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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sex=The Unknown Quantity
+       The Spiritual Function of Sex
+
+Author: Ali Nomad
+
+Release Date: September 3, 2009 [EBook #29896]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEX=THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Ritu Aggarwal, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      SEX = The Unknown Quantity
+
+                    THE SPIRITUAL FUNCTION OF SEX
+
+     A New and Startling Interpretation of the Meaning, Scope and
+       Function of Sex as Seen and Interpreted From the Inner or
+          Cosmic Standpoint. A Work That Should Revolutionize
+           the Thought of Today in its Relation to the Vital
+                 Mystery of Sex in All its Aspects. It
+                  Presents a Practical Solution to the
+                     Sex Problems of Everyday Life.
+
+                                 _By_
+
+                              ALI NOMAD
+                  [DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL]
+
+                           _Author of_
+
+  "COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT", "THE DEAD SPEAK"
+       "REVELATIONS OF THE HAND", "GHOSTS", "HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL"
+           "PERSONAL MAGNETISM", "PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY", ETC.
+
+
+                          CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+                                 1916
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1916, by
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY.
+    Copyrighted and Registered in Stationers' Hall, London, England.
+                         (All Rights Reserved)
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT IN ALL COUNTRIES SIGNATORIES TO THE BERNE CONVENTION.
+
+
+                          THE STERLING PRESS.
+
+
+                               DEDICATED
+                        TO THE CHILD OF TOMORROW
+                       THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT
+
+
+
+
+                         PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD
+
+
+TO OUR READERS:
+
+We feel justified in claiming this work marks an epoch in the advanced
+thought of human evolution. Nothing has ever been written dealing with
+the problem of Sex which is at once so illuminating, convincing and
+satisfying. To our knowledge this particular view of the sex-subject
+has never before been presented, and, perhaps it could not have been,
+owing to the fact that it is only _now_ in these days of higher
+thought, that such a view could be understood.
+
+The author, Ali Nomad, is already well known to progressive readers as
+the writer of "Cosmic Consciousness," or, "The Man-God Whom We Await;"
+a work that has made its author famous by the reprint of its many
+editions.
+
+There are signs of a new order in the relation of the Sexes already
+indicated upon the horizon of the World's consciousness as the result
+of the present world-conflict. _Today people are as ignorant of the
+subject of Sex as they are of God._ Both of these must be understood
+if the race is to progress beyond its present stage. Otherwise we
+shall pass into the long sleep of oblivion like all civilizations in
+the past leaving future generations to grapple with the same world
+problems.
+
+True or _perfect_ marriage is the most important attainment in the
+life of the individual.
+
+The author demonstrates that perfect marriage is a scientific
+possibility and that legal marriage and divorce simply conform to
+civil laws. He very clearly outlines the reason why civilization makes
+little or no progress in dealing with the social evil and other sex
+problems.
+
+The publishers place this book before an intelligent public,
+believing, that more _real_ knowledge can be gained by its study, than
+by any other known method, because
+
+_First._ The reader is brought face to face with himself, and nature.
+
+_Second._ The reader can demonstrate the truth of the propositions set
+  forth.
+
+_Third._ The methods, rules, and laws have been verified by
+  intelligent men and women who have lived the life.
+
+_Fourth._ "Sex," The Divine Principle which all human beings should
+  understand, has been presented in plain simple terms, and elucidated,
+  so that the reader _cannot_ fail to understand the true path of
+  moral progress.
+
+This volume is not a romance, a fairy tale nor a dream intended to
+entertain or amuse, but a scientific instruction which will elevate
+the individual and the race, develop self respect, self control,
+morality and love. If the propositions presented by the author are
+correct--let the standards be changed; _if_ the propositions are
+_incorrect_, they will not disturb the standards of today.
+
+                                                       THE PUBLISHERS.
+
+
+
+
+                       SEX--THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
+                     The Spiritual Function of Sex
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                              INTRODUCTION
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+  SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL                                         19
+
+    Sex the fundamental basis of the universe; sex in organic
+    life; the law of attraction and repulsion in animal and plant
+    life; sex attraction and repulsion in human life; how
+    differentiated and why; some secrets of modern chemistry; the
+    cosmic law of involution and evolution; the symbol of the
+    serpent in a new light; what is "the power of the gods"
+    referred to in ancient mythology; some erroneous ideas in
+    regard to the sex function; the philosophy of restraint; the
+    inner sex-function and its outward expression compared; the
+    senses as avenues of inspiration; the creation of form and
+    sense-objects; what constitutes a "perfect and complete
+    being?" the theory of "counterparts" and its spiritual
+    significance; is procreation the highest function of sex;
+    what constitutes the fundamental law of love? the various
+    expressions of the love-nature from inorganic to organic
+    life.
+
+                                CHAPTER II
+
+  FROM SEX WORSHIP TO SEX DEGRADATION                               29
+
+    Sex the origin of all religious ceremonies; from
+    nature-worship to sex-worship; the history of Ancient forms
+    and ceremonies of worship; how sex-worship has survived the
+    ages; how it thrives today in modern religion; early stages
+    of civilization in relation to Sex; the antiquity of the
+    symbol of the virgin and child; its occult significance in
+    symbolism; the reality of the "bi-une God;" some secrets of
+    the Ancient Egyptians in regard to the function of sex; the
+    esoteric cause of the Egyptian talismanic and symbolical
+    revival today; the secret or esoteric meaning of the
+    swastika-cross; why Aum is always typified by a circle;
+    ancient forms of oath-taking and why; the source of
+    sex-energy spiritual; how and where the idea of
+    "blood-atonement" and vicarious sacrifice originated; the
+    beginning of sex-degradation.
+
+                                CHAPTER III
+
+  PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE                          53
+
+    The consecutive order from ancient sex-worship to modern
+    civilization; the real causes of race-advancement in the
+    cosmic tidal-wave, and what it portends; why conditions are
+    as they are today in regard to sex-life; the psychic forces
+    in their relation to sex-life; some fallacies in regard to
+    Eugenics; why Greek and Roman civilization failed; why and
+    how modern civilization need not fail; why women seek to
+    avoid motherhood; women of two types; the awake and the
+    asleep; the cosmic office of the Female Principle; its
+    relation to Creation; how the superman and woman will differ
+    from the undeveloped type; what is meant by "half-gods;" are
+    women of today lacking in the love-nature; will the race die
+    out? If so, why, and if not why not? How did the "Holy
+    Family" differ from other families?
+
+                                CHAPTER IV
+
+  THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING                                75
+
+    The relation of ancient marriage customs to religion; why
+    human evolution must necessarily be slow; ancient marriage
+    customs and their spiritual interpretation; why marriage
+    ceremonies have always prevailed; customs of all races
+    compared; why the institution has a permanent place in Social
+    Evolution; the symbolism of the visible world; why Science
+    and Mysticism agree spiritually; the origin of "variation"
+    the fundamental cause of woman's subjugation; when men defend
+    "outraged honor," is it a primitive or a primordial instinct?
+    the history of monogamy; the monogamic idea and the ideal
+    monogamy; the history and cause of polygamy; the evolution of
+    the "old-maid" idea and the psychic cause of this evolution;
+    the path of the virtuous woman in ancient days; the elevating
+    power in the dowry system; the two great purposes which this
+    custom has served.
+
+                                CHAPTER V
+
+  THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION                        93
+
+    Why the monogamic ideal of marriage is right; how, when and
+    where, will marriage be lasting; the basic principle of
+    sex-union; when the bonds of matrimony are truly "holy;"
+    attraction and cohesion two distinct phases of chemical laws;
+    ideas of a modern writer; how all morality has come from the
+    ideal of marriage; some erroneous ideas of spirituality in
+    relation to the sex-function; when and why Man becomes
+    immortal; the custom and the hidden meaning in the wedding
+    ring; the symbolism of ancient marriage customs; the esoteric
+    meaning of "orange-blossoms;" the veil; the ring; the crown;
+    why these have endured throughout the ages; the interior and
+    hidden meaning of Rosicrusian symbols in respect to the
+    sex-function; women admitted to the Order and why; the
+    mystery and marvel of the symbolic "dove;" why it plays so
+    important a part in marriage customs and lover's phrases; the
+    symbolism of the ark; the egg; the drinking-cup and other
+    persisting accompaniments to marriage customs.
+
+                                CHAPTER VI
+
+  CONTINENCE; CHASTITY; ASCETICISM: THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE   103
+
+    The Ancient Greek and Roman idea of the sex-relation; why the
+    asceticism of the Dark Ages arose; why the Church instituted
+    celibacy; why the Church retained the pagan idea of "the
+    virgin;" the effect this has had upon the growth and power of
+    Christianity; lives of celebrated saints in the light of
+    Occult wisdom; why and in what way the essentials of
+    Christianity are like other religious ideals; who is "the One
+    True and Only God?" the interior meaning of the word
+    "chastity;" the difference between chastity and asceticism;
+    the unbroken line connecting ancient ideas of sex, with
+    modern; the attitude of religious systems toward women; why
+    women are supporters of the churches in modern days; the
+    "mystic bride" and the mystical meaning; William James
+    comments on the spiritual ecstacy of St. Teresa; Swedenborg
+    on "Conjugal love;" trances; ecstacies; and visions of
+    saints; the term "virgin," and its origin; the evolution of
+    sex-love to spiritual love.
+
+                                CHAPTER VII
+
+  SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?                                  119
+
+    Why we hear of "affinities" and "soul-mates" today more than
+    formerly; the great distinction between these two words; the
+    psychic forces behind woman's invasion of business fields;
+    the basis of "the unwritten law;" why affinity marriages
+    fail; the hidden reason girls look for a "rich husband;" the
+    final outcome; when and how women are "ruined;" the mystery
+    of the hermaphrodite; what is the true significance of the
+    term "androgynous?" mistaken ideas of morality in dress and
+    manners; what sort of beings constitute "the kingdom of God?"
+    the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics; the wisdom of the
+    "initiates;" the spiritual quality in folk-lore; the time
+    when "temptation" will be no more; when "naked and unashamed"
+    the race will re-enter the lost Paradise.
+
+                                CHAPTER VIII
+
+  THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED                                       137
+
+    Science and mysticism the same at root; Christian mysticism
+    versus scientific postulates; the interior meaning in fairy
+    stories; personalities and principles in mystic revelation;
+    the esoteric meaning in Mythology; are there gods and
+    mortals? the ark in religious symbology; its interior
+    meaning; what were the "tablets of stone?" the reality of the
+    "cherubim" and the "seraphim;" the inner meaning of the
+    symbolical "ark of the Covenant;" is spiritual love devoid of
+    sex?; what is the symbolical "flaming sword?"; why the Jews
+    claimed to be God's "chosen people;" what makes for "immortal
+    godhood?"; the symbolism of the "life-token" stories; the
+    symbolism of the sleeping princess; a theory that solves all
+    the problems of life; the symbolical rites and ceremonies of
+    secret orders; the secrets of the Ancient Alchemists; the
+    Rosicrucians; the Free Masons; the Hermetics; their
+    initiation rites and ceremonies explained; what is meant by
+    the "Holy of Holies?" by the "secret chamber;" and the degree
+    of "mastership;" the sexual significance of the symbolism of
+    the "templars;" the red rose on the cross; the star and the
+    crescent; what is the inner meaning of "the radiant center;"
+    why the Catholic Church opposed the order of Free-masons; did
+    the Alchemists discover the secret of metallic transmutation?
+    what is meant by "the philosopher's stone;" why it was of
+    such a rare purity; why the early Church opposed all
+    reference to sex; the distinction between "discovering" and
+    "finding;" their spiritual meaning; what was the stone that
+    was raised at Babylon: was it a phallic symbol? why the
+    average "Knight Templar" fails to attain the powers and
+    privileges of esoteric Free-masonry; what is the "gate of
+    life?" the Arcana of the Hermetics and its sexual
+    significance; the symbolism of the double-headed eagle; why
+    the eagle was an ancient religious symbol; the antithesis of
+    "the eagle and the dove" explained; the "lamb and the goat"
+    symbolism; the God-ideas of the Ancients and their effects on
+    modern life; why "riding the goat" is the usual initiatory
+    rite and ceremony in secret orders; some secret plates of
+    Hermetic orders explained; what is the "magic solvent" of the
+    alchemists? the relation of Christian symbolism to the
+    Alchemical secrets; the inner meaning of "the sun and the
+    moon" in ancient literature; transmutation: exterior or
+    interior? what constitutes "the abiding glory."
+
+                                CHAPTER IX
+
+  WHAT CONSTITUTES SEXUAL IMMORALITY?                              159
+
+    Can there be standards of morality in the sex-relation; if so
+    what are they? is monogamy the ideal sex relationship? is
+    polygamy a future possibility? why matriarchal polygamy is
+    less degrading than patriarchal; why polygamy is not the
+    ideal sex relationship; the fallacy of legal marriage as a
+    test of sexual morality; why we "cannot wrong the universe;"
+    the one commandment of "the Most High God;" what is it? our
+    modern standards the result of phallic worship; why the Roman
+    Church has survived the centuries; the interior meaning in
+    the "Holy Virgin" idea of the Church; the vital point in the
+    Roman marriage restrictions; men inherently more faithful to
+    marriage vows than women, and why this is so; the bi-sexual
+    individual the most developed; the counterpartal union and
+    its relation to marriage customs; why "affinities" are so
+    numerous; sexual infidelity an impossible premise; what is to
+    become of present-day ethical standards of sexual morality?;
+    historic ideas of sexual immorality and their influence upon
+    modern civilization; modern effects of ancient Hebraic
+    customs; why suppression of prostitution must fail; why
+    prostitution is moral degeneracy; the Oriental versus the
+    Occidental view of prostitution; why modern ideas of sexual
+    morality are fallacious and untenable; can there be a
+    universal standard of sexual morality? why present-day ideas
+    of marriage are degrading; compulsion in marriage and
+    prostitution compared; how, why, and when, the sex-relation
+    may be exalted, reverenced and deified; mistakes of some
+    "Civic Leaguers;" why, when, and how, unfaithfulness in
+    marriage is wrong; the single versus the double standard in
+    sex.
+
+                                CHAPTER X
+
+  THE PATHWAY OF LOVE                                              189
+
+    Love the Great Reality; Love the Alpha and Omega of Life;
+    Sex-love the basis of all other loves; Sex-love the true
+    spiritual love; what is love of an abstract God? Love the
+    perfect mathematician; the moral code and Nature; why we
+    cannot break the laws of God; why Love is depicted with
+    bandaged eyes; Eros and Cupid explained; why the Egyptians
+    depicted Horus with finger on lips; some symbolic caricatures
+    in modern civilization; how it is true that "love makes gods
+    of men;" why Religion has remained materialistic; Love, the
+    only vitalizing power in the universe; the arch-enemy of
+    Love; why Love never leads to disaster; why Love is always
+    pure; erroneous ideas of success and failure; what is real
+    degradation? the pathway of love from chemical attraction to
+    spiritual union; why spiritual mates must be the answer to
+    Life's puzzle; what constitutes actual infidelity? what is to
+    be done with sex relations that are not spiritual unions? Are
+    they immoral? too much made of the marriage ceremony and too
+    little of fitness; is it better to be "respectably bonded" or
+    spiritually mated? what will happen when we rid Society of a
+    belief in "impure" love; why marriage vows are inadequate;
+    puerile; and futile; when we find the "pearl of great price;"
+    why spiritual mates cannot be parted; why bonds and vows must
+    give place to mutual agreement; does spiritual union come
+    with love of God? what is the "bliss of Nirvana?" why the
+    libertine is a pauper in the realm of love; when we imbibe
+    the "nectar of gods;" why the "holy of Holies" cannot be
+    defiled; when the divine office of sex is prostituted; why
+    all sex relations may not be eternal yet moral; the mistaken
+    teaching of the church regarding sex, and the result; inane
+    ideas of Paradise; an appalling prospect of heaven; perfect
+    sex-union the incentive to aspiration; Humanity progresses in
+    spite of fear; prophecy literally true; the true business of
+    business; the final test; the Love that is merging, melting;
+    satisfying and how to attain it.
+
+                                CHAPTER XI
+
+  THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION                                         209
+
+    The spiritual cause of all physical activity; two words that
+    are of vital import today; did Jesus lie? is the kingdom
+    within an actual truth? the interior qualities and their
+    relationship to present day affairs; the fundamental
+    difference between mysticism and Christianity; the key to the
+    kingdom; the interior symbolism of "wireless telegraphy;" the
+    breeder of discord; the interior meaning of certain important
+    words; the survival of the fittest in its interior meaning;
+    the finer and ever finer forces at work; when the gods arrive
+    the half gods go; sex-force at the Center of Being; when
+    abnormalities and perversions of sex will be impossible; the
+    radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary function
+    of sex-force vitalization, not procreation; the art of
+    transmutation and the key to the gate of life; the esoteric
+    meaning of our "second childhood;" the present necessity for
+    physical old-age; the spiritual message in the doctrine of
+    sacrifice; the mystical formula for transmutation; the
+    mystery of the "Holy Grail" elucidated; the only method of
+    attaining godhood.
+
+                                CHAPTER XII
+
+  "SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"                                  231
+
+    The barriers between men and the "bliss of Heaven;" the
+    difference between mortals and gods; the character of a
+    bi-une Being; erroneous ideas of masculinity and femininity;
+    the change of the present day toward these ideas; God not a
+    hermaphroditic Personality, but a pair; some "laws of God;"
+    the ideal of union versus the idea of possession; the highest
+    manifestation of sex-love; the solar-man and the mental man
+    in sex; qualities of sex-force; is the divine man less sexual
+    than the physical? the divine fulcrum of Sex; how eternal
+    youth and life are possible; why you can not lose in the
+    "game of Love;" we cannot sin against the Eternal God; why
+    and when the "eternal equasion" is perfect; no mistakes or
+    flaws in the Cosmic scheme; how spiritual mates may find each
+    other; the true way of transmutation simple; why we have
+    "painted dolls of women;" the hearts of men; the highest
+    wisdom; some fallacies regarding the law of transmutation;
+    why the "inner vision" does not require a trip to the
+    Himalayas; why "brotherhoods" cannot insure you the way; all
+    beauty and joy the result of the divinity of Sex; life
+    mathematically just; when we shall "enter the kingdom."
+
+
+
+
+                              INTRODUCTION
+
+
+No phase of civilization can rise to the highest possibilities as long
+as the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the most
+important and the most sacred function of our being, is one of shame,
+sinfulness, lust and uncleanness.
+
+Even among those who are conscientiously trying to establish better
+social conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like the
+proper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidences
+that our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sex
+problem.
+
+Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving their
+attention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so long
+neglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fettered
+by the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart from
+materia medica, or religion, is difficult.
+
+Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of all
+the delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which should
+by right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surround
+a union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share with
+the one and only possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, there
+is nothing of shame or apology--sentiments which alas, actuate the
+so-called "modest" man or woman of today.
+
+Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate for
+public discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex is
+too indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon public
+attention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, the
+opinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truth
+and so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfied
+with offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing these
+effects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing that
+all the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching and
+thinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, and
+hold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in its
+rightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of this
+universe, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies.
+
+It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has to
+be discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subject
+must be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is our
+contention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized and
+understood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sex
+were recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function _that
+it is_, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before the
+sun.
+
+In the meantime the subject must be discussed from all points of view.
+
+It must be permitted to thrive in the light and thus it will flower
+into the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it.
+
+In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex must
+be aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal and
+reverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex,
+is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths and
+transmitted to the children yet unborn.
+
+"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings,
+proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands,
+health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes,
+benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights
+of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the
+earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification
+of itself.
+
+"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his
+sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."
+
+Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet,"
+only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental
+perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and
+everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal
+future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to
+encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of
+all life--Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting
+upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the
+very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from
+divine sources justifies such an idea.
+
+Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until
+the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be
+that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the
+more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.
+
+In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the
+subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued
+pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention
+that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred
+function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before
+the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in
+celestial spaces.
+
+                                                           THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                      SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL
+
+
+The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.
+
+Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life
+of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause
+of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction
+and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and
+centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits--or
+rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male
+and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is _Life_.
+
+The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth,
+to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various
+gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name
+for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The
+law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity.
+"The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a
+scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the
+forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible
+universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.
+
+Sex is the algebracial X--the unknown quantity which defies analysis.
+
+Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all
+over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second
+coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but
+another form of the X--the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.
+
+The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and
+within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female
+element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the
+Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of
+love is _union_. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the
+struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of
+union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union
+must come from the Center of Life--from the spiritual Reality, which
+the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.
+
+Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the
+upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the
+earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and
+social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in
+the ascendant and love demands _union_--not merely matrimony.
+
+The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending
+law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth,
+forming a circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral
+convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the
+adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and
+transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a
+circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood--victory over
+death through _regeneration_.
+
+It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but
+without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical
+sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all
+instincts.
+
+There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It
+is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases,
+sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the
+continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex
+has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor
+giving in marriage" after death.
+
+This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from
+seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere
+physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of
+spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere
+physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the
+healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as
+long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to
+the mind as "spirituality."
+
+Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem
+of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its
+spiritual function is not _less_ but infinitely _more_ than that which
+we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.
+
+Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a
+million fold, refining, purifying and _intensifying_ the sex instinct
+until it bears a relationship to the average instance of
+sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism
+bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life
+in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the
+musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the
+spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not
+mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of
+life-manifestation.
+
+We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the
+mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each
+blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and
+purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into
+the grand compositions of the Masters.
+
+"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may
+safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental
+principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses
+(senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always
+where the line demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos.
+Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex,
+and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more
+permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.
+
+Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the
+visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible
+worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the
+mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the
+animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and
+protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of
+both sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter but
+masculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rare
+instances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean that
+there is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves the
+union in one _Whole Entity_ of the two distinct principles, and by
+this fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the very
+crux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the mere
+physical expression of the law, but that the object of the
+sex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male and
+a female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being--the true
+representative of the bi-une Being whom we know as God.
+
+Absolute and perfect union is possible only at the center, the crux,
+of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol
+of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have
+for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not
+final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many
+sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not
+fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritual
+counterparts.
+
+Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it
+expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species,
+and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of
+sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident
+plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and
+perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked
+for and who we believe is here.
+
+If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical
+only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the
+spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the
+function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of
+procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend
+of life-manifestation.
+
+Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we
+find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs
+deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and
+almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of
+Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally
+rather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher
+sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely
+instinctive urge to perpetuate the species--the lowest expression of
+Love--and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there,
+and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the
+fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs
+other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we
+see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the
+god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the
+stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.
+
+In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find the
+universal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oak
+tree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon a
+plant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be the
+case, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is to
+attract to itself _its own_; that which belongs to it by right of
+Cosmic law and order and justice.
+
+All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt to
+appropriate and _possess_ that which, in the final analysis, in the
+Absolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall have
+mastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its true
+spiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth's
+creatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered the
+instinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which would
+protect and preserve, and _leave free_, will have gained supremacy
+over selfishness and the desire for possession.
+
+In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal.
+Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of
+sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that
+Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as
+babies.
+
+Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression
+than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note
+with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge
+is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the
+mammals.
+
+The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the
+harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic
+ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in
+continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense
+love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but
+it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our
+ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem
+of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the
+spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings
+learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating,
+which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their
+progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease with sex-expression.
+It permeates all their intercourse.
+
+The trait which distinguishes the spiritual man from the animal man is
+analogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep and
+lasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing with
+each other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other's
+words; contacting, as it were, each other's _inner nature_, rather
+than obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, in
+the common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives which
+their love has brought forth.
+
+Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the
+sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical
+contact, to that of spiritual union--a wide gulf seemingly; but who
+would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union
+with the Beloved One means?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                    SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION
+
+
+Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and
+inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and
+civilized, has been founded upon Sex--the inevitable, the inviolable,
+the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.
+
+Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An
+intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will
+not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an
+unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more
+worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of
+birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed
+planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life
+from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only
+shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be
+"shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It
+is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from
+spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle
+of Sex is unrecognized by them.
+
+With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which
+survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of
+worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the
+simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of
+complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries
+previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature
+makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a
+time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as
+"The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something
+higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of
+Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the
+evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.
+
+It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after
+all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The
+vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen
+to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural
+and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater
+than that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act of
+procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the
+Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman
+issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child"
+became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat
+different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may
+trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying
+fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those
+whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have
+originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as
+an object of worship.
+
+Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this
+symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and
+reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also
+enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although
+defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.
+
+The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all
+symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the
+ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance.
+At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the
+nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she
+alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately
+reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the
+reproductive power.
+
+Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began--a warfare which, if
+it had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since in
+race-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women have
+continued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until now
+the future offers a golden promise of _union_. As long as primitive
+man kept to nature worship, deifying earth as the mother who brought
+forth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religious
+practices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent of
+springtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the period
+of gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature's
+own laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasion
+of thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and general
+good-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing and
+music and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this very
+natural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness was
+accompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation.
+
+There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early
+Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the
+"Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of
+Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her
+androgynous character.
+
+Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent
+of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all
+the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as
+the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this
+day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as
+feminine.
+
+Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine,
+as were all deities; but later, when it was shown that the sun
+apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in
+succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a
+deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled
+and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from
+her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level
+of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.
+
+While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of
+life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from
+the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder
+and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the
+mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon
+the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this
+ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law
+is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we
+contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have
+prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily
+persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was
+yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really
+fundamental.
+
+From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved
+a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle
+an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female
+sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and
+sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of
+generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet
+from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves
+dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative
+organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the
+most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.
+
+The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the
+Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it
+must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful
+miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back
+over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to
+fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get
+lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more
+exalted planes of our ideals.
+
+From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), with
+all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon
+woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of
+time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be
+individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was
+established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ
+which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy.
+In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part
+the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note
+today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed
+stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of
+deification--the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?
+
+The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the
+phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni
+worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were
+celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian
+festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature
+worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic
+worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.
+
+There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called
+Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of
+Ceres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to have
+noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the
+entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the
+rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins
+distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted
+to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.
+
+Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor
+of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that
+the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male
+belonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is to
+say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this
+ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time
+would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive
+and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the
+question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that
+purity and peace would reign upon earth.
+
+This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation
+to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have
+been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because
+phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that
+not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the
+Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man
+violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This
+gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted
+sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much
+that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the
+pure and perfect union of male and female--the only ideal that will,
+or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.
+
+The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis.
+For a period of several days during the time set apart for the
+festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature
+of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue
+of inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth and
+honor.
+
+Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether
+expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent
+worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those
+qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach
+immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say
+what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs
+only to those who are pure in heart.
+
+From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy
+communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of
+the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the
+phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol.
+Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian
+supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism.
+Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a
+spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and
+reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of
+every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times
+will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how
+obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently
+associated.
+
+The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy,
+underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of the
+Central African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above the
+din of our modern commercial civilization. The prejudiced and the
+superficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremonies
+records only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences of
+depravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of the
+idea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race which
+has sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world's
+evolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races are
+today emerging.
+
+All mystic truths are expressed in symbolism. It has been said that
+these truths are "veiled;" this is true only because the observer has
+not yet learned to speak the language. The universal language is
+symbolism. In the early Egyptian, the Indian, and the Hebrew
+religions, the fundamental idea was the two generating principles (or
+we might say the two aspects of the One principle) of generation. The
+two in spiritual _union_ represented the Infinite--the Deity. The
+Hebrew word "Elohim" is plural, and means male and female united,
+forming the One Perfect and Complete Being. This union is the "Holy of
+Holies" of the ancient mystics and alchemists. We see its reflection
+and its persistence today in the Catholic service of the Mass, where
+the priest raises the Eucharist as the "Holy of Holies" in which is
+generated the Christ-man, and before whom all human devotees bow the
+head that they may not look upon the perfection and beauty of its pure
+radiance. Neither is the priest supposed to touch the chalice with
+uncovered hands. He prepares himself by fasting and prayer before he
+mounts the altar upon which this "Holy of Holies" is hidden from view.
+
+The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations is
+easily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols of
+yoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, although
+it is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it is
+only through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man can
+be born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is either
+concealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek and
+Roman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. This
+debasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and is
+unquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Roman
+empires.
+
+If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson that
+neither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but only
+different; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but that
+each little group and class of humans has its particular contribution
+to the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing the
+mind from the shackles of ignorance--that darkness which obscures our
+inner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-called
+civilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women of
+this century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we are
+different and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individuality
+is our contribution to the work of the cosmic law, which is seeking
+to lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestial
+light.
+
+The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important place
+in a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is one
+of the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximately
+four thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlier
+ideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres," the emblem
+of the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacred
+character of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterized
+as feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleur
+de lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, and
+they are called feminine, although really androgynous.
+
+The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has
+been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is
+supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But
+close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel
+in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are
+tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and
+seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new
+plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new
+life. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not as
+pronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone are
+both present in the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and not
+feminine alone.
+
+Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as the
+representative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life and
+energy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle in
+the Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although in
+reality bi-sexual.
+
+The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which the
+male principle has dominated, as the one true and only God--the giver
+of life, the energizing power of Creation--and the lily and the
+Eucharist are both representative of the Female principle.
+
+Historians mark the beginning of the worship of the _One True God_,
+defined philosophically as the "Monistic" God-idea, from the building
+of the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in the
+earliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anything
+suggestive of "confusion of tongues." The name unquestionably came
+from "babil" meaning "the gate of God." Thus only is its meaning
+obvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam and phallus
+which obtained at that time. It is also evident that the phallic
+worshippers borrowed the simile of "the gate of God" from the
+worshippers of the yoni, who based their claim to truth upon the
+indisputable fact, that out of the womb comes the life of plant, and
+animal, and man.
+
+The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel show
+conclusively that it was a monument to the victory of the phallic
+worshippers over the yoni, proving that the "one true and only God"
+was male. From that time also God has been alluded to as "He,"
+although in the Oriental countries, and particularly among the Hindus,
+we find repeated allusions to the Deity as "The Divine Mother," and
+all the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because of
+this fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions and
+philosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retained
+the divinity of the female principle in theory, but not in fact.
+
+Sex-worship is contemptuously alluded to in modern literature as
+"strange and erotic ideas," or words equally condemnatory. But this is
+an absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that the
+mystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder;
+and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomes
+erotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth," and
+when the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. It
+becomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight for
+supremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of union
+shall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form of
+religious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle of
+birth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will the
+family be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, be
+worshipped.
+
+The trinity in unity has been a widespread and persistent part of all
+religions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal has
+a permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is often
+obscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seeking
+the light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscured
+truths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions," will
+reveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modern
+concepts.
+
+But while we note a vague recognition of the female element in all our
+modern religious systems, the general acceptance of the God-idea as
+monistic and the gender of this monistic God as masculine betrays the
+domination of phallicism over yoni worship and also over that of the
+two principles in conjunction--the bi-une Deity. The tree is
+universally accepted as an emblem of life-energy. The upright shape of
+the tree; the sap which rises at certain periods from invisible
+sources; and the fact that the germinal power of the seeds of the
+fruits and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make the
+tree symbolical of eternal life. The tree is either male or female,
+except in certain instances where it is, like the lotus, androgynous,
+such for example as the ash, which is the "sacred" tree of
+Scandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, it
+has been regarded as "sacred." The same idea is found throughout all
+myths, and all religious symbolism, namely: _the attainment of
+god-hood is reached when both sexes are united in one Being._
+
+The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a
+subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the
+history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to
+that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held
+sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our
+own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and
+its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest,
+in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The
+Latin name for the pine is pinus.
+
+Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that
+step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its
+spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its
+root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the
+life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the
+male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity
+contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally
+became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the
+spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race,
+became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused
+any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.
+
+Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father,
+Son and--Holy Ghost."
+
+The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what
+of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity
+composed of three male beings?
+
+It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the
+female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian
+Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their
+reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the
+Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are
+evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the
+God-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instruments
+of the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the male
+principle as the only true God.
+
+So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modern
+thought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardly
+notice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerful
+hypnotist.
+
+Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand the
+symbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblems
+which constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems are
+the pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika.
+The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with their
+protruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with the
+mound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, which
+venerated both sexes as co-equal. It is easy to realize why the Jews
+were driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worship
+the Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing the
+phallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in the
+God-head.
+
+It is also significant that side by side with the present-day Feminist
+Movement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptian
+architecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art,
+which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on its
+artistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not with
+acclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and so
+closely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged the
+centuries and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancient
+civilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to the
+Egyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, is
+in vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobacco
+and what not (so essentially an American custom) we find the
+modernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika.
+
+The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every country
+and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally,
+originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes
+have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the
+whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizing
+its antiquity and its universality.
+
+The two sex principles, joined in the center of the four arms or legs,
+of the cross, accomplish that which is said (and truthfully if taken
+on the physical plane only) to be impossible of accomplishment--they
+square the circle. A circle is emblematical of completeness. Aum, the
+Absolute, the Omniscient, is always typified by a circle. To "square
+the circle" means esoterically to have reached godhood, and this can
+be accomplished only by the male and female _united_ in spirit. The
+swastika is essentially a bi-une sex symbol although it has been
+sometimes called male and sometimes female, according to its shape,
+which varies with the various meanings ascribed to it. Primitive man
+was not prolific in language, and one symbol expressed many ideas
+according to its varied form and position.
+
+The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of the
+generative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power was
+conceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still
+"testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substituted
+for the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognition
+of the Creative Principle, we note that the Bible is made up of
+"testaments," which stand for its "sacredness."
+
+Evidently it was only after the advent of the male God that oaths and
+vows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's word
+was reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of the Supreme Creative
+power of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential of
+union, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and it
+is estimated that about six hundred years B.C. the level of debauchery
+and vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies were
+nothing more than orgies of sex-degradation.
+
+The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility and
+power evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced woman
+to the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than a
+receptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and a
+man's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy--an ideal
+which is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is bounded
+by nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man.
+
+Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? What
+did it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answer
+the idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret of
+the generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as old
+age conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened and
+the supply insufficient.
+
+This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, they
+argued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) left
+him. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generation
+realize, although we know that old age with consequent cessation of
+physical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even our
+supposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energy
+dies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place where
+they realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know that
+old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the
+functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is
+the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not
+do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy
+into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute
+the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to
+pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay
+down his body and take it up again."
+
+There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciously
+leave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, while
+they visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is no
+more than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attained
+that we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itself
+confer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but that
+these may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service--not as
+payment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailing
+law, which gives what we demand.
+
+What we demand we naturally work for. If we serve Love, we get the
+coin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed by
+Jones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith.
+
+Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed to
+transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal
+instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty
+idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as
+before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the
+Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live
+through many years of life without having loved some person or some
+thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost
+every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision.
+The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.
+
+From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood
+was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the
+logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which
+reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and
+engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the
+"sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as
+a final act of propitiation.
+
+The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings,
+and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of
+orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible
+as he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes and
+holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by
+police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of
+the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the
+idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.
+
+In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death,
+even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races
+observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and
+the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at
+certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What
+more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of
+sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of
+the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies?
+And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God,
+they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.
+
+And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed;
+but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to
+sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the
+aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came,
+that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world,
+and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and
+trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had
+been rigorously suppressed.
+
+And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so
+they conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read of
+repeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freely
+on the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people.
+At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that the
+only Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the final
+debt of transgression and set men free from death, that they might
+have eternal life, which to them meant life in the physical body.
+
+It is not at all possible that Jesus had any such idea of his mission.
+He was far too illumined for that, even judging from the meager
+accounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story of
+his mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea of
+blood-sacrifice as _payment_ for the privilege of physical virility,
+so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, could
+not die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuries
+and is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christian
+churches in this civilized century.
+
+And yet there is an esoteric truth underlying this universal idea of
+sacrifice, and when we come to this in a subsequent chapter, we will
+better understand how and why it has persisted throughout the
+centuries.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+               PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE
+
+
+From the study of ancient sex-worship to our twentieth century systems
+of religion; our scientific discoveries; our intellectual standards of
+philosophy and social ethics; and above all, perhaps, our marvelous
+commercial order, connecting, as it does, the entire globe, seems a
+far cry; but it is only another link in a chain and fits into the past
+as accurately and as inevitably as the morning follows the night.
+
+There is an erroneous idea current that public institutions, such as
+law-courts, religious creeds, educational systems, reform movements,
+et cetera, are causes of race-advancement. As a matter of fact they
+are not causes but results. They do not determine progress; they
+reflect it.
+
+Causes start from the Center and radiate outward. We may realize this
+more readily if we will remember that if we throw a pebble into a pool
+of water, it starts innumerable little waves which traveling outward,
+reach a point some distance from the central source, and if we were to
+see the outermost wavelet only, we might imagine that the disturbance
+begins and ends far from the place where the pebble was thrown.
+
+This illustration explains the difference between the materialistic
+and the metaphysical points of view. The former notes the result, and
+the latter the cause of existing conditions. The mystical viewpoint
+takes into account the fact that there is a cosmic law which acts like
+a tidal-wave. Materialists call the action of this law "Evolution,"
+assuming that its impetus comes from our physical activities. It is,
+in fact, from the Center or spiritual source of life that all power,
+all evolution, emanates. The spiritual is the intensity of power; the
+physical is the attenuated.
+
+The term, "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporous
+space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent
+reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago,
+"The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our
+mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we see
+the effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods of
+locomotion; our architecture; our commerce--in all the avenues of our
+active civilization.
+
+We wish to emphasize the point that every so-called advancement; every
+discovery; every improvement in moral ideals as well as in mechanics,
+and in those things that add to our physical comfort, comes from the
+center of Life.
+
+The external but _reflects_ the action of the Cosmic Law which
+uncovers the vast areas of consciousness and frees the human soul from
+the hypnotisms, and the limitations of the animal-mind.
+
+Animal force is still strong in the world to-day, but it is not as
+strong as it appears to be, because much of the seeming indifference
+and cold-heartedness of the people, taken en masse, is due to the
+hurried, feverish and insistent demands of our external life.
+
+Underneath the surface, in the realm of the sub-conscious activities,
+there is developing the spirit of unity; of sympathy; and a
+consciousness of our innate relationship. This realization comes to
+the surface in times of great stress and peril.
+
+The whole trend of modern life symbolizes or reflects the _ideal_ of
+unity, albeit the tooth and claw and growl of the animal in Man may be
+seen and felt and heard in the vain effort to postpone the inevitable
+dethronement of the animal force, which would dominate the weaker and
+appropriate for the personal self, the creation of brain and hand,
+much as the house-dog, satiated with over-feeding, buries the bone he
+cannot eat lest some hungry brother-dog shall get it. Nevertheless,
+despite the animal greed that still shows in our modern life, there is
+plenty of evidence that we are on the upward spiral that leads to
+unity--the effect of love.
+
+The superficial observer, dominated by that instinct of fear which
+seems to be so ingrained in our animal nature that we are all slaves
+to it in some form or degree, sees in the present-day conditions a
+menace to what he believes to be the moral life of the race, and
+particularly as these conditions apply to the modern woman.
+
+He sees women coming out of the seclusion of their "rightful sphere"
+and meeting men on terms of equality. He sees what he terms "immodest
+dress;" defiance of traditional ideas of etiquette and conduct; he
+notes what appears to be a disregard for the faith of our fathers;
+and, above all, a distaste for that special function of
+woman--child-bearing. The superficial observer, both male and female,
+feels great alarm.
+
+But let us not be dismayed. Present day conditions, particularly as
+they relate to the female principle of Creation, but reflect the
+inevitable reaction from a one-sided course. The pendulum swings back
+again and ultimately we will strike a balance; from domination to
+unity; from struggle to harmony. Even American commercial life admits
+the value of a vacation time.
+
+Present day conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in a
+well-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything that
+disturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm to
+the undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern life
+which directly affect women, or in which we may say, the Female
+Principle is especially concerned, we note a determined and united
+demand for freedom.
+
+Woman's demand for political equality is but a shadowgraph as it were
+of the real demand which is the demand of the Divine Feminine
+throughout all manifested life, for recognition of equality, in the
+plan of creation. It is a symbol of the ideal of unity which finds
+expression in the commercial world in trusts and labor unions; in the
+"let us get together" plea of the various advocates of reform; of all
+those enterprises which are seen to most directly affect the entire
+human family.
+
+That there are women who are blind to this fundamental idea of their
+demand for political equality is true; and it is also true that there
+are perhaps as many men as there are women who recognize the need of
+woman's political and social equality, but this only proves the fact
+which we have already emphasized, namely that it is not women as
+personalities, but the Female Principle throughout the universe that
+is at the root of the modern Feminist Movement. The male principle is
+not confined to the form of man, neither is the female principle
+always expressed in the form of woman. Many men exemplify more of the
+maternal instinct than do certain women; neither must it be assumed
+that this type of man is effeminate; or that the woman of Amazonian
+physique is more masculine in thought and habit than is the little
+frou-frou specimen of womankind who looks appealingly into the eyes of
+her male escort, beseeching protection from the rude stares which she
+has premeditatedly invited. Qualities are sexless and universal. It is
+only in their specific combinations that they adequately represent the
+masculine or the feminine gender.
+
+Blessed are they who have learned the art of discrimination.
+
+Broadly speaking, women are behaving in a manner which upsets all
+precedent and promises ultimate emancipation from restraint.
+
+But is it not possible that women no longer need restraint if they
+ever needed it? Is it not possible that the world has grown up, and
+that both men and women may safely be allowed the freedom of
+self-government, with all possible mutual aid in the work of
+establishing an upright, free, and trustworthy science of right
+living?
+
+That which is always in the future is never ours and if we are ever
+going to be free and happy and well-conditioned there is no reason why
+we should not make it soon.
+
+Woman's demand for political equality is sometimes used as an excuse
+to lessen her dignity and her place in society. People who do this are
+of the same type as those before whom Sex cannot be discussed
+intelligently because they do not realize the sacredness of Sex. They
+are a remnant of the ages which have passed and which have left their
+mark, in the idea of a half-sexed God, the "He," the spouseless Father
+who brought forth the visible universe apparently without co-operation
+with the Female Principle. This type of person prates much about the
+dangers of race-suicide, meaning thereby the increasing tendency to
+childlessness and not as should be taken into account the death rate
+among children who are born of diseased and unfit parents and brought
+into existence without the necessary conditions of sanitation, food
+and care.
+
+Our national Eugenic societies are hampered by false ideas of what
+constitutes morality, being bound to uphold the tradition that the
+child that is born of married parents, no matter how diseased in body
+and deficient in mind, is better-born than is the offspring of
+unmarried parents, even though the latter may be a model of physical
+health and mental efficiency. Eugenics will remain limited in scope
+until such time as the entire world adopts "in spirit and in truth"
+the recent action of the European governments, and recognizes the
+legitimacy of all children however born.
+
+And although the action of the European governments was born of
+nothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiers
+might be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the human
+race. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended to
+all children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the cruel
+and unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents.
+Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and although
+it seems a terrible price to pay for even so badly a needed reform as
+this, Humanity has always paid dearly for its willful blindness. It
+certainly should be evident to any sane mind that every child that is
+born into this world has a moral and a legal right to be here.
+Whatever may be said for or against parents, it is wicked stupidity to
+brand an innocent child with the epithet "illegitimate." The lowest
+animal has a right to be born. Many a beautiful and innocent child is
+denied that right.
+
+If it has taken one of the most bloody wars in history to establish
+the right of birth, even so the struggle will not have been in vain,
+because this right, once established in the hearts of all Humanity,
+will forever do away with warfare. No doubt this assertion will sound
+far-fetched to many, but the future will see the vindication of this
+belief.
+
+Birth is actually the most important function in life. If it is
+immoral to be born, no matter what the conditions of such birth, what
+possible chance have we to live morally? We cannot discriminate in
+dealing with the great fundamentals of life.
+
+This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws are
+inviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child of
+the beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of the
+unmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into the
+world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may
+not be always polite, but she is always truthful.
+
+As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth,
+Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because
+Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we
+are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the
+conditions of a part.
+
+Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some
+circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into
+account our ideas of respectability.
+
+The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate
+for women to have children before they have been married?"
+
+The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be
+permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do
+it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must
+begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried
+woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society
+is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state,
+because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of
+maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries--both of which result
+from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.
+
+If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy
+by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world
+_desired by the mother_ is born in accordance with the highest
+possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and
+Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child
+because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of
+men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be
+one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present
+time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and
+condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.
+
+When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.
+
+As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of motherhood, it is
+inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of
+child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who
+would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more
+perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make
+motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might
+not see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life.
+We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We are
+always seeking to check effects.
+
+The average human being is little more than a phonographic record of
+the dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious.
+
+Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we will
+find that the birthrate will increase among the "rich and
+respectable," where now we note a determined desire to shirk the
+responsibilities of parenthood.
+
+We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will be
+alarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is the
+ideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationships
+are neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established only
+between free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choice
+mean life and health.
+
+The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from
+self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases
+tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious
+selection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love is
+inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of
+all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however
+well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical
+aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the
+effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease
+and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no
+real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to
+Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher _ideal_,
+rather than a higher _order_. The higher order can come only by
+getting back to primal laws.
+
+The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were
+competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two
+important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for
+beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but
+both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the
+world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a
+civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was
+like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble,
+and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but
+freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.
+
+Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was
+unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of
+force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal of
+sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important
+requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the
+element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must
+take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give
+the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted
+in, finally results in decadence.
+
+We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of
+those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of
+education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are
+embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious
+example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a
+marriage between a brother and sister--a custom which prevailed among
+ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well
+believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain
+that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love.
+Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.
+
+In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to
+exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established
+that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions
+only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and
+intellectual.
+
+Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of
+"Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful
+physical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul
+and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we
+instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.
+
+Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual
+behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end
+and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid
+maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's
+rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.
+
+Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish
+and unselfish--are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer
+rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women
+living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if
+they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of
+semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light"
+housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the
+nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry
+minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready
+made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under
+these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light
+housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.
+
+Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged
+from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to
+apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated
+apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say,
+notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a
+cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something
+back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day
+life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem
+deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always
+upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.
+
+This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates the
+average woman, who is able physically and financially to bear children
+and yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with the
+planet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developed
+and the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain falls
+upon the just and the unjust alike.
+
+Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change in
+human ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an ideal
+in which equality shall be more nearly represented and they give
+themselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regenerating
+work.
+
+The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension of
+it. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduate
+from it or we return for another term, according as we have mastered
+the studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and we
+see that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth has
+two aspects. One is from apparent selfishness and lack of the
+temperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to women
+as an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct.
+
+The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to a
+restless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of the
+Feminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimes
+we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the
+cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically
+termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and
+they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind.
+
+Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can put
+into words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing is
+not a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life.
+Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle for
+completeness knows intuitively, that even though she may never beget
+mortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exercise
+of her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, which
+seemingly separates us from invisible areas. Moreover motherhood is
+qualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made nor
+unmade by the birthrate.
+
+Two important considerations present themselves to the world today: One
+is that woman--considered as the fecund receptive sex-principle--is
+refusing the sex relationship on the old basis, however "respectable"
+and well-intentioned that basis was. Generally speaking, it is evident
+that the old basis of intercourse between the sexes has been, is
+being, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied, refused, as the
+approved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The other important
+observation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this.
+
+It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-conscious
+limitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of a
+condition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerable
+divorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why are
+women refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live with
+their husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they less
+courageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable of
+love--either love of children or love of the father who begets the
+children?
+
+It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of love
+than ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the first
+time in the history of many generations, what we owe to the future.
+Formerly men built entirely for self, and for the immediate present.
+We can look back and trace the development of a race consciousness
+from the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriers
+between races and nations and sects and societies, as also between the
+sexes, slowly dissolving.
+
+Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying a
+political, or educational or religions platform with an Occidental.
+Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existed
+between the Jew and the Gentile--now they exchange pulpits, and all
+sects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women are
+elected to political and educational offices. No matter that these
+evidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are _promises_ of the
+birth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when a
+man's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediate
+family only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at the
+expense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate of
+any other women and children.
+
+To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of the
+self interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and is
+not, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated our
+hair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were best
+conserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is that
+Love has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or more
+altruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of love
+is to expand; to grow; to _give_ of itself until unselfishness must
+come with the final aim of love, which is _unity_ and not possession.
+
+We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and more
+inclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves the
+higher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal of
+love is possible to the woman of today than ever before. We must take
+into consideration the average of the sex, at the same time not
+forgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities of
+both sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing and
+unselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope,
+the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealing
+with principles and not merely with individuals.
+
+Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal or
+conjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may then
+ask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusion
+that women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demand
+conditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind.
+They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfect
+race--a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and claw
+and choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over the
+possession of bones.
+
+Ever and ever we have been promised the coming of the perfect man--the
+"man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously
+active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged
+under the domination of the animal nature which subdues and
+appropriates.
+
+A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union.
+Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite the
+gods to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merely
+reproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall be
+something more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction.
+This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according to
+the development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union is
+coming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type of
+union, but also as the initiative of the promised time when the
+kingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens.
+
+All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief in
+its efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surely
+vain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keeps
+his promises," which is simply one way of saying that the law of the
+cosmos is reliable.
+
+"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God," but both must agree
+that whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. There
+can be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in which
+Love is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree of
+logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also
+so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on
+the physical plane--a manifestation of life which even physicists are
+bound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities.
+
+We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of a
+decreasing birthrate as we see it on the physical plane. There are
+many other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and the
+planets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is the
+axis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony.
+
+The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principle
+is refusing maternity, and above all the _bondage_ of matrimony for
+the important reason that the time has come for the rearing of the
+Man-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex,
+superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sense
+gratification.
+
+Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Why
+should it not manifest in this most important of all our systems of
+intercourse?
+
+The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacred
+or holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishment
+for indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more than
+half ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of a
+cosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operated
+with to advantage.
+
+Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood.
+Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony is
+always marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children.
+And there are many women with children who know not the first faint
+dawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) love
+which comes most often in the guise of motherhood, but which is
+always present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other's
+inner nature.
+
+If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and the
+rightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evade
+motherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of all
+life; if they will not rest until every child that is born into this
+world is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is given
+every advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moral
+training, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only to
+rival each other in the quality and the perfection of their
+motherhood.
+
+The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating the
+birthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to prevent
+conception, may be well meant as these things are consistent with
+prevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to the
+problem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule,
+children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and provided
+for.
+
+Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparatively
+every woman would be normal under proper social and economic
+conditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because of
+lack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because of
+lack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modern
+mo-loch, Public Opinion.
+
+When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of his
+children. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to be
+free from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving her
+free to be guided in the most vital and important function of her
+life, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Love
+will establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no other
+power on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachments
+nor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love is
+the only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God.
+
+Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will be
+superseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and when
+this comes to pass, Humanity will rise to that ideal.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+                  THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING
+
+
+Any attempt to discuss subjects pertaining to the sex-relation with
+intelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact that
+sex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices,
+reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted to
+sex-worship and sex-degradation.
+
+It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and to
+make a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" of
+matrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, so
+to speak, the social institution of marriage.
+
+Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which are
+based upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to the
+prejudices and "beliefs" of the average.
+
+Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting and
+fundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudices
+must be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature's
+confidence and be the sharer of her secrets."
+
+The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark of theological
+bias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previous
+discovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend his
+God"--as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it--were not
+capable of self-defense.
+
+It is due to this mistaken zeal on the part of the short-sighted ones,
+that human evolution is slow, albeit it is likewise inevitable.
+
+They are like those who, viewing the wrecking of a ruined habitation,
+condemned by the Board of Public Safety, try to stop the process of
+the workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have been
+cleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable building
+will be put up on the same ground; and anything from the old
+architecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the new
+building.
+
+The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protect
+them from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from their
+brothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes a
+desirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home,
+rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study of
+history should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changes
+in human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods wait
+upon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand for
+improved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to be
+bidden, "Enter, Friend."
+
+As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals. Until there is a
+more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite
+certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does
+duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor
+thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many
+complaints as a hypochondriac.
+
+But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of the
+fundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning of
+recorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, very
+satisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in social
+and individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from a
+study of the history of marriage.
+
+There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all
+phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees
+all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the
+exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external,
+world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the
+everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a
+succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long
+anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres
+and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual
+events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far
+distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which
+meets his eye.
+
+Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according to
+their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted
+and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.
+
+Humanity is ever seeking the Reality--the Noumenon, which we
+intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.
+
+The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages,
+side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the
+sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and
+ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human
+ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.
+
+Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution,
+obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of
+forms is common.
+
+And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change
+and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family
+species, as we have in the human family.
+
+Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some
+animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.
+
+Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the
+animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is
+obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific,
+to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is
+greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild
+and domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic
+life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are
+slaughtered for food.
+
+The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the
+male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and
+rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself
+very early among the various families, from motives of self-protection,
+if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numerically
+strong.
+
+In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life,
+and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some
+species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist,
+preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only
+with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say
+that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.
+
+It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A
+mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner.
+It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a
+creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided
+in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power
+undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it
+may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no
+temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habit
+would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping
+with the eagle character.
+
+The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among
+birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social
+institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are
+just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward
+trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite
+and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is
+recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of
+today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy
+obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not
+reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.
+
+Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as
+sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and
+also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a
+night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging
+head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of
+marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a
+marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In
+these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and
+generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In
+fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were
+easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seems
+to have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continue
+the family.
+
+Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the
+very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had
+no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family
+was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female
+heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he
+would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her
+family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became
+the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.
+
+Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually
+acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his
+"possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of
+conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized
+idea of "earning."
+
+Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this
+respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost
+general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence
+as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he
+kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy
+with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his
+wife's person.
+
+In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity
+within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide
+under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a
+martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are
+given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had
+taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the
+following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found
+prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your
+silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How
+much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these
+pestilential marauders?"
+
+Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in
+defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The
+inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the
+average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of
+man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of
+free-will.
+
+Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the
+possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more
+ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.
+
+Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what
+constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same
+idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much
+investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another,
+actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male
+are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent
+methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she
+has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for
+"outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions
+through the safer channels of the law-courts.
+
+The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a
+part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral
+code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
+This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to
+themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense
+being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of
+satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably
+respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her
+neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual
+matters, "as long as he provides well for me."
+
+When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes
+morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is
+governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.
+
+It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary
+expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize
+the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense,
+which besmirch the path of Evolution.
+
+Thus the tendency to æsthetic selection, always more pronounced in
+the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false
+valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.
+
+In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove
+many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not
+like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her
+claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare
+bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we
+may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman
+of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the
+"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which
+critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized
+our grandmothers.
+
+Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating,
+everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency;
+and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the
+right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by
+capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.
+
+One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the
+world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman
+approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal,
+except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the
+gens of the family.
+
+These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal
+status of women has been, as it is now, no more than what the
+evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.
+
+It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per
+se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either
+better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our
+idea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women
+in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which
+would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it
+has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best
+has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of
+personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in
+him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at
+first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically
+conceded _his children at least_ first place; although the wife was
+hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.
+
+Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and
+among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his _Evolution of
+the Family_, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the
+Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtless
+the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle;
+it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was
+necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold
+to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious
+servant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she
+might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the
+Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no
+other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her.
+Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be
+able to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the moment
+of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."
+
+The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia,
+although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the
+same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the
+Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that
+neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for
+centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes,
+where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has
+been, and still is, deplorable.
+
+In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most
+inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her
+husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male
+children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and
+mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she
+allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice
+for her.
+
+This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous
+woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of
+women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class
+was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of
+power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law
+unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced
+prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on
+terms of at least temporary social equality.
+
+Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the
+independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in
+ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the
+prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the
+most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love
+out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although
+this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation,
+inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with
+so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the
+evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served
+two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;
+and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the
+aristocratic class from extinction through decadence.
+
+As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a
+degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages,
+they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and,
+as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of
+wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the
+freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of
+their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I
+have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and
+houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils."
+
+One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece
+and Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their
+civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically
+was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in
+which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of
+procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished.
+Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase
+"between the devil and the deep sea."
+
+Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for
+the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took
+her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the
+transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily
+to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she
+would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse.
+
+In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the
+rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife
+was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to
+the eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in
+a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our
+social ethics.
+
+It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct
+influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred
+years of Christian civilization among the white races.
+
+Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have not
+molded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, when
+esoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union means
+equality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; race
+equality.
+
+We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enough
+to explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems to
+be the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret to
+say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the
+construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect
+to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas!
+confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced by the professional
+man.
+
+The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is
+judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of
+foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of
+what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge;
+and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicity
+of ideas and customs and creations.
+
+Differentiation is the primal attempt.
+
+Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first of
+all she is different from, rather than identical with, men.
+
+The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "feminine
+frivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessing
+that in her natural environment she does not consider herself his
+equal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she may
+deceive herself and others into thinking she is.
+
+An individual is important to Society in proportion to his
+originality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; some
+hitherto unfamiliar view.
+
+Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, a
+consciousness of our unity with all life, we find that although
+religious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasized
+in the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity should
+have been established, segregation has been the rule, and it is
+without any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Church
+that we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and her
+co-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not a
+consummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world.
+
+That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in the
+wake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction with
+religious systems; and a determined disregard for what has been
+presented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religious
+creeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best they
+have been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom is
+the great liberator.
+
+The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in America
+and Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science,
+mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" into
+its literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the variety
+of new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety of
+names that we cannot here enumerate them.
+
+Nevertheless, we are still many leagues short of realizing this ideal,
+despite the preachments in its favor. Politically, the ideal of unity
+is presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, and
+Suffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "let
+us get together on this," and in efforts at legislation that shall
+control corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hours
+of work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by the
+rising sun of unity.
+
+We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, in
+order that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: What
+does marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of the
+social body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entire
+Cosmos?
+
+Has it any real place and purpose beyond that of procreation, or any
+more spiritual function than the perpetuation of the human species?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+              THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION
+
+
+Notwithstanding the patent fact that the institution of monogamous
+marriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain that
+any other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race.
+
+Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promise
+of the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfect
+image of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for.
+That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallen
+far short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizing
+that the ideal is right.
+
+Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meeting
+and the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfect
+complementaries.
+
+In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritual
+counterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base of
+union, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all the
+laws of men be employed to keep them tied to each other in the body.
+If two persons belong to each other by the inviolable law of spiritual
+counterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep their
+souls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in the
+flesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"--the word meaning whole;
+entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they may
+be judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and any
+attempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint of
+exterior judgment must fail.
+
+The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highest
+ideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for that
+reason insist that marriage as a social institution is always complete
+and holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulus
+of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical
+attraction and cohesion--an instinct, which we share in common with
+every form of life, from the lowest insect to man--shall they be
+compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" in
+the physical body?
+
+We would say, "Heaven forbid!" only that the appeal is unnecessary.
+Heaven does forbid, and that is why we see so many attempts to disrupt
+these immature relationships.
+
+"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passional
+attractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all the
+motions, growths, and activities in the physical and moral world,"
+says a writer, and he adds: "The failure to attain the desired end,
+and the warfare between uncongenial and repulsive elements is the
+cause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in both
+spheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would be
+no storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If the
+marriage between the individual will and understanding, between the
+interior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regenerated
+men upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriage
+between the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise."
+
+Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons of
+opposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every other
+activity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because of
+this union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; all
+morality comes from the ideal marriage--the union of Wisdom and Love.
+To imagine that a function, so vitally important to our exterior life,
+should have no place in the phases of life which we know as "higher,"
+is a manifest absurdity, and comes from those attenuated concepts of
+what constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; concepts
+which, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord," have
+temporarily defied modern progress.
+
+There is no wide gulf between the spiritual and the material worlds,
+although the material is but an imperfect reflection of the basic
+principle of life.
+
+Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature is a system of
+nuptials," says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit or
+Divine Life.
+
+How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degrading
+sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only,
+we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types
+of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that
+Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret
+of eternal and never-ceasing union of complementaries.
+
+Take, for example, the symbol of the wedding-ring. This custom,
+varying only in unimportant details, consistent with the prevailing
+social custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days.
+The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently by
+both bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circle
+of wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one," of the
+finding by each of "the other half." The circle is always used to
+express the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "without
+beginning and without end."
+
+According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of pure
+gold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might not
+acquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something more
+than mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability to
+sustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. It
+symbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this priceless
+blessing of perfect conjugal union, other than by his own efforts.
+Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartal
+union--which means actually "twain made one," comes only by dint of
+strife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life.
+
+Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that of
+drinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life," at the completion
+of a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of the
+bride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; but
+more generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Wine
+drinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can be
+enjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life--the
+divine or spiritual sex-union.
+
+This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness the
+truth that only complementaries have the power to act and react,
+without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfect
+balance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction less
+than the other, perfect balance is lacking.
+
+Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was the
+donning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly included
+the bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to the
+bride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greek
+marriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads of
+both bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged.
+
+We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. We
+have the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; and
+the circlet which symbolizes eternity.
+
+The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows
+the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love;
+which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal
+truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until
+we are _fit for the kingdom_.
+
+The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremony
+symbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritual
+marriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life,
+shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the wedding
+veil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of the
+physical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shall
+know our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we have
+found that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge of
+our every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entire
+panorama of the universe becomes an open book. There is no "visible"
+and "invisible;" it is all One, with our own bi-une sex nature for the
+pivotal center.
+
+So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man that
+we are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not sooner
+penetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven," we say of
+some self-sacrificing and loving soul, and the phrase suggests to
+most of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all their
+splendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning which
+the splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes.
+
+Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature is
+in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are
+symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant;
+luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of
+the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of
+gems--diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?
+
+It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is their
+luminosity--their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the power
+which we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has a
+corresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have all
+things which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell us
+that all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Either
+they tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not the
+way."
+
+The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown of
+gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its
+esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating
+to the spiritual marriage--counterpartal union.
+
+Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritual
+body, the body also becomes sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, we
+remember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weeds
+are unregenerate flowers.
+
+Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human body
+is a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. The
+changes produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything which
+the experimental chemist has ever discovered in nature.
+
+It is a fact well known to the pathologist that an unwilling wife,
+however faithful she may be, if forced into the sexual act, may
+present her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; nor
+is this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized fact
+that anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructive
+thought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body.
+
+In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriage
+of Christian Rosy Cross," which is, when read with the key to its
+esoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between the
+sexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of the
+Rosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets,"
+which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicrucians
+and other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union of
+the male and the female principles throughout nature and culminating
+in man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through the
+perfect balance of sex.
+
+It has been said that women were not admitted to the Brotherhood of
+the Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there is plenty of evidence
+to prove.
+
+Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation of
+the sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, it
+became necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires of
+Esoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; in
+consequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the very
+heart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory,
+unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiated
+into the secret code.
+
+In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so far
+succeeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women were
+excluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of the
+secret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by side
+with this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbols
+has been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixed
+with frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to the
+Virgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenith
+of its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and,
+either through fear of the influence of their work, or possibly
+through lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, had
+employed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power of
+the Church.
+
+This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter devoted to "The
+Hidden Wisdom," and so we will leave it for the present.
+
+One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in the
+intimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove with
+the ceremony of marriage.
+
+The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. The
+turtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for the
+fervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for the
+devotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if
+either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to
+death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are
+happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a
+symbol of peace.
+
+Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure
+prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from
+ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying
+over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth,
+the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of
+life. Let us also remember that they issued _in pairs_.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI
+
+  CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE
+
+
+From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function
+was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages
+of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost
+general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex
+function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in
+common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par
+with gluttony.
+
+Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization
+that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially
+materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it
+occupies today in fine stock-breeding.
+
+Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude
+toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the
+history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was
+evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather
+erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it
+sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.
+
+In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the
+normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he
+experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we
+must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the
+sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a
+revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.
+
+Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy,
+except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that
+women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took the
+best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of
+wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the
+orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all
+these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and
+beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it
+came in the idea of asceticism--an instance where the remedy was worse
+than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was
+not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of
+licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as
+something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who
+should have known better.
+
+The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which
+fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were
+inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than
+from any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note a
+militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of
+woman's claim to free expression.
+
+While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church
+instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy,
+but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained,
+from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy
+Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the
+inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted
+children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their
+comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath
+the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are
+gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes
+to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old,
+nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been
+to hold to this central truth of all Life--religious, social,
+national, and domestic--the truth that it is only by exalting the
+maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour
+of mankind.
+
+And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be
+the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church
+itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"--the pure Love between one
+man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour
+that ever was or ever will be--the pure Christ-child that is born of
+conterpartal union.
+
+Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a
+city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that
+even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a
+pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the
+omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of his
+discovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have been
+swallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember also
+that this central idea has been the foundation of all religious rites
+since time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric of
+Christianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, he
+will see that it has merely been _revealed_, and the revelation will
+prove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual and
+the most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that Perfect
+Love is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withhold
+Heaven from us, if we have this perfect love.
