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"In The Beginning We Were All Created Female" Monica Sjoo
"In the beginning . . . was a very female sea. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all life-forms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean-nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. Charles Darwin believed the menstrual cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea. And, because this longest period of life's time on earth was dominated by marine forms reproducing parthenogenetically, he concluded that the female principle was primordial. In the beginning, life did not gestate within the body of any creature, but within the ocean womb containing all organic life. There were no specialized sex organs; rather, a generalized female existence reproduced itself within the female body of the sea."
Before more complex life forms could develop and move onto land, it was necessary to miniaturize the oceanic environment, to reproduce it on a small and mobile scale. Soft, moist eggs deposited on dry ground and exposed to air would die; life could not move beyond the water-hugging amphibian stage. In the course of evolution, the ocean - the protective and nourishing space, the amniotic fluids, even the lunar-tidal rhythm - was transferred into the individual female body. And the penis, a mechanical device for land reproduction, evolved.
The penis first appeared in the Age of Reptiles, about 200 million years ago. Our archetypal association of the snake with the phallus contains, no doubt, this genetic memory.
This is a fundamental and recurring pattern in nature: Life is a female environment in which the male appears, often periodically, and created by the female, to perform highly specialized tasks related to species reproduction and a more complex evolution, a freshwater crustacean, reproduces several generations of females by parthenogenesis; the egg and its own polar body mate to form a complete set of genes for a female offspring. Once annually, at the end of the year's cycle, a short-lived male group is produced; the males specialize in manufacturing leathery egg cases able to survive the winter. Among honeybees the drone group is produced and regulated by the sterile daughter workers and the fertile queen. Drones exist to mate with the queen. An average of seven drones per hive accomplish this act each season, and then the entire male group is destroyed by the workers. Among whiptail lizards in the American South-west, four species are parthenogenetic; males are unknown among the desert grassland, plateau, and Chihuahua whiptails, and have been found only rarely among the checkered whiptails.
Among mammals, even among humans, parthenogenesis is not technically impossible. Every female egg contains a polar body with a complete set of chromosomes; the polar body and the egg, if united, could form a daughter embryo. In fact, ovarian cysts are unfertilized eggs that have joined with their polar bodies, been implanted in the ovarian wall, and started to develop there.
This is not to say that males are an unnecessary sex. Parthenogenesis is a cloning process. Sexual reproduction, which enhances the variety and health of the gene pool, is necessary for the kind of complex evolution that has produced the human species. The point being made here is simply that, when it comes to the two sexes, one of us has been around a lot longer than the other.
In The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, Mary Jane Sherfey, M.D., described her discovery in 1961 of something called the inductor theory. The inductor theory stated that "All mammalian embryos, male and female, are anatomically female during the early stages of fetal life." Sherfey wondered why this theory had been buried in the medical literature since 1951, completely ignored by the profession. The men who made this herstory-making discovery simply didn't want it to be true.
Sherfey pioneered the discussion of the inductor theory; and now, with modifications based on further data, its findings are accepted as facts of mammalian - including human - development. As Stephen Jay Gould describes it, the embryo in its first eight weeks is an "indifferent" creature, with bisexual potential. In the eighth week, if a Y-chromosome-bearing sperm fuses with the egg, the gonads will develop into testes, which secrete androgen, which in turn induces male genitalia to develop. In the absence of androgen, the embryo develops into a female. There is a difference in the development of the internal and external genitalia, however. For the internal genitalia - the fallopian tubes and ovaries, or the sperm-carrying ducts - "the early embryo contains precursors of both sexes." In the presence or absence of androgen, as one set develops the other degenerates. With the external genitalia, "the different organs of male and female develop along diverging lines from the same precursor." This means, in effect, that the clitoris and the penis are the same organ, formed from the same tissue. The labia majora and the scrotum are one, indistinguishable in the early embryonic stages; in the presence of androgen "The two lips simply grow longer, fold over and fuse along the midline, forming the scrotal sac."
Gould concludes: "The female course of development is, in a sense, biologically intrinsic to all mammals. It is the pattern that unfolds in the absence of any hormonal influence. The male route is a modification induced by secretion of androgens from the developing testes."
The vulnerability of the male newcomer within the female environment is well known. Vaginal secretions are more destructive to the Y-bearing sperm. The mortality rate is higher among neonate and infant males. Within the womb the male fetus, for the first two months, is protected by being virtually indistinguishable from a female. After that, it must produce large amounts of the masculinizing hormone in order to define itself as male, to achieve and to maintain its sexual identity. For all we know the Near Eastern myths upon which our Western mythologies are built, those which portray the young god or hero battling against a female dragon, have some analog here, in utero, where the male fetus wages a kind of chemical war against rebecoming female.
