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 advancedthought of human evolution. Nothing has ever been written dealing withthe problem of Sex which is at once so illuminating, convincing andsatisfying. To our knowledge this particular view of the sex-subjecthas never before been presented, and, perhaps it could not have been, owing to the fact that it is only _now_ in these days of higherthought, that such a view could be understood. 

The author, Ali Nomad, is already well known to progressive readers asthe writer of "Cosmic Consciousness, " or, "The Man-God Whom We Await;"a work that has made its author famous by the reprint of its manyeditions. 

There are signs of a new order in the relation of the Sexes alreadyindicated upon the horizon of the World's consciousness as the resultof the present world-conflict. _Today people are as ignorant of thesubject of Sex as they are of God. _ Both of these must be understoodif the race is to progress beyond its present stage. Otherwise weshall pass into the long sleep of oblivion like all civilizations inthe past leaving future generations to grapple with the same worldproblems. 

True or _perfect_ marriage is the most important attainment in thelife of the individual. 

The author demonstrates that perfect marriage is a scientificpossibility and that legal marriage and divorce simply conform tocivil laws. He very clearly outlines the reason why civilization makeslittle or no progress in dealing with the social evil and other sexproblems. 

The publishers place this book before an intelligent public, believing, that more _real_ knowledge can be gained by its study, thanby 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 toentertain or amuse, but a scientific instruction which will elevatethe individual and the race, develop self respect, self control, morality and love. If the propositions presented by the author arecorrect--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 longas the average mental attitude toward the most vital, the mostimportant 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 bettersocial conditions, there is a deplorable lack of anything like theproper attitude toward the problems of Sex, albeit there are evidencesthat our social consciousness is alive to the seriousness of the sexproblem. 

Many of our advanced thinkers and scientists are giving theirattention to the subject, but it is a theme which has been so longneglected, so hedged about by false standards of morality; so fetteredby the system of tabu, that a rational discussion of Sex apart frommateria medica, or religion, is difficult. 

Moreover, the physiological side of the sex question robs it of allthe delicacy, and the intimacy and the beauty and romance which shouldby right, surround the function of sex-mating and which does surrounda union that is pure and perfect. In this innate desire to share withthe one and only possible mate, the intimate secrets of love, thereis nothing of shame or apology--sentiments which alas, actuate theso-called "modest" man or woman of today. 

Sex matters should, indeed, be held too sacred, too intimate forpublic discussion, whereas the present-day attitude holds that Sex istoo indecent to be spoken of. When the subject is forced upon publicattention as it so frequently is through tragic occurrences, theopinions expressed are both petty and puerile. They evade the truthand so avoid the issue. They deal with effects only, are satisfiedwith offering suggestions as to ways and means of suppressing theseeffects, instead of going to the root of the matter and realizing thatall the tragedies that spring out of Sex are due to wrong teaching andthinking in regard to the sex-function. That which we reverence, andhold sacred, we do not profane. Until Sex is established in itsrightful place, as the holy and divine creative power of thisuniverse, we will be shocked and horrified with sex-tragedies. 

It is a pity that the physiological and hygienic aspect of Sex has tobe discussed at all, but it is necessary that all sides of the subjectmust be presented to meet the great variety of minds, but it is ourcontention that if the spiritual quality of Sex were recognized andunderstood, there would be no need for any other view, because if Sexwere recognized as the sacred, and holy and spiritual function _thatit is_, disease and sinfulness would disappear as the mist before thesun. 

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 flowerinto the perfection of the spiritual seed that generated it. 

In the meantime, the debasement of all things connected with sex mustbe aired, discussed, and weeded out, until a sane and normal andreverential recognition of the universality and the eternality of Sex, is engendered in the minds of men and women and growing youths andtransmitted 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, delightsof earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of theearth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justificationof itself. 

"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of hissex; 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 mentalperverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" andeverything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternalfuture upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking toencompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source ofall life--Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foistingupon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted thevery essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or fromdivine sources justifies such an idea. 

Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving untilthe last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may bethat we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all themore thoroughly for having so long neglected it. 

In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of thesubject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issuedpertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contentionthat the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacredfunction of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, beforethe Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is incelestial 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 lifeof Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the causeof death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attractionand repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal andcentrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits--orrather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both maleand 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 variousgases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another namefor copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. Thelaw of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity. "The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature, " says ascientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all theforms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visibleuniverse, 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 allover the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the secondcoming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross. " The cross is butanother form of the X--the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action. 

