20

Man and Woman

To complete these considerations on traditional life, I will now briefly discuss the sexual dimension.

In this context too we find that in the traditional worldview, realities corresponded to symbols and actions to rites; what derives from these correspondences are the principles for understanding the sexes and for regulating the relationships that are necessarily established between men and women in every normal civilization.

In traditional symbolism, the supernatural principle was conceived as “masculine” and the principle of nature and of becoming as “feminine.” In Hellenic terms the “one” (τὀ ἔν), which is “in itself,” complete, and self-sufficient, is regarded as masculine. Conversely, the dyad, the principle of differentiation and of “other-than-self,” and thus the principle of desire and of movement, is regarded as feminine. In Hindu terms (according to the Sāṃkhya darśana) , the impassible spirit (puruṣa) is masculine, while prakṛti, the active matrix of every conditioned form, is feminine. The Far Eastern tradition has expressed equivalent concepts through the cosmic duality of yin and yang, whereby yang, the male. principle, is associated with the “virtue of heaven” and yin, the feminine principle, with the principle of the “earth.”^[1]

Considered in and of themselves, the two principles are in opposition to each other. But in the order of the creative formation that I have repeatedly identified as the soul of the traditional world, and that was destined to develop historically in relation to the conflict between various races and civilizations, they are transformed into elements of a synthesis in which both retain a distinctive function. This is not the place to show that behind the various representations of the myth of the “fall” we often find the idea of the male principle’s identification with and loss in the feminine principle until the former has acquired the latter’s way of being. In any event, when this happens, when that which is naturally a self-subsistent principle succumbs to the law of that which does not have its own principle in itself by giving in to the forces of “desire,” then it is appropriate to talk about a “fall.” On the plane of human reality, the diffidence that various traditions have nurtured toward women is based precisely on this belief; the woman is often considered as a principle of “sin,” impurity, and evil, as well as a temptation and a danger for those who are in search of the supernatural.

Nevertheless, it is possible to consider another possibility that runs counter to the direction of the “fall,” and that is to establish the correct relationship between the two principles. This occurs when the feminine principle, whose force is centrifugal, does not turn to fleeting objects but rather to a “virile” stability in which she finds a limit to her “restlessness.” Stability is then transmitted to the feminine principle to the point of intimately transfiguring all of its possibilities. What occurs in these terms is a synthesis in a positive sense. What is needed therefore is a radical “conversion” of the feminine principle to the opposite principle; moreover, it is absolutely necessary for the masculine principle to remain wholly itself. Then, according to metaphysical symbols, the female becomes the “bride” and also the “power” or instrumental generating force that receives the primordial principle of the immobile male’s activity and form: as in the doctrine of Śakti, which can also be found in Aristotelianism and in Neoplatonism, though expressed in different terms. I have mentioned the Tantric-Tibetan representations that are very significant in this regard, in which the male “bearer-of-the-scepter” is immobile, cold, and substantiated with light while the substance of Śakti, which envelops it and uses it as its axis, is a flickering flame.^[2]

These meanings constitute the foundation of the traditional teachings concerning the human sexes. This norm obeys the principle of the caste system and it also emphasizes the two cardinal tenets of dharma and of bhakti, or fides: self-subsistent nature and active dedication.

If birth is not a matter of chance, then it is not a coincidence for a being to “awaken” to itself in the body of a man or a woman. Here too, the physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dhanna.

We know that every traditional civilization is based on the will to order and give “form,” and that the traditional law is not oriented toward what is unqualified, equal, and indefinite, or in other words, toward that impersonal mix in which the various parts of the whole become promiscuously or atomically similar, but rather intends these parts to be themselves and to express as perfectly as possible their own typical nature. Therefore, particularly with regard to the genders, man and woman are two different types; those who are born as men must realize themselves as men, while those who are born as women must realize themselves as women, overcoming any mixture and promiscuity of vocations. Even in regard to the supernatural vocation, man and woman must both have their own distinctive paths to follow, which cannot be altered without them turning into contradictory and inorganic ways of being.