For now, it is enough to say that "maleness" among mammals is not a primary state, but differentiates from the original female biochemistry and anatomy. The original libido of warm-blooded animals is female, and the male - or maleness - is a derivation from this primary female pattern. Why, then, did the medical men, the scientists, take longer to figure out this basic biological fact than it took them to split the atom? And why, once this fact was noted, did they turn around and bury it in professional silence for ten years, until a woman dug it up again? Why indeed.
For about two thousand years of Western history, female sexuality was denied; when it could not be denied it was condemned as evil. The female was seen as divinely designed to be a passive vessel, serving reproductive purposes only. In one not-too-ancient dictionary, "clitoris" was defined as a "rudimentary organ," while "masculinity" equalled "the Cosmic generative force" . . . ! With Freud, female sexuality was not so much "rediscovered" as pathologized. Freud dismissed the clitoris as an undeveloped masculine organ and defined original libido as male. Clitoral eroticism was reduced to a perverse neurosis. Even after Masters's and Johnson's laboratory studies were published in Human Sexual Response in 1966, their findings were not integrated into psychoanalytical theory. In Mary Jane Sherfey's research during that period, she found not one work of comparative anatomy that described - or even mentioned - the deeper-lying clitoral structures; yet every other structure of the human body was described in living detail. Even today, with our relative sophistication of 1987, we are frequently whistled at by magazine headlines that promise breathless articles announcing the discovery of a new "spot" - a G-spot, an X-spot - located within the vagina. Within all these new "spots" exists the old wistful desire to deny the existence of the clitoris as a trigger-organ of female orgasm.
Why? There is the generalized, traditional fear of female sexuality. Further, there is discomfort with the similarity, with the common origin, of the female clitoris and the male penis. Women are used to hearing the clitoris described as an "undeveloped penis"; men are not used to thinking of the penis as an overdeveloped clitoris. Finally, and most seriously, there is a profound psychological and institutional reluctance to face the repercussions of the fact that the female clitoris is the only organ in the human body whose purpose is exclusively that of erotic stimulation and release. What does this mean? It means that for the human female, alone among all earth's life-forms, sexuality and reproduction are not inseparable. It is the male penis, carrier of both semen and sexual response, that is simultaneously procreative and erotic. If we wanted to reduce one of the sexes to a purely reproductive function, on the basis of its anatomy (we don't), it would be the male sex that qualified for such a reduction, not the female. Not the human female.
But these are only biological facts. These are only biological realities. As we know, facts and realities can be, and are, systematically ignored in the service of established ideologies.
Throughout the world today virtually all religious, cultural, economic, and political institutions stand, where they were built centuries ago, on the solid foundation of an erroneous concept. A concept that assumes the psychic passivity, the creative inferiority, and the sexual secondariness of women. This enshrined concept states that men exist to create the human world, while women exist to reproduce humans. Period. If we argue that data exists - not solely biological, but archaeological, mythological, anthropological, and historical data - which refutes the universality of this erroneous concept, we are told to shut up; because something called "God" supports the erroneous concept, and that's all that matters. That's the final word. Throughout the world, throughout what we know of history, something called "God" has been used to support the denial, the condemnation, and the mutilation of female sexuality. Of the female sex, ourselves. Today, in parts of Africa - predominantly among African Muslims, but also among African Christians and Jews, and some tribal beliefs - young girls are still subjected to clitoridectomy. This surgery, often performed by older women with broken glass or knives, excises the clitoris, severing the nerves of orgasm; the operation is intended to force the girl to concentrate on her vagina as a reproductive vessel. Infibulation, a more thorough operation, removes the labia minora and much of the labia majora; the girl is then closed up with thorns or required to lie with her legs tied together until her entire vaginal orifice is fused shut, with a straw inserted to allow passage of urine and menstrual blood. On the wedding night the young woman is slit open by a midwife or her husband; further cutting and reclosing is performed before and after childbirth. Complications from these surgeries are numerous, including death from infection, hemorrhage, inability to urinate, scar tissue preventing dilation during labor, painful coitus, and infertility due to chronic pelvic infection. In 1976 an estimated 10 million women were involved with this operation. And something called "God" justified it; a "God" who supposedly created young girls as filthy sex maniacs who must then be mutilated to turn them into docile breeders.
The word "infibulation" comes from the Latin fibula, meaning a "clasp." Those civilized Romans, great highway builders, also invented the technology of fastening metal clasps through the prepuces of young girls to enforce chastity. This practice was copied by Christian crusaders during the early Middle Ages in Europe; they locked up their wives and daughters in metal "chastity belts" and then took the keys with them while they were gone - often for many years - fighting for "God" in the Near East.
