The Sacred Feminine: The Christian and Thelemic Perspectives

The Hodegetria

Since we are in a Marian devotional month in the liturgical calendar, I have of course been meditating a lot on the Virgin Mary and her allegorical purpose. Personally, I believe that she is one of those figures in the Bible that cannot be taken at all literally, and that she must solely be interpreted allegorically. Otherwise she makes no logical sense, and of course we must always put our faith to trial by the fires of intellect and experience. In recorded history prior to the invention of artificial insemination, there are no births by Virgins as far as I am aware. There are many in mythology, however! So quite clearly Our Lady, like many figures from the Bible, is a mythological personage who expresses a sublime philosophical idea regarding nature. This is not to lower her position or to degrade, for by all means she is still mightily exalted. Thus we must regard her nature as such, and not view her with certain mundane interpretations.

I think what my first issue thinking about Mary was that she is known as "the mother of us all." Now, I understand that to many this would have to do with the fact that Mary is also the Church, and through her we are baptized in the name of Christ. Thus we are "reborn." But are we not already baptized in Christ merely by existing? For "through Him all things were made." He is that which is, and through Him beings have their ability to exist. Nothing may be said to exist unless it partakes in a fundamental union with the Logos. (I prefer to refer to Christ as the Logos for that is what He represents. It is better to use general terms such as these in order to not exclude anyone who is not necessarily "Christian." Because of course the Logos/Christ is not a concept only contained in Western thought, and we should remember this.) Again, the Logos is that fundamental defining purpose for an existing being. It is its DNA, if you will - the coding for its manifested existence.

But the Logos in and of itself is useless. Like a man with no female partner, it cannot create by its own means. Therefore it must create for itself a feminine counterpart, or a passive extension and image of itself. If we look at the Sephiroth, this is clearly illustrated for us. Kether, sometimes referred to as the first Logos, first mover, etc., begets Chokhmah and Binah, the Father and the Mother respectively. Kether is the original point of unextended, impartial existence. Nothing can be said about it other than the fact that it exists. Chokhmah, the more overt Logos and the first sephirah on the Pillar of Mercy, is Kether's first more defined force or wisdom. Now we can say something about the original point of existence - we can characterize its will. However, we cannot really understand it. Binah, understanding and the first sephirah on the Pillar of Severity, teaches us the limitations of this wisdom and thereby balances out Chokhmah's infinite stream of force. The harmony between these two factors, the masculine active will and the feminine passive will, or the Will of God with the Image of God, results in the birth of something definitive and glorious. It is the birth of the Word made Flesh.

I hope now you see the obvious correlation between the Sephirotic/Neo-Platonic philosophy and the Christian Mystery of the Incarnation. They are strikingly similar. The Virgin Mary is a representation of Binah, the Divine Feminine, and Christ is more or less Chokhmah and Kether sort of conglomerated, or the Divine Masculine. It's difficult to really fit Christ into the Sephiroth because they're simply different systems of interpretation, and they do not intersect seamlessly. Christ is somewhat akin to the Ain Soph, Kether, Chokhmah, and Tiphareth all at the same time. I believe it depends on how we are talking about Him. If we refer to the Logos as that which is coeternal with the Father, then we are referring to the Ain Soph. If we mean Him to represent the Cornerstone of any existing being, then we mean Kether. If we speak of Him as the Life or Will of any existing being, then we mean Chokhmah. And finally, if we mean to speak of Him as Jesus Christ, the dying and resurrecting man-God, then we mean to say Tiphareth, or consciousness at the level of Tiphareth.

Regardless, the Virgin Mary still fits very neatly into the category of Binah, or even the Ain Soph Aur. For our purposes, however, let us stick to the idea of Binah, and leave the Ain Soph Aur for even more lofty discussions. Frankly, the whole business of Ain-anything is really confusing, and is meant to be so. Being at the very top of the Tree of Life, it is the most hidden, the most esoteric, the most difficult to describe, and yet it best describes the idea of God as unmanifested, unmade Being. But leaving all that aside, let us instead return the original Marian myth: the Annunciation. In the story, Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel, who pronounces her to be the future Mother of God. She humbly accepts the divine command issued by the archangel, calling herself "the handmaid of the Lord," and as a result is infused with the Holy Spirit and conceives Jesus. By giving birth to God, Mary in effect gives birth to all things that are made, and essentially baptizes all those things in the waters of her womb in the name of Christ. Note that Mary's name has the obvious etymological connection to the word "mare" in Latin, which translates to "sea." St. Jerome was the first Christian writer to write about this connection prominently, and it is from him that we get the imagery for the famous Marian hymn Ave maris stella (Hail, Star of the Sea). Mary therefore has an overt connection to the ocean and the womb. In Genesis as well, remember that "the Spirit of God moved across the waters" and brought life from chaos.

Atu III The Empress represents the Feminine
as the Vessel of Nature. Her letter is Daleth
which means "door." Her path on the
Sephiroth connects Chokhmah to Binah.