I have already considered the way of being that corresponds eminently to man; I have also discussed the two main paths of approach to the value of “being a principle to oneself,” namely, action and contemplation. Thus, the warrior (the hero) and the ascetic represent the two fundamental types of pure virility. In symmetry with these types, there are also two types available to the feminine nature. A woman realizes herself as such and even rises to the same level reached by a man as warrior and ascetic only as lover and mother. These are bipartitions of the same ideal strain; just as there is an active heroism, there is also a passive heroism; there is a heroism of absolute affirmation and a heroism of absolute dedication. They can both be luminous and produce plenty of fruits, as far as overcoming human limitations and achieving liberation are concerned, when they are lived with purity and in the sense of an offering. This differentiation of the heroic strain determines the distinctive character of the paths of fulfillment available to men and women. In the case of women the actions of the warrior and of the ascetic who affirm themselves in a life that is beyond life, the former through pure action and the latter through pure detachment, correspond to the act of the woman totally giving of herself and being entirely for another being, whether he is the loved one (the type of the lover—the Aphrodistic woman) or the son (the type of the mother—the Demetrian woman), finding in this dedication the meaning of her own life, her own joy, and her own justification. This is what bhakti or fides, which constitute the normal and natural way of participation of the traditional woman, really mean, both in the order of “form” and even beyond “form” when it is lived in a radical and impersonal way. To realize oneself in an increasingly resolute way according to these two distinct and unmistakable directions; to reduce in a woman all that is masculine and in a man everything that is feminine; and to strive to implement the archetypes of the “absolute man” and of the “absolute woman”—this was the traditional law concerning the sexes according to their different planes of existence.

Therefore, a woman could traditionally participate in the sacred hierarchical order only in a mediated fashion, through her relationship with a man. In India women did not have their own initiation even when they belonged to a higher caste: before they got married they did not belong to the sacred community of the noble ones (ārya) other than through their fathers, and when they were married, through their husbands, who also represented the mystical head of the family.^[3] In Doric Hellas, the woman in her entire life did not enjoy any rights; before getting married, her κύριoς was her father. In Rome, in conformity with a similar spirituality, a woman, far from being “equal” to man, was juridically regarded as a daughter of her own husband (filiae loco) and as a sister of her own children (sororis loco); when she was a young girl, she was under the potestas of her father, who was the leader and the priest of his own gens; when she married, according to a rather blunt expression she was in manu viri. These traditional decrees regulating a woman’s dependency can also be found in other civilizations;^[4] far from being unjust and arrogant, as the modern “free spirits” are quick to decry, they helped to define the limits and the natural place of the only spiritual path proper to the pure feminine nature.

I will mention here some ancient views that expressly describe the pure type of the traditional woman, who is capable of an offering that is half human and half divine. In the Aztec-Nahua tradition the same privilege of heavenly immortality proper to the warrior aristocracy was partaken of by the mothers who died while giving birth, since the Aztecs considered this sacrifice on the same level as the one made by those who die on the battlefield. Another example is the type of the traditional Hindu woman, a woman who in the deepest recesses of her soul was capable of the most extreme forms of sensuality and yet who lived by an invisible and votive fides. By virtue of this fides, that offering that was manifested in the erotic dedication of her body, person, and will culminated in another type of offering—of a different kind and way beyond the world of the senses. Because of this fides the bride would leap into the funerary pyre in order to follow the man whom she had married into the next life. This traditional sacrifice, which was regarded as a sheer “barbarism” by Europeans and by Westernized Hindus and in which the widow was burnt alive with the body of the dead husband, is called satī in Sanskrit, from the root as and the prefix sat (being), from which the word satya (the truth) comes; satī also signifies “gift,” “faithfulness,” “love.”^[5] Therefore this sacrifice was considered as the supreme culmination of the relationship between two beings of a different sex and as the sign of an absolute type of relationship, from the point of view of truth and superhumanity. In this context man provides the role of the support for a liberating bhakti, and love becomes a door and a pathway. According to the traditional teaching the woman who followed her husband in death attained “heaven”; she was transformed into the same substance as her deceased husband^[6] since she partook of that transfiguration (which occurred through the incineration of the material body) into a divine body of light, symbolized among Aryan civilizations by the ritual burning of the cadaver.^[7] We find an analogous renunciation of life on the part of Germanic women if their husbands or lovers died in battle.

I have previously suggested that, generally speaking, the essence of bhakti consists of indifference toward the object or the means of an action, that is, in pure action and in a selfless attitude. This helps us understand how the ritual sacrifice of a widow (satī) could have been institutionalized in a traditional civilization such as the Hindu. Whenever a woman gives herself and even sacrifices herself only because of a stronger and reciprocated bond of human passion toward another being, her actions are still on the level of ordinary events; only when her dedication can support and develop itself without any other external motivation whatsoever, does she truly participate in a transcendent dimension.