And, lest through hypocrisy and racism we dismiss these practices as merely "Barbaric" or "Ancient," we must recall that clitoridectomies were performed in the last century on young girls and women in both Europe and America. This surgery, very popular with nineteenth-century Victorians, was inflicted on any female considered to be "oversexed," or as a punishment for masturbation, or as a cure for "madness." These determinations were all made by male relatives, male physicians, and male clerics, and the women involved had no legal say in the matter.
These are extreme examples of the repression and mutilation of female sexuality, always sanctioned, however remotely and dishonestly, by something called "God." All the other repressions and mutilations - of the body, of the mind, of the soul, of our experienced female selves - are so well known and documented that they need no numeration at this point; we can all make our own lists. The point is this: Wherever repression of female sexuality, and of the female sex, exists - and, at the present writing, this is everywhere on earth - we find the same underlying assumptions. These are ontological assumptions - assumptions made at the very root of things - about the nature of life itself. They are (1) that the world was created by a male deity figure, or God; (2) that existing world orders, or cultures, were made by and for men, with God's sanction; (3) that females are an auxiliary sex, who exist to serve and populate these male world orders; (4) that autonomous female sexuality poses a wild and lethal threat to these world orders, and therefore must be controlled and repressed; and finally (5) that God's existence as a male sanctions this repression. The perfect circularity, or tautology, of these assumptions only helps to bind them more securely around the human psyche. That they are as erroneous as they are universal seems to pose no problem to their upholders. After all, wherever we go on earth, every intact institution - religious, legal, governmental, economic, military, communications, and customs - is built on the solid slab of these assumptions. And that's a pretty entrenched error.
In the post-World War II United States - as well as in Europe and most of the world generally - we've gone through a secularizing period in which some of these assumptions have been loosened up, and even been made to crumble, under questioning. But now the backlash is upon us. Today, spokespeople for various fundamentalist religious beliefs use modern media to broadcast a very old idea: that female sexuality - i.e., feminists, and feminist demands for abortion, contraception, reproductive autonomy, childcare, equal pay, psychological integrity - constitutes a threat to "our civilization"; and this amounts to a "Blasphemy against God." Whores of Babylon, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and the "menace of world communism" all somehow get subliminally mixed up in this feminist threat - for some very good historic and psychological reasons - which we will explore later. For now, it is enough to say that "God" and "civilization" are loaded concepts (loaded with dynamite!) that can always be brought in to end an argument that cannot otherwise be refuted. Or, for those who don't lean too heavily on "God," or who major in "civilization," you can always quote an anthropologist!
For, just as established religions assume the maleness of God, just as Freud and psychoanalysis assumed the maleness of libido, so have the social sciences - and in particular anthropology - assumed the generic maleness of human evolution. Both popular and academic anthropological writers have presented us with scenarios of human evolution that feature, almost exclusively, the adventures and inventions of man the hunter, man the toolmaker, man the territorial marker, and so forth. Woman is not comprehended as an evolutionary or evolutionizing creature. She is treated rather as an auxiliary to a male-dominated evolutionary process; she mothers him, she mates him, she cooks his dinner, she follows around after him picking up his loose rocks. He evolves, she follows; he evolutionizes, she adjusts. If the book jackets don't give us pictures of female Homo sapiens being dragged by the hair through 2 or 3 million years of he-man evolution, we are left to assume this was the situation.
This, despite the known fact that among contemporary and historic hunting-and-gathering people, as among our remote hunting-and-gathering ancestors, 75 percent to 80 percent of the group's subsistence comes from the women's food-gathering activities. This, despite the known fact that the oldest tools used by contemporary hunters and gatherers, and the oldest, most primal tools ever found in ancient sites, are women's digging sticks. This, despite worldwide legends that cite women as the first users and domesticators of fire. This, despite the known fact that women were the first potters, the first weavers, the first textile-dyers and hide-tanners, the first to gather and study medicinal plants - i.e., the first doctors - and on and on. Observing the linguistic interplay between mothers and infants, mothers and children, and among work-groups of women, it is easy to speculate on the female contribution to the origin and elaboration of language. That the first time measurements ever made, the first formal calendars, were women's lunar-markings on painted pebbles and carved sticks is also known. And it is thoroughly known that the only "God"-image ever painted on rock, carved in stone, or sculpted in clay, from the Upper Paleolithic to the Middle Neolithic - and that's roughly 30,000 years - was the image of a human female.
