Polarity of Baphomet

Let us see what part the much-tormented question of Sex plays in this deeper conception of life that we are trying to reach. We must follow our usual procedure and first try to get at the roots and underlying causes, taking as broad and as scientific a view of the subject as we can. We find the male and female are really the positive and negative aspects in nature – that is to say, that male is the positive or electrical quality and female is the magnetic, receptive or negative quality. When the two fuse, creative action occurs. The word ‘negative’ is here used in its electrical application, and means that which does not act but holds power. It does not represent futility or weakness, but reserve force. The whole of the universe is built upon this fusion of ‘male’ and ‘female’. From the greatest planet to the tiniest chemical cell the same process goes on. It is really as if the world were an electric pole containing vast numbers of other electric poles of all sizes down to the most minute. Let us consider this question of electricity for a moment. Quite simply, you have a current of electricity passing down a ‘pole’ or straight line – the pole can be a bar or iron, a planet or a person; one side of the pole is the ‘positive’ or electrical side, and the other side is the ‘negative’ or magnetic side. The magnetic side draws to itself, absorbs and retains power. When it contacts the positive – i.e. the action, or electrical – side of the pole, it gives off this power, combustion occurs, a spark is lit, and force is generated. It is exactly this process which causes a planet to rotate, moves a car, creates a child, or makes a plant grow. The positive electrical male side of nature is represented by the acids, and the passive female magnetic side of nature is represented by the alkalis. Before a planet or a car moves, the right constituents of acid and alkali must be assembled, to create the little explosions of electrical life-force which brings action about. It is also this identical driving-force which motivates our bodies. The tiniest cell in our bodies is an electric battery in a state of combustion; just as our whole body is also electrically polarized. The acid part of our bodies is the action part, the muscles; the alkali part of us is the blood, which holds and carries the power to those muscles. When in a state of health the two are rightly balanced, but at death the power which holds them apart (the pole) is withdrawn and the acid floods the alkaline blood, causing the whole mechanism to become static. In chemistry you must take an alkali element and combine it with an acid element if you want to create a compound which is strong and useful. If you want to make a bomb (which is only condensing the production of force into a small space) you must also bring together an acid and an alkali – when they are allowed to meet the bomb explodes. The same thing happens when a well-matched man and woman meet – attraction leads to combination and then action! It must not be inferred, however, that a man is all electrical and a woman all magnetic. On the contrary, these two qualities run in juxtaposition through every cell and atom. But all existing things are pre-eminently of one sex, although containing both interiorly in various degrees. The planet Mars, for instance, is pre-eminently masculine, but of course is held in manifestation by its pole of positive and negative. Our earth has its pole running through it, called North and South at its two ends, and, of course, one side of the earth is electrical and the other magnetic. So also a man and a woman, though pre-eminently male-electric and female-magnetic, have each what we might call their poles running through them. The right side of our bodies is electric and the left side magnetic – the right side the side of action and the left the female or heart side. The subdivision of these two continues to infinity in our bodies, until each tiny cell has its pole, and even each atom, as we know, is revolving round its pole or axis. Thus throughout the whole of life from the greatest to the tiniest we have the same process going on. The female magnetic power attracts the male electric force and creation and action takes place. Now, as this process runs throughout everything we may expect to find an expression of it in our own brain, and we do! The human brain has a shape curiously like the human embryo, and it contains a part which is male and a part which is female. When these two parts are co-ordinated by mental training and concentration, and made to co-operate, a most wonderful development takes place, and the mind becomes inspired, forceful and creative. This was well known to the very ancient peoples. In their own remarkable way they worshipped the means by which a human being can contact ‘God’ within his own brain. They worshipped those symbols of the male-female power in the head. Succeeding generations, in their ignorance, debased this worship into the Phallic worship of sex in its physical sense. Our ideas about the things that matter have grown smaller and smaller down the centuries, until at present they are almost non-existent! We can now begin to glimpse the truths lying behind the worship, in many ancient civilizations, of the great Trinities of Life, The Christians adopted them, and gave us God (the Life-force), the Virgin or Mother (the