The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward andwithin itself. The home is established and maintained by the femaleelement; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus theFemale Principle best expresses the highest love because the object oflove is _union_. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever thestruggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack ofunion. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True unionmust come from the Center of Life--from the spiritual Reality, whichthe physical only imperfectly shadows forth. 

Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note theupward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that theearth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, andsocial unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is inthe ascendant and love demands _union_--not merely matrimony. 

The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-endinglaw 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 spiralconvolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to theadoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention andtransmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming acircle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood--victory overdeath through _regeneration_. 

It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, butwithout Sex there would not be even the urge toward physicalsustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to allinstincts. 

There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. Itis almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases, sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in thecontinuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sexhas no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage norgiving in marriage" after death. 

This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race fromseeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of merephysical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence ofspirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by merephysical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom thehealthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring aslong as possible the attainment of that which has been presented tothe mind as "spirituality. "

Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problemof Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Itsspiritual function is not _less_ but infinitely _more_ than that whichwe glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression. 

Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto amillion fold, refining, purifying and _intensifying_ the sex instinctuntil it bears a relationship to the average instance ofsex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organismbears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Lifein all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of themusical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of thespiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can notmark a too distinctive separation between the various phases oflife-manifestation. 

We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with themental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact eachblends into the other, when we rightly understand their place andpurpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend intothe grand compositions of the Masters. 

"As above so below, and as below so above, " is a truism which we maysafely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamentalprinciple of this external life which we cognize with our five senses(senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not alwayswhere 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, morepermanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms. 

Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in thevisible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisibleworlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself themystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and theanimal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, andprotoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles ofboth sexes. It is not sexless, but bi-sexual; not neuter butmasculine-feminine. Every form of life has sex, and in some rareinstances both sexes are present in one form. This does not mean thatthere is another phase of sex unclassified, but rather it proves theunion in one _Whole Entity_ of the two distinct principles, and bythis fact of the "twain made one" we may know that Sex is the verycrux of the cosmic law; that not only does it survive the merephysical expression of the law, but that the object of thesex-function is the spiritual union of the two principles, a male anda female entity, forming one complete and perfect Being--the truerepresentative 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 symbolof spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not havefor their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are notfinal, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are manysex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do notfulfil this highest of all relationships, that of spiritualcounterparts. 

Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see itexpressed 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 ofsex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evidentplan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement andperfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long lookedfor and who we believe is here. 

If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physicalonly, instead of basing our observations from the interior, thespiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that thefunction of sex was designed for no other purpose than that ofprocreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trendof life-manifestation. 

Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, wefind as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggsdeposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific andalmost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law ofSex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturallyrather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no highersentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merelyinstinctive urge to perpetuate the species--the lowest expression ofLove--and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there, and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from thefact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggsother than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, wesee the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages thegod-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably thestickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young. 

In those forms of life which are supposed to be insensate, we find theuniversal law of sex-attraction and repulsion. The pollen from an oaktree, for example, may be blown about by the wind and may light upon aplant which is far removed in species from its own; but if such be thecase, no fertilization takes place. The fundamental law of Love is toattract to itself _its own_; that which belongs to it by right ofCosmic law and order and justice. 

All the inharmony of our social life comes from the attempt toappropriate and _possess_ that which, in the final analysis, in theAbsolute, is not ours. When the majority of Mankind shall havemastered this lesson, the human race will enter upon its truespiritual life. The psychic mind with which man alone of all earth'screatures is supposed to be endowed will have conquered theinstinctive mind, and the higher expression of love which wouldprotect and preserve, and _leave free_, will have gained supremacyover 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 ofsex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree thatParadise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well asbabies. 

Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expressionthan that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we notewith satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urgeis more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of themammals. 

The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and theharmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many estheticways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; incontinuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intenselove, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, butit softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles ourideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblemof the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as thespiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beingslearn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating, which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of theirprogeny. 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 isanalogous to that of the birds; namely, that of finding a deep andlasting joy in the presence of the loved one; in sympathizing witheach other's ideals; listening with devoted attention to each other'swords; contacting, as it were, each other's _inner nature_, ratherthan obeying the merely animal urge of procreation. And above all, inthe common aim of altruistic thoughtfulness for the little lives whichtheir love has brought forth. 

Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise thesex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physicalcontact, to that of spiritual union--a wide gulf seemingly; but whowould not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual unionwith the Beloved One means?