In 1948 The Gate of Horn was published in Britain; in 1963 it was published in America, retitled Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age. In this pioneering work, archaeologist and scholar G. Rachel Levy showed the unbroken continuity of religious images and ideas descending from the Cro-Magnon peoples of the Upper Paleolithic period in Ice Age Europe, through the Mesolithic and Neolithic developments in the Near East, and down to our own historical time. As Levy noted, these early people are lost to us in the mists of time; but their primal visions, images, and gestalts of human experience on this planet still resonate in our psyches, as well as in our historic religious-ontological symbols. These Early Stone Age people "bequeathed to all humanity a foundation of ideas upon which the mind could raise its structures." [5] And what were these primal human images and ideas? The cave as the female womb; The Mother as a pregnant earth; the magical fertile female as The Mother of all animals; the Venus of Laussel standing with the horn of the moon upraised in her hand; the cave as the female tomb where life is buried, painted blood red, and awaiting rebirth. Levy shows the continuity of these images and symbols through the Late Neolithic Near Eastern rites and mythologies, and their endurance 30,000 years later in "modern" religions. In Christianity, for example, with its central image of the birth of the sacred child, in a cave-like shelter, surrounded by magic animals; and, especially in Catholicism, the icon of the great mother who stands on the horned moon and awaits the rebirth of the world.
The evidence leaves no doubt that these images were at the origins of what we call human psychological and spiritual expression. Levy's book is a masterpiece; it received great praise upon both its British and American publications; and has since been virtually bypassed and ignored by the anthropological-archaeological-academic establishments. Why? Because her evidence is irrefutable. It shows with clarity - and in the solidity of stone and bone - that the first 30,000 years of Homo sapiens' existence was dominated by a celebration of the female processes: of the mysteries of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth; of the analogous abundance of the earth; of the seasonal movement of animals and the cycles of time in the Great Round of The Mother. The Gate of Horn is as close as we can come to reading the "sacred book" of our early human ancestors. And it confirms what too many people do not want to know: that the first "God" was female.
Since Levy wrote, the tendency has been to relegate these Old Stone Age and Neolithic images to the psychological realm - they've become "Archetypes of the unconscious" and so forth, while anthropological writers proper, both academic and popular, continue to explain physical, real human development solely in terms of the experiences of the male body in hunting, aggression, and toolmaking. Thus the female images - which are there, and cannot be denied - are sideswiped, reduced to "The subjective," "The mythic realms"; and thus the first 30,000 years of our human history is denied to us, relegated to a "mind trip" or "psychological software." Even among feminists, in recent years, there has arisen doubt that these images and symbols might be anything but "mythology"— i.e., unrealities.
To approach our human past - and the female God - we need a wagon with at least two wheels: one is the mythical-historical-archaeological; the other is the biological-anthropological. A strong track has already been laid down for the mythical-historical-archaeological wheel; milestones along that track, along with G. Rachel Levy's great work, are J. J. Bachofen's Myth, Religion and Mother-Right, Robert Briffault's The Mothers, Helen Diner's Mothers and Amazons, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, Robert Graves's The White Goddess, O. G. S. Crawford's The Eye Goddess, Sibylle von Cles-Reden's In the Realm of the Great Goddess, Michael Dames's Silbury Treasure and Avebury Cycle, Marija Gimbutas's The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe; and most recently Elizabeth G. Davis's The First Sex; Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood; Phyllis Chesler's Women and Madness and About Men; Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born; Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father, Gyn-Ecology, and Pure Lust; Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature; Anne Cameron's Daughters of Copper Woman—and many many more, including the richly useful Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.
The other side of our wagon - the biological-anthropological side - has almost no wheel and no track; not because there is no important place to go in that direction, but because the physical-cultural anthropologists are off somewhere else, busily mapping the evolution of Tarzan. There is no body of anthropological work based on the evolution of female biology. With rare exceptions, there have been no attempts whatsoever to study the evolution of human physiology and cultural organization - from pre-hominid to "modern man" - from the perspective of the definitive changes undergone by the female in the process of that evolution. Popular books on this subject, by Lionel Tiger, Desmond Morris, et al., are invariably male-oriented, treating the evolution of the female as sex object only, from monkey-in-heat to hot bunny. One delightful exception is Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman; during 12 million years of dry Pliocene, Morgan speculates, the female prehominid took to the oceans, surviving in the warm and food-filled coastal waters and during this experience underwent a sea-change from knuckle-walking, rear-sex primate to upright human sexual body, to which the male primate responded by becoming man. Morgan argues convincingly that the human species survived the long Pliocene drought through the cooperation and social invention of the evolving hominid females in their adaptation to the sea; academic "experts" ignore this theory, but they have no other explanation for our Pliocene survival, for our successful evolution from ape to human during this difficult period, or for the many ways in which our human bodies resemble the bodies of sea mammals, rather than primates.
In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, historian William Irwin Thompson points out that early human evolution occurred in three critical stages: (1) hominization, in which our primate bodies became human, not only in walking upright and freeing the hands, but specifically in our sexual characteristics and functions; (2) symbolization, in which we began using speech, marking time, painting and sculpting images; and (3) agriculturalization, in which we domesticated seeds and began control of food production. And, as Thompson writes, all three stages were initiated and developed by the human female. The symbol-making and agricultural stages have been studied, and the originating role of women in these stages is known; it is sexual hominization which, as yet, has barely been explored.