+
+Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every other
+religious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true and
+only God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears;
+according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-une
+God, will be our spiritual development.
+
+We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when we
+abandon it as unclean and unworthy and unholy; both attitudes are
+abnormal, and unbalanced.
+
+Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balanced
+person is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balanced
+individual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced and
+therefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced and
+healthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; this
+fact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is now
+considering, to wit: the earth's axis may be straightened, and, if so,
+a uniform temperature will prevail on this globe.
+
+Returning to a consideration of the subjects which head this chapter,
+we find it necessary to clear the ground a little, in regard to a
+definition of words.
+
+The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in the
+matter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of the
+sex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The word
+has come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from the
+sex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, that
+any indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, our
+modern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestly
+paradoxical that they are absurd.
+
+On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful and
+holy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as an
+indecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh.
+
+We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible only
+because of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taught
+that sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lower
+state of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we are
+told that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, where
+there is no such "polluting sin" as sex-love.
+
+We certainly do need balance.
+
+The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the
+undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid
+of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our
+minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person;
+it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not
+surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection
+with the male. It is strictly a female attribute--nay, we may almost
+say, "organ."
+
+If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of
+opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression,
+or--which occurs more frequently--as a commercial expediency,
+believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial
+market--if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes
+bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is
+extolled.
+
+This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a
+bridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should
+the evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature
+was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the
+arch-enemy of both sexes.
+
+And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may
+look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the
+Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their
+sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon
+the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery,
+among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of
+that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the
+deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related
+by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen
+years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by
+her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had
+"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the
+same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered
+quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always
+over-crowded with similar sales.
+
+Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings
+keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage;
+inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious,
+blissful life.
+
+Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed
+to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price
+for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual
+deception has been the rule.
+
+Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the
+wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story
+of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman
+brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly
+from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given
+birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author
+made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and
+coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of
+the clerical critics.
+
+When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever
+held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld
+almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one
+hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in
+the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the _One primordial, and
+indestructible key to salvation_--the birth of the god-man through the
+recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.
+
+But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there
+is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to
+regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in
+sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic
+aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently
+described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."
+
+If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it were
+profane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view of
+mysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would be
+able to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack.
+
+The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance and
+ecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Either
+they will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is due
+the subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or they
+must be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns all
+sexual desire--that of eroticism and innate and ineradicable
+depravity.
+
+Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, the
+paroxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to the
+Holy Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedly
+obnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtue
+of prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to an
+ideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual,
+then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at once
+both explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "the
+mystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using the
+terminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physical
+union than the word "married") was the "bride-groom;" more than that;
+she declared that she was married with a ring, set with precious
+stones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring.
+
+Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employ
+when exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is
+singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of
+the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and
+exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the
+dilettante lover.
+
+To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed within
+themselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age of
+sexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human love
+spiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal to
+that of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for the
+intensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them into
+such an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the bliss
+of the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, and
+were totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-called
+practical life.
+
+Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his
+"Varieties of Religious Experience," says: "Her idea of religion seems
+to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so
+without irreverence--between the devotee and the Deity." Although this
+estimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless be shocking to
+the people who think they are pious, we take an optimistic view of it,
+and suggest that the saint's idea of religion is far more satisfying
+than that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most of
+the female saints, became "the bride of Christ"--the _man_ Jesus, the
+Christ, let it be remembered.
+
+St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gave
+herself up so wholly to this inward contemplation; to fasting, prayer,
+and withdrawal from the outer to the inner life, that she lived as the
+"bride of God," in such daily contact with Him as would fitly describe
+any love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God"
+indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses and
+compliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover.
+
+In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that he
+selected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and
+"consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning with
+love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity." In consequence of this
+vow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautiful
+women.
+
+Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were not
+so, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as the
+object of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, and
+Theresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the Virgin
+Mary.
+
+"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse with her guardian angel,
+who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun and
+with a crown of glory on his head."
+
+St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved with
+extravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "a
+young man of such radiant beauty and purity that he melted her soul."
+
+The truth is that, in seeking to escape from the "sin" of human love,
+as seen in the world, in the union of the sexes, they touched the very
+main-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown to
+the merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritual
+sex-union.
+
+Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints really
+came into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms of
+holy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequently
+appear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?
+
+The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must be
+interpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in these
+instances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology,
+that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even though
+the visions did relate to some person other than the members of the
+Holy Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would have
+been attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint.
+
+They were practically compelled to include God and Christ in their
+ecstacies to prove their respectability.
+
+One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which
+"flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularly
+applicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described by
+those who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborg
+so constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights." This
+phrase is "melting love." It is a feeling of melting or merging into
+the other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed by
+the two souls. In fact, it is _union_; whereas the lesser, or we may
+say the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but _contact_.
+
+If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives of
+the saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we are
+sorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages,
+which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all we
+may know of the "love of God," is by analogous comparison to what we
+know of human love.
+
+If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitably
+arrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In which
+event, the very word itself would have lost its significance.
+
+The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects of
+saintliness lies in the realization that neither the saints
+themselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had any
+conception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened and
+unprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly ecstacies,
+postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, be
+objectionable, what can be said of the only other view which is
+possible in the light of the evidence submitted?
+
+Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we must
+needs decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue.
+
+For example, consider the character of a mother of the
+self-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of the
+human family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect the
+generations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with an
+unmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of the
+opposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment;
+upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of this
+self-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even common
+affection. Who is the more chaste?
+
+Coventry Patmore says:
+
+  "Virgins are they before the Lord,
+    Whose souls are pure. The vestal fire
+  Is not, as some mis-read the Word,
+    By Marriage quenched, but burns the higher."
+
+If purity of soul were synonymous with celibacy, the entire
+constantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished;
+but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward the
+divine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purer
+conception of love. As we approach a higher type of civilization, the
+broader, deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. The
+more spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and our
+love-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual love
+is less sexual than is physical love. Spiritual love is physical love,
+_plus_ all the other phases of love.
+
+The real objection to sex love on the physical plane is not based upon
+its strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than an
+attraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, it
+has no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like the
+electrical wire that is "short circuited," it expends itself in one
+spasmodic combustion.
+
+True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common and
+erroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process of
+subtraction.
+
+We need go no further than to review the processes in the external
+world of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of the
+spiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea of
+exclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called
+"spiritual."
+
+All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Where
+formerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we now
+harness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces of
+electricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering between
+two single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions of
+persons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness, as we
+approach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging;
+drawing within.
+
+The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to the
+female pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in external
+life. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid the
+suction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, and
+union between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth to
+individual human life, and we have what?
+
+_Counterpartal Sex-union._
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                    SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?
+
+
+We have heard much in recent years of "affinities," and "soul-mates,"
+and we are likely to hear much more in the future. So much that is
+unsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that we
+almost hesitate to employ them; but that is always the way with Fear.
+It builds a high wall between us and Truth, and dares us to scale it.
+
+We accept the challenge.
+
+To begin with, the words are not synonymous, although frequently used
+as such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes and
+appetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages of
+development may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highly
+intellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend to
+attract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtue
+of mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only--that is, when it is
+because two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskey
+diluted; or their wine iced--we are apt to find the result in a
+mistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for the
+reasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which to
+draw. The chemistry of the body changes with time and emotional
+experiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from a
+congeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived.
+
+Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches a
+state higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos.
+
+Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to the
+senses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; but
+back of thought is desire; and back of desire is design--cosmic design
+we may say--expressing itself discretively; in individuals.
+
+Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of a
+finer nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-conscious
+attraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons of
+the opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference for
+each others' society which deceives the average on-looker into
+thinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of fact
+there may never have been any thought of such relationship.
+
+A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, or
+Margaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion of
+men for many years without having entered into any more intimate
+relationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past,
+and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirable
+companionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seen
+twice with the same man without having the neighbors speculating as
+to a suitable name for the baby.
+
+More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settle
+themselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectual
+affinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from the
+old thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse,
+and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexual
+appetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane of
+intellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or by
+the force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking to
+spoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature did
+not intend it to be so.
+
+A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beings
+now accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes,
+a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. He
+was a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of a
+degree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; she
+was moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a month
+of married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community,
+remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval and
+shocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendship
+with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the
+ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.
+
+The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be
+"yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual
+predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire.
+And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an
+idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It
+is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an
+idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.
+
+Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon
+personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other
+to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it
+still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in
+the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.
+
+A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived
+together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they
+agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They
+agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either
+come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given
+without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor
+and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of
+civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.
+
+True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to
+be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her
+up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual
+companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and
+disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which
+is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the
+animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality
+than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By
+exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended
+or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to
+fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized
+man vents his remaining savagery.
+
+Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And
+while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some
+degree of mutuality, are a step higher in social development than were
+the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic
+exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where
+woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an
+"old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must
+go through an evolutionary phase.
+
+Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust,
+these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and
+mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they
+evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual
+affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency
+than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was
+heard so frequently as it is now.
+
+The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since
+women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage
+bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more
+frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically
+independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have
+been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences.
+And it is at the _evidence_ of marital unhappiness that all the
+criticism is directed.
+
+If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce
+tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to
+the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal
+moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother
+is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood,
+whether she is a wife or not.
+
+This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many.
+The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become
+chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public
+morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are
+our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they
+are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first
+be demolished, before they are rebuilt.
+
+The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one
+single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals,
+that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the
+whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest
+change in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we go
+on year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word of
+the Century. If "self-improvement," then social improvement. Mankind
+is still in the making, as far as external conditions are concerned.
+
+The complaint goes up from every side, that women refuse motherhood.
+Girls who have been carefully reared, brought up in the most orthodox
+movement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention of
+finding a rich husband and not, emphatically, _not_ having any
+children.
+
+May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girls
+who become mothers without first becoming wives?
+
+We are wont to refer to unmarried mothers as "unfortunates" and
+"ruined." But in what does the misfortune consist, and wherein are
+they ruined?
+
+Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because she
+has loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any way
+except that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nigh
+unforgivable stupidity?
+
+The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain
+famous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respect
+in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no
+husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place
+accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's
+well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of
+perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband,
+but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"
+
+We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example,
+and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard
+child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said
+that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but
+observation should convince us that in all too many instances the
+first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime
+against posterity.
+
+We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a
+husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We
+endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we
+insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the
+greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the
+sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the
+unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one,
+when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes
+courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a
+hypocritical world.
+
+The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and
+happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in
+the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence,
+alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will
+be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no
+power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may
+temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.
+
+What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention is
+that affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we may
+have many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possibly
+have more than one soul-mate.
+
+Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves that
+make a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merely
+similar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because of
+curiosity or dissimiliarity.
+
+They belong to each other because together they complete a perfect
+balance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balance
+the qualities lacking in the other.
+
+In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, and
+re-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, instead
+of merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this external
+plane of consciousness.
+
+Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, because
+the real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interior
+nature exists independently of the physical organism.
+
+Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This is
+manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the
+avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing
+called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we
+note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom
+the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuries
+the race-thought seeks the underlying cause for specific effects,
+instead of, as heretofore, being satisfied to deal with effects only,
+suppressing those that are unpleasant and extolling those that seem
+agreeable.
+
+The scientist expresses it thus: "Nature is giving up her secrets to
+man." The metaphysician puts it this way: "The soul of man is
+unveiling, and soon we shall know each other in Truth." The
+religionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St.
+Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "we
+shall see each other face to face; not as now through a glass,
+darkly."
+
+This tendency to "get behind the scenes" as it were, to penetrate the
+crust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature,
+may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders of
+denunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who are
+not yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and
+"respectability," women have insisted upon freedom of the body in
+dress until at last the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad woman
+excites little adverse comment. The fact has at last established
+itself that the female form has legs.
+
+This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted to
+see exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman has
+always known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the game
+of enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her
+"meal-ticket." She could always keep him guessing as to whether or not
+she had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund of
+curiosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed to
+woman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donning
+the matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have always
+known this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageable
+daughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped to
+secure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressed
+thus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of the
+respectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is the
+standard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would have
+us retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies are
+vile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an idea
+of modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit has
+fled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it was
+founded upon the idea that woman was an instrument of the devil
+himself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked,
+and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innate
+defilement.
+
+The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admit
+women to the communion table in the "holy sacrament." A fine chance
+has any sacrament of being holy, with one half of it missing!
+
+The old idea of womanly modesty consisted of blushing with shame and
+embarrassment if by chance her ankles became exposed to the interested
+and curious gaze of a male. Notwithstanding this ideal of modesty, the
+designing and beguiling female managed to arrange just such a
+contretemps every time there was an eligible male within sight; if
+discovered, she either assumed a look of infantile innocence, or she
+took the opportunity to coax a becoming blush.
+
+To be sure, this does not accurately describe all women of "the good
+old days." There was the other type.
+
+Nature manifests in extremes. There was the type, fitting ancestors to
+those women of to-day who are outraged and shocked at the present-day
+fashions, which actually disclose the fact that women are
+anatomatically endowed with legs and hips, quite in defiance of man's
+inherited predilection for making this discovery under conditions that
+would pamper to his satiating sex-appetite. They, poor creatures, were
+dreadfully ashamed of being women, and they did all that was possible
+to conceal the fact. They, doubtless, would gladly have amputated
+their legs, if the ministers had so decreed, and they apologized to
+the world every time an unforseen circumstance uncovered a portion of
+these offensive legs. In fact, they denied the existence of "said
+members," and alluded to them tentatively and with modest hesitation,
+as "limbs."
+
+"But," some will exclaim, "we cannot see any possible connection
+between a regenerated race, and a fashion which permits the display of
+the female figure upon the public streets, where men who are as yet
+un-regenerated, and licentious, may leer and pass vile remarks, and
+suggest lustful thoughts."
+
+Few can see any connection between our so-called practical, everyday
+life, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life as
+something remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distant
+future. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that we
+postpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the human
+family has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdom
+come upon earth," they apparently have not had the slightest idea that
+God would take them at their word.
+
+They are like the old darky who called upon "de Lawd to strike him
+dead if he was not telling the truth," when as a matter of fact he was
+lying roundly. At that moment a bricklayer on the building above where
+Rastus was standing, dropped a brick, which struck the old darkey on
+the head, and he exclaimed "What's de matter, good Lawd, caint
+you'all take a joke?"
+
+The Kingdom of God, from all records, whether orthodox or heterodox,
+has been described as the abode of angels; and angels have been
+pictured as nearly nude as our silly "morality" would permit. No one
+has as yet suggested that we compel the angels to wear hoopskirts,
+although "September Morn" has been compelled, by police regulation, to
+don a sweater.
+
+The spiritual life awaits our cognizance, just behind the transparent
+veil of our limited mortal consciousness. This is the message of the
+"unveiling" of the female form. This is the time of woman's revealment
+of true modesty; true ideals. The Female Principle, representing the
+spiritual element in nature, hitherto shut in; covered up; hidden--is
+coming out.
+
+Men must learn to be able to look upon the female form without spasms
+of either lustful desires; or contemptuous indifference.
+
+There was a time when the presence of a female office-force in the
+business section of a city was the signal for unwarranted familiarity
+on the part of some of the male members of a corporation. There was a
+time, when women first invaded the ranks of the "down-town" business
+centers, that a woman's appointment to a responsible position rested
+upon her claims to feminine attractiveness. Now, the only question
+asked is, "Is she efficient?"
+
+_That which she is, in her interior nature, is the final test of her
+power._ When men have become inured to the knowledge, so long
+concealed, that women have legs and that there is no more
+seductiveness in them than in their faces, the love of man for woman
+will undergo the same evolution that his estimate of her business
+efficiency has undergone. He will judge her by what she is in her
+interior nature; and his sexual desires, now manifested distractedly
+in mere love of the female, will become concentrated in love of the
+one woman to whom his soul turns in irresistible sex-attraction, as
+unerringly as the needle turns to the pole to which it is magnetized.
+
+Is this fact so unmanifest? Does not everything point to it?
+
+A few years ago, a man and a woman could not pass a day together in
+mutual conversation, and interest, without encroachment upon the one
+emotion which they were supposed to hold in common--sexual attraction.
+
+That was indeed the whole sum and substance of communication between
+the two sexes, if we may except the rare instances which history has
+made much of, because of their rarity--women of the French salons, who
+have become famous for their wit and beauty, in neither of which
+attributes did they outstrip the average self-supporting woman of
+today.
+
+But custom has slowly, but perceptibly, established the possibility of
+a frank and non-sentimental companionship between the male and the
+female, and the result is that both are much more clear as to the true
+character of their sentiments toward each other. Neither is blinded
+by the force of undifferentiated sex-attraction.
+
+There must be some specific basis of mutual love; hence we have the
+vogue of the "affinity," and by the term is instantly recognized a
+special force of attraction, independent of undifferentiated sex
+alone. It is known that there is at least an assumption of an interior
+attraction, and we insist that affinity marriages, however incomplete
+as yet, are still superior in motive to that of mere marriage, where
+it is a case of _a_ male and _a_ female, united by propinquity; family
+considerations; commercial interests; class association; or what not.
+
+Affinities at least have the grace to presuppose a special
+sex-attraction. They argue for the ultimate goal of special and
+permanent selection, even if they fail to reach it.
+
+That there will be many failures during the journey from the
+sense-conscious life, to the soul-conscious life, is a foregone
+conclusion. The pathway of Love has always been a thorny one, but
+those who are on the high ground may look across into the rose-strewn
+garden, and know that the little god is aiming his arrows at the
+interior nature of those whom he would unite. He is not blind. His
+sight is illumined and he sees that the soul can unite only with its
+mate. True it is that "the course of true love never did run smooth,"
+but let us hope that the time is coming when it will be less thorny.
+
+_There are no mismates in soul-union._
+
+This truth is the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics. It is the
+hidden wisdom of the initiates; the alchemical mysteries of the
+Ancients. It is told to us in the fairy story of the Sleeping
+Princess--a story which is found in the folk-lore of every country of
+the globe. It is the philosopher's stone, which when found, opens the
+door to all wisdoms.
+
+_There can be no mismates in soul-union._
+
+Neither can there be any sexual "temptation," or desire outside of
+this union, when once found.
+
+  "But never shall he faint or fall
+  Who lists to hear, o'er every fate,
+  The sweeter and the higher call
+            Of his true mate.
+
+  I hear it wheresoe'er I rove;
+  She holds me safe from shame or sin;
+  The holy temple of her love
+            I worship in."
+
+A time when "the twain shall be" virtually, "one flesh" and the
+"outside as the inside" is not a chimerical dream.
+
+When the physical body is as much reverenced as is the spiritual; when
+in fact, the soul is revealed (unveiled) to our mortal consciousness;
+when the mind has been freed from its load of prejudices and fears and
+doubts and belief in sin; then we shall, indeed, truly see each other.
+
+We do not see each other now, unless perhaps we have developed that
+spiritual insight which is not blinded by appearances, but which
+contacts the interior nature. But the revealing, the uncovering
+process has begun. We have come to the time so long anticipated; so
+earnestly promised, when "naked and unashamed" we should "re-enter the
+lost Paradise."
+
+Well, the women, God bless them, are as naked as the tender morality
+of our police officials will permit and as unashamed as it is possible
+to be with the handicap of a puritanical ancestry, which was so
+evil-minded as to suspect God himself of sin when He formed the
+"wicked" body.
+
+Prudists may howl; and legislators may legislate; but the course of
+the Cosmic Law which would free us and bestow upon us Peace and Love
+and Happiness without stint, has never been stopped, although it has
+been obstructed.
+
+Let us examine some points of the Hidden Wisdom, in the light of this
+postulate, and see if the conclusion is not warranted.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                      THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED
+
+
+As we have previously observed, there is what may be termed a
+religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from the
+standpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is in
+everything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of the
+same subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticism
+itself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distance
+view of science.
+
+Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noise
+over calling each other black, we find the scientist frequently
+disdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equal
+disapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from his
+point of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of the
+same pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at the
+cause. In their final calculations they arrive at the same conclusion,
+although they call it by different names.
+
+The scientist says that everything proceeds from the one eternal
+energy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with the
+external. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest." In
+reference to this definition of religious mysticism, perhaps the
+phraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism,"
+is the best possible exposition of the position of the religious
+mystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religious
+mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of the
+living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attempt
+to realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal in
+the eternal, and the eternal in the temporal."
+
+Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using other
+terminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimately
+say, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms of
+discovery.
+
+The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to
+measure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrum
+somewhere beyond."
+
+The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of the
+Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the
+hypothetical base of algebraical science--the unknown quantity of
+which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from
+cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete,
+perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have
+deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercise
+the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is a
+most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with the
+same superficial idea that they entertain in regard to puzzles, saying
+"it is only a puzzle"--utterly ignoring the value of exercising the
+inductive reasoning faculties.
+
+Fairy stories are popularly supposed to be for the entertainment and
+amusement of children. In reality they are the universal language of
+symbolism. There is not a single fairy story which has not been handed
+down from generation to generation, and, what is more suggestive, each
+story is told with astonishing lack of variation, in every tongue and
+throughout every nation on this earth.
+
+The stories involving the turning of men into animals and their final
+restoration to human form, as a reward for some service, some
+sacrifice, typifies the two-fold nature of Man. He may live in his
+animal, or exterior nature; or he may develop his spiritual, or
+interior nature; through service; through unselfish love. Our limited
+mortal consciousness is responsible for the tendency to personify
+everything, instead of to realize the principles underlying all
+expression. God and the Devil have been the personification of the two
+phases of the principles of Evolution, from animal man to spiritual
+man.
+
+Romulus and Remus have been presented as an actual and specific
+instance of twins; likewise Castor and Pollux. Almost every child
+instinctively alludes to himself or herself, as either "the good
+little me" or the "bad little me." "O, I didn't do that; it was the
+bad little Dorothy," or "Harold," as the case may be, is the
+child-like way of expressing the innate consciousness that there is
+an interior and an exterior nature to all of us.
+
+The union of gods with mortals, which forms the gist of Mythological
+tales, symbolizes the god-like and the mortal qualities inherent in
+human nature. Mortals raised to the abode of the gods; and the gods
+descended into mortal life; symbolize the interchangeability of what
+we term matter and spirit--the power of transmutation of the lower
+into the higher life.
+
+Volumes could be written upon the subject, and we will therefore try
+to confine our reviews to the symbolical traditions which deal most
+directly with the relations of the sexes.
+
+In religious symbology, the story of the ark stands as the supreme
+type of creation, through the conjunction of the sexes.
+
+The cherubim are, when all is said and done, nothing more, nor yet
+less, than spiritual children--the result of spiritual sex-union.
+
+And in this later synoptic mysticism of the ark of the Covenant, we
+are informed that "every gift within the tabernacle is willingly
+offered." If we will but contemplate the volumes of wisdom contained
+within that sentence, we cannot fail to conclude that every
+infinitesimal particle of coercion in whatsoever shape and form,
+individual, economic, ethical, or religious, must be excluded from the
+regenerated, perfect, ideal sex-relation; otherwise we do not attain
+it.
+
+If the Ancients seemed to take some of these folk-lore stories too
+literally, we of this "practical" age, do not take them literally
+enough.
+
+We have imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended in
+the physical. This view is excusable in the case of the materialist,
+if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for
+the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life.
+Since sex is the cause and the result of what we know of creation;
+since it is the foundation of all the qualities that we know as
+spiritual laws; friendship; unselfishness; fidelity; paternal
+solicitude--it is absolutely certain that the most beautiful things we
+know here must have a correspondence in the life hereafter. Of these
+beautiful things in life, babies come first; with birds and flowers
+and music as fitting accessories.
+
+But to return to the ark of the covenant. The perpetual flame on the
+altar (the center) is the undying Flame of spiritual love--and by that
+we mean sex-love, let it be understood. If we seem to repeat this too
+frequently it is because of the almost general habit of the race to
+apologize for sex-love. The erroneous idea obtains, that spiritual
+love is sexless. All too frequently we come across the phrase, "with a
+love that has in it nothing of human love," the writer evidently
+anxious to convey the impression of tremendous spirituality and the
+consequent elimination of the sex function.
+
+And so we emphasize once more, and we may do so again, the assurance
+that the symbol of the never-dying flame upon the altar is typical of
+the never-dying spirit of sex-love. Spirit is ever symbolized by
+flame, as in the "flaming sword" of the archangel.
+
+The Deity upon the seat of the altar symbolizes the bi-une
+Sex-principle of creation.
+
+The reason that the Jewish people have claimed that they were "God's
+chosen people" is because, in their symbolism of the ark of the
+Covenant, all Israel was grouped under the tabernacle. The formation
+of the tabernacle proves that it typifies the mother's womb. The
+tabernacle was guarded by the priests who _were sworn to purity_; thus
+they symbolized the esoteric truth that the pure spiritual sex-union
+bestows immortal god-hood.
+
+Let us take another story, that of the life-token. This is best told
+in the story of the Holy Grail, although it is found in all the
+fairy-books of all nations, in the language and form befitting the
+race to which it belongs.
+
+In the original, that is in the earliest recitals of this life-token
+story, we find that the thing left behind, as a _center_ (which is
+always guarded and protected in various ways), was a tree. Here, we
+have the phallic symbol as the life-token. But in the story of the
+Holy Grail, the cup is the life token to be guarded; it is the sacred
+symbol of the quest and it is of a design resembling the red rose of
+the Templars. This time it is the yoni--literally the _chalice_ of the
+_holy communion_; the centre of the radiant circle, which is the
+answer to all the problems within the radius. It is the search for,
+and the finding of, the balance in counterpartal union. It is the X of
+Being, and only the purest and the noblest of the Knights of the
+"Round Table" essay the difficult quest. The "mound of Venus" is
+another name for the "Round Table."
+
+Again is emphasized the necessity for purity, and this purity,
+although including all the spiritual qualities: fidelity; bravery;
+self-sacrifice; humanity; love of truth; culminates in sexual purity.
+
+"Blessed are the pure in heart (the pulse of the soul) for they shall
+see God." We revise this latter part, and we say "for they shall be
+_gods_."
+
+Let us consider the story of the "sleeping Princess." She is depicted
+as a princess, first of all, because she is the daughter of a king; a
+king is an earthly ruler, or exalted person. Esoterically, she is the
+daughter of the exalted God, and she is the soul. Sometimes this story
+is told in the male gender, but everywhere the essential points are
+the same.
+
+Wagner, who is known as a Mystic, has illustrated the story in
+Brunhilde and Siegfried. Brunhilde is an immortal--a goddess, who
+renounces her immortality to become a woman.
+
+She sleeps on the top of a high mountain and she is surrounded by a
+circle of flame; and here she sleeps, despite all efforts to arouse
+her, until awakened by the touch of Siegfried--the one human being in
+all the universe who could awaken the sleeping princess.
+
+The high mountain symbolizes the highest love of which we are capable.
+To reach the soul of the exalted woman, typified in the fairy-story by
+the word princess, and later, by Wagner, as the goddess, man must be
+her mate. _No other can enter the womb of her soul_, though many may
+effect an entrance to the outer court.
+
+This truth, as absolute as life itself, solves all the problems of the
+mystery of love and its joys and sorrows. No soul can wholly,
+unreservedly love the "wrong" one. Though we may love and die of the
+pain of unrequited loving, yet love is its own self-justification, and
+its own reward. The pathway of love leads up the mountain top, but no
+one who reaches the summit shall fail to find that for which he seeks.
+
+The soul of man, and of woman, has been playing a game of blind-man's
+bluff--a fitting name for the game it is, too. Unable to see anything
+but the exterior nature, and longing for success in the search, we
+have frantically grabbed here and there, and appropriated that which
+we grabbed, with a self-complacency and an egotism of which little
+Jack Horner would be ashamed.
+
+In the symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders, such as the
+Ancient Alchemists; the Hermetics; the Rosicrusians; and in modern
+times, the Free Masons, we have this story of the search for the
+ultimate balance of soul union, told in language veiled unless we are
+fit to know; but openly enough if we are fit. And in all these orders
+(alleged guardians of the hidden wisdom) we have varying degrees of
+initiation; and in each degree the initiate must undergo certain
+trials to prove his fearlessness; his fidelity; his fitness, in other
+words, for the final revealment of all, which is the initiation into
+the "holy of holies;" the "secret chamber" and the degree of
+"mastership."
+
+In the order of Masonry, the highest degree is that of the Templar.
+The symbol of the Templars is the red rose on the cross, together with
+the star and the crescent. The star preserves the esotericism of its
+nomenclature, in whatever sphere it is used, namely, the power of
+radiating light. It stands for the radiant center. The Knights Templar
+sought the radiant center to complete their half circle, and when they
+should have found, they were to become radiant with the light of
+spiritual power. That they originally at least, understood the way of
+this initiation, is evident by the symbol of the rose and the
+cross--the combined phallus and yoni.
+
+This fact is the underlying cause of the open and hereditary enmity of
+the Church of Rome for the modern order of Freemasons. The Church
+sought to specialize in the persons of the Virgin Mary and her Son the
+eternal principles of the "way of the cross." The temporal power of
+the Church could be built up only by offering a complete system of
+salvation within the church itself. At the same time, the utter
+degradation of Sex, which had reached its depths under Roman
+civilization, called for as complete a reversion of the ideas of the
+Ancient sex-worshippers, as was consistent with the truth.
+
+Hence we find the extreme attitude of the Church opposing all
+reference to sex as other than a part of the temptations of the Evil
+One, although they did retain the central truth typified by the Holy
+Virgin Mother, and the pure and perfect child.
+
+The Alchemists are supposed to have been imbued with the desire and,
+to some extent, at least, were regarded as having the knowledge of how
+to make gold. This gold-making was always accomplished by
+transmutation of the baser (lower) metals; also, the knowledge of how
+to accomplish this transmutation was possible only to one possessing
+"the philosopher's stone."
+
+If we will but remember that this "philosopher's stone" was of such a
+purity that it was almost impossible to find it; that, although
+several initiates claimed to possess the stone, yet no visible proof
+of its existence, or of gold resulting from lead or copper, was ever
+offered; and again if we will realize the fine distinction between the
+words "found" and "discovered," and take note that the word "found" is
+used almost invariably in connection with those who claimed to possess
+the stone, we will arrive at the obvious conclusion that the secret of
+the Alchemists was of an interior nature. We "discover" outside of
+ourselves; we "find" within. Above all, the "stone of great purity" is
+the same that was raised at Babylon, supplanting the yoni, which is
+to say, the phallic symbol.
+
+A philosopher is one who is wise in his interior nature; his wisdom is
+of the esoteric quality; we do not apply the term "philosopher" to
+either great educators, or great financiers; but to those whose
+activities are turned within.
+
+The force which is manifested in the lower desires and passions, when
+transmuted into spiritual channels, opens the door to the golden light
+of illumination.
+
+To become in reality a Prince of the Rosy Cross bestows the exaltation
+and the power, typified by that of an earthly prince--one who is
+exalted above the common man.
+
+It is doubtful, indeed, if many of the ancient alchemists attained to
+this exalted degree in its true significance; and we may readily
+believe that in an age in which wealth was so eagerly sought; temporal
+power so much desired; where deception was almost general; that few
+lived the requisite purity of life to have accomplished the
+transmutation; so today there is not one in a thousand of the many who
+have taken the degree of "Knight Templar," who recognizes its esoteric
+meaning.
+
+But words have a trick of trapping us, and we note that the word
+"taken" is invariably used in referring to modern Masonic initiation.
+Verily they have "taken" the degree in its outward semblance. They
+have not attained to its powers and privileges.
+
+Nor can they do so, when they exclude the very "gate of life" from the
+order. They may become masons (builders of the temple), but how can
+they become Architects, when they have not entered the tabernacle?
+
+In a search for hidden meanings, and for a secret tradition which is
+believed to be discoverable in Kabalistic and Hermetic literature, we
+find, if we possess true insight, the one indubitable truth,
+subordinating all the other symbols, namely that of the supremacy, the
+finality, of the sublimated sex-union, resulting in immortal
+mastership.
+
+Most modern interpreters of the archives of these ancient philosophers
+ignore the sexual significance of the arcana, but a glimpse at the
+symbols will readily convince the initiated of their identity with
+sexual symbology.
+
+For example in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi
+(Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate
+used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes
+"had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The
+sexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but this
+may be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of the
+alchemical symbols, or it may be due to a materialistic tendency on
+the part of the compiler.
+
+The plates, however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed to
+Basil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "The
+Great Hermetic Arcanum," the supreme and significant point of the
+illustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through which
+the initiate travels in his search for the supreme god-head, two
+doves, holding in their beaks a crown. The doves are perfectly
+matched. The crown is balanced between them, and the figure tops the
+circle, under the heading "regeneration."
+
+In another plate, which the author presents as "the Philosophic Cross,
+or Plan of the Third Temple as prophesied by Ezekiel," we note again,
+that the crown of the symbolical temple represents the red rose upon a
+cross, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle with
+outstretched wings, shielding her little brood, and on either side a
+tree and a flowering rosebush.
+
+Here is the symbol par excellence of generation. The creative function
+of the male and the female in procreative conjunctivity.
+
+The employment of the eagle as a religious symbol may be traced back
+to the civilization of the Hittites.
+
+Only a few years ago, two English archæologists discovered a
+double-headed eagle in Asia. This was identical with those seen
+perpetuating religious rites and ceremonies of the sex-worshipers. An
+eagle holding in its talons a serpent is an emblem well known today.
+The origin of the adoption of the eagle as a religious, though not
+necessarily a "sacred," symbol by prehistoric races, may easily be
+imagined, if we consider that the eagle is a bird of tremendous power;
+and that it soars to unreachable heights; and that it unquestionably
+was at some time seen to swoop down and carry off the serpent,
+possibly even during their ceremonies of serpent-worship.
+
+This idea becomes quite convincing when we also remember that the
+ceremonies of the serpent worshipers were carried on, as far as
+feasible, upon the mountain. We allude to this stage of religious
+history as "serpent worship," but when we realize the points of
+analogy between the serpent and the phallus it is apparent that the
+serpent was only the nature-emblem of generation, as manifested by the
+male principle.
+
+"The eagle and the dove" is a phrase employed today to illustrate the
+law of antithesis, and it is more than probable that the eagle
+represented the lower nature of the sex-relation, in juxtaposition to
+the higher, as the dove is emblematical of the spiritualized aspect of
+sex-love. We have an analogy to that of the eagle and the dove in the
+Biblical allusion to "the last day; when God will separate the 'sheep
+from the goats,'" Here again is a pertinent reference to the sex
+nature. The goat is a symbol of sensuality and lust, principally
+because he has perverted sexual proclivities, notably that of
+coercion. For this reason, Classical Mythology employs the satyr, a
+creature half man and half goat, to typify the lowest form of the sex
+call in man.
+
+On the other hand, the lamb is the type of gentleness and affection,
+and although in outward appearance the lamb and the goat are not
+dissimilar, their natures are antithetical.
+
+In estimating the God-idea of the Ancients, many mistakes have arisen
+by confounding religious symbols with the "sacred" symbols. The
+race-mind was in its kindergarten stage, and all ideals were instilled
+by means of pictures--a method which even the present hour finds most
+effective.
+
+In modern theological symbolism we have God and the Devil; Heaven and
+Hell; angels and demons, to illustrate by antithesis.
+
+They all belong to religious symbology, but only those which teach
+spiritual ideals are denominated "sacred."
+
+"Riding the goat," alleged to be the almost invariable initiatory
+prelude to fitness for membership in all secret orders, means, first
+of all, that the would-be initiate must have control over his lower
+sexual desires. If he cannot control the goat instincts within his
+nature, he stands small chance of taking the higher degrees of
+spiritual regeneration, through transmutation.
+
+In another symbolic chart presenting the secrets of alchemical
+transmutation, we find depicted "The Gate of Eternal Wisdom," and we
+are further informed that this "gate" also brings "knowledge of God."
+The design of this cave-like aperture should betray its esoteric
+meaning. It is situated under a mound, upon which trees are planted.
+The inscriptions on the corrugated walls of the cave, are evidently
+designed to resemble seven lotus petals, and are set forth as the
+seven mysteries. Inscriptions warning against profanation of this
+sacred gate, and also promising eternal life and glory to the true
+initiate, inspire the intrepid and deter the doubtful. Of these
+latter, several are outside the entrance. Two are on the steps leading
+to the mouth of the cave but their attitude bespeaks doubt of their
+worthiness. Only one has penetrated to the radiant center of the
+aperture, and there is room for but the one to enter the radiance of
+the solar gate, which truly bestows a knowledge that is "of God."
+
+Sex Symbology is a subject that calls for a large volume devoted to
+this special side of it, and we cannot hope to do more here than to
+touch a few of the almost universal proofs of the contention which is
+the purpose of this book, namely, that the supreme goal of life,
+typified in every religion, every philosophy, and in the intuitional
+knowledge of the human mind, is spiritual sex-union; and that this can
+be accomplished only by counterparts; the two halves of the bi-une god
+seed uniting in one immortal and complete pair--a man and a woman.
+Not, we must again emphasize, not in a hermaphroditic personality, but
+in two perfect complementaries--mates; not _one_ but _a pair_.
+
+In another exposition of Hermetic secrets we discover the amazing
+statement that "the alchemist is found working throughout, in
+conjunction with a woman of the art; _they begin and they attain
+together_."
+
+This should be plain enough. Small chance, indeed, either would have
+of attaining alone. But if this suggestion is not sufficient (and
+either from design or from failure to comprehend the significance of
+it, the translator seems to have missed the point), we are introduced
+to a symbolical figure-study, which shows a Chalice in which the sun
+and the moon are personified (the solar-man and the solar-woman), with
+the god Vulcan (fire) seated between them. Underneath this "twain-one"
+symbol a mortal man and a mortal woman are kneeling on either side of
+a cone-shaped and dome-tipped furnace, which is lighted by a feeble
+candle. But their attitude of prayer bespeaks the hope that this
+earthly flame will be transmuted by their prayers and aspirations; by
+their reverential attitude toward the divine character of the function
+of mating, into the immortal and unquenchable flame typified by the
+god of fire himself.
+
+In another series of symbolical plates, purporting to be the story of
+Metallic transmutation, but representing, above all, the story of
+manifestation from the Divine to the human and again to the
+spiritualized and perfected Adam and Eve--(the solar man and the solar
+woman), we again see that from generation to regeneration the work is
+accomplished by man and woman in conjunction.
+
+These plates bear the hall-marks of Christian appropriation of
+Hermetic symbolism, as peculiarly applicable to the Church, but the
+central doctrine of salvation through sex-regeneration, is retained.
+Whether consciously or not, is a question.
+
+Modern commentators and translators of alchemical literature insist
+that such documents are palpably related to the secret, or secrets, of
+metallic transmutation. That they prove the search for, if not the
+existence of, a "magic solvent" that resolves the baser metals into
+gold; but, as far as known, such a compound has not yet been
+discovered or, if it ever was, it has since been lost and evades all
+attempts at rediscovery. But if we read these alchemical treatises as
+they relate to transmutation of sex-love from the pro-creative
+function to regeneration through spiritual or counterpartal union
+(solar mates), we have the key to every statement.
+
+A writer tells of an instance which is recorded among alchemical
+archives, where "an unknown master testified to his possession of the
+mystery" (supposedly of metallic transmutation), but it is added that
+"he had not proceeded to the work because he had failed to meet an
+_elect woman_, who was necessary thereto." In other words, applying
+this statement in its obviously logical sense, the unknown master knew
+the esoteric meaning of the alchemical postulate, but not having met
+his female complement, he could not testify to the results of this
+transmutation. An "elect woman" would hardly be necessary in the work
+of metallic transmutation.
+
+Small wonder that the "alchemist" abandoned the work of turning lead
+and copper into gold. If he had found the key of keys, he cared little
+whether lead were lead, or whether gold remained gold, or melted into
+thin air. The golden light of illumination showed him all things in
+their purpose, and gold as a metal meant no more to him than did the
+so-called "baser" metals.
+
+Commenting upon this statement, the translator observes: "Those
+Hermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if a
+record of spiritual experience, present, like the literature of
+physical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism: the marriage of
+sun and moon; of a mystical king and queen; a union between natures
+which are _one_ at the _root_, but diverse in manifestation; a
+transmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein."
+
+If we will remember that the solar-man was personified by the Ancients
+as the sun; and the solar-woman by the moon, we have the first and
+salient points of the original Hermetic secrets, however much they may
+have degenerated from their spiritual to their physical application.
+The probabilities are that owing to the disapproval of the Christian
+Hierarchy, only the most veiled terminology was permissible. This view
+is more logical than is the one that the esoteric meaning was lost
+sight of.
+
+The marriage of an hypothetical or "mystical king and queen" bespeaks
+exaltation of the two conjoining persons, male and female, but this
+exaltation is in consciousness, and not in mere personality. The
+terms "king" and "queen" are nothing more or less than symbols of an
+exalted (spiritualized) state.
+
+And, in passing, we may here mention the fact that the language of
+lovers testifies to this intuitional realization. "My queen!" exclaims
+the enraptured lover, although in social station his beloved one may
+be only a scullery maid; and certainly, neither the beauty nor the
+goodness nor the wisdom of earthly kings and queens would be
+sufficient to inspire the comparison.
+
+It is ever the soul calling for the mate who, when found, will exalt
+the "twain-one" into the immortal powers and immortal wealth
+imperfectly symbolized by earthly rulers, making "right royal queens
+and kings of common clay."
+
+The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between two
+natures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation." And
+the alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promised
+that, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out of
+which all manifestation is composed," it only remained for someone to
+discover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substances
+in a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, could
+be dissolved into its constituent parts and re-solved again in the
+proportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared to
+say could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would not
+even be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interior
+transmutation, because having attained to the radiant center, he
+would realize the "glory of the worlds," and gold, as metal, would be
+to him of far less value than the emerald of the grass; the pearls of
+dew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; the
+laughter of children.
+
+How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think it
+worth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even consider
+the ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of his
+labors.
+
+But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure and
+unquenchable love--that were indeed worthy of ages of research. For
+are we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek and
+find? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the glory
+of the world? Is it fame, or wealth, or lands, or gems or kingdoms?
+
+Love is the only glory worthy of the name.
+
+  "For Life with all its yield of joy and woe
+  And hope and fear--believe the aged friend--
+  Is just our chance at the prize o' learning love."
+
+When we realize the esoteric meaning of this aspect of the ancient
+alchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole,
+manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to the
+fourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "transmutation which
+follows this union and the abiding glory therein," is the inevitable
+and logical sequential answer.
+
+An _abiding_ glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability.
+Transmutation is not synonymous with, extinction, or elimination, or
+abandonment. We _transmute_ the lower into the higher, the exterior
+into the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sum
+and substance of the "Ancient Wisdom."
+
+There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane of
+life, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to assume
+that Sex is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, or
+any other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are not
+distinctively separable anyway. They are merely _names_ which we use
+to distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness.
+
+The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariably
+misinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption of
+individuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, sexless Thing;
+but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than that
+bringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided,
+would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than
+bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting
+the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article.
+The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable.
+
+It takes two to make a pair. Mistake it not, and further, there is no
+_abiding glory_ in this world or in the next or in any other sphere,
+that is not founded upon the deep, intense and eternal love of man and
+woman.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                    WHAT CONSTITUTES SEX IMMORALITY?
+
+
+The average mind, nurtured in apprehensive awe of that race fetish
+called Public Opinion, is inordinately afraid of words.
+
+"Atheist," "infidel," "ungodly" are epithets which have been used as
+mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of
+religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the last
+century.
+
+These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the
+undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown
+that the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for the
+old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the
+contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood than
+that which the early Church postulated.
+
+Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance against
+Evolution.
+
+Ignorance is fearful of the unknown, and the knights of Enlightenment
+have ever had to fight their way through the ranks of abuse and
+criticism and misrepresentation.
+
+Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate of
+rational thought hesitates to claim affiliation; and yet the goal of
+our highest endeavors must be a state of Society where Love, the god,
+is free from the mire of corruption, and the bonds of slavery.
+
+Let us not be afraid of so harmless a thing as a word, remembering the
+case of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignation
+because someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat." She did not
+know what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved.
+
+When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we will
+not be so fearful of its sound.
+
+To whom is this epithet most frequently applied?
+
+Is it to the average man who is known to be a Lothario in matters of
+sex? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one who
+is "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no way
+affects his social standing.
+
+Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalized
+prostitution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning of
+free-love that the term is never used in connection with what modern
+reform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obvious
+reason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound and
+murdered as in this phase of woman's degradation.
+
+Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type of
+defiance of traditional sex-ethics there is always the spirit of
+self-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing.
+
+We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the young
+woman who has, what the world calls, "sinned," because, forsooth, she
+pays the price of her deviation from social standards (when
+discovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, or
+by sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it is
+evident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuates
+her conduct.
+
+It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to those
+who openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge in
+the sex-relationship, independent of the marriage ceremony. It matters
+not whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is the
+demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and
+morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to
+traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing
+the term "free-love" with an unpleasant odor.
+
+Public opinion puts a premium upon deceit.
+
+Such intimate matters as marriage and divorce are really no concern of
+any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.
+
+The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little with
+Truth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence of
+divorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring to
+live apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets before
+they may act upon such a decision.
+
+Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of
+the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from
+the world because she loved a man well enough to pay that price.
+
+She might have insisted that the man obtain a divorce from his wife,
+to whom he had been married seventeen or more years, and thus win the
+approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material
+things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of
+her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care
+for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the
+story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent
+club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if
+any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.
+
+Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed to
+think that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, she
+might in time be worthy of their forgiveness.
+
+Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with England
+of being a nation without a sense of humor.
+
+Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angels
+fear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions upon
+other people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue.
+
+The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or
+unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly
+indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity
+for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly
+brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man
+with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of
+self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of
+pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for
+her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not
+alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken
+her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real
+love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the
+fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It
+should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that
+a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved
+to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable
+position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.
+
+But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it is
+small wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings.
+
+If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, we
+would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces
+are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their
+outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands
+of Convention.
+
+The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women,
+because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to
+personal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and until
+women of the self-respecting and educated class began to openly
+emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the
+phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women
+the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.
+
+All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality
+sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sex
+promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium
+that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the
+claim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defiance
+of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its
+standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.
+
+The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other
+advanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life,
+has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free
+choice.
+
+Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shielding
+her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and
+abhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretly
+indulges her sex-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she is
+forced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequently
+these instincts are abnormally strong because of pre-natal and
+inherited influences.
+
+Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the average
+woman, are disastrous to the sex, and through them to the race,
+because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds and
+fetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement.
+
+Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physical
+disease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression of
+the sex-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through the
+compulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercial
+prostitution, is death to the best development of the race.
+
+Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through the
+religious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord and
+Master" have been compelled to develop a craftiness and an artificial
+"modesty" which, in most cases, passes for femininity, and deceives,
+as it is intended to do, the average man.
+
+For centuries, a woman's only profession was matrimony. Her education
+for this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance of
+all that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of her
+nature--the function of sex. In the occasional instances where she had
+inherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she must
+at least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of every
+emotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his sex-nature in her
+task of "catching a husband," it is small wonder that women have
+developed the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently both
+treacherous and cruel.
+
+Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting and
+conserving power of the bi-une sex-love, that she has broken through
+these mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defiance
+at the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification of
+her own sex-nature, and her right to her own person, despite the
+epithet of "free-love."
+
+Woman's partial emancipation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone to
+her head," as it were, and we see many women confounding license with
+liberty; mistaking passion for Love; and exchanging restraint for
+debauchery.
+
+The average woman is either almost entirely lacking in sex desire or
+she is abnormally active in that function. In truth, the same state of
+affairs prevails here, as in so many other phases of our modern life,
+namely, there is no balance. We are a civilization of extremes; we are
+one-sided, abnormal; distorted. We are seeking the pivotal point of
+our destiny, which is the soul, but few have reached that point. Those
+who have not, are groping through the jungles of the mental plane of
+consciousness, upheld on the one hand by the upward trend of their
+being, which seeks the level of the soul-conscious state; and held
+back on the other hand by the trammels of the sense-conscious type
+from which the race has developed to its present condition.
+
+Those instances where women indulge in excesses are comparatively rare
+in proportion to numbers, and they loom large in perspective because
+of their very incongruity with our ideals of womanly conduct. The vast
+majority of women may be safely trusted to use their sex-freedom, when
+it shall have truly arrived, for the purpose of finding that one and
+only mate which their souls instinctively know to be our rightful
+heritage--the proverbial "pearl of great price" which insures
+immortality in the bliss of union with our Beloved.
+
+Love, when freed from the illusions of sense; from the shackles of
+commercialism; from the bonds of error regarding the meaning and
+purpose of marriage; freed from selfishness and licentiousness; will
+solve the question of sex-promiscuity. This for the obvious reason
+that Love seeks its own. If left free to seek, it will find.
+
+But, if sex promiscuity is far from being free-love, if the doctrine
+of sex freedom is fraught with many dangers under our present social
+system, it must be conceded that no one method of social evolution,
+thus far devised, can be recommended as ideally perfect. The best that
+we can hope to do is to emphasize the importance and the sacredness
+and the innate purity of the sex-relation, while conceding to both
+sexes all the personal liberty possible.
+
+And above all, we should avoid condemnation of those who claim the
+right to freedom, lest we cover up a condition which can but be the
+better for being open to the light. Particularly should we shield
+women from the charge of immorality, and licentiousness, when we see
+them straying down the by-paths of the senses, in their quest for
+freedom, remembering that the centuries of repression and submission
+and consequent deception have left their mark upon woman's
+temperament.
+
+Man has for ages boasted of his sex virility; of his conquests in what
+he has termed "love." Not infrequently a man's choice of a wife is the
+result of much seeking in the garden of Life; and much sipping of the
+honey from the various flowers that grow therein. Often, indeed, a man
+frankly tells the woman he would marry that he knows he loves her
+above all other women for the convincing reason that he has tried so
+many and none have held him. Should a woman make the same confession
+and draw the same conclusion, he would be horrified.
+
+It must be admitted, then, that the term "free-lovers" is applied only
+to those who defy Public Opinion and claim their right to respect and
+morality despite their defiance of Society's false standards of
+morality. These standards are false because they are based upon
+criticism and censure of results instead of upon motives.
+
+Society ignores, if it does not actually encourage, frivolous
+flirtations, and frowns most harshly upon instances of real love. It
+sets the seal of disapproval and ostracism upon those who, because of
+circumstances or possibly because of indifference to man-made laws,
+take their affairs into their own hands and refuse to exhibit either
+penitence or shame when the world discovers that they neglected the
+marriage ceremony. If two persons truly love each other and there is
+nothing to interfere with their undergoing the publicity of a marriage
+ceremony, well and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle
+with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are
+innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to
+overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where
+absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other,
+prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as
+these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose
+something by persecuting those who are independent enough and honest
+enough to act from motive, rather than from custom, and who insist
+upon maintaining their self-respect, in the face of criticism.
+Self-respect is not related to braggadocio.
+
+It must be admitted that as yet there are few persons who have the
+courage to endure martyrdom for their convictions, which is, perhaps,
+just as well, because the majority are unable to distinguish between
+brazen shamelessness and unashamedness. The average woman will stick
+to the safe habit of dissembling.
+
+Women have learned the lesson of the cat too thoroughly to jump
+immediately from the back-yard of Deception to the front porch of
+Truth.
+
+In this one respect at least, however much she may indulge her desire
+for frankness in other directions, a woman will lie valiantly,
+self-protectingly, and continually, even though she follow in secret
+the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the
+hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and
+satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it
+would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary.
+But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement;
+whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be,
+that what is virtue in man is vice in a cat?"
+
+We are not told in the story what conclusion she arrived at, but we
+can imagine that her conclusion was that which women have arrived at,
+in a similar situation, to wit: man is unjust and unreasonable, but he
+is also stronger than I am, and therefore, while I shall follow his
+example, I shall take good care to hide the feathers.
+
+In the meantime, we are crossing the bridge that leads from the
+jungles of our animal nature, where prowl the beasts of deceit; greed;
+selfishness; sensuality; vanity; avarice; and domination; to the
+Heights, illumined by Love set free.
+
+Let us not jostle and crowd each other too harshly, while we are en
+route.
+
+But, of course, we are confronted with the pertinent query as to what,
+if any, absolute standard of morality there can be in matters of the
+sex relation. Freedom is so easily misconstrued into implying
+sex-promiscuity; and monogamy, the final survival of the various
+systems of marriage, has in its modern as well as in its ancient
+aspect so much of coercion; and coercion is cited as the insuperable
+obstacle to attainment of the supreme state of spiritual sex-union,
+that the would-be initiate becomes confused, and is lost in a maze of
+paradoxes.
+
+Moral distinctions are too fine for the undeveloped man-animal, and
+that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The
+objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their
+failure to die after they have become senile.
+
+Moral standards are as unstable as the shifting sands of the sea.
+
+"Our moral sentiments," say Letourneau, "are simply habits incarnate
+in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act
+reputed culpable at Paris, or at London, may be, and frequently is,
+held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin."
+
+And Emerson, the intellectual Seer, says: "There is a soul at the
+centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us
+can wrong the universe."
+
+It is a colossal piece of impudent presumption, when we come to think
+about it, for Man to ask the Supreme, Absolute, Infinite Power to
+forgive him. But, if we cannot wrong the universe, we can and we do
+wrong ourselves and each other as mortals.
+
+That is the whole gist of the story. We are constantly wronging
+ourselves and each other and calling upon God to support us in our
+strife when God cannot know aught save the call of Love.
+
+The growing, evolving race, has found it necessary to establish
+certain loosely defined codes of morals and of social ethics, in the
+same way that man has bridled the horse that he may control him;
+incidentally, we may observe that where this bridle formerly included
+"blinders," it now permits the horse to see whither he is going.
+
+Perhaps a brief survey of the standards of sexual morality which have
+upheld (or down-held, just as we look at it) the human race until now,
+may be illuminating.
+
+It has been disputed, if, under the matriarchal system of polygamy,
+the moral condition of the people was higher than under the
+patriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can be
+reached upon this point, save and except that any condition, however
+primitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must be
+better than that in which she is the object of coercion. This is
+evident, because the degree of coercion can never, under any
+circumstances, be as great with the male as with the female.
+
+Therefore, matriarchal polygamy is comparatively more nearly moral
+than is patriarchal polygamy, and when all is said and done, historic
+morality is comparative.
+
+But from the standpoint of modern idealism matriarchal polygamy seems
+to be a very low estimate of moral conduct; and from the standpoint of
+sexual idealism it is a low standard; a standard only a degree higher
+than that of patriarchal polygamy--a standard which is the lineal
+descendant of the ethics of the marriage-by-capture period of human
+evolution, and from which we are today by no means free, owing to
+economic, religious, and ethical conditions.
+
+There is a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the unorganized
+brotherhood of the Enlightened, that laws are made for the guidance of
+the masses. Unbridled ignorance is a dangerous force; as dangerous as
+an unbridled horse, unless it be that the horse exhibits intelligence
+enough to know where it is headed for and how to avoid obstacles en
+route.
+
+And even as the laws of a community are made for the intellectually
+undeveloped, so the commandments were compiled for the spiritual
+guidance of the uninitiated.
+
+We trust that it will not shock the sensibilities of the "pious" when
+we affirm and maintain and insist that the ten commandments are not
+"from God" in the letter of the statements, as postulated by Theology.
+They bear all the earmarks of the ancient Hebrew race-mind, which
+placed a man's "neighbor's wife" in the same category with "his ox and
+his ass and his house" and his other property and possessions.
+
+There is but one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, and
+that is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot break
+it if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying to
+live in defiance of its immutability.
+
+"We cannot wrong the universe!"
+
+Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are at
+present the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship,
+engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea. Both the Hebrew
+and the Roman customs maintained the inferiority and the consequent
+subjugation of woman, despite the fact that the Roman Church exalted
+the Virgin as a personality; but the postulate of the Church that Mary
+was so exalted by a miracle, which never could be repeated, killed any
+forlorn hope which might have lurked within the female breast
+regarding a possible emulation of her example. No other woman might do
+more than cringe and crawl and beg and whine; or cajole and wheedle
+and buy the Holy Mother's intercession, which intercession, even if
+successful, could at best but secure her an eternal job in the
+Heavenly hierarchy, where, sexless, companionless, mateless, anæmic,
+she could look all day at a male God whom she could never presume to
+reach.
+
+Rather a lonesome outlook for eternity, and it is small wonder that
+woman got discouraged at the prospect. The miracle is rather that she
+endured it so long.
+
+But the Roman system had at least one virtue. It instilled into the
+mortal mind of its people a sub-conscious realization of the ideal of
+monogamy; not an ideal monogamy by a long way, but a monogamic ideal.
+They are quite different; but inasmuch as it is an outward semblance
+of a more spiritual conception of marriage than that of polygamy, it
+is the highest ideal yet realized for the many, and does duty in our
+present day and age, as consistent with our superior civilization.
+
+Monogamy at least pretends to be a marriage by mutual consent; and
+even in the pretense there is the germ of a hope; but it would be
+folly to deny that underneath this appearance of marriage by mutual
+consent we see the remnants of the traditional idea of the right by
+purchase, and therefore we have the jealousy that arises by virtue of
+our property rights.
+
+The right by purchase assuredly underlies our present-day marriage
+system, although it is disguised as economic necessity; as a religious
+sacrament; and as a suitable or a brilliant "catch"--a type of
+marriage by capture which forms the ideal of our own upper-class women
+and which the housemaid copies in her limited way.
+
+Viewed from the surface evidence, the average woman of today is, as
+Kipling says, far "more deadly than the male." She is more
+unscrupulous in her methods; more unreasonable in her demands; more
+devoid of sentiment or sympathy; more fickle in her desires and more
+nagging in her complaints. But, when all is said and done, we must
+admit that woman is only expressing her inheritance. When she becomes
+balanced, the sexes will meet on common ground.
+
+Woman's demand for better physical environment; for more comfort, and
+more justice; presages, after all, a higher and a more satisfactory
+idea of the marriage relationship. Underneath this materialistic
+demand, there is the silent voice of the soul calling for a more
+ideal marriage relation. It is the materialistic expression of a
+spiritual urge and will in time rise to higher ground. It is a demand
+for a better state than that which our grandmothers enjoyed, or
+endured.
+
+We have seen in the history of marriage, that the estimate of sexual
+immorality has been based, all too frequently, upon woman's disregard
+for the rights of her husband in her person.
+
+For centuries the burden of sustaining a sexual moral standard has
+rested almost wholly upon the shoulders of the women; and it is
+therefore natural that the present-day defiant attitude of many women
+toward the traditional standard should be viewed with alarm; and there
+is more in this thought of alarm than the mere anxiety on the part of
+man to hold woman to her appointed task of guardian of marital
+morality.
+
+Although men may wander from the home and fireside, it is a peculiar
+fact that they generally hold to a mental string by which they may
+find their way back again, very frequently the more contented to be
+there for their wanderings. But with a woman it is different. Once a
+woman has broken loose from the ties that have bound her to her
+inherited post of morality-preserver, she seldom goes back again, but
+keeps on her way until she finds that for which she seeks, or gives up
+the search of her own volition.
+
+Is this, then, evidence that it is a woman's first duty to "stay put"
+when matrimonial exigencies have placed her in a specific "pocket" of
+the matrimonial billiard-table?
+
+We believe not; and this belief is founded upon the fact that the
+female principle, which is, we admit, the centralizing, centripetal
+force in the cosmos, is not always manifested in the form of woman.
+The balanced individual is bi-sexual, even as the balanced "twain-one"
+is bi-sexual. If man was all male principle, and woman all female
+principle they would not be complementary, but antithetical. Each must
+be balanced within himself and herself before they can merge into each
+other.
+
+Affinities are numerous, but mates are found but once; otherwise, the
+problems that are being discussed here would never have arisen.
+
+If, then, as has been shown in the fact that only counterpartal unions
+are real, eternal and spiritually indissoluble; and that only true
+mates can thus unite, and when thus united have no desire to wander,
+what becomes of our ideas of sexual infidelity?
+
+Since the very law of the Cosmos has seen to it that we cannot be
+untrue to the only one who seemingly has a right to our fidelity in
+the sex relation and since this union can become general only by
+freeing love from bondage, what becomes of the laboriously built up
+ethics of our social intercourse?
+
+Are they to be abandoned as of no value?
+
+We can almost hear the storm of protest which the righteous reader may
+feel in duty bound to let loose at such a suggestion, if for no other
+reason than that protest is the accepted way of proving one's own
+virtuous tendencies.
+
+In the early seventies, a woman named Virginia Woodhull brought down
+upon her defenseless head the un-Christian-like abuse of the Christian
+public by announcing a doctrine which seems to have been nothing more
+dreadful than that of an equal standard of morality for men and women.
+The poor woman died broken-hearted, it is said; and yet nothing that
+we can unearth regarding her personal life and habits would seem to
+have warranted the cruel gibes that were hurled at her. The dear old
+lady lived a most continent, even ascetic life.
+
+But the world has made rapid strides since that time, and we trust
+that the urgent need of something reasonable and feasible upon the sex
+question will inspire the reader to an unprejudiced review of this
+chapter. We would that it were possible to supply a modicum of
+understanding with each copy of this volume; but since it is not, we
+must take our chance with the average. Let us reason together:
+
+Expediency is the mother of morality in social organizations, which
+have, of necessity, unstable, ever-changing standards. These standards
+represent, for some, ideals yet to be attained; while for others they
+become mere mileposts on the path of Evolution. The individual
+reaches, and then passes, an accepted ideal; gradually when a
+sufficient number, constituting a majority, have reached this ideal,
+it ceases to be a standard for the social organization, and another
+ideal is substituted.
+
+The laws of the cave-man called for self-restraint exercised toward
+his own immediate clan, and this necessity for self-restraint was
+based upon nothing higher than the law of self-preservation; but
+gradually the sphere widened; from clan to nation. So do our ethical
+and moral standards enlarge. Traditional concepts are not necessarily
+wrong, but they are almost sure to be inadequate to evolving Mankind.
+
+Formerly, sexual morality consisted of the reservation of the person
+of a sister to the use of her brothers. Any infringement upon this
+moral code was punished by death to the woman and to her out-clannish
+lover.
+
+And we have today an analogous example, although we are glad to say,
+it is not the highest standard; still, if one's husband or wife
+violates the marriage vows, it is more condonable, if the
+co-respondent be of the wealthy class; and in monarchies it is
+accounted an honor to have been selected as the king's favorite.
+
+The institution of prostitution which exists everywhere today has its
+standards in the different countries; and the white races seem to
+think that their morality is superior to that of the Orientals because
+the social standing of prostitutes in the Orient is not irretrievably
+lost; they are permitted, in the event of marriage, to resume social
+equality with other women. Among white people, prostitutes have no
+other recourse than to sink lower and lower, until utter degradation
+is reached.
+
+We believe that the Oriental view of the situation is a far higher
+standard of morality than is our Occidental attitude.
+
+If there can lawfully be such an organization as is now being proposed
+as desirable in large cities, namely, a "morals police," it certainly
+should be instigated by a more sane purpose than that which is at the
+root of our present police guardianship.
+
+Attempts at suppression of prostitution have hitherto been conducted
+on the principle that the women of that class are objectionable to the
+sight of our mothers and sisters and wives, and the sinfulness of the
+hopelessly "fallen" ones has been the theme of press and pulpit. And
+all the time the women of the half-world have resented this attitude
+as being unjust, and unfair, and hypocritical, and untenable. They
+have known that if the act of selling their bodies to men is a crime
+against the community, then more than half the feminine world is
+criminal. And they have contended that since the "respectable" women
+were neither contacted nor exploited by them, they cannot see wherein
+they offend society, provided the laws of sanitation and segregation
+are complied with.
+
+In other words, they have said that it is none of Society's business
+whether they sell themselves to one man or to a number, since they
+must pay the penalty. And their attitude is relatively right. It is
+none of Society's business whether a woman is a prostitute or not,
+considered as an offense against Society. That is the wrong attitude
+toward this condition of our social disorder.
+
+No prostitute offends you or me. She, poor creature, offends herself,
+and we offend her and ourselves by permitting social conditions that
+make for such degradation. We are conniving with her to barter her
+birthright of freedom and real love for food and shelter, and taint
+and tinsel, whenever we encourage marriage on any other ground than
+that of true love, and when we regard virtue as a matter of physical
+contact.
+
+If we judge from the many plays which we see on the boards; if we are
+influenced by the press and the pulpit; we must acknowledge that the
+general idea of sexual morality is an absurd one. The inference is
+that one special organ of a woman's physical body is the sole
+custodian of all virtue and all morality. The accepted idea seems to
+be that if a woman is married her body is then the property of her
+husband. Her emotions, her mind, her heart, her happiness, her
+preferences do not count for anything. The one act is made
+all-important. On the husband's side, if he provides for his wife and
+family, he is justified in exacting the sole right to the wife's body,
+and although his own heart and caresses may be given to another, he
+justifies himself, and the wife not infrequently feels satisfied, as
+long as he provides well for her. What is this but prostitution? The
+principle is the same as in the case of the recognized prostitute,
+although the conditions are easier for the woman, and less cheapening
+of her womanhood, but the difference is only in degree.