wisdom or stored power), and the Son, the result of that blending, the One who acts and achieves. In most ancient religions we can trace an appreciation of this Trinity. The alchemists expressed the Triangle in their own way, as Mercury, Sulphur and Salt (our cell-salts being that which builds and acts within our won bodies). Then there is also our Sun, the male electrical positive force whose rays strike the magnetic female Moon; the combination of both rays reaching the earth causes fertilization, movement and growth. For a long time we have been accustomed in our little limited way to think of sex only in the primitive terms of our power of physical procreation, not as the vase process on which the whole universe is built. Infinitely petty and restricting taboos have shamefacedly locked up the entire question in a secret box in our minds. We muddle along in complete ignorance, oblivious that the box contains our greatest jewels. Let us now take out these jewels of ours and study their value. We are confronted throughout history with certain symbols. One of them is the serpent, which was always much in evidence wherever the ancient temples devoted to wisdom flourished. Since the old story of Adam and Eve, the serpent has represented two things – Knowledge and Sex – thus hinting at a close connection between them. And the secret is that the Creative Force within us is one single force, whether it be used for physical or mental ends. We have the choice as to which way we shall direct this force, upwards or downwards. In material-minded or primitive man it continues to be used purely for procreation or sensual gratification. But as man aspires to higher ideals, as he yearns to create mentally and live in the spirit, the force is gradually drawn upwards to the creative principles in the brain. This force is called by the Easterns the Kundalini, and is likened to a serpent of fire lying coiled at the base of the spine. If man steadily purifies his mind and nature through living chastely and moderately, he is able to magnetize the Kundalini serpent upwards through the channel of his spine, until finally it reaches the Masculine-Feminine principles of the brain and fires them into co-ordination. The man is then filled with inspiration and becomes attuned to the inner world of Wisdom. This can only be accomplished with the help of the ‘Kundalini serpent’. Perhaps Christ gave a hint of this when he said: ‘Be ye wise as serpents.’ Men and women have, therefore, the choice as to what they will do with this power within them. Shall they exhaust it in the various self-indulgences of sex-life, both mental and physical, or shall they use it to become creative in the realms of the spirit and higher mind – a force for good? It is this tremendous choice which every human being has to face. Usually they face it unconsciously or in the dark, because of the utter helplessness of present-day education in these matters. Hardly one of the many pitfalls surrounding them is properly explained. It is easy to convince ourselves of the fact that it is one and the same force which feeds either the procreative organs or the brain. The gland specialists have brought much to light proving this. They tell us that the Pineal Gland in the head acts as a brake upon sex development. As we have said, it was once a third eye. Now it regulates the action of light upon the body. If it is diseased or inactive we get precocious sex-development. The Pituitary Body, in the head, is the gland of intellectuality, promoting the mathematical and artistic powers. When it is deficient sexual abnormalities result. We also have the evidence of our numberless lunatic asylums, peopled largely with those whose brains have deteriorated through sex excesses of various kinds. On the other hand we have many cases of people who apparently have gone made as the result of fanatical piousness. This needs another explanation. Here we have com up against the result of what might be termed SPIRITUAL GREED. A person who is greedy and self-indulgent on the physical plane will naturally not change his character just because he decides that more benefit will accrue from a pursuit of spiritual assets. It is possible to be greedy for spiritual food which is as yet undeserved. Very often people attempt to make in a few years the spiritual progress for which they should have been patiently working for all their lives. The result is that the body has not had time for its vibrations to become purified and raised to a higher tempo, and the brain is still full of the dregs of worldly and impure thoughts. When, therefore, by a forcing process, the Kundalini serpent of fire is prematurely driven up the spine, burning away all dross as it goes, and it arrives within a brain unfitted to receive it, parts of the brain cannot stand this bath of fire and perish with the sudden burning of the dross they still contain, and various forms of derangement ensue. Many highly dangerous breathing exercises originating in the East are designed with purpose of arousing the Kundalini. They bring disastrous results when used by ignorant or materially minded people. Sometimes the same issue is achieved when those with mixed motives fling themselves violently into the various religious cults and ‘isms’; we hear that their final foal turns out to be a mental home. Yet another mishap can befall the aspirant who is not