Why? Why indeed. Because sexual hominization is almost exclusively the story of the human female. The mechanics and anatomy of male sexuality, after all, haven't changed greatly since the primates made love. The revolution in human sexuality - the revolution that made us human - resulted from evolutionary changes that occurred in the female body. These changes were not primarily related to mammalian reproduction, but to human sexual relationship. No one knows the order in which they occurred, but taken together, as an evolved cluster of sexual characteristics, they constitute a truly radical sexual metamorphosis undergone by the human female:
Elimination of the estrus cycle, and development of the menstrual cycle, meant that women were not periodically in heat, but capable of sexual activity at any time. Pregnancy could occur during a part of the cycle; but for most of the cycle sex could happen without necessarily resulting in pregnancy. Among all other animals, the estrus cycle determines that copulation always results in pregnancy, and has no other than a reproductive purpose.
Development of the clitoris and evolution of the vagina meant a greatly enhanced sexuality and orgasmic potential in human females compared to all other animals.
The change from rear to frontal sex, we can imagine, created an enormous change in relations between the sexes; frontal sex means a prolonged and enhanced lovemaking period, and what might be called the personalization of sex. The emotion-evoking role of face-to-face intercourse in the development of human self-consciousness has yet to be evaluated (she turned around and looked him in the eye: and there was light!)
Development of breasts added to woman's potential for sexual arousal; further, combined with frontal sex, no doubt the female's maternal and social feelings were also now aroused by the personal lover, whose body was now analogous to the infant's body at her breast.
As Thompson points out, such radical changes in the female body alone were enough to trigger the hominization of the species. Human beings, with these changes, became the only creatures on earth for whom copulation occurs - can occur, anytime - for nonreproductive purposes. Human sex thus became a multipurpose activity. It can happen for emotional bonding, for social bonding, for pleasure, for communication, for shelter and comfort, for personal release, for escape - as well as for reproduction of the species. And this is one of the original and major, determining differences between humans and all other animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fishes, worms . . . for whom copulation exists only and solely for species reproduction.
The human race has been definitively shaped by the evolution/ revolution of the female body into a capacity for nonreproductive sex.
This is not just a physical fact. It is a cultural, religious, and political fact of primary significance.
Many feminists today are unsure whether studies of evolutionary biology, or of religious mythology, can have political relevance for contemporary women. We believe that nothing could be more politically relevant than knowing why we got where we are now, by seeing how we got here, and where we began.
In the beginning, the first environment for all new life was female: the physical/ emotional/ spiritual body of The Mother, and the communal body of women - young girls, grown women, older women working together. When hunting-and-gathering people move, the infant is carried bound close to The Mother's body; when they settle, the women form an "Inner circle" campsite of women and children. The socialization process begins here.
Human culture is marked by a strengthening and prolongation of the relation between mothers and offspring. For its first year the human child is virtually an "embryo" outside the womb, extremely vulnerable and totally dependent. Female group behavior - the cooperative care-sharing among mothers and children, older and younger women, in the tasks of daily life - emerges from the fact of this prolonged dependence of the human child on the human female for its survival. Males help but they also leave; the male body comes and goes, but the female presence is constant. Females train, discipline, and protect the young; beyond infant care, the maintenance and leadership of the entire kin-group is the task of women. The female animal is always on the alert, for on her rests the responsibility not only of feeding the young, but of keeping the young from being food for others. She is the giver and also the sustainer of beginning life. Among humans, males help with protection and food acquisition; but it is the communal group of females that surrounds the child, in its first four to six years of life, with a strong physical, emotional, traditional, and linguistic presence. And this is the foundation of social life and human culture.
The popular image of early human society as being dominated - indeed created - by sexist male hunters and ferocious territorial head-bangers just doesn't hold water. If the first humans had depended solely on despotic and aggressive male leaders, or on several males in chronic, ritualistic contention for power—human society would never have developed. Human culture could never have been invented. The human presence on earth would never have evolved.
The fact is that it was from this first inner circle of women - the campsite, the fire-site, the cave, the first hearth, the first circle of birth - that human society evolved. As hominids evolved into Paleolithic Homo sapiens, and then into settled and complex Neolithic village people on the time-edge of "civilization," these tens of thousands of years of human culture were shaped and sustained by communities of creative, sexually and psychically active women - women who were inventors, producers, scientists, physicians, lawgivers, visionary shamans, artists. Women who were also The Mothers - receivers and transmitters of terrestrial and cosmic energy.
We have to understand how and why these ancient millennia of womancultures have been buried - ignored, denied, passed off as "mythology" or "primitive prehistoric origins" - by Western male historians who insist (and often really believe) that "real history" began only about five thousand years ago with the relatively recent institutions of patriarchy.