+
+Now, a singular idea of fidelity, a direct antithesis to the one just
+mentioned, prevails among prostitutes, when married either by law or
+by selection.
+
+They may surrender their physical body to another, for money, and
+according to their idea they may yet remain true to the husband or
+lover, because the matter is a business transaction. The other man has
+only what he has purchased, namely, the physical body. But should the
+woman permit another man to arouse in her a sexual response; should
+another invade her mind, absorb her thoughts, or engage her heart, the
+husband is outraged and the woman realizes her unfaithfulness.
+
+All of which goes to show that up to the present time sexual morality
+has in itself no absolute uniform standard by which it can be measured
+and satisfactorily and convincingly presented to all persons, as have
+other phases of morality, such as honesty, justice, mercy, generosity,
+friendship, fidelity to country, and self-sacrifice to the good of
+humanity.
+
+And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexual
+morality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality.
+Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, but
+as has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined by
+local conditions.
+
+Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexual
+morality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remote
+probability, albeit it will arrive some day.
+
+First of all, the sex relation must be absolutely free from sale;
+coercion; or barter; whether within the respectable "sale" of
+matrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from any
+erroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced,
+deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to the
+sexual embrace of human lovers.
+
+An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture.
+If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the
+physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many
+women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry
+from mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if we
+listen to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate our
+souls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedly
+cultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness of
+mind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor to
+uplift the moral tone of the world.
+
+These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration of
+Sex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protect
+myself against my enemies"--and so it is in this instance.
+
+Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why that
+name, anyway?) are infected with the bacteria of sex-degradation.
+They really require a lengthy process of mental disinfection, before
+attempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexual
+uplift.
+
+A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largest
+city in the United States recently declared in public print, of the
+beautiful and chaste painting "September Morn," that it was "lewd,
+filthy, and suggestive of unclean things." This type of woman is
+intrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting them
+with the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of the
+Father-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"
+
+Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted in
+our souls, namely:
+
+Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing in
+the universe--because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. The
+righteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man's
+customs; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement,
+indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thought
+which may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency to
+confusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us see
+if we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction.
+
+One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem is
+sadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension of
+the average, we may at least do so for some.
+
+One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement that
+the sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in the
+conclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then it
+is right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live as
+they do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, and
+while pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretly
+carry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"
+
+Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is the
+sex-relation right or wrong?"
+
+The men will declare that it is "right sometimes and wrong sometimes."
+The women, almost as a unit, will do the same. Occasionally a woman
+will be found sufficiently illumined to give a sane answer.
+
+Following up the thoughtless answer with the request to illustrate,
+and the reply will be something like this: "Well, if people are
+married it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" and
+even as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that it
+is puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, few
+have the temerity, and fewer yet have the capability, to utter Truth.
+
+It would be as sensible to say that it is right for the sun to shine
+sometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right for
+the sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all that
+is needed.
+
+Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, is
+entirely "up to us." The sun does its part. It is fulfilling the
+inexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right.
+
+But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The
+law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it
+may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases,
+diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world.
+
+How is it possible to have a perfect flower--a healthy, normal and
+wholesome sprout from a diseased root?
+
+The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the
+only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be
+done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy,
+sacred--the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite
+different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their
+sex-relations.
+
+To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of
+marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring
+back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing
+that can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyone
+knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and
+the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the
+lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.
+
+Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does the
+prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would
+not sell herself for money.
+
+Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted
+ideals of sex?
+
+If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.
+
+These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from
+love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex
+as a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day and
+good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.
+
+Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one
+standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now
+persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand,
+that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been
+found?
+
+A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the
+woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?
+
+History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded
+in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best
+that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention
+from ourselves.
+
+Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that
+a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made
+regulations, are not in danger.
+
+Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than
+they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval,
+should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the
+highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high
+the price of such devotion.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                         THE PATHWAY OF LOVE
+
+
+Love is the Great Reality.
+
+Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to
+love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of
+love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it
+is at the same time the only liberating force.
+
+Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a
+people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of
+the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the
+wake of seeming victory.
+
+There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that
+Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and
+the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there
+are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the
+wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns
+supreme.
+
+Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate
+us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the
+limitations and attractions of the animal-man.
+
+Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life. "There is no other God
+but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe,
+apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and
+presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but
+always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.
+
+Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by
+that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:
+
+"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and
+evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the
+tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and
+philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every
+home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of
+immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of
+love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless
+things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay.
+It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without
+that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but
+with it--earth is Heaven and we are gods."
+
+It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been
+recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life
+are worthless.
+
+It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of
+commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be
+bartered for.
+
+Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and
+magic solvent which transmutes all baser emotions into the higher,
+the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not
+sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or
+altruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had
+developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex
+instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as
+we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most
+instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty
+than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of
+animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the
+earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with
+us but happily in decreasing numbers.
+
+But even among animals we find evidences of something vague,
+indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we
+term a tendency toward _selection_; and in the animal also, through
+the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again
+we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of
+humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the
+maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love,
+is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than
+with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the
+evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the
+family.
+
+If maternal love were confined strictly to the female parent, and the
+procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only,
+we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent
+reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female,
+since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.
+
+As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the
+life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a
+larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above
+even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.
+
+Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this
+abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may
+tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of
+the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of
+the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to
+which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some
+perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower
+into its full possibilities.
+
+And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more
+than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that
+we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved any
+_human being_ with as great a love as we are capable of.
+
+If any one holds the mistaken idea--and it is one that is very
+generally held--that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer
+phase of emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in
+order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all
+other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being
+in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat.
+The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted
+with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break
+the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God,
+whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or
+something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry
+whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he
+does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may
+permit him the same liberty.
+
+God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take care
+of Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot be
+killed by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying.
+
+Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes of
+seeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfect
+mathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or a
+woman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neither
+is Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned with
+appearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within.
+He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with the
+material at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeks
+to unite lovers in their interior nature, but as each of the would-be
+happy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he is
+handicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness of
+Love, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over His
+eyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, the
+Egyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger on
+his lips, to typify the truth that true love is not noisy, blustering,
+jealous, burning, ranting, protesting. He is silent; soft; melting;
+blissful; magnetic; _uniting_.
+
+Our noisy civilization, seeking happiness in Things, mistakes
+protestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriages
+are consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depicted
+Cupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is a
+slander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could see
+one. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what one
+knows," declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern bride
+and bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards of
+living, to know dollars better than they know Love, their perverted
+vision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even the
+dollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united in
+love, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united then
+indeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty.
+
+But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, married
+couples have learned or they are learning, that there is an interior
+nature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected.
+
+In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road to
+the heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Love
+never faileth."
+
+It has been said that "love makes gods of men," and we have taken this
+phrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth,
+because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced their
+natures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, and
+are immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God," and the pilgrimage
+is ended.
+
+There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, that
+universal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot." It
+comes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate
+quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means
+always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my
+seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing."
+
+Life is a succession of experiences in the quest of immortality.
+Immortality would be a curse instead of a blessing if attained alone.
+
+Even the attainment of so unworthy an ambition as riches is a mockery
+if unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle to
+the one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to share
+it. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, he
+whose love nature is supposed to find satisfaction in making others
+happy--can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unless
+there is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; or
+lacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness which
+he does not find here.
+
+Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material plane
+for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love;
+a love where intellect, spirit and sex finds its perfect mate."
+
+Verily, love is the only vitalizing power in the universe; and when
+denied the interior union which should exist between a conjoining
+pair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship as
+much of the divine nectar as they will accept.
+
+_There is no impure love._ I repeat: There is no impure love. The
+impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he
+fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the
+Slough of Despond to the Heights of Bliss.
+
+If love be always pure, if it be always the uplifting, unifying,
+constructive power of the universe, what becomes of the apparent fact
+that men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, women
+have lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk to
+depths below that of the brute creation?
+
+What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appears
+to love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate love
+for all that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that love
+is always pure when it leads to such disaster?
+
+Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever the
+erring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently dragged
+from his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of human
+conflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; He
+unites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity of
+union.
+
+Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation of
+egoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes a
+man to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loves
+with jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence with
+the baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he must
+be taught the lesson of the Yoga sutras "not this way; not this way;"
+and the more worthy he is of redemption, the more certainly will he be
+caught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereas
+by seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path of
+inwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safely
+trust his redemption.
+
+If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through what
+appears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity have
+temporarily supplanted Love. But there is another side to the
+question. Society has very erroneous ideas of success and failure; and
+in looking at these opposite ends of the same pole, Society may be
+standing on it's head.
+
+A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worth
+repeating.
+
+A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities of
+social life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercial
+world, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that he
+had married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life of
+the Islanders. English society, when his name was mentioned at all,
+spoke of him with hushed voices and with a "what a pity y' know"
+manner as of one who had sunk below the depths of ordinary failure.
+Subsequently a friend visited Samoa and found the young man enjoying
+life and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversation
+the visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been rather
+wild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impart
+agreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "Sir
+Arthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon the
+self-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity;
+and he was such a decent sort, too." So we may see that there is much
+in the point of view.
+
+Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trust
+this test, because no one can be happy in any other than the
+progressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been a
+satisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to the
+possessor if it shuts out love; and if love be present, wealth holds
+but an inconsequential place.
+
+However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force of
+attraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the union
+of two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced,
+there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the question
+inevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are not
+yet perfect?"
+
+If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate for
+each man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the only
+truly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of
+"temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all the
+marriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident that
+soul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to be
+abandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?
+
+It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deception
+and dishonesty are immoral.
+
+Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage.
+Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray a
+confidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and it
+is the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether applied
+to the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges.
+
+Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not impose
+upon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not to
+break them; but if vows are not to be broken, they may, thank Heaven,
+be dissolved.
+
+And surely the marriage ceremony of the future will not impose vows or
+promises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to the
+necessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at its
+very highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated,
+nothing more than announcement to the society of which they are
+members, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, as
+well as inwardly, in sexual union.
+
+We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of the
+fitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether too
+much confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, and
+altogether too little as to whether they are spiritually united.
+
+Possession! that is the word that spells unhappiness, in married life;
+each wants to possess the other; neither one tries for the spirit of
+union. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit.
+
+Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathway
+leads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promises
+staring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitute
+mutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If we
+cannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith and
+should cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action we
+would have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husband
+and wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame of
+mind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be no
+further opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world of
+a belief in sin and immorality, the sooner will Love reign.
+
+It is said of the sages of India that they can live in the jungles and
+the ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?
+
+They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desire
+to crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love and
+compassion that there is no point of connection between them and the
+destructive instinct in the beast.
+
+When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away from
+the tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent and
+the eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure and
+perfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet it
+and when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear,
+all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fear
+of "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though
+"seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween thee
+and me," the call of soul to soul will be felt and answered. Byron says:
+
+  "There are two souls of equal flow,
+  Whose gentle streams so calmly run,
+  That when they part--they part? Oh no,
+  They cannot part, those souls are one."
+
+With a sentiment such as this between two beings, what need for vows
+and promises, and bonds?
+
+It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, even
+feverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implying
+that they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although this
+conclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and the
+faculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty that
+prevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, and
+above all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to impute
+personal motives to such as would, if permitted, lead them to a freer,
+and consequently a purer life, impel the writer to deny that which is,
+finally, the very point at issue.
+
+In the interest of Truth, we are compelled to state that we would do
+away with "bonds." We would substitute therefor mutual agreements,
+subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutually
+helpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of the
+crippled human race. We need not always walk lame.
+
+It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surest
+way to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind him
+that he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out to
+him the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man has
+so little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, when
+assured that God-hood means a bliss so great that he can hardly
+imagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of births
+and deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself.
+Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritual
+union--with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or any
+other impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?
+
+No, but with his mate.
+
+On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There
+is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love
+in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love
+flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little
+pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights
+and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."
+
+Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the
+perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly
+tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these
+same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead
+of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for
+union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to
+exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the
+"Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin;
+they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the
+golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly
+the opposite direction.
+
+Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most
+certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most
+certainly not.
+
+We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have
+concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or
+uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral
+in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is
+adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance;
+sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual
+immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit
+that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based
+upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a
+convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own
+realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is
+immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent
+of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for
+position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual
+helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish
+gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money;
+or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of
+an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine
+office of sex.
+
+But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet
+all may, if we desire, be moral. And all moral and sexual
+relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the
+time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth
+need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.
+
+If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that
+sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from
+pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love
+of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in
+soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the
+restraints of marriage.
+
+But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect
+of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the
+other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and
+has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the
+happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative
+of perfect mating.
+
+If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable
+finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne
+endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing;
+only to lie at His feet"--the prospect appalls!
+
+Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too
+short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is
+the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!
+
+But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we
+realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by
+experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin
+to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and
+sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood,
+immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate;
+sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying
+aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and
+bliss, there is an incentive to aspire.
+
+Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be
+"taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or
+feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment
+has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the
+doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has
+known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has
+dwarfed our stature.
+
+In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise
+patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods."
+
+Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and
+earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss
+being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and
+when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps
+death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd back
+at its summons to inhabit their perfected world."
+
+We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful
+words--elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always
+in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be
+ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These
+prophetic utterances are literal truths.
+
+Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we
+will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise--the
+body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior
+nature.
+
+While we are building the business which sustains our physical body;
+while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion or
+whatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior nature
+which we are now, and which we will be when the life of the body
+ceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business were
+their only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing the
+same methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate from
+the same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands or
+falls in the final test, by the motives; the desires; the sentiments;
+the sympathies; the generosities; the forgiveness; the kind impulses;
+the pities; the charities; the tolerances; we feel while we are
+apparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these little
+impulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seemingly
+important business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which we
+climb to the spiritual heights where the bliss of true and perfect,
+melting, merging, liquid-love, of the one and only mate awaits us.
+
+One thing more. This also is a secret. Perhaps you will not even
+believe it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of our
+crazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they are
+also, and above all, idealists.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                       THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION
+
+
+External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we have
+builded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortal
+senses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal which
+prompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one who
+looks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead of
+merely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells its
+interior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It is
+said that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; but
+to those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; what
+seems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which is
+limited to sense consciousness.
+
+There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give the
+key to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered.
+The word "union," or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase of
+our busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. This
+word, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word
+"agreement," or "combination" or "partnership," formerly used. Union
+means something more interior, than do these other words, even when
+applied to commercial issues.
+
+The business man says to his partners "let us unite on this question."
+They are already partners, but unless there is a unity of thought and
+ideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. We
+have labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity of
+effort; a merging of interests; a welding together into one
+thought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness of
+meaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the words
+lodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organization
+of men in social or commercial combination.
+
+In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there may
+be no quality of union, although there is the outward bond of
+fellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know more
+of a subject than appears on the surface. We want to know the within.
+We want to fathom the interior meaning; to get below the surface, or
+the appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import--the word
+_within_. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footsteps
+toward home.
+
+The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but the
+Christian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those who
+would listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was truly
+spiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed,
+but only to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandments
+already in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the one
+and only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begat
+him: "That ye love one another."
+
+Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets and
+through all the channels of the physical senses to look within. That
+which you are--not what you appear to be to the eyes of the
+sense-conscious--but that which you are in your interior nature, is
+what counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to write
+salable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in the
+commercial game; but when the word is impartially considered
+efficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability is
+measured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wise
+judgment--interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin be
+white or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are of
+imposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within that
+constitutes true efficiency.
+
+So the kingdom whatever it may be whether of heaven or hell; of love;
+or of power; or of ambition; the kingdom is within. The source of your
+power is in the interior of your nature.
+
+If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to the
+Cosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again to
+those who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in on
+this," has been said to one who was left out of some supposedly
+desirable thing; or "you are not _in_ it," meaning that you are not up
+to the required standard. Even as the walls of a building only
+imperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that which
+the building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physical
+appearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature.
+
+"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritual
+teacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The character of
+the heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are at
+variance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within,
+we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom--interior
+vision.
+
+Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exterior
+and their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled up
+like a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grain
+of true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message from
+knowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and we _find_
+wisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interior
+meaning.
+
+The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is a
+difference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to the
+interior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience.
+Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with the
+interior; it penetrates the outer and seeks the interior; but never
+does the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never does
+he mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message.
+
+Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life were
+the only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of the
+thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the
+visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that
+civilization is insane.
+
+If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this
+which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in
+his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example,
+is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advanced
+civilization?
+
+With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly
+to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of
+wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and
+hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are
+ostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing,
+embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution of
+man's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to
+which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell
+us that man in his interior nature--in his reality--is not a creeping,
+crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into
+ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.
+
+Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, did
+it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind
+regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly
+intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in
+motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a
+corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the
+power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute
+strength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively puny
+strength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force of
+the elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire--an
+interior quality.
+
+Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make us
+happier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather than
+their so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to man
+his power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it to
+do his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above and
+beyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put upon
+modern inventions and accomplishment is the message which these
+mechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not a
+machine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not a
+miserable worm of the dust, but a winged god.
+
+Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanical
+marvels is the knowledge of each other which has resulted from
+intercommunication between nation and nation. The great breeder of
+discord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man of
+the cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he did
+not know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know;
+his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous and
+dangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country are
+like ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even though
+they may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet of
+nuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down.
+Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideas
+of "alien" races and "foreign" nations.
+
+Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanical
+inventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other human
+beings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings,
+emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like our
+own, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reach
+the heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet been
+established, it is because the majority of Mankind are still only
+sense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which the
+past few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that the
+slow-moving mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all this
+knowledge must come in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seeks
+love as the only eternal reality. Not because God has commanded that
+we shall do so; not because of a sentimental ideal, but because any
+other course is futile, foolish, silly and does not "get us anywhere"
+as the slangologists rightly express it.
+
+Thus everything in the busy commercial world, seemingly bent upon
+perpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symbolic
+language of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. These
+two words are really complementary, because it is only with the
+interior nature that unity can be established.
+
+We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships,
+corporations, combinations from the outside. These are external
+expressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of the
+interior nature only.
+
+With the more intimate knowledge of each other which
+intercommunication between nations makes general, each little
+segregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at the
+conclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" on
+any proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much less
+costly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than by
+going to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains of
+the majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thought
+that perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained by
+peaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained nor
+appeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wise
+observation that fundamentally, cosmically there is no place for
+enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the
+whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and
+segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can
+permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped
+and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these
+thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things,
+than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.
+
+The world has been living through a nightmare. The warfare which
+belongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has been
+carried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight like
+tigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well,
+using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devices
+and the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this type
+of warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose between
+transmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blind
+indeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who use
+the sword shall perish by the sword." How else can it be? There is but
+one force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use it
+to destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of law
+that we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum in
+arithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is no
+limit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate.
+
+The fact is dawning upon an increasing number of thinkers, that even
+as brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there is
+still a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its power
+that nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. That
+power is love, without which though we have all else we are but as
+"sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."
+
+Even as the ferocious man-eating animals have disappeared from the
+earth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the erotic
+pomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to their
+chariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourged
+slaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of the
+amphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged
+"civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolution
+of our own "false gods." Transmuted into pure and perfect love and
+peace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate and
+destruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward the
+maintenance of a balanced world--a world in which Love and Wisdom are
+united.
+
+We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude
+are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic
+Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the
+decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why
+cannot we trust God?
+
+In the external world, then, the idea that a part of this sphere is
+inherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies; that
+the female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy--all these
+ideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the coming
+civilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it to
+our individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the human
+organism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Before
+we can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to a
+balanced and sane state within our own organism.
+
+We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the various
+expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social
+body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain
+unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may
+safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have
+conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our
+chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the
+clutches of an abnormal appetite.
+
+Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physical
+appetites to the finer, and interior desires of the soul,
+abnormalities and perversions of sex-force will be impossible.
+
+Sex-force is, at the Center of Being, unpolluted. It is pure, perfect
+and harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it is
+balanced.
+
+In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly every
+one is lop-sided, and unbalanced. Alienists declare that almost every
+man and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An age
+of specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness." But
+the source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where we
+consciously unite with that interior source we will no longer be
+unbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, at
+the center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There is
+no chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy.
+There is equilibrium.
+
+It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness that
+equality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life will
+appear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer men
+can imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-powering
+and at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy.
+The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable from
+sex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine the
+mechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail to
+comprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior being
+until we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortal
+and glimpse the heights of the immortal life.
+
+No one can give to another this interior wisdom--this philosopher's
+stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the
+pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and
+promise that the results are mathematically proportionate to effort,
+and effort will be backed by individual desire.
+
+We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side
+of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for
+purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is
+contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize.
+Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary
+function.
+
+Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they
+are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they
+remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek.
+All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman
+who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the
+ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual
+alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found
+the key to the gate of eternal life.
+
+As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old
+age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into
+interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express
+the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become
+transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts.
+It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters
+that quality--be it much or little--so that we may not go into the
+interior realms a spiritual pauper.
+
+Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so
+old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship,
+and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in
+the soul life.
+
+There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any
+degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and
+love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines
+through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that
+when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that
+the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.
+
+This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a
+mental recognition of age.
+
+"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth
+and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdom
+that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual
+love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.
+
+But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay,
+they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves
+this one, without having attained that which he craves.
+
+This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no
+appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law
+is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of
+immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."
+
+"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be
+such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they
+not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual
+sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"
+The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its
+reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very
+nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his
+unreadiness for _Illumination_. The desire for self-gratification,
+though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical
+to attainment of spiritual consciousness.
+
+There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine
+of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or
+gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories
+in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing
+by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spirit
+becomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of our
+willingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existence
+seems a sacrifice.
+
+"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him pass
+on" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it as
+clearly as it can be stated.
+
+Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expect
+to enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to the
+letter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruism _is_; it is not mere
+recognition of a word.
+
+We may presuppose another natural and instinctive query: "If then only
+by union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal life
+and love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever all
+ties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, and
+search for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found the
+answer to all life's problems?"
+
+Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We should
+remember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitful
+quest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), he
+learned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom he
+gave the cup of cold water _without any consciousness of doing a good
+deed_; without hope of thereby finding the grail.
+
+He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any good
+will not find it though he should give away every farthing to the
+poor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips;
+though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all day
+and all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of self
+and of _obtaining_ something so long will he miss the _attainment_.
+
+Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute or
+reversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not trying
+to say that they should not be broken; or that they cannot be broken
+with impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished. They simply
+cannot be broken--they are unbreakable.
+
+We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, or
+in any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any more
+than we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing to
+it; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest nor
+scribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. No
+one can break the law of your being any more than you can break that
+of another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in the
+intervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Wherefore
+then, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousy
+and wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to a
+marriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?
+
+If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that the
+object of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres there
+is only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by any
+possibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place once
+found no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said in
+previous chapters of the word "found;" it is from within.
+
+How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, so
+magnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama of
+life; to establish such marvelous diversity within such simple unity;
+to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile has
+been the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need not
+worry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God are
+loaded." Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we may
+cheat in the game of life.
+
+We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility of
+offending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so far
+as it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us." We can delay
+arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we
+will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied
+longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain
+wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of
+his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless
+areas of infinite bliss and wisdom?
+
+We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothing
+more phenomenal than withdrawing from one room to another. The soul
+may strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing can
+free it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. The
+broader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfold
+in its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine we
+become, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual and
+attract our own.
+
+It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession as
+one's own counterpart defeats the very effort. We are not to seek; we
+are only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shall
+have done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though the
+two halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers which
+the sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves and
+the bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate to
+thee." We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest we
+lose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyes
+glued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realms
+of vibration "whence cometh our light."
+
+Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that is
+spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate
+on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to
+thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or
+winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the
+great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his
+embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the
+heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there
+anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
+circulation through all men as the water of the globe is all one sea,
+and truly seen its tide is one."
+
+Here then are specific and trustworthy statements for the further
+enlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraical
+propositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortal
+godhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Source
+of Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but we
+must claim it if we would consciously realize this truth.
+
+God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and in
+truth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not one
+hermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, even
+though each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperament
+and qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point because
+there has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon this
+definition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctively
+masculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and he
+or she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness.
+
+Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Woman
+is not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear for
+courage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality;
+helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when he
+spares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; when
+he unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy from
+weakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentleness
+with vigor.
+
+No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore you
+are not to try to enforce your ideas of morality upon others. Who has
+constituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concern
+yourself with establishing happiness upon this earth.
+
+You are to see to it that your love is big and broad enough;
+all-inclusive enough to wish to see every one happy from your
+immediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You need
+not worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. You
+are to render love and service to this world with all your heart and
+all your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of your
+desires.
+
+No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is
+rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say
+the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from
+the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without
+regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither
+do we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained to
+a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment
+and hatred.
+
+There is no one formula which fits all cases--other than that given in
+love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as
+we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it
+may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to
+them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other
+motive than personal selfishness, you may be doing yourself an
+injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining,
+then you are doubly mistaken in your course.
+
+The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it
+may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word
+"unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the
+wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or
+her. There is just one big world of difference between these two
+points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and
+Hell.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+
+                    "SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"
+
+
+Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure and
+satisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing and
+feeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-fold
+is the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who are
+themselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others.
+This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, and
+which they will not believe or trust.
+
+Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs us
+heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and
+turbulent pleasure."
+
+And finally, as regards the sex-function, we would like to impress
+upon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom will
+understand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation of
+sex-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love that
+is of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in the
+region popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circumscribe the
+sex-function, as a secondary and by no means compulsory consideration.
+
+When the sex force has become diffused throughout the entire being,
+radiating from the solar man, and permeating the mind and thus
+entering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mind
+physical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and is
+found to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. Sex is not
+confined to the specialized sex-organs. It permeates the entire being.
+The person who has no conception of his reality other than as a
+physical entity has not so much as touched the area of spiritual
+ecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the gods;" and so
+infinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not do
+so until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains upon
+the sense-conscious plane and seeks by sexual perversity and
+debauchery and sexual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection of
+joy which he intuitively knows evades him.
+
+Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and just
+and merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies," that it cannot
+be defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It is
+forever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope to
+express the creative power, the sexual realization of a god, through
+the functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of the
+animal.
+
+Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do not
+imagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your puny
+physical powers would suggest. Neither should you imagine that the
+sex-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking in
+love-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right and
+normal in itself; the attitude of the average man and woman invests it
+with all its uncleanness.
+
+But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged
+in respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed
+against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church
+denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it
+in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less
+than the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divine
+fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor
+little bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as the
+hope and savior of Mankind.
+
+If you would have eternal youth and eternal life and love and wisdom,
+accept this truth, because nothing else can, or will, save you from
+the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
+
+Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and we
+would like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; no
+misconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we are
+here stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple and
+unescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time and
+ignorance.
+
+The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapters
+we will again state it, so that there may be no mistake: If the
+balance is found in counterpartal sex-union--the one man and the one
+woman uniting on the solar plane--would not this balance be maintained
+if only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; in
+other words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on the
+one hand and extreme impurity on the other?
+
+Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there
+are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the
+union is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one must
+be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is
+possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would,
+really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we
+may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of
+the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of
+serfs; but doubt not that _eternal equation_ is perfect.
+
+There is still another query: If true sex-union is of the soul, what
+is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of
+death, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thus
+circumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel
+each one to earn the prize of eternal life?
+
+The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The
+realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than
+is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of
+untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize
+values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he
+might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a
+million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was,
+he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow
+wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.
+
+If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne of
+angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the
+crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common,
+everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is
+the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and
+the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without
+thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and
+love of the spiritual realms.
+
+The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of esoteric
+wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such
+effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the
+principal benefit of a college education is to teach the student that
+he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of
+years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not.
+If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were
+well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the
+price of transmutation only after exhausting every other method, what
+does it matter, so that he finally learns it?
+
+_Learn to look into the hearts of men._
+
+At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a
+moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with
+segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the
+hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the
+heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving
+picture.
+
+You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue
+rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a
+clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress
+is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse,
+perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if
+you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that
+her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming
+experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has
+donned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries of
+grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to
+comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted
+to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and
+happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and
+the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be
+carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
+
+Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our
+fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be
+heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for
+their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll
+of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on
+having two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If she
+is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the
+more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your
+help and sympathy.
+
+"_Learn to look into the hearts of men._"
+
+Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder
+doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just
+an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and
+longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if
+the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria or
+the intermezzo.
+
+And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold
+street-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside.
+But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their
+appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize with
+them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the
+manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the
+condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in
+crime.
+
+You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with
+his misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if you
+would transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to
+immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to
+sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without
+sympathy walks to his own funeral."
+
+Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to
+find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden
+Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you
+must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the
+lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personality
+that conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard this
+personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is,
+or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as
+we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes
+unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut it
+off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should the
+men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a
+later century?
+
+You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in
+order to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There is
+nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot
+learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of
+the world.
+
+There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater
+than love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is no
+God holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will
+readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that
+appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;
+think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the
+lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the
+expression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gave
+to it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to do
+so.
+
+Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the
+Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with
+the specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illumination
+from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you
+turn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of the
+toad,' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula and
+still blesses it with His fruitful presence."
+
+And finally do not make the too common mistake of confounding
+brazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation.
+
+Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life has
+come because of the divinity of Sex. If you have been wise enough to
+know this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect to
+that function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading the
+subject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would
+"cast pearls before swine;" you will not countenance jokes and ribald
+songs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you will
+fold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart's divine altar, as
+something too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of the
+un-tender day.
+
+If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of Sex, you
+will desire unity and disdain possession, knowing that whatever of
+Heaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality of
+spiritual realization of the function of Sex. You will respect the
+physical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of the
+universe, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. You
+will teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; that
+nothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inward
+honesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire.
+
+If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love and
+we shall surely enter therein.
+
+Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal gods.
+
+
+                                 FINIS
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL_
+
+               The Scientific Use of Mental Electricity.
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+  The Enlargement of Consciousness.
+  The Doctrine of Free-Will.
+  Thought Is the Building Material.
+  The Creative Power of Conscious Thought.
+  Experiments Proving That Thought Can Kill.
+  Confessions of a Trained Nurse.
+  People Who Think God Hangs Out the Sun.
+  Action Essential to Creative Principle.
+  The "Science of God's Anger."
+  Thought Is of the Universal Supply.
+  Why the Number Thirteen Is Unlucky.
+  How Poison May Be Generated in the System.
+  Thought and the Cell-Structure of the Brain.
+  Why We Fail in Our Efforts.
+  The Spectrums of Love and Hate.
+  The Power of Imagination.
+  Fear Is the King of Thoughts That Kill.
+  Parents Make Cringing Weaklings of Children.
+  How Whole Cities May Be Poisoned by Thought.
+  Case of a Well-Known Man Killed by Thought.
+  There Is Neither Reward nor Punishment.
+  The Survival of That Which Is Creative.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
+                    Send Your Order Today
+
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+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _PERSONAL MAGNETISM_
+
+                        The Power of Persuasion
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+  The Philosophy of "The Survival of the Fittest."
+  The Power of Persuasion.
+  Effects of Force Law.
+  Magnetism in Professional Life.
+  Opinion of a Noted Actor.
+  What Is Personal Magnetism?
+  Different Kinds of Magnetism.
+  The Human Body an Electrical Machine.
+  Will Power the Dynamo.
+  Magnetism Not Necessarily Good.
+  The Law Governing Invisible Force.
+  Love the Generator of Soul Magnetism.
+  Necessity for Understanding Use of Powers.
+  The Body the Medium of the Soul's Expression.
+  What Constitutes Success?
+  Rules for Acquiring Personal Magnetism.
+  Spirit Manifests Only Through Matter.
+  Fasting Not Wise.
+  Psychic Science Teaches the Study of ALL THINGS.
+  The Yogi of India.
+  Individuality the One Essential.
+  Character Indestructible.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
+                    Send Your Order Today
+
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+                           COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+               IF YOU CANNOT READ CHARACTER THEN--READ
+
+                      REVELATIONS OF THE HAND
+
+                     How to Know Human Nature
+
+     A Scientific Study of the Shape and Markings of the Hand, as
+            an Index to Character, Disease and Tendencies
+                    With Explanatory Illustrations.
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+        The Most Practical SCIENCE OF PALMISTRY Ever Published!
+
+                         PARTIAL CONTENTS
+
+  PART I--CHEIROGNOMY.
+
+  Chapter.
+  1--The Seven Types of Hands
+  2--The Primitive or Elementary Hand.
+  3--The Square Type of Hand.
+  4--The Spatulate Type of Hand.
+  5--The Conic Type of Hand.
+  6--The Philosophic Type of Hand.
+  7--The Psychic Type of Hand.
+  8--The Mixed Type of Hand.
+  9--The Fingers.
+  10--The Thumb.
+  11--The Nails.
+  12--Large and Small, Hard and Soft Hands.
+  13--The Colour of the Palms.
+  14--The Mounts.
+  15--Right and Left Hands.
+  16--Resume of Cheirognomy.
+
+
+  PART 2--CHEIROMANCY.
+
+  Chapter.
+  1--The Lines of the Hand.
+  2--The Line of Life.
+  3--The Line of Mentality or Head.
+  4--The Line of Heart.
+  5--The Line of Fate.
+  6--The Line of Apollo, or Sun.
+  7--The Line of Health or Liver.
+  8--The Girdle of Venus.
+  9--The Via Lascivia, The Line of Mars and the Line of Intuition.
+  10--The Line of Marriage; Children.
+  11--The Rascette and Minor Lines.
+  12--Lines of Influence and Travel Lines.
+  13--Character of the Lines.
+  14--Signs Found on the Palm.
+  15--The Great Triangle and the Quadrangle.
+  16--How to Reckon Time. Systems of Seven and Ten.
+  17--Abnormal Tendencies.
+
+
+                     SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY
+
+                         SECOND EDITION
+
+  _Crown 8vo, 215 pages, profusely illustrated with full-page plates
+        and numerous engravings, silk cloth bound, gold stamped,
+                          $2.00 postpaid._
+
+                         CHICAGO, U. S. A.
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+
+
+
+
+                       "THE DEAD SPEAK!"
+
+           LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               Author of
+
+     "Sex--The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak!" "The Swastika
+                              Series," Etc.
+
+  We are living in an age of earnest inquiry and enhanced knowledge in
+  respect to ourselves as spiritual beings, and that great and wonderful
+  Universe of Spirit to which we are inseparably allied. The author is
+  devoting his life to establishing better conditions on earth, by
+  bringing the two worlds into closer association. No one can read this
+  book with an unprejudiced mind, without absorbing some of its grand
+  and inspiring truth and be uplifted and made better by it.
+
+  Chapter 1.
+  The Advent of Psychic Research.
+
+  Chapter 2.
+  The Dangers in Psychic Research and How to Avoid Them.
+
+  Chapter 3.
+  Physical Manifestations: Table-Rapping, Levitation, Etc.
+
+  Chapter 4.
+  Automatism.
+
+  Chapter 5.
+  Haunted Houses.
+
+  Chapter 6.
+  Spirit Interlopers.
+
+  Chapter 7.
+  Vampirism and Astral Hypnosis.
+
+  Chapter 8.
+  Prevision.
+
+  Chapter 9.
+  The Mystery of Trance.
+
+  Chapter 10.
+  The Mystery of Dreams.
+
+  Chapter 11.
+  Phantasms of the Living.
+
+  Chapter 12.
+  The Last Enemy--Death Overcome!
+
+  If you desire to acquire a knowledge of the GREAT SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
+  that has dawned upon mankind with the birth of the twentieth
+  century--with a mind and heart open to those scientific and spiritual
+  truths that are daily being proven by scientists and thinkers of
+  world-repute--we take the liberty of reminding you there is no book
+  more enlightening, no work more appreciated, no effort more powerful,
+  than this book.
+
+  There is a difference between this book and others upon the
+  subject--it is not an ordinary chronicle of unconnected notations but
+  a romantic story of extraordinary interest and value for the spiritual
+  and scientific truths which set forth the most advanced knowledge of
+  the deeper things of the Soul so simply that any reader of ordinary
+  intelligence can grasp, comprehend and apply those laws whose values
+  extend the usefulness of every Truth seeker who is seeking light upon
+  the MYSTERIES OF LIFE, both Here and Here-after.
+
+
+                     Send Your Order Today
+
+  _12mo., 200 pages, silk cloth-bound, gold stamped, with Frontispiece,
+                       $1.50 (net) postpaid._
+
+                         CHICAGO, U. S. A.
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+
+
+
+
+                         _Just Published_
+
+                       COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
+                                  or
+                    THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT!
+
+                                  By
+                             Ali Nomad
+                    [Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall]
+
+                               Author of
+     "Sex--The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak," "The Swastika
+                             Series," Etc.
+
+                                _READ_
+
+  An Exposition of the Peculiar Phenomenon Which Is Puzzling Science:
+  Its Analogy to the Mystical Phenomena of the Brahm, Zen and Other
+  Oriental Sects; Its Meaning and Its Future.
+
+  With Simple, Concise and Thoroughly Practical Methods of Inducing the
+  Phenomenon.
+
+  Presenting a new and startling theory of the meaning and scope of the
+  prophecy current among the ancients and revived at the present time,
+  of the coming of a new Christ; the prophecy elucidated and explained
+  in the light of To-day; what it means and what it will lead to.
+
+                          SECOND EDITION
+
+     _12mo., 371 pages, cloth, gold stamped, $1.12 postpaid_
+
+                         SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY
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+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY_
+
+  The Scientific Revelation of Natural Laws Prove the Continuity of Life
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                         PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY
+
+  If Man Die Shall He Live Again?
+  The Invisible Something That Survives Death.
+  A Case That Will Bear Quoting.
+  Seeing Through Opaque Substances.
+  Faith Is Not Fact--Evidence Not Proof.
+  Proof Must Rest Upon Individual Experience.
+  The Psychic Body Basis of Organism.
+  All Life Is Manifested in Form.
+  Science Stands for Axioms That May Be Proved.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
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+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                               _GHOSTS_
+
+                    The Message of the Illuminati.
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+
+          Founded Upon Henrik Ibsen's Psychological Masterpiece
+
+                    "THE GHOSTS WE MEET EVERY DAY"
+
+  The ghosts we meet on the street; in commercial and social life.
+
+  Ghosts of dead ideas; Ghosts of fear; Ghosts of false standards of
+  morality; false ideals of living.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
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+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+2. The following misprints have been corrected:
+    "attaing" corrected to "attaining" (page 12)
+    "Morever" corrected to "Moreover" (page 67)
+    "Doubless" corrected to "Doubtless" (page 85)
+    "esctacies" corrected to "ecstacies" (page 116)
+    "aproach" corrected to "approach" (page 116)
+    "mutality" corrected to "mutuality" (page 123)
+    Incomplete sentence "We have already" removed on page 140.
+    "iadequate" corrected to "inadequate" (page 179)
+    "magnectic" corrected to "magnetic" (page 194)
+    "instintctive" corrected to "instinctive" (page 224)
+    "phenonenal" corrected to "phenomenal" (page 226)
+    "anoher" corrected to "another" (page 234)
+    "estoeric" corrected to "esoteric" (page 235)
+    "and and" corrected to "and" (page 240)
+    "advaced" corrected to "advanced" (in ad for the "The Dead Speak!")
+
+3. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
+spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
+
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sex = The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad.
+    </title>
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+
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+         text-align: justify;
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+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+              /*  visibility: hidden; */
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+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sex=The Unknown Quantity
+       The Spiritual Function of Sex
+
+Author: Ali Nomad
+
+Release Date: September 3, 2009 [EBook #29896]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEX=THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Ritu Aggarwal, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 440px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="440" height="540" alt="Cover Page" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 80%;" />
+
+<h1>SEX = The Unknown Quantity</h1>
+
+<h3>THE SPIRITUAL FUNCTION OF SEX<br /></h3>
+
+<h4>A New and Startling Interpretation of the Meaning, Scope and Function of Sex
+as Seen and Interpreted From the Inner or Cosmic Standpoint. A Work That
+Should Revolutionize the Thought of Today in its Relation to the Vital
+Mystery of Sex in All its Aspects. It Presents a Practical Solution
+to the Sex Problems of Everyday Life.<br /><br /><br /><br /></h4>
+
+
+
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+
+<h2>ALI NOMAD</h2>
+
+<h4>[DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL]</h4>
+
+<h3><i>Author of</i></h3>
+
+<h5>"COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT", "THE DEAD SPEAK",
+"REVELATIONS OF THE HAND", "GHOSTS", "HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL", "PERSONAL MAGNETISM",
+"PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY", ETC.<br /></h5>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;">
+<img src="images/publisher.png" width="100" height="100" alt="Publisher Icon" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.</h3>
+
+<h3>STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+
+<h3>1916<br /></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 80%;" />
+
+<h4>Copyright, 1916, by</h4>
+<h2>STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY.</h2>
+<h4>Copyrighted and Registered in Stationers' Hall, London, England.</h4>
+<h4>(All Rights Reserved)<br /><br /></h4>
+
+<h4>COPYRIGHT IN ALL COUNTRIES<br />
+SIGNATORIES TO THE BERNE CONVENTION.</h4>
+
+<h3><small>THE</small> STERLING <small>PRESS</small>.</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 80%;" />
+
+<h3>DEDICATED</h3>
+<h3>TO THE CHILD OF TOMORROW</h3>
+<h3>THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT<br /></h3>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 80%;" />
+<h2>PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">To Our Readers:</span></p>
+
+<p>We feel justified in claiming this work marks
+an epoch in the advanced thought of human evolution.
+Nothing has ever been written dealing
+with the problem of Sex which is at once so
+illuminating, convincing and satisfying. To our
+knowledge this particular view of the sex-subject
+has never before been presented, and, perhaps it
+could not have been, owing to the fact that it is
+only <i>now</i> in these days of higher thought, that
+such a view could be understood.</p>
+
+<p>The author, Ali Nomad, is already well known
+to progressive readers as the writer of "Cosmic
+Consciousness," or, "The Man-God Whom We
+Await;" a work that has made its author famous
+by the reprint of its many editions.</p>
+
+<p>There are signs of a new order in the relation
+of the Sexes already indicated upon the horizon
+of the World's consciousness as the result of the
+present world-conflict. <i>Today people are as ignorant
+of the subject of Sex as they are of God.</i>
+Both of these must be understood if the race is
+to progress beyond its present stage. Otherwise
+we shall pass into the long sleep of oblivion like
+all civilizations in the past leaving future generations
+to grapple with the same world problems.</p>
+
+<p>True or <i>perfect</i> marriage is the most important
+attainment in the life of the individual.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>The author demonstrates that perfect marriage
+is a scientific possibility and that legal marriage
+and divorce simply conform to civil laws. He
+very clearly outlines the reason why civilization
+makes little or no progress in dealing with the
+social evil and other sex problems.</p>
+
+<p>The publishers place this book before an intelligent
+public, believing, that more <i>real</i> knowledge
+can be gained by its study, than by any other
+known method, because</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>First.</i> The reader is brought face to face with
+himself, and nature.</p>
+
+<p><i>Second.</i> The reader can demonstrate the truth of
+the propositions set forth.</p>
+
+<p><i>Third.</i> The methods, rules, and laws have been
+verified by intelligent men and women who
+have lived the life.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fourth.</i> "Sex," The Divine Principle which all
+human beings should understand, has been
+presented in plain simple terms, and elucidated,
+so that the reader <i>cannot</i> fail to understand
+the true path of moral progress.</p></div>
+
+<p>This volume is not a romance, a fairy tale nor
+a dream intended to entertain or amuse, but a
+scientific instruction which will elevate the individual
+and the race, develop self respect, self
+control, morality and love. If the propositions
+presented by the author are correct&mdash;let the standards
+be changed; <i>if</i> the propositions are <i>in</i>correct,
+they will not disturb the standards of today.</p>
+
+<p style='text-align:right;'>THE PUBLISHERS.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SEX&mdash;THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY</h2>
+
+<h3>The Spiritual Function of Sex</h3>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<h4><a href="#INTRODUCTION"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></a></h4>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h4>
+<p><span class="smcap">Sex Universal and Eternal</span> <a href="#Page_19">19</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Sex the fundamental basis of the universe; sex in
+organic life; the law of attraction and repulsion
+in animal and plant life; sex attraction and repulsion
+in human life; how differentiated and
+why; some secrets of modern chemistry; the
+cosmic law of involution and evolution; the symbol
+of the serpent in a new light; what is "the
+power of the gods" referred to in ancient mythology;
+some erroneous ideas in regard to the
+sex function; the philosophy of restraint; the
+inner sex-function and its outward expression
+compared; the senses as avenues of inspiration;
+the creation of form and sense-objects; what
+constitutes a "perfect and complete being?" the
+theory of "counterparts" and its spiritual significance;
+is procreation the highest function of
+sex; what constitutes the fundamental law of
+love? the various expressions of the love-nature
+from inorganic to organic life.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">From Sex Worship To Sex Degradation</span> <a href="#Page_29">29</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Sex the origin of all religious ceremonies; from nature-worship
+to sex-worship; the history of Ancient
+forms and ceremonies of worship; how
+sex-worship has survived the ages; how it
+thrives today in modern religion; early stages of
+civilization in relation to Sex; the antiquity of
+the symbol of the virgin and child; its occult
+significance in symbolism; the reality of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+"bi-une God;" some secrets of the Ancient Egyptians
+in regard to the function of sex; the esoteric
+cause of the Egyptian talismanic and symbolical
+revival today; the secret or esoteric
+meaning of the swastika-cross; why Aum is always
+typified by a circle; ancient forms of oath-taking
+and why; the source of sex-energy spiritual;
+how and where the idea of "blood-atonement"
+and vicarious sacrifice originated; the
+beginning of sex-degradation.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Present-day Conditions: the Cosmic Cause</span> <a href="#Page_53">53</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>The consecutive order from ancient sex-worship to
+modern civilization; the real causes of race-advancement
+in the cosmic tidal-wave, and what
+it portends; why conditions are as they are today
+in regard to sex-life; the psychic forces in
+their relation to sex-life; some fallacies in regard
+to Eugenics; why Greek and Roman civilization
+failed; why and how modern civilization
+need not fail; why women seek to avoid motherhood;
+women of two types; the awake and the
+asleep; the cosmic office of the Female Principle;
+its relation to Creation; how the superman and
+woman will differ from the undeveloped type;
+what is meant by "half-gods;" are women of today
+lacking in the love-nature; will the race die
+out? If so, why, and if not why not? How did
+the "Holy Family" differ from other families?</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The History of Marriage and Mating</span> <a href="#Page_75">75</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>The relation of ancient marriage customs to religion;
+why human evolution must necessarily
+be slow; ancient marriage customs and their
+spiritual interpretation; why marriage ceremonies
+have always prevailed; customs of all races
+compared; why the institution has a permanent
+place in Social Evolution; the symbolism of the
+visible world; why Science and Mysticism agree
+spiritually; the origin of "variation" the fundamental<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+cause of woman's subjugation; when
+men defend "outraged honor," is it a primitive
+or a primordial instinct? the history of monogamy;
+the monogamic idea and the ideal monogamy;
+the history and cause of polygamy; the
+evolution of the "old-maid" idea and the psychic
+cause of this evolution; the path of the
+virtuous woman in ancient days; the elevating
+power in the dowry system; the two great purposes
+which this custom has served.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Symbolism of Marriage and of Sex-union</span> <a href="#Page_93">93</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Why the monogamic ideal of marriage is right; how,
+when and where, will marriage be lasting; the
+basic principle of sex-union; when the bonds of
+matrimony are truly "holy;" attraction and cohesion
+two distinct phases of chemical laws;
+ideas of a modern writer; how all morality has
+come from the ideal of marriage; some erroneous
+ideas of spirituality in relation to the sex-function;
+when and why Man becomes immortal;
+the custom and the hidden meaning in the wedding
+ring; the symbolism of ancient marriage
+customs; the esoteric meaning of "orange-blossoms;"
+the veil; the ring; the crown; why these
+have endured throughout the ages; the interior
+and hidden meaning of Rosicrusian symbols in
+respect to the sex-function; women admitted to
+the Order and why; the mystery and marvel of
+the symbolic "dove;" why it plays so important
+a part in marriage customs and lover's
+phrases; the symbolism of the ark; the egg; the
+drinking-cup and other persisting accompaniments
+to marriage customs.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Continence; Chastity; Asceticism: Their Spiritual
+Significance</span> <a href="#Page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>The Ancient Greek and Roman idea of the sex-relation;
+why the asceticism of the Dark Ages
+arose; why the Church instituted celibacy; why
+the Church retained the pagan idea of "the virgin;"
+the effect this has had upon the growth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+and power of Christianity; lives of celebrated
+saints in the light of Occult wisdom; why and
+in what way the essentials of Christianity are
+like other religious ideals; who is "the One True
+and Only God?" the interior meaning of the
+word "chastity;" the difference between chastity
+and asceticism; the unbroken line connecting
+ancient ideas of sex, with modern; the attitude
+of religious systems toward women; why women
+are supporters of the churches in modern days;
+the "mystic bride" and the mystical meaning;
+William James comments on the spiritual
+ecstacy of St. Teresa; Swedenborg on "Conjugal
+love;" trances; ecstacies; and visions of
+saints; the term "virgin," and its origin; the
+evolution of sex-love to spiritual love.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Soul-union: Where Will It Lead</span>? <a href="#Page_119">119</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Why we hear of "affinities" and "soul-mates" today
+more than formerly; the great distinction between these two words; the psychic forces
+behind woman's invasion of business fields; the basis of "the unwritten law;" why affinity
+marriages fail; the hidden reason girls look for a "rich husband;" the final outcome; when
+and how women are "ruined;" the mystery of the hermaphrodite; what is the true significance of
+the term "androgynous?" mistaken ideas of morality in dress and manners; what sort of beings
+constitute "the kingdom of God?" the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics; the wisdom of the
+"initiates;" the spiritual quality in folk-lore; the time when "temptation" will be no more;
+when "naked and unashamed" the race will re-enter the lost Paradise.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Hidden Wisdom Revealed</span> <a href="#Page_137">137</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Science and mysticism the same at root; Christian
+mysticism versus scientific postulates; the interior meaning in fairy stories; personalities
+and principles in mystic revelation; the esoteric meaning in Mythology; are there gods and mortals?
+the ark in religious symbology; its interior<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+meaning; what were the "tablets of stone?" the reality of the "cherubim" and the
+"seraphim;" the inner meaning of the symbolical "ark of the Covenant;" is spiritual love
+devoid of sex?; what is the symbolical "flaming sword?"; why the Jews claimed to be God's
+"chosen people;" what makes for "immortal godhood?"; the symbolism of the "life-token"
+stories; the symbolism of the sleeping princess; a theory that solves all the problems of life; the
+symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders; the secrets of the Ancient Alchemists; the
+Rosicrucians; the Free Masons; the Hermetics; their initiation rites and ceremonies explained;
+what is meant by the "Holy of Holies?" by the "secret chamber;" and the degree of "mastership;"
+the sexual significance of the symbolism of the "templars;" the red rose on the cross;
+the star and the crescent; what is the inner meaning of "the radiant center;" why the Catholic
+Church opposed the order of Free-masons; did the Alchemists discover the secret of metallic
+transmutation? what is meant by "the philosopher's stone;" why it was of such a rare
+purity; why the early Church opposed all reference to sex; the distinction between "discovering"
+and "finding;" their spiritual meaning; what was the stone that was raised at Babylon:
+was it a phallic symbol? why the average "Knight Templar" fails to attain the powers
+and privileges of esoteric Free-masonry; what is the "gate of life?" the Arcana of the Hermetics
+and its sexual significance; the symbolism of the double-headed eagle; why the eagle was an
+ancient religious symbol; the antithesis of "the eagle and the dove" explained; the "lamb and
+the goat" symbolism; the God-ideas of the Ancients and their effects on modern life; why
+"riding the goat" is the usual initiatory rite and ceremony in secret orders; some secret
+plates of Hermetic orders explained; what is the "magic solvent" of the alchemists? the relation
+of Christian symbolism to the Alchemical secrets; the inner meaning of "the sun and the
+moon" in ancient literature; transmutation: exterior or interior? what constitutes "the abiding
+glory."</small></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">What Constitutes Sexual Immorality</span>? <a href="#Page_159">159</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Can there be standards of morality in the sex-relation;
+if so what are they? is monogamy the
+ideal sex relationship? is polygamy a future
+possibility? why matriarchal polygamy is less
+degrading than patriarchal; why polygamy is
+not the ideal sex relationship; the fallacy of
+legal marriage as a test of sexual morality; why
+we "cannot wrong the universe;" the one commandment
+of "the Most High God;" what is it?
+our modern standards the result of phallic worship;
+why the Roman Church has survived the
+centuries; the interior meaning in the "Holy
+Virgin" idea of the Church; the vital point in
+the Roman marriage restrictions; men inherently
+more faithful to marriage vows than women,
+and why this is so; the bi-sexual individual
+the most developed; the counterpartal union and
+its relation to marriage customs; why "affinities"
+are so numerous; sexual infidelity an
+impossible premise; what is to become of present-day
+ethical standards of sexual morality?;
+historic ideas of sexual immorality and their
+influence upon modern civilization; modern effects
+of ancient Hebraic customs; why suppression
+of prostitution must fail; why prostitution
+is moral degeneracy; the Oriental versus the Occidental
+view of prostitution; why modern ideas
+of sexual morality are fallacious and untenable;
+can there be a universal standard of sexual
+morality? why present-day ideas of marriage
+are degrading; compulsion in marriage and
+prostitution compared; how, why, and when, the
+sex-relation may be exalted, reverenced and deified;
+mistakes of some "Civic Leaguers;" why,
+when, and how, unfaithfulness in marriage is
+wrong; the single versus the double standard in
+sex.</small></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Pathway of Love</span> <a href="#Page_189">189</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>Love the Great Reality; Love the Alpha and Omega
+of Life; Sex-love the basis of all other loves;
+Sex-love the true spiritual love; what is love
+of an abstract God? Love the perfect mathematician;
+the moral code and Nature; why we
+cannot break the laws of God; why Love is depicted
+with bandaged eyes; Eros and Cupid explained;
+why the Egyptians depicted Horus with
+finger on lips; some symbolic caricatures in
+modern civilization; how it is true that "love
+makes gods of men;" why Religion has remained
+materialistic; Love, the only vitalizing
+power in the universe; the arch-enemy of
+Love; why Love never leads to disaster; why
+Love is always pure; erroneous ideas of success
+and failure; what is real degradation? the pathway
+of love from chemical attraction to spiritual
+union; why spiritual mates must be the answer
+to Life's puzzle; what constitutes actual infidelity?
+what is to be done with sex relations that
+are not spiritual unions? Are they immoral?
+too much made of the marriage ceremony and
+too little of fitness; is it better to be "respectably
+bonded" or spiritually mated? what will
+happen when we rid Society of a belief in "impure"
+love; why marriage vows are inadequate;
+puerile; and futile; when we find the "pearl of
+great price;" why spiritual mates cannot be
+parted; why bonds and vows must give place to
+mutual agreement; does spiritual union come
+with love of God? what is the "bliss of Nirvana?"
+why the libertine is a pauper in the
+realm of love; when we imbibe the "nectar of
+gods;" why the "holy of Holies" cannot be defiled;
+when the divine office of sex is prostituted;
+why all sex relations may not be eternal yet
+moral; the mistaken teaching of the church regarding
+sex, and the result; inane ideas of
+Paradise; an appalling prospect of heaven; perfect
+sex-union the incentive to aspiration; Humanity
+progresses in spite of fear; prophecy
+literally true; the true business of business; the
+final test; the Love that is merging, melting;
+satisfying and how to attain it.</small></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Law of Transmutation</span> <a href="#Page_209">209</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>The spiritual cause of all physical activity; two
+words that are of vital import today; did Jesus
+lie? is the kingdom within an actual truth? the
+interior qualities and their relationship to
+present day affairs; the fundamental difference
+between mysticism and Christianity; the key to
+the kingdom; the interior symbolism of "wireless
+telegraphy;" the breeder of discord; the
+interior meaning of certain important words;
+the survival of the fittest in its interior meaning;
+the finer and ever finer forces at work;
+when the gods arrive the half gods go; sex-force
+at the Center of Being; when abnormalities
+and perversions of sex will be impossible;
+the radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary
+function of sex-force vitalization, not procreation;
+the art of transmutation and the key
+to the gate of life; the esoteric meaning of our
+"second childhood;" the present necessity for
+physical old-age; the spiritual message in the
+doctrine of sacrifice; the mystical formula for
+transmutation; the mystery of the "Holy Grail"
+elucidated; the only method of <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'attaing'">attaining</ins> godhood.</small></p></div>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></h4>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Selling the Thrones of Angels</span>" <a href="#Page_231">231</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>The barriers between men and the "bliss of Heaven;"
+the difference between mortals and gods; the
+character of a bi-une Being; erroneous ideas of
+masculinity and femininity; the change of the
+present day toward these ideas; God not a hermaphroditic
+Personality, but a pair; some "laws
+of God;" the ideal of union versus the idea of
+possession; the highest manifestation of sex-love;
+the solar-man and the mental man in sex;
+qualities of sex-force; is the divine man less sexual
+than the physical? the divine fulcrum of
+Sex; how eternal youth and life are possible;
+why you can not lose in the "game of Love;" we
+cannot sin against the Eternal God; why and
+when the "eternal equasion" is perfect; no mistakes
+or flaws in the Cosmic scheme; how spiritual
+mates may find each other; the true way of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+transmutation simple; why we have "painted
+dolls of women;" the hearts of men; the highest
+wisdom; some fallacies regarding the law
+of transmutation; why the "inner vision" does
+not require a trip to the Himalayas; why
+"brotherhoods" cannot insure you the way; all
+beauty and joy the result of the divinity of Sex;
+life mathematically just; when we shall "enter
+the kingdom."</small></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>No phase of civilization can rise to the highest possibilities as long
+as the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the most
+important and the most sacred function of our being, is one of shame,
+sinfulness, lust and uncleanness.</p>
+
+<p>Even among those who are conscientiously trying to establish better
+social conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like the
+proper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidences
+that our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sex
+problem.</p>
+
+<p>Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving their
+attention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so long
+neglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fettered
+by the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart from
+materia medica, or religion, is difficult.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of all
+the delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which should
+by right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surround
+a union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share with
+the one and only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, there
+is nothing of shame or apology&mdash;sentiments which alas, actuate the
+so-called "modest" man or woman of today.</p>
+
+<p>Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate for
+public discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex is
+too indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon public
+attention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, the
+opinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truth
+and so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfied
+with offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing these
+effects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing that
+all the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching and
+thinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, and
+hold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in its
+rightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of this
+universe, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has to
+be discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subject
+must be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is our
+contention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized and
+understood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sex
+were recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function <i>that
+it is</i>, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the subject must be discussed from all points of view.</p>
+
+<p>It must be permitted to thrive in the light and thus it will flower
+into the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex must
+be aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal and
+reverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex,
+is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths and
+transmitted to the children yet unborn.</p>
+
+<p>"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings,
+proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands,
+health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes,
+benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights
+of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the
+earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification
+of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his
+sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."</p>
+
+<p>Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet,"
+only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental
+perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and
+everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal
+future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to
+encompass immortal life by denying the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> very beginning and source of
+all life&mdash;Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting
+upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the
+very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from
+divine sources justifies such an idea.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until
+the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be
+that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the
+more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.</p>
+
+<p>In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the
+subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued
+pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention
+that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred
+function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before
+the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in
+celestial spaces.</p>
+
+<p style='text-align:right;'><span class="smcap">The Author</span>.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL</h2>
+
+<p>The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.</p>
+
+<p>Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life
+of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause
+of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction
+and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and
+centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits&mdash;or
+rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male
+and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is <i>Life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth,
+to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various
+gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name
+for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The
+law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity.
+"The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a
+scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the
+forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible
+universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sex is the algebracial X&mdash;the unknown quantity which defies analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all
+over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second
+coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but
+another form of the X&mdash;the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.</p>
+
+<p>The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and
+within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female
+element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the
+Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of
+love is <i>union</i>. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the
+struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of
+union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union
+must come from the Center of Life&mdash;from the spiritual Reality, which
+the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.</p>
+
+<p>Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the
+upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the
+earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and
+social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in
+the ascendant and love demands <i>union</i>&mdash;not merely matrimony.</p>
+
+<p>The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending
+law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth,
+forming a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral
+convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the
+adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and
+transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a
+circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood&mdash;victory over
+death through <i>regeneration</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but
+without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical
+sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all
+instincts.</p>
+
+<p>There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It
+is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases,
+sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the
+continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex
+has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor
+giving in marriage" after death.</p>
+
+<p>This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from
+seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere
+physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of
+spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere
+physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the
+healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as
+long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to
+the mind as "spirituality."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem
+of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its
+spiritual function is not <i>less</i> but infinitely <i>more</i> than that which
+we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.</p>
+
+<p>Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a
+million fold, refining, purifying and <i>intensifying</i> the sex instinct
+until it bears a relationship to the average instance of
+sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism
+bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life
+in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the
+musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the
+spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not
+mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of
+life-manifestation.</p>
+
+<p>We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the
+mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each
+blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and
+purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into
+the grand compositions of the Masters.</p>
+
+<p>"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may
+safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental
+principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses
+(senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always
+where the line<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos.
+Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex,
+and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more
+permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.</p>
+
+<p>Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the
+visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible
+worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the
+mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the
+animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and
+protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of
+both sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter but
+masculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rare
+instances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean that
+there is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves the
+union in one <i>Whole Entity</i> of the two distinct principles, and by
+this fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the very
+crux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the mere
+physical expression of the law, but that the object of the
+sex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male and
+a female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being&mdash;the true
+representative of the bi-une Being whom we know as God.</p>
+
+<p>Absolute and perfect union is possible only at the center, the crux,
+of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol
+of spiritual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have
+for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not
+final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many
+sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not
+fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritual
+counterparts.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it
+expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species,
+and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of
+sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident
+plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and
+perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked
+for and who we believe is here.</p>
+
+<p>If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical
+only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the
+spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the
+function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of
+procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend
+of life-manifestation.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we
+find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs
+deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and
+almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of
+Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally
+rather careless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher
+sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely
+instinctive urge to perpetuate the species&mdash;the lowest expression of
+Love&mdash;and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there,
+and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the
+fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs
+other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we
+see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the
+god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the
+stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.</p>
+
+<p>In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find the
+universal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oak
+tree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon a
+plant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be the
+case, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is to
+attract to itself <i>its own</i>; that which belongs to it by right of
+Cosmic law and order and justice.</p>
+
+<p>All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt to
+appropriate and <i>possess</i> that which, in the final analysis, in the
+Absolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall have
+mastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its true
+spiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth's
+creatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+instinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which would
+protect and preserve, and <i>leave free</i>, will have gained supremacy
+over selfishness and the desire for possession.</p>
+
+<p>In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal.
+Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of
+sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that
+Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as
+babies.</p>
+
+<p>Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression
+than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note
+with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge
+is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the
+mammals.</p>
+
+<p>The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the
+harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic
+ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in
+continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense
+love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but
+it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our
+ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem
+of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the
+spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings
+learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating,
+which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their
+progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> with sex-expression.
+It permeates all their intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>The trait which distinguishes the spiritual man from the animal man is
+analogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep and
+lasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing with
+each other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other's
+words; contacting, as it were, each other's <i>inner nature</i>, rather
+than obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, in
+the common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives which
+their love has brought forth.</p>
+
+<p>Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the
+sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical
+contact, to that of spiritual union&mdash;a wide gulf seemingly; but who
+would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union
+with the Beloved One means?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+
+<h2>SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and
+inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and
+civilized, has been founded upon Sex&mdash;the inevitable, the inviolable,
+the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An
+intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will
+not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an
+unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more
+worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of
+birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed
+planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life
+from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only
+shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be
+"shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It
+is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from
+spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle
+of Sex is unrecognized by them.</p>
+
+<p>With all due respect to the highest types of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> religious creeds which
+survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of
+worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the
+simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of
+complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries
+previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature
+makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a
+time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as
+"The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something
+higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of
+Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the
+evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.</p>
+
+<p>It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after
+all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The
+vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen
+to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural
+and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater
+than that of human beings&mdash;a power manifesting itself in the act of
+procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the
+Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman
+issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child"
+became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat
+different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying
+fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those
+whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have
+originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as
+an object of worship.</p>
+
+<p>Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this
+symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and
+reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also
+enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although
+defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.</p>
+
+<p>The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all
+symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the
+ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance.