Mary then is not just a humble maiden mother. She is the womb of Nature, and is the Feminine will to live. She is rightly called "the door of life," for through her all things are born. The sacred Word that Christ represents is "Life," and she is its vessel. When she accepts the Divine Will to Live, she accepts Life in its most chaotic form. Remember that Chokhmah is barely defined, and Kether has virtually no definition. Chokhmah in particular is simply the infinite force and vigor of Life itself, the original impartial point of existence extending its energy outwards. With the third point, Binah, that energy is confined in the shape of a triangle - a metaphorical womb. Mary is associated with virtue and prudence because she Understands the proper course for Life. She is coequal with the Father, Chokhmah, and is the final direct expression of Kether, the Crown. By her means, Kether is able to manifest itself in space and time, and thereby experience itself as a made Being.

However, because she is "virtuous" does not mean she is so in any human sense of the word. Virtue is highly subjective, and in this case the example she sets for us by her humility does not mean we should humble ourselves to the point of absurdity. For example, women should not necessarily be housewives and remain subservient to men. Chastity is not necessarily a "good" thing, for by it we restrict the force of Life. Mary's passivity is the acceptance of Life in whatever form it can come in. She is understanding of God's wisdom because she knows how best to limit it for its own wellbeing. This limitation is more or less known as death. The Divine Feminine is the great recycler, being both the Fertile Mother and the Sterile Mother. She is fairness and justice in its highest notion, for she is balanced. For as much life she brings forth she also brings forth as much death. But this is how existence is allowed to remain intact. Can you imagine if nothing died? It'd be anarchy! In some ways we should be really thankful for death, even though it's obviously something most of us don't look forward to (myself included).

Now to bring in Mr. Crowley on this. Crowley equates Binah with the Whore of Babalon, and Chokhmah with Father Chaos, which of course all sounds very Satanic and icky. But at the same time, these descriptions make sense. Chokhmah has no sense of restriction, whereas Binah is the original notion of restriction. However, Binah does not restrict herself from impregnation with God's Will, no matter what form it decides to come in. We are more than aware of the diversity of Life - Life constituting all existing things, be they "alive" or "inanimate." The Divine Will to create Life then is equally diverse, and infinitely so. Binah/Mary as the humble Feminine accepts these creations and births them, but on the condition that they must eventually die. Binah/Mary as the Virgin remains ever fruitful, for her womb is never deprived of its fertility. She loves all of her creations equally, and subjects all of them to the same fair treatment out of this love. The love she has extends beyond the individual and encompasses the Universe. This is how the desires of the individual are not necessarily equivalent to what is actually best for that individual, given their relationship to the Universe at large.

So those of us who are lucky enough to raise their consciousness to the level of Binah effectively "die." They lose all sense of individuality, because they have ascertained their connection with the World. Their personal desires and identities are rendered meaningless in the sight of all that is made. Binah, like the Virgin Mary, shows us the Way of God, which is in Christ. She is our Guide, our Fountain of Life, our Protector, our Mother. The medieval tropes that continue to survive in modern Marian prayers certainly have some validity to them. By knowledge of the Mother we may come to knowledge of the Father/Son, and through knowledge of Him, we attain knowledge of God.

Gabriel with his scroll dispenses the
Will and Word of God to the Virgin
in the form of the Holy Spirit.

I'm sure some of you are still feeling weird about the correlation I have drawn between the Virgin Mary and the Whore of Babalon. I admit it is a stark comparison. First of all, remember that Crowley's whole linguistic methodology was based on juxtaposition. He used old concepts and renamed them things people found repulsive. By doing this he teaches us a great lesson - we cannot decide what God should and should not be based on subjective personal or cultural preference. God simply Is. Second of all, remember what Crowley says about existence above the Abyss, that "contradiction is unity." The concepts of virginity and whoredom are polarized against each other. But who can really say one is "positive" and the other "negative?" Above the Abyss, their contradiction becomes unity, and they come to represent the same thing impartially.

I think what is most important about all this is to see the foolishness of Christian morality regarding sexuality and women. It is not necessarily God's Will that everyone should be chaste, nor is it possible that he prefers chastity to sexuality. It is not reasonable to say that woman is below man. Outside of the realm of sexuality and women, it is also foolish to say that baptism only occurs through the Church, when simply by being born we are baptized through Mary in the name of the Logos. Etc.

Limiting the Circle

There is a particularly disconcerting section of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians – 4:8 through 4:9.

“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

While this is at first a seemingly lovely passage, it makes no logical sense after further review. If God is infinite unmanifested Being, an eternal, infinite circle, if you will, how can we say anything definitive about Him? Furthermore, no one shares the same ideas of “purity,” or “goodness.” Your concepts of these things may be entirely different from mine, and so therefore we cannot take Paul’s advice literally. We cannot suggest that there are universal concepts of “goodness” which apply to God. Rather, more generally, we must accept that God can be expressed by the sum total of potential goods, as cognitively defined by an infinite number of potential people.