A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who, though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater. A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. Several languages bear a strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas. They frequently use the same word to signify indifferently the modes of astonishment or admiration and those of terror. The Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus (thunderstruck) is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the French etonnement, and the English astonishment and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder? They who have a more general knowledge of languages, could produce, I make no doubt, many other and equally striking examples.
This article pivots around a particular image - the feminine water spirit, embodied in her forms of mermaid, nixie 1 or water sprite - through the thought-architectures of the philosophers Jung, Deleuze and Guattari; it traces the filaments that connect these philosophers to this feminine image, as well as to one another, unfurling the imbrication and lineage of their ideas. Within the thought-structures of Deleuze, Guattari and Jung, her fluid figure is elucidated as an emblem of technology, as a metaphor that refers to the unconscious and its technological involutions; her humanoid-fish form providing an image of thought or way of talking about the transformation of form, and the flitting, swimming valences at work in the unconscious. Through this impartation, I am intimating a secret world, suffused with magic and myth, a philosophical vision of reality in terms of an aesthetic sensibility in the vein of Magical Realism. Using the thought-architectures of Jung, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as with some inspiration from Nietzsche, I will also render an original interpretation of the figure of the mermaid as a liberatory emblem.
This article elaborates the mermaid or nixie as a nexus connecting the thought-realms of Jung, Deleuze and Guattari in the manner that follows. For Carl Jung, the mermaid 3 embodies an archetype that makes reference to the unconscious. The most prominent archetype that corresponds to the unconscious in Jungian thought is the sea. Based on the notion of the unconscious as the sea, Jung develops several interpretations of the mermaid archetype: he interprets the mermaid as an anima and as an alchemical metaphor that refers to the transformative structure of the unconscious and the process of coming to consciousness, known as individuation.
Playing on the notion of the mermaid as emblem of the transformative structure of the unconscious and figure of individuation, I suggest that the mermaid can be interpreted as the figure that traverses the oceanic realm of the unconscious. She is not stuck within in, as a neurotic is: her body, a hybrid of fish and human, has adapted to its watery conditions. She is part human, part Overhuman, in Nietzschean terms: she has overcome herself. In Jungian language, she has overcome the challenges and obstacles posed by the unconscious. In this sense, the process of navigating, and therefore overcoming the personal unconscious will be elucidated as a process of becoming-mermaid.
Jung's Watery Underworld
The way the unconscious elicits its manifestation in archetypal form most prominently is through the image of water. The sea as the symbol of the collective unconscious (Jung, 1969: 18) refers to a vast expanse that lurks beneath conscious awareness, a watery abyss. Water also refers to a principle of generation the generative element that underlies life. Water is the primary constituent of the human form, and the most basic human necessity for life. Jung also interprets water as a maternal symbol, in the sense that it is the unconscious that engenders consciousness. The unconscious is thus conceived by Jung, in an archetypal or metaphorical sense, primarily as a feminine, watery underworld. She is the generatrix of all, the womb from which all consciousness emerges. Jung also sees water as connected with the Tao, as symbol of the Tao, making reference to the "water dragon" of Tao ; Jung sees the transformative, vitalist principle of the Tao as connected with the collective unconscious. Jung's conceptions of the unconscious, as vitalist energy and maternal generatrix, all indicate a principle of creative generation, gestation and transformation
Jung's Anima Mermaid
Based on the notion of the unconscious as an abyssal sea, Jung develops a few different conceptions of mermaids:
Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures
soon loom up; fishes, presumably, harmless dwellers of the deep - harmless, if
only the lake were not haunted. They are water-beings of a peculiar sort.
Sometimes a mermaid or nixie gets ensnared in the fisherman's ne
A female human-fish hybrid: she is "an even more instinctive version of a magical feminine being I call the anima".
In Jung's theories, the anima is a formative archetype of the unconscious, alongside the ego, the shadow and the self. The anima (for men) and animus (for women) embodies the qualities of the opposite sex that dwell within the unconscious of the individual. Every man has an internal feminine archetype that mediates his relation with women, and this same dynamic is at work with women and their animus, acting as an interface for their interactions with the male form. This anima is conceived of as the unconscious, feminine aspect of the man, his secret feminine personality, or stated in another way, the feminine personification of his unconscious, her character forged from the bank or repository of all of his relations with woman. She is a mode of the unconscious, a shape that the unconscious assumes: an internal, autonomous gridwork that orders perception, imposed and projected upon the feminine forms that he encounters in the external world. The autonomous nature of the anima is a function of her capacity to invoke irrational emotional affect and instinct in the man. She generates the subject's moods and reactions, exists as the source of spontaneity and impulse. Her character is the harbinger of fate for her hapless subject, moored to her unconscious influence. Under her sway, the subject encounters conflict, both from within and in the external world, but the source of his conflict stems from within, as that which conditions all of the subject's experiences with women. She is the "life behind consciousness," in one of its forms. She can be a source of danger or inspiration, and needs to be integrated, as an aspect of the unconscious personality, into conscious life.