+At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the
+nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she
+alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately
+reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the
+reproductive power.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began&mdash;a warfare which, if
+it had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since in
+race-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women have
+continued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until now
+the future offers a golden promise of <i>union</i>. As long as primitive
+man kept to nature worship, deifying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> earth as the mother who brought
+forth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religious
+practices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent of
+springtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the period
+of gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature's
+own laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasion
+of thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and general
+good-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing and
+music and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this very
+natural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness was
+accompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation.</p>
+
+<p>There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early
+Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the
+"Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of
+Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her
+androgynous character.</p>
+
+<p>Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent
+of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all
+the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as
+the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this
+day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as
+feminine.</p>
+
+<p>Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine,
+as were all deities; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> later, when it was shown that the sun
+apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in
+succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a
+deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled
+and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from
+her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level
+of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.</p>
+
+<p>While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of
+life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from
+the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder
+and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the
+mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon
+the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this
+ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law
+is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we
+contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have
+prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily
+persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was
+yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really
+fundamental.</p>
+
+<p>From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved
+a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle
+an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+female sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and
+sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of
+generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet
+from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves
+dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative
+organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the
+most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.</p>
+
+<p>The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the
+Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it
+must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful
+miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back
+over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to
+fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get
+lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more
+exalted planes of our ideals.</p>
+
+<p>From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), with
+all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon
+woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of
+time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be
+individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was
+established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ
+which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy.
+In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note
+today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed
+stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of
+deification&mdash;the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?</p>
+
+<p>The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the
+phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni
+worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were
+celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian
+festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature
+worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic
+worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.</p>
+
+<p>There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called
+Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of
+Ceres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to have
+noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the
+entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the
+rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins
+distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted
+to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.</p>
+
+<p>Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor
+of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that
+the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male
+belonged exclusively to the exalted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> or perfected woman, which is to
+say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this
+ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time
+would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive
+and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the
+question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that
+purity and peace would reign upon earth.</p>
+
+<p>This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation
+to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have
+been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because
+phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that
+not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the
+Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man
+violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This
+gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted
+sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much
+that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the
+pure and perfect union of male and female&mdash;the only ideal that will,
+or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.</p>
+
+<p>The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis.
+For a period of several days during the time set apart for the
+festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature
+of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue
+of inward purity and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> strict adherence to high ideals of truth and
+honor.</p>
+
+<p>Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether
+expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent
+worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those
+qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach
+immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say
+what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs
+only to those who are pure in heart.</p>
+
+<p>From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy
+communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of
+the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the
+phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol.
+Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian
+supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism.
+Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a
+spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and
+reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of
+every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times
+will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how
+obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently
+associated.</p>
+
+<p>The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy,
+underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of the
+Central African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above the
+din of our modern commercial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> civilization. The prejudiced and the
+superficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremonies
+records only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences of
+depravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of the
+idea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race which
+has sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world's
+evolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races are
+today emerging.</p>
+
+<p>All mystic truths are expressed in symbolism. It has been said that
+these truths are "veiled;" this is true only because the observer has
+not yet learned to speak the language. The universal language is
+symbolism. In the early Egyptian, the Indian, and the Hebrew
+religions, the fundamental idea was the two generating principles (or
+we might say the two aspects of the One principle) of generation. The
+two in spiritual <i>union</i> represented the Infinite&mdash;the Deity. The
+Hebrew word "Elohim" is plural, and means male and female united,
+forming the One Perfect and Complete Being. This union is the "Holy of
+Holies" of the ancient mystics and alchemists. We see its reflection
+and its persistence today in the Catholic service of the Mass, where
+the priest raises the Eucharist as the "Holy of Holies" in which is
+generated the Christ-man, and before whom all human devotees bow the
+head that they may not look upon the perfection and beauty of its pure
+radiance. Neither is the priest supposed to touch the chalice with
+uncovered hands. He prepares<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> himself by fasting and prayer before he
+mounts the altar upon which this "Holy of Holies" is hidden from view.</p>
+
+<p>The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations is
+easily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols of
+yoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, although
+it is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it is
+only through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man can
+be born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is either
+concealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek and
+Roman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. This
+debasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and is
+unquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Roman
+empires.</p>
+
+<p>If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson that
+neither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but only
+different; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but that
+each little group and class of humans has its particular contribution
+to the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing the
+mind from the shackles of ignorance&mdash;that darkness which obscures our
+inner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-called
+civilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women of
+this century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we are
+different and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individuality
+is our contribution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> to the work of the cosmic law, which is seeking
+to lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestial
+light.</p>
+
+<p>The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important place
+in a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is one
+of the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximately
+four thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlier
+ideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres," the emblem
+of the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacred
+character of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterized
+as feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleur
+de lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, and
+they are called feminine, although really androgynous.</p>
+
+<p>The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has
+been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is
+supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But
+close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel
+in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are
+tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and
+seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new
+plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new
+life. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not as
+pronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone are
+both present in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and not
+feminine alone.</p>
+
+<p>Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as the
+representative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life and
+energy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle in
+the Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although in
+reality bi-sexual.</p>
+
+<p>The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which the
+male principle has dominated, as the one true and only God&mdash;the giver
+of life, the energizing power of Creation&mdash;and the lily and the
+Eucharist are both representative of the Female principle.</p>
+
+<p>Historians mark the beginning of the worship of the <i>One True God</i>,
+defined philosophically as the "Monistic" God-idea, from the building
+of the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in the
+earliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anything
+suggestive of "confusion of tongues." The name unquestionably came
+from "babil" meaning "the gate of God." Thus only is its meaning
+obvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam and phallus
+which obtained at that time. It is also evident that the phallic
+worshippers borrowed the simile of "the gate of God" from the
+worshippers of the yoni, who based their claim to truth upon the
+indisputable fact, that out of the womb comes the life of plant, and
+animal, and man.</p>
+
+<p>The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel show
+conclusively that it was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> monument to the victory of the phallic
+worshippers over the yoni, proving that the "one true and only God"
+was male. From that time also God has been alluded to as "He,"
+although in the Oriental countries, and particularly among the Hindus,
+we find repeated allusions to the Deity as "The Divine Mother," and
+all the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because of
+this fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions and
+philosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retained
+the divinity of the female principle in theory, but not in fact.</p>
+
+<p>Sex-worship is contemptuously alluded to in modern literature as
+"strange and erotic ideas," or words equally condemnatory. But this is
+an absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that the
+mystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder;
+and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomes
+erotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth," and
+when the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. It
+becomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight for
+supremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of union
+shall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form of
+religious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle of
+birth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will the
+family be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, be
+worshipped.</p>
+
+<p>The trinity in unity has been a widespread and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> persistent part of all
+religions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal has
+a permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is often
+obscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seeking
+the light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscured
+truths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions," will
+reveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modern
+concepts.</p>
+
+<p>But while we note a vague recognition of the female element in all our
+modern religious systems, the general acceptance of the God-idea as
+monistic and the gender of this monistic God as masculine betrays the
+domination of phallicism over yoni worship and also over that of the
+two principles in conjunction&mdash;the bi-une Deity. The tree is
+universally accepted as an emblem of life-energy. The upright shape of
+the tree; the sap which rises at certain periods from invisible
+sources; and the fact that the germinal power of the seeds of the
+fruits and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make the
+tree symbolical of eternal life. The tree is either male or female,
+except in certain instances where it is, like the lotus, androgynous,
+such for example as the ash, which is the "sacred" tree of
+Scandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, it
+has been regarded as "sacred." The same idea is found throughout all
+myths, and all religious symbolism, namely: <i>the attainment of god-hood</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+<i>is reached when both sexes are united in one Being.</i></p>
+
+<p>The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a
+subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the
+history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to
+that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held
+sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our
+own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and
+its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest,
+in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The
+Latin name for the pine is pinus.</p>
+
+<p>Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that
+step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its
+spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its
+root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the
+life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the
+male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity
+contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally
+became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the
+spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race,
+became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused
+any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father,
+Son and&mdash;Holy Ghost."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what
+of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity
+composed of three male beings?</p>
+
+<p>It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the
+female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian
+Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their
+reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the
+Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are
+evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the
+God-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instruments
+of the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the male
+principle as the only true God.</p>
+
+<p>So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modern
+thought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardly
+notice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerful
+hypnotist.</p>
+
+<p>Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand the
+symbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblems
+which constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems are
+the pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika.
+The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with their
+protruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with the
+mound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, which
+venerated both sexes as co-equal. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> easy to realize why the Jews
+were driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worship
+the Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing the
+phallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in the
+God-head.</p>
+
+<p>It is also significant that side by side with the present-day Feminist
+Movement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptian
+architecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art,
+which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on its
+artistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not with
+acclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and so
+closely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged the
+centuries and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancient
+civilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to the
+Egyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, is
+in vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobacco
+and what not (so essentially an American custom) we find the
+modernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika.</p>
+
+<p>The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every country
+and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally,
+originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes
+have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the
+whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+realizing its antiquity and its universality.</p>
+
+<p>The two sex principles, joined in the center of the four arms or legs,
+of the cross, accomplish that which is said (and truthfully if taken
+on the physical plane only) to be impossible of accomplishment&mdash;they
+square the circle. A circle is emblematical of completeness. Aum, the
+Absolute, the Omniscient, is always typified by a circle. To "square
+the circle" means esoterically to have reached godhood, and this can
+be accomplished only by the male and female <i>united</i> in spirit. The
+swastika is essentially a bi-une sex symbol although it has been
+sometimes called male and sometimes female, according to its shape,
+which varies with the various meanings ascribed to it. Primitive man
+was not prolific in language, and one symbol expressed many ideas
+according to its varied form and position.</p>
+
+<p>The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of the
+generative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power was
+conceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still
+"testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substituted
+for the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognition
+of the Creative Principle, we note that the Bible is made up of
+"testaments," which stand for its "sacredness."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently it was only after the advent of the male God that oaths and
+vows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's word
+was reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> the Supreme Creative
+power of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential of
+union, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and it
+is estimated that about six hundred years B.C. the level of debauchery
+and vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies were
+nothing more than orgies of sex-degradation.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility and
+power evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced woman
+to the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than a
+receptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and a
+man's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy&mdash;an ideal
+which is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is bounded
+by nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man.</p>
+
+<p>Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? What
+did it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answer
+the idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret of
+the generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as old
+age conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened and
+the supply insufficient.</p>
+
+<p>This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, they
+argued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) left
+him. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generation
+realize, although we know that old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> age with consequent cessation of
+physical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even our
+supposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energy
+dies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place where
+they realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know that
+old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the
+functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is
+the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not
+do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy
+into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute
+the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to
+pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay
+down his body and take it up again."</p>
+
+<p>There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciously
+leave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, while
+they visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is no
+more than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attained
+that we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itself
+confer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but that
+these may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service&mdash;not as
+payment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailing
+law, which gives what we demand.</p>
+
+<p>What we demand we naturally work for. If we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> serve Love, we get the
+coin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed by
+Jones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith.</p>
+
+<p>Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed to
+transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal
+instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty
+idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as
+before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the
+Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live
+through many years of life without having loved some person or some
+thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost
+every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision.
+The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.</p>
+
+<p>From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood
+was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the
+logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which
+reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and
+engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the
+"sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as
+a final act of propitiation.</p>
+
+<p>The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings,
+and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of
+orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible
+as he would swallow a dose of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> castor-oil, by closing his eyes and
+holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by
+police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of
+the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the
+idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.</p>
+
+<p>In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death,
+even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races
+observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and
+the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at
+certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What
+more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of
+sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of
+the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies?
+And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God,
+they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.</p>
+
+<p>And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed;
+but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to
+sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the
+aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came,
+that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world,
+and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and
+trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had
+been rigorously suppressed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so
+they conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read of
+repeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freely
+on the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people.
+At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that the
+only Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the final
+debt of transgression and set men free from death, that they might
+have eternal life, which to them meant life in the physical body.</p>
+
+<p>It is not at all possible that Jesus had any such idea of his mission.
+He was far too illumined for that, even judging from the meager
+accounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story of
+his mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea of
+blood-sacrifice as <i>payment</i> for the privilege of physical virility,
+so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, could
+not die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuries
+and is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christian
+churches in this civilized century.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there is an esoteric truth underlying this universal idea of
+sacrifice, and when we come to this in a subsequent chapter, we will
+better understand how and why it has persisted throughout the
+centuries.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE</h2>
+
+
+<p>From the study of ancient sex-worship to our twentieth century systems
+of religion; our scientific discoveries; our intellectual standards of
+philosophy and social ethics; and above all, perhaps, our marvelous
+commercial order, connecting, as it does, the entire globe, seems a
+far cry; but it is only another link in a chain and fits into the past
+as accurately and as inevitably as the morning follows the night.</p>
+
+<p>There is an erroneous idea current that public institutions, such as
+law-courts, religious creeds, educational systems, reform movements,
+et cetera, are causes of race-advancement. As a matter of fact they
+are not causes but results. They do not determine progress; they
+reflect it.</p>
+
+<p>Causes start from the Center and radiate outward. We may realize this
+more readily if we will remember that if we throw a pebble into a pool
+of water, it starts innumerable little waves which traveling outward,
+reach a point some distance from the central source, and if we were to
+see the outermost wavelet only, we might imagine that the disturbance
+begins and ends far from the place where the pebble was thrown.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>This illustration explains the difference between the materialistic
+and the metaphysical points of view. The former notes the result, and
+the latter the cause of existing conditions. The mystical viewpoint
+takes into account the fact that there is a cosmic law which acts like
+a tidal-wave. Materialists call the action of this law "Evolution,"
+assuming that its impetus comes from our physical activities. It is,
+in fact, from the Center or spiritual source of life that all power,
+all evolution, emanates. The spiritual is the intensity of power; the
+physical is the attenuated.</p>
+
+<p>The term, "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporous
+space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent
+reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago,
+"The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our
+mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we see
+the effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods of
+locomotion; our architecture; our commerce&mdash;in all the avenues of our
+active civilization.</p>
+
+<p>We wish to emphasize the point that every so-called advancement; every
+discovery; every improvement in moral ideals as well as in mechanics,
+and in those things that add to our physical comfort, comes from the
+center of Life.</p>
+
+<p>The external but <i>reflects</i> the action of the Cosmic Law which
+uncovers the vast areas of consciousness and frees the human soul from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+hypnotisms, and the limitations of the animal-mind.</p>
+
+<p>Animal force is still strong in the world to-day, but it is not as
+strong as it appears to be, because much of the seeming indifference
+and cold-heartedness of the people, taken en masse, is due to the
+hurried, feverish and insistent demands of our external life.</p>
+
+<p>Underneath the surface, in the realm of the sub-conscious activities,
+there is developing the spirit of unity; of sympathy; and a
+consciousness of our innate relationship. This realization comes to
+the surface in times of great stress and peril.</p>
+
+<p>The whole trend of modern life symbolizes or reflects the <i>ideal</i> of
+unity, albeit the tooth and claw and growl of the animal in Man may be
+seen and felt and heard in the vain effort to postpone the inevitable
+dethronement of the animal force, which would dominate the weaker and
+appropriate for the personal self, the creation of brain and hand,
+much as the house-dog, satiated with over-feeding, buries the bone he
+cannot eat lest some hungry brother-dog shall get it. Nevertheless,
+despite the animal greed that still shows in our modern life, there is
+plenty of evidence that we are on the upward spiral that leads to
+unity&mdash;the effect of love.</p>
+
+<p>The superficial observer, dominated by that instinct of fear which
+seems to be so ingrained in our animal nature that we are all slaves
+to it in some form or degree, sees in the present-day conditions a
+menace to what he believes to be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> moral life of the race, and
+particularly as these conditions apply to the modern woman.</p>
+
+<p>He sees women coming out of the seclusion of their "rightful sphere"
+and meeting men on terms of equality. He sees what he terms "immodest
+dress;" defiance of traditional ideas of etiquette and conduct; he
+notes what appears to be a disregard for the faith of our fathers;
+and, above all, a distaste for that special function of
+woman&mdash;child-bearing. The superficial observer, both male and female,
+feels great alarm.</p>
+
+<p>But let us not be dismayed. Present day conditions, particularly as
+they relate to the female principle of Creation, but reflect the
+inevitable reaction from a one-sided course. The pendulum swings back
+again and ultimately we will strike a balance; from domination to
+unity; from struggle to harmony. Even American commercial life admits
+the value of a vacation time.</p>
+
+<p>Present day conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in a
+well-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything that
+disturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm to
+the undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern life
+which directly affect women, or in which we may say, the Female
+Principle is especially concerned, we note a determined and united
+demand for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's demand for political equality is but a shadowgraph as it were
+of the real demand which is the demand of the Divine Feminine
+throughout all manifested life, for recognition of equality, in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+the plan of creation. It is a symbol of the ideal of unity which finds
+expression in the commercial world in trusts and labor unions; in the
+"let us get together" plea of the various advocates of reform; of all
+those enterprises which are seen to most directly affect the entire
+human family.</p>
+
+<p>That there are women who are blind to this fundamental idea of their
+demand for political equality is true; and it is also true that there
+are perhaps as many men as there are women who recognize the need of
+woman's political and social equality, but this only proves the fact
+which we have already emphasized, namely that it is not women as
+personalities, but the Female Principle throughout the universe that
+is at the root of the modern Feminist Movement. The male principle is
+not confined to the form of man, neither is the female principle
+always expressed in the form of woman. Many men exemplify more of the
+maternal instinct than do certain women; neither must it be assumed
+that this type of man is effeminate; or that the woman of Amazonian
+physique is more masculine in thought and habit than is the little
+frou-frou specimen of womankind who looks appealingly into the eyes of
+her male escort, beseeching protection from the rude stares which she
+has premeditatedly invited. Qualities are sexless and universal. It is
+only in their specific combinations that they adequately represent the
+masculine or the feminine gender.</p>
+
+
+<p>Blessed are they who have learned the art of discrimination.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>Broadly speaking, women are behaving in a manner which upsets all
+precedent and promises ultimate emancipation from restraint.</p>
+
+<p>But is it not possible that women no longer need restraint if they
+ever needed it? Is it not possible that the world has grown up, and
+that both men and women may safely be allowed the freedom of
+self-government, with all possible mutual aid in the work of
+establishing an upright, free, and trustworthy science of right
+living?</p>
+
+<p>That which is always in the future is never ours and if we are ever
+going to be free and happy and well-conditioned there is no reason why
+we should not make it soon.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's demand for political equality is sometimes used as an excuse
+to lessen her dignity and her place in society. People who do this are
+of the same type as those before whom Sex cannot be discussed
+intelligently because they do not realize the sacredness of Sex. They
+are a remnant of the ages which have passed and which have left their
+mark, in the idea of a half-sexed God, the "He," the spouseless Father
+who brought forth the visible universe apparently without co-operation
+with the Female Principle. This type of person prates much about the
+dangers of race-suicide, meaning thereby the increasing tendency to
+childlessness and not as should be taken into account the death rate
+among children who are born of diseased and unfit parents and brought
+into existence without the necessary conditions of sanitation, food
+and care.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>Our national Eugenic societies are hampered by false ideas of what
+constitutes morality, being bound to uphold the tradition that the
+child that is born of married parents, no matter how diseased in body
+and deficient in mind, is better-born than is the offspring of
+unmarried parents, even though the latter may be a model of physical
+health and mental efficiency. Eugenics will remain limited in scope
+until such time as the entire world adopts "in spirit and in truth"
+the recent action of the European governments, and recognizes the
+legitimacy of all children however born.</p>
+
+<p>And although the action of the European governments was born of
+nothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiers
+might be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the human
+race. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended to
+all children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the cruel
+and unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents.
+Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and although
+it seems a terrible price to pay for even so badly a needed reform as
+this, Humanity has always paid dearly for its willful blindness. It
+certainly should be evident to any sane mind that every child that is
+born into this world has a moral and a legal right to be here.
+Whatever may be said for or against parents, it is wicked stupidity to
+brand an innocent child with the epithet "illegitimate." The lowest
+animal has a right to be born.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+Many a beautiful and innocent child is denied that right.</p>
+
+<p>If it has taken one of the most bloody wars in history to establish
+the right of birth, even so the struggle will not have been in vain,
+because this right, once established in the hearts of all Humanity,
+will forever do away with warfare. No doubt this assertion will sound
+far-fetched to many, but the future will see the vindication of this
+belief.</p>
+
+<p>Birth is actually the most important function in life. If it is
+immoral to be born, no matter what the conditions of such birth, what
+possible chance have we to live morally? We cannot discriminate in
+dealing with the great fundamentals of life.</p>
+
+<p>This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws are
+inviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child of
+the beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of the
+unmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into the
+world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may
+not be always polite, but she is always truthful.</p>
+
+<p>As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth,
+Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because
+Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we
+are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the
+conditions of a part.</p>
+
+<p>Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some
+circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into
+account our ideas of respectability.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate
+for women to have children before they have been married?"</p>
+
+<p>The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be
+permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do
+it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must
+begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried
+woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society
+is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state,
+because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of
+maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries&mdash;both of which result
+from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.</p>
+
+<p>If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy
+by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world
+<i>desired by the mother</i> is born in accordance with the highest
+possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and
+Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child
+because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of
+men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be
+one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present
+time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and
+condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.</p>
+
+<p>When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.</p>
+
+<p>As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> motherhood, it is
+inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of
+child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who
+would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more
+perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make
+motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might
+not see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life.
+We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We are
+always seeking to check effects.</p>
+
+<p>The average human being is little more than a phonographic record of
+the dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious.</p>
+
+<p>Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we will
+find that the birthrate will increase among the "rich and
+respectable," where now we note a determined desire to shirk the
+responsibilities of parenthood.</p>
+
+<p>We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will be
+alarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is the
+ideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationships
+are neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established only
+between free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choice
+mean life and health.</p>
+
+<p>The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from
+self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases
+tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious
+selection must include love, and we may safely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> trust love. Love is
+inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of
+all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however
+well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical
+aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the
+effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease
+and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no
+real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to
+Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher <i>ideal</i>,
+rather than a higher <i>order</i>. The higher order can come only by
+getting back to primal laws.</p>
+
+<p>The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were
+competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two
+important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for
+beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but
+both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the
+world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a
+civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was
+like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble,
+and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but
+freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.</p>
+
+<p>Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was
+unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of
+force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> ideal of
+sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important
+requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the
+element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must
+take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give
+the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted
+in, finally results in decadence.</p>
+
+<p>We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of
+those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of
+education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are
+embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious
+example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a
+marriage between a brother and sister&mdash;a custom which prevailed among
+ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well
+believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain
+that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love.
+Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to
+exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established
+that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions
+only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and
+intellectual.</p>
+
+<p>Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of
+"Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful physical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul
+and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we
+instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual
+behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end
+and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid
+maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's
+rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.</p>
+
+<p>Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish
+and unselfish&mdash;are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer
+rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women
+living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if
+they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of
+semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light"
+housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the
+nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry
+minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready
+made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under
+these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light
+housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.</p>
+
+<p>Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged
+from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to
+apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say,
+notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a
+cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something
+back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day
+life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem
+deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always
+upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.</p>
+
+<p>This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates the
+average woman, who is able physically and financially to bear children
+and yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with the
+planet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developed
+and the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain falls
+upon the just and the unjust alike.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change in
+human ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an ideal
+in which equality shall be more nearly represented and they give
+themselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regenerating
+work.</p>
+
+<p>The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension of
+it. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduate
+from it or we return for another term, according as we have mastered
+the studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and we
+see that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth has
+two aspects. One is from apparent selfishness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> and lack of the
+temperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to women
+as an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct.</p>
+
+<p>The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to a
+restless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of the
+Feminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimes
+we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the
+cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically
+termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and
+they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind.</p>
+
+<p>Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can put
+into words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing is
+not a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life.
+Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle for
+completeness knows intuitively, that even though she may never beget
+mortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exercise
+of her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, which
+seemingly separates us from invisible areas. <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'Morever'">Moreover</ins> motherhood is
+qualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made nor
+unmade by the birthrate.</p>
+
+<p>Two important considerations present themselves to the world today:
+One is that woman&mdash;considered as the fecund receptive
+sex-principle&mdash;is refusing the sex relationship on the old basis,
+however "respectable" and well-intentioned that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> basis was. Generally
+speaking, it is evident that the old basis of intercourse between the
+sexes has been, is being, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied,
+refused, as the approved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The
+other important observation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this.</p>
+
+<p>It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-conscious
+limitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of a
+condition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerable
+divorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why are
+women refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live with
+their husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they less
+courageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable of
+love&mdash;either love of children or love of the father who begets the
+children?</p>
+
+<p>It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of love
+than ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the first
+time in the history of many generations, what we owe to the future.
+Formerly men built entirely for self, and for the immediate present.
+We can look back and trace the development of a race consciousness
+from the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriers
+between races and nations and sects and societies, as also between the
+sexes, slowly dissolving.</p>
+
+<p>Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying a
+political, or educational or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> religions platform with an Occidental.
+Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existed
+between the Jew and the Gentile&mdash;now they exchange pulpits, and all
+sects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women are
+elected to political and educational offices. No matter that these
+evidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are <i>promises</i> of the
+birth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when a
+man's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediate
+family only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at the
+expense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate of
+any other women and children.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of the
+self interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and is
+not, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated our
+hair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were best
+conserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is that
+Love has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or more
+altruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of love
+is to expand; to grow; to <i>give</i> of itself until unselfishness must
+come with the final aim of love, which is <i>unity</i> and not possession.</p>
+
+<p>We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and more
+inclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves the
+higher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal of
+love is possible to the woman of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> today than ever before. We must take
+into consideration the average of the sex, at the same time not
+forgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities of
+both sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing and
+unselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope,
+the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealing
+with principles and not merely with individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal or
+conjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may then
+ask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusion
+that women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demand
+conditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind.
+They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfect
+race&mdash;a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and claw
+and choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over the
+possession of bones.</p>
+
+<p>Ever and ever we have been promised the coming of the perfect man&mdash;the
+"man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously
+active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged
+under the domination of the animal nature which subdues and
+appropriates.</p>
+
+<p>A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union.
+Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite the gods
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merely
+reproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall be
+something more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction.
+This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according to
+the development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union is
+coming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type of
+union, but also as the initiative of the promised time when the
+kingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief in
+its efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surely
+vain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keeps
+his promises," which is simply one way of saying that the law of the
+cosmos is reliable.</p>
+
+<p>"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God," but both must agree
+that whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. There
+can be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in which
+Love is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree of
+logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also
+so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on
+the physical plane&mdash;a manifestation of life which even physicists are
+bound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities.</p>
+
+<p>We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of a
+decreasing birthrate as we see it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> on the physical plane. There are
+many other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and the
+planets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is the
+axis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony.</p>
+
+<p>The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principle
+is refusing maternity, and above all the <i>bondage</i> of matrimony for
+the important reason that the time has come for the rearing of the
+Man-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex,
+superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sense
+gratification.</p>
+
+<p>Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Why
+should it not manifest in this most important of all our systems of
+intercourse?</p>
+
+<p>The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacred
+or holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishment
+for indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more than
+half ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of a
+cosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operated
+with to advantage.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood.
+Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony is
+always marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children.
+And there are many women with children who know not the first faint
+dawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) love
+which comes most often in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> the guise of motherhood, but which is
+always present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other's
+inner nature.</p>
+
+<p>If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and the
+rightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evade
+motherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of all
+life; if they will not rest until every child that is born into this
+world is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is given
+every advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moral
+training, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only to
+rival each other in the quality and the perfection of their
+motherhood.</p>
+
+<p>The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating the
+birthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to prevent
+conception, may be well meant as these things are consistent with
+prevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to the
+problem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule,
+children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and provided
+for.</p>
+
+<p>Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparatively
+every woman would be normal under proper social and economic
+conditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because of
+lack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because of
+lack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modern
+mo-loch, Public Opinion.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of his
+children. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to be
+free from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving her
+free to be guided in the most vital and important function of her
+life, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Love
+will establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no other
+power on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachments
+nor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love is
+the only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God.</p>
+
+<p>Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will be
+superseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and when
+this comes to pass, Humanity will rise to that ideal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+
+<h2>THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING</h2>
+
+
+<p>Any attempt to discuss subjects pertaining to the sex-relation with
+intelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact that
+sex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices,
+reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted to
+sex-worship and sex-degradation.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and to
+make a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" of
+matrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, so
+to speak, the social institution of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which are
+based upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to the
+prejudices and "beliefs" of the average.</p>
+
+<p>Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting and
+fundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudices
+must be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature's
+confidence and be the sharer of her secrets."</p>
+
+<p>The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+of theological bias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previous
+discovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend his
+God"&mdash;as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it&mdash;were not
+capable of self-defense.</p>
+
+<p>It is due to this mistaken zeal on the part of the short-sighted ones,
+that human evolution is slow, albeit it is likewise inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>They are like those who, viewing the wrecking of a ruined habitation,
+condemned by the Board of Public Safety, try to stop the process of
+the workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have been
+cleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable building
+will be put up on the same ground; and anything from the old
+architecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the new
+building.</p>
+
+<p>The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protect
+them from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from their
+brothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes a
+desirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home,
+rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study of
+history should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changes
+in human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods wait
+upon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand for
+improved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to be
+bidden, "Enter, Friend."</p>
+
+<p>As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+Until there is a more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite
+certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does
+duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor
+thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many
+complaints as a hypochondriac.</p>
+
+<p>But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of the
+fundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning of
+recorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, very
+satisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in social
+and individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from a
+study of the history of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all
+phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees
+all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the
+exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external,
+world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the
+everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a
+succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long
+anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres
+and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual
+events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far
+distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which
+meets his eye.</p>
+
+<p>Science examines, dissects, and classifies these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+symbols according to their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted
+and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.</p>
+
+<p>Humanity is ever seeking the Reality&mdash;the Noumenon, which we
+intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages,
+side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the
+sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and
+ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human
+ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution,
+obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of
+forms is common.</p>
+
+<p>And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change
+and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family
+species, as we have in the human family.</p>
+
+<p>Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some
+animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.</p>
+
+<p>Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the
+animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is
+obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific,
+to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is
+greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic
+life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are
+slaughtered for food.</p>
+
+<p>The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the
+male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and
+rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself
+very early among the various families, from motives of
+self-protection, if from nothing higher, since victory evidently
+favored the numerically strong.</p>
+
+<p>In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life,
+and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some
+species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist,
+preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only
+with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say
+that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.</p>
+
+<p>It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A
+mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner.
+It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a
+creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided
+in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power
+undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it
+may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no
+temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+event force of habit would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping
+with the eagle character.</p>
+
+<p>The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among
+birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social
+institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are
+just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward
+trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite
+and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is
+recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of
+today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy
+obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not
+reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.</p>
+
+<p>Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as
+sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and
+also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a
+night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging
+head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of
+marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a
+marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In
+these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and
+generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In
+fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were
+easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+when there seems to have developed a sense of obligation to the
+offspring to continue the family.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the
+very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had
+no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family
+was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female
+heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he
+would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her
+family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became
+the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.</p>
+
+<p>Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually
+acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his
+"possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of
+conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized
+idea of "earning."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this
+respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost
+general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence
+as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he
+kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy
+with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his
+wife's person.</p>
+
+<p>In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity
+within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide under these
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a
+martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are
+given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had
+taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the
+following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found
+prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your
+silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How
+much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these
+pestilential marauders?"</p>
+
+<p>Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in
+defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The
+inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the
+average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of
+man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of
+free-will.</p>
+
+<p>Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the
+possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more
+ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.</p>
+
+<p>Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what
+constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same
+idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much
+investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another,
+actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male
+are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+to such violent methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she
+has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for
+"outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions
+through the safer channels of the law-courts.</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a
+part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral
+code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
+This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to
+themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense
+being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of
+satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably
+respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her
+neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual
+matters, "as long as he provides well for me."</p>
+
+<p>When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes
+morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is
+governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary
+expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize
+the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense,
+which besmirch the path of Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the tendency to æsthetic selection, always more pronounced in the female than in the male,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+has been swallowed up in the false valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.</p>
+
+<p>In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove
+many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not
+like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her
+claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare
+bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we
+may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman
+of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the
+"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which
+critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized
+our grandmothers.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating,
+everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency;
+and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the
+right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by
+capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.</p>
+
+<p>One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the
+world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman
+approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal,
+except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the
+gens of the family.</p>
+
+<p>These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal
+status of women has been,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> as it is now, no more than what the
+evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.</p>
+
+<p>It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per
+se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either
+better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our
+idea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women
+in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which
+would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it
+has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best
+has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of
+personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in
+him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at
+first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically
+conceded <i>his children at least</i> first place; although the wife was
+hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.</p>
+
+<p>Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and
+among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his <i>Evolution of
+the Family</i>, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the
+Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'Doubless'">Doubtless</ins> the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle;
+it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was
+necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold
+to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious
+servant, busy and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she
+might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the
+Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no
+other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her.
+Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be
+able to prove, <i>cloths in hand</i>, that she was a virgin at the moment
+of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."</p>
+
+<p>The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia,
+although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the
+same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the
+Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that
+neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for
+centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes,
+where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has
+been, and still is, deplorable.</p>
+
+<p>In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most
+inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her
+husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male
+children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and
+mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she
+allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice
+for her.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous
+woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of
+women were to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class
+was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of
+power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law
+unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced
+prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on
+terms of at least temporary social equality.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the
+independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in
+ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the
+prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the
+most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love
+out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although
+this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation,
+inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with
+so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the
+evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served
+two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;
+and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the
+aristocratic class from extinction through decadence.</p>
+
+<p>As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a
+degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages,
+they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and,
+as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of wealth, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+married women to whom they were forced to accord the
+freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of
+their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I
+have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and
+houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils."</p>
+
+<p>One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece
+and Rome&mdash;an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their
+civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically
+was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in
+which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of
+procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished.
+Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase
+"between the devil and the deep sea."</p>
+
+<p>Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for
+the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took
+her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the
+transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily
+to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she
+would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse.</p>
+
+<p>In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the
+rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife
+was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to
+the eldest son. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in
+a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our
+social ethics.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct
+influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred
+years of Christian civilization among the white races.</p>
+
+<p>Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have not
+molded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, when
+esoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union means
+equality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; race
+equality.</p>
+
+<p>We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enough
+to explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems to
+be the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret to
+say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the
+construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect
+to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas!
+confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced by the professional
+man.</p>
+
+<p>The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is
+judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of
+foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of
+what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge;
+and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicity
+of ideas and customs and creations.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>Differentiation is the primal attempt.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first of
+all she is different from, rather than identical with, men.</p>
+
+<p>The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "feminine
+frivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessing
+that in her natural environment she does not consider herself his
+equal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she may
+deceive herself and others into thinking she is.</p>
+
+<p>An individual is important to Society in proportion to his
+originality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; some
+hitherto unfamiliar view.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, a
+consciousness of our unity with all life, we find that although
+religious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasized
+in the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity should
+have been established, segregation has been the rule, and it is
+without any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Church
+that we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and her
+co-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not a
+consummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world.</p>
+
+<p>That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in the
+wake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction with
+religious systems; and a determined disregard for what has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+been presented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religious
+creeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best they
+have been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom is
+the great liberator.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in America
+and Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science,
+mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" into
+its literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the variety
+of new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety of
+names that we cannot here enumerate them.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, we are still many leagues short of realizing this ideal,
+despite the preachments in its favor. Politically, the ideal of unity
+is presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, and
+Suffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "let
+us get together on this," and in efforts at legislation that shall
+control corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hours
+of work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by the
+rising sun of unity.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, in
+order that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: What
+does marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of the
+social body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entire
+Cosmos?</p>
+
+<p>Has it any real place and purpose beyond that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> of procreation, or any
+more spiritual function than the perpetuation of the human species?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h2>THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the patent fact that the institution of monogamous
+marriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain that
+any other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race.</p>
+
+<p>Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promise
+of the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfect
+image of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for.
+That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallen
+far short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizing
+that the ideal is right.</p>
+
+<p>Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meeting
+and the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfect
+complementaries.</p>
+
+<p>In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritual
+counterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base of
+union, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all the
+laws of men be employed to keep them tied to each other in the body.
+If two persons belong to each other by the inviolable law of spiritual
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+counterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep their
+souls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in the
+flesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"&mdash;the word meaning whole;
+entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they may
+be judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and any
+attempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint of
+exterior judgment must fail.</p>
+
+<p>The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highest
+ideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for that
+reason insist that marriage as a social institution is always complete
+and holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulus
+of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical
+attraction and cohesion&mdash;an instinct, which we share in common with
+every form of life, from the lowest insect to man&mdash;shall they be
+compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" in
+the physical body?</p>
+
+<p>We would say, "Heaven forbid!" only that the appeal is unnecessary.
+Heaven does forbid, and that is why we see so many attempts to disrupt
+these immature relationships.</p>
+
+<p>"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passional
+attractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all the
+motions, growths, and activities in the physical and moral world,"
+says a writer, and he adds: "The failure to attain the desired end,
+and the warfare between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> uncongenial and repulsive elements is the
+cause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in both
+spheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would be
+no storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If the
+marriage between the individual will and understanding, between the
+interior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regenerated
+men upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriage
+between the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise."</p>
+
+<p>Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons of
+opposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every other
+activity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because of
+this union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; all
+morality comes from the ideal marriage&mdash;the union of Wisdom and Love.
+To imagine that a function, so vitally important to our exterior life,
+should have no place in the phases of life which we know as "higher,"
+is a manifest absurdity, and comes from those attenuated concepts of
+what constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; concepts
+which, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord," have
+temporarily defied modern progress.</p>
+
+<p>There is no wide gulf between the spiritual and the material worlds,
+although the material is but an imperfect reflection of the basic
+principle of life.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> is a system of
+nuptials," says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit or
+Divine Life.</p>
+
+<p>How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degrading
+sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only,
+we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types
+of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that
+Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret
+of eternal and never-ceasing union of complementaries.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, the symbol of the wedding-ring. This custom,
+varying only in unimportant details, consistent with the prevailing
+social custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days.
+The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently by
+both bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circle
+of wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one," of the
+finding by each of "the other half." The circle is always used to
+express the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "without
+beginning and without end."</p>
+
+<p>According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of pure
+gold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might not
+acquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something more
+than mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability to
+sustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. It
+symbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this priceless blessing of perfect
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+conjugal union, other than by his own efforts.
+Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartal
+union&mdash;which means actually "twain made one," comes only by dint of
+strife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life.</p>
+
+<p>Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that of
+drinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life," at the completion
+of a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of the
+bride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; but
+more generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Wine
+drinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can be
+enjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life&mdash;the
+divine or spiritual sex-union.</p>
+
+<p>This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness the
+truth that only complementaries have the power to act and react,
+without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfect
+balance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction less
+than the other, perfect balance is lacking.</p>
+
+<p>Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was the
+donning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly included
+the bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to the
+bride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greek
+marriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads of
+both bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. We
+have the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; and
+the circlet which symbolizes eternity.</p>
+
+<p>The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows
+the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love;
+which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal
+truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until
+we are <i>fit for the kingdom</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremony
+symbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritual
+marriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life,
+shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the wedding
+veil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of the
+physical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shall
+know our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we have
+found that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge of
+our every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entire
+panorama of the universe becomes an open book. There is no "visible"
+and "invisible;" it is all One, with our own bi-une sex nature for the
+pivotal center.</p>
+
+<p>So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man that
+we are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not sooner
+penetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven," we say of
+some self-sacrificing and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> loving soul, and the phrase suggests to
+most of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all their
+splendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning which
+the splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature is
+in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are
+symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant;
+luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of
+the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of
+gems&mdash;diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?</p>
+
+<p>It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is their
+luminosity&mdash;their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the power
+which we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has a
+corresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have all
+things which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell us
+that all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Either
+they tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not the
+way."</p>
+
+<p>The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown of
+gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its
+esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating
+to the spiritual marriage&mdash;counterpartal union.</p>
+
+<p>Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritual
+body, the body also becomes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, we
+remember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weeds
+are unregenerate flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human body
+is a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. The
+changes produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything which
+the experimental chemist has ever discovered in nature.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fact well known to the pathologist that an unwilling wife,
+however faithful she may be, if forced into the sexual act, may
+present her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; nor
+is this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized fact
+that anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructive
+thought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body.</p>
+
+<p>In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriage
+of Christian Rosy Cross," which is, when read with the key to its
+esoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between the
+sexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of the
+Rosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets,"
+which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicrucians
+and other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union of
+the male and the female principles throughout nature and culminating
+in man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through the
+perfect balance of sex.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that women were not admitted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+to the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there
+is plenty of evidence to prove.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation of
+the sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, it
+became necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires of
+Esoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; in
+consequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the very
+heart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory,
+unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiated
+into the secret code.</p>
+
+<p>In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so far
+succeeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women were
+excluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of the
+secret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by side
+with this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbols
+has been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixed
+with frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to the
+Virgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenith
+of its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and,
+either through fear of the influence of their work, or possibly
+through lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, had
+employed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power of
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+devoted to "The Hidden Wisdom," and so we will leave it for the present.</p>
+
+<p>One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in the
+intimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove with
+the ceremony of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. The
+turtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for the
+fervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for the
+devotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if
+either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to
+death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are
+happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a
+symbol of peace.</p>
+
+<p>Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure
+prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from
+ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying
+over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth,
+the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of
+life. Let us also remember that they issued <i>in pairs</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h2>CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function
+was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages
+of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost
+general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex
+function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in
+common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par
+with gluttony.</p>
+
+<p>Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization
+that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially
+materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it
+occupies today in fine stock-breeding.</p>
+
+<p>Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude
+toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the
+history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was
+evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather
+erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it
+sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the
+normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he
+experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we
+must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the
+sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a
+revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy,
+except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that
+women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took the
+best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of
+wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the
+orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all
+these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and
+beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it
+came in the idea of asceticism&mdash;an instance where the remedy was worse
+than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was
+not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of
+licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as
+something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who
+should have known better.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which
+fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were
+inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than
+from any other of the phases of Christian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> Orthodoxy, that we note a
+militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of
+woman's claim to free expression.</p>
+
+<p>While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church
+instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy,
+but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained,
+from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy
+Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the
+inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted
+children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their
+comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath
+the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are
+gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes
+to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old,
+nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been
+to hold to this central truth of all Life&mdash;religious, social,
+national, and domestic&mdash;the truth that it is only by exalting the
+maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour
+of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be
+the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church
+itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"&mdash;the pure Love between one
+man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour that ever
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+was or ever will be&mdash;the pure Christ-child that is born of
+conterpartal union.</p>
+
+<p>Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a
+city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that
+even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a
+pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the
+omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of his
+discovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have been
+swallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember also
+that this central idea has been the foundation of all religious rites
+since time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric of
+Christianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, he
+will see that it has merely been <i>revealed</i>, and the revelation will
+prove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual and
+the most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that Perfect
+Love is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withhold
+Heaven from us, if we have this perfect love.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every other
+religious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true and
+only God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears;
+according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-une
+God, will be our spiritual development.</p>
+
+<p>We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when we
+abandon it as unclean and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> unworthy and unholy; both attitudes are
+abnormal, and unbalanced.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balanced
+person is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balanced
+individual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced and
+therefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced and
+healthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; this
+fact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is now
+considering, to wit: the earth's axis may be straightened, and, if so,
+a uniform temperature will prevail on this globe.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to a consideration of the subjects which head this chapter,
+we find it necessary to clear the ground a little, in regard to a
+definition of words.</p>
+
+<p>The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in the
+matter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of the
+sex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The word
+has come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from the
+sex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, that
+any indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, our
+modern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestly
+paradoxical that they are absurd.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful and
+holy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as an
+indecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible only
+because of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taught
+that sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lower
+state of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we are
+told that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, where
+there is no such "polluting sin" as sex-love.</p>
+
+<p>We certainly do need balance.</p>
+
+<p>The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the
+undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid
+of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our
+minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person;
+it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not
+surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection
+with the male. It is strictly a female attribute&mdash;nay, we may almost
+say, "organ."</p>
+
+<p>If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of
+opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression,
+or&mdash;which occurs more frequently&mdash;as a commercial expediency,
+believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial
+market&mdash;if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes
+bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is
+extolled.</p>
+
+<p>This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a bridegroom
+had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should the evidence of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature
+was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the
+arch-enemy of both sexes.</p>
+
+<p>And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may
+look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the
+Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their
+sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon
+the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery,
+among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of
+that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the
+deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related
+by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen
+years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by
+her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had
+"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the
+same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered
+quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always
+over-crowded with similar sales.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings
+keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage;
+inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious,
+blissful life.</p>
+
+<p>Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed
+to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual
+deception has been the rule.</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the
+wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story
+of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman
+brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly
+from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given
+birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author
+made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and
+coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of
+the clerical critics.</p>
+
+<p>When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever
+held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld
+almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one
+hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in
+the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the <i>One primordial, and
+indestructible key to salvation</i>&mdash;the birth of the god-man through the
+recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.</p>
+
+<p>But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there
+is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to
+regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in
+sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic
+aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently described
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."</p>
+
+<p>If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it were
+profane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view of
+mysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would be
+able to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack.</p>
+
+<p>The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance and
+ecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Either
+they will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is due
+the subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or they
+must be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns all
+sexual desire&mdash;that of eroticism and innate and ineradicable
+depravity.</p>
+
+<p>Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, the
+paroxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to the
+Holy Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedly
+obnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtue
+of prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to an
+ideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual,
+then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at once
+both explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "the
+mystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using the
+terminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physical
+union than the word "married") <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>was the "bride-groom;" more than that;
+she declared that she was married with a ring, set with precious
+stones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring.</p>
+
+<p>Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employ
+when exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is
+singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of
+the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and
+exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the
+dilettante lover.</p>
+
+<p>To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed within
+themselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age of
+sexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human love
+spiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal to
+that of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for the
+intensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them into
+such an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the bliss
+of the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, and
+were totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-called
+practical life.</p>
+
+<p>Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his
+"Varieties of Religious Experience," says: "Her idea of religion seems
+to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation&mdash;if one may say so
+without irreverence&mdash;between the devotee and the Deity." Although this
+estimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+be shocking to the people who think they are pious, we take an optimistic view of it,
+and suggest that the saint's idea of religion is far more satisfying
+than that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most of
+the female saints, became "the bride of Christ"&mdash;the <i>man</i> Jesus, the
+Christ, let it be remembered.</p>
+
+<p>St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gave
+herself up so wholly to this inward contemplation; to fasting, prayer,
+and withdrawal from the outer to the inner life, that she lived as the
+"bride of God," in such daily contact with Him as would fitly describe
+any love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God"
+indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses and
+compliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that he
+selected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and
+"consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning with
+love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity." In consequence of this
+vow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautiful
+women.</p>
+
+<p>Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were not
+so, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as the
+object of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, and
+Theresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the Virgin
+Mary.</p>
+
+<p>"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> with her guardian angel,
+who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun and
+with a crown of glory on his head."</p>
+
+<p>St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved with
+extravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "a
+young man of such radiant beauty and purity that he melted her soul."</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that, in seeking to escape from the "sin" of human love,
+as seen in the world, in the union of the sexes, they touched the very
+main-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown to
+the merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritual
+sex-union.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints really
+came into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms of
+holy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequently
+appear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?</p>
+
+<p>The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must be
+interpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in these
+instances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology,
+that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even though
+the visions did relate to some person other than the members of the
+Holy Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would have
+been attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint.</p>
+
+<p>They were practically compelled to include God<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> and Christ in their
+ecstacies to prove their respectability.</p>
+
+<p>One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which
+"flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularly
+applicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described by
+those who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborg
+so constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights." This
+phrase is "melting love." It is a feeling of melting or merging into
+the other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed by
+the two souls. In fact, it is <i>union</i>; whereas the lesser, or we may
+say the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but <i>contact</i>.</p>
+
+<p>If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives of
+the saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we are
+sorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages,
+which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all we
+may know of the "love of God," is by analogous comparison to what we
+know of human love.</p>
+
+<p>If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitably
+arrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In which
+event, the very word itself would have lost its significance.</p>
+
+<p>The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects of
+saintliness lies in the realization that neither the saints
+themselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had any
+conception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+and unprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'esctacies'">ecstacies</ins>,
+postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, be
+objectionable, what can be said of the only other view which is
+possible in the light of the evidence submitted?</p>
+
+<p>Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we must
+needs decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue.</p>
+
+<p>For example, consider the character of a mother of the
+self-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of the
+human family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect the
+generations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with an
+unmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of the
+opposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment;
+upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of this
+self-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even common
+affection. Who is the more chaste?</p>
+
+<p>Coventry Patmore says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>"Virgins are they before the Lord,</p>
+  <p class="i2">Whose souls are pure. The vestal fire</p>
+  <p>Is not, as some mis-read the Word,</p>
+  <p class="i2">By Marriage quenched, but burns the higher."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If purity of soul were synonymous with celibacy, the entire
+constantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished;
+but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward the
+divine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purer
+conception of love. As we <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'aproach'">approach</ins> a higher type of civilization, the broader,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. The
+more spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and our
+love-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual love
+is less sexual than is physical love. Spiritual love is physical love,
+<i>plus</i> all the other phases of love.</p>
+
+<p>The real objection to sex love on the physical plane is not based upon
+its strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than an
+attraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, it
+has no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like the
+electrical wire that is "short circuited," it expends itself in one
+spasmodic combustion.</p>
+
+<p>True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common and
+erroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process of
+subtraction.</p>
+
+<p>We need go no further than to review the processes in the external
+world of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of the
+spiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea of
+exclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called
+"spiritual."</p>
+
+<p>All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Where
+formerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we now
+harness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces of
+electricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering between
+two single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions of
+persons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+as we approach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging;
+drawing within.</p>
+
+<p>The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to the
+female pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in external
+life. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid the
+suction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, and
+union between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth to
+individual human life, and we have what?</p>
+
+<p><i>Counterpartal Sex-union.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?</h2>
+
+
+<p>We have heard much in recent years of "affinities," and "soul-mates,"
+and we are likely to hear much more in the future. So much that is
+unsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that we
+almost hesitate to employ them; but that is always the way with Fear.
+It builds a high wall between us and Truth, and dares us to scale it.</p>
+
+<p>We accept the challenge.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, the words are not synonymous, although frequently used
+as such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes and
+appetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages of
+development may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highly
+intellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend to
+attract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtue
+of mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only&mdash;that is, when it is
+because two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskey
+diluted; or their wine iced&mdash;we are apt to find the result in a
+mistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for the
+reasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which to
+draw. The chemistry of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> body changes with time and emotional
+experiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from a
+congeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived.</p>
+
+<p>Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches a
+state higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos.</p>
+
+<p>Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to the
+senses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; but
+back of thought is desire; and back of desire is design&mdash;cosmic design
+we may say&mdash;expressing itself discretively; in individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of a
+finer nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-conscious
+attraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons of
+the opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference for
+each others' society which deceives the average on-looker into
+thinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of fact
+there may never have been any thought of such relationship.</p>
+
+<p>A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, or
+Margaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion of
+men for many years without having entered into any more intimate
+relationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past,
+and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirable
+companionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seen twice with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+the same man without having the neighbors speculating as
+to a suitable name for the baby.</p>
+
+<p>More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settle
+themselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectual
+affinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from the
+old thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse,
+and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexual
+appetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane of
+intellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or by
+the force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking to
+spoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature did
+not intend it to be so.</p>
+
+<p>A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beings
+now accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes,
+a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. He
+was a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of a
+degree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; she
+was moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a month
+of married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community,
+remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval and
+shocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendship
+with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the
+ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be
+"yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual
+predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire.
+And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an
+idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It
+is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an
+idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon
+personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other
+to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it
+still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in
+the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived
+together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they
+agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They
+agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either
+come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given
+without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor
+and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of
+civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.</p>
+
+<p>True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to
+be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual
+companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and
+disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which
+is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the
+animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality
+than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By
+exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended
+or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to
+fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized
+man vents his remaining savagery.</p>
+
+<p>Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And
+while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some
+degree of <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'mutality'">mutuality</ins>, are a step higher in social development than were
+the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic
+exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where
+woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an
+"old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must
+go through an evolutionary phase.</p>
+
+<p>Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust,
+these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and
+mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they
+evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual
+affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was
+heard so frequently as it is now.</p>
+
+<p>The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since
+women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage
+bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more
+frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically
+independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have
+been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences.
+And it is at the <i>evidence</i> of marital unhappiness that all the
+criticism is directed.</p>
+
+<p>If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce
+tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to
+the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal
+moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother
+is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood,
+whether she is a wife or not.</p>
+
+<p>This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many.
+The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become
+chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public
+morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are
+our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they
+are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first
+be demolished, before they are rebuilt.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one
+single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals,
+that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the
+whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest
+change in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we go
+on year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word of
+the Century. If "self-improvement," then social improvement. Mankind
+is still in the making, as far as external conditions are concerned.</p>
+
+<p>The complaint goes up from every side, that women refuse motherhood.
+Girls who have been carefully reared, brought up in the most orthodox
+movement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention of
+finding a rich husband and not, emphatically, <i>not</i> having any
+children.</p>
+
+<p>May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girls
+who become mothers without first becoming wives?</p>
+
+<p>We are wont to refer to unmarried mothers as "unfortunates" and
+"ruined." But in what does the misfortune consist, and wherein are
+they ruined?</p>
+
+<p>Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because she
+has loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any way
+except that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nigh
+unforgivable stupidity?</p>
+
+<p>The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain
+famous woman who, by her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> force of character; her defiant self-respect
+in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no
+husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place
+accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's
+well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of
+perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband,
+but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"</p>
+
+<p>We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example,
+and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard
+child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said
+that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but
+observation should convince us that in all too many instances the
+first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime
+against posterity.</p>
+
+<p>We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a
+husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We
+endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we
+insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the
+greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the
+sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the
+unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one,
+when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes
+courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a
+hypocritical world.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and
+happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in
+the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence,
+alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will
+be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no
+power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may
+temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.</p>
+
+<p>What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention is
+that affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we may
+have many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possibly
+have more than one soul-mate.</p>
+
+<p>Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves that
+make a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merely
+similar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because of
+curiosity or dissimiliarity.</p>
+
+<p>They belong to each other because together they complete a perfect
+balance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balance
+the qualities lacking in the other.</p>
+
+<p>In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, and
+re-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, instead
+of merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this external
+plane of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, because
+the real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interior nature
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+exists independently of the physical organism.</p>
+
+<p>Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This is
+manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the
+avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing
+called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we
+note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom
+the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuries
+the race-thought seeks the underlying cause for specific effects,
+instead of, as heretofore, being satisfied to deal with effects only,
+suppressing those that are unpleasant and extolling those that seem
+agreeable.</p>
+
+<p>The scientist expresses it thus: "Nature is giving up her secrets to
+man." The metaphysician puts it this way: "The soul of man is
+unveiling, and soon we shall know each other in Truth." The
+religionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St.
+Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "we
+shall see each other face to face; not as now through a glass,
+darkly."</p>
+
+<p>This tendency to "get behind the scenes" as it were, to penetrate the
+crust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature,
+may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders of
+denunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who are
+not yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and
+"respectability," women have insisted upon freedom of the body in
+dress until at last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad woman
+excites little adverse comment. The fact has at last established
+itself that the female form has legs.</p>
+
+<p>This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted to
+see exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman has
+always known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the game
+of enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her
+"meal-ticket." She could always keep him guessing as to whether or not
+she had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund of
+curiosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed to
+woman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donning
+the matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have always
+known this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageable
+daughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped to
+secure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressed
+thus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of the
+respectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is the
+standard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would have
+us retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies are
+vile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an idea
+of modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit has
+fled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it was
+founded upon the idea that woman was an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> instrument of the devil
+himself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked,
+and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innate
+defilement.</p>
+
+<p>The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admit
+women to the communion table in the "holy sacrament." A fine chance
+has any sacrament of being holy, with one half of it missing!</p>
+
+<p>The old idea of womanly modesty consisted of blushing with shame and
+embarrassment if by chance her ankles became exposed to the interested
+and curious gaze of a male. Notwithstanding this ideal of modesty, the
+designing and beguiling female managed to arrange just such a
+contretemps every time there was an eligible male within sight; if
+discovered, she either assumed a look of infantile innocence, or she
+took the opportunity to coax a becoming blush.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, this does not accurately describe all women of "the good
+old days." There was the other type.</p>
+
+<p>Nature manifests in extremes. There was the type, fitting ancestors to
+those women of to-day who are outraged and shocked at the present-day
+fashions, which actually disclose the fact that women are
+anatomatically endowed with legs and hips, quite in defiance of man's
+inherited predilection for making this discovery under conditions that
+would pamper to his satiating sex-appetite. They, poor creatures, were
+dreadfully ashamed of being women, and they did all that was possible
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+to conceal the fact. They, doubtless, would gladly have amputated
+their legs, if the ministers had so decreed, and they apologized to
+the world every time an unforseen circumstance uncovered a portion of
+these offensive legs. In fact, they denied the existence of "said
+members," and alluded to them tentatively and with modest hesitation,
+as "limbs."</p>
+
+<p>"But," some will exclaim, "we cannot see any possible connection
+between a regenerated race, and a fashion which permits the display of
+the female figure upon the public streets, where men who are as yet
+un-regenerated, and licentious, may leer and pass vile remarks, and
+suggest lustful thoughts."</p>
+
+<p>Few can see any connection between our so-called practical, everyday
+life, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life as
+something remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distant
+future. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that we
+postpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the human
+family has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdom
+come upon earth," they apparently have not had the slightest idea that
+God would take them at their word.</p>
+
+<p>They are like the old darky who called upon "de Lawd to strike him
+dead if he was not telling the truth," when as a matter of fact he was
+lying roundly. At that moment a bricklayer on the building above where
+Rastus was standing, dropped a brick, which struck the old darkey on
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+the head, and he exclaimed "What's de matter, good Lawd, caint
+you'all take a joke?"</p>
+
+<p>The Kingdom of God, from all records, whether orthodox or heterodox,
+has been described as the abode of angels; and angels have been
+pictured as nearly nude as our silly "morality" would permit. No one
+has as yet suggested that we compel the angels to wear hoopskirts,
+although "September Morn" has been compelled, by police regulation, to
+don a sweater.</p>
+
+<p>The spiritual life awaits our cognizance, just behind the transparent
+veil of our limited mortal consciousness. This is the message of the
+"unveiling" of the female form. This is the time of woman's revealment
+of true modesty; true ideals. The Female Principle, representing the
+spiritual element in nature, hitherto shut in; covered up; hidden&mdash;is
+coming out.</p>
+
+<p>Men must learn to be able to look upon the female form without spasms
+of either lustful desires; or contemptuous indifference.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when the presence of a female office-force in the
+business section of a city was the signal for unwarranted familiarity
+on the part of some of the male members of a corporation. There was a
+time, when women first invaded the ranks of the "down-town" business
+centers, that a woman's appointment to a responsible position rested
+upon her claims to feminine attractiveness. Now, the only question
+asked is, "Is she efficient?"</p>
+
+<p><i>That which she is, in her interior nature, is the final test of her power.</i>
+When men have become<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> inured to the knowledge, so long
+concealed, that women have legs and that there is no more
+seductiveness in them than in their faces, the love of man for woman
+will undergo the same evolution that his estimate of her business
+efficiency has undergone. He will judge her by what she is in her
+interior nature; and his sexual desires, now manifested distractedly
+in mere love of the female, will become concentrated in love of the
+one woman to whom his soul turns in irresistible sex-attraction, as
+unerringly as the needle turns to the pole to which it is magnetized.</p>
+
+<p>Is this fact so unmanifest? Does not everything point to it?</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago, a man and a woman could not pass a day together in
+mutual conversation, and interest, without encroachment upon the one
+emotion which they were supposed to hold in common&mdash;sexual attraction.</p>
+
+<p>That was indeed the whole sum and substance of communication between
+the two sexes, if we may except the rare instances which history has
+made much of, because of their rarity&mdash;women of the French salons, who
+have become famous for their wit and beauty, in neither of which
+attributes did they outstrip the average self-supporting woman of
+today.</p>
+
+<p>But custom has slowly, but perceptibly, established the possibility of
+a frank and non-sentimental companionship between the male and the
+female, and the result is that both are much more clear as to the true
+character of their sentiments<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> toward each other. Neither is blinded
+by the force of undifferentiated sex-attraction.</p>
+
+<p>There must be some specific basis of mutual love; hence we have the
+vogue of the "affinity," and by the term is instantly recognized a
+special force of attraction, independent of undifferentiated sex
+alone. It is known that there is at least an assumption of an interior
+attraction, and we insist that affinity marriages, however incomplete
+as yet, are still superior in motive to that of mere marriage, where
+it is a case of <i>a</i> male and <i>a</i> female, united by propinquity; family
+considerations; commercial interests; class association; or what not.</p>
+
+<p>Affinities at least have the grace to presuppose a special
+sex-attraction. They argue for the ultimate goal of special and
+permanent selection, even if they fail to reach it.</p>
+
+<p>That there will be many failures during the journey from the
+sense-conscious life, to the soul-conscious life, is a foregone
+conclusion. The pathway of Love has always been a thorny one, but
+those who are on the high ground may look across into the rose-strewn
+garden, and know that the little god is aiming his arrows at the
+interior nature of those whom he would unite. He is not blind. His
+sight is illumined and he sees that the soul can unite only with its
+mate. True it is that "the course of true love never did run smooth,"
+but let us hope that the time is coming when it will be less thorny.</p>
+
+<p><i>There are no mismates in soul-union.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>This truth is the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics. It is the
+hidden wisdom of the initiates; the alchemical mysteries of the
+Ancients. It is told to us in the fairy story of the Sleeping
+Princess&mdash;a story which is found in the folk-lore of every country of
+the globe. It is the philosopher's stone, which when found, opens the
+door to all wisdoms.</p>
+
+<p><i>There can be no mismates in soul-union.</i></p>
+
+<p>Neither can there be any sexual "temptation," or desire outside of
+this union, when once found.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p>"But never shall he faint or fall</p>
+    <p>Who lists to hear, o'er every fate,</p>
+    <p>The sweeter and the higher call</p>
+    <p class="i6">Of his true mate.</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p>I hear it wheresoe'er I rove;</p>
+    <p>She holds me safe from shame or sin;</p>
+    <p>The holy temple of her love</p>
+    <p class="i6">I worship in."</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>A time when "the twain shall be" virtually, "one flesh" and the
+"outside as the inside" is not a chimerical dream.</p>
+
+<p>When the physical body is as much reverenced as is the spiritual; when
+in fact, the soul is revealed (unveiled) to our mortal consciousness;
+when the mind has been freed from its load of prejudices and fears and
+doubts and belief in sin; then we shall, indeed, truly see each other.</p>
+
+<p>We do not see each other now, unless perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+we have developed that spiritual insight which is not blinded by appearances, but which
+contacts the interior nature. But the revealing, the uncovering
+process has begun. We have come to the time so long anticipated; so
+earnestly promised, when "naked and unashamed" we should "re-enter the
+lost Paradise."</p>
+
+<p>Well, the women, God bless them, are as naked as the tender morality
+of our police officials will permit and as unashamed as it is possible
+to be with the handicap of a puritanical ancestry, which was so
+evil-minded as to suspect God himself of sin when He formed the
+"wicked" body.</p>
+
+<p>Prudists may howl; and legislators may legislate; but the course of
+the Cosmic Law which would free us and bestow upon us Peace and Love
+and Happiness without stint, has never been stopped, although it has
+been obstructed.</p>
+
+<p>Let us examine some points of the Hidden Wisdom, in the light of this
+postulate, and see if the conclusion is not warranted.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED</h2>
+
+
+<p>As we have previously observed, there is what may be termed a
+religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from the
+standpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is in
+everything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of the
+same subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticism
+itself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distance
+view of science.</p>
+
+<p>Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noise
+over calling each other black, we find the scientist frequently
+disdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equal
+disapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from his
+point of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of the
+same pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at the
+cause. In their final calculations they arrive at the same conclusion,
+although they call it by different names.</p>
+
+<p>The scientist says that everything proceeds from the one eternal
+energy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with the
+external. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest." In
+reference to this definition of religious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> mysticism, perhaps the
+phraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism,"
+is the best possible exposition of the position of the religious
+mystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religious
+mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of the
+living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attempt
+to realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal in
+the eternal, and the eternal in the temporal."</p>
+
+<p>Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using other
+terminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimately
+say, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms of
+discovery.</p>
+
+<p>The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to
+measure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrum
+somewhere beyond."</p>
+
+<p>The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of the Circle;
+from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the hypothetical
+base of algebraical science&mdash;the unknown quantity of which sex is the
+symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from cause forward to effect
+the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but it
+is simple only after we have deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are
+designed to exercise the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the
+key, is a most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical"
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+persons dismiss it with the same superficial idea that they entertain in
+regard to puzzles, saying "it is only a puzzle"&mdash;utterly ignoring the
+value of exercising the inductive reasoning faculties.</p>
+
+<p>Fairy stories are popularly supposed to be for the entertainment and
+amusement of children. In reality they are the universal language of
+symbolism. There is not a single fairy story which has not been handed
+down from generation to generation, and, what is more suggestive, each
+story is told with astonishing lack of variation, in every tongue and
+throughout every nation on this earth.</p>
+
+<p>The stories involving the turning of men into animals and their final
+restoration to human form, as a reward for some service, some
+sacrifice, typifies the two-fold nature of Man. He may live in his
+animal, or exterior nature; or he may develop his spiritual, or
+interior nature; through service; through unselfish love. Our limited
+mortal consciousness is responsible for the tendency to personify
+everything, instead of to realize the principles underlying all
+expression. God and the Devil have been the personification of the two
+phases of the principles of Evolution, from animal man to spiritual
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Romulus and Remus have been presented as an actual and specific
+instance of twins; likewise Castor and Pollux. Almost every child
+instinctively alludes to himself or herself, as either "the good
+little me" or the "bad little me." "O, I didn't do that; it was the
+bad little Dorothy," or "Harold," as the case may be, is the child-like
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+way of expressing the innate consciousness that there is
+an interior and an exterior nature to all of us.</p>
+
+<p>The union of gods with mortals, which forms the gist of Mythological
+tales, symbolizes the god-like and the mortal qualities inherent in
+human nature. Mortals raised to the abode of the gods; and the gods
+descended into mortal life; symbolize the interchangeability of what
+we term matter and spirit&mdash;the power of transmutation of the lower
+into the higher life.</p>
+
+<p>Volumes could be written upon the subject, and we will therefore try
+to confine our reviews to the symbolical traditions which deal most
+directly with the relations of the sexes.</p>
+
+<p>In religious symbology, the story of the ark stands as the supreme
+type of creation, through the conjunction of the sexes. <ins class="correction" title="incomplete sentence 'We have already' removed">_</ins></p>
+
+<p>The cherubim are, when all is said and done, nothing more, nor yet
+less, than spiritual children&mdash;the result of spiritual sex-union.</p>
+
+<p>And in this later synoptic mysticism of the ark of the Covenant, we
+are informed that "every gift within the tabernacle is willingly
+offered." If we will but contemplate the volumes of wisdom contained
+within that sentence, we cannot fail to conclude that every
+infinitesimal particle of coercion in whatsoever shape and form,
+individual, economic, ethical, or religious, must be excluded from the
+regenerated, perfect, ideal sex-relation; otherwise we do not attain
+it.</p>
+
+<p>If the Ancients seemed to take some of these
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+folk-lore stories too literally, we of this "practical" age, do not take
+them literally enough.</p>
+
+<p>We have imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended in
+the physical. This view is excusable in the case of the materialist,
+if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for
+the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life.