Therefore, we must also include things that are “bad” in the understanding of God, for what makes something “bad” other than the fact that it does not immediately satisfy the needs of an individual? One man’s “bad” is another’s “good.” The philosopher Nietzsche wrote extensively on this concept, and of course he is absolutely correct. I could say that a given bacteria is “bad” because it makes me sick, but from that bacteria’s point of view, my white blood cells are “bad” because they’re trying to kill the bacteria. But of course my blood cells in my opinion are quite “good” because they ensure my survival. Survival and security are perhaps the most important things to us on the most fundamental part of our beings. Our emotional needs, such as our need for love and attention, stem from our need for security. When we feel like we do not have these, we are more susceptible to committing faults against others.

Needless to say, God cannot be understood as the “supreme Good,” unless we conceptualize that as being the sum total of all potential goods, which would be infinite. Since of course, all of these would be different, nothing definitive can be said about the nature of God’s goodness. We can only agree in as neutral a sense possible that God is “good.”

The individual perspective is terribly important, and it is a shame Christianity fails to realize this. Its message of self-sacrifice and community building has been so warped that it no longer makes any sense. If we want Christianity to sound less like babbling idiocy and more like a sensible philosophy, we must weed through a tremendous amount of muddled muck. For a religion that is supposed to be so “standardized,” its symbols and myths are too confused, and do not clearly state an obvious doctrine that resonates with human experience as a whole. It projects a very Western mindset. Of course there are many aspects of Christianity that people across the world connect to, particularly ideas of suffering, charity, and equality.

But the human experience at the biological level, the natural level, does not agree with it. In fact, nature, the manifestation of God’s divine law, wholly rejects most of Christianity’s notions. Competition, death, and violence are inherent building blocks of nature. Nature produces itself through these methods, and since they seem to threaten our individual survival, we proclaim them to be bad and use religion to invent a hypothetical desired future-world where none of these things exist. God will supposedly wipe these things clean and there will only be “goodness,” and “peace.” But what would be the consequences of this? How would we deal with overpopulation of every species? The unfortunate reality is that disease, war, and famine are absolutely necessary for every species. God is not just in any moral or human sense of the word, but He is exact. The justice of God ensures that creation is measured appropriately, so that the universe as a whole maintains a perfect equilibrium. Otherwise, imbalance would lead to chaos, which would lead to collapse. So our wistful notions of “peace” are impossible, and are ignorant of reality. We are moving from God and knowledge of Him even further when we focus on goals such as these.

Peace, then, must be on the individual level. Everyone knows of the inner battles we all wage within ourselves. One part of us wants one thing, another part the opposite. Our biological needs contest with our moral desires and vice versa, and thus our decision-making is cluttered and unfocused. But we can ask God for peace in this regard. We can ask the Lord to grant us the power of His Son, His Will and His Word, who represents a sublimely focused willpower. The Divine Will is that which is capable of binding our own disparate will into one complete force. By doing this we attain a state of great power, calm, and wisdom. No longer do we feel insecure and threatened by others, but instead we feel prepared to face greater challenges. We begin to trust that the doors that were once closed will open for us. This is the sense in which peace may lead to progress. This is the kind of inner peace that will lead to better, purer relationships between humans. But “world peace” will never do this. That sort of peace could only be instituted by governments with pens and papers, and could do nothing to truly bring the minds of men and women to peace. Discord starts at the individual level and emanates outward from us, affecting all around us. Fix the issue at the source and spread peace around you in this fashion. But do not believe that peace should come from others sacrificing or effacing themselves for your sake, so that you might have it easier. Sometimes they are wrong and sometimes you are wrong, but these are easier to deal with if at least one of the individuals can approach the situation with calmness, security, and clarity, and not with unchecked, foolish emotions.

Religions have the very unfortunate tendency to dumb doctrine down into myths and stories so that the masses may have access to their wisdom. The issue arises when the masses don’t have the courage or intelligence to see beyond the veil of these stories by checking them against their own experiences and knowledge. It is true that there are some things about God that we cannot logically understand, particularly as was previously demonstrated. Very little can be intelligently and definitively said about God, if anything at all. But logic must not be seen as pointless in terms of spirituality. We must treat life as a science, in which we learn about the world through experimentation. Every experience is an experiment – some yield fruit, others do not. Everyone has the right to choose for themselves which experiences they wish to strive for in order to reap the greatest result. Let no one consider these experiences “bad” or “good,” but only as neutral experiments. Do not invoke God in order to enforce a specific morality. Doing so is to blaspheme against His very nature – to limit His Being. We can no longer say that Judeo-Christian values are the only important values in the world, for we know that many people have gotten along fine without them. Instead, let us yearn to know a God that is far mightier and less petty. Let us desire the Lord who is All, who is Being unmade, and not the idealistic invention of individuals.