The anima exists in the realm of the divine. All that she touches is rendered numinous: sparkling with danger, the taboo, and magic. She wants life, in both its good and bad aspects. She is immortal and daemonic, a personal angel or demon. She can appear as angel that indicates towards the highest meaning, imparting profound wisdom, or can manifest as a chaotic irrationality characteristic of the elfin realm from whence she derives. The more that the deeper meaning underlying her chaotic manifestation is realised, the more that the tethers enforced on her subject lose their hold and the anima's character of impetuosity and compulsivity recede to reveal the vista of a "new cosmos". The anima and animus stem from the collective unconscious, and lead towards it. Such a localisation accounts for their "strangeness." Jung asserts that the archetypes bring to conscious awareness something buried deep in the psychic past, the ancestral mind and its form of perception (1969: 286). The anima is our psychic inheritance from ancestral time, containing within itself the history of religion and language. Jung's mermaid call lures one towards integration, and to the realm of the collective unconscious.
Jung's Alchemical Melusine
Jung also elaborates the mermaid anima as an alchemical figure. Inspired by alchemy, Jung develops a psychological interpretation of the alchemists' doctrines. Alchemy represents to an ancient science and philosophy that endeavoured to transmute ‘base' metals such as lead into gold. Jung shows that the alchemists sought an all-pervading essence or quality that exists within the human, symbolised by sea water: in Jung's interpretation, their sought-after elixir was the collective unconscious:
For the alchemists it was wisdom and knowledge, truth and spirit, and its
source was in the inner man, though its symbol was common water or seawater. What they evidently had in mind was a ubiquitous and all-pervading
essence, an anima mundi and the 'greatest treasure,' the innermost and most
secret numinosum of man. There is probably no more suitable psychological
concept for this than the collective unconscious"
By Diane Rosen
Creativity is discussed first in terms of Carl Jung's pioneering psychoanalytic theory of opposites, as mirrored in the night sea journey archetype: a descent into the unknown where bounded consciousness and the limitless unconscious collide. Galvanized by its very contradiction, this "journey" is the crucible of personal development and all creative change. Continuing the theme of constructive errancy, creativity is then considered in terms of mind wandering, a shift of attention inward that heightens unconscious divergent processing. Creativity is a form of deterministic chaos that thrives on the conflict between conscious-unconscious, logical-irrational, cognitive-affective processes over time.
THE NIGHT sea JOURNEY
Descending into the unconscious, the conscious mind puts itself in a perilous position. It is in the situation of the primitive hero who is devoured by the dragon: a diminution or extinction of consciousness, an abaissement du niveau mental. The value of the imagination lies in its polyvalence, since every image allows endless transpositions... The poeisis of the dream [and creative work] is characterized by the paradoxical identity of opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum, which Jung exploits when exploring the self in relation to the collective unconscious.
What alchemists called the "chaos" or prima materia is the primeval source of all undifferentiated potentiality, often represented by darkness or the sea. Jung identifies this fertile primordial state with the unconscious. Psychological and creative transformation was seen to occur through a process emulating the latent vitality of synthesized opposites, embodied in ancient depictions of prima materia as a paradoxical androgynous being: Hermaphroditus, the original unity and matrix of all potentialities, the world-creating spirit; the Greek god Eros, "a divine Urkind whose powers are not yet differentiated"; Yin-Yang, the dark feminine and light masculine principles, each inherent in the other, driving the other's potentiality into actuality; Adam before the creation of Eve, fashioned of clay that was part of the original undifferentiated chaos. Even pre-eminently male or female divinities were considered to have a dual nature, because androgyny came to signify the prototypical union of opposites in seamless, self-contained wholeness, an archetype of universal distribution to which all possibilities belong.
With the Enlightenment, notions of lateral multiplicity were eclipsed by a hierarchal worldview; the privileging of reason permeated every discipline, including the arts. Nineteenth century aesthetics, for example, valued the austerity of draftsmanship as a timeless expression of masculine (Apollonian) intellect, while color was disparaged as frivolously feminine, hedonistic (Dionysian) and a threat to masculine culture. Harking back to Eve, "woman" was seen as the personification of nature's irrational and destructive forces. Rejection of this perceived chthonic power was rationalized as the logical response to disruptive unconscious material and unbridled emotion. "The Apollonian line," asserts social critic Paglia, "separates objects from each other and from nature. Disgust is Apollonian fear at a melting borderline". At just such borderlines, however, is where all change occurs.