In Islam the institution of the harem was inspired by these motivations. In Christian Europe it would take the idea of God for a woman to renounce her public life and to withdraw to a cloistered life; and even in this case, this was the choice of only a very few. In Islam a man sufficed to provide such a motivation and the cloistered life of the harem was considered as a natural thing that no wellborn woman would ever criticize or intend to avoid; it seemed natural for a woman to concentrate all her life on one man only, who was loved in such a vast and unselfish way as to allow other women to share in the same feeling and to be united to him through the same bond and the same dedication. What surfaces in all this is the character of “purity,” which is considered to be essential in this path. A love that sets conditions and requires the reciprocated love and the dedication of a man was reputed to be of an inferior kind. On the other hand, a real man could not know love in this way other than by becoming feminine, thus losing that inner self-sufficiency thanks to which a woman finds in him a support and something that motivates and excites her desire to totally give herself to him. According to the myth Siva, who was conceived as the great ascetic of the mountain peaks, turned Kāma (the god of love) into ashes with a single glance when the latter tried to awaken in him passion for his bride, Pārvatī. Likewise, there is a profound meaning in the legend about the Kalki-avatara, which talks about a woman who could not be possessed by anybody because the men who desired her and fell in love with her turned into women as the result of their passion. As far as the woman is concerned, there is true greatness in her when she is capable of giving without asking for anything in return; when she is like a flame feeding itself; when she loves even more as the object of her love does not commit himself, does not open himself up, and even creates some distance; and finally, when the man is not perceived by her as a mere husband or lover, but as her lord. The spirit animating the harem consisted in the struggle to overcome jealousy and thus the passionate selfishness and the woman’s natural inclination to possess the man. A woman was asked to commit herself to the harem from her adolescence to her old age and to be faithful to a man who could enjoy other women beside herself and possess them all without “giving” himself to any one in particular. In this “inhuman” trait there was something ascetical and even sacred.^[8] In this apparent reification of woman, she experienced a true possession, an overcoming, and even a liberation because vis-à-vis such an unconditional fides, a man, in his human appearance, was just a means to higher ends; thus she discovered new possibilities to achieve higher goals. Just as the rule of the harem imitated the rule of the convents, likewise the Islamic law regulating a woman’s life (according to the possibilities of her own nature, without excluding, but on the contrary, including and even exasperating the life of the senses) elevated her to the same plane of monastic asceticism.^[9] To a lesser degree, an analogous attitude in a woman should be considered the natural presupposition in those civilizations, such as Greece and Rome, in which the institution of concubinage enjoyed a sort of regular character and was legally acknowledged as a way to complement the monogamic marriage and in which sexual exclusivism was overcome.

It goes without saying that I am not referring here to the harem or analogous institutions in mere materialistic terms. I have in mind what the harem meant to the pure traditional idea, and the superior possibility inspiring these institutions. It is the task of Tradition to create solid riverbeds, so that the chaotic currents of life may flow in the right direction. Free are those people who, upon undertaking this traditional direction, do not experience it as a burden but rather develop it naturally and recognize themselves in it so as to actualize through an inner élan the highest and most “traditional” possibility of their own nature. The others, those who blindly follow the institutions and obey and live them without understanding them are not what we may call “self-supported” beings: although devoid of light, their obedience virtually leads them beyond their limitations as individuals and orients them in the same direction followed by those who are free. But for those who follow neither the spirit nor the form of the traditional riverbed, there is nothing but chaos; they are the lost, the “fallen” ones.

This is the case of our contemporaries as far as the woman is concerned. And yet it was not possible that a world that has “overcome” (to employ a Jacobin term) the caste system by returning to every human being his or her own “dignity” and “rights” could preserve some sense of the correct relationship between the two sexes. The emancipation of women was destined to follow that of the slaves and the glorification of people without a caste and without traditions, namely, the pariah. In a society that no longer understands the figure of the ascetic and of the warrior; in which the hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepters; in which the archetype of the virile man is represented by a boxer or by a movie star if not by the dull wimp represented by the intellectual, the college professor, the narcissistic puppet of the artist, or the busy and dirty money-making banker and the politician—in such a society it was only a matter of time before women rose up and claimed for themselves a “personality” and a “freedom” according to the anarchist and individualist meaning usually associated with these words. And while traditional ethics asked men and women to be themselves to the utmost of their capabilities and express with radical traits their own gender-related characteristics—the new “civilization” aims at leveling everything since it is oriented to the formless and to a stage that is truly not beyond but on this side of the individuation and differentiation of the sexes.