 CHAPTER II

 SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION

Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to andinclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage andcivilized, 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. Anintelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth willnot shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of anunknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, moreworthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery ofbirth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seedplanted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human lifefrom the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The onlyshocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be"shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. Itis shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away fromspiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracleof Sex is unrecognized by them. 

With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds whichsurvive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form ofworship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was thesimplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze ofcomplexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuriesprevious to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literaturemakes constant allusion to "The Golden Age, " evidently referring to atime before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as"The Fall of Man. " The first conception of a supreme power, somethinghigher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery ofSex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in theevidences of sex seen in plants and animals. 

It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was afterall only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. Thevital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seento be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the naturaland inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greaterthan that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act ofprocreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, theFemale Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the womanissued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child"became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhatdifferent meaning from that which we give it today, although we maytrace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil, " signifyingfecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by thosewhose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to haveoriginated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, asan object of worship. 

Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of thissymbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, andreverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is alsoenduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, althoughdefiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell. 

The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of allsymbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with theideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance. At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and thenurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; shealone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimatelyreversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of thereproductive power. 

Thus the age-long warfare between the sexes began--a warfare which, ifit had any foundation in Reality, must have resulted long since inrace-extinction. But despite this degrading warfare men and women havecontinued to attract each other in varying degrees of love, until nowthe future offers a golden promise of _union_. As long as primitiveman kept to nature worship, deifying earth as the mother who broughtforth the grains and fruits for her childrens' sustenance, religiouspractices were devoid of sacrifice and strife. The advent ofspringtime when the earth awakened from her long sleep and the periodof gestation began when the seeds were planted, or when from Nature'sown laws they were reproduced without the aid of man, was the occasionof thanksgiving and rejoicing with general merry-making and generalgood-will. Again, in harvest time there was feasting and rejoicing andmusic and dancing; and we have no reason to believe that this verynatural method of showing their gratitude and their happiness wasaccompanied by any suggestion of sacrifice or propitiation. 

There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the earlyDeities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the"Divine Mother. " The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess ofUniversal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying herandrogynous character. 

Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parentof all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of allthe Deities. " Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped asthe first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to thisday we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue asfeminine. 

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 sunapparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and insucceeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as adeific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradledand cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman fromher lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the levelof the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring. 

While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver oflife, " the heads of families were female and descent was traced fromthe mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruderand the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, themother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark uponthe masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of thisordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-lawis to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When wecontemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that haveprevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easilypersuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it wasyesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is reallyfundamental. 

From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolveda phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principlean exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the femalesex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery andsex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ ofgeneration was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yetfrom the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the grovesdedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generativeorgans of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that themost exalted motives first actuated the worshippers. 

The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or theDeity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and itmust be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderfulmiracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look backover the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature tofall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we getlost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and moreexalted planes of our ideals. 

From yoni worship (worship of the female organ of generation), withall the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed uponwoman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course oftime, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it beindividual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there wasestablished a "new religion, " and this time it was the male organwhich was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy. In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most partthe same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we notetoday among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxedstronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy ofdeification--the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?

The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of thephallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoniworship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which werecelebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirianfestivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of natureworship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallicworshippers had brought both ideals into degradation. 

There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks calledThesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival ofCeres (the goddess of Life and Law), which we are anxious to havenoted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout theentire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that therites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virginsdistinguished for their purity of life. " Very rarely were men admittedto the inner secrets of the Eleusirians. 

Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honorof the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared thatthe power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the malebelonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is tosay the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of thisceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a timewould come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceiveand bring forth a child and that when that time should come thequestion as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and thatpurity and peace would reign upon earth. 

This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolationto sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may havebeen simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, becausephallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, thatnot an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into theEleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any manviolating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. Thisgives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exaltedsect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so muchthat of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included thepure 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 thefestivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific natureof Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtueof inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth andhonor. 

Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whetherexpressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpentworship, we find the universally recognized fact that only thosequalities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reachimmortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to saywhat the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongsonly to those who are pure in heart. 

From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holycommunion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution ofthe male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that thephallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol. Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyriansupremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism. Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from aspiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe andreverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions ofevery tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all timeswill be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter howobscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequentlyassociated. 

The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy, underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of theCentral African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above thedin of our modern commercial civilization. The prejudiced and thesuperficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremoniesrecords only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences ofdepravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of theidea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race whichhas sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world'sevolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races aretoday emerging. 