+Since sex is the cause and the result of what we know of creation;
+since it is the foundation of all the qualities that we know as
+spiritual laws; friendship; unselfishness; fidelity; paternal
+solicitude&mdash;it is absolutely certain that the most beautiful things we
+know here must have a correspondence in the life hereafter. Of these
+beautiful things in life, babies come first; with birds and flowers
+and music as fitting accessories.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the ark of the covenant. The perpetual flame on the
+altar (the center) is the undying Flame of spiritual love&mdash;and by that
+we mean sex-love, let it be understood. If we seem to repeat this too
+frequently it is because of the almost general habit of the race to
+apologize for sex-love. The erroneous idea obtains, that spiritual
+love is sexless. All too frequently we come across the phrase, "with a
+love that has in it nothing of human love," the writer evidently
+anxious to convey the impression of tremendous spirituality and the
+consequent elimination of the sex function.</p>
+
+<p>And so we emphasize once more, and we may do so again, the assurance
+that the symbol of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> never-dying flame upon the altar is typical of
+the never-dying spirit of sex-love. Spirit is ever symbolized by
+flame, as in the "flaming sword" of the archangel.</p>
+
+<p>The Deity upon the seat of the altar symbolizes the bi-une
+Sex-principle of creation.</p>
+
+<p>The reason that the Jewish people have claimed that they were "God's
+chosen people" is because, in their symbolism of the ark of the
+Covenant, all Israel was grouped under the tabernacle. The formation
+of the tabernacle proves that it typifies the mother's womb. The
+tabernacle was guarded by the priests who <i>were sworn to purity</i>; thus
+they symbolized the esoteric truth that the pure spiritual sex-union
+bestows immortal god-hood.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take another story, that of the life-token. This is best told
+in the story of the Holy Grail, although it is found in all the
+fairy-books of all nations, in the language and form befitting the
+race to which it belongs.</p>
+
+<p>In the original, that is in the earliest recitals of this life-token
+story, we find that the thing left behind, as a <i>center</i> (which is
+always guarded and protected in various ways), was a tree. Here, we
+have the phallic symbol as the life-token. But in the story of the
+Holy Grail, the cup is the life token to be guarded; it is the sacred
+symbol of the quest and it is of a design resembling the red rose of
+the Templars. This time it is the yoni&mdash;literally the <i>chalice</i> of the
+<i>holy communion</i>; the centre of the radiant circle, which is the
+answer to all the problems within the radius. It is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> search for,
+and the finding of, the balance in counterpartal union. It is the X of
+Being, and only the purest and the noblest of the Knights of the
+"Round Table" essay the difficult quest. The "mound of Venus" is
+another name for the "Round Table."</p>
+
+<p>Again is emphasized the necessity for purity, and this purity,
+although including all the spiritual qualities: fidelity; bravery;
+self-sacrifice; humanity; love of truth; culminates in sexual purity.</p>
+
+<p>"Blessed are the pure in heart (the pulse of the soul) for they shall
+see God." We revise this latter part, and we say "for they shall be
+<i>gods</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider the story of the "sleeping Princess." She is depicted
+as a princess, first of all, because she is the daughter of a king; a
+king is an earthly ruler, or exalted person. Esoterically, she is the
+daughter of the exalted God, and she is the soul. Sometimes this story
+is told in the male gender, but everywhere the essential points are
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner, who is known as a Mystic, has illustrated the story in
+Brunhilde and Siegfried. Brunhilde is an immortal&mdash;a goddess, who
+renounces her immortality to become a woman.</p>
+
+<p>She sleeps on the top of a high mountain and she is surrounded by a
+circle of flame; and here she sleeps, despite all efforts to arouse
+her, until awakened by the touch of Siegfried&mdash;the one human being in
+all the universe who could awaken the sleeping princess.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>The high mountain symbolizes the highest love of which we are capable.
+To reach the soul of the exalted woman, typified in the fairy-story by
+the word princess, and later, by Wagner, as the goddess, man must be
+her mate. <i>No other can enter the womb of her soul</i>, though many may
+effect an entrance to the outer court.</p>
+
+<p>This truth, as absolute as life itself, solves all the problems of the
+mystery of love and its joys and sorrows. No soul can wholly,
+unreservedly love the "wrong" one. Though we may love and die of the
+pain of unrequited loving, yet love is its own self-justification, and
+its own reward. The pathway of love leads up the mountain top, but no
+one who reaches the summit shall fail to find that for which he seeks.</p>
+
+<p>The soul of man, and of woman, has been playing a game of blind-man's
+bluff&mdash;a fitting name for the game it is, too. Unable to see anything
+but the exterior nature, and longing for success in the search, we
+have frantically grabbed here and there, and appropriated that which
+we grabbed, with a self-complacency and an egotism of which little
+Jack Horner would be ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>In the symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders, such as the Ancient
+Alchemists; the Hermetics; the Rosicrusians; and in modern times, the Free Masons,
+we have this story of the search for the ultimate balance of soul union, told in
+language veiled unless we are fit to know; but openly enough if we are fit. And in
+all these orders (alleged guardians of the hidden wisdom)
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+we have varying degrees of initiation; and in each degree the initiate must undergo
+certain trials to prove his fearlessness; his fidelity; his fitness, in other
+words, for the final revealment of all, which is the initiation into
+the "holy of holies;" the "secret chamber" and the degree of
+"mastership."</p>
+
+<p>In the order of Masonry, the highest degree is that of the Templar.
+The symbol of the Templars is the red rose on the cross, together with
+the star and the crescent. The star preserves the esotericism of its
+nomenclature, in whatever sphere it is used, namely, the power of
+radiating light. It stands for the radiant center. The Knights Templar
+sought the radiant center to complete their half circle, and when they
+should have found, they were to become radiant with the light of
+spiritual power. That they originally at least, understood the way of
+this initiation, is evident by the symbol of the rose and the
+cross&mdash;the combined phallus and yoni.</p>
+
+<p>This fact is the underlying cause of the open and hereditary enmity of
+the Church of Rome for the modern order of Freemasons. The Church
+sought to specialize in the persons of the Virgin Mary and her Son the
+eternal principles of the "way of the cross." The temporal power of
+the Church could be built up only by offering a complete system of
+salvation within the church itself. At the same time, the utter
+degradation of Sex, which had reached its depths under Roman
+civilization, called for as complete a reversion of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+ideas of the Ancient sex-worshippers, as was consistent with the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Hence we find the extreme attitude of the Church opposing all
+reference to sex as other than a part of the temptations of the Evil
+One, although they did retain the central truth typified by the Holy
+Virgin Mother, and the pure and perfect child.</p>
+
+<p>The Alchemists are supposed to have been imbued with the desire and,
+to some extent, at least, were regarded as having the knowledge of how
+to make gold. This gold-making was always accomplished by
+transmutation of the baser (lower) metals; also, the knowledge of how
+to accomplish this transmutation was possible only to one possessing
+"the philosopher's stone."</p>
+
+<p>If we will but remember that this "philosopher's stone" was of such a
+purity that it was almost impossible to find it; that, although
+several initiates claimed to possess the stone, yet no visible proof
+of its existence, or of gold resulting from lead or copper, was ever
+offered; and again if we will realize the fine distinction between the
+words "found" and "discovered," and take note that the word "found" is
+used almost invariably in connection with those who claimed to possess
+the stone, we will arrive at the obvious conclusion that the secret of
+the Alchemists was of an interior nature. We "discover" outside of
+ourselves; we "find" within. Above all, the "stone of great purity" is
+the same that was raised at Babylon,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+supplanting the yoni, which is to say, the phallic symbol.</p>
+
+<p>A philosopher is one who is wise in his interior nature; his wisdom is
+of the esoteric quality; we do not apply the term "philosopher" to
+either great educators, or great financiers; but to those whose
+activities are turned within.</p>
+
+<p>The force which is manifested in the lower desires and passions, when
+transmuted into spiritual channels, opens the door to the golden light
+of illumination.</p>
+
+<p>To become in reality a Prince of the Rosy Cross bestows the exaltation
+and the power, typified by that of an earthly prince&mdash;one who is
+exalted above the common man.</p>
+
+<p>It is doubtful, indeed, if many of the ancient alchemists attained to
+this exalted degree in its true significance; and we may readily
+believe that in an age in which wealth was so eagerly sought; temporal
+power so much desired; where deception was almost general; that few
+lived the requisite purity of life to have accomplished the
+transmutation; so today there is not one in a thousand of the many who
+have taken the degree of "Knight Templar," who recognizes its esoteric
+meaning.</p>
+
+<p>But words have a trick of trapping us, and we note that the word
+"taken" is invariably used in referring to modern Masonic initiation.
+Verily they have "taken" the degree in its outward semblance. They
+have not attained to its powers and privileges.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>Nor can they do so, when they exclude the very "gate of life" from the
+order. They may become masons (builders of the temple), but how can
+they become Architects, when they have not entered the tabernacle?</p>
+
+<p>In a search for hidden meanings, and for a secret tradition which is
+believed to be discoverable in Kabalistic and Hermetic literature, we
+find, if we possess true insight, the one indubitable truth,
+subordinating all the other symbols, namely that of the supremacy, the
+finality, of the sublimated sex-union, resulting in immortal
+mastership.</p>
+
+<p>Most modern interpreters of the archives of these ancient philosophers
+ignore the sexual significance of the arcana, but a glimpse at the
+symbols will readily convince the initiated of their identity with
+sexual symbology.</p>
+
+<p>For example in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi
+(Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate
+used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes
+"had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The
+sexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but this
+may be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of the
+alchemical symbols, or it may be due to a materialistic tendency on
+the part of the compiler.</p>
+
+<p>The plates, however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed to
+Basil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "The Great Hermetic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+Arcanum," the supreme and significant point of the
+illustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through which
+the initiate travels in his search for the supreme god-head, two
+doves, holding in their beaks a crown. The doves are perfectly
+matched. The crown is balanced between them, and the figure tops the
+circle, under the heading "regeneration."</p>
+
+<p>In another plate, which the author presents as "the Philosophic Cross,
+or Plan of the Third Temple as prophesied by Ezekiel," we note again,
+that the crown of the symbolical temple represents the red rose upon a
+cross, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle with
+outstretched wings, shielding her little brood, and on either side a
+tree and a flowering rosebush.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the symbol par excellence of generation. The creative function
+of the male and the female in procreative conjunctivity.</p>
+
+<p>The employment of the eagle as a religious symbol may be traced back
+to the civilization of the Hittites.</p>
+
+<p>Only a few years ago, two English arch&aelig;ologists discovered a
+double-headed eagle in Asia. This was identical with those seen
+perpetuating religious rites and ceremonies of the sex-worshipers. An
+eagle holding in its talons a serpent is an emblem well known today.
+The origin of the adoption of the eagle as a religious, though not
+necessarily a "sacred," symbol by prehistoric races, may easily be
+imagined, if we consider that the eagle is a bird of tremendous power; and that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+it soars to unreachable heights; and that it unquestionably
+was at some time seen to swoop down and carry off the serpent,
+possibly even during their ceremonies of serpent-worship.</p>
+
+<p>This idea becomes quite convincing when we also remember that the
+ceremonies of the serpent worshipers were carried on, as far as
+feasible, upon the mountain. We allude to this stage of religious
+history as "serpent worship," but when we realize the points of
+analogy between the serpent and the phallus it is apparent that the
+serpent was only the nature-emblem of generation, as manifested by the
+male principle.</p>
+
+<p>"The eagle and the dove" is a phrase employed today to illustrate the
+law of antithesis, and it is more than probable that the eagle
+represented the lower nature of the sex-relation, in juxtaposition to
+the higher, as the dove is emblematical of the spiritualized aspect of
+sex-love. We have an analogy to that of the eagle and the dove in the
+Biblical allusion to "the last day; when God will separate the 'sheep
+from the goats,'" Here again is a pertinent reference to the sex
+nature. The goat is a symbol of sensuality and lust, principally
+because he has perverted sexual proclivities, notably that of
+coercion. For this reason, Classical Mythology employs the satyr, a
+creature half man and half goat, to typify the lowest form of the sex
+call in man.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the lamb is the type of gentleness and affection, and although in outward
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+appearance the lamb and the goat are not dissimilar, their natures are antithetical.</p>
+
+<p>In estimating the God-idea of the Ancients, many mistakes have arisen
+by confounding religious symbols with the "sacred" symbols. The
+race-mind was in its kindergarten stage, and all ideals were instilled
+by means of pictures&mdash;a method which even the present hour finds most
+effective.</p>
+
+<p>In modern theological symbolism we have God and the Devil; Heaven and
+Hell; angels and demons, to illustrate by antithesis.</p>
+
+<p>They all belong to religious symbology, but only those which teach
+spiritual ideals are denominated "sacred."</p>
+
+<p>"Riding the goat," alleged to be the almost invariable initiatory
+prelude to fitness for membership in all secret orders, means, first
+of all, that the would-be initiate must have control over his lower
+sexual desires. If he cannot control the goat instincts within his
+nature, he stands small chance of taking the higher degrees of
+spiritual regeneration, through transmutation.</p>
+
+<p>In another symbolic chart presenting the secrets of alchemical
+transmutation, we find depicted "The Gate of Eternal Wisdom," and we
+are further informed that this "gate" also brings "knowledge of God."
+The design of this cave-like aperture should betray its esoteric meaning.
+It is situated under a mound, upon which trees are planted. The inscriptions
+on the corrugated walls of the cave, are evidently designed to resemble
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+seven lotus petals, and are set forth as the
+seven mysteries. Inscriptions warning against profanation of this
+sacred gate, and also promising eternal life and glory to the true
+initiate, inspire the intrepid and deter the doubtful. Of these
+latter, several are outside the entrance. Two are on the steps leading
+to the mouth of the cave but their attitude bespeaks doubt of their
+worthiness. Only one has penetrated to the radiant center of the
+aperture, and there is room for but the one to enter the radiance of
+the solar gate, which truly bestows a knowledge that is "of God."</p>
+
+<p>Sex Symbology is a subject that calls for a large volume devoted to
+this special side of it, and we cannot hope to do more here than to
+touch a few of the almost universal proofs of the contention which is
+the purpose of this book, namely, that the supreme goal of life,
+typified in every religion, every philosophy, and in the intuitional
+knowledge of the human mind, is spiritual sex-union; and that this can
+be accomplished only by counterparts; the two halves of the bi-une god
+seed uniting in one immortal and complete pair&mdash;a man and a woman.
+Not, we must again emphasize, not in a hermaphroditic personality, but
+in two perfect complementaries&mdash;mates; not <i>one</i> but <i>a pair</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In another exposition of Hermetic secrets we discover the amazing
+statement that "the alchemist is found working throughout, in
+conjunction with a woman of the art; <i>they begin and they attain
+together</i>."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>This should be plain enough. Small chance, indeed, either would have
+of attaining alone. But if this suggestion is not sufficient (and
+either from design or from failure to comprehend the significance of
+it, the translator seems to have missed the point), we are introduced
+to a symbolical figure-study, which shows a Chalice in which the sun
+and the moon are personified (the solar-man and the solar-woman), with
+the god Vulcan (fire) seated between them. Underneath this "twain-one"
+symbol a mortal man and a mortal woman are kneeling on either side of
+a cone-shaped and dome-tipped furnace, which is lighted by a feeble
+candle. But their attitude of prayer bespeaks the hope that this
+earthly flame will be transmuted by their prayers and aspirations; by
+their reverential attitude toward the divine character of the function
+of mating, into the immortal and unquenchable flame typified by the
+god of fire himself.</p>
+
+<p>In another series of symbolical plates, purporting to be the story of
+Metallic transmutation, but representing, above all, the story of
+manifestation from the Divine to the human and again to the
+spiritualized and perfected Adam and Eve&mdash;(the solar man and the solar
+woman), we again see that from generation to regeneration the work is
+accomplished by man and woman in conjunction.</p>
+
+<p>These plates bear the hall-marks of Christian appropriation of
+Hermetic symbolism, as peculiarly applicable to the Church, but the central
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+doctrine of salvation through sex-regeneration, is retained.
+Whether consciously or not, is a question.</p>
+
+<p>Modern commentators and translators of alchemical literature insist
+that such documents are palpably related to the secret, or secrets, of
+metallic transmutation. That they prove the search for, if not the
+existence of, a "magic solvent" that resolves the baser metals into
+gold; but, as far as known, such a compound has not yet been
+discovered or, if it ever was, it has since been lost and evades all
+attempts at rediscovery. But if we read these alchemical treatises as
+they relate to transmutation of sex-love from the pro-creative
+function to regeneration through spiritual or counterpartal union
+(solar mates), we have the key to every statement.</p>
+
+<p>A writer tells of an instance which is recorded among alchemical
+archives, where "an unknown master testified to his possession of the
+mystery" (supposedly of metallic transmutation), but it is added that
+"he had not proceeded to the work because he had failed to meet an
+<i>elect woman</i>, who was necessary thereto." In other words, applying
+this statement in its obviously logical sense, the unknown master knew
+the esoteric meaning of the alchemical postulate, but not having met
+his female complement, he could not testify to the results of this
+transmutation. An "elect woman" would hardly be necessary in the work
+of metallic transmutation.</p>
+
+<p>Small wonder that the "alchemist" abandoned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> the work of turning lead
+and copper into gold. If he had found the key of keys, he cared little
+whether lead were lead, or whether gold remained gold, or melted into
+thin air. The golden light of illumination showed him all things in
+their purpose, and gold as a metal meant no more to him than did the
+so-called "baser" metals.</p>
+
+<p>Commenting upon this statement, the translator observes: "Those
+Hermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if a
+record of spiritual experience, present, like the literature of
+physical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism: the marriage of
+sun and moon; of a mystical king and queen; a union between natures
+which are <i>one</i> at the <i>root</i>, but diverse in manifestation; a
+transmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein."</p>
+
+<p>If we will remember that the solar-man was personified by the Ancients
+as the sun; and the solar-woman by the moon, we have the first and
+salient points of the original Hermetic secrets, however much they may
+have degenerated from their spiritual to their physical application.
+The probabilities are that owing to the disapproval of the Christian
+Hierarchy, only the most veiled terminology was permissible. This view
+is more logical than is the one that the esoteric meaning was lost
+sight of.</p>
+
+<p>The marriage of an hypothetical or "mystical king and queen" bespeaks
+exaltation of the two conjoining persons, male and female, but this
+exaltation is in consciousness, and not in mere
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+personality. The terms "king" and "queen" are nothing more or less than
+symbols of an exalted (spiritualized) state.</p>
+
+<p>And, in passing, we may here mention the fact that the language of
+lovers testifies to this intuitional realization. "My queen!" exclaims
+the enraptured lover, although in social station his beloved one may
+be only a scullery maid; and certainly, neither the beauty nor the
+goodness nor the wisdom of earthly kings and queens would be
+sufficient to inspire the comparison.</p>
+
+<p>It is ever the soul calling for the mate who, when found, will exalt
+the "twain-one" into the immortal powers and immortal wealth
+imperfectly symbolized by earthly rulers, making "right royal queens
+and kings of common clay."</p>
+
+<p>The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between two
+natures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation." And
+the alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promised
+that, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out of
+which all manifestation is composed," it only remained for someone to
+discover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substances
+in a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, could
+be dissolved into its constituent parts and re-solved again in the
+proportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared to
+say could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would not
+even be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interior transmutation,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+because having attained to the radiant center, he
+would realize the "glory of the worlds," and gold, as metal, would be
+to him of far less value than the emerald of the grass; the pearls of
+dew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; the
+laughter of children.</p>
+
+<p>How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think it
+worth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even consider
+the ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of his
+labors.</p>
+
+<p>But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure and
+unquenchable love&mdash;that were indeed worthy of ages of research. For
+are we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek and
+find? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the glory
+of the world? Is it fame, or wealth, or lands, or gems or kingdoms?</p>
+
+<p>Love is the only glory worthy of the name.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>"For Life with all its yield of joy and woe</p>
+  <p>And hope and fear&mdash;believe the aged friend&mdash;</p>
+  <p>Is just our chance at the prize o' learning love."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When we realize the esoteric meaning of this aspect of the ancient
+alchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole,
+manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to the
+fourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "transmutation which
+follows this union and the abiding glory therein," is the inevitable
+and logical sequential answer.</p>
+
+<p>An <i>abiding</i> glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability. Transmutation is not synonymous
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+with, extinction, or elimination, or abandonment. We <i>transmute</i> the lower into the higher, the exterior
+into the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sum and substance of the "Ancient Wisdom."</p>
+
+<p>There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane of
+life, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to assume
+that Sex is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, or
+any other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are not
+distinctively separable anyway. They are merely <i>names</i> which we use
+to distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariably
+misinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption of
+individuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, sexless Thing;
+but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than that
+bringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided,
+would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than
+bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting
+the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article.
+The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable.</p>
+
+<p>It takes two to make a pair. Mistake it not, and further, there is no
+<i>abiding glory</i> in this world or in the next or in any other sphere,
+that is not founded upon the deep, intense and eternal love of man and
+woman.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h2>WHAT CONSTITUTES SEX IMMORALITY?</h2>
+
+
+<p>The average mind, nurtured in apprehensive awe of that race fetish
+called Public Opinion, is inordinately afraid of words.</p>
+
+<p>"Atheist," "infidel," "ungodly" are epithets which have been used as
+mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of
+religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the last
+century.</p>
+
+<p>These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the
+undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown
+that the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for the
+old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the
+contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood than
+that which the early Church postulated.</p>
+
+<p>Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance against
+Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>Ignorance is fearful of the unknown, and the knights of Enlightenment
+have ever had to fight their way through the ranks of abuse and
+criticism and misrepresentation.</p>
+
+<p>Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate of rational thought hesitates to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+claim affiliation; and yet the goal of our highest endeavors must be a state of Society where Love, the god,
+is free from the mire of corruption, and the bonds of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>Let us not be afraid of so harmless a thing as a word, remembering the
+case of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignation
+because someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat." She did not
+know what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved.</p>
+
+<p>When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we will
+not be so fearful of its sound.</p>
+
+<p>To whom is this epithet most frequently applied?</p>
+
+<p>Is it to the average man who is known to be a Lothario in matters of
+sex? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one who
+is "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no way
+affects his social standing.</p>
+
+<p>Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalized
+prostitution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning of
+free-love that the term is never used in connection with what modern
+reform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obvious
+reason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound and
+murdered as in this phase of woman's degradation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type of defiance of traditional sex-ethics
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+there is always the spirit of self-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing.</p>
+
+<p>We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the young
+woman who has, what the world calls, "sinned," because, forsooth, she
+pays the price of her deviation from social standards (when
+discovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, or
+by sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it is
+evident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuates
+her conduct.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to those
+who openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge in
+the sex-relationship, independent of the marriage ceremony. It matters
+not whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is the
+demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and
+morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to
+traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing
+the term "free-love" with an unpleasant odor.</p>
+
+<p>Public opinion puts a premium upon deceit.</p>
+
+<p>Such intimate matters as marriage and divorce are really no concern of
+any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.</p>
+
+<p>The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little with
+Truth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence of
+divorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+live apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets before
+they may act upon such a decision.</p>
+
+<p>Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of
+the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from
+the world because she loved a man well enough to pay that price.</p>
+
+<p>She might have insisted that the man obtain a divorce from his wife,
+to whom he had been married seventeen or more years, and thus win the
+approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material
+things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of
+her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care
+for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the
+story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent
+club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if
+any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed to
+think that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, she
+might in time be worthy of their forgiveness.</p>
+
+<p>Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with England
+of being a nation without a sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angels
+fear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions upon
+other people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or
+unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly
+indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity
+for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly
+brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man
+with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of
+self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of
+pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for
+her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not
+alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken
+her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real
+love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the
+fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It
+should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that
+a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved
+to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable
+position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.</p>
+
+<p>But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it is
+small wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings.</p>
+
+<p>If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, we
+would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces
+are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their
+outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands
+of Convention.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women,
+because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to
+personal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and until
+women of the self-respecting and educated class began to openly
+emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the
+phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women
+the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.</p>
+
+<p>All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality
+sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sex
+promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium
+that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the
+claim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defiance
+of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its
+standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.</p>
+
+<p>The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other
+advanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life,
+has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free
+choice.</p>
+
+<p>Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shielding
+her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and
+abhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretly
+indulges her sex-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she is
+forced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequently these instincts
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+are abnormally strong because of pre-natal and inherited influences.</p>
+
+<p>Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the average
+woman, are disastrous to the sex, and through them to the race,
+because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds and
+fetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement.</p>
+
+<p>Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physical
+disease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression of
+the sex-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through the
+compulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercial
+prostitution, is death to the best development of the race.</p>
+
+<p>Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through the
+religious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord and
+Master" have been compelled to develop a craftiness and an artificial
+"modesty" which, in most cases, passes for femininity, and deceives,
+as it is intended to do, the average man.</p>
+
+<p>For centuries, a woman's only profession was matrimony. Her education
+for this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance of
+all that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of her
+nature&mdash;the function of sex. In the occasional instances where she had
+inherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she must
+at least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of every
+emotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his sex-nature in her task
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+of "catching a husband," it is small wonder that women have
+developed the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently both
+treacherous and cruel.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting and
+conserving power of the bi-une sex-love, that she has broken through
+these mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defiance
+at the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification of
+her own sex-nature, and her right to her own person, despite the
+epithet of "free-love."</p>
+
+<p>Woman's partial emancipation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone to
+her head," as it were, and we see many women confounding license with
+liberty; mistaking passion for Love; and exchanging restraint for
+debauchery.</p>
+
+<p>The average woman is either almost entirely lacking in sex desire or
+she is abnormally active in that function. In truth, the same state of
+affairs prevails here, as in so many other phases of our modern life,
+namely, there is no balance. We are a civilization of extremes; we are
+one-sided, abnormal; distorted. We are seeking the pivotal point of
+our destiny, which is the soul, but few have reached that point. Those
+who have not, are groping through the jungles of the mental plane of
+consciousness, upheld on the one hand by the upward trend of their
+being, which seeks the level of the soul-conscious state; and held
+back on the other hand by the trammels of the sense-conscious type
+from which the race has developed to its present condition.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>Those instances where women indulge in excesses are comparatively rare
+in proportion to numbers, and they loom large in perspective because
+of their very incongruity with our ideals of womanly conduct. The vast
+majority of women may be safely trusted to use their sex-freedom, when
+it shall have truly arrived, for the purpose of finding that one and
+only mate which their souls instinctively know to be our rightful
+heritage&mdash;the proverbial "pearl of great price" which insures
+immortality in the bliss of union with our Beloved.</p>
+
+<p>Love, when freed from the illusions of sense; from the shackles of
+commercialism; from the bonds of error regarding the meaning and
+purpose of marriage; freed from selfishness and licentiousness; will
+solve the question of sex-promiscuity. This for the obvious reason
+that Love seeks its own. If left free to seek, it will find.</p>
+
+<p>But, if sex promiscuity is far from being free-love, if the doctrine
+of sex freedom is fraught with many dangers under our present social
+system, it must be conceded that no one method of social evolution,
+thus far devised, can be recommended as ideally perfect. The best that
+we can hope to do is to emphasize the importance and the sacredness
+and the innate purity of the sex-relation, while conceding to both
+sexes all the personal liberty possible.</p>
+
+<p>And above all, we should avoid condemnation of those who claim the
+right to freedom, lest we cover up a condition which can but be the
+better for being open to the light. Particularly should we
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+shield women from the charge of immorality, and licentiousness, when we see
+them straying down the by-paths of the senses, in their quest for
+freedom, remembering that the centuries of repression and submission
+and consequent deception have left their mark upon woman's
+temperament.</p>
+
+<p>Man has for ages boasted of his sex virility; of his conquests in what
+he has termed "love." Not infrequently a man's choice of a wife is the
+result of much seeking in the garden of Life; and much sipping of the
+honey from the various flowers that grow therein. Often, indeed, a man
+frankly tells the woman he would marry that he knows he loves her
+above all other women for the convincing reason that he has tried so
+many and none have held him. Should a woman make the same confession
+and draw the same conclusion, he would be horrified.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted, then, that the term "free-lovers" is applied only
+to those who defy Public Opinion and claim their right to respect and
+morality despite their defiance of Society's false standards of
+morality. These standards are false because they are based upon
+criticism and censure of results instead of upon motives.</p>
+
+<p>Society ignores, if it does not actually encourage, frivolous
+flirtations, and frowns most harshly upon instances of real love. It
+sets the seal of disapproval and ostracism upon those who, because of
+circumstances or possibly because of indifference to man-made laws,
+take their affairs into their own hands and refuse to exhibit either
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+penitence or shame when the world discovers that they neglected the
+marriage ceremony. If two persons truly love each other and there is
+nothing to interfere with their undergoing the publicity of a marriage
+ceremony, well and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle
+with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are
+innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to
+overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where
+absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other,
+prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as
+these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose
+something by persecuting those who are independent enough and honest
+enough to act from motive, rather than from custom, and who insist
+upon maintaining their self-respect, in the face of criticism.
+Self-respect is not related to braggadocio.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that as yet there are few persons who have the
+courage to endure martyrdom for their convictions, which is, perhaps,
+just as well, because the majority are unable to distinguish between
+brazen shamelessness and unashamedness. The average woman will stick
+to the safe habit of dissembling.</p>
+
+<p>Women have learned the lesson of the cat too thoroughly to jump
+immediately from the back-yard of Deception to the front porch of
+Truth.</p>
+
+<p>In this one respect at least, however much she may indulge her desire
+for frankness in other directions, a woman will lie valiantly, self-protectingly,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+and continually, even though she follow in secret
+the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the
+hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and
+satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it
+would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary.
+But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement;
+whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be,
+that what is virtue in man is vice in a cat?"</p>
+
+<p>We are not told in the story what conclusion she arrived at, but we
+can imagine that her conclusion was that which women have arrived at,
+in a similar situation, to wit: man is unjust and unreasonable, but he
+is also stronger than I am, and therefore, while I shall follow his
+example, I shall take good care to hide the feathers.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, we are crossing the bridge that leads from the
+jungles of our animal nature, where prowl the beasts of deceit; greed;
+selfishness; sensuality; vanity; avarice; and domination; to the
+Heights, illumined by Love set free.</p>
+
+<p>Let us not jostle and crowd each other too harshly, while we are en
+route.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, we are confronted with the pertinent query as to what,
+if any, absolute standard of morality there can be in matters of the
+sex relation. Freedom is so easily misconstrued into implying
+sex-promiscuity; and monogamy, the final survival of the various
+systems of marriage, has in its modern as well as in its ancient aspect
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+so much of coercion; and coercion is cited as the insuperable
+obstacle to attainment of the supreme state of spiritual sex-union,
+that the would-be initiate becomes confused, and is lost in a maze of
+paradoxes.</p>
+
+<p>Moral distinctions are too fine for the undeveloped man-animal, and
+that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The
+objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their
+failure to die after they have become senile.</p>
+
+<p>Moral standards are as unstable as the shifting sands of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Our moral sentiments," say Letourneau, "are simply habits incarnate
+in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act
+reputed culpable at Paris, or at London, may be, and frequently is,
+held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin."</p>
+
+<p>And Emerson, the intellectual Seer, says: "There is a soul at the
+centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us
+can wrong the universe."</p>
+
+<p>It is a colossal piece of impudent presumption, when we come to think
+about it, for Man to ask the Supreme, Absolute, Infinite Power to
+forgive him. But, if we cannot wrong the universe, we can and we do
+wrong ourselves and each other as mortals.</p>
+
+<p>That is the whole gist of the story. We are constantly wronging
+ourselves and each other and calling upon God to support us in our
+strife when God cannot know aught save the call of Love.</p>
+
+<p>The growing, evolving race, has found it necessary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+to establish certain loosely defined codes of morals and of social ethics,
+in the same way that man has bridled the horse that he may control him;
+incidentally, we may observe that where this bridle formerly included
+"blinders," it now permits the horse to see whither he is going.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps a brief survey of the standards of sexual morality which have
+upheld (or down-held, just as we look at it) the human race until now,
+may be illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>It has been disputed, if, under the matriarchal system of polygamy,
+the moral condition of the people was higher than under the
+patriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can be
+reached upon this point, save and except that any condition, however
+primitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must be
+better than that in which she is the object of coercion. This is
+evident, because the degree of coercion can never, under any
+circumstances, be as great with the male as with the female.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, matriarchal polygamy is comparatively more nearly moral
+than is patriarchal polygamy, and when all is said and done, historic
+morality is comparative.</p>
+
+<p>But from the standpoint of modern idealism matriarchal polygamy seems
+to be a very low estimate of moral conduct; and from the standpoint of
+sexual idealism it is a low standard; a standard only a degree higher
+than that of patriarchal polygamy&mdash;a standard which is the lineal
+descendant of the ethics of the marriage-by-capture period
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+of human evolution, and from which we are today by no means free, owing to
+economic, religious, and ethical conditions.</p>
+
+<p>There is a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the unorganized
+brotherhood of the Enlightened, that laws are made for the guidance of
+the masses. Unbridled ignorance is a dangerous force; as dangerous as
+an unbridled horse, unless it be that the horse exhibits intelligence
+enough to know where it is headed for and how to avoid obstacles en
+route.</p>
+
+<p>And even as the laws of a community are made for the intellectually
+undeveloped, so the commandments were compiled for the spiritual
+guidance of the uninitiated.</p>
+
+<p>We trust that it will not shock the sensibilities of the "pious" when
+we affirm and maintain and insist that the ten commandments are not
+"from God" in the letter of the statements, as postulated by Theology.
+They bear all the earmarks of the ancient Hebrew race-mind, which
+placed a man's "neighbor's wife" in the same category with "his ox and
+his ass and his house" and his other property and possessions.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, and
+that is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot break
+it if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying to
+live in defiance of its immutability.</p>
+
+<p>"We cannot wrong the universe!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are at
+present the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship,
+engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea. Both the Hebrew
+and the Roman customs maintained the inferiority and the consequent
+subjugation of woman, despite the fact that the Roman Church exalted
+the Virgin as a personality; but the postulate of the Church that Mary
+was so exalted by a miracle, which never could be repeated, killed any
+forlorn hope which might have lurked within the female breast
+regarding a possible emulation of her example. No other woman might do
+more than cringe and crawl and beg and whine; or cajole and wheedle
+and buy the Holy Mother's intercession, which intercession, even if
+successful, could at best but secure her an eternal job in the
+Heavenly hierarchy, where, sexless, companionless, mateless, an&aelig;mic,
+she could look all day at a male God whom she could never presume to
+reach.</p>
+
+<p>Rather a lonesome outlook for eternity, and it is small wonder that
+woman got discouraged at the prospect. The miracle is rather that she
+endured it so long.</p>
+
+<p>But the Roman system had at least one virtue. It instilled into the
+mortal mind of its people a sub-conscious realization of the ideal of
+monogamy; not an ideal monogamy by a long way, but a monogamic ideal.
+They are quite different; but inasmuch as it is an outward semblance
+of a more spiritual conception of marriage than that of polygamy, it
+is the highest ideal yet realized for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> the many, and does duty in our
+present day and age, as consistent with our superior civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Monogamy at least pretends to be a marriage by mutual consent; and
+even in the pretense there is the germ of a hope; but it would be
+folly to deny that underneath this appearance of marriage by mutual
+consent we see the remnants of the traditional idea of the right by
+purchase, and therefore we have the jealousy that arises by virtue of
+our property rights.</p>
+
+<p>The right by purchase assuredly underlies our present-day marriage
+system, although it is disguised as economic necessity; as a religious
+sacrament; and as a suitable or a brilliant "catch"&mdash;a type of
+marriage by capture which forms the ideal of our own upper-class women
+and which the housemaid copies in her limited way.</p>
+
+<p>Viewed from the surface evidence, the average woman of today is, as
+Kipling says, far "more deadly than the male." She is more
+unscrupulous in her methods; more unreasonable in her demands; more
+devoid of sentiment or sympathy; more fickle in her desires and more
+nagging in her complaints. But, when all is said and done, we must
+admit that woman is only expressing her inheritance. When she becomes
+balanced, the sexes will meet on common ground.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's demand for better physical environment; for more comfort, and
+more justice; presages, after all, a higher and a more satisfactory
+idea of the marriage relationship. Underneath this materialistic
+demand, there is the silent voice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> of the soul calling for a more
+ideal marriage relation. It is the materialistic expression of a
+spiritual urge and will in time rise to higher ground. It is a demand
+for a better state than that which our grandmothers enjoyed, or
+endured.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen in the history of marriage, that the estimate of sexual
+immorality has been based, all too frequently, upon woman's disregard
+for the rights of her husband in her person.</p>
+
+<p>For centuries the burden of sustaining a sexual moral standard has
+rested almost wholly upon the shoulders of the women; and it is
+therefore natural that the present-day defiant attitude of many women
+toward the traditional standard should be viewed with alarm; and there
+is more in this thought of alarm than the mere anxiety on the part of
+man to hold woman to her appointed task of guardian of marital
+morality.</p>
+
+<p>Although men may wander from the home and fireside, it is a peculiar
+fact that they generally hold to a mental string by which they may
+find their way back again, very frequently the more contented to be
+there for their wanderings. But with a woman it is different. Once a
+woman has broken loose from the ties that have bound her to her
+inherited post of morality-preserver, she seldom goes back again, but
+keeps on her way until she finds that for which she seeks, or gives up
+the search of her own volition.</p>
+
+<p>Is this, then, evidence that it is a woman's first duty to "stay put" when matrimonial exigencies
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+have placed her in a specific "pocket" of the matrimonial billiard-table?</p>
+
+<p>We believe not; and this belief is founded upon the fact that the
+female principle, which is, we admit, the centralizing, centripetal
+force in the cosmos, is not always manifested in the form of woman.
+The balanced individual is bi-sexual, even as the balanced "twain-one"
+is bi-sexual. If man was all male principle, and woman all female
+principle they would not be complementary, but antithetical. Each must
+be balanced within himself and herself before they can merge into each
+other.</p>
+
+<p>Affinities are numerous, but mates are found but once; otherwise, the
+problems that are being discussed here would never have arisen.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, as has been shown in the fact that only counterpartal unions
+are real, eternal and spiritually indissoluble; and that only true
+mates can thus unite, and when thus united have no desire to wander,
+what becomes of our ideas of sexual infidelity?</p>
+
+<p>Since the very law of the Cosmos has seen to it that we cannot be
+untrue to the only one who seemingly has a right to our fidelity in
+the sex relation and since this union can become general only by
+freeing love from bondage, what becomes of the laboriously built up
+ethics of our social intercourse?</p>
+
+<p>Are they to be abandoned as of no value?</p>
+
+<p>We can almost hear the storm of protest which the righteous reader may
+feel in duty bound to let loose at such a suggestion, if for no other reason
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+than that protest is the accepted way of proving one's own
+virtuous tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>In the early seventies, a woman named Virginia Woodhull brought down
+upon her defenseless head the un-Christian-like abuse of the Christian
+public by announcing a doctrine which seems to have been nothing more
+dreadful than that of an equal standard of morality for men and women.
+The poor woman died broken-hearted, it is said; and yet nothing that
+we can unearth regarding her personal life and habits would seem to
+have warranted the cruel gibes that were hurled at her. The dear old
+lady lived a most continent, even ascetic life.</p>
+
+<p>But the world has made rapid strides since that time, and we trust
+that the urgent need of something reasonable and feasible upon the sex
+question will inspire the reader to an unprejudiced review of this
+chapter. We would that it were possible to supply a modicum of
+understanding with each copy of this volume; but since it is not, we
+must take our chance with the average. Let us reason together:</p>
+
+<p>Expediency is the mother of morality in social organizations, which
+have, of necessity, unstable, ever-changing standards. These standards
+represent, for some, ideals yet to be attained; while for others they
+become mere mileposts on the path of Evolution. The individual
+reaches, and then passes, an accepted ideal; gradually when a
+sufficient number, constituting a majority, have reached this ideal,
+it ceases to be a standard for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> the social organization, and another
+ideal is substituted.</p>
+
+<p>The laws of the cave-man called for self-restraint exercised toward
+his own immediate clan, and this necessity for self-restraint was
+based upon nothing higher than the law of self-preservation; but
+gradually the sphere widened; from clan to nation. So do our ethical
+and moral standards enlarge. Traditional concepts are not necessarily
+wrong, but they are almost sure to be <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'iadequate'">inadequate</ins> to evolving Mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Formerly, sexual morality consisted of the reservation of the person
+of a sister to the use of her brothers. Any infringement upon this
+moral code was punished by death to the woman and to her out-clannish
+lover.</p>
+
+<p>And we have today an analogous example, although we are glad to say,
+it is not the highest standard; still, if one's husband or wife
+violates the marriage vows, it is more condonable, if the
+co-respondent be of the wealthy class; and in monarchies it is
+accounted an honor to have been selected as the king's favorite.</p>
+
+<p>The institution of prostitution which exists everywhere today has its
+standards in the different countries; and the white races seem to
+think that their morality is superior to that of the Orientals because
+the social standing of prostitutes in the Orient is not irretrievably
+lost; they are permitted, in the event of marriage, to resume social
+equality with other women. Among white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> people, prostitutes have no
+other recourse than to sink lower and lower, until utter degradation
+is reached.</p>
+
+<p>We believe that the Oriental view of the situation is a far higher
+standard of morality than is our Occidental attitude.</p>
+
+<p>If there can lawfully be such an organization as is now being proposed
+as desirable in large cities, namely, a "morals police," it certainly
+should be instigated by a more sane purpose than that which is at the
+root of our present police guardianship.</p>
+
+<p>Attempts at suppression of prostitution have hitherto been conducted
+on the principle that the women of that class are objectionable to the
+sight of our mothers and sisters and wives, and the sinfulness of the
+hopelessly "fallen" ones has been the theme of press and pulpit. And
+all the time the women of the half-world have resented this attitude
+as being unjust, and unfair, and hypocritical, and untenable. They
+have known that if the act of selling their bodies to men is a crime
+against the community, then more than half the feminine world is
+criminal. And they have contended that since the "respectable" women
+were neither contacted nor exploited by them, they cannot see wherein
+they offend society, provided the laws of sanitation and segregation
+are complied with.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, they have said that it is none of Society's business
+whether they sell themselves to one man or to a number, since they
+must pay the penalty. And their attitude is relatively right.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+It is none of Society's business whether a woman is a prostitute or not,
+considered as an offense against Society. That is the wrong attitude
+toward this condition of our social disorder.</p>
+
+<p>No prostitute offends you or me. She, poor creature, offends herself,
+and we offend her and ourselves by permitting social conditions that
+make for such degradation. We are conniving with her to barter her
+birthright of freedom and real love for food and shelter, and taint
+and tinsel, whenever we encourage marriage on any other ground than
+that of true love, and when we regard virtue as a matter of physical
+contact.</p>
+
+<p>If we judge from the many plays which we see on the boards; if we are
+influenced by the press and the pulpit; we must acknowledge that the
+general idea of sexual morality is an absurd one. The inference is
+that one special organ of a woman's physical body is the sole
+custodian of all virtue and all morality. The accepted idea seems to
+be that if a woman is married her body is then the property of her
+husband. Her emotions, her mind, her heart, her happiness, her
+preferences do not count for anything. The one act is made
+all-important. On the husband's side, if he provides for his wife and
+family, he is justified in exacting the sole right to the wife's body,
+and although his own heart and caresses may be given to another, he
+justifies himself, and the wife not infrequently feels satisfied, as
+long as he provides well for her. What is this but prostitution? The
+principle is the same as in the case of the recognized prostitute,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+although the conditions are easier for the woman, and less cheapening
+of her womanhood, but the difference is only in degree.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a singular idea of fidelity, a direct antithesis to the one just
+mentioned, prevails among prostitutes, when married either by law or
+by selection.</p>
+
+<p>They may surrender their physical body to another, for money, and
+according to their idea they may yet remain true to the husband or
+lover, because the matter is a business transaction. The other man has
+only what he has purchased, namely, the physical body. But should the
+woman permit another man to arouse in her a sexual response; should
+another invade her mind, absorb her thoughts, or engage her heart, the
+husband is outraged and the woman realizes her unfaithfulness.</p>
+
+<p>All of which goes to show that up to the present time sexual morality
+has in itself no absolute uniform standard by which it can be measured
+and satisfactorily and convincingly presented to all persons, as have
+other phases of morality, such as honesty, justice, mercy, generosity,
+friendship, fidelity to country, and self-sacrifice to the good of
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexual
+morality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality.
+Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, but
+as has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined by
+local conditions.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexual
+morality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remote
+probability, albeit it will arrive some day.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, the sex relation must be absolutely free from sale;
+coercion; or barter; whether within the respectable "sale" of
+matrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from any
+erroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced,
+deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to the
+sexual embrace of human lovers.</p>
+
+<p>An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture.
+If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the
+physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many
+women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry
+from mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if we
+listen to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate our
+souls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedly
+cultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness of
+mind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor to
+uplift the moral tone of the world.</p>
+
+<p>These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration of
+Sex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protect
+myself against my enemies"&mdash;and so it is in this instance.</p>
+
+<p>Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why that name, anyway?) are infected
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+with the bacteria of sex-degradation. They really require a lengthy process of mental
+disinfection, before attempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexual
+uplift.</p>
+
+<p>A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largest
+city in the United States recently declared in public print, of the
+beautiful and chaste painting "September Morn," that it was "lewd,
+filthy, and suggestive of unclean things." This type of woman is
+intrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting them
+with the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of the
+Father-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"</p>
+
+<p>Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted in
+our souls, namely:</p>
+
+<p>Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing in
+the universe&mdash;because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. The
+righteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man's
+customs; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement,
+indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thought
+which may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency to
+confusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us see
+if we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction.</p>
+
+<p>One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem is
+sadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension of
+the average, we may at least do so for some.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement that
+the sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in the
+conclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then it
+is right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live as
+they do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, and
+while pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretly
+carry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"</p>
+
+<p>Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is the
+sex-relation right or wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>The men will declare that it is "right sometimes and wrong sometimes."
+The women, almost as a unit, will do the same. Occasionally a woman
+will be found sufficiently illumined to give a sane answer.</p>
+
+<p>Following up the thoughtless answer with the request to illustrate,
+and the reply will be something like this: "Well, if people are
+married it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" and
+even as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that it
+is puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, few
+have the temerity, and fewer yet have the capability, to utter Truth.</p>
+
+<p>It would be as sensible to say that it is right for the sun to shine
+sometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right for
+the sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all that
+is needed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, is
+entirely "up to us." The sun does its part. It is fulfilling the
+inexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right.</p>
+
+<p>But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The
+law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it
+may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases,
+diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world.</p>
+
+<p>How is it possible to have a perfect flower&mdash;a healthy, normal and
+wholesome sprout from a diseased root?</p>
+
+<p>The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the
+only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be
+done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy,
+sacred&mdash;the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite
+different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their
+sex-relations.</p>
+
+<p>To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of
+marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring
+back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing
+that can make us whole&mdash;and the first office of Truth, as everyone
+knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and
+the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the
+lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Does the libertine believe in the sacredness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> of sex? Never. Does the
+prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would
+not sell herself for money.</p>
+
+<p>Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted
+ideals of sex?</p>
+
+<p>If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.</p>
+
+<p>These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from
+love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex
+as a human plaything&mdash;something which may be called bad one day and
+good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.</p>
+
+<p>Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one
+standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now
+persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand,
+that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been
+found?</p>
+
+<p>A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the
+woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?</p>
+
+<p>History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded
+in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best
+that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention
+from ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that
+a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made
+regulations, are not in danger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than
+they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval,
+should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the
+highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high
+the price of such devotion.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h2>THE PATHWAY OF LOVE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Love is the Great Reality.</p>
+
+<p>Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to
+love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of
+love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it
+is at the same time the only liberating force.</p>
+
+<p>Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a
+people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of
+the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the
+wake of seeming victory.</p>
+
+<p>There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that
+Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and
+the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there
+are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the
+wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns
+supreme.</p>
+
+<p>Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate
+us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the
+limitations and attractions of the animal-man.</p>
+
+<p>Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+"There is no other God but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe,
+apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and
+presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but
+always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.</p>
+
+<p>Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by
+that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:</p>
+
+<p>"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and
+evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the
+tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and
+philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every
+home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of
+immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of
+love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless
+things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay.
+It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without
+that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but
+with it&mdash;earth is Heaven and we are gods."</p>
+
+<p>It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been
+recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life
+are worthless.</p>
+
+<p>It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of
+commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be
+bartered for.</p>
+
+<p>Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and
+magic solvent which transmutes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> all baser emotions into the higher,
+the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not
+sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or
+altruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had
+developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex
+instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as
+we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most
+instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty
+than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of
+animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the
+earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with
+us but happily in decreasing numbers.</p>
+
+<p>But even among animals we find evidences of something vague,
+indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we
+term a tendency toward <i>selection</i>; and in the animal also, through
+the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again
+we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of
+humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the
+maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love,
+is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than
+with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the
+evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the
+family.</p>
+
+<p>If maternal love were confined strictly to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> female parent, and the
+procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only,
+we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent
+reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female,
+since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.</p>
+
+<p>As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the
+life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a
+larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above
+even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.</p>
+
+<p>Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this
+abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may
+tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of
+the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of
+the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to
+which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some
+perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower
+into its full possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more
+than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that
+we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved any
+<i>human being</i> with as great a love as we are capable of.</p>
+
+<p>If any one holds the mistaken idea&mdash;and it is one that is very generally
+held&mdash;that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer phase of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in
+order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all
+other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being
+in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat.
+The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted
+with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break
+the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God,
+whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or
+something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry
+whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he
+does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may
+permit him the same liberty.</p>
+
+<p>God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take care
+of Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot be
+killed by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying.</p>
+
+<p>Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes of
+seeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfect
+mathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or a
+woman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neither
+is Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned with
+appearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within.
+He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with the
+material at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeks
+to unite lovers in their interior nature, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+as each of the would-be happy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he is
+handicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness of
+Love, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over His
+eyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, the
+Egyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger on
+his lips, to typify the truth that true love is not noisy, blustering,
+jealous, burning, ranting, protesting. He is silent; soft; melting;
+blissful; <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'magnectic'">magnetic</ins>; <i>uniting</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Our noisy civilization, seeking happiness in Things, mistakes
+protestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriages
+are consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depicted
+Cupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is a
+slander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could see
+one. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what one
+knows," declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern bride
+and bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards of
+living, to know dollars better than they know Love, their perverted
+vision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even the
+dollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united in
+love, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united then
+indeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty.</p>
+
+<p>But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, married
+couples have learned or they are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> learning, that there is an interior
+nature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected.</p>
+
+<p>In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road to
+the heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Love
+never faileth."</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that "love makes gods of men," and we have taken this
+phrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth,
+because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced their
+natures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, and
+are immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God," and the pilgrimage
+is ended.</p>
+
+<p>There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, that
+universal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot." It
+comes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate
+quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means
+always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my
+seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing."</p>
+
+<p>Life is a succession of experiences in the quest of immortality.
+Immortality would be a curse instead of a blessing if attained alone.</p>
+
+<p>Even the attainment of so unworthy an ambition as riches is a mockery
+if unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle to
+the one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to share
+it. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, he whose love nature
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+is supposed to find satisfaction in making others
+happy&mdash;can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unless
+there is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; or
+lacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness which
+he does not find here.</p>
+
+<p>Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material plane
+for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love;
+a love where intellect, spirit and sex finds its perfect mate."</p>
+
+<p>Verily, love is the only vitalizing power in the universe; and when
+denied the interior union which should exist between a conjoining
+pair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship as
+much of the divine nectar as they will accept.</p>
+
+<p><i>There is no impure love.</i> I repeat: There is no impure love. The
+impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he
+fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the
+Slough of Despond to the Heights of Bliss.</p>
+
+<p>If love be always pure, if it be always the uplifting, unifying,
+constructive power of the universe, what becomes of the apparent fact
+that men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, women
+have lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk to
+depths below that of the brute creation?</p>
+
+<p>What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appears
+to love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate love for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+all that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that love
+is always pure when it leads to such disaster?</p>
+
+<p>Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever the
+erring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently dragged
+from his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of human
+conflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; He
+unites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity of
+union.</p>
+
+<p>Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation of
+egoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes a
+man to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loves
+with jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence with
+the baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he must
+be taught the lesson of the Yoga sutras "not this way; not this way;"
+and the more worthy he is of redemption, the more certainly will he be
+caught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereas
+by seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path of
+inwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safely
+trust his redemption.</p>
+
+<p>If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through what
+appears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity have temporarily
+supplanted Love. But there is another side to the question. Society has
+very erroneous ideas of success and failure; and in looking at these
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+opposite ends of the same pole, Society may be standing on it's head.</p>
+
+<p>A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worth
+repeating.</p>
+
+<p>A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities of
+social life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercial
+world, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that he
+had married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life of
+the Islanders. English society, when his name was mentioned at all,
+spoke of him with hushed voices and with a "what a pity y' know"
+manner as of one who had sunk below the depths of ordinary failure.
+Subsequently a friend visited Samoa and found the young man enjoying
+life and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversation
+the visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been rather
+wild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impart
+agreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "Sir
+Arthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon the
+self-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity;
+and he was such a decent sort, too." So we may see that there is much
+in the point of view.</p>
+
+<p>Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trust
+this test, because no one can be happy in any other than the
+progressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been a
+satisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to the
+possessor if it shuts out love; and if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> love be present, wealth holds
+but an inconsequential place.</p>
+
+<p>However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force of
+attraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the union
+of two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced,
+there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the question
+inevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are not
+yet perfect?"</p>
+
+<p>If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate for
+each man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the only
+truly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of
+"temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all the
+marriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident that
+soul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to be
+abandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?</p>
+
+<p>It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deception
+and dishonesty are immoral.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage.
+Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray a
+confidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and it
+is the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether applied
+to the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not impose
+upon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+break them; but if vows are not to be broken, they may, thank Heaven,
+be dissolved.</p>
+
+<p>And surely the marriage ceremony of the future will not impose vows or
+promises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to the
+necessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at its
+very highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated,
+nothing more than announcement to the society of which they are
+members, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, as
+well as inwardly, in sexual union.</p>
+
+<p>We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of the
+fitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether too
+much confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, and
+altogether too little as to whether they are spiritually united.</p>
+
+<p>Possession! that is the word that spells unhappiness, in married life;
+each wants to possess the other; neither one tries for the spirit of
+union. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit.</p>
+
+<p>Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathway
+leads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promises
+staring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitute
+mutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If we
+cannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith and
+should cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action we
+would have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husband
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+and wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame of
+mind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be no
+further opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world of
+a belief in sin and immorality, the sooner will Love reign.</p>
+
+<p>It is said of the sages of India that they can live in the jungles and
+the ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?</p>
+
+<p>They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desire
+to crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love and
+compassion that there is no point of connection between them and the
+destructive instinct in the beast.</p>
+
+<p>When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away from
+the tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent and
+the eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure and
+perfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet it
+and when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear,
+all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fear
+of "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though
+"seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween thee
+and me," the call of soul to soul will be felt and answered. Byron says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <p>"There are two souls of equal flow,</p>
+  <p>Whose gentle streams so calmly run,</p>
+  <p>That when they part&mdash;they part? Oh no,</p>
+  <p>They cannot part, those souls are one."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>With a sentiment such as this between two beings, what need for vows
+and promises, and bonds?</p>
+
+<p>It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, even
+feverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implying
+that they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although this
+conclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and the
+faculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty that
+prevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, and
+above all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to impute
+personal motives to such as would, if permitted, lead them to a freer,
+and consequently a purer life, impel the writer to deny that which is,
+finally, the very point at issue.</p>
+
+<p>In the interest of Truth, we are compelled to state that we would do
+away with "bonds." We would substitute therefor mutual agreements,
+subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutually
+helpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of the
+crippled human race. We need not always walk lame.</p>
+
+<p>It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surest
+way to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind him
+that he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out to
+him the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man has
+so little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, when
+assured that God-hood means a bliss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> so great that he can hardly
+imagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of births
+and deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself.
+Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritual
+union&mdash;with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or any
+other impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?</p>
+
+<p>No, but with his mate.</p>
+
+<p>On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There
+is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love
+in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love
+flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little
+pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights
+and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."</p>
+
+<p>Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the
+perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly
+tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these
+same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead
+of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for
+union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to
+exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the
+"Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin;
+they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the
+golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly
+the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most
+certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most
+certainly not.</p>
+
+<p>We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have
+concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or
+uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral
+in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is
+adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance;
+sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual
+immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit
+that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based
+upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a
+convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own
+realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is
+immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent
+of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for
+position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual
+helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish
+gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money;
+or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of
+an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine
+office of sex.</p>
+
+<p>But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet
+all may, if we desire, be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> moral. And all moral and sexual
+relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the
+time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth
+need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.</p>
+
+<p>If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that
+sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from
+pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love
+of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in
+soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the
+restraints of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect
+of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the
+other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and
+has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the
+happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative
+of perfect mating.</p>
+
+<p>If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable
+finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne
+endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing;
+only to lie at His feet"&mdash;the prospect appalls!</p>
+
+<p>Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too
+short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is
+the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we
+realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by
+experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin
+to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and
+sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood,
+immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate;
+sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying
+aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and
+bliss, there is an incentive to aspire.</p>
+
+<p>Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be
+"taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or
+feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment
+has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the
+doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has
+known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has
+dwarfed our stature.</p>
+
+<p>In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise
+patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods."</p>
+
+<p>Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and
+earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss
+being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and
+when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps
+death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+back at its summons to inhabit their perfected world."</p>
+
+<p>We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful
+words&mdash;elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always
+in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be
+ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These
+prophetic utterances are literal truths.</p>
+
+<p>Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we
+will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise&mdash;the
+body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>While we are building the business which sustains our physical body;
+while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion or
+whatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior nature
+which we are now, and which we will be when the life of the body
+ceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business were
+their only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing the
+same methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate from
+the same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands or
+falls in the final test, by the motives; the desires; the sentiments;
+the sympathies; the generosities; the forgiveness; the kind impulses;
+the pities; the charities; the tolerances; we feel while we are
+apparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these little
+impulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seemingly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+important business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which we
+climb to the spiritual heights where the bliss of true and perfect,
+melting, merging, liquid-love, of the one and only mate awaits us.</p>
+
+<p>One thing more. This also is a secret. Perhaps you will not even
+believe it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of our
+crazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they are
+also, and above all, idealists.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION</h2>
+
+
+<p>External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we have
+builded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortal
+senses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal which
+prompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one who
+looks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead of
+merely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells its
+interior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It is
+said that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; but
+to those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; what
+seems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which is
+limited to sense consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give the
+key to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered.
+The word "union," or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase of
+our busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. This
+word, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word "agreement,"
+or "combination" or "partnership," formerly used. Union means something
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+more interior, than do these other words, even when applied to commercial
+issues.</p>
+
+<p>The business man says to his partners "let us unite on this question."
+They are already partners, but unless there is a unity of thought and
+ideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. We
+have labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity of
+effort; a merging of interests; a welding together into one
+thought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness of
+meaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the words
+lodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organization
+of men in social or commercial combination.</p>
+
+<p>In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there may
+be no quality of union, although there is the outward bond of
+fellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know more
+of a subject than appears on the surface. We want to know the within.
+We want to fathom the interior meaning; to get below the surface, or
+the appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import&mdash;the word
+<i>within</i>. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footsteps
+toward home.</p>
+
+<p>The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but the
+Christian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those who
+would listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was truly
+spiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+only to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandments
+already in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the one
+and only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begat
+him: "That ye love one another."</p>
+
+<p>Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets and
+through all the channels of the physical senses to look within. That
+which you are&mdash;not what you appear to be to the eyes of the
+sense-conscious&mdash;but that which you are in your interior nature, is
+what counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to write
+salable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in the
+commercial game; but when the word is impartially considered
+efficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability is
+measured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wise
+judgment&mdash;interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin be
+white or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are of
+imposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within that
+constitutes true efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>So the kingdom whatever it may be whether of heaven or hell; of love;
+or of power; or of ambition; the kingdom is within. The source of your
+power is in the interior of your nature.</p>
+
+<p>If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to the
+Cosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again to
+those who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in on
+this," has been said to one who was left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> out of some supposedly
+desirable thing; or "you are not <i>in</i> it," meaning that you are not up
+to the required standard. Even as the walls of a building only
+imperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that which
+the building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physical
+appearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature.</p>
+
+<p>"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritual
+teacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The character of
+the heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are at
+variance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within,
+we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom&mdash;interior
+vision.</p>
+
+<p>Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exterior
+and their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled up
+like a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grain
+of true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message from
+knowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and we <i>find</i>
+wisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interior
+meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is a
+difference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to the
+interior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience.
+Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with the
+interior; it penetrates<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> the outer and seeks the interior; but never
+does the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never does
+he mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life were
+the only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of the
+thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the
+visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that
+civilization is insane.</p>
+
+<p>If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this
+which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in
+his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example,
+is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advanced
+civilization?</p>
+
+<p>With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly
+to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of
+wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and
+hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are
+ostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing,
+embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution of
+man's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to
+which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell
+us that man in his interior nature&mdash;in his reality&mdash;is not a creeping,
+crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into
+ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, did
+it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind
+regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly
+intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in
+motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a
+corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the
+power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute
+strength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively puny
+strength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force of
+the elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire&mdash;an
+interior quality.</p>
+
+<p>Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make us
+happier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather than
+their so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to man
+his power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it to
+do his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above and
+beyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put upon
+modern inventions and accomplishment is the message which these
+mechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not a
+machine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not a
+miserable worm of the dust, but a winged god.</p>
+
+<p>Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanical marvels
+is the knowledge of each other which has resulted from intercommunication
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+between nation and nation. The great breeder of
+discord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man of
+the cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he did
+not know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know;
+his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous and
+dangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country are
+like ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even though
+they may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet of
+nuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down.
+Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideas
+of "alien" races and "foreign" nations.</p>
+
+<p>Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanical
+inventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other human
+beings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings,
+emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like our
+own, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reach
+the heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet been
+established, it is because the majority of Mankind are still only
+sense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which the
+past few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that the slow-moving
+mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all this knowledge must come
+in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seeks love as the only eternal
+reality. Not because God has commanded that we shall do so;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+not because of a sentimental ideal, but because any other course is futile,
+foolish, silly and does not "get us anywhere" as the slangologists rightly
+express it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus everything in the busy commercial world, seemingly bent upon
+perpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symbolic
+language of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. These
+two words are really complementary, because it is only with the
+interior nature that unity can be established.</p>
+
+<p>We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships,
+corporations, combinations from the outside. These are external
+expressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of the
+interior nature only.</p>
+
+<p>With the more intimate knowledge of each other which
+intercommunication between nations makes general, each little
+segregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at the
+conclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" on
+any proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much less
+costly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than by
+going to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains of
+the majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thought
+that perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained by
+peaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained nor
+appeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wise
+observation that fundamentally, cosmically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> there is no place for
+enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the
+whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and
+segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can
+permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped
+and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these
+thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things,
+than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.</p>
+
+<p>The world has been living through a nightmare. The warfare which
+belongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has been
+carried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight like
+tigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well,
+using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devices
+and the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this type
+of warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose between
+transmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blind
+indeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who use
+the sword shall perish by the sword." How else can it be? There is but
+one force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use it
+to destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of law
+that we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum in
+arithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is no
+limit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is dawning upon an increasing number<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> of thinkers, that even
+as brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there is
+still a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its power
+that nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. That
+power is love, without which though we have all else we are but as
+"sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."</p>
+
+<p>Even as the ferocious man-eating animals have disappeared from the
+earth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the erotic
+pomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to their
+chariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourged
+slaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of the
+amphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged
+"civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolution
+of our own "false gods." Transmuted into pure and perfect love and
+peace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate and
+destruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward the
+maintenance of a balanced world&mdash;a world in which Love and Wisdom are
+united.</p>
+
+<p>We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude
+are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic
+Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the
+decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why
+cannot we trust God?</p>
+
+<p>In the external world, then, the idea that a part
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+of this sphere is inherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies;
+that the female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy&mdash;all these
+ideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the coming
+civilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it to
+our individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the human
+organism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Before
+we can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to a
+balanced and sane state within our own organism.</p>
+
+<p>We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the various
+expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social
+body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain
+unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may
+safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have
+conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our
+chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the
+clutches of an abnormal appetite.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physical
+appetites to the finer, and interior desires of the soul,
+abnormalities and perversions of sex-force will be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Sex-force is, at the Center of Being, unpolluted. It is pure, perfect
+and harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it is
+balanced.</p>
+
+<p>In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly every
+one is lop-sided, and unbalanced.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> Alienists declare that almost every
+man and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An age
+of specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness." But
+the source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where we
+consciously unite with that interior source we will no longer be
+unbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, at
+the center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There is
+no chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy.
+There is equilibrium.</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness that
+equality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life will
+appear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer men
+can imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-powering
+and at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy.
+The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable from
+sex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine the
+mechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail to
+comprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior being
+until we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortal
+and glimpse the heights of the immortal life.</p>
+
+<p>No one can give to another this interior wisdom&mdash;this philosopher's
+stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the
+pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and
+promise that the results are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> mathematically proportionate to effort,
+and effort will be backed by individual desire.</p>
+
+<p>We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side
+of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for
+purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is
+contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize.
+Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary
+function.</p>
+
+<p>Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they
+are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they
+remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek.
+All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman
+who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the
+ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual
+alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found
+the key to the gate of eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old
+age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into
+interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express
+the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become
+transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts.
+It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters
+that quality&mdash;be it much or little&mdash;so that we may not go into the
+interior realms a spiritual pauper.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so
+old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship,
+and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in
+the soul life.</p>
+
+<p>There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any
+degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and
+love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines
+through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that
+when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that
+the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.</p>
+
+<p>This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a
+mental recognition of age.</p>
+
+<p>"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth
+and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom&mdash;the wisdom
+that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual
+love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.</p>
+
+<p>But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay,
+they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves
+this one, without having attained that which he craves.</p>
+
+<p>This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no
+appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law
+is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of
+immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be
+such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they
+not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual
+sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"
+The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its
+reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very
+nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his
+unreadiness for <i>Illumination</i>. The desire for self-gratification,
+though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical
+to attainment of spiritual consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine
+of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or
+gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories
+in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing
+by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spirit
+becomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of our
+willingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existence
+seems a sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him pass
+on" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it as
+clearly as it can be stated.</p>
+
+<p>Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expect
+to enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+letter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruism <i>is</i>; it is not mere
+recognition of a word.</p>
+
+<p>We may presuppose another natural and <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'instintctive'">instinctive</ins> query: "If then only
+by union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal life
+and love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever all
+ties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, and
+search for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found the
+answer to all life's problems?"</p>
+
+<p>Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We should
+remember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitful
+quest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), he
+learned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom he
+gave the cup of cold water <i>without any consciousness of doing a good
+deed</i>; without hope of thereby finding the grail.</p>
+
+<p>He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any good
+will not find it though he should give away every farthing to the
+poor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips;
+though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all day
+and all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of self
+and of <i>obtaining</i> something so long will he miss the <i>attainment</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute or
+reversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not trying
+to say that they should not be broken; or that they cannot
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+be broken with impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished.
+They simply cannot be broken&mdash;they are unbreakable.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, or
+in any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any more
+than we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing to
+it; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest nor
+scribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. No
+one can break the law of your being any more than you can break that
+of another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in the
+intervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Wherefore
+then, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousy
+and wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to a
+marriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?</p>
+
+<p>If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that the
+object of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres there
+is only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by any
+possibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place once
+found no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said in
+previous chapters of the word "found;" it is from within.</p>
+
+<p>How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, so
+magnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama of
+life; to establish such marvelous diversity within such
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+simple unity; to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile has
+been the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need not
+worry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God are
+loaded." Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we may
+cheat in the game of life.</p>
+
+<p>We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility of
+offending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so far
+as it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us." We can delay
+arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we
+will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied
+longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain
+wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of
+his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless
+areas of infinite bliss and wisdom?</p>
+
+<p>We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothing
+more <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'phenonenal'">phenomenal</ins> than withdrawing from one room to another. The soul
+may strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing can
+free it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. The
+broader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfold
+in its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine we
+become, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual and
+attract our own.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession as
+one's own counterpart defeats<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> the very effort. We are not to seek; we
+are only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shall
+have done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though the
+two halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers which
+the sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves and
+the bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate to
+thee." We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest we
+lose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyes
+glued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realms
+of vibration "whence cometh our light."</p>
+
+<p>Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that is
+spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate
+on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to
+thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or
+winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the
+great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his
+embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the
+heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there
+anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
+circulation through all men as the water of the globe is all one sea,
+and truly seen its tide is one."</p>
+
+<p>Here then are specific and trustworthy statements for the further
+enlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+propositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortal
+godhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Source
+of Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but we
+must claim it if we would consciously realize this truth.</p>
+
+<p>God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and in
+truth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not one
+hermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, even
+though each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperament
+and qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point because
+there has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon this
+definition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctively
+masculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and he
+or she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness.</p>
+
+<p>Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Woman
+is not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear for
+courage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality;
+helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when he
+spares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; when
+he unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy from
+weakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentleness
+with vigor.</p>
+
+<p>No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore you
+are not to try to enforce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> your ideas of morality upon others. Who has
+constituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concern
+yourself with establishing happiness upon this earth.</p>
+
+<p>You are to see to it that your love is big and broad enough;
+all-inclusive enough to wish to see every one happy from your
+immediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You need
+not worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. You
+are to render love and service to this world with all your heart and
+all your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of your
+desires.</p>
+
+<p>No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is
+rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say
+the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from
+the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without
+regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither
+do we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained to
+a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment
+and hatred.</p>
+
+<p>There is no one formula which fits all cases&mdash;other than that given in
+love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as
+we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it
+may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to
+them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other motive than personal selfishness,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+you may be doing yourself an injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining,
+then you are doubly mistaken in your course.</p>
+
+<p>The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it
+may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word
+"unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the
+wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or
+her. There is just one big world of difference between these two
+points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and
+Hell.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h2>"SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"</h2>
+
+<p>Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure and
+satisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing and
+feeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-fold
+is the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who are
+themselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others.
+This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, and
+which they will not believe or trust.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs us
+heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and
+turbulent pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>And finally, as regards the sex-function, we would like to impress
+upon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom will
+understand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation of
+sex-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love that
+is of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in the
+region popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circumscribe the
+sex-function, as a secondary and by no means compulsory consideration.</p>
+
+<p>When the sex force has become diffused<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> throughout the entire being,
+radiating from the solar man, and permeating the mind and thus
+entering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mind
+physical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and is
+found to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. Sex is not
+confined to the specialized sex-organs. It permeates the entire being.
+The person who has no conception of his reality other than as a
+physical entity has not so much as touched the area of spiritual
+ecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the gods;" and so
+infinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not do
+so until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains upon
+the sense-conscious plane and seeks by sexual perversity and
+debauchery and sexual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection of
+joy which he intuitively knows evades him.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and just
+and merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies," that it cannot
+be defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It is
+forever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope to
+express the creative power, the sexual realization of a god, through
+the functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of the
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do not
+imagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your puny
+physical powers would suggest. Neither should you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> imagine that the
+sex-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking in
+love-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right and
+normal in itself; the attitude of the average man and woman invests it
+with all its uncleanness.</p>
+
+<p>But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged
+in respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed
+against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church
+denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it
+in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less
+than the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divine
+fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor
+little bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as the
+hope and savior of Mankind.</p>
+
+<p>If you would have eternal youth and eternal life and love and wisdom,
+accept this truth, because nothing else can, or will, save you from
+the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."</p>
+
+<p>Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and we
+would like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; no
+misconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we are
+here stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple and
+unescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time and
+ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapters
+we will again state<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> it, so that there may be no mistake: If the
+balance is found in counterpartal sex-union&mdash;the one man and the one
+woman uniting on the solar plane&mdash;would not this balance be maintained
+if only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; in
+other words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on the
+one hand and extreme impurity on the other?</p>
+
+<p>Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there
+are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the
+union is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one must
+be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is
+possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would,
+really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we
+may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of
+the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of
+serfs; but doubt not that <i>eternal equation</i> is perfect.</p>
+
+<p>There is still <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'anoher'">another</ins> query: If true sex-union is of the soul, what
+is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of
+death, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thus
+circumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel
+each one to earn the prize of eternal life?</p>
+
+<p>The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The
+realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than
+is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize
+values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he
+might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a
+million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was,
+he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow
+wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.</p>
+
+<p>If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne of
+angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the
+crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common,
+everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is
+the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and
+the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without
+thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and
+love of the spiritual realms.</p>
+
+<p>The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'estoeric'">esoteric</ins>
+wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such
+effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the
+principal benefit of a college education is to teach the student that
+he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of
+years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not.
+If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were
+well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the
+price of transmutation only after exhausting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> every other method, what
+does it matter, so that he finally learns it?</p>
+
+<p><i>Learn to look into the hearts of men.</i></p>
+
+<p>At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a
+moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with
+segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the
+hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the
+heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving
+picture.</p>
+
+<p>You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue
+rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a
+clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress
+is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse,
+perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if
+you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that
+her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming
+experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has
+donned to hide a turbulent heart&mdash;the dowry of centuries of
+grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to
+comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted
+to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and
+happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and
+the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be
+carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."</p>
+
+<p>Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+legs of our fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be
+heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for
+their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll
+of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on
+having two things long denied womankind&mdash;freedom and happiness. If she
+is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the
+more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your
+help and sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Learn to look into the hearts of men.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder
+doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just
+an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and
+longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if
+the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the <i>spirit</i> of the aria or
+the intermezzo.</p>
+
+<p>And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold
+street-arabs&mdash;at least that is what they look like from the outside.
+But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their
+appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize with
+them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the
+manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the
+condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in
+crime.</p>
+
+<p>You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with
+his misery. If you have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> the inner vision, which you must have if you
+would transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to
+immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to
+sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without
+sympathy walks to his own funeral."</p>
+
+<p>Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to
+find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden
+Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you
+must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the
+lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane&mdash;the personality
+that conceals <i>you</i>. And above all, you are not to regard this
+personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is,
+or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as
+we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes
+unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut it
+off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to&mdash;why should the
+men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a
+later century?</p>
+
+<p>You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in
+order to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There is
+nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot
+learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater
+than love; and there is no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> heaven happier than love and there is no
+God holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will
+readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that
+appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;
+think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the
+lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the
+expression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gave
+to it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to do
+so.</p>
+
+<p>Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the
+Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with
+the specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illumination
+from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you
+turn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of the
+toad,' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula and
+still blesses it with His fruitful presence."</p>
+
+<p>And finally do not make the too common mistake of confounding
+brazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life has
+come because of the divinity of Sex. If you have been wise enough to
+know this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect to
+that function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading the
+subject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would
+"cast pearls before swine;" you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> will not countenance jokes and ribald
+songs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you will
+fold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart's divine altar, as
+something too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of the
+un-tender day.</p>
+
+<p>If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of Sex, you
+will desire unity <ins class="correction" title="original has repeated words 'and and'">and</ins> disdain possession, knowing that whatever of
+Heaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality of
+spiritual realization of the function of Sex. You will respect the
+physical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of the
+universe, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. You
+will teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; that
+nothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inward
+honesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire.</p>
+
+<p>If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love and
+we shall surely enter therein.</p>
+
+<p>Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal gods.<br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'>FINIS</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h4>THE SWASTIKA SERIES</h4>
+  <h3>HAVE YOU READ</h3>
+  <h1><i>HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL</i></h1>
+  <h3>The Scientific Use of Mental Electricity.</h3>
+  <h4>By<br />Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall</h4>
+
+  <p>The Enlargement of Consciousness.</p>
+  <p>The Doctrine of Free-Will.</p>
+  <p>Thought Is the Building Material.</p>
+  <p>The Creative Power of Conscious Thought.</p>
+  <p>Experiments Proving That Thought Can Kill.</p>
+  <p>Confessions of a Trained Nurse.</p>
+  <p>People Who Think God Hangs Out the Sun.</p>
+  <p>Action Essential to Creative Principle.</p>
+  <p>The "Science of God's Anger."</p>
+  <p>Thought Is of the Universal Supply.</p>
+  <p>Why the Number Thirteen Is Unlucky.</p>
+  <p>How Poison May Be Generated in the System.</p>
+  <p>Thought and the Cell-Structure of the Brain.</p>
+  <p>Why We Fail in Our Efforts.</p>
+  <p>The Spectrums of Love and Hate.</p>
+  <p>The Power of Imagination.</p>
+  <p>Fear Is the King of Thoughts That Kill.</p>
+  <p>Parents Make Cringing Weaklings of Children.</p>
+  <p>How Whole Cities May Be Poisoned by Thought.</p>
+  <p>Case of a Well-Known Man Killed by Thought.</p>
+  <p>There Is Neither Reward nor Punishment.</p>
+  <p>The Survival of That Which Is Creative.</p>
+
+  <h3>Price 25 Cents</h3>
+  <h4>Send Your Order Today</h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h4>THE SWASTIKA SERIES</h4>
+  <h3>HAVE YOU READ</h3>
+  <h1><i>PERSONAL MAGNETISM</i></h1>
+  <h3>The Power of Persuasion</h3>
+  <h4>By<br />Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall</h4>
+
+  <p style='text-align:center;'><b>CONTENTS</b></p>
+  <p>The Philosophy of "The Survival of the Fittest."</p>
+  <p>The Power of Persuasion.</p>
+  <p>Effects of Force Law.</p>
+  <p>Magnetism in Professional Life.</p>
+  <p>Opinion of a Noted Actor.</p>
+  <p>What Is Personal Magnetism?</p>
+  <p>Different Kinds of Magnetism.</p>
+  <p>The Human Body an Electrical Machine.</p>
+  <p>Will Power the Dynamo.</p>
+  <p>Magnetism Not Necessarily Good.</p>
+  <p>The Law Governing Invisible Force.</p>
+  <p>Love the Generator of Soul Magnetism.</p>
+  <p>Necessity for Understanding Use of Powers.</p>
+  <p>The Body the Medium of the Soul's Expression.</p>
+  <p>What Constitutes Success?</p>
+  <p>Rules for Acquiring Personal Magnetism.</p>
+  <p>Spirit Manifests Only Through Matter.</p>
+  <p>Fasting Not Wise.</p>
+  <p>Psychic Science Teaches the Study of ALL THINGS.</p>
+  <p>The Yogi of India.</p>
+  <p>Individuality the One Essential.</p>
+  <p>Character Indestructible.</p>
+
+  <h3>Price 25 Cents</h3>
+  <h4>Send Your Order Today</h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+  <h4>IF YOU CANNOT READ CHARACTER THEN&mdash;READ</h4>
+  <h2>REVELATIONS OF THE HAND</h2>
+  <h3>How to Know Human Nature</h3>
+
+  <h4>A Scientific Study of the Shape and Markings of the Hand, as an Index to Character, Disease and Tendencies</h4>
+  <h3>With Explanatory Illustrations.</h3>
+
+  <h3>By<br />
+  DR. ALEXANDER J. MCIVOR-TYNDALL</h3>
+
+  <h3>The Most Practical SCIENCE OF PALMISTRY Ever Published!</h3>
+
+  <h4>PARTIAL CONTENTS</h4>
+
+  <table summary="book ad">
+  <tr><td><b>PART I&mdash;CHEIROGNOMY.</b></td><td><b>PART 2&mdash;CHEIROMANCY.</b></td></tr>
+  <tr><td>Chapter.</td><td>Chapter.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>1&mdash;The Seven Types of Hands</td><td>1&mdash;The Lines of the Hand.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>2&mdash;The Primitive or Elementary Hand.</td><td>2&mdash;The Line of Life.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>3&mdash;The Square Type of Hand.</td><td>3&mdash;The Line of Mentality or Head.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>4&mdash;The Spatulate Type of Hand.</td><td>4&mdash;The Line of Heart.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>5&mdash;The Conic Type of Hand.</td><td>5&mdash;The Line of Fate.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>6&mdash;The Philosophic Type of Hand.</td><td>6&mdash;The Line of Apollo, or Sun.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>7&mdash;The Psychic Type of Hand.</td><td>7&mdash;The Line of Health or Liver.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>8&mdash;The Mixed Type of Hand.</td><td>8&mdash;The Girdle of Venus.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>9&mdash;The Fingers.</td><td>9&mdash;The Via Lascivia, The Line of Mars and the Line of Intuition.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>10&mdash;The Thumb.</td><td>10&mdash;The Line of Marriage; Children.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>11&mdash;The Nails.</td><td>11&mdash;The Rascette and Minor Lines.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>12&mdash;Large and Small, Hard and Soft Hands.</td><td>12&mdash;Lines of Influence and Travel Lines.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>13&mdash;The Colour of the Palms.</td><td>13&mdash;Character of the Lines.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>14&mdash;The Mounts.</td><td>14&mdash;Signs Found on the Palm.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>15&mdash;Right and Left Hands.</td><td>15&mdash;The Great Triangle and the Quadrangle.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td>16&mdash;Resume of Cheirognomy.</td><td>16&mdash;How to Reckon Time. Systems of Seven and Ten.</td></tr>
+  <tr><td></td><td>17&mdash;Abnormal Tendencies.</td></tr>
+  </table>
+
+  <h4>SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY</h4>
+  <h4>SECOND EDITION<br /><i>Crown 8vo, 215 pages, profusely illustrated with full-page plates and numerous engravings, silk cloth bound, gold stamped,   $2.00 postpaid.</i></h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h2>"THE DEAD SPEAK!"</h2>
+  <h3>LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD</h3>
+  <h4>By</h4>
+  <h3>DR. ALEXANDER J. MCIVOR-TYNDALL</h3>
+  <h4>Author of<br />"Sex&mdash;The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak!" "The Swastika Series," Etc.</h4>
+
+<p>We are living in an age of earnest inquiry and enhanced
+knowledge in respect to ourselves as spiritual beings, and
+that great and wonderful Universe of Spirit to which we
+are inseparably allied. The author is devoting his life to
+establishing better conditions on earth, by bringing the two
+worlds into closer association. No one can read this book
+with an unprejudiced mind, without absorbing some of its
+grand and inspiring truth and be uplifted and made better by
+it.<br/></p>
+
+  <p>Chapter 1.<br />The Advent of Psychic Research.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 2.<br />The Dangers in Psychic Research and How to Avoid Them.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 3.<br />Physical Manifestations: Table-Rapping, Levitation, Etc.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 4.<br />Automatism.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 5.<br />Haunted Houses.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 6.<br />Spirit Interlopers.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 7.<br />Vampirism and Astral Hypnosis.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 8.<br />Prevision.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 9.<br />The Mystery of Trance.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 10.<br />The Mystery of Dreams.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 11.<br />Phantasms of the Living.</p>
+  <p>Chapter 12.<br />The Last Enemy&mdash;Death Overcome!<br/></p>
+
+<p>If you desire to acquire a knowledge of the GREAT SPIRITUAL
+AWAKENING that has dawned upon mankind with the birth of the twentieth
+century&mdash;with a mind and heart open to those scientific
+and spiritual truths that are daily being proven by scientists
+and thinkers of world-repute&mdash;we take the liberty of
+reminding you there is no book more enlightening, no work
+more appreciated, no effort more powerful, than this book.</p>
+
+<p>There is a difference between this book and others upon
+the subject&mdash;it is not an ordinary chronicle of unconnected
+notations but a romantic story of extraordinary interest and
+value for the spiritual and scientific truths which set
+forth the most <ins class="correction" title="original reads 'advaced'">advanced</ins> knowledge of the deeper things of
+the Soul so simply that any reader of ordinary intelligence
+can grasp, comprehend and apply those laws whose values
+extend the usefulness of every Truth seeker who is seeking light
+upon the MYSTERIES OF LIFE, both Here and Here-after.</p>
+
+  <h3>Send Your Order Today</h3>
+  <h4><i>12mo., 200 pages, silk cloth-bound, gold stamped, with Frontispiece, $1.50 (net) postpaid.</i></h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h4><i><span class="u">Just Published</span></i></h4>
+  <h2>COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS</h2>
+  <h4>or</h4>
+  <h2>The Man-God Whom We Await!</h2>
+  <h4>By</h4>
+  <h2><i>Ali Nomad</i></h2>
+  <h3>[Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall]</h3>
+  <h4>Author of<br />"Sex&mdash;The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak," "The Swastika Series," Etc.</h4>
+  <h3><i>READ</i></h3>
+
+<p>An Exposition of the Peculiar Phenomenon Which Is Puzzling
+Science: Its Analogy to the Mystical Phenomena
+of the Brahm, Zen and Other Oriental Sects; Its
+Meaning and Its Future.</p>
+
+<p>With Simple, Concise and Thoroughly Practical Methods
+of Inducing the Phenomenon.</p>
+
+<p>Presenting a new and startling theory of the meaning and
+scope of the prophecy current among the ancients and
+revived at the present time, of the coming of a new
+Christ; the prophecy elucidated and explained in
+the light of To-day; what it means and what it will
+lead to.</p>
+
+  <h3>SECOND EDITION</h3>
+  <h5><i>12mo., 371 pages, cloth, gold stamped, $1.12 postpaid</i></h5>
+  <h5>SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY</h5>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h4>THE SWASTIKA SERIES</h4>
+  <h3>HAVE YOU READ</h3>
+  <h1><i>PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY</i></h1>
+  <h3>The Scientific Revelation of Natural Laws Prove the Continuity of Life</h3>
+  <h4>By<br />Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall</h4>
+
+  <p style='text-align:center;'>
+  CONTENTS<br />
+  PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY</p>
+  <p>If Man Die Shall He Live Again?</p>
+  <p>The Invisible Something That Survives Death.</p>
+  <p>A Case That Will Bear Quoting.</p>
+  <p>Seeing Through Opaque Substances.</p>
+  <p>Faith Is Not Fact&mdash;Evidence Not Proof.</p>
+  <p>Proof Must Rest Upon Individual Experience.</p>
+  <p>The Psychic Body Basis of Organism.</p>
+  <p>All Life Is Manifested in Form.</p>
+  <p>Science Stands for Axioms That May Be Proved.</p>
+
+  <h3>Price 25 Cents</h3>
+  <h4>Send Your Order Today</h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="books">
+  <h4>THE SWASTIKA SERIES</h4>
+  <h3>HAVE YOU READ</h3>
+  <h1><i>GHOSTS</i></h1>
+  <h3>The Message of the Illuminati.</h3>
+  <h4>By<br />Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall</h4>
+
+  <p style='text-align:center;'>
+  Founded Upon Henrik Ibsen's Psychological Masterpiece<br />
+  "THE GHOSTS WE MEET EVERY DAY"</p>
+
+  <p>The ghosts we meet on the street; in commercial and social life.</p>
+
+  <p>Ghosts of dead ideas; Ghosts of fear; Ghosts of false standards of morality; false ideals of living.</p>
+
+  <h3>Price 25 Cents</h3>
+  <h4>Send Your Order Today</h4>
+  <h3>CHICAGO, U. S. A.<br />STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sex=The Unknown Quantity
+       The Spiritual Function of Sex
+
+Author: Ali Nomad
+
+Release Date: September 3, 2009 [EBook #29896]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEX=THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Ritu Aggarwal, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      SEX = The Unknown Quantity
+
+                    THE SPIRITUAL FUNCTION OF SEX
+
+     A New and Startling Interpretation of the Meaning, Scope and
+       Function of Sex as Seen and Interpreted From the Inner or
+          Cosmic Standpoint. A Work That Should Revolutionize
+           the Thought of Today in its Relation to the Vital
+                 Mystery of Sex in All its Aspects. It
+                  Presents a Practical Solution to the
+                     Sex Problems of Everyday Life.
+
+                                 _By_
+
+                              ALI NOMAD
+                  [DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL]
+
+                           _Author of_
+
+  "COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT", "THE DEAD SPEAK"
+       "REVELATIONS OF THE HAND", "GHOSTS", "HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL"
+           "PERSONAL MAGNETISM", "PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY", ETC.
+
+
+                          CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+                                 1916
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1916, by
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY.
+    Copyrighted and Registered in Stationers' Hall, London, England.
+                         (All Rights Reserved)
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT IN ALL COUNTRIES SIGNATORIES TO THE BERNE CONVENTION.
+
+
+                          THE STERLING PRESS.
+
+
+                               DEDICATED
+                        TO THE CHILD OF TOMORROW
+                       THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT
+
+
+
+
+                         PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD
+
+
+TO OUR READERS:
+
+We feel justified in claiming this work marks an epoch in the advanced
+thought of human evolution. Nothing has ever been written dealing with
+the problem of Sex which is at once so illuminating, convincing and
+satisfying. To our knowledge this particular view of the sex-subject
+has never before been presented, and, perhaps it could not have been,
+owing to the fact that it is only _now_ in these days of higher
+thought, that such a view could be understood.
+
+The author, Ali Nomad, is already well known to progressive readers as
+the writer of "Cosmic Consciousness," or, "The Man-God Whom We Await;"
+a work that has made its author famous by the reprint of its many
+editions.
+
+There are signs of a new order in the relation of the Sexes already
+indicated upon the horizon of the World's consciousness as the result
+of the present world-conflict. _Today people are as ignorant of the
+subject of Sex as they are of God._ Both of these must be understood
+if the race is to progress beyond its present stage. Otherwise we
+shall pass into the long sleep of oblivion like all civilizations in
+the past leaving future generations to grapple with the same world
+problems.
+
+True or _perfect_ marriage is the most important attainment in the
+life of the individual.
+
+The author demonstrates that perfect marriage is a scientific
+possibility and that legal marriage and divorce simply conform to
+civil laws. He very clearly outlines the reason why civilization makes
+little or no progress in dealing with the social evil and other sex
+problems.
+
+The publishers place this book before an intelligent public,
+believing, that more _real_ knowledge can be gained by its study, than
+by any other known method, because
+
+_First._ The reader is brought face to face with himself, and nature.
+
+_Second._ The reader can demonstrate the truth of the propositions set
+  forth.
+
+_Third._ The methods, rules, and laws have been verified by
+  intelligent men and women who have lived the life.
+
+_Fourth._ "Sex," The Divine Principle which all human beings should
+  understand, has been presented in plain simple terms, and elucidated,
+  so that the reader _cannot_ fail to understand the true path of
+  moral progress.
+
+This volume is not a romance, a fairy tale nor a dream intended to
+entertain or amuse, but a scientific instruction which will elevate
+the individual and the race, develop self respect, self control,
+morality and love. If the propositions presented by the author are
+correct--let the standards be changed; _if_ the propositions are
+_incorrect_, they will not disturb the standards of today.
+
+                                                       THE PUBLISHERS.
+
+
+
+
+                       SEX--THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
+                     The Spiritual Function of Sex
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                              INTRODUCTION
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+  SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL                                         19
+
+    Sex the fundamental basis of the universe; sex in organic
+    life; the law of attraction and repulsion in animal and plant
+    life; sex attraction and repulsion in human life; how
+    differentiated and why; some secrets of modern chemistry; the
+    cosmic law of involution and evolution; the symbol of the
+    serpent in a new light; what is "the power of the gods"
+    referred to in ancient mythology; some erroneous ideas in
+    regard to the sex function; the philosophy of restraint; the
+    inner sex-function and its outward expression compared; the
+    senses as avenues of inspiration; the creation of form and
+    sense-objects; what constitutes a "perfect and complete
+    being?" the theory of "counterparts" and its spiritual
+    significance; is procreation the highest function of sex;
+    what constitutes the fundamental law of love? the various
+    expressions of the love-nature from inorganic to organic
+    life.
+
+                                CHAPTER II
+
+  FROM SEX WORSHIP TO SEX DEGRADATION                               29
+
+    Sex the origin of all religious ceremonies; from
+    nature-worship to sex-worship; the history of Ancient forms
+    and ceremonies of worship; how sex-worship has survived the
+    ages; how it thrives today in modern religion; early stages
+    of civilization in relation to Sex; the antiquity of the
+    symbol of the virgin and child; its occult significance in
+    symbolism; the reality of the "bi-une God;" some secrets of
+    the Ancient Egyptians in regard to the function of sex; the
+    esoteric cause of the Egyptian talismanic and symbolical
+    revival today; the secret or esoteric meaning of the
+    swastika-cross; why Aum is always typified by a circle;
+    ancient forms of oath-taking and why; the source of
+    sex-energy spiritual; how and where the idea of
+    "blood-atonement" and vicarious sacrifice originated; the
+    beginning of sex-degradation.
+
+                                CHAPTER III
+
+  PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE                          53
+
+    The consecutive order from ancient sex-worship to modern
+    civilization; the real causes of race-advancement in the
+    cosmic tidal-wave, and what it portends; why conditions are
+    as they are today in regard to sex-life; the psychic forces
+    in their relation to sex-life; some fallacies in regard to
+    Eugenics; why Greek and Roman civilization failed; why and
+    how modern civilization need not fail; why women seek to
+    avoid motherhood; women of two types; the awake and the
+    asleep; the cosmic office of the Female Principle; its
+    relation to Creation; how the superman and woman will differ
+    from the undeveloped type; what is meant by "half-gods;" are
+    women of today lacking in the love-nature; will the race die
+    out? If so, why, and if not why not? How did the "Holy
+    Family" differ from other families?
+
+                                CHAPTER IV
+
+  THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING                                75
+
+    The relation of ancient marriage customs to religion; why
+    human evolution must necessarily be slow; ancient marriage
+    customs and their spiritual interpretation; why marriage
+    ceremonies have always prevailed; customs of all races
+    compared; why the institution has a permanent place in Social
+    Evolution; the symbolism of the visible world; why Science
+    and Mysticism agree spiritually; the origin of "variation"
+    the fundamental cause of woman's subjugation; when men defend
+    "outraged honor," is it a primitive or a primordial instinct?
+    the history of monogamy; the monogamic idea and the ideal
+    monogamy; the history and cause of polygamy; the evolution of
+    the "old-maid" idea and the psychic cause of this evolution;
+    the path of the virtuous woman in ancient days; the elevating
+    power in the dowry system; the two great purposes which this
+    custom has served.
+
+                                CHAPTER V
+
+  THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION                        93
+
+    Why the monogamic ideal of marriage is right; how, when and
+    where, will marriage be lasting; the basic principle of
+    sex-union; when the bonds of matrimony are truly "holy;"
+    attraction and cohesion two distinct phases of chemical laws;
+    ideas of a modern writer; how all morality has come from the
+    ideal of marriage; some erroneous ideas of spirituality in
+    relation to the sex-function; when and why Man becomes
+    immortal; the custom and the hidden meaning in the wedding
+    ring; the symbolism of ancient marriage customs; the esoteric
+    meaning of "orange-blossoms;" the veil; the ring; the crown;
+    why these have endured throughout the ages; the interior and
+    hidden meaning of Rosicrusian symbols in respect to the
+    sex-function; women admitted to the Order and why; the
+    mystery and marvel of the symbolic "dove;" why it plays so
+    important a part in marriage customs and lover's phrases; the
+    symbolism of the ark; the egg; the drinking-cup and other
+    persisting accompaniments to marriage customs.
+
+                                CHAPTER VI
+
+  CONTINENCE; CHASTITY; ASCETICISM: THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE   103
+
+    The Ancient Greek and Roman idea of the sex-relation; why the
+    asceticism of the Dark Ages arose; why the Church instituted
+    celibacy; why the Church retained the pagan idea of "the
+    virgin;" the effect this has had upon the growth and power of
+    Christianity; lives of celebrated saints in the light of
+    Occult wisdom; why and in what way the essentials of
+    Christianity are like other religious ideals; who is "the One
+    True and Only God?" the interior meaning of the word
+    "chastity;" the difference between chastity and asceticism;
+    the unbroken line connecting ancient ideas of sex, with
+    modern; the attitude of religious systems toward women; why
+    women are supporters of the churches in modern days; the
+    "mystic bride" and the mystical meaning; William James
+    comments on the spiritual ecstacy of St. Teresa; Swedenborg
+    on "Conjugal love;" trances; ecstacies; and visions of
+    saints; the term "virgin," and its origin; the evolution of
+    sex-love to spiritual love.
+
+                                CHAPTER VII
+
+  SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?                                  119
+
+    Why we hear of "affinities" and "soul-mates" today more than
+    formerly; the great distinction between these two words; the
+    psychic forces behind woman's invasion of business fields;
+    the basis of "the unwritten law;" why affinity marriages
+    fail; the hidden reason girls look for a "rich husband;" the
+    final outcome; when and how women are "ruined;" the mystery
+    of the hermaphrodite; what is the true significance of the
+    term "androgynous?" mistaken ideas of morality in dress and
+    manners; what sort of beings constitute "the kingdom of God?"
+    the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics; the wisdom of the
+    "initiates;" the spiritual quality in folk-lore; the time
+    when "temptation" will be no more; when "naked and unashamed"
+    the race will re-enter the lost Paradise.
+
+                                CHAPTER VIII
+
+  THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED                                       137
+
+    Science and mysticism the same at root; Christian mysticism
+    versus scientific postulates; the interior meaning in fairy
+    stories; personalities and principles in mystic revelation;
+    the esoteric meaning in Mythology; are there gods and
+    mortals? the ark in religious symbology; its interior
+    meaning; what were the "tablets of stone?" the reality of the
+    "cherubim" and the "seraphim;" the inner meaning of the
+    symbolical "ark of the Covenant;" is spiritual love devoid of
+    sex?; what is the symbolical "flaming sword?"; why the Jews
+    claimed to be God's "chosen people;" what makes for "immortal
+    godhood?"; the symbolism of the "life-token" stories; the
+    symbolism of the sleeping princess; a theory that solves all
+    the problems of life; the symbolical rites and ceremonies of
+    secret orders; the secrets of the Ancient Alchemists; the
+    Rosicrucians; the Free Masons; the Hermetics; their
+    initiation rites and ceremonies explained; what is meant by
+    the "Holy of Holies?" by the "secret chamber;" and the degree
+    of "mastership;" the sexual significance of the symbolism of
+    the "templars;" the red rose on the cross; the star and the
+    crescent; what is the inner meaning of "the radiant center;"
+    why the Catholic Church opposed the order of Free-masons; did
+    the Alchemists discover the secret of metallic transmutation?
+    what is meant by "the philosopher's stone;" why it was of
+    such a rare purity; why the early Church opposed all
+    reference to sex; the distinction between "discovering" and
+    "finding;" their spiritual meaning; what was the stone that
+    was raised at Babylon: was it a phallic symbol? why the
+    average "Knight Templar" fails to attain the powers and
+    privileges of esoteric Free-masonry; what is the "gate of
+    life?" the Arcana of the Hermetics and its sexual
+    significance; the symbolism of the double-headed eagle; why
+    the eagle was an ancient religious symbol; the antithesis of
+    "the eagle and the dove" explained; the "lamb and the goat"
+    symbolism; the God-ideas of the Ancients and their effects on
+    modern life; why "riding the goat" is the usual initiatory
+    rite and ceremony in secret orders; some secret plates of
+    Hermetic orders explained; what is the "magic solvent" of the
+    alchemists? the relation of Christian symbolism to the
+    Alchemical secrets; the inner meaning of "the sun and the
+    moon" in ancient literature; transmutation: exterior or
+    interior? what constitutes "the abiding glory."
+
+                                CHAPTER IX
+
+  WHAT CONSTITUTES SEXUAL IMMORALITY?                              159
+
+    Can there be standards of morality in the sex-relation; if so
+    what are they? is monogamy the ideal sex relationship? is
+    polygamy a future possibility? why matriarchal polygamy is
+    less degrading than patriarchal; why polygamy is not the
+    ideal sex relationship; the fallacy of legal marriage as a
+    test of sexual morality; why we "cannot wrong the universe;"
+    the one commandment of "the Most High God;" what is it? our
+    modern standards the result of phallic worship; why the Roman
+    Church has survived the centuries; the interior meaning in
+    the "Holy Virgin" idea of the Church; the vital point in the
+    Roman marriage restrictions; men inherently more faithful to
+    marriage vows than women, and why this is so; the bi-sexual
+    individual the most developed; the counterpartal union and
+    its relation to marriage customs; why "affinities" are so
+    numerous; sexual infidelity an impossible premise; what is to
+    become of present-day ethical standards of sexual morality?;
+    historic ideas of sexual immorality and their influence upon
+    modern civilization; modern effects of ancient Hebraic
+    customs; why suppression of prostitution must fail; why
+    prostitution is moral degeneracy; the Oriental versus the
+    Occidental view of prostitution; why modern ideas of sexual
+    morality are fallacious and untenable; can there be a
+    universal standard of sexual morality? why present-day ideas
+    of marriage are degrading; compulsion in marriage and
+    prostitution compared; how, why, and when, the sex-relation
+    may be exalted, reverenced and deified; mistakes of some
+    "Civic Leaguers;" why, when, and how, unfaithfulness in
+    marriage is wrong; the single versus the double standard in
+    sex.
+
+                                CHAPTER X
+
+  THE PATHWAY OF LOVE                                              189
+
+    Love the Great Reality; Love the Alpha and Omega of Life;
+    Sex-love the basis of all other loves; Sex-love the true
+    spiritual love; what is love of an abstract God? Love the
+    perfect mathematician; the moral code and Nature; why we
+    cannot break the laws of God; why Love is depicted with
+    bandaged eyes; Eros and Cupid explained; why the Egyptians
+    depicted Horus with finger on lips; some symbolic caricatures
+    in modern civilization; how it is true that "love makes gods
+    of men;" why Religion has remained materialistic; Love, the
+    only vitalizing power in the universe; the arch-enemy of
+    Love; why Love never leads to disaster; why Love is always
+    pure; erroneous ideas of success and failure; what is real
+    degradation? the pathway of love from chemical attraction to
+    spiritual union; why spiritual mates must be the answer to
+    Life's puzzle; what constitutes actual infidelity? what is to
+    be done with sex relations that are not spiritual unions? Are
+    they immoral? too much made of the marriage ceremony and too
+    little of fitness; is it better to be "respectably bonded" or
+    spiritually mated? what will happen when we rid Society of a
+    belief in "impure" love; why marriage vows are inadequate;
+    puerile; and futile; when we find the "pearl of great price;"
+    why spiritual mates cannot be parted; why bonds and vows must
+    give place to mutual agreement; does spiritual union come
+    with love of God? what is the "bliss of Nirvana?" why the
+    libertine is a pauper in the realm of love; when we imbibe
+    the "nectar of gods;" why the "holy of Holies" cannot be
+    defiled; when the divine office of sex is prostituted; why
+    all sex relations may not be eternal yet moral; the mistaken
+    teaching of the church regarding sex, and the result; inane
+    ideas of Paradise; an appalling prospect of heaven; perfect
+    sex-union the incentive to aspiration; Humanity progresses in
+    spite of fear; prophecy literally true; the true business of
+    business; the final test; the Love that is merging, melting;
+    satisfying and how to attain it.
+
+                                CHAPTER XI
+
+  THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION                                         209
+
+    The spiritual cause of all physical activity; two words that
+    are of vital import today; did Jesus lie? is the kingdom
+    within an actual truth? the interior qualities and their
+    relationship to present day affairs; the fundamental
+    difference between mysticism and Christianity; the key to the
+    kingdom; the interior symbolism of "wireless telegraphy;" the
+    breeder of discord; the interior meaning of certain important
+    words; the survival of the fittest in its interior meaning;
+    the finer and ever finer forces at work; when the gods arrive
+    the half gods go; sex-force at the Center of Being; when
+    abnormalities and perversions of sex will be impossible; the
+    radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary function
+    of sex-force vitalization, not procreation; the art of
+    transmutation and the key to the gate of life; the esoteric
+    meaning of our "second childhood;" the present necessity for
+    physical old-age; the spiritual message in the doctrine of
+    sacrifice; the mystical formula for transmutation; the
+    mystery of the "Holy Grail" elucidated; the only method of
+    attaining godhood.
+
+                                CHAPTER XII
+
+  "SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"                                  231
+
+    The barriers between men and the "bliss of Heaven;" the
+    difference between mortals and gods; the character of a
+    bi-une Being; erroneous ideas of masculinity and femininity;
+    the change of the present day toward these ideas; God not a
+    hermaphroditic Personality, but a pair; some "laws of God;"
+    the ideal of union versus the idea of possession; the highest
+    manifestation of sex-love; the solar-man and the mental man
+    in sex; qualities of sex-force; is the divine man less sexual
+    than the physical? the divine fulcrum of Sex; how eternal
+    youth and life are possible; why you can not lose in the
+    "game of Love;" we cannot sin against the Eternal God; why
+    and when the "eternal equasion" is perfect; no mistakes or
+    flaws in the Cosmic scheme; how spiritual mates may find each
+    other; the true way of transmutation simple; why we have
+    "painted dolls of women;" the hearts of men; the highest
+    wisdom; some fallacies regarding the law of transmutation;
+    why the "inner vision" does not require a trip to the
+    Himalayas; why "brotherhoods" cannot insure you the way; all
+    beauty and joy the result of the divinity of Sex; life
+    mathematically just; when we shall "enter the kingdom."
+
+
+
+
+                              INTRODUCTION
+
+
+No phase of civilization can rise to the highest possibilities as long
+as the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the most
+important and the most sacred function of our being, is one of shame,
+sinfulness, lust and uncleanness.
+
+Even among those who are conscientiously trying to establish better
+social conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like the
+proper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidences
+that our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sex
+problem.
+
+Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving their
+attention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so long
+neglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fettered
+by the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart from
+materia medica, or religion, is difficult.
+
+Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of all
+the delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which should
+by right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surround
+a union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share with
+the one and only possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, there
+is nothing of shame or apology--sentiments which alas, actuate the
+so-called "modest" man or woman of today.
+
+Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate for
+public discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex is
+too indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon public
+attention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, the
+opinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truth
+and so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfied
+with offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing these
+effects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing that
+all the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching and
+thinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, and
+hold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in its
+rightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of this
+universe, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies.
+
+It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has to
+be discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subject
+must be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is our
+contention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized and
+understood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sex
+were recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function _that
+it is_, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before the
+sun.
+
+In the meantime the subject must be discussed from all points of view.
+
+It must be permitted to thrive in the light and thus it will flower
+into the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it.
+
+In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex must
+be aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal and
+reverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex,
+is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths and
+transmitted to the children yet unborn.
+
+"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings,
+proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands,
+health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes,
+benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights
+of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the
+earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification
+of itself.
+
+"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his
+sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."
+
+Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet,"
+only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental
+perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and
+everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal
+future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to
+encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of
+all life--Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting
+upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the
+very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from
+divine sources justifies such an idea.
+
+Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until
+the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be
+that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the
+more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.
+
+In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the
+subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued
+pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention
+that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred
+function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before
+the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in
+celestial spaces.
+
+                                                           THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                      SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL
+
+
+The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.
+
+Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life
+of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause
+of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction
+and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and
+centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits--or
+rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male
+and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is _Life_.
+
+The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth,
+to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various
+gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name
+for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The
+law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity.
+"The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a
+scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the
+forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible
+universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.
+
+Sex is the algebracial X--the unknown quantity which defies analysis.
+
+Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all
+over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second
+coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but
+another form of the X--the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.
+
+The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and
+within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female
+element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the
+Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of
+love is _union_. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the
+struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of
+union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union
+must come from the Center of Life--from the spiritual Reality, which
+the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.
+
+Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the
+upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the
+earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and
+social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in
+the ascendant and love demands _union_--not merely matrimony.
+
+The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending
+law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth,
+forming a circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral
+convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the
+adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and
+transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a
+circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood--victory over
+death through _regeneration_.
+
+It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but
+without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical
+sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all
+instincts.
+
+There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It
+is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases,
+sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the
+continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex
+has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor
+giving in marriage" after death.
+
+This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from
+seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere
+physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of
+spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere
+physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the
+healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as
+long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to
+the mind as "spirituality."
+
+Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem
+of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its
+spiritual function is not _less_ but infinitely _more_ than that which
+we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.
+
+Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a
+million fold, refining, purifying and _intensifying_ the sex instinct
+until it bears a relationship to the average instance of
+sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism
+bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life
+in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the
+musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the
+spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not
+mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of
+life-manifestation.
+
+We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the
+mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each
+blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and
+purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into
+the grand compositions of the Masters.
+
+"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may
+safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental
+principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses
+(senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always
+where the line demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos.
+Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex,
+and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more
+permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.
+
+Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the
+visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible
+worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the
+mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the
+animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and
+protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of
+both sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter but
+masculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rare
+instances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean that
+there is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves the
+union in one _Whole Entity_ of the two distinct principles, and by
+this fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the very
+crux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the mere
+physical expression of the law, but that the object of the
+sex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male and
+a female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being--the true
+representative of the bi-une Being whom we know as God.
+
+Absolute and perfect union is possible only at the center, the crux,
+of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol
+of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have
+for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not
+final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many
+sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not
+fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritual
+counterparts.
+
+Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it
+expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species,
+and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of
+sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident
+plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and
+perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked
+for and who we believe is here.
+
+If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical
+only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the
+spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the
+function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of
+procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend
+of life-manifestation.
+
+Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we
+find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs
+deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and
+almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of
+Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally
+rather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher
+sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely
+instinctive urge to perpetuate the species--the lowest expression of
+Love--and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there,
+and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the
+fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs
+other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we
+see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the
+god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the
+stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.
+
+In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find the
+universal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oak
+tree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon a
+plant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be the
+case, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is to
+attract to itself _its own_; that which belongs to it by right of
+Cosmic law and order and justice.
+
+All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt to
+appropriate and _possess_ that which, in the final analysis, in the
+Absolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall have
+mastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its true
+spiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth's
+creatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered the
+instinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which would
+protect and preserve, and _leave free_, will have gained supremacy
+over selfishness and the desire for possession.
+
+In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal.
+Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of
+sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that
+Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as
+babies.
+
+Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression
+than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note
+with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge
+is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the
+mammals.
+
+The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the
+harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic
+ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in
+continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense
+love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but
+it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our
+ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem
+of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the
+spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings
+learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating,
+which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their
+progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease with sex-expression.
+It permeates all their intercourse.
+
+The trait which distinguishes the spiritual man from the animal man is
+analogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep and
+lasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing with
+each other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other's
+words; contacting, as it were, each other's _inner nature_, rather
+than obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, in
+the common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives which
+their love has brought forth.
+
+Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the
+sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical
+contact, to that of spiritual union--a wide gulf seemingly; but who
+would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union
+with the Beloved One means?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                    SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION
+
+
+Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and
+inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and
+civilized, has been founded upon Sex--the inevitable, the inviolable,
+the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.
+
+Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An
+intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will
+not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an
+unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more
+worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of
+birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed
+planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life
+from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only
+shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be
+"shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It
+is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from
+spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle
+of Sex is unrecognized by them.
+
+With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which
+survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of
+worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the
+simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of
+complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries
+previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature
+makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a
+time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as
+"The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something
+higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of
+Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the
+evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.
+
+It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after
+all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The
+vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen
+to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural
+and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater
+than that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act of
+procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the
+Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman
+issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child"
+became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat
+different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may
+trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying
+fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those
+whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have
+originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as
+an object of worship.
+
+Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this
+symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and
+reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also
+enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although
+defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.
+
+The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all
+symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the
+ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance.
+At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the
+nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she
+alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately
+reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the
+reproductive power.
+
+Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began--a warfare which, if
+it had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since in
+race-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women have
+continued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until now
+the future offers a golden promise of _union_. As long as primitive
+man kept to nature worship, deifying earth as the mother who brought
+forth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religious
+practices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent of
+springtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the period
+of gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature's
+own laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasion
+of thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and general
+good-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing and
+music and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this very
+natural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness was
+accompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation.
+
+There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early
+Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the
+"Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of
+Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her
+androgynous character.
+
+Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent
+of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all
+the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as
+the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this
+day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as
+feminine.
+
+Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine,
+as were all deities; but later, when it was shown that the sun
+apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in
+succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a
+deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled
+and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from
+her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level
+of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.
+
+While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of
+life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from
+the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder
+and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the
+mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon
+the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this
+ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law
+is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we
+contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have
+prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily
+persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was
+yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really
+fundamental.
+
+From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved
+a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle
+an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female
+sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and
+sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of
+generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet
+from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves
+dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative
+organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the
+most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.
+
+The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the
+Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it
+must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful
+miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back
+over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to
+fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get
+lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more
+exalted planes of our ideals.
+
+From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), with
+all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon
+woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of
+time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be
+individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was
+established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ
+which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy.
+In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part
+the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note
+today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed
+stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of
+deification--the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?
+
+The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the
+phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni
+worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were
+celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian
+festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature
+worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic
+worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.
+
+There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called
+Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of
+Ceres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to have
+noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the
+entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the
+rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins
+distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted
+to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.
+
+Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor
+of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that
+the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male
+belonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is to
+say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this
+ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time
+would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive
+and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the
+question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that
+purity and peace would reign upon earth.
+
+This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation
+to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have
+been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because
+phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that
+not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the
+Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man
+violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This
+gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted
+sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much
+that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the
+pure and perfect union of male and female--the only ideal that will,
+or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.
+
+The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis.
+For a period of several days during the time set apart for the
+festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature
+of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue
+of inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth and
+honor.
+
+Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether
+expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent
+worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those
+qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach
+immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say
+what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs
+only to those who are pure in heart.
+
+From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy
+communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of
+the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the
+phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol.
+Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian
+supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism.
+Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a
+spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and
+reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of
+every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times
+will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how
+obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently
+associated.
+
+The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy,
+underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of the
+Central African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above the
+din of our modern commercial civilization. The prejudiced and the
+superficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremonies
+records only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences of
+depravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of the
+idea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race which
+has sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world's
+evolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races are
+today emerging.
+
+All mystic truths are expressed in symbolism. It has been said that
+these truths are "veiled;" this is true only because the observer has
+not yet learned to speak the language. The universal language is
+symbolism. In the early Egyptian, the Indian, and the Hebrew
+religions, the fundamental idea was the two generating principles (or
+we might say the two aspects of the One principle) of generation. The
+two in spiritual _union_ represented the Infinite--the Deity. The
+Hebrew word "Elohim" is plural, and means male and female united,
+forming the One Perfect and Complete Being. This union is the "Holy of
+Holies" of the ancient mystics and alchemists. We see its reflection
+and its persistence today in the Catholic service of the Mass, where
+the priest raises the Eucharist as the "Holy of Holies" in which is
+generated the Christ-man, and before whom all human devotees bow the
+head that they may not look upon the perfection and beauty of its pure
+radiance. Neither is the priest supposed to touch the chalice with
+uncovered hands. He prepares himself by fasting and prayer before he
+mounts the altar upon which this "Holy of Holies" is hidden from view.
+
+The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations is
+easily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols of
+yoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, although
+it is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it is
+only through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man can
+be born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is either
+concealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek and
+Roman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. This
+debasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and is
+unquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Roman
+empires.
+
+If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson that
+neither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but only
+different; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but that
+each little group and class of humans has its particular contribution
+to the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing the
+mind from the shackles of ignorance--that darkness which obscures our
+inner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-called
+civilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women of
+this century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we are
+different and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individuality
+is our contribution to the work of the cosmic law, which is seeking
+to lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestial
+light.
+
+The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important place
+in a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is one
+of the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximately
+four thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlier
+ideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres," the emblem
+of the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacred
+character of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterized
+as feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleur
+de lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, and
+they are called feminine, although really androgynous.
+
+The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has
+been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is
+supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But
+close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel
+in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are
+tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and
+seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new
+plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new
+life. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not as
+pronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone are
+both present in the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and not
+feminine alone.
+
+Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as the
+representative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life and
+energy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle in
+the Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although in
+reality bi-sexual.
+
+The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which the
+male principle has dominated, as the one true and only God--the giver
+of life, the energizing power of Creation--and the lily and the
+Eucharist are both representative of the Female principle.
+
+Historians mark the beginning of the worship of the _One True God_,
+defined philosophically as the "Monistic" God-idea, from the building
+of the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in the
+earliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anything
+suggestive of "confusion of tongues." The name unquestionably came
+from "babil" meaning "the gate of God." Thus only is its meaning
+obvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam and phallus
+which obtained at that time. It is also evident that the phallic
+worshippers borrowed the simile of "the gate of God" from the
+worshippers of the yoni, who based their claim to truth upon the
+indisputable fact, that out of the womb comes the life of plant, and
+animal, and man.
+
+The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel show
+conclusively that it was a monument to the victory of the phallic
+worshippers over the yoni, proving that the "one true and only God"
+was male. From that time also God has been alluded to as "He,"
+although in the Oriental countries, and particularly among the Hindus,
+we find repeated allusions to the Deity as "The Divine Mother," and
+all the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because of
+this fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions and
+philosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retained
+the divinity of the female principle in theory, but not in fact.
+
+Sex-worship is contemptuously alluded to in modern literature as
+"strange and erotic ideas," or words equally condemnatory. But this is
+an absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that the
+mystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder;
+and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomes
+erotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth," and
+when the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. It
+becomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight for
+supremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of union
+shall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form of
+religious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle of
+birth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will the
+family be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, be
+worshipped.
+
+The trinity in unity has been a widespread and persistent part of all
+religions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal has
+a permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is often
+obscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seeking
+the light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscured
+truths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions," will
+reveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modern
+concepts.
+
+But while we note a vague recognition of the female element in all our
+modern religious systems, the general acceptance of the God-idea as
+monistic and the gender of this monistic God as masculine betrays the
+domination of phallicism over yoni worship and also over that of the
+two principles in conjunction--the bi-une Deity. The tree is
+universally accepted as an emblem of life-energy. The upright shape of
+the tree; the sap which rises at certain periods from invisible
+sources; and the fact that the germinal power of the seeds of the
+fruits and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make the
+tree symbolical of eternal life. The tree is either male or female,
+except in certain instances where it is, like the lotus, androgynous,
+such for example as the ash, which is the "sacred" tree of
+Scandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, it
+has been regarded as "sacred." The same idea is found throughout all
+myths, and all religious symbolism, namely: _the attainment of
+god-hood is reached when both sexes are united in one Being._
+
+The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a
+subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the
+history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to
+that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held
+sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our
+own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and
+its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest,
+in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The
+Latin name for the pine is pinus.
+
+Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that
+step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its
+spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its
+root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the
+life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the
+male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity
+contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally
+became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the
+spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race,
+became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused
+any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.
+
+Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father,
+Son and--Holy Ghost."
+
+The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what
+of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity
+composed of three male beings?
+
+It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the
+female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian
+Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their
+reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the
+Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are
+evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the
+God-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instruments
+of the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the male
+principle as the only true God.
+
+So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modern
+thought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardly
+notice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerful
+hypnotist.
+
+Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand the
+symbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblems
+which constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems are
+the pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika.
+The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with their
+protruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with the
+mound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, which
+venerated both sexes as co-equal. It is easy to realize why the Jews
+were driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worship
+the Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing the
+phallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in the
+God-head.
+
+It is also significant that side by side with the present-day Feminist
+Movement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptian
+architecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art,
+which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on its
+artistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not with
+acclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and so
+closely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged the
+centuries and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancient
+civilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to the
+Egyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, is
+in vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobacco
+and what not (so essentially an American custom) we find the
+modernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika.
+
+The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every country
+and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally,
+originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes
+have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the
+whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizing
+its antiquity and its universality.
+
+The two sex principles, joined in the center of the four arms or legs,
+of the cross, accomplish that which is said (and truthfully if taken
+on the physical plane only) to be impossible of accomplishment--they
+square the circle. A circle is emblematical of completeness. Aum, the
+Absolute, the Omniscient, is always typified by a circle. To "square
+the circle" means esoterically to have reached godhood, and this can
+be accomplished only by the male and female _united_ in spirit. The
+swastika is essentially a bi-une sex symbol although it has been
+sometimes called male and sometimes female, according to its shape,
+which varies with the various meanings ascribed to it. Primitive man
+was not prolific in language, and one symbol expressed many ideas
+according to its varied form and position.
+
+The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of the
+generative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power was
+conceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still
+"testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substituted
+for the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognition
+of the Creative Principle, we note that the Bible is made up of
+"testaments," which stand for its "sacredness."
+
+Evidently it was only after the advent of the male God that oaths and
+vows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's word
+was reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of the Supreme Creative
+power of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential of
+union, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and it
+is estimated that about six hundred years B.C. the level of debauchery
+and vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies were
+nothing more than orgies of sex-degradation.
+
+The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility and
+power evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced woman
+to the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than a
+receptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and a
+man's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy--an ideal
+which is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is bounded
+by nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man.
+
+Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? What
+did it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answer
+the idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret of
+the generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as old
+age conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened and
+the supply insufficient.
+
+This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, they
+argued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) left
+him. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generation
+realize, although we know that old age with consequent cessation of
+physical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even our
+supposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energy
+dies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place where
+they realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know that
+old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the
+functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is
+the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not
+do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy
+into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute
+the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to
+pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay
+down his body and take it up again."
+
+There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciously
+leave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, while
+they visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is no
+more than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attained
+that we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itself
+confer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but that
+these may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service--not as
+payment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailing
+law, which gives what we demand.
+
+What we demand we naturally work for. If we serve Love, we get the
+coin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed by
+Jones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith.
+
+Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed to
+transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal
+instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty
+idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as
+before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the
+Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live
+through many years of life without having loved some person or some
+thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost
+every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision.
+The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.
+
+From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood
+was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the
+logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which
+reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and
+engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the
+"sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as
+a final act of propitiation.
+
+The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings,
+and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of
+orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible
+as he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes and
+holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by
+police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of
+the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the
+idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.
+
+In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death,
+even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races
+observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and
+the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at
+certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What
+more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of
+sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of
+the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies?
+And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God,
+they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.
+
+And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed;
+but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to
+sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the
+aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came,
+that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world,
+and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and
+trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had
+been rigorously suppressed.
+
+And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so
+they conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read of
+repeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freely
+on the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people.
+At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that the
+only Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the final
+debt of transgression and set men free from death, that they might
+have eternal life, which to them meant life in the physical body.
+
+It is not at all possible that Jesus had any such idea of his mission.
+He was far too illumined for that, even judging from the meager
+accounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story of
+his mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea of
+blood-sacrifice as _payment_ for the privilege of physical virility,
+so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, could
+not die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuries
+and is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christian
+churches in this civilized century.
+
+And yet there is an esoteric truth underlying this universal idea of
+sacrifice, and when we come to this in a subsequent chapter, we will
+better understand how and why it has persisted throughout the
+centuries.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+               PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE
+
+
+From the study of ancient sex-worship to our twentieth century systems
+of religion; our scientific discoveries; our intellectual standards of
+philosophy and social ethics; and above all, perhaps, our marvelous
+commercial order, connecting, as it does, the entire globe, seems a
+far cry; but it is only another link in a chain and fits into the past
+as accurately and as inevitably as the morning follows the night.
+
+There is an erroneous idea current that public institutions, such as
+law-courts, religious creeds, educational systems, reform movements,
+et cetera, are causes of race-advancement. As a matter of fact they
+are not causes but results. They do not determine progress; they
+reflect it.
+
+Causes start from the Center and radiate outward. We may realize this
+more readily if we will remember that if we throw a pebble into a pool
+of water, it starts innumerable little waves which traveling outward,
+reach a point some distance from the central source, and if we were to
+see the outermost wavelet only, we might imagine that the disturbance
+begins and ends far from the place where the pebble was thrown.
+
+This illustration explains the difference between the materialistic
+and the metaphysical points of view. The former notes the result, and
+the latter the cause of existing conditions. The mystical viewpoint
+takes into account the fact that there is a cosmic law which acts like
+a tidal-wave. Materialists call the action of this law "Evolution,"
+assuming that its impetus comes from our physical activities. It is,
+in fact, from the Center or spiritual source of life that all power,
+all evolution, emanates. The spiritual is the intensity of power; the
+physical is the attenuated.
+
+The term, "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporous
+space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent
+reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago,
+"The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our
+mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we see
+the effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods of
+locomotion; our architecture; our commerce--in all the avenues of our
+active civilization.
+
+We wish to emphasize the point that every so-called advancement; every
+discovery; every improvement in moral ideals as well as in mechanics,
+and in those things that add to our physical comfort, comes from the
+center of Life.
+
+The external but _reflects_ the action of the Cosmic Law which
+uncovers the vast areas of consciousness and frees the human soul from
+the hypnotisms, and the limitations of the animal-mind.
+
+Animal force is still strong in the world to-day, but it is not as
+strong as it appears to be, because much of the seeming indifference
+and cold-heartedness of the people, taken en masse, is due to the
+hurried, feverish and insistent demands of our external life.
+
+Underneath the surface, in the realm of the sub-conscious activities,
+there is developing the spirit of unity; of sympathy; and a
+consciousness of our innate relationship. This realization comes to
+the surface in times of great stress and peril.
+
+The whole trend of modern life symbolizes or reflects the _ideal_ of
+unity, albeit the tooth and claw and growl of the animal in Man may be
+seen and felt and heard in the vain effort to postpone the inevitable
+dethronement of the animal force, which would dominate the weaker and
+appropriate for the personal self, the creation of brain and hand,
+much as the house-dog, satiated with over-feeding, buries the bone he
+cannot eat lest some hungry brother-dog shall get it. Nevertheless,
+despite the animal greed that still shows in our modern life, there is
+plenty of evidence that we are on the upward spiral that leads to
+unity--the effect of love.
+
+The superficial observer, dominated by that instinct of fear which
+seems to be so ingrained in our animal nature that we are all slaves
+to it in some form or degree, sees in the present-day conditions a
+menace to what he believes to be the moral life of the race, and
+particularly as these conditions apply to the modern woman.
+
+He sees women coming out of the seclusion of their "rightful sphere"
+and meeting men on terms of equality. He sees what he terms "immodest
+dress;" defiance of traditional ideas of etiquette and conduct; he
+notes what appears to be a disregard for the faith of our fathers;
+and, above all, a distaste for that special function of
+woman--child-bearing. The superficial observer, both male and female,
+feels great alarm.
+
+But let us not be dismayed. Present day conditions, particularly as
+they relate to the female principle of Creation, but reflect the
+inevitable reaction from a one-sided course. The pendulum swings back
+again and ultimately we will strike a balance; from domination to
+unity; from struggle to harmony. Even American commercial life admits
+the value of a vacation time.