What truly amounts to an abdication was thus claimed as a “step forward.” After centuries of “slavery” women wanted to be themselves and to do whatever they pleased. But so-called feminism has not been able to devise a personality for women other than by imitating the male personality, so that the woman’s “claims” conceal a fundamental lack of trust in herself as well as her inability to be and to function as a real woman and not as a man. Due to such a misunderstanding, the modern woman has considered her traditional role to be demeaning and has taken offense at being treated “only as a woman.” This was the beginning of a wrong vocation; because of this she wanted to take her revenge, reclaim her “dignity,” prove her “true value” and compete with men in a man’s world. But the man she set out to defeat is not at all a real man, only the puppet of a standardized, rationalized society that no longer knows anything that is truly differentiated and qualitative. In such a civilization there obviously cannot be any room for legitimate privileges and thus women who are unable and unwilling to recognize their natural traditional vocation and to defend it (even on the lowest possible plane, since no woman who is sexually fulfilled ever feels the need to imitate and to envy man) could easily demonstrate that they too virtually possess the same faculties and talents—both material and intellectual—that are found in the other sex and that, generally speaking, are required and cherished in a society of the modern type. Man for his part has irresponsibly let this happen and has even helped and “pushed” women into the streets, offices, schools, and factories, into all the “polluted” crossroads of modern culture and society. Thus the last leveling push has been imparted.

And wherever the spiritual emasculation of materialistic modern man did not tacitly restore the primacy (typically found in ancient gynaecocratic communities) of the woman as hetaera, ruling over men enslaved by their senses and at her service, the results have been the degeneration of the feminine type even in her somatic characteristics, the atrophy of her natural possibilities, the suppression of her unique inner life. Hence the types of the woman -garςonne and the shallow and vain woman, incapable of any élan beyond herself, utterly inadequate as far as sensuality and sinfulness are concerned because to the modern woman the possibilities of physical love are often not as interesting as the narcissistic cult of her body, or as being seen with as many or as few clothes as possible, or as engaging in physical training, dancing, practicing sports, pursuing wealth, and so on. As it is, Europe knew very little about the purity of the offering and about the faithfulness of the one who gives her all without asking anything in return; or about a love strong enough so as not to be exclusivist. Besides a purely conformist and bourgeois faithfulness, the love Europe has celebrated is the love that does not tolerate the other person’s lack of commitment. Now when a woman, before consecrating herself to a man, pretends that he belongs to her body and soul, not only has she already “humanized” and impoverished her offering, but worse yet, she has begun to betray the pure essence of femininity in order to borrow characteristics typical of the male nature — and possibly the lowest of these: the yearning to possess and lay claims over another person, and the pride of the ego. After that, everything else came tumbling down in a rush, following the law of acceleration. Eventually, because of the woman’s increased egocentrism, men will no longer be of interest to her; she will only care about what they will be able to offer to satisfy her pleasure or her vanity. In the end she will even incur forms of corruption that usually accompany superficiality, namely, a practical and superficial lifestyle of a masculine type that has perverted her nature and thrown her into the same male pit of work, profits, frantic activity, and politics.

The same holds true for the results of the Western “emancipation” of women, which is on its way to infecting the rest of the world faster than a plague. Traditional woman or the absolute woman, in giving herself, in her living for another, in wanting to be only for another being with simplicity and purity fulfilled herself, belonged to herself, displayed her own heroism, and even became superior to ordinary men. Modern woman in wanting to be for herself has destroyed herself. The “personality” she so much yearned for is killing all semblance of female personality in her.