sufficiently whole-hearted. If he once arouses the 'serpent’, and then subconsciously repents of his endeavours, the serpent rushes downwards and plunges his owner into the worst of orgies and excesses. Unfortunately this sometimes happens to saintly men who have been just a little too ambitious for spiritual gain. We have to realize that steady, patient, even and balanced progress is the surest way; we must not expect to come to results too easily. Greed of the mental or spiritual body will produce a congestion and sickness on those planes as surely as its counterpart will be on the physical. To try and attain mental expansion while still the victim of inhibitions and repressions is like expecting to become a ballet-dancer while still refusing to use certain limbs or muscles. We have so fully to realize the glories of possible attainment that all lesser desires simply fade out – they do not have to be repressed. It is only in the purity of a one-pointed mind (the root-meaning of pure is ‘complete’) that we can welcome as one of the greatest events of our life the safe awakening of the Kundalini serpent. The same truth applies in the relation between the sexes, where again sincerity of purpose and wholeheartedness are the determining factors of resulting happiness. When a spiritually minded man and woman fall in love with each other there occurs a blending and a union between the seven-fold bodies of each of them, culminating in spiritual as well as physical creation. This gives an ecstasy and fulfilment seven times greater than that which the average physical union can bring. Force and power are engendered an hundredfold more on all planes through having been conserved instead of frittered away. Both the children and all creative work resulting from such a union would be incomparably superior to the average. If every child were brought up with understanding and ambition focused upon such an ideal we should soon have a heaven upon earth. As it is, the subject of sex is so little understood that any irregularities in its manifestation consign the victim to suffering in ignorant and misunderstood wretchedness. The interplay of the masculine-feminine positive-negative principle throughout out bodies is not yet fully grasped. The ancient wisdom teaches that man, having a positive masculine physical body, has a feminine negative etheric body. This may be why he has in some ways much less staying power in the matter of pain and endurance than woman, who owes her endurance to the fact that in spite of her negative feminine physical body she has a positive or male etheric body. Man’s astral or emotional body is masculine, and therefore active and under his control, whereas woman’s astral is negative and absorbing. It is at the mercy of outside influences, and that is why she can be dragged down to lower depths in some ways than a man can. A drunken woman is more terrible than a drunken man. It would seem to follow, then, that man’s mental body has a preponderance of the feminine quality and woman’s of the masculine, and perhaps that explains why wise men have always considered that woman can actually take the lead and inspire them from the mental level if she but realizes it and fits herself to do so. Man is meant to learn sensitivity and intuition from woman, and woman is meant to learn steadiness and honesty from man. A perfect man or a perfect woman must be a complete blending of the qualities of both. That is why we are told that at the end of evolution there will be no differentiation of the sexes. Meanwhile, the process of this integration brings about temporary aberrations which result, through misunderstanding, in homosexuality and other irregularities. We are taught that men and women change their sex at various incarnations. This change sometimes produces a masculine woman or a feminine man, until the readjustment is complete. It is necessary that these things are better understood. Then people, instead of giving way helplessly to any abnormalities which they discover within themselves, and living a life of shame-faced yet defiant indulgence, will learn to master such tendencies and turn them to good account. When we consider that, from the greatest to the smallest, all progress and evolution depends upon the interplay of the male-positive and female-negative principle, and how this especially applies to the mental and spiritual creative powers to which mankind is dedicated to strive, we begin to see how much futile stagnation is caused either by people who refuse any relationship with the opposite sex, such as nuns and monks, or by those who indulge in homosexuality. The seven bodies of man and woman merge creatively when they work or play together, entirely irrespective of the sexual act, and stimulate and nourish one another in a way which is essential to the bringing through of creative inspiration. In the temples of ancient wisdom, before their degeneration, the priests worked with their female oracles to achieve their greatest results. When men and women are brought up to be sensitively alive to this interplay of the forces between them, they will obtain so much fulfilment from them that the act of procreation will fall back quite naturally to its normal use. Sex-antagonism and other inhibitions will disappear. There will be produced the perfect working unit, built up of Woman-Wisdom-Strength and Man-Power-Action.