+
+Present day conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in a
+well-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything that
+disturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm to
+the undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern life
+which directly affect women, or in which we may say, the Female
+Principle is especially concerned, we note a determined and united
+demand for freedom.
+
+Woman's demand for political equality is but a shadowgraph as it were
+of the real demand which is the demand of the Divine Feminine
+throughout all manifested life, for recognition of equality, in the
+plan of creation. It is a symbol of the ideal of unity which finds
+expression in the commercial world in trusts and labor unions; in the
+"let us get together" plea of the various advocates of reform; of all
+those enterprises which are seen to most directly affect the entire
+human family.
+
+That there are women who are blind to this fundamental idea of their
+demand for political equality is true; and it is also true that there
+are perhaps as many men as there are women who recognize the need of
+woman's political and social equality, but this only proves the fact
+which we have already emphasized, namely that it is not women as
+personalities, but the Female Principle throughout the universe that
+is at the root of the modern Feminist Movement. The male principle is
+not confined to the form of man, neither is the female principle
+always expressed in the form of woman. Many men exemplify more of the
+maternal instinct than do certain women; neither must it be assumed
+that this type of man is effeminate; or that the woman of Amazonian
+physique is more masculine in thought and habit than is the little
+frou-frou specimen of womankind who looks appealingly into the eyes of
+her male escort, beseeching protection from the rude stares which she
+has premeditatedly invited. Qualities are sexless and universal. It is
+only in their specific combinations that they adequately represent the
+masculine or the feminine gender.
+
+Blessed are they who have learned the art of discrimination.
+
+Broadly speaking, women are behaving in a manner which upsets all
+precedent and promises ultimate emancipation from restraint.
+
+But is it not possible that women no longer need restraint if they
+ever needed it? Is it not possible that the world has grown up, and
+that both men and women may safely be allowed the freedom of
+self-government, with all possible mutual aid in the work of
+establishing an upright, free, and trustworthy science of right
+living?
+
+That which is always in the future is never ours and if we are ever
+going to be free and happy and well-conditioned there is no reason why
+we should not make it soon.
+
+Woman's demand for political equality is sometimes used as an excuse
+to lessen her dignity and her place in society. People who do this are
+of the same type as those before whom Sex cannot be discussed
+intelligently because they do not realize the sacredness of Sex. They
+are a remnant of the ages which have passed and which have left their
+mark, in the idea of a half-sexed God, the "He," the spouseless Father
+who brought forth the visible universe apparently without co-operation
+with the Female Principle. This type of person prates much about the
+dangers of race-suicide, meaning thereby the increasing tendency to
+childlessness and not as should be taken into account the death rate
+among children who are born of diseased and unfit parents and brought
+into existence without the necessary conditions of sanitation, food
+and care.
+
+Our national Eugenic societies are hampered by false ideas of what
+constitutes morality, being bound to uphold the tradition that the
+child that is born of married parents, no matter how diseased in body
+and deficient in mind, is better-born than is the offspring of
+unmarried parents, even though the latter may be a model of physical
+health and mental efficiency. Eugenics will remain limited in scope
+until such time as the entire world adopts "in spirit and in truth"
+the recent action of the European governments, and recognizes the
+legitimacy of all children however born.
+
+And although the action of the European governments was born of
+nothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiers
+might be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the human
+race. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended to
+all children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the cruel
+and unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents.
+Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and although
+it seems a terrible price to pay for even so badly a needed reform as
+this, Humanity has always paid dearly for its willful blindness. It
+certainly should be evident to any sane mind that every child that is
+born into this world has a moral and a legal right to be here.
+Whatever may be said for or against parents, it is wicked stupidity to
+brand an innocent child with the epithet "illegitimate." The lowest
+animal has a right to be born. Many a beautiful and innocent child is
+denied that right.
+
+If it has taken one of the most bloody wars in history to establish
+the right of birth, even so the struggle will not have been in vain,
+because this right, once established in the hearts of all Humanity,
+will forever do away with warfare. No doubt this assertion will sound
+far-fetched to many, but the future will see the vindication of this
+belief.
+
+Birth is actually the most important function in life. If it is
+immoral to be born, no matter what the conditions of such birth, what
+possible chance have we to live morally? We cannot discriminate in
+dealing with the great fundamentals of life.
+
+This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws are
+inviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child of
+the beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of the
+unmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into the
+world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may
+not be always polite, but she is always truthful.
+
+As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth,
+Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because
+Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we
+are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the
+conditions of a part.
+
+Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some
+circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into
+account our ideas of respectability.
+
+The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate
+for women to have children before they have been married?"
+
+The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be
+permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do
+it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must
+begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried
+woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society
+is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state,
+because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of
+maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries--both of which result
+from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.
+
+If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy
+by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world
+_desired by the mother_ is born in accordance with the highest
+possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and
+Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child
+because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of
+men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be
+one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present
+time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and
+condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.
+
+When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.
+
+As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of motherhood, it is
+inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of
+child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who
+would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more
+perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make
+motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might
+not see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life.
+We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We are
+always seeking to check effects.
+
+The average human being is little more than a phonographic record of
+the dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious.
+
+Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we will
+find that the birthrate will increase among the "rich and
+respectable," where now we note a determined desire to shirk the
+responsibilities of parenthood.
+
+We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will be
+alarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is the
+ideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationships
+are neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established only
+between free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choice
+mean life and health.
+
+The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from
+self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases
+tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious
+selection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love is
+inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of
+all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however
+well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical
+aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the
+effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease
+and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no
+real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to
+Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher _ideal_,
+rather than a higher _order_. The higher order can come only by
+getting back to primal laws.
+
+The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were
+competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two
+important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for
+beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but
+both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the
+world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a
+civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was
+like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble,
+and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but
+freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.
+
+Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was
+unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of
+force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal of
+sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important
+requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the
+element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must
+take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give
+the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted
+in, finally results in decadence.
+
+We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of
+those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of
+education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are
+embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious
+example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a
+marriage between a brother and sister--a custom which prevailed among
+ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well
+believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain
+that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love.
+Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.
+
+In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to
+exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established
+that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions
+only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and
+intellectual.
+
+Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of
+"Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful
+physical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul
+and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we
+instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.
+
+Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual
+behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end
+and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid
+maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's
+rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.
+
+Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish
+and unselfish--are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer
+rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women
+living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if
+they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of
+semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light"
+housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the
+nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry
+minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready
+made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under
+these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light
+housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.
+
+Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged
+from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to
+apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated
+apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say,
+notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a
+cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something
+back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day
+life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem
+deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always
+upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.
+
+This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates the
+average woman, who is able physically and financially to bear children
+and yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with the
+planet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developed
+and the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain falls
+upon the just and the unjust alike.
+
+Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change in
+human ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an ideal
+in which equality shall be more nearly represented and they give
+themselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regenerating
+work.
+
+The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension of
+it. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduate
+from it or we return for another term, according as we have mastered
+the studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and we
+see that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth has
+two aspects. One is from apparent selfishness and lack of the
+temperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to women
+as an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct.
+
+The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to a
+restless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of the
+Feminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimes
+we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the
+cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically
+termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and
+they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind.
+
+Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can put
+into words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing is
+not a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life.
+Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle for
+completeness knows intuitively, that even though she may never beget
+mortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exercise
+of her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, which
+seemingly separates us from invisible areas. Moreover motherhood is
+qualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made nor
+unmade by the birthrate.
+
+Two important considerations present themselves to the world today: One
+is that woman--considered as the fecund receptive sex-principle--is
+refusing the sex relationship on the old basis, however "respectable"
+and well-intentioned that basis was. Generally speaking, it is evident
+that the old basis of intercourse between the sexes has been, is
+being, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied, refused, as the
+approved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The other important
+observation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this.
+
+It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-conscious
+limitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of a
+condition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerable
+divorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why are
+women refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live with
+their husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they less
+courageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable of
+love--either love of children or love of the father who begets the
+children?
+
+It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of love
+than ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the first
+time in the history of many generations, what we owe to the future.
+Formerly men built entirely for self, and for the immediate present.
+We can look back and trace the development of a race consciousness
+from the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriers
+between races and nations and sects and societies, as also between the
+sexes, slowly dissolving.
+
+Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying a
+political, or educational or religions platform with an Occidental.
+Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existed
+between the Jew and the Gentile--now they exchange pulpits, and all
+sects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women are
+elected to political and educational offices. No matter that these
+evidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are _promises_ of the
+birth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when a
+man's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediate
+family only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at the
+expense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate of
+any other women and children.
+
+To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of the
+self interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and is
+not, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated our
+hair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were best
+conserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is that
+Love has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or more
+altruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of love
+is to expand; to grow; to _give_ of itself until unselfishness must
+come with the final aim of love, which is _unity_ and not possession.
+
+We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and more
+inclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves the
+higher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal of
+love is possible to the woman of today than ever before. We must take
+into consideration the average of the sex, at the same time not
+forgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities of
+both sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing and
+unselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope,
+the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealing
+with principles and not merely with individuals.
+
+Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal or
+conjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may then
+ask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusion
+that women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demand
+conditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind.
+They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfect
+race--a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and claw
+and choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over the
+possession of bones.
+
+Ever and ever we have been promised the coming of the perfect man--the
+"man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously
+active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged
+under the domination of the animal nature which subdues and
+appropriates.
+
+A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union.
+Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite the
+gods to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merely
+reproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall be
+something more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction.
+This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according to
+the development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union is
+coming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type of
+union, but also as the initiative of the promised time when the
+kingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens.
+
+All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief in
+its efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surely
+vain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keeps
+his promises," which is simply one way of saying that the law of the
+cosmos is reliable.
+
+"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God," but both must agree
+that whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. There
+can be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in which
+Love is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree of
+logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also
+so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on
+the physical plane--a manifestation of life which even physicists are
+bound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities.
+
+We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of a
+decreasing birthrate as we see it on the physical plane. There are
+many other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and the
+planets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is the
+axis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony.
+
+The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principle
+is refusing maternity, and above all the _bondage_ of matrimony for
+the important reason that the time has come for the rearing of the
+Man-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex,
+superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sense
+gratification.
+
+Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Why
+should it not manifest in this most important of all our systems of
+intercourse?
+
+The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacred
+or holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishment
+for indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more than
+half ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of a
+cosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operated
+with to advantage.
+
+Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood.
+Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony is
+always marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children.
+And there are many women with children who know not the first faint
+dawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) love
+which comes most often in the guise of motherhood, but which is
+always present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other's
+inner nature.
+
+If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and the
+rightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evade
+motherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of all
+life; if they will not rest until every child that is born into this
+world is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is given
+every advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moral
+training, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only to
+rival each other in the quality and the perfection of their
+motherhood.
+
+The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating the
+birthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to prevent
+conception, may be well meant as these things are consistent with
+prevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to the
+problem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule,
+children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and provided
+for.
+
+Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparatively
+every woman would be normal under proper social and economic
+conditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because of
+lack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because of
+lack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modern
+mo-loch, Public Opinion.
+
+When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of his
+children. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to be
+free from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving her
+free to be guided in the most vital and important function of her
+life, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Love
+will establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no other
+power on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachments
+nor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love is
+the only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God.
+
+Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will be
+superseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and when
+this comes to pass, Humanity will rise to that ideal.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+                  THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING
+
+
+Any attempt to discuss subjects pertaining to the sex-relation with
+intelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact that
+sex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices,
+reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted to
+sex-worship and sex-degradation.
+
+It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and to
+make a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" of
+matrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, so
+to speak, the social institution of marriage.
+
+Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which are
+based upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to the
+prejudices and "beliefs" of the average.
+
+Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting and
+fundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudices
+must be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature's
+confidence and be the sharer of her secrets."
+
+The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark of theological
+bias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previous
+discovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend his
+God"--as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it--were not
+capable of self-defense.
+
+It is due to this mistaken zeal on the part of the short-sighted ones,
+that human evolution is slow, albeit it is likewise inevitable.
+
+They are like those who, viewing the wrecking of a ruined habitation,
+condemned by the Board of Public Safety, try to stop the process of
+the workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have been
+cleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable building
+will be put up on the same ground; and anything from the old
+architecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the new
+building.
+
+The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protect
+them from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from their
+brothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes a
+desirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home,
+rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study of
+history should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changes
+in human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods wait
+upon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand for
+improved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to be
+bidden, "Enter, Friend."
+
+As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals. Until there is a
+more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite
+certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does
+duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor
+thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many
+complaints as a hypochondriac.
+
+But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of the
+fundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning of
+recorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, very
+satisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in social
+and individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from a
+study of the history of marriage.
+
+There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all
+phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees
+all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the
+exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external,
+world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the
+everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a
+succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long
+anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres
+and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual
+events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far
+distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which
+meets his eye.
+
+Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according to
+their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted
+and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.
+
+Humanity is ever seeking the Reality--the Noumenon, which we
+intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.
+
+The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages,
+side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the
+sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and
+ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human
+ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.
+
+Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution,
+obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of
+forms is common.
+
+And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change
+and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family
+species, as we have in the human family.
+
+Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some
+animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.
+
+Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the
+animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is
+obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific,
+to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is
+greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild
+and domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic
+life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are
+slaughtered for food.
+
+The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the
+male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and
+rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself
+very early among the various families, from motives of self-protection,
+if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numerically
+strong.
+
+In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life,
+and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some
+species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist,
+preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only
+with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say
+that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.
+
+It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A
+mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner.
+It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a
+creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided
+in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power
+undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it
+may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no
+temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habit
+would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping
+with the eagle character.
+
+The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among
+birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social
+institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are
+just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward
+trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite
+and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is
+recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of
+today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy
+obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not
+reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.
+
+Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as
+sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and
+also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a
+night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging
+head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of
+marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a
+marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In
+these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and
+generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In
+fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were
+easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seems
+to have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continue
+the family.
+
+Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the
+very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had
+no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family
+was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female
+heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he
+would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her
+family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became
+the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.
+
+Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually
+acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his
+"possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of
+conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized
+idea of "earning."
+
+Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this
+respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost
+general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence
+as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he
+kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy
+with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his
+wife's person.
+
+In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity
+within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide
+under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a
+martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are
+given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had
+taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the
+following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found
+prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your
+silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How
+much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these
+pestilential marauders?"
+
+Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in
+defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The
+inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the
+average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of
+man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of
+free-will.
+
+Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the
+possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more
+ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.
+
+Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what
+constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same
+idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much
+investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another,
+actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male
+are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent
+methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she
+has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for
+"outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions
+through the safer channels of the law-courts.
+
+The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a
+part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral
+code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
+This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to
+themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense
+being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of
+satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably
+respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her
+neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual
+matters, "as long as he provides well for me."
+
+When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes
+morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is
+governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.
+
+It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary
+expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize
+the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense,
+which besmirch the path of Evolution.
+
+Thus the tendency to aesthetic selection, always more pronounced in
+the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false
+valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.
+
+In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove
+many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not
+like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her
+claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare
+bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we
+may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman
+of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the
+"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which
+critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized
+our grandmothers.
+
+Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating,
+everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency;
+and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the
+right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by
+capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.
+
+One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the
+world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman
+approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal,
+except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the
+gens of the family.
+
+These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal
+status of women has been, as it is now, no more than what the
+evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.
+
+It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per
+se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either
+better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our
+idea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women
+in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which
+would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it
+has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best
+has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of
+personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in
+him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at
+first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically
+conceded _his children at least_ first place; although the wife was
+hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.
+
+Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and
+among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his _Evolution of
+the Family_, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the
+Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtless
+the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle;
+it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was
+necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold
+to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious
+servant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she
+might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the
+Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no
+other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her.
+Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be
+able to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the moment
+of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."
+
+The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia,
+although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the
+same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the
+Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that
+neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for
+centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes,
+where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has
+been, and still is, deplorable.
+
+In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most
+inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her
+husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male
+children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and
+mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she
+allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice
+for her.
+
+This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous
+woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of
+women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class
+was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of
+power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law
+unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced
+prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on
+terms of at least temporary social equality.
+
+Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the
+independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in
+ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the
+prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the
+most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love
+out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although
+this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation,
+inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with
+so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the
+evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served
+two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;
+and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the
+aristocratic class from extinction through decadence.
+
+As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a
+degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages,
+they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and,
+as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of
+wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the
+freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of
+their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I
+have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and
+houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils."
+
+One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece
+and Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their
+civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically
+was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in
+which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of
+procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished.
+Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase
+"between the devil and the deep sea."
+
+Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for
+the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took
+her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the
+transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily
+to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she
+would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse.
+
+In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the
+rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife
+was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to
+the eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in
+a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our
+social ethics.
+
+It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct
+influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred
+years of Christian civilization among the white races.
+
+Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have not
+molded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, when
+esoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union means
+equality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; race
+equality.
+
+We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enough
+to explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems to
+be the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret to
+say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the
+construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect
+to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas!
+confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced by the professional
+man.
+
+The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is
+judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of
+foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of
+what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge;
+and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicity
+of ideas and customs and creations.
+
+Differentiation is the primal attempt.
+
+Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first of
+all she is different from, rather than identical with, men.
+
+The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "feminine
+frivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessing
+that in her natural environment she does not consider herself his
+equal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she may
+deceive herself and others into thinking she is.
+
+An individual is important to Society in proportion to his
+originality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; some
+hitherto unfamiliar view.
+
+Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, a
+consciousness of our unity with all life, we find that although
+religious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasized
+in the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity should
+have been established, segregation has been the rule, and it is
+without any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Church
+that we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and her
+co-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not a
+consummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world.
+
+That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in the
+wake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction with
+religious systems; and a determined disregard for what has been
+presented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religious
+creeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best they
+have been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom is
+the great liberator.
+
+The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in America
+and Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science,
+mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" into
+its literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the variety
+of new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety of
+names that we cannot here enumerate them.
+
+Nevertheless, we are still many leagues short of realizing this ideal,
+despite the preachments in its favor. Politically, the ideal of unity
+is presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, and
+Suffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "let
+us get together on this," and in efforts at legislation that shall
+control corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hours
+of work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by the
+rising sun of unity.
+
+We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, in
+order that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: What
+does marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of the
+social body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entire
+Cosmos?
+
+Has it any real place and purpose beyond that of procreation, or any
+more spiritual function than the perpetuation of the human species?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+              THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION
+
+
+Notwithstanding the patent fact that the institution of monogamous
+marriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain that
+any other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race.
+
+Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promise
+of the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfect
+image of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for.
+That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallen
+far short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizing
+that the ideal is right.
+
+Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meeting
+and the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfect
+complementaries.
+
+In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritual
+counterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base of
+union, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all the
+laws of men be employed to keep them tied to each other in the body.
+If two persons belong to each other by the inviolable law of spiritual
+counterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep their
+souls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in the
+flesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"--the word meaning whole;
+entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they may
+be judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and any
+attempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint of
+exterior judgment must fail.
+
+The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highest
+ideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for that
+reason insist that marriage as a social institution is always complete
+and holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulus
+of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical
+attraction and cohesion--an instinct, which we share in common with
+every form of life, from the lowest insect to man--shall they be
+compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" in
+the physical body?
+
+We would say, "Heaven forbid!" only that the appeal is unnecessary.
+Heaven does forbid, and that is why we see so many attempts to disrupt
+these immature relationships.
+
+"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passional
+attractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all the
+motions, growths, and activities in the physical and moral world,"
+says a writer, and he adds: "The failure to attain the desired end,
+and the warfare between uncongenial and repulsive elements is the
+cause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in both
+spheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would be
+no storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If the
+marriage between the individual will and understanding, between the
+interior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regenerated
+men upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriage
+between the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise."
+
+Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons of
+opposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every other
+activity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because of
+this union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; all
+morality comes from the ideal marriage--the union of Wisdom and Love.
+To imagine that a function, so vitally important to our exterior life,
+should have no place in the phases of life which we know as "higher,"
+is a manifest absurdity, and comes from those attenuated concepts of
+what constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; concepts
+which, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord," have
+temporarily defied modern progress.
+
+There is no wide gulf between the spiritual and the material worlds,
+although the material is but an imperfect reflection of the basic
+principle of life.
+
+Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature is a system of
+nuptials," says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit or
+Divine Life.
+
+How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degrading
+sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only,
+we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types
+of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that
+Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret
+of eternal and never-ceasing union of complementaries.
+
+Take, for example, the symbol of the wedding-ring. This custom,
+varying only in unimportant details, consistent with the prevailing
+social custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days.
+The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently by
+both bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circle
+of wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one," of the
+finding by each of "the other half." The circle is always used to
+express the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "without
+beginning and without end."
+
+According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of pure
+gold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might not
+acquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something more
+than mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability to
+sustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. It
+symbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this priceless
+blessing of perfect conjugal union, other than by his own efforts.
+Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartal
+union--which means actually "twain made one," comes only by dint of
+strife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life.
+
+Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that of
+drinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life," at the completion
+of a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of the
+bride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; but
+more generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Wine
+drinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can be
+enjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life--the
+divine or spiritual sex-union.
+
+This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness the
+truth that only complementaries have the power to act and react,
+without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfect
+balance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction less
+than the other, perfect balance is lacking.
+
+Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was the
+donning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly included
+the bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to the
+bride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greek
+marriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads of
+both bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged.
+
+We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. We
+have the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; and
+the circlet which symbolizes eternity.
+
+The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows
+the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love;
+which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal
+truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until
+we are _fit for the kingdom_.
+
+The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremony
+symbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritual
+marriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life,
+shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the wedding
+veil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of the
+physical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shall
+know our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we have
+found that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge of
+our every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entire
+panorama of the universe becomes an open book. There is no "visible"
+and "invisible;" it is all One, with our own bi-une sex nature for the
+pivotal center.
+
+So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man that
+we are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not sooner
+penetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven," we say of
+some self-sacrificing and loving soul, and the phrase suggests to
+most of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all their
+splendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning which
+the splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes.
+
+Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature is
+in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are
+symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant;
+luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of
+the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of
+gems--diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?
+
+It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is their
+luminosity--their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the power
+which we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has a
+corresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have all
+things which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell us
+that all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Either
+they tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not the
+way."
+
+The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown of
+gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its
+esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating
+to the spiritual marriage--counterpartal union.
+
+Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritual
+body, the body also becomes sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, we
+remember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weeds
+are unregenerate flowers.
+
+Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human body
+is a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. The
+changes produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything which
+the experimental chemist has ever discovered in nature.
+
+It is a fact well known to the pathologist that an unwilling wife,
+however faithful she may be, if forced into the sexual act, may
+present her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; nor
+is this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized fact
+that anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructive
+thought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body.
+
+In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriage
+of Christian Rosy Cross," which is, when read with the key to its
+esoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between the
+sexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of the
+Rosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets,"
+which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicrucians
+and other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union of
+the male and the female principles throughout nature and culminating
+in man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through the
+perfect balance of sex.
+
+It has been said that women were not admitted to the Brotherhood of
+the Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there is plenty of evidence
+to prove.
+
+Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation of
+the sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, it
+became necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires of
+Esoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; in
+consequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the very
+heart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory,
+unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiated
+into the secret code.
+
+In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so far
+succeeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women were
+excluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of the
+secret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by side
+with this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbols
+has been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixed
+with frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to the
+Virgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenith
+of its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and,
+either through fear of the influence of their work, or possibly
+through lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, had
+employed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power of
+the Church.
+
+This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter devoted to "The
+Hidden Wisdom," and so we will leave it for the present.
+
+One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in the
+intimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove with
+the ceremony of marriage.
+
+The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. The
+turtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for the
+fervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for the
+devotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if
+either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to
+death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are
+happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a
+symbol of peace.
+
+Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure
+prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from
+ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying
+over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth,
+the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of
+life. Let us also remember that they issued _in pairs_.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI
+
+  CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE
+
+
+From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function
+was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages
+of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost
+general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex
+function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in
+common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par
+with gluttony.
+
+Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization
+that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially
+materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it
+occupies today in fine stock-breeding.
+
+Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude
+toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the
+history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was
+evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather
+erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it
+sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.
+
+In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the
+normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he
+experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we
+must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the
+sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a
+revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.
+
+Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy,
+except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that
+women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took the
+best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of
+wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the
+orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all
+these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and
+beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it
+came in the idea of asceticism--an instance where the remedy was worse
+than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was
+not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of
+licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as
+something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who
+should have known better.
+
+The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which
+fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were
+inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than
+from any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note a
+militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of
+woman's claim to free expression.
+
+While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church
+instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy,
+but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained,
+from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy
+Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the
+inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted
+children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their
+comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath
+the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are
+gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes
+to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old,
+nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been
+to hold to this central truth of all Life--religious, social,
+national, and domestic--the truth that it is only by exalting the
+maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour
+of mankind.
+
+And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be
+the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church
+itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"--the pure Love between one
+man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour
+that ever was or ever will be--the pure Christ-child that is born of
+conterpartal union.
+
+Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a
+city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that
+even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a
+pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the
+omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of his
+discovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have been
+swallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember also
+that this central idea has been the foundation of all religious rites
+since time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric of
+Christianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, he
+will see that it has merely been _revealed_, and the revelation will
+prove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual and
+the most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that Perfect
+Love is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withhold
+Heaven from us, if we have this perfect love.
+
+Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every other
+religious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true and
+only God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears;
+according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-une
+God, will be our spiritual development.
+
+We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when we
+abandon it as unclean and unworthy and unholy; both attitudes are
+abnormal, and unbalanced.
+
+Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balanced
+person is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balanced
+individual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced and
+therefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced and
+healthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; this
+fact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is now
+considering, to wit: the earth's axis may be straightened, and, if so,
+a uniform temperature will prevail on this globe.
+
+Returning to a consideration of the subjects which head this chapter,
+we find it necessary to clear the ground a little, in regard to a
+definition of words.
+
+The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in the
+matter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of the
+sex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The word
+has come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from the
+sex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, that
+any indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, our
+modern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestly
+paradoxical that they are absurd.
+
+On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful and
+holy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as an
+indecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh.
+
+We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible only
+because of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taught
+that sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lower
+state of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we are
+told that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, where
+there is no such "polluting sin" as sex-love.
+
+We certainly do need balance.
+
+The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the
+undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid
+of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our
+minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person;
+it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not
+surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection
+with the male. It is strictly a female attribute--nay, we may almost
+say, "organ."
+
+If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of
+opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression,
+or--which occurs more frequently--as a commercial expediency,
+believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial
+market--if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes
+bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is
+extolled.
+
+This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a
+bridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should
+the evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature
+was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the
+arch-enemy of both sexes.
+
+And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may
+look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the
+Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their
+sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon
+the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery,
+among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of
+that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the
+deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related
+by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen
+years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by
+her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had
+"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the
+same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered
+quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always
+over-crowded with similar sales.
+
+Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings
+keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage;
+inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious,
+blissful life.
+
+Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed
+to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price
+for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual
+deception has been the rule.
+
+Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the
+wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story
+of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman
+brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly
+from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given
+birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author
+made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and
+coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of
+the clerical critics.
+
+When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever
+held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld
+almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one
+hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in
+the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the _One primordial, and
+indestructible key to salvation_--the birth of the god-man through the
+recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.
+
+But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there
+is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to
+regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in
+sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic
+aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently
+described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."
+
+If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it were
+profane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view of
+mysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would be
+able to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack.
+
+The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance and
+ecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Either
+they will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is due
+the subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or they
+must be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns all
+sexual desire--that of eroticism and innate and ineradicable
+depravity.
+
+Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, the
+paroxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to the
+Holy Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedly
+obnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtue
+of prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to an
+ideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual,
+then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at once
+both explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "the
+mystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using the
+terminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physical
+union than the word "married") was the "bride-groom;" more than that;
+she declared that she was married with a ring, set with precious
+stones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring.
+
+Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employ
+when exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is
+singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of
+the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and
+exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the
+dilettante lover.
+
+To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed within
+themselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age of
+sexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human love
+spiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal to
+that of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for the
+intensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them into
+such an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the bliss
+of the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, and
+were totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-called
+practical life.
+
+Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his
+"Varieties of Religious Experience," says: "Her idea of religion seems
+to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so
+without irreverence--between the devotee and the Deity." Although this
+estimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless be shocking to
+the people who think they are pious, we take an optimistic view of it,
+and suggest that the saint's idea of religion is far more satisfying
+than that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most of
+the female saints, became "the bride of Christ"--the _man_ Jesus, the
+Christ, let it be remembered.
+
+St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gave
+herself up so wholly to this inward contemplation; to fasting, prayer,
+and withdrawal from the outer to the inner life, that she lived as the
+"bride of God," in such daily contact with Him as would fitly describe
+any love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God"
+indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses and
+compliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover.
+
+In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that he
+selected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and
+"consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning with
+love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity." In consequence of this
+vow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautiful
+women.
+
+Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were not
+so, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as the
+object of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, and
+Theresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the Virgin
+Mary.
+
+"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse with her guardian angel,
+who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun and
+with a crown of glory on his head."
+
+St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved with
+extravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "a
+young man of such radiant beauty and purity that he melted her soul."
+
+The truth is that, in seeking to escape from the "sin" of human love,
+as seen in the world, in the union of the sexes, they touched the very
+main-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown to
+the merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritual
+sex-union.
+
+Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints really
+came into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms of
+holy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequently
+appear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?
+
+The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must be
+interpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in these
+instances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology,
+that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even though
+the visions did relate to some person other than the members of the
+Holy Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would have
+been attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint.
+
+They were practically compelled to include God and Christ in their
+ecstacies to prove their respectability.
+
+One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which
+"flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularly
+applicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described by
+those who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborg
+so constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights." This
+phrase is "melting love." It is a feeling of melting or merging into
+the other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed by
+the two souls. In fact, it is _union_; whereas the lesser, or we may
+say the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but _contact_.
+
+If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives of
+the saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we are
+sorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages,
+which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all we
+may know of the "love of God," is by analogous comparison to what we
+know of human love.
+
+If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitably
+arrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In which
+event, the very word itself would have lost its significance.
+
+The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects of
+saintliness lies in the realization that neither the saints
+themselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had any
+conception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened and
+unprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly ecstacies,
+postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, be
+objectionable, what can be said of the only other view which is
+possible in the light of the evidence submitted?
+
+Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we must
+needs decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue.
+
+For example, consider the character of a mother of the
+self-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of the
+human family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect the
+generations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with an
+unmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of the
+opposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment;
+upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of this
+self-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even common
+affection. Who is the more chaste?
+
+Coventry Patmore says:
+
+  "Virgins are they before the Lord,
+    Whose souls are pure. The vestal fire
+  Is not, as some mis-read the Word,
+    By Marriage quenched, but burns the higher."
+
+If purity of soul were synonymous with celibacy, the entire
+constantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished;
+but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward the
+divine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purer
+conception of love. As we approach a higher type of civilization, the
+broader, deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. The
+more spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and our
+love-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual love
+is less sexual than is physical love. Spiritual love is physical love,
+_plus_ all the other phases of love.
+
+The real objection to sex love on the physical plane is not based upon
+its strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than an
+attraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, it
+has no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like the
+electrical wire that is "short circuited," it expends itself in one
+spasmodic combustion.
+
+True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common and
+erroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process of
+subtraction.
+
+We need go no further than to review the processes in the external
+world of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of the
+spiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea of
+exclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called
+"spiritual."
+
+All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Where
+formerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we now
+harness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces of
+electricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering between
+two single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions of
+persons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness, as we
+approach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging;
+drawing within.
+
+The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to the
+female pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in external
+life. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid the
+suction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, and
+union between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth to
+individual human life, and we have what?
+
+_Counterpartal Sex-union._
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                    SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?
+
+
+We have heard much in recent years of "affinities," and "soul-mates,"
+and we are likely to hear much more in the future. So much that is
+unsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that we
+almost hesitate to employ them; but that is always the way with Fear.
+It builds a high wall between us and Truth, and dares us to scale it.
+
+We accept the challenge.
+
+To begin with, the words are not synonymous, although frequently used
+as such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes and
+appetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages of
+development may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highly
+intellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend to
+attract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtue
+of mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only--that is, when it is
+because two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskey
+diluted; or their wine iced--we are apt to find the result in a
+mistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for the
+reasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which to
+draw. The chemistry of the body changes with time and emotional
+experiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from a
+congeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived.
+
+Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches a
+state higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos.
+
+Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to the
+senses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; but
+back of thought is desire; and back of desire is design--cosmic design
+we may say--expressing itself discretively; in individuals.
+
+Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of a
+finer nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-conscious
+attraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons of
+the opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference for
+each others' society which deceives the average on-looker into
+thinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of fact
+there may never have been any thought of such relationship.
+
+A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, or
+Margaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion of
+men for many years without having entered into any more intimate
+relationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past,
+and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirable
+companionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seen
+twice with the same man without having the neighbors speculating as
+to a suitable name for the baby.
+
+More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settle
+themselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectual
+affinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from the
+old thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse,
+and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexual
+appetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane of
+intellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or by
+the force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking to
+spoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature did
+not intend it to be so.
+
+A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beings
+now accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes,
+a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. He
+was a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of a
+degree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; she
+was moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a month
+of married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community,
+remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval and
+shocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendship
+with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the
+ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.
+
+The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be
+"yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual
+predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire.
+And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an
+idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It
+is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an
+idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.
+
+Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon
+personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other
+to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it
+still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in
+the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.
+
+A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived
+together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they
+agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They
+agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either
+come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given
+without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor
+and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of
+civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.
+
+True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to
+be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her
+up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual
+companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and
+disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which
+is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the
+animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality
+than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By
+exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended
+or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to
+fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized
+man vents his remaining savagery.
+
+Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And
+while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some
+degree of mutuality, are a step higher in social development than were
+the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic
+exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where
+woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an
+"old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must
+go through an evolutionary phase.
+
+Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust,
+these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and
+mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they
+evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual
+affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency
+than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was
+heard so frequently as it is now.
+
+The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since
+women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage
+bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more
+frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically
+independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have
+been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences.
+And it is at the _evidence_ of marital unhappiness that all the
+criticism is directed.
+
+If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce
+tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to
+the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal
+moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother
+is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood,
+whether she is a wife or not.
+
+This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many.
+The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become
+chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public
+morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are
+our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they
+are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first
+be demolished, before they are rebuilt.
+
+The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one
+single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals,
+that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the
+whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest
+change in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we go
+on year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word of
+the Century. If "self-improvement," then social improvement. Mankind
+is still in the making, as far as external conditions are concerned.
+
+The complaint goes up from every side, that women refuse motherhood.
+Girls who have been carefully reared, brought up in the most orthodox
+movement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention of
+finding a rich husband and not, emphatically, _not_ having any
+children.
+
+May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girls
+who become mothers without first becoming wives?
+
+We are wont to refer to unmarried mothers as "unfortunates" and
+"ruined." But in what does the misfortune consist, and wherein are
+they ruined?
+
+Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because she
+has loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any way
+except that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nigh
+unforgivable stupidity?
+
+The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain
+famous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respect
+in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no
+husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place
+accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's
+well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of
+perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband,
+but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"
+
+We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example,
+and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard
+child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said
+that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but
+observation should convince us that in all too many instances the
+first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime
+against posterity.
+
+We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a
+husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We
+endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we
+insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the
+greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the
+sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the
+unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one,
+when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes
+courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a
+hypocritical world.
+
+The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and
+happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in
+the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence,
+alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will
+be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no
+power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may
+temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.
+
+What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention is
+that affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we may
+have many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possibly
+have more than one soul-mate.
+
+Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves that
+make a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merely
+similar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because of
+curiosity or dissimiliarity.
+
+They belong to each other because together they complete a perfect
+balance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balance
+the qualities lacking in the other.
+
+In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, and
+re-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, instead
+of merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this external
+plane of consciousness.
+
+Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, because
+the real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interior
+nature exists independently of the physical organism.
+
+Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This is
+manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the
+avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing
+called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we
+note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom
+the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuries
+the race-thought seeks the underlying cause for specific effects,
+instead of, as heretofore, being satisfied to deal with effects only,
+suppressing those that are unpleasant and extolling those that seem
+agreeable.
+
+The scientist expresses it thus: "Nature is giving up her secrets to
+man." The metaphysician puts it this way: "The soul of man is
+unveiling, and soon we shall know each other in Truth." The
+religionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St.
+Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "we
+shall see each other face to face; not as now through a glass,
+darkly."
+
+This tendency to "get behind the scenes" as it were, to penetrate the
+crust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature,
+may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders of
+denunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who are
+not yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and
+"respectability," women have insisted upon freedom of the body in
+dress until at last the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad woman
+excites little adverse comment. The fact has at last established
+itself that the female form has legs.
+
+This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted to
+see exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman has
+always known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the game
+of enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her
+"meal-ticket." She could always keep him guessing as to whether or not
+she had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund of
+curiosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed to
+woman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donning
+the matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have always
+known this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageable
+daughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped to
+secure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressed
+thus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of the
+respectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is the
+standard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would have
+us retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies are
+vile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an idea
+of modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit has
+fled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it was
+founded upon the idea that woman was an instrument of the devil
+himself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked,
+and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innate
+defilement.
+
+The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admit
+women to the communion table in the "holy sacrament." A fine chance
+has any sacrament of being holy, with one half of it missing!
+
+The old idea of womanly modesty consisted of blushing with shame and
+embarrassment if by chance her ankles became exposed to the interested
+and curious gaze of a male. Notwithstanding this ideal of modesty, the
+designing and beguiling female managed to arrange just such a
+contretemps every time there was an eligible male within sight; if
+discovered, she either assumed a look of infantile innocence, or she
+took the opportunity to coax a becoming blush.
+
+To be sure, this does not accurately describe all women of "the good
+old days." There was the other type.
+
+Nature manifests in extremes. There was the type, fitting ancestors to
+those women of to-day who are outraged and shocked at the present-day
+fashions, which actually disclose the fact that women are
+anatomatically endowed with legs and hips, quite in defiance of man's
+inherited predilection for making this discovery under conditions that
+would pamper to his satiating sex-appetite. They, poor creatures, were
+dreadfully ashamed of being women, and they did all that was possible
+to conceal the fact. They, doubtless, would gladly have amputated
+their legs, if the ministers had so decreed, and they apologized to
+the world every time an unforseen circumstance uncovered a portion of
+these offensive legs. In fact, they denied the existence of "said
+members," and alluded to them tentatively and with modest hesitation,
+as "limbs."
+
+"But," some will exclaim, "we cannot see any possible connection
+between a regenerated race, and a fashion which permits the display of
+the female figure upon the public streets, where men who are as yet
+un-regenerated, and licentious, may leer and pass vile remarks, and
+suggest lustful thoughts."
+
+Few can see any connection between our so-called practical, everyday
+life, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life as
+something remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distant
+future. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that we
+postpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the human
+family has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdom
+come upon earth," they apparently have not had the slightest idea that
+God would take them at their word.
+
+They are like the old darky who called upon "de Lawd to strike him
+dead if he was not telling the truth," when as a matter of fact he was
+lying roundly. At that moment a bricklayer on the building above where
+Rastus was standing, dropped a brick, which struck the old darkey on
+the head, and he exclaimed "What's de matter, good Lawd, caint
+you'all take a joke?"
+
+The Kingdom of God, from all records, whether orthodox or heterodox,
+has been described as the abode of angels; and angels have been
+pictured as nearly nude as our silly "morality" would permit. No one
+has as yet suggested that we compel the angels to wear hoopskirts,
+although "September Morn" has been compelled, by police regulation, to
+don a sweater.
+
+The spiritual life awaits our cognizance, just behind the transparent
+veil of our limited mortal consciousness. This is the message of the
+"unveiling" of the female form. This is the time of woman's revealment
+of true modesty; true ideals. The Female Principle, representing the
+spiritual element in nature, hitherto shut in; covered up; hidden--is
+coming out.
+
+Men must learn to be able to look upon the female form without spasms
+of either lustful desires; or contemptuous indifference.
+
+There was a time when the presence of a female office-force in the
+business section of a city was the signal for unwarranted familiarity
+on the part of some of the male members of a corporation. There was a
+time, when women first invaded the ranks of the "down-town" business
+centers, that a woman's appointment to a responsible position rested
+upon her claims to feminine attractiveness. Now, the only question
+asked is, "Is she efficient?"
+
+_That which she is, in her interior nature, is the final test of her
+power._ When men have become inured to the knowledge, so long
+concealed, that women have legs and that there is no more
+seductiveness in them than in their faces, the love of man for woman
+will undergo the same evolution that his estimate of her business
+efficiency has undergone. He will judge her by what she is in her
+interior nature; and his sexual desires, now manifested distractedly
+in mere love of the female, will become concentrated in love of the
+one woman to whom his soul turns in irresistible sex-attraction, as
+unerringly as the needle turns to the pole to which it is magnetized.
+
+Is this fact so unmanifest? Does not everything point to it?
+
+A few years ago, a man and a woman could not pass a day together in
+mutual conversation, and interest, without encroachment upon the one
+emotion which they were supposed to hold in common--sexual attraction.
+
+That was indeed the whole sum and substance of communication between
+the two sexes, if we may except the rare instances which history has
+made much of, because of their rarity--women of the French salons, who
+have become famous for their wit and beauty, in neither of which
+attributes did they outstrip the average self-supporting woman of
+today.
+
+But custom has slowly, but perceptibly, established the possibility of
+a frank and non-sentimental companionship between the male and the
+female, and the result is that both are much more clear as to the true
+character of their sentiments toward each other. Neither is blinded
+by the force of undifferentiated sex-attraction.
+
+There must be some specific basis of mutual love; hence we have the
+vogue of the "affinity," and by the term is instantly recognized a
+special force of attraction, independent of undifferentiated sex
+alone. It is known that there is at least an assumption of an interior
+attraction, and we insist that affinity marriages, however incomplete
+as yet, are still superior in motive to that of mere marriage, where
+it is a case of _a_ male and _a_ female, united by propinquity; family
+considerations; commercial interests; class association; or what not.
+
+Affinities at least have the grace to presuppose a special
+sex-attraction. They argue for the ultimate goal of special and
+permanent selection, even if they fail to reach it.
+
+That there will be many failures during the journey from the
+sense-conscious life, to the soul-conscious life, is a foregone
+conclusion. The pathway of Love has always been a thorny one, but
+those who are on the high ground may look across into the rose-strewn
+garden, and know that the little god is aiming his arrows at the
+interior nature of those whom he would unite. He is not blind. His
+sight is illumined and he sees that the soul can unite only with its
+mate. True it is that "the course of true love never did run smooth,"
+but let us hope that the time is coming when it will be less thorny.
+
+_There are no mismates in soul-union._
+
+This truth is the "secret of secrets" of the Hermetics. It is the
+hidden wisdom of the initiates; the alchemical mysteries of the
+Ancients. It is told to us in the fairy story of the Sleeping
+Princess--a story which is found in the folk-lore of every country of
+the globe. It is the philosopher's stone, which when found, opens the
+door to all wisdoms.
+
+_There can be no mismates in soul-union._
+
+Neither can there be any sexual "temptation," or desire outside of
+this union, when once found.
+
+  "But never shall he faint or fall
+  Who lists to hear, o'er every fate,
+  The sweeter and the higher call
+            Of his true mate.
+
+  I hear it wheresoe'er I rove;
+  She holds me safe from shame or sin;
+  The holy temple of her love
+            I worship in."
+
+A time when "the twain shall be" virtually, "one flesh" and the
+"outside as the inside" is not a chimerical dream.
+
+When the physical body is as much reverenced as is the spiritual; when
+in fact, the soul is revealed (unveiled) to our mortal consciousness;
+when the mind has been freed from its load of prejudices and fears and
+doubts and belief in sin; then we shall, indeed, truly see each other.
+
+We do not see each other now, unless perhaps we have developed that
+spiritual insight which is not blinded by appearances, but which
+contacts the interior nature. But the revealing, the uncovering
+process has begun. We have come to the time so long anticipated; so
+earnestly promised, when "naked and unashamed" we should "re-enter the
+lost Paradise."
+
+Well, the women, God bless them, are as naked as the tender morality
+of our police officials will permit and as unashamed as it is possible
+to be with the handicap of a puritanical ancestry, which was so
+evil-minded as to suspect God himself of sin when He formed the
+"wicked" body.
+
+Prudists may howl; and legislators may legislate; but the course of
+the Cosmic Law which would free us and bestow upon us Peace and Love
+and Happiness without stint, has never been stopped, although it has
+been obstructed.
+
+Let us examine some points of the Hidden Wisdom, in the light of this
+postulate, and see if the conclusion is not warranted.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                      THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED
+
+
+As we have previously observed, there is what may be termed a
+religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from the
+standpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is in
+everything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of the
+same subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticism
+itself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distance
+view of science.
+
+Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noise
+over calling each other black, we find the scientist frequently
+disdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equal
+disapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from his
+point of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of the
+same pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at the
+cause. In their final calculations they arrive at the same conclusion,
+although they call it by different names.
+
+The scientist says that everything proceeds from the one eternal
+energy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with the
+external. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest." In
+reference to this definition of religious mysticism, perhaps the
+phraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism,"
+is the best possible exposition of the position of the religious
+mystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religious
+mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of the
+living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attempt
+to realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal in
+the eternal, and the eternal in the temporal."
+
+Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using other
+terminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimately
+say, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms of
+discovery.
+
+The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to
+measure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrum
+somewhere beyond."
+
+The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of the
+Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the
+hypothetical base of algebraical science--the unknown quantity of
+which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from
+cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete,
+perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have
+deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercise
+the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is a
+most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with the
+same superficial idea that they entertain in regard to puzzles, saying
+"it is only a puzzle"--utterly ignoring the value of exercising the
+inductive reasoning faculties.
+
+Fairy stories are popularly supposed to be for the entertainment and
+amusement of children. In reality they are the universal language of
+symbolism. There is not a single fairy story which has not been handed
+down from generation to generation, and, what is more suggestive, each
+story is told with astonishing lack of variation, in every tongue and
+throughout every nation on this earth.
+
+The stories involving the turning of men into animals and their final
+restoration to human form, as a reward for some service, some
+sacrifice, typifies the two-fold nature of Man. He may live in his
+animal, or exterior nature; or he may develop his spiritual, or
+interior nature; through service; through unselfish love. Our limited
+mortal consciousness is responsible for the tendency to personify
+everything, instead of to realize the principles underlying all
+expression. God and the Devil have been the personification of the two
+phases of the principles of Evolution, from animal man to spiritual
+man.
+
+Romulus and Remus have been presented as an actual and specific
+instance of twins; likewise Castor and Pollux. Almost every child
+instinctively alludes to himself or herself, as either "the good
+little me" or the "bad little me." "O, I didn't do that; it was the
+bad little Dorothy," or "Harold," as the case may be, is the
+child-like way of expressing the innate consciousness that there is
+an interior and an exterior nature to all of us.
+
+The union of gods with mortals, which forms the gist of Mythological
+tales, symbolizes the god-like and the mortal qualities inherent in
+human nature. Mortals raised to the abode of the gods; and the gods
+descended into mortal life; symbolize the interchangeability of what
+we term matter and spirit--the power of transmutation of the lower
+into the higher life.
+
+Volumes could be written upon the subject, and we will therefore try
+to confine our reviews to the symbolical traditions which deal most
+directly with the relations of the sexes.
+
+In religious symbology, the story of the ark stands as the supreme
+type of creation, through the conjunction of the sexes.
+
+The cherubim are, when all is said and done, nothing more, nor yet
+less, than spiritual children--the result of spiritual sex-union.
+
+And in this later synoptic mysticism of the ark of the Covenant, we
+are informed that "every gift within the tabernacle is willingly
+offered." If we will but contemplate the volumes of wisdom contained
+within that sentence, we cannot fail to conclude that every
+infinitesimal particle of coercion in whatsoever shape and form,
+individual, economic, ethical, or religious, must be excluded from the
+regenerated, perfect, ideal sex-relation; otherwise we do not attain
+it.
+
+If the Ancients seemed to take some of these folk-lore stories too
+literally, we of this "practical" age, do not take them literally
+enough.
+
+We have imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended in
+the physical. This view is excusable in the case of the materialist,
+if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for
+the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life.
+Since sex is the cause and the result of what we know of creation;
+since it is the foundation of all the qualities that we know as
+spiritual laws; friendship; unselfishness; fidelity; paternal
+solicitude--it is absolutely certain that the most beautiful things we
+know here must have a correspondence in the life hereafter. Of these
+beautiful things in life, babies come first; with birds and flowers
+and music as fitting accessories.
+
+But to return to the ark of the covenant. The perpetual flame on the
+altar (the center) is the undying Flame of spiritual love--and by that
+we mean sex-love, let it be understood. If we seem to repeat this too
+frequently it is because of the almost general habit of the race to
+apologize for sex-love. The erroneous idea obtains, that spiritual
+love is sexless. All too frequently we come across the phrase, "with a
+love that has in it nothing of human love," the writer evidently
+anxious to convey the impression of tremendous spirituality and the
+consequent elimination of the sex function.
+
+And so we emphasize once more, and we may do so again, the assurance
+that the symbol of the never-dying flame upon the altar is typical of
+the never-dying spirit of sex-love. Spirit is ever symbolized by
+flame, as in the "flaming sword" of the archangel.
+
+The Deity upon the seat of the altar symbolizes the bi-une
+Sex-principle of creation.
+
+The reason that the Jewish people have claimed that they were "God's
+chosen people" is because, in their symbolism of the ark of the
+Covenant, all Israel was grouped under the tabernacle. The formation
+of the tabernacle proves that it typifies the mother's womb. The
+tabernacle was guarded by the priests who _were sworn to purity_; thus
+they symbolized the esoteric truth that the pure spiritual sex-union
+bestows immortal god-hood.
+
+Let us take another story, that of the life-token. This is best told
+in the story of the Holy Grail, although it is found in all the
+fairy-books of all nations, in the language and form befitting the
+race to which it belongs.
+
+In the original, that is in the earliest recitals of this life-token
+story, we find that the thing left behind, as a _center_ (which is
+always guarded and protected in various ways), was a tree. Here, we
+have the phallic symbol as the life-token. But in the story of the
+Holy Grail, the cup is the life token to be guarded; it is the sacred
+symbol of the quest and it is of a design resembling the red rose of
+the Templars. This time it is the yoni--literally the _chalice_ of the
+_holy communion_; the centre of the radiant circle, which is the
+answer to all the problems within the radius. It is the search for,
+and the finding of, the balance in counterpartal union. It is the X of
+Being, and only the purest and the noblest of the Knights of the
+"Round Table" essay the difficult quest. The "mound of Venus" is
+another name for the "Round Table."
+
+Again is emphasized the necessity for purity, and this purity,
+although including all the spiritual qualities: fidelity; bravery;
+self-sacrifice; humanity; love of truth; culminates in sexual purity.
+
+"Blessed are the pure in heart (the pulse of the soul) for they shall
+see God." We revise this latter part, and we say "for they shall be
+_gods_."
+
+Let us consider the story of the "sleeping Princess." She is depicted
+as a princess, first of all, because she is the daughter of a king; a
+king is an earthly ruler, or exalted person. Esoterically, she is the
+daughter of the exalted God, and she is the soul. Sometimes this story
+is told in the male gender, but everywhere the essential points are
+the same.
+
+Wagner, who is known as a Mystic, has illustrated the story in
+Brunhilde and Siegfried. Brunhilde is an immortal--a goddess, who
+renounces her immortality to become a woman.
+
+She sleeps on the top of a high mountain and she is surrounded by a
+circle of flame; and here she sleeps, despite all efforts to arouse
+her, until awakened by the touch of Siegfried--the one human being in
+all the universe who could awaken the sleeping princess.
+
+The high mountain symbolizes the highest love of which we are capable.
+To reach the soul of the exalted woman, typified in the fairy-story by
+the word princess, and later, by Wagner, as the goddess, man must be
+her mate. _No other can enter the womb of her soul_, though many may
+effect an entrance to the outer court.
+
+This truth, as absolute as life itself, solves all the problems of the
+mystery of love and its joys and sorrows. No soul can wholly,
+unreservedly love the "wrong" one. Though we may love and die of the
+pain of unrequited loving, yet love is its own self-justification, and
+its own reward. The pathway of love leads up the mountain top, but no
+one who reaches the summit shall fail to find that for which he seeks.
+
+The soul of man, and of woman, has been playing a game of blind-man's
+bluff--a fitting name for the game it is, too. Unable to see anything
+but the exterior nature, and longing for success in the search, we
+have frantically grabbed here and there, and appropriated that which
+we grabbed, with a self-complacency and an egotism of which little
+Jack Horner would be ashamed.
+
+In the symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders, such as the
+Ancient Alchemists; the Hermetics; the Rosicrusians; and in modern
+times, the Free Masons, we have this story of the search for the
+ultimate balance of soul union, told in language veiled unless we are
+fit to know; but openly enough if we are fit. And in all these orders
+(alleged guardians of the hidden wisdom) we have varying degrees of
+initiation; and in each degree the initiate must undergo certain
+trials to prove his fearlessness; his fidelity; his fitness, in other
+words, for the final revealment of all, which is the initiation into
+the "holy of holies;" the "secret chamber" and the degree of
+"mastership."
+
+In the order of Masonry, the highest degree is that of the Templar.
+The symbol of the Templars is the red rose on the cross, together with
+the star and the crescent. The star preserves the esotericism of its
+nomenclature, in whatever sphere it is used, namely, the power of
+radiating light. It stands for the radiant center. The Knights Templar
+sought the radiant center to complete their half circle, and when they
+should have found, they were to become radiant with the light of
+spiritual power. That they originally at least, understood the way of
+this initiation, is evident by the symbol of the rose and the
+cross--the combined phallus and yoni.
+
+This fact is the underlying cause of the open and hereditary enmity of
+the Church of Rome for the modern order of Freemasons. The Church
+sought to specialize in the persons of the Virgin Mary and her Son the
+eternal principles of the "way of the cross." The temporal power of
+the Church could be built up only by offering a complete system of
+salvation within the church itself. At the same time, the utter
+degradation of Sex, which had reached its depths under Roman
+civilization, called for as complete a reversion of the ideas of the
+Ancient sex-worshippers, as was consistent with the truth.
+
+Hence we find the extreme attitude of the Church opposing all
+reference to sex as other than a part of the temptations of the Evil
+One, although they did retain the central truth typified by the Holy
+Virgin Mother, and the pure and perfect child.
+
+The Alchemists are supposed to have been imbued with the desire and,
+to some extent, at least, were regarded as having the knowledge of how
+to make gold. This gold-making was always accomplished by
+transmutation of the baser (lower) metals; also, the knowledge of how
+to accomplish this transmutation was possible only to one possessing
+"the philosopher's stone."
+
+If we will but remember that this "philosopher's stone" was of such a
+purity that it was almost impossible to find it; that, although
+several initiates claimed to possess the stone, yet no visible proof
+of its existence, or of gold resulting from lead or copper, was ever
+offered; and again if we will realize the fine distinction between the
+words "found" and "discovered," and take note that the word "found" is
+used almost invariably in connection with those who claimed to possess
+the stone, we will arrive at the obvious conclusion that the secret of
+the Alchemists was of an interior nature. We "discover" outside of
+ourselves; we "find" within. Above all, the "stone of great purity" is
+the same that was raised at Babylon, supplanting the yoni, which is
+to say, the phallic symbol.
+
+A philosopher is one who is wise in his interior nature; his wisdom is
+of the esoteric quality; we do not apply the term "philosopher" to
+either great educators, or great financiers; but to those whose
+activities are turned within.
+
+The force which is manifested in the lower desires and passions, when
+transmuted into spiritual channels, opens the door to the golden light
+of illumination.
+
+To become in reality a Prince of the Rosy Cross bestows the exaltation
+and the power, typified by that of an earthly prince--one who is
+exalted above the common man.
+
+It is doubtful, indeed, if many of the ancient alchemists attained to
+this exalted degree in its true significance; and we may readily
+believe that in an age in which wealth was so eagerly sought; temporal
+power so much desired; where deception was almost general; that few
+lived the requisite purity of life to have accomplished the
+transmutation; so today there is not one in a thousand of the many who
+have taken the degree of "Knight Templar," who recognizes its esoteric
+meaning.
+
+But words have a trick of trapping us, and we note that the word
+"taken" is invariably used in referring to modern Masonic initiation.
+Verily they have "taken" the degree in its outward semblance. They
+have not attained to its powers and privileges.
+
+Nor can they do so, when they exclude the very "gate of life" from the
+order. They may become masons (builders of the temple), but how can
+they become Architects, when they have not entered the tabernacle?
+
+In a search for hidden meanings, and for a secret tradition which is
+believed to be discoverable in Kabalistic and Hermetic literature, we
+find, if we possess true insight, the one indubitable truth,
+subordinating all the other symbols, namely that of the supremacy, the
+finality, of the sublimated sex-union, resulting in immortal
+mastership.
+
+Most modern interpreters of the archives of these ancient philosophers
+ignore the sexual significance of the arcana, but a glimpse at the
+symbols will readily convince the initiated of their identity with
+sexual symbology.
+
+For example in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi
+(Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate
+used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes
+"had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The
+sexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but this
+may be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of the
+alchemical symbols, or it may be due to a materialistic tendency on
+the part of the compiler.
+
+The plates, however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed to
+Basil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "The
+Great Hermetic Arcanum," the supreme and significant point of the
+illustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through which
+the initiate travels in his search for the supreme god-head, two
+doves, holding in their beaks a crown. The doves are perfectly
+matched. The crown is balanced between them, and the figure tops the
+circle, under the heading "regeneration."
+
+In another plate, which the author presents as "the Philosophic Cross,
+or Plan of the Third Temple as prophesied by Ezekiel," we note again,
+that the crown of the symbolical temple represents the red rose upon a
+cross, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle with
+outstretched wings, shielding her little brood, and on either side a
+tree and a flowering rosebush.
+
+Here is the symbol par excellence of generation. The creative function
+of the male and the female in procreative conjunctivity.
+
+The employment of the eagle as a religious symbol may be traced back
+to the civilization of the Hittites.
+
+Only a few years ago, two English archaeologists discovered a
+double-headed eagle in Asia. This was identical with those seen
+perpetuating religious rites and ceremonies of the sex-worshipers. An
+eagle holding in its talons a serpent is an emblem well known today.
+The origin of the adoption of the eagle as a religious, though not
+necessarily a "sacred," symbol by prehistoric races, may easily be
+imagined, if we consider that the eagle is a bird of tremendous power;
+and that it soars to unreachable heights; and that it unquestionably
+was at some time seen to swoop down and carry off the serpent,
+possibly even during their ceremonies of serpent-worship.
+
+This idea becomes quite convincing when we also remember that the
+ceremonies of the serpent worshipers were carried on, as far as
+feasible, upon the mountain. We allude to this stage of religious
+history as "serpent worship," but when we realize the points of
+analogy between the serpent and the phallus it is apparent that the
+serpent was only the nature-emblem of generation, as manifested by the
+male principle.
+
+"The eagle and the dove" is a phrase employed today to illustrate the
+law of antithesis, and it is more than probable that the eagle
+represented the lower nature of the sex-relation, in juxtaposition to
+the higher, as the dove is emblematical of the spiritualized aspect of
+sex-love. We have an analogy to that of the eagle and the dove in the
+Biblical allusion to "the last day; when God will separate the 'sheep
+from the goats,'" Here again is a pertinent reference to the sex
+nature. The goat is a symbol of sensuality and lust, principally
+because he has perverted sexual proclivities, notably that of
+coercion. For this reason, Classical Mythology employs the satyr, a
+creature half man and half goat, to typify the lowest form of the sex
+call in man.
+
+On the other hand, the lamb is the type of gentleness and affection,
+and although in outward appearance the lamb and the goat are not
+dissimilar, their natures are antithetical.
+
+In estimating the God-idea of the Ancients, many mistakes have arisen
+by confounding religious symbols with the "sacred" symbols. The
+race-mind was in its kindergarten stage, and all ideals were instilled
+by means of pictures--a method which even the present hour finds most
+effective.
+
+In modern theological symbolism we have God and the Devil; Heaven and
+Hell; angels and demons, to illustrate by antithesis.
+
+They all belong to religious symbology, but only those which teach
+spiritual ideals are denominated "sacred."
+
+"Riding the goat," alleged to be the almost invariable initiatory
+prelude to fitness for membership in all secret orders, means, first
+of all, that the would-be initiate must have control over his lower
+sexual desires. If he cannot control the goat instincts within his
+nature, he stands small chance of taking the higher degrees of
+spiritual regeneration, through transmutation.
+
+In another symbolic chart presenting the secrets of alchemical
+transmutation, we find depicted "The Gate of Eternal Wisdom," and we
+are further informed that this "gate" also brings "knowledge of God."
+The design of this cave-like aperture should betray its esoteric
+meaning. It is situated under a mound, upon which trees are planted.
+The inscriptions on the corrugated walls of the cave, are evidently
+designed to resemble seven lotus petals, and are set forth as the
+seven mysteries. Inscriptions warning against profanation of this
+sacred gate, and also promising eternal life and glory to the true
+initiate, inspire the intrepid and deter the doubtful. Of these
+latter, several are outside the entrance. Two are on the steps leading
+to the mouth of the cave but their attitude bespeaks doubt of their
+worthiness. Only one has penetrated to the radiant center of the
+aperture, and there is room for but the one to enter the radiance of
+the solar gate, which truly bestows a knowledge that is "of God."
+
+Sex Symbology is a subject that calls for a large volume devoted to
+this special side of it, and we cannot hope to do more here than to
+touch a few of the almost universal proofs of the contention which is
+the purpose of this book, namely, that the supreme goal of life,
+typified in every religion, every philosophy, and in the intuitional
+knowledge of the human mind, is spiritual sex-union; and that this can
+be accomplished only by counterparts; the two halves of the bi-une god
+seed uniting in one immortal and complete pair--a man and a woman.
+Not, we must again emphasize, not in a hermaphroditic personality, but
+in two perfect complementaries--mates; not _one_ but _a pair_.
+
+In another exposition of Hermetic secrets we discover the amazing
+statement that "the alchemist is found working throughout, in
+conjunction with a woman of the art; _they begin and they attain
+together_."
+
+This should be plain enough. Small chance, indeed, either would have
+of attaining alone. But if this suggestion is not sufficient (and
+either from design or from failure to comprehend the significance of
+it, the translator seems to have missed the point), we are introduced
+to a symbolical figure-study, which shows a Chalice in which the sun
+and the moon are personified (the solar-man and the solar-woman), with
+the god Vulcan (fire) seated between them. Underneath this "twain-one"
+symbol a mortal man and a mortal woman are kneeling on either side of
+a cone-shaped and dome-tipped furnace, which is lighted by a feeble
+candle. But their attitude of prayer bespeaks the hope that this
+earthly flame will be transmuted by their prayers and aspirations; by
+their reverential attitude toward the divine character of the function
+of mating, into the immortal and unquenchable flame typified by the
+god of fire himself.
+
+In another series of symbolical plates, purporting to be the story of
+Metallic transmutation, but representing, above all, the story of
+manifestation from the Divine to the human and again to the
+spiritualized and perfected Adam and Eve--(the solar man and the solar
+woman), we again see that from generation to regeneration the work is
+accomplished by man and woman in conjunction.
+
+These plates bear the hall-marks of Christian appropriation of
+Hermetic symbolism, as peculiarly applicable to the Church, but the
+central doctrine of salvation through sex-regeneration, is retained.
+Whether consciously or not, is a question.
+
+Modern commentators and translators of alchemical literature insist
+that such documents are palpably related to the secret, or secrets, of
+metallic transmutation. That they prove the search for, if not the
+existence of, a "magic solvent" that resolves the baser metals into
+gold; but, as far as known, such a compound has not yet been
+discovered or, if it ever was, it has since been lost and evades all
+attempts at rediscovery. But if we read these alchemical treatises as
+they relate to transmutation of sex-love from the pro-creative
+function to regeneration through spiritual or counterpartal union
+(solar mates), we have the key to every statement.
+
+A writer tells of an instance which is recorded among alchemical
+archives, where "an unknown master testified to his possession of the
+mystery" (supposedly of metallic transmutation), but it is added that
+"he had not proceeded to the work because he had failed to meet an
+_elect woman_, who was necessary thereto." In other words, applying
+this statement in its obviously logical sense, the unknown master knew
+the esoteric meaning of the alchemical postulate, but not having met
+his female complement, he could not testify to the results of this
+transmutation. An "elect woman" would hardly be necessary in the work
+of metallic transmutation.