It is easy to foresee what will become of the relationship between the sexes, even from a material point of view. Here too, like in magnetism, the higher and stronger the creative spark, the more radical the polarity; the more a man is a man, the more a woman is a woman. What could possibly go on between these mixed beings lacking all contact with the forces of their deepest nature? between these beings for whom sex is reduced to the physiological plane? between these beings who, in the deepest recesses of their souls, are neither men nor women, or who are masculine women or feminine men, and who claim to have reached full sexual emancipation while truly having only regressed? All relationships are destined to have an ambiguous and crumbling character: the comradely promiscuities and morbid “intellectual” sympathies such as are commonplace in the new communist realism. In other words, modern woman will be affected by neurotic complexes and all the other complexes upon which Freud constructed a “science” that is truly a sign of our times. The possibilities of the world of the “emancipated” woman are not dissimilar: the avant-gardes of this world (North America and Russia) are already present, and give interesting and very meaningful testimonies to this fact.^[10]

All this cannot but have repercussions on an order of things that goes way beyond what our contemporaries, because of their recklessness, will ever suspect.

Footnotes

1. Further metaphysical and mythical references are found in J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: among the philosophers of the Sung dynasty we find the teaching that Heaven “produces” men while the Earth “produces” women; therefore woman must be subjected to man as the Earth is subjected to Heaven.

2. In the erotic symbolism of these traditions the same meaning is expressed through the figuration of the divine couple as they engage in the so-called viparīta-maithuna, an intercourse in which the male is still while the śakti moves her body.

3. “Apart from their husbands women cannot sacrifice or undertake a vow or fast; it is because a wife obeys her husband that she is exalted in heaven.” The Laws of Manu 5.155. It is not possible in this context to discuss the meaning of female priesthood and to explain why it does not contradict the abovementioned example. Female priesthood traditionally had a lunar character; rather than representing another path available to women, it expressed an affirmation of feminine dharma as an absolute elimination of any personal principle so as to make room for the voice of the oracle and of the god. Further on I will discuss the alteration proper of decadent civilizations in which the lunar, feminine element usurps the hierarchical peak. We must also consider the sacral and initiatory use of women in the “path of sex.”

4. In an ancient Chinese text, the Niu-kie-tsi-pien (5) we read: “When a woman leaves the house of her father to join the house of her husband, she loses everything, including her name. She does not own anything in her own right; whatever she has and whatever she is belongs to her husband.” And in the Niu-hien-shu it is said that a woman must be in the house “as a shadow and as a mere echo.” Quoted in S. Trovatelli. Le civilta e le legislazioni dell’antico Oriente (Bologna, 1890), 157–58.

5. Analogous customs are also found among other Indo—European stocks: among the Thracians, the Greeks, the Scythians, and Slavs. In the Inca civilization the suicide of widows, though it was not decreed by a law, was nevertheless common practice; those women who had not the courage to commit suicide or believed they had good reasons not to commit it, were despised by their community.

6. “The woman who is not unfaithful to her husband but restrains her mind and heart, speech, and body reaches her husband’s worlds after death, and good people call her a virtuous woman.” The Laws of Manu 9.29.

7. “In this fire the gods offer a person. From this oblation the man arises having the color of light.” Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.2.14. See also Proclus, In Timeum, 5.331b; 2.65b.

8. In The Laws of Manu it is written: “A girl, a young woman or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons”’ (5.147–48). And also: “A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities” (5.154).

9. The sacral offering of the body and of virginity itself has been sanctioned in a rigorous form in what amounts to yet another cause of scandal for our contemporaries, namely, in sacred prostitution, which was practiced in ancient Syrian, Lician, Lidian, and Theban temples. The woman was not supposed to offer her virginity out of a passional motive toward a given man; she was supposed to give herself to the first man who tossed her a sacred coin within the sacred enclosure, as if it were a sacred offering to the goddess of the temple. A woman was supposed to get married only after this ritual offering of her body. Herodotus (The Histories, 1.199) noted that: “The woman goes with the first man who throws her a coin, and rejects no one. When she has gone with him, and so satisfied the goddess, she returns home, and from that time forth no gift however great will prevail with her.”

10. According to some statistics gathered in the 1950s (C. Freed and W. Kroger), an estimated 75 percent of North-American women are “sexually anesthetized,” while their “libido” has allegedly shifted in the direction of exhibitionist narcissism. In Anglo-Saxon women, the neurotic and typically feminine sexual inhibition was typical of their culture and was due to their being victims of a false ideal of “dignity” in addition to the prejudices of puritan moralism. The reaction of the so-called sexual revolution has only led the masses to a regimen of quick, easy, and cheap sex treated as an item of consumption.