All mystic truths are expressed in symbolism. It has been said thatthese truths are "veiled;" this is true only because the observer hasnot yet learned to speak the language. The universal language issymbolism. In the early Egyptian, the Indian, and the Hebrewreligions, the fundamental idea was the two generating principles (orwe might say the two aspects of the One principle) of generation. Thetwo in spiritual _union_ represented the Infinite--the Deity. TheHebrew word "Elohim" is plural, and means male and female united, forming the One Perfect and Complete Being. This union is the "Holy ofHolies" of the ancient mystics and alchemists. We see its reflectionand its persistence today in the Catholic service of the Mass, wherethe priest raises the Eucharist as the "Holy of Holies" in which isgenerated the Christ-man, and before whom all human devotees bow thehead that they may not look upon the perfection and beauty of its pureradiance. Neither is the priest supposed to touch the chalice withuncovered hands. He prepares himself by fasting and prayer before hemounts the altar upon which this "Holy of Holies" is hidden from view. 

The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations iseasily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols ofyoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, althoughit is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it isonly through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man canbe born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is eitherconcealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek andRoman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. Thisdebasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and isunquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Romanempires. 

If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson thatneither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but onlydifferent; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but thateach little group and class of humans has its particular contributionto the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing themind from the shackles of ignorance--that darkness which obscures ourinner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-calledcivilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women ofthis century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we aredifferent and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individualityis our contribution to the work of the cosmic law, which is seekingto lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestiallight. 

The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important placein a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is oneof the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximatelyfour thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlierideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres, " the emblemof the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacredcharacter of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterizedas feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleurde lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, andthey are called feminine, although really androgynous. 

The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, hasbeen regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it issupposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. Butclose examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vesselin the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which aretiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant andseed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into newplants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the newlife. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not aspronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone areboth present in the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and notfeminine alone. 

Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as therepresentative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life andenergy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle inthe Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although inreality bi-sexual. 

The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which themale principle has dominated, as the one true and only God--the giverof life, the energizing power of Creation--and the lily and theEucharist 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 buildingof the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in theearliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anythingsuggestive of "confusion of tongues. " The name unquestionably camefrom "babil" meaning "the gate of God. " Thus only is its meaningobvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam and phalluswhich obtained at that time. It is also evident that the phallicworshippers borrowed the simile of "the gate of God" from theworshippers of the yoni, who based their claim to truth upon theindisputable fact, that out of the womb comes the life of plant, andanimal, and man. 

The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel showconclusively that it was a monument to the victory of the phallicworshippers 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, " andall the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because ofthis fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions andphilosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retainedthe 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 isan absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that themystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder;and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomeserotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth, " andwhen the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. Itbecomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight forsupremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of unionshall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form ofreligious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle ofbirth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will thefamily be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, beworshipped. 

The trinity in unity has been a widespread and persistent part of allreligions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal hasa permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is oftenobscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seekingthe light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscuredtruths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions, " willreveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modernconcepts. 

But while we note a vague recognition of the female element in all ourmodern religious systems, the general acceptance of the God-idea asmonistic and the gender of this monistic God as masculine betrays thedomination of phallicism over yoni worship and also over that of thetwo principles in conjunction--the bi-une Deity. The tree isuniversally accepted as an emblem of life-energy. The upright shape ofthe tree; the sap which rises at certain periods from invisiblesources; and the fact that the germinal power of the seeds of thefruits and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make thetree 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 ofScandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, ithas been regarded as "sacred. " The same idea is found throughout allmyths, and all religious symbolism, namely: _the attainment ofgod-hood is reached when both sexes are united in one Being. _

The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in asubsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with thehistory of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship tothat of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, heldsacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which ourown Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, andits perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest, in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. TheLatin name for the pine is pinus. 

Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but thatstep led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; itsspiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; itsroot and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of thelife-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of themale principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deitycontributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finallybecame the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of thespheres, " from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race, became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refusedany 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 whatof our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinitycomposed of three male beings?

It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that thefemale principle is given a place co-equal with the male. ChristianScience addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God, " and theirreverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as theIonian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, areevidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in theGod-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instrumentsof the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the maleprinciple as the only true God. 

So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modernthought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardlynotice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerfulhypnotist. 

Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand thesymbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblemswhich constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems arethe pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika. The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with theirprotruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with themound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, whichvenerated both sexes as co-equal. It is easy to realize why the Jewswere driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worshipthe Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing thephallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in theGod-head. 

