine weakness, because biologically it is females who have to carry out the absolutely pivotal function of biological mothering. A woman naturally has as great or greater value than a man - as great because it takes two sexes to reproduce, but greater in that it is the female who physically makes the pivotal investment in pregnancy, in lactation and in long-term mothering of the next generation. For this reason and for the evolutionary heath of the human species, female reproductive choice should not be repressed by religious or social edict on the part of men.
Many other constructions of religion are clearly contrary to natural ecology:
While we all may quail at being eaten by a lion, we now realize natural evolutionary diversity gives rise to carnivores as well as herbivores, just as it branches to form plants and animals. Without the lion, the gazelle might multiply to the point where it would eat itself to extinction in a famine on the grassland. Likewise parasites such as diseases are a natural part of the ecosystem, even though we may seek for our own sakes to eradicate the paralytic scourges of polio from the planet. Our ideas of good and evil thus need to respect nature in a way which is consistent with climax diversity. Nature is here an oracle of survival, forming an Occam's razor for our ideas of good and evil and the ideal order, which we need urgently to learn from in coming to care for the planet as a living system. While nature is a matter of tooth and claw, humanity has evolved in an environment where our life expectancy has been long and our gatherer-hunter phase has had significant opportunities for leisure, sufficient to pursue the pleasures and mysteries of existence. It is thus wrong to regard nature as violent, evil or debased, but rather a manifestation of the flowering of sentient consciousness.
A variety of natural explanations for religion have been put forward of an evolutionary nature, one of the most discussed being the idea that religious propensity, which in twin studies has been shown to have a 40% genetic basis, constitutes an advantageous evolutionary trait which serves to aid a society, by reducing intra-group strife to provide enhanced resistance to inter-group conflict, as an extension of the biology of morality. Religious devotion can then be seen in a linkage in the brain between intense emotion and overwhelming significance, paralleled by a tendency to social conformity and submission to a higher power. Other theories see religion as a self-reproducing cultural process in the manner of a meme, or a socially and economically successful paradigm which reinforces group cooperation to a common end.
However a more sinister aspect of patriarchal religion comes in its harnessing to justify a fearful and violent reaction on the part of men to paternity uncertainty, by erecting jealous and vengeful Gods, which, in addition to rousing the fascist aspects of religious fervour, act to repress female reproductive choice, by making women subject to the reproductive and sexual control of men, through religious codes and laws exacting dire punishments for women who deviate from the patriarchal code. When one examines in each of the patriarchal religions just how the rules work, it becomes clear that a dual current of justification operates to claim the religion is protecting women, while placing them in effective bondage, both to the men and to the commands of the patriarchal God.
Coupled with these reproductive imperatives are a nexus of personality characteristics of jealousy, retribution, anger and violence against the polluting and deceitful ways of the female, and any form of independent life, which are less than godly and more akin to psychopathic: A petulant jealous vigilante of women's obedience, casting dire punishments, in a fit of road rage, against any female who appears to be making her own strategic decisions, on the reproductive highway. A Father who is claimed to be the God of love and forgiveness, who insists that his only begotten Son has to be killed to achieve these ends. A vengeful God who is the justification for death fatwas and violent emotive demonstrations against anyone who would depict, or criticize, even aptly the 'final' prophet, or his teachings. An angry, judgmental God, who fulminates in the End of Days, sorting the wheat from the chaff of damnation, throwing unbelievers in hell, in a tumult and triage of all life. The manifestations of God described by the major monotheistic religions, rather than inspiring transcendence, divinity, or mercy, display many, or all, of the less socially adjusted aspects of male reproductive coercion, and domineering behavior run amok.
We should all beware the seduction of apocalypse, the unveiling in the day of judgment, because it is a real part of our future shock - a tragic mistake brought on by male dominance and clash of patriarchal cultures, in violation of nature. Nevertheless we should also use it to full advantage, to liberate in reunion to ferry us across the Styx of the genocide of life's diversity to reflower paradise, in as soft a landing as we can nurture together. The Tantric origin reminds us that, just as the origin of the universe is sexual union, so the reintegration - the restoration of paradise - comes, not through the rule of a lone God in the day of patriarchal judgment, but through the fusion in sexual embrace of the feminine and masculine principles coming again into ecstatic reunion with all of life.
In all the apocalyptic scenarios, despite triage and tumult, the blessed regain the paradise they have almost allowed to be destroyed in the fall into division. Standing at the end of time is the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world, when the jealous God put a flaming sword between paradise and the primal couple. This tree of life is the perpetual tree of living diversity, immortal in its germ web, so long as Earth shall live. It is to the tree of life and to the reunion with the repressed feminine, in the bridal unveiling of matrimonial concord, that we owe our allegiance, our faith, our hopes, and our religious, scientific and ethical duty, to further in peace, and in love supreme.