The archetypal night sea journey represents this generative process of transformation at porous divides. Known from primitive times and in myths of all cultures, it almost universally follows a dialectical pattern Campbell calls the "nuclear unit of the monomyth": complete separation from the world as a form of self-annihilation, potentially harmful or illuminating; penetration to and confrontation with a primal source of power; and a life-renewing return. Jung envisioned several fundamental psychoanalytic themes in terms of this archetype, including the healing-destructive aspects of introversion, and deathrebirth as a psychological trajectory through unconscious realms impenetrable to reason. The night journey offers a useful frame for probing creativity as well, beginning with the perilous descent below conscious awareness.
DEPARTURE
Through a spontaneous activation of unconscious contents, new interests and tendencies appear which have hitherto received no attention... During the incubation period of such a change we often observe a loss of conscious energy, seen most clearly before the onset of certain psychoses and in the empty stillness which precedes creative work.
From spiritual quests to dreamscapes and the imagination, the primordial night journey figuratively maps a great variety of personal travails and transformations. It begins in total withdrawal of interest from the known world and disappearance into darkness, outside of time. Iconic examples of such retreat include Odysseus in the underworld; Jesus entombed; Jonah swallowed by a whale; and the mythic sun-hero's undersea passage inside the belly of a dragon. Creative behavior is certainly based on a similar dissociation that simultaneously deactivates consciousness (the "light" of reason), and animates the prolific unconscious ("darkness"). Jung's term for the complex dynamic that unites the two is the transcendent function, a key organizing principle for which transcendent denotes not a metaphysical quality but a psychological function, comprised of other complex functions, and organically facilitating state transitions by a mutual confrontation of opposites.
These opposites manifest as the known self and its alterity, corresponding to the dynamic syzygy of conscious and unconscious content. Eyes shut against the external world, the dreaming/ creative self plunges downward into the night sea, a nether region where familiar narratives of established identity are disrupted, and ego is annihilated. The antithetical shadow-self comes forth, forming an oppositional dyad "constituted dialectically by the confrontation with an alterity that is both indigenous and alien to itself... In the chaos, confusion and flux of dreaming, fixed boundaries of subjectivity are dissolved". For this transpersonal being there is no longer a unified "I," no center, no striving for order, connection or logical understanding. Instead, disjointed shards of data can freely self-organize into new narratives that will be endogenously defined.
The second, liminal stage of the sea journey is equivalent to alchemical solve, the breaking down of an essential elixir in the retort by repeated distillations and reconstitutions. Inside the belly of the sea-monster (i.e. the enormity of divergent energies), complex systems of the psyche disintegrate and the hero undergoes a period of struggle. As the embodiment of life energy flowing back to its fundamental, unconscious source, he is engulfed by its infinite, often disquieting, contents; restoration of equilibrium (the convergent whole) is not assured. Jung likens this tension of opposites to a state of physical recoil: a backward movement and compression of the body, the better to leap forward (reculer pour mieux sauter). Aligned with this preparedness-to-spring is the inherent psychological readiness-for-action, a pivotal condition for return to progression. This edge-of-chaos energy is the stimulus for a dialectics of change.
Tuesday June 15th.
The Conscioussness of Moby Dick by Avoidbeing
MOBY DICK IS THE SPARK OF DIVINE GNOSIS: blubber as those densified sheaths of matter that surround the warm interior, husks of the unseen being. If such an epic sprawling novel is said to contain within it a biblically allegorical mythos; it would only be of the true esoteric route to note that every biblical allegory has its selfsame gnostic roots, hermeneutically bubbling up from such aquatic and critical depths. The descents into cetological minutiae is that same descent of the soul into matter: as Ishmael wrestles with the duality of "docile, verdant peace of the land" and the "crazy cannibalistic chaos of the sea"; he draws his analytical rationality towards that ocean he can only know from a ship; so too Science draws its Pequodic boundary to stave off the abyssal waters of Nun, mystic night of the soul. The artifacts of the mundane realm, which Melville turns into an art of Digression (loci of contemplation), are only existent in contrast with the mysticism of the transcendent ocean, which is one with the Sky-as the archaic consciousness of Queequeg's when he reveals his cosmology: "the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens". Though critical readings of the 'homoerotic' are not correct, on the surface, since the homoerotic is revealed not as within sexuality, but outside of it, when Ishmael is purifying that divine Semen of the Whale that represents gnosis: he goes into an ecstatic trance; a frenzy in which all of mankind, not homoerotic but Homo-Eros, becomes unified: "let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness". As for Ahab; testament to the old figure and a figure of the Old Testament, has been 'dismembered': much like Osiris, where the loss of his 'members' is the forgetting of the Self, only to be 'remembered' in anamnesis of the soul. Mystical is his every word that isn't bound to the locale of the ship: Ishmael says "the body is the lees of my better being", "my shadow here on earth is my true substance", Ahab says "the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy", he gnostically laments the scandal of autogenesis: the ontological loneliness of God who so longs to know himself in the void of himself.
Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.