It is also significant that side by side with the present-day FeministMovement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptianarchitecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art, which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on itsartistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not withacclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and soclosely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged thecenturies and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancientcivilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to theEgyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, isin vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobaccoand what not (so essentially an American custom) we find themodernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika. 

The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every countryand in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally, originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumeshave in recent years been written on its history and meaning, thewhole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizingits 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 takenon the physical plane only) to be impossible of accomplishment--theysquare the circle. A circle is emblematical of completeness. Aum, theAbsolute, the Omniscient, is always typified by a circle. To "squarethe circle" means esoterically to have reached godhood, and this canbe accomplished only by the male and female _united_ in spirit. Theswastika is essentially a bi-une sex symbol although it has beensometimes called male and sometimes female, according to its shape, which varies with the various meanings ascribed to it. Primitive manwas not prolific in language, and one symbol expressed many ideasaccording to its varied form and position. 

The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of thegenerative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power wasconceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still"testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substitutedfor the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognitionof 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 andvows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's wordwas reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of the Supreme Creativepower of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential ofunion, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and itis estimated that about six hundred years B. C. The level of debaucheryand vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies werenothing more than orgies of sex-degradation. 

The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility andpower evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced womanto the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than areceptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and aman's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy--an idealwhich is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is boundedby nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man. 

Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? Whatdid it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answerthe idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret ofthe generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as oldage conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened andthe supply insufficient. 

This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, theyargued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) lefthim. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generationrealize, although we know that old age with consequent cessation ofphysical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even oursupposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energydies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place wherethey realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know thatold age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between thefunctions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age isthe wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will notdo so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energyinto higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmutethe creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come topass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "laydown his body and take it up again. "

There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciouslyleave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, whilethey visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is nomore than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attainedthat we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itselfconfer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but thatthese may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service--not aspayment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailinglaw, which gives what we demand. 

What we demand we naturally work for. If we serve Love, we get thecoin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed byJones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith. 

Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed totransmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animalinstinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the loftyidealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death asbefore the change. But again we may note a wise provision of theCosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to livethrough many years of life without having loved some person or something with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almostevery 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 bloodwas the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace thelogical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice whichreigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, andengrafted 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, asa 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 oforthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bibleas he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes andholding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped bypolice authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent ofthe God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in theidea 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 racesobserved that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on andthe blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow atcertain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. Whatmore natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea ofsending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil ofthe 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 tosacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for theaged, 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 andtrained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function hadbeen rigorously suppressed. 

And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and sothey conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read ofrepeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freelyon the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people. At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that theonly Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the finaldebt of transgression and set men free from death, that they mighthave 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 meageraccounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story ofhis mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea ofblood-sacrifice as _payment_ for the privilege of physical virility, so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, couldnot die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuriesand is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christianchurches in this civilized century. 

And yet there is an esoteric truth underlying this universal idea ofsacrifice, and when we come to this in a subsequent chapter, we willbetter understand how and why it has persisted throughout thecenturies. 

 CHAPTER III

 PRESENT-DAY CONDITIONS: THE COSMIC CAUSE

From the study of ancient sex-worship to our twentieth century systemsof religion; our scientific discoveries; our intellectual standards ofphilosophy and social ethics; and above all, perhaps, our marvelouscommercial order, connecting, as it does, the entire globe, seems afar cry; but it is only another link in a chain and fits into the pastas accurately and as inevitably as the morning follows the night. 

There is an erroneous idea current that public institutions, such aslaw-courts, religious creeds, educational systems, reform movements, et cetera, are causes of race-advancement. As a matter of fact theyare not causes but results. They do not determine progress; theyreflect it. 

Causes start from the Center and radiate outward. We may realize thismore readily if we will remember that if we throw a pebble into a poolof water, it starts innumerable little waves which traveling outward, reach a point some distance from the central source, and if we were tosee the outermost wavelet only, we might imagine that the disturbancebegins and ends far from the place where the pebble was thrown. 

This illustration explains the difference between the materialisticand the metaphysical points of view. The former notes the result, andthe latter the cause of existing conditions. The mystical viewpointtakes into account the fact that there is a cosmic law which acts likea 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; thephysical is the attenuated. 

The term, "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporousspace where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligentreflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago, "The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed. " Ourmental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we seethe effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods oflocomotion; our architecture; our commerce--in all the avenues of ouractive civilization. 