+
+Small wonder that the "alchemist" abandoned the work of turning lead
+and copper into gold. If he had found the key of keys, he cared little
+whether lead were lead, or whether gold remained gold, or melted into
+thin air. The golden light of illumination showed him all things in
+their purpose, and gold as a metal meant no more to him than did the
+so-called "baser" metals.
+
+Commenting upon this statement, the translator observes: "Those
+Hermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if a
+record of spiritual experience, present, like the literature of
+physical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism: the marriage of
+sun and moon; of a mystical king and queen; a union between natures
+which are _one_ at the _root_, but diverse in manifestation; a
+transmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein."
+
+If we will remember that the solar-man was personified by the Ancients
+as the sun; and the solar-woman by the moon, we have the first and
+salient points of the original Hermetic secrets, however much they may
+have degenerated from their spiritual to their physical application.
+The probabilities are that owing to the disapproval of the Christian
+Hierarchy, only the most veiled terminology was permissible. This view
+is more logical than is the one that the esoteric meaning was lost
+sight of.
+
+The marriage of an hypothetical or "mystical king and queen" bespeaks
+exaltation of the two conjoining persons, male and female, but this
+exaltation is in consciousness, and not in mere personality. The
+terms "king" and "queen" are nothing more or less than symbols of an
+exalted (spiritualized) state.
+
+And, in passing, we may here mention the fact that the language of
+lovers testifies to this intuitional realization. "My queen!" exclaims
+the enraptured lover, although in social station his beloved one may
+be only a scullery maid; and certainly, neither the beauty nor the
+goodness nor the wisdom of earthly kings and queens would be
+sufficient to inspire the comparison.
+
+It is ever the soul calling for the mate who, when found, will exalt
+the "twain-one" into the immortal powers and immortal wealth
+imperfectly symbolized by earthly rulers, making "right royal queens
+and kings of common clay."
+
+The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between two
+natures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation." And
+the alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promised
+that, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out of
+which all manifestation is composed," it only remained for someone to
+discover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substances
+in a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, could
+be dissolved into its constituent parts and re-solved again in the
+proportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared to
+say could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would not
+even be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interior
+transmutation, because having attained to the radiant center, he
+would realize the "glory of the worlds," and gold, as metal, would be
+to him of far less value than the emerald of the grass; the pearls of
+dew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; the
+laughter of children.
+
+How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think it
+worth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even consider
+the ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of his
+labors.
+
+But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure and
+unquenchable love--that were indeed worthy of ages of research. For
+are we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek and
+find? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the glory
+of the world? Is it fame, or wealth, or lands, or gems or kingdoms?
+
+Love is the only glory worthy of the name.
+
+  "For Life with all its yield of joy and woe
+  And hope and fear--believe the aged friend--
+  Is just our chance at the prize o' learning love."
+
+When we realize the esoteric meaning of this aspect of the ancient
+alchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole,
+manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to the
+fourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "transmutation which
+follows this union and the abiding glory therein," is the inevitable
+and logical sequential answer.
+
+An _abiding_ glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability.
+Transmutation is not synonymous with, extinction, or elimination, or
+abandonment. We _transmute_ the lower into the higher, the exterior
+into the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sum
+and substance of the "Ancient Wisdom."
+
+There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane of
+life, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to assume
+that Sex is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, or
+any other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are not
+distinctively separable anyway. They are merely _names_ which we use
+to distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness.
+
+The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariably
+misinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption of
+individuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, sexless Thing;
+but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than that
+bringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided,
+would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than
+bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting
+the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article.
+The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable.
+
+It takes two to make a pair. Mistake it not, and further, there is no
+_abiding glory_ in this world or in the next or in any other sphere,
+that is not founded upon the deep, intense and eternal love of man and
+woman.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                    WHAT CONSTITUTES SEX IMMORALITY?
+
+
+The average mind, nurtured in apprehensive awe of that race fetish
+called Public Opinion, is inordinately afraid of words.
+
+"Atheist," "infidel," "ungodly" are epithets which have been used as
+mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of
+religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the last
+century.
+
+These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the
+undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown
+that the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for the
+old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the
+contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood than
+that which the early Church postulated.
+
+Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance against
+Evolution.
+
+Ignorance is fearful of the unknown, and the knights of Enlightenment
+have ever had to fight their way through the ranks of abuse and
+criticism and misrepresentation.
+
+Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate of
+rational thought hesitates to claim affiliation; and yet the goal of
+our highest endeavors must be a state of Society where Love, the god,
+is free from the mire of corruption, and the bonds of slavery.
+
+Let us not be afraid of so harmless a thing as a word, remembering the
+case of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignation
+because someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat." She did not
+know what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved.
+
+When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we will
+not be so fearful of its sound.
+
+To whom is this epithet most frequently applied?
+
+Is it to the average man who is known to be a Lothario in matters of
+sex? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one who
+is "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no way
+affects his social standing.
+
+Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalized
+prostitution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning of
+free-love that the term is never used in connection with what modern
+reform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obvious
+reason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound and
+murdered as in this phase of woman's degradation.
+
+Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type of
+defiance of traditional sex-ethics there is always the spirit of
+self-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing.
+
+We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the young
+woman who has, what the world calls, "sinned," because, forsooth, she
+pays the price of her deviation from social standards (when
+discovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, or
+by sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it is
+evident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuates
+her conduct.
+
+It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to those
+who openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge in
+the sex-relationship, independent of the marriage ceremony. It matters
+not whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is the
+demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and
+morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to
+traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing
+the term "free-love" with an unpleasant odor.
+
+Public opinion puts a premium upon deceit.
+
+Such intimate matters as marriage and divorce are really no concern of
+any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.
+
+The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little with
+Truth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence of
+divorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring to
+live apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets before
+they may act upon such a decision.
+
+Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of
+the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from
+the world because she loved a man well enough to pay that price.
+
+She might have insisted that the man obtain a divorce from his wife,
+to whom he had been married seventeen or more years, and thus win the
+approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material
+things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of
+her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care
+for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the
+story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent
+club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if
+any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.
+
+Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed to
+think that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, she
+might in time be worthy of their forgiveness.
+
+Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with England
+of being a nation without a sense of humor.
+
+Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angels
+fear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions upon
+other people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue.
+
+The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or
+unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly
+indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity
+for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly
+brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man
+with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of
+self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of
+pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for
+her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not
+alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken
+her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real
+love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the
+fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It
+should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that
+a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved
+to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable
+position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.
+
+But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it is
+small wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings.
+
+If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, we
+would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces
+are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their
+outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands
+of Convention.
+
+The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women,
+because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to
+personal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and until
+women of the self-respecting and educated class began to openly
+emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the
+phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women
+the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.
+
+All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality
+sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sex
+promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium
+that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the
+claim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defiance
+of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its
+standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.
+
+The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other
+advanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life,
+has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free
+choice.
+
+Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shielding
+her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and
+abhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretly
+indulges her sex-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she is
+forced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequently
+these instincts are abnormally strong because of pre-natal and
+inherited influences.
+
+Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the average
+woman, are disastrous to the sex, and through them to the race,
+because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds and
+fetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement.
+
+Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physical
+disease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression of
+the sex-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through the
+compulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercial
+prostitution, is death to the best development of the race.
+
+Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through the
+religious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord and
+Master" have been compelled to develop a craftiness and an artificial
+"modesty" which, in most cases, passes for femininity, and deceives,
+as it is intended to do, the average man.
+
+For centuries, a woman's only profession was matrimony. Her education
+for this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance of
+all that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of her
+nature--the function of sex. In the occasional instances where she had
+inherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she must
+at least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of every
+emotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his sex-nature in her
+task of "catching a husband," it is small wonder that women have
+developed the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently both
+treacherous and cruel.
+
+Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting and
+conserving power of the bi-une sex-love, that she has broken through
+these mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defiance
+at the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification of
+her own sex-nature, and her right to her own person, despite the
+epithet of "free-love."
+
+Woman's partial emancipation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone to
+her head," as it were, and we see many women confounding license with
+liberty; mistaking passion for Love; and exchanging restraint for
+debauchery.
+
+The average woman is either almost entirely lacking in sex desire or
+she is abnormally active in that function. In truth, the same state of
+affairs prevails here, as in so many other phases of our modern life,
+namely, there is no balance. We are a civilization of extremes; we are
+one-sided, abnormal; distorted. We are seeking the pivotal point of
+our destiny, which is the soul, but few have reached that point. Those
+who have not, are groping through the jungles of the mental plane of
+consciousness, upheld on the one hand by the upward trend of their
+being, which seeks the level of the soul-conscious state; and held
+back on the other hand by the trammels of the sense-conscious type
+from which the race has developed to its present condition.
+
+Those instances where women indulge in excesses are comparatively rare
+in proportion to numbers, and they loom large in perspective because
+of their very incongruity with our ideals of womanly conduct. The vast
+majority of women may be safely trusted to use their sex-freedom, when
+it shall have truly arrived, for the purpose of finding that one and
+only mate which their souls instinctively know to be our rightful
+heritage--the proverbial "pearl of great price" which insures
+immortality in the bliss of union with our Beloved.
+
+Love, when freed from the illusions of sense; from the shackles of
+commercialism; from the bonds of error regarding the meaning and
+purpose of marriage; freed from selfishness and licentiousness; will
+solve the question of sex-promiscuity. This for the obvious reason
+that Love seeks its own. If left free to seek, it will find.
+
+But, if sex promiscuity is far from being free-love, if the doctrine
+of sex freedom is fraught with many dangers under our present social
+system, it must be conceded that no one method of social evolution,
+thus far devised, can be recommended as ideally perfect. The best that
+we can hope to do is to emphasize the importance and the sacredness
+and the innate purity of the sex-relation, while conceding to both
+sexes all the personal liberty possible.
+
+And above all, we should avoid condemnation of those who claim the
+right to freedom, lest we cover up a condition which can but be the
+better for being open to the light. Particularly should we shield
+women from the charge of immorality, and licentiousness, when we see
+them straying down the by-paths of the senses, in their quest for
+freedom, remembering that the centuries of repression and submission
+and consequent deception have left their mark upon woman's
+temperament.
+
+Man has for ages boasted of his sex virility; of his conquests in what
+he has termed "love." Not infrequently a man's choice of a wife is the
+result of much seeking in the garden of Life; and much sipping of the
+honey from the various flowers that grow therein. Often, indeed, a man
+frankly tells the woman he would marry that he knows he loves her
+above all other women for the convincing reason that he has tried so
+many and none have held him. Should a woman make the same confession
+and draw the same conclusion, he would be horrified.
+
+It must be admitted, then, that the term "free-lovers" is applied only
+to those who defy Public Opinion and claim their right to respect and
+morality despite their defiance of Society's false standards of
+morality. These standards are false because they are based upon
+criticism and censure of results instead of upon motives.
+
+Society ignores, if it does not actually encourage, frivolous
+flirtations, and frowns most harshly upon instances of real love. It
+sets the seal of disapproval and ostracism upon those who, because of
+circumstances or possibly because of indifference to man-made laws,
+take their affairs into their own hands and refuse to exhibit either
+penitence or shame when the world discovers that they neglected the
+marriage ceremony. If two persons truly love each other and there is
+nothing to interfere with their undergoing the publicity of a marriage
+ceremony, well and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle
+with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are
+innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to
+overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where
+absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other,
+prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as
+these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose
+something by persecuting those who are independent enough and honest
+enough to act from motive, rather than from custom, and who insist
+upon maintaining their self-respect, in the face of criticism.
+Self-respect is not related to braggadocio.
+
+It must be admitted that as yet there are few persons who have the
+courage to endure martyrdom for their convictions, which is, perhaps,
+just as well, because the majority are unable to distinguish between
+brazen shamelessness and unashamedness. The average woman will stick
+to the safe habit of dissembling.
+
+Women have learned the lesson of the cat too thoroughly to jump
+immediately from the back-yard of Deception to the front porch of
+Truth.
+
+In this one respect at least, however much she may indulge her desire
+for frankness in other directions, a woman will lie valiantly,
+self-protectingly, and continually, even though she follow in secret
+the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the
+hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and
+satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it
+would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary.
+But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement;
+whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be,
+that what is virtue in man is vice in a cat?"
+
+We are not told in the story what conclusion she arrived at, but we
+can imagine that her conclusion was that which women have arrived at,
+in a similar situation, to wit: man is unjust and unreasonable, but he
+is also stronger than I am, and therefore, while I shall follow his
+example, I shall take good care to hide the feathers.
+
+In the meantime, we are crossing the bridge that leads from the
+jungles of our animal nature, where prowl the beasts of deceit; greed;
+selfishness; sensuality; vanity; avarice; and domination; to the
+Heights, illumined by Love set free.
+
+Let us not jostle and crowd each other too harshly, while we are en
+route.
+
+But, of course, we are confronted with the pertinent query as to what,
+if any, absolute standard of morality there can be in matters of the
+sex relation. Freedom is so easily misconstrued into implying
+sex-promiscuity; and monogamy, the final survival of the various
+systems of marriage, has in its modern as well as in its ancient
+aspect so much of coercion; and coercion is cited as the insuperable
+obstacle to attainment of the supreme state of spiritual sex-union,
+that the would-be initiate becomes confused, and is lost in a maze of
+paradoxes.
+
+Moral distinctions are too fine for the undeveloped man-animal, and
+that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The
+objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their
+failure to die after they have become senile.
+
+Moral standards are as unstable as the shifting sands of the sea.
+
+"Our moral sentiments," say Letourneau, "are simply habits incarnate
+in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act
+reputed culpable at Paris, or at London, may be, and frequently is,
+held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin."
+
+And Emerson, the intellectual Seer, says: "There is a soul at the
+centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us
+can wrong the universe."
+
+It is a colossal piece of impudent presumption, when we come to think
+about it, for Man to ask the Supreme, Absolute, Infinite Power to
+forgive him. But, if we cannot wrong the universe, we can and we do
+wrong ourselves and each other as mortals.
+
+That is the whole gist of the story. We are constantly wronging
+ourselves and each other and calling upon God to support us in our
+strife when God cannot know aught save the call of Love.
+
+The growing, evolving race, has found it necessary to establish
+certain loosely defined codes of morals and of social ethics, in the
+same way that man has bridled the horse that he may control him;
+incidentally, we may observe that where this bridle formerly included
+"blinders," it now permits the horse to see whither he is going.
+
+Perhaps a brief survey of the standards of sexual morality which have
+upheld (or down-held, just as we look at it) the human race until now,
+may be illuminating.
+
+It has been disputed, if, under the matriarchal system of polygamy,
+the moral condition of the people was higher than under the
+patriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can be
+reached upon this point, save and except that any condition, however
+primitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must be
+better than that in which she is the object of coercion. This is
+evident, because the degree of coercion can never, under any
+circumstances, be as great with the male as with the female.
+
+Therefore, matriarchal polygamy is comparatively more nearly moral
+than is patriarchal polygamy, and when all is said and done, historic
+morality is comparative.
+
+But from the standpoint of modern idealism matriarchal polygamy seems
+to be a very low estimate of moral conduct; and from the standpoint of
+sexual idealism it is a low standard; a standard only a degree higher
+than that of patriarchal polygamy--a standard which is the lineal
+descendant of the ethics of the marriage-by-capture period of human
+evolution, and from which we are today by no means free, owing to
+economic, religious, and ethical conditions.
+
+There is a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the unorganized
+brotherhood of the Enlightened, that laws are made for the guidance of
+the masses. Unbridled ignorance is a dangerous force; as dangerous as
+an unbridled horse, unless it be that the horse exhibits intelligence
+enough to know where it is headed for and how to avoid obstacles en
+route.
+
+And even as the laws of a community are made for the intellectually
+undeveloped, so the commandments were compiled for the spiritual
+guidance of the uninitiated.
+
+We trust that it will not shock the sensibilities of the "pious" when
+we affirm and maintain and insist that the ten commandments are not
+"from God" in the letter of the statements, as postulated by Theology.
+They bear all the earmarks of the ancient Hebrew race-mind, which
+placed a man's "neighbor's wife" in the same category with "his ox and
+his ass and his house" and his other property and possessions.
+
+There is but one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, and
+that is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot break
+it if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying to
+live in defiance of its immutability.
+
+"We cannot wrong the universe!"
+
+Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are at
+present the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship,
+engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea. Both the Hebrew
+and the Roman customs maintained the inferiority and the consequent
+subjugation of woman, despite the fact that the Roman Church exalted
+the Virgin as a personality; but the postulate of the Church that Mary
+was so exalted by a miracle, which never could be repeated, killed any
+forlorn hope which might have lurked within the female breast
+regarding a possible emulation of her example. No other woman might do
+more than cringe and crawl and beg and whine; or cajole and wheedle
+and buy the Holy Mother's intercession, which intercession, even if
+successful, could at best but secure her an eternal job in the
+Heavenly hierarchy, where, sexless, companionless, mateless, anaemic,
+she could look all day at a male God whom she could never presume to
+reach.
+
+Rather a lonesome outlook for eternity, and it is small wonder that
+woman got discouraged at the prospect. The miracle is rather that she
+endured it so long.
+
+But the Roman system had at least one virtue. It instilled into the
+mortal mind of its people a sub-conscious realization of the ideal of
+monogamy; not an ideal monogamy by a long way, but a monogamic ideal.
+They are quite different; but inasmuch as it is an outward semblance
+of a more spiritual conception of marriage than that of polygamy, it
+is the highest ideal yet realized for the many, and does duty in our
+present day and age, as consistent with our superior civilization.
+
+Monogamy at least pretends to be a marriage by mutual consent; and
+even in the pretense there is the germ of a hope; but it would be
+folly to deny that underneath this appearance of marriage by mutual
+consent we see the remnants of the traditional idea of the right by
+purchase, and therefore we have the jealousy that arises by virtue of
+our property rights.
+
+The right by purchase assuredly underlies our present-day marriage
+system, although it is disguised as economic necessity; as a religious
+sacrament; and as a suitable or a brilliant "catch"--a type of
+marriage by capture which forms the ideal of our own upper-class women
+and which the housemaid copies in her limited way.
+
+Viewed from the surface evidence, the average woman of today is, as
+Kipling says, far "more deadly than the male." She is more
+unscrupulous in her methods; more unreasonable in her demands; more
+devoid of sentiment or sympathy; more fickle in her desires and more
+nagging in her complaints. But, when all is said and done, we must
+admit that woman is only expressing her inheritance. When she becomes
+balanced, the sexes will meet on common ground.
+
+Woman's demand for better physical environment; for more comfort, and
+more justice; presages, after all, a higher and a more satisfactory
+idea of the marriage relationship. Underneath this materialistic
+demand, there is the silent voice of the soul calling for a more
+ideal marriage relation. It is the materialistic expression of a
+spiritual urge and will in time rise to higher ground. It is a demand
+for a better state than that which our grandmothers enjoyed, or
+endured.
+
+We have seen in the history of marriage, that the estimate of sexual
+immorality has been based, all too frequently, upon woman's disregard
+for the rights of her husband in her person.
+
+For centuries the burden of sustaining a sexual moral standard has
+rested almost wholly upon the shoulders of the women; and it is
+therefore natural that the present-day defiant attitude of many women
+toward the traditional standard should be viewed with alarm; and there
+is more in this thought of alarm than the mere anxiety on the part of
+man to hold woman to her appointed task of guardian of marital
+morality.
+
+Although men may wander from the home and fireside, it is a peculiar
+fact that they generally hold to a mental string by which they may
+find their way back again, very frequently the more contented to be
+there for their wanderings. But with a woman it is different. Once a
+woman has broken loose from the ties that have bound her to her
+inherited post of morality-preserver, she seldom goes back again, but
+keeps on her way until she finds that for which she seeks, or gives up
+the search of her own volition.
+
+Is this, then, evidence that it is a woman's first duty to "stay put"
+when matrimonial exigencies have placed her in a specific "pocket" of
+the matrimonial billiard-table?
+
+We believe not; and this belief is founded upon the fact that the
+female principle, which is, we admit, the centralizing, centripetal
+force in the cosmos, is not always manifested in the form of woman.
+The balanced individual is bi-sexual, even as the balanced "twain-one"
+is bi-sexual. If man was all male principle, and woman all female
+principle they would not be complementary, but antithetical. Each must
+be balanced within himself and herself before they can merge into each
+other.
+
+Affinities are numerous, but mates are found but once; otherwise, the
+problems that are being discussed here would never have arisen.
+
+If, then, as has been shown in the fact that only counterpartal unions
+are real, eternal and spiritually indissoluble; and that only true
+mates can thus unite, and when thus united have no desire to wander,
+what becomes of our ideas of sexual infidelity?
+
+Since the very law of the Cosmos has seen to it that we cannot be
+untrue to the only one who seemingly has a right to our fidelity in
+the sex relation and since this union can become general only by
+freeing love from bondage, what becomes of the laboriously built up
+ethics of our social intercourse?
+
+Are they to be abandoned as of no value?
+
+We can almost hear the storm of protest which the righteous reader may
+feel in duty bound to let loose at such a suggestion, if for no other
+reason than that protest is the accepted way of proving one's own
+virtuous tendencies.
+
+In the early seventies, a woman named Virginia Woodhull brought down
+upon her defenseless head the un-Christian-like abuse of the Christian
+public by announcing a doctrine which seems to have been nothing more
+dreadful than that of an equal standard of morality for men and women.
+The poor woman died broken-hearted, it is said; and yet nothing that
+we can unearth regarding her personal life and habits would seem to
+have warranted the cruel gibes that were hurled at her. The dear old
+lady lived a most continent, even ascetic life.
+
+But the world has made rapid strides since that time, and we trust
+that the urgent need of something reasonable and feasible upon the sex
+question will inspire the reader to an unprejudiced review of this
+chapter. We would that it were possible to supply a modicum of
+understanding with each copy of this volume; but since it is not, we
+must take our chance with the average. Let us reason together:
+
+Expediency is the mother of morality in social organizations, which
+have, of necessity, unstable, ever-changing standards. These standards
+represent, for some, ideals yet to be attained; while for others they
+become mere mileposts on the path of Evolution. The individual
+reaches, and then passes, an accepted ideal; gradually when a
+sufficient number, constituting a majority, have reached this ideal,
+it ceases to be a standard for the social organization, and another
+ideal is substituted.
+
+The laws of the cave-man called for self-restraint exercised toward
+his own immediate clan, and this necessity for self-restraint was
+based upon nothing higher than the law of self-preservation; but
+gradually the sphere widened; from clan to nation. So do our ethical
+and moral standards enlarge. Traditional concepts are not necessarily
+wrong, but they are almost sure to be inadequate to evolving Mankind.
+
+Formerly, sexual morality consisted of the reservation of the person
+of a sister to the use of her brothers. Any infringement upon this
+moral code was punished by death to the woman and to her out-clannish
+lover.
+
+And we have today an analogous example, although we are glad to say,
+it is not the highest standard; still, if one's husband or wife
+violates the marriage vows, it is more condonable, if the
+co-respondent be of the wealthy class; and in monarchies it is
+accounted an honor to have been selected as the king's favorite.
+
+The institution of prostitution which exists everywhere today has its
+standards in the different countries; and the white races seem to
+think that their morality is superior to that of the Orientals because
+the social standing of prostitutes in the Orient is not irretrievably
+lost; they are permitted, in the event of marriage, to resume social
+equality with other women. Among white people, prostitutes have no
+other recourse than to sink lower and lower, until utter degradation
+is reached.
+
+We believe that the Oriental view of the situation is a far higher
+standard of morality than is our Occidental attitude.
+
+If there can lawfully be such an organization as is now being proposed
+as desirable in large cities, namely, a "morals police," it certainly
+should be instigated by a more sane purpose than that which is at the
+root of our present police guardianship.
+
+Attempts at suppression of prostitution have hitherto been conducted
+on the principle that the women of that class are objectionable to the
+sight of our mothers and sisters and wives, and the sinfulness of the
+hopelessly "fallen" ones has been the theme of press and pulpit. And
+all the time the women of the half-world have resented this attitude
+as being unjust, and unfair, and hypocritical, and untenable. They
+have known that if the act of selling their bodies to men is a crime
+against the community, then more than half the feminine world is
+criminal. And they have contended that since the "respectable" women
+were neither contacted nor exploited by them, they cannot see wherein
+they offend society, provided the laws of sanitation and segregation
+are complied with.
+
+In other words, they have said that it is none of Society's business
+whether they sell themselves to one man or to a number, since they
+must pay the penalty. And their attitude is relatively right. It is
+none of Society's business whether a woman is a prostitute or not,
+considered as an offense against Society. That is the wrong attitude
+toward this condition of our social disorder.
+
+No prostitute offends you or me. She, poor creature, offends herself,
+and we offend her and ourselves by permitting social conditions that
+make for such degradation. We are conniving with her to barter her
+birthright of freedom and real love for food and shelter, and taint
+and tinsel, whenever we encourage marriage on any other ground than
+that of true love, and when we regard virtue as a matter of physical
+contact.
+
+If we judge from the many plays which we see on the boards; if we are
+influenced by the press and the pulpit; we must acknowledge that the
+general idea of sexual morality is an absurd one. The inference is
+that one special organ of a woman's physical body is the sole
+custodian of all virtue and all morality. The accepted idea seems to
+be that if a woman is married her body is then the property of her
+husband. Her emotions, her mind, her heart, her happiness, her
+preferences do not count for anything. The one act is made
+all-important. On the husband's side, if he provides for his wife and
+family, he is justified in exacting the sole right to the wife's body,
+and although his own heart and caresses may be given to another, he
+justifies himself, and the wife not infrequently feels satisfied, as
+long as he provides well for her. What is this but prostitution? The
+principle is the same as in the case of the recognized prostitute,
+although the conditions are easier for the woman, and less cheapening
+of her womanhood, but the difference is only in degree.
+
+Now, a singular idea of fidelity, a direct antithesis to the one just
+mentioned, prevails among prostitutes, when married either by law or
+by selection.
+
+They may surrender their physical body to another, for money, and
+according to their idea they may yet remain true to the husband or
+lover, because the matter is a business transaction. The other man has
+only what he has purchased, namely, the physical body. But should the
+woman permit another man to arouse in her a sexual response; should
+another invade her mind, absorb her thoughts, or engage her heart, the
+husband is outraged and the woman realizes her unfaithfulness.
+
+All of which goes to show that up to the present time sexual morality
+has in itself no absolute uniform standard by which it can be measured
+and satisfactorily and convincingly presented to all persons, as have
+other phases of morality, such as honesty, justice, mercy, generosity,
+friendship, fidelity to country, and self-sacrifice to the good of
+humanity.
+
+And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexual
+morality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality.
+Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, but
+as has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined by
+local conditions.
+
+Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexual
+morality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remote
+probability, albeit it will arrive some day.
+
+First of all, the sex relation must be absolutely free from sale;
+coercion; or barter; whether within the respectable "sale" of
+matrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from any
+erroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced,
+deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to the
+sexual embrace of human lovers.
+
+An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture.
+If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the
+physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many
+women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry
+from mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if we
+listen to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate our
+souls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedly
+cultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness of
+mind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor to
+uplift the moral tone of the world.
+
+These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration of
+Sex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protect
+myself against my enemies"--and so it is in this instance.
+
+Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why that
+name, anyway?) are infected with the bacteria of sex-degradation.
+They really require a lengthy process of mental disinfection, before
+attempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexual
+uplift.
+
+A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largest
+city in the United States recently declared in public print, of the
+beautiful and chaste painting "September Morn," that it was "lewd,
+filthy, and suggestive of unclean things." This type of woman is
+intrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting them
+with the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of the
+Father-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"
+
+Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted in
+our souls, namely:
+
+Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing in
+the universe--because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. The
+righteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man's
+customs; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement,
+indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thought
+which may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency to
+confusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us see
+if we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction.
+
+One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem is
+sadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension of
+the average, we may at least do so for some.
+
+One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement that
+the sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in the
+conclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then it
+is right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live as
+they do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, and
+while pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretly
+carry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"
+
+Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is the
+sex-relation right or wrong?"
+
+The men will declare that it is "right sometimes and wrong sometimes."
+The women, almost as a unit, will do the same. Occasionally a woman
+will be found sufficiently illumined to give a sane answer.
+
+Following up the thoughtless answer with the request to illustrate,
+and the reply will be something like this: "Well, if people are
+married it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" and
+even as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that it
+is puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, few
+have the temerity, and fewer yet have the capability, to utter Truth.
+
+It would be as sensible to say that it is right for the sun to shine
+sometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right for
+the sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all that
+is needed.
+
+Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, is
+entirely "up to us." The sun does its part. It is fulfilling the
+inexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right.
+
+But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The
+law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it
+may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases,
+diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world.
+
+How is it possible to have a perfect flower--a healthy, normal and
+wholesome sprout from a diseased root?
+
+The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the
+only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be
+done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy,
+sacred--the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite
+different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their
+sex-relations.
+
+To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of
+marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring
+back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing
+that can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyone
+knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and
+the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the
+lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.
+
+Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does the
+prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would
+not sell herself for money.
+
+Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted
+ideals of sex?
+
+If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.
+
+These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from
+love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex
+as a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day and
+good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.
+
+Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one
+standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now
+persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand,
+that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been
+found?
+
+A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the
+woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?
+
+History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded
+in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best
+that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention
+from ourselves.
+
+Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that
+a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made
+regulations, are not in danger.
+
+Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than
+they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval,
+should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the
+highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high
+the price of such devotion.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                         THE PATHWAY OF LOVE
+
+
+Love is the Great Reality.
+
+Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to
+love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of
+love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it
+is at the same time the only liberating force.
+
+Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a
+people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of
+the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the
+wake of seeming victory.
+
+There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that
+Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and
+the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there
+are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the
+wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns
+supreme.
+
+Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate
+us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the
+limitations and attractions of the animal-man.
+
+Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life. "There is no other God
+but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe,
+apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and
+presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but
+always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.
+
+Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by
+that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:
+
+"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and
+evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the
+tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and
+philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every
+home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of
+immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of
+love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless
+things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay.
+It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without
+that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but
+with it--earth is Heaven and we are gods."
+
+It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been
+recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life
+are worthless.
+
+It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of
+commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be
+bartered for.
+
+Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and
+magic solvent which transmutes all baser emotions into the higher,
+the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not
+sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or
+altruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had
+developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex
+instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as
+we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most
+instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty
+than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of
+animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the
+earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with
+us but happily in decreasing numbers.
+
+But even among animals we find evidences of something vague,
+indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we
+term a tendency toward _selection_; and in the animal also, through
+the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again
+we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of
+humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the
+maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love,
+is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than
+with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the
+evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the
+family.
+
+If maternal love were confined strictly to the female parent, and the
+procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only,
+we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent
+reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female,
+since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.
+
+As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the
+life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a
+larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above
+even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.
+
+Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this
+abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may
+tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of
+the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of
+the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to
+which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some
+perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower
+into its full possibilities.
+
+And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more
+than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that
+we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved any
+_human being_ with as great a love as we are capable of.
+
+If any one holds the mistaken idea--and it is one that is very
+generally held--that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer
+phase of emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in
+order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all
+other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being
+in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat.
+The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted
+with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break
+the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God,
+whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or
+something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry
+whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he
+does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may
+permit him the same liberty.
+
+God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take care
+of Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot be
+killed by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying.
+
+Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes of
+seeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfect
+mathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or a
+woman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neither
+is Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned with
+appearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within.
+He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with the
+material at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeks
+to unite lovers in their interior nature, but as each of the would-be
+happy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he is
+handicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness of
+Love, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over His
+eyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, the
+Egyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger on
+his lips, to typify the truth that true love is not noisy, blustering,
+jealous, burning, ranting, protesting. He is silent; soft; melting;
+blissful; magnetic; _uniting_.
+
+Our noisy civilization, seeking happiness in Things, mistakes
+protestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriages
+are consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depicted
+Cupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is a
+slander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could see
+one. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what one
+knows," declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern bride
+and bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards of
+living, to know dollars better than they know Love, their perverted
+vision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even the
+dollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united in
+love, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united then
+indeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty.
+
+But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, married
+couples have learned or they are learning, that there is an interior
+nature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected.
+
+In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road to
+the heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Love
+never faileth."
+
+It has been said that "love makes gods of men," and we have taken this
+phrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth,
+because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced their
+natures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, and
+are immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God," and the pilgrimage
+is ended.
+
+There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, that
+universal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot." It
+comes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate
+quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means
+always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my
+seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing."
+
+Life is a succession of experiences in the quest of immortality.
+Immortality would be a curse instead of a blessing if attained alone.
+
+Even the attainment of so unworthy an ambition as riches is a mockery
+if unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle to
+the one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to share
+it. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, he
+whose love nature is supposed to find satisfaction in making others
+happy--can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unless
+there is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; or
+lacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness which
+he does not find here.
+
+Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material plane
+for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love;
+a love where intellect, spirit and sex finds its perfect mate."
+
+Verily, love is the only vitalizing power in the universe; and when
+denied the interior union which should exist between a conjoining
+pair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship as
+much of the divine nectar as they will accept.
+
+_There is no impure love._ I repeat: There is no impure love. The
+impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he
+fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the
+Slough of Despond to the Heights of Bliss.
+
+If love be always pure, if it be always the uplifting, unifying,
+constructive power of the universe, what becomes of the apparent fact
+that men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, women
+have lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk to
+depths below that of the brute creation?
+
+What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appears
+to love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate love
+for all that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that love
+is always pure when it leads to such disaster?
+
+Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever the
+erring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently dragged
+from his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of human
+conflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; He
+unites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity of
+union.
+
+Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation of
+egoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes a
+man to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loves
+with jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence with
+the baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he must
+be taught the lesson of the Yoga sutras "not this way; not this way;"
+and the more worthy he is of redemption, the more certainly will he be
+caught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereas
+by seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path of
+inwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safely
+trust his redemption.
+
+If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through what
+appears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity have
+temporarily supplanted Love. But there is another side to the
+question. Society has very erroneous ideas of success and failure; and
+in looking at these opposite ends of the same pole, Society may be
+standing on it's head.
+
+A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worth
+repeating.
+
+A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities of
+social life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercial
+world, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that he
+had married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life of
+the Islanders. English society, when his name was mentioned at all,
+spoke of him with hushed voices and with a "what a pity y' know"
+manner as of one who had sunk below the depths of ordinary failure.
+Subsequently a friend visited Samoa and found the young man enjoying
+life and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversation
+the visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been rather
+wild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impart
+agreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "Sir
+Arthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon the
+self-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity;
+and he was such a decent sort, too." So we may see that there is much
+in the point of view.
+
+Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trust
+this test, because no one can be happy in any other than the
+progressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been a
+satisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to the
+possessor if it shuts out love; and if love be present, wealth holds
+but an inconsequential place.
+
+However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force of
+attraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the union
+of two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced,
+there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the question
+inevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are not
+yet perfect?"
+
+If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate for
+each man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the only
+truly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of
+"temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all the
+marriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident that
+soul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to be
+abandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?
+
+It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deception
+and dishonesty are immoral.
+
+Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage.
+Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray a
+confidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and it
+is the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether applied
+to the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges.
+
+Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not impose
+upon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not to
+break them; but if vows are not to be broken, they may, thank Heaven,
+be dissolved.
+
+And surely the marriage ceremony of the future will not impose vows or
+promises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to the
+necessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at its
+very highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated,
+nothing more than announcement to the society of which they are
+members, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, as
+well as inwardly, in sexual union.
+
+We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of the
+fitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether too
+much confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, and
+altogether too little as to whether they are spiritually united.
+
+Possession! that is the word that spells unhappiness, in married life;
+each wants to possess the other; neither one tries for the spirit of
+union. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit.
+
+Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathway
+leads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promises
+staring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitute
+mutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If we
+cannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith and
+should cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action we
+would have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husband
+and wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame of
+mind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be no
+further opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world of
+a belief in sin and immorality, the sooner will Love reign.
+
+It is said of the sages of India that they can live in the jungles and
+the ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?
+
+They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desire
+to crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love and
+compassion that there is no point of connection between them and the
+destructive instinct in the beast.
+
+When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away from
+the tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent and
+the eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure and
+perfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet it
+and when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear,
+all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fear
+of "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though
+"seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween thee
+and me," the call of soul to soul will be felt and answered. Byron says:
+
+  "There are two souls of equal flow,
+  Whose gentle streams so calmly run,
+  That when they part--they part? Oh no,
+  They cannot part, those souls are one."
+
+With a sentiment such as this between two beings, what need for vows
+and promises, and bonds?
+
+It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, even
+feverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implying
+that they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although this
+conclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and the
+faculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty that
+prevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, and
+above all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to impute
+personal motives to such as would, if permitted, lead them to a freer,
+and consequently a purer life, impel the writer to deny that which is,
+finally, the very point at issue.
+
+In the interest of Truth, we are compelled to state that we would do
+away with "bonds." We would substitute therefor mutual agreements,
+subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutually
+helpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of the
+crippled human race. We need not always walk lame.
+
+It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surest
+way to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind him
+that he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out to
+him the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man has
+so little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, when
+assured that God-hood means a bliss so great that he can hardly
+imagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of births
+and deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself.
+Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritual
+union--with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or any
+other impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?
+
+No, but with his mate.
+
+On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There
+is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love
+in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love
+flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little
+pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights
+and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."
+
+Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the
+perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly
+tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these
+same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead
+of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for
+union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to
+exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the
+"Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin;
+they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the
+golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly
+the opposite direction.
+
+Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most
+certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most
+certainly not.
+
+We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have
+concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or
+uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral
+in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is
+adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance;
+sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual
+immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit
+that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based
+upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a
+convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own
+realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is
+immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent
+of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for
+position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual
+helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish
+gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money;
+or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of
+an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine
+office of sex.
+
+But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet
+all may, if we desire, be moral. And all moral and sexual
+relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the
+time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth
+need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.
+
+If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that
+sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from
+pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love
+of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in
+soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the
+restraints of marriage.
+
+But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect
+of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the
+other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and
+has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the
+happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative
+of perfect mating.
+
+If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable
+finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne
+endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing;
+only to lie at His feet"--the prospect appalls!
+
+Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too
+short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is
+the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!
+
+But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we
+realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by
+experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin
+to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and
+sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood,
+immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate;
+sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying
+aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and
+bliss, there is an incentive to aspire.
+
+Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be
+"taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or
+feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment
+has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the
+doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has
+known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has
+dwarfed our stature.
+
+In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise
+patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods."
+
+Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and
+earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss
+being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and
+when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps
+death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd back
+at its summons to inhabit their perfected world."
+
+We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful
+words--elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always
+in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be
+ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These
+prophetic utterances are literal truths.
+
+Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we
+will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise--the
+body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior
+nature.
+
+While we are building the business which sustains our physical body;
+while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion or
+whatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior nature
+which we are now, and which we will be when the life of the body
+ceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business were
+their only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing the
+same methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate from
+the same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands or
+falls in the final test, by the motives; the desires; the sentiments;
+the sympathies; the generosities; the forgiveness; the kind impulses;
+the pities; the charities; the tolerances; we feel while we are
+apparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these little
+impulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seemingly
+important business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which we
+climb to the spiritual heights where the bliss of true and perfect,
+melting, merging, liquid-love, of the one and only mate awaits us.
+
+One thing more. This also is a secret. Perhaps you will not even
+believe it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of our
+crazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they are
+also, and above all, idealists.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                       THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION
+
+
+External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we have
+builded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortal
+senses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal which
+prompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one who
+looks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead of
+merely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells its
+interior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It is
+said that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; but
+to those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; what
+seems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which is
+limited to sense consciousness.
+
+There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give the
+key to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered.
+The word "union," or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase of
+our busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. This
+word, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word
+"agreement," or "combination" or "partnership," formerly used. Union
+means something more interior, than do these other words, even when
+applied to commercial issues.
+
+The business man says to his partners "let us unite on this question."
+They are already partners, but unless there is a unity of thought and
+ideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. We
+have labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity of
+effort; a merging of interests; a welding together into one
+thought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness of
+meaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the words
+lodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organization
+of men in social or commercial combination.
+
+In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there may
+be no quality of union, although there is the outward bond of
+fellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know more
+of a subject than appears on the surface. We want to know the within.
+We want to fathom the interior meaning; to get below the surface, or
+the appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import--the word
+_within_. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footsteps
+toward home.
+
+The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but the
+Christian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those who
+would listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was truly
+spiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed,
+but only to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandments
+already in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the one
+and only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begat
+him: "That ye love one another."
+
+Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets and
+through all the channels of the physical senses to look within. That
+which you are--not what you appear to be to the eyes of the
+sense-conscious--but that which you are in your interior nature, is
+what counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to write
+salable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in the
+commercial game; but when the word is impartially considered
+efficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability is
+measured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wise
+judgment--interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin be
+white or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are of
+imposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within that
+constitutes true efficiency.
+
+So the kingdom whatever it may be whether of heaven or hell; of love;
+or of power; or of ambition; the kingdom is within. The source of your
+power is in the interior of your nature.
+
+If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to the
+Cosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again to
+those who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in on
+this," has been said to one who was left out of some supposedly
+desirable thing; or "you are not _in_ it," meaning that you are not up
+to the required standard. Even as the walls of a building only
+imperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that which
+the building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physical
+appearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature.
+
+"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritual
+teacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The character of
+the heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are at
+variance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within,
+we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom--interior
+vision.
+
+Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exterior
+and their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled up
+like a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grain
+of true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message from
+knowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and we _find_
+wisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interior
+meaning.
+
+The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is a
+difference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to the
+interior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience.
+Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with the
+interior; it penetrates the outer and seeks the interior; but never
+does the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never does
+he mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message.
+
+Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life were
+the only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of the
+thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the
+visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that
+civilization is insane.
+
+If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this
+which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in
+his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example,
+is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advanced
+civilization?
+
+With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly
+to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of
+wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and
+hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are
+ostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing,
+embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution of
+man's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to
+which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell
+us that man in his interior nature--in his reality--is not a creeping,
+crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into
+ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.
+
+Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, did
+it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind
+regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly
+intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in
+motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a
+corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the
+power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute
+strength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively puny
+strength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force of
+the elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire--an
+interior quality.
+
+Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make us
+happier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather than
+their so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to man
+his power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it to
+do his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above and
+beyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put upon
+modern inventions and accomplishment is the message which these
+mechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not a
+machine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not a
+miserable worm of the dust, but a winged god.
+
+Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanical
+marvels is the knowledge of each other which has resulted from
+intercommunication between nation and nation. The great breeder of
+discord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man of
+the cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he did
+not know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know;
+his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous and
+dangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country are
+like ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even though
+they may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet of
+nuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down.
+Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideas
+of "alien" races and "foreign" nations.
+
+Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanical
+inventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other human
+beings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings,
+emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like our
+own, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reach
+the heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet been
+established, it is because the majority of Mankind are still only
+sense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which the
+past few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that the
+slow-moving mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all this
+knowledge must come in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seeks
+love as the only eternal reality. Not because God has commanded that
+we shall do so; not because of a sentimental ideal, but because any
+other course is futile, foolish, silly and does not "get us anywhere"
+as the slangologists rightly express it.
+
+Thus everything in the busy commercial world, seemingly bent upon
+perpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symbolic
+language of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. These
+two words are really complementary, because it is only with the
+interior nature that unity can be established.
+
+We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships,
+corporations, combinations from the outside. These are external
+expressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of the
+interior nature only.
+
+With the more intimate knowledge of each other which
+intercommunication between nations makes general, each little
+segregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at the
+conclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" on
+any proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much less
+costly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than by
+going to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains of
+the majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thought
+that perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained by
+peaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained nor
+appeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wise
+observation that fundamentally, cosmically there is no place for
+enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the
+whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and
+segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can
+permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped
+and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these
+thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things,
+than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.
+
+The world has been living through a nightmare. The warfare which
+belongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has been
+carried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight like
+tigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well,
+using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devices
+and the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this type
+of warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose between
+transmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blind
+indeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who use
+the sword shall perish by the sword." How else can it be? There is but
+one force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use it
+to destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of law
+that we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum in
+arithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is no
+limit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate.
+
+The fact is dawning upon an increasing number of thinkers, that even
+as brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there is
+still a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its power
+that nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. That
+power is love, without which though we have all else we are but as
+"sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."
+
+Even as the ferocious man-eating animals have disappeared from the
+earth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the erotic
+pomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to their
+chariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourged
+slaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of the
+amphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged
+"civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolution
+of our own "false gods." Transmuted into pure and perfect love and
+peace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate and
+destruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward the
+maintenance of a balanced world--a world in which Love and Wisdom are
+united.
+
+We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude
+are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic
+Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the
+decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why
+cannot we trust God?
+
+In the external world, then, the idea that a part of this sphere is
+inherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies; that
+the female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy--all these
+ideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the coming
+civilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it to
+our individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the human
+organism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Before
+we can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to a
+balanced and sane state within our own organism.
+
+We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the various
+expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social
+body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain
+unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may
+safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have
+conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our
+chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the
+clutches of an abnormal appetite.
+
+Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physical
+appetites to the finer, and interior desires of the soul,
+abnormalities and perversions of sex-force will be impossible.
+
+Sex-force is, at the Center of Being, unpolluted. It is pure, perfect
+and harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it is
+balanced.
+
+In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly every
+one is lop-sided, and unbalanced. Alienists declare that almost every
+man and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An age
+of specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness." But
+the source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where we
+consciously unite with that interior source we will no longer be
+unbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, at
+the center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There is
+no chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy.
+There is equilibrium.
+
+It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness that
+equality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life will
+appear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer men
+can imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-powering
+and at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy.
+The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable from
+sex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine the
+mechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail to
+comprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior being
+until we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortal
+and glimpse the heights of the immortal life.
+
+No one can give to another this interior wisdom--this philosopher's
+stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the
+pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and
+promise that the results are mathematically proportionate to effort,
+and effort will be backed by individual desire.
+
+We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side
+of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for
+purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is
+contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize.
+Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary
+function.
+
+Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they
+are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they
+remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek.
+All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman
+who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the
+ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual
+alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found
+the key to the gate of eternal life.
+
+As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old
+age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into
+interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express
+the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become
+transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts.
+It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters
+that quality--be it much or little--so that we may not go into the
+interior realms a spiritual pauper.
+
+Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so
+old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship,
+and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in
+the soul life.
+
+There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any
+degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and
+love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines
+through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that
+when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that
+the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.
+
+This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a
+mental recognition of age.
+
+"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth
+and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdom
+that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual
+love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.
+
+But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay,
+they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves
+this one, without having attained that which he craves.
+
+This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no
+appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law
+is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of
+immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."
+
+"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be
+such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they
+not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual
+sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"
+The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its
+reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very
+nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his
+unreadiness for _Illumination_. The desire for self-gratification,
+though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical
+to attainment of spiritual consciousness.
+
+There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine
+of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or
+gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories
+in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing
+by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spirit
+becomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of our
+willingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existence
+seems a sacrifice.
+
+"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him pass
+on" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it as
+clearly as it can be stated.
+
+Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expect
+to enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to the
+letter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruism _is_; it is not mere
+recognition of a word.
+
+We may presuppose another natural and instinctive query: "If then only
+by union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal life
+and love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever all
+ties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, and
+search for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found the
+answer to all life's problems?"
+
+Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We should
+remember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitful
+quest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), he
+learned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom he
+gave the cup of cold water _without any consciousness of doing a good
+deed_; without hope of thereby finding the grail.
+
+He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any good
+will not find it though he should give away every farthing to the
+poor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips;
+though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all day
+and all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of self
+and of _obtaining_ something so long will he miss the _attainment_.
+
+Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute or
+reversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not trying
+to say that they should not be broken; or that they cannot be broken
+with impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished. They simply
+cannot be broken--they are unbreakable.
+
+We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, or
+in any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any more
+than we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing to
+it; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest nor
+scribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. No
+one can break the law of your being any more than you can break that
+of another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in the
+intervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Wherefore
+then, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousy
+and wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to a
+marriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?
+
+If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that the
+object of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres there
+is only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by any
+possibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place once
+found no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said in
+previous chapters of the word "found;" it is from within.
+
+How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, so
+magnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama of
+life; to establish such marvelous diversity within such simple unity;
+to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile has
+been the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need not
+worry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God are
+loaded." Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we may
+cheat in the game of life.
+
+We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility of
+offending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so far
+as it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us." We can delay
+arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we
+will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied
+longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain
+wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of
+his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless
+areas of infinite bliss and wisdom?
+
+We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothing
+more phenomenal than withdrawing from one room to another. The soul
+may strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing can
+free it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. The
+broader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfold
+in its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine we
+become, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual and
+attract our own.
+
+It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession as
+one's own counterpart defeats the very effort. We are not to seek; we
+are only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shall
+have done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though the
+two halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers which
+the sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves and
+the bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate to
+thee." We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest we
+lose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyes
+glued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realms
+of vibration "whence cometh our light."
+
+Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that is
+spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate
+on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to
+thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or
+winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the
+great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his
+embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the
+heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there
+anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
+circulation through all men as the water of the globe is all one sea,
+and truly seen its tide is one."
+
+Here then are specific and trustworthy statements for the further
+enlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraical
+propositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortal
+godhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Source
+of Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but we
+must claim it if we would consciously realize this truth.
+
+God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and in
+truth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not one
+hermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, even
+though each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperament
+and qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point because
+there has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon this
+definition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctively
+masculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and he
+or she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness.
+
+Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Woman
+is not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear for
+courage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality;
+helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when he
+spares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; when
+he unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy from
+weakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentleness
+with vigor.
+
+No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore you
+are not to try to enforce your ideas of morality upon others. Who has
+constituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concern
+yourself with establishing happiness upon this earth.
+
+You are to see to it that your love is big and broad enough;
+all-inclusive enough to wish to see every one happy from your
+immediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You need
+not worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. You
+are to render love and service to this world with all your heart and
+all your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of your
+desires.
+
+No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is
+rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say
+the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from
+the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without
+regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither
+do we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained to
+a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment
+and hatred.
+
+There is no one formula which fits all cases--other than that given in
+love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as
+we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it
+may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to
+them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other
+motive than personal selfishness, you may be doing yourself an
+injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining,
+then you are doubly mistaken in your course.
+
+The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it
+may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word
+"unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the
+wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or
+her. There is just one big world of difference between these two
+points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and
+Hell.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+
+                    "SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"
+
+
+Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure and
+satisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing and
+feeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-fold
+is the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who are
+themselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others.
+This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, and
+which they will not believe or trust.
+
+Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs us
+heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and
+turbulent pleasure."
+
+And finally, as regards the sex-function, we would like to impress
+upon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom will
+understand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation of
+sex-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love that
+is of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in the
+region popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circumscribe the
+sex-function, as a secondary and by no means compulsory consideration.
+
+When the sex force has become diffused throughout the entire being,
+radiating from the solar man, and permeating the mind and thus
+entering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mind
+physical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and is
+found to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. Sex is not
+confined to the specialized sex-organs. It permeates the entire being.
+The person who has no conception of his reality other than as a
+physical entity has not so much as touched the area of spiritual
+ecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the gods;" and so
+infinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not do
+so until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains upon
+the sense-conscious plane and seeks by sexual perversity and
+debauchery and sexual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection of
+joy which he intuitively knows evades him.
+
+Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and just
+and merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies," that it cannot
+be defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It is
+forever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope to
+express the creative power, the sexual realization of a god, through
+the functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of the
+animal.
+
+Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do not
+imagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your puny
+physical powers would suggest. Neither should you imagine that the
+sex-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking in
+love-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right and
+normal in itself; the attitude of the average man and woman invests it
+with all its uncleanness.
+
+But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged
+in respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed
+against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church
+denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it
+in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less
+than the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divine
+fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor
+little bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as the
+hope and savior of Mankind.
+
+If you would have eternal youth and eternal life and love and wisdom,
+accept this truth, because nothing else can, or will, save you from
+the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
+
+Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and we
+would like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; no
+misconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we are
+here stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple and
+unescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time and
+ignorance.
+
+The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapters
+we will again state it, so that there may be no mistake: If the
+balance is found in counterpartal sex-union--the one man and the one
+woman uniting on the solar plane--would not this balance be maintained
+if only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; in
+other words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on the
+one hand and extreme impurity on the other?
+
+Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there
+are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the
+union is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one must
+be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is
+possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would,
+really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we
+may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of
+the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of
+serfs; but doubt not that _eternal equation_ is perfect.
+
+There is still another query: If true sex-union is of the soul, what
+is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of
+death, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thus
+circumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel
+each one to earn the prize of eternal life?
+
+The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The
+realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than
+is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of
+untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize
+values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he
+might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a
+million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was,
+he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow
+wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.
+
+If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne of
+angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the
+crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common,
+everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is
+the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and
+the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without
+thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and
+love of the spiritual realms.
+
+The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of esoteric
+wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such
+effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the
+principal benefit of a college education is to teach the student that
+he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of
+years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not.
+If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were
+well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the
+price of transmutation only after exhausting every other method, what
+does it matter, so that he finally learns it?
+
+_Learn to look into the hearts of men._
+
+At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a
+moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with
+segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the
+hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the
+heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving
+picture.
+
+You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue
+rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a
+clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress
+is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse,
+perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if
+you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that
+her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming
+experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has
+donned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries of
+grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to
+comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted
+to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and
+happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and
+the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be
+carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
+
+Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our
+fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be
+heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for
+their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll
+of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on
+having two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If she
+is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the
+more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your
+help and sympathy.
+
+"_Learn to look into the hearts of men._"
+
+Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder
+doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just
+an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and
+longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if
+the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria or
+the intermezzo.
+
+And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold
+street-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside.
+But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their
+appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize with
+them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the
+manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the
+condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in
+crime.
+
+You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with
+his misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if you
+would transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to
+immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to
+sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without
+sympathy walks to his own funeral."
+
+Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to
+find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden
+Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you
+must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the
+lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personality
+that conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard this
+personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is,
+or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as
+we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes
+unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut it
+off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should the
+men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a
+later century?
+
+You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in
+order to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There is
+nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot
+learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of
+the world.
+
+There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater
+than love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is no
+God holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will
+readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that
+appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;
+think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the
+lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the
+expression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gave
+to it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to do
+so.
+
+Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the
+Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with
+the specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illumination
+from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you
+turn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of the
+toad,' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula and
+still blesses it with His fruitful presence."
+
+And finally do not make the too common mistake of confounding
+brazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation.
+
+Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life has
+come because of the divinity of Sex. If you have been wise enough to
+know this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect to
+that function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading the
+subject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would
+"cast pearls before swine;" you will not countenance jokes and ribald
+songs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you will
+fold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart's divine altar, as
+something too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of the
+un-tender day.
+
+If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of Sex, you
+will desire unity and disdain possession, knowing that whatever of
+Heaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality of
+spiritual realization of the function of Sex. You will respect the
+physical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of the
+universe, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. You
+will teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; that
+nothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inward
+honesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire.
+
+If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love and
+we shall surely enter therein.
+
+Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal gods.
+
+
+                                 FINIS
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _HOW THOUGHT CAN KILL_
+
+               The Scientific Use of Mental Electricity.
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+  The Enlargement of Consciousness.
+  The Doctrine of Free-Will.
+  Thought Is the Building Material.
+  The Creative Power of Conscious Thought.
+  Experiments Proving That Thought Can Kill.
+  Confessions of a Trained Nurse.
+  People Who Think God Hangs Out the Sun.
+  Action Essential to Creative Principle.
+  The "Science of God's Anger."
+  Thought Is of the Universal Supply.
+  Why the Number Thirteen Is Unlucky.
+  How Poison May Be Generated in the System.
+  Thought and the Cell-Structure of the Brain.
+  Why We Fail in Our Efforts.
+  The Spectrums of Love and Hate.
+  The Power of Imagination.
+  Fear Is the King of Thoughts That Kill.
+  Parents Make Cringing Weaklings of Children.
+  How Whole Cities May Be Poisoned by Thought.
+  Case of a Well-Known Man Killed by Thought.
+  There Is Neither Reward nor Punishment.
+  The Survival of That Which Is Creative.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
+                    Send Your Order Today
+
+                      CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING
+                           COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _PERSONAL MAGNETISM_
+
+                        The Power of Persuasion
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+  The Philosophy of "The Survival of the Fittest."
+  The Power of Persuasion.
+  Effects of Force Law.
+  Magnetism in Professional Life.
+  Opinion of a Noted Actor.
+  What Is Personal Magnetism?
+  Different Kinds of Magnetism.
+  The Human Body an Electrical Machine.
+  Will Power the Dynamo.
+  Magnetism Not Necessarily Good.
+  The Law Governing Invisible Force.
+  Love the Generator of Soul Magnetism.
+  Necessity for Understanding Use of Powers.
+  The Body the Medium of the Soul's Expression.
+  What Constitutes Success?
+  Rules for Acquiring Personal Magnetism.
+  Spirit Manifests Only Through Matter.
+  Fasting Not Wise.
+  Psychic Science Teaches the Study of ALL THINGS.
+  The Yogi of India.
+  Individuality the One Essential.
+  Character Indestructible.
+
+                       Price 25 Cents
+                    Send Your Order Today
+
+                      CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING
+                           COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+               IF YOU CANNOT READ CHARACTER THEN--READ
+
+                      REVELATIONS OF THE HAND
+
+                     How to Know Human Nature
+
+     A Scientific Study of the Shape and Markings of the Hand, as
+            an Index to Character, Disease and Tendencies
+                    With Explanatory Illustrations.
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+        The Most Practical SCIENCE OF PALMISTRY Ever Published!
+
+                         PARTIAL CONTENTS
+
+  PART I--CHEIROGNOMY.
+
+  Chapter.
+  1--The Seven Types of Hands
+  2--The Primitive or Elementary Hand.
+  3--The Square Type of Hand.
+  4--The Spatulate Type of Hand.
+  5--The Conic Type of Hand.
+  6--The Philosophic Type of Hand.
+  7--The Psychic Type of Hand.
+  8--The Mixed Type of Hand.
+  9--The Fingers.
+  10--The Thumb.
+  11--The Nails.
+  12--Large and Small, Hard and Soft Hands.
+  13--The Colour of the Palms.
+  14--The Mounts.
+  15--Right and Left Hands.
+  16--Resume of Cheirognomy.
+
+
+  PART 2--CHEIROMANCY.
+
+  Chapter.
+  1--The Lines of the Hand.
+  2--The Line of Life.
+  3--The Line of Mentality or Head.
+  4--The Line of Heart.
+  5--The Line of Fate.
+  6--The Line of Apollo, or Sun.
+  7--The Line of Health or Liver.
+  8--The Girdle of Venus.
+  9--The Via Lascivia, The Line of Mars and the Line of Intuition.
+  10--The Line of Marriage; Children.
+  11--The Rascette and Minor Lines.
+  12--Lines of Influence and Travel Lines.
+  13--Character of the Lines.
+  14--Signs Found on the Palm.
+  15--The Great Triangle and the Quadrangle.
+  16--How to Reckon Time. Systems of Seven and Ten.
+  17--Abnormal Tendencies.
+
+
+                     SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY
+
+                         SECOND EDITION
+
+  _Crown 8vo, 215 pages, profusely illustrated with full-page plates
+        and numerous engravings, silk cloth bound, gold stamped,
+                          $2.00 postpaid._
+
+                         CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                    STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                       "THE DEAD SPEAK!"
+
+           LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               Author of
+
+     "Sex--The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak!" "The Swastika
+                              Series," Etc.
+
+  We are living in an age of earnest inquiry and enhanced knowledge in
+  respect to ourselves as spiritual beings, and that great and wonderful
+  Universe of Spirit to which we are inseparably allied. The author is
+  devoting his life to establishing better conditions on earth, by
+  bringing the two worlds into closer association. No one can read this
+  book with an unprejudiced mind, without absorbing some of its grand
+  and inspiring truth and be uplifted and made better by it.
+
+  Chapter 1.
+  The Advent of Psychic Research.
+
+  Chapter 2.
+  The Dangers in Psychic Research and How to Avoid Them.
+
+  Chapter 3.
+  Physical Manifestations: Table-Rapping, Levitation, Etc.
+
+  Chapter 4.
+  Automatism.
+
+  Chapter 5.
+  Haunted Houses.
+
+  Chapter 6.
+  Spirit Interlopers.
+
+  Chapter 7.
+  Vampirism and Astral Hypnosis.
+
+  Chapter 8.
+  Prevision.
+
+  Chapter 9.
+  The Mystery of Trance.
+
+  Chapter 10.
+  The Mystery of Dreams.
+
+  Chapter 11.
+  Phantasms of the Living.
+
+  Chapter 12.
+  The Last Enemy--Death Overcome!
+
+  If you desire to acquire a knowledge of the GREAT SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
+  that has dawned upon mankind with the birth of the twentieth
+  century--with a mind and heart open to those scientific and spiritual
+  truths that are daily being proven by scientists and thinkers of
+  world-repute--we take the liberty of reminding you there is no book
+  more enlightening, no work more appreciated, no effort more powerful,
+  than this book.
+
+  There is a difference between this book and others upon the
+  subject--it is not an ordinary chronicle of unconnected notations but
+  a romantic story of extraordinary interest and value for the spiritual
+  and scientific truths which set forth the most advanced knowledge of
+  the deeper things of the Soul so simply that any reader of ordinary
+  intelligence can grasp, comprehend and apply those laws whose values
+  extend the usefulness of every Truth seeker who is seeking light upon
+  the MYSTERIES OF LIFE, both Here and Here-after.
+
+
+                     Send Your Order Today
+
+  _12mo., 200 pages, silk cloth-bound, gold stamped, with Frontispiece,
+                       $1.50 (net) postpaid._
+
+                         CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                    STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                         _Just Published_
+
+                       COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
+                                  or
+                    THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT!
+
+                                  By
+                             Ali Nomad
+                    [Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall]
+
+                               Author of
+     "Sex--The Unknown Quantity," "The Dead Speak," "The Swastika
+                             Series," Etc.
+
+                                _READ_
+
+  An Exposition of the Peculiar Phenomenon Which Is Puzzling Science:
+  Its Analogy to the Mystical Phenomena of the Brahm, Zen and Other
+  Oriental Sects; Its Meaning and Its Future.
+
+  With Simple, Concise and Thoroughly Practical Methods of Inducing the
+  Phenomenon.
+
+  Presenting a new and startling theory of the meaning and scope of the
+  prophecy current among the ancients and revived at the present time,
+  of the coming of a new Christ; the prophecy elucidated and explained
+  in the light of To-day; what it means and what it will lead to.
+
+                          SECOND EDITION
+
+     _12mo., 371 pages, cloth, gold stamped, $1.12 postpaid_
+
+                         SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY
+
+                         CHICAGO, U. S. A.
+                     STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
+
+                            HAVE YOU READ
+
+                        _PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY_
+
+  The Scientific Revelation of Natural Laws Prove the Continuity of Life
+
+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                         PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY
+
+  If Man Die Shall He Live Again?
+  The Invisible Something That Survives Death.
+  A Case That Will Bear Quoting.
+  Seeing Through Opaque Substances.
+  Faith Is Not Fact--Evidence Not Proof.
+  Proof Must Rest Upon Individual Experience.
+  The Psychic Body Basis of Organism.
+  All Life Is Manifested in Form.
+  Science Stands for Axioms That May Be Proved.
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+                       Price 25 Cents
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+                      CHICAGO, U. S. A.
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+                         THE SWASTIKA SERIES
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+                            HAVE YOU READ
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+                               _GHOSTS_
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+                    The Message of the Illuminati.
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+                                  By
+                  Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall
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+          Founded Upon Henrik Ibsen's Psychological Masterpiece
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+                    "THE GHOSTS WE MEET EVERY DAY"
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+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+2. The following misprints have been corrected:
+    "attaing" corrected to "attaining" (page 12)
+    "Morever" corrected to "Moreover" (page 67)
+    "Doubless" corrected to "Doubtless" (page 85)
+    "esctacies" corrected to "ecstacies" (page 116)
+    "aproach" corrected to "approach" (page 116)
+    "mutality" corrected to "mutuality" (page 123)
+    Incomplete sentence "We have already" removed on page 140.
+    "iadequate" corrected to "inadequate" (page 179)
+    "magnectic" corrected to "magnetic" (page 194)
+    "instintctive" corrected to "instinctive" (page 224)
+    "phenonenal" corrected to "phenomenal" (page 226)
+    "anoher" corrected to "another" (page 234)
+    "estoeric" corrected to "esoteric" (page 235)
+    "and and" corrected to "and" (page 240)
+    "advaced" corrected to "advanced" (in ad for the "The Dead Speak!")
+
+3. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
+spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex=The Unknown Quantity, by Ali Nomad
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