Sex As Symbol : Ancient Light in Modern Psychology

Excerpt from the Chapter 1:

Poured in while liquid or plastic, the matter of substance crystallizes, solidifies, hardens and thus brings into manifest existence the things of the visible worlds. Therefore each created object bears the image of the thought that shaped it. Even man was made in the image of his creator. The universe is the Logos of God, for it reveals the form of the logical structure of the cosmos.

It is the logical structure concreted in matter. If, then, the pervading oversoul of the system wishes to communicate with the intelligences of gradated ranges of lower being brought into function by its own initial activity, it is perforce constrained, if not confined, to speaking in the language germane to and commensurate with the lower ranges of consciousness addressed. For the enlightenment of inferior by superior intelligence, such a language must be constituted in the character and nature of symbols known or knowable to the lower.

Therefore higher intelligence must speak to lower in the language of concretely known objects in the latter's world. Thus it is that the objective world of any creature's life furnishes the characters and alphabet of the language it is capable of comprehending. It is the office of the physical world to provide the symbols which constitute language, for all language must be concrete at base. There is not a word of remotest abstraction that does not take its roots in some simply physical or mechanical process. As Carlyle says, "Thy very attention, is it not merely a stretching toward?" To express spirit itself, the terms used are all in the meaning of breath or air. The human mind can conceive of abstractions, such as principles, laws, ideas, realities of superphysical nature, only with the help of sensually known objects or phenomena.

One of the most instructive truths of all time was announced by the great hierophant Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt in the inscription on the famous Emerald Tablet:

"True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles of the One Thing."

Well had it been for the race of man if the pertinence of this wisdom-laden pronouncement of the ancient sage had not been obscured and lost when ignorance smothered sagacity in the third century of the Christian era. For it embodies the basic principle of all human culture. There goes with it as its corollary and necessary involvement the great truth that an immediate analogy subsists between things seen and realities unseen. It becomes in its primary cogency the key, as it is the starting point, of all religion, philosophy, morality and psychology, not to name such ancillary manifestations as mythology, anthropology, poetry, drama, ritual, folk-lore and celebratory festivals.

The modern world has witnessed, if somewhat stolidly, a remarkable phenomena. It has seen, perhaps not strictly the renaissance, but at any rate the recrudescence, of three long buried and discredited ancient sciences. These are alchemy, astrology and symbolism. Neither of them has come back to vogue in the same aura of understanding in which they were esteemed of old. They have reappeared in the modern day resting on foundations that are for the most part pseudo or spurious.

Their true nature and rationale are by no means known as formerly they were. They rest now on partial and imperfect theorization. Whatever they possessed of legitimate worth before their repression has not been reintegrated in their recent resurgence. Indeed it may be said with reference at any rate to astrology and symbolism that whereas in olden times they stood grounded on scientific theses of positive value, they now flourish largely through supposititious motivations. Their original high science has not been resuscitated with them.

Our concern is definitely with symbolism. While the rehabilitation of this primary science is still in its infancy, there are cheering signs that it is on the way to be given more adequate recognition of its pivotal importance. It is one of the indices of the waking of the modern mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations of Medievalism that a new science of "semantics" is well started toward a central place in mental procedure. Yet it is evident that current understanding has far to go before it will have regained the ancient insight that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology by which the mind can be given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the realities of higher worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed signs and coins of mental imagery, are local and temporary. They come and go, and serve a partial segment of humanity, locking each unit off in cultural isolation.

Symbolism is the one universal and omnipresent language, significant and meaningful everywhere. For its alphabet is the world of ubiquitous nature. The tree, the seed, the leaf, the serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water, earth, fire, the flower, the sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same oration to penetrating perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let nature by your teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell two varying stories of truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of ways of telling her story, but they all converge eventually upon the one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has but one law, as ancient sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out to concretion in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation in the worlds of form.

If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true meaning. All things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the universal, the eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it has little serviceableness for man, who is no dweller in the absolute, but is still a citizen of the relative. Truth, in manifestation, is many-sided, has many facets, comes to an epiphany or showing forth at many levels. Strictly, man's concern is not directly with truth. His prerogative is to deal with the many truths that confront him, doing his best to rationalize them into an organic structure that approximates a vision of truth from his level.