We wish to emphasize the point that every so-called advancement; everydiscovery; every improvement in moral ideals as well as in mechanics, and in those things that add to our physical comfort, comes from thecenter of Life. 

The external but _reflects_ the action of the Cosmic Law whichuncovers the vast areas of consciousness and frees the human soul fromthe hypnotisms, and the limitations of the animal-mind. 

Animal force is still strong in the world to-day, but it is not asstrong as it appears to be, because much of the seeming indifferenceand cold-heartedness of the people, taken en masse, is due to thehurried, 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 aconsciousness of our innate relationship. This realization comes tothe surface in times of great stress and peril. 

The whole trend of modern life symbolizes or reflects the _ideal_ ofunity, albeit the tooth and claw and growl of the animal in Man may beseen and felt and heard in the vain effort to postpone the inevitabledethronement of the animal force, which would dominate the weaker andappropriate for the personal self, the creation of brain and hand, much as the house-dog, satiated with over-feeding, buries the bone hecannot eat lest some hungry brother-dog shall get it. Nevertheless, despite the animal greed that still shows in our modern life, there isplenty of evidence that we are on the upward spiral that leads tounity--the effect of love. 

The superficial observer, dominated by that instinct of fear whichseems to be so ingrained in our animal nature that we are all slavesto it in some form or degree, sees in the present-day conditions amenace to what he believes to be the moral life of the race, andparticularly 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 "immodestdress;" defiance of traditional ideas of etiquette and conduct; henotes what appears to be a disregard for the faith of our fathers;and, above all, a distaste for that special function ofwoman--child-bearing. The superficial observer, both male and female, feels great alarm. 

But let us not be dismayed. Present day conditions, particularly asthey relate to the female principle of Creation, but reflect theinevitable reaction from a one-sided course. The pendulum swings backagain and ultimately we will strike a balance; from domination tounity; from struggle to harmony. Even American commercial life admitsthe value of a vacation time. 

Present day conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in awell-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything thatdisturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm tothe undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern lifewhich directly affect women, or in which we may say, the FemalePrinciple is especially concerned, we note a determined and uniteddemand for freedom. 

Woman's demand for political equality is but a shadowgraph as it wereof the real demand which is the demand of the Divine Femininethroughout all manifested life, for recognition of equality, in theplan of creation. It is a symbol of the ideal of unity which findsexpression in the commercial world in trusts and labor unions; in the"let us get together" plea of the various advocates of reform; of allthose enterprises which are seen to most directly affect the entirehuman family. 

That there are women who are blind to this fundamental idea of theirdemand for political equality is true; and it is also true that thereare perhaps as many men as there are women who recognize the need ofwoman's political and social equality, but this only proves the factwhich we have already emphasized, namely that it is not women aspersonalities, but the Female Principle throughout the universe thatis at the root of the modern Feminist Movement. The male principle isnot confined to the form of man, neither is the female principlealways expressed in the form of woman. Many men exemplify more of thematernal instinct than do certain women; neither must it be assumedthat this type of man is effeminate; or that the woman of Amazonianphysique is more masculine in thought and habit than is the littlefrou-frou specimen of womankind who looks appealingly into the eyes ofher male escort, beseeching protection from the rude stares which shehas premeditatedly invited. Qualities are sexless and universal. It isonly in their specific combinations that they adequately represent themasculine or the feminine gender. 

Blessed are they who have learned the art of discrimination. 

Broadly speaking, women are behaving in a manner which upsets allprecedent and promises ultimate emancipation from restraint. 

But is it not possible that women no longer need restraint if theyever needed it? Is it not possible that the world has grown up, andthat both men and women may safely be allowed the freedom ofself-government, with all possible mutual aid in the work ofestablishing an upright, free, and trustworthy science of rightliving?

That which is always in the future is never ours and if we are evergoing to be free and happy and well-conditioned there is no reason whywe should not make it soon. 

Woman's demand for political equality is sometimes used as an excuseto lessen her dignity and her place in society. People who do this areof the same type as those before whom Sex cannot be discussedintelligently because they do not realize the sacredness of Sex. Theyare a remnant of the ages which have passed and which have left theirmark, in the idea of a half-sexed God, the "He, " the spouseless Fatherwho brought forth the visible universe apparently without co-operationwith the Female Principle. This type of person prates much about thedangers of race-suicide, meaning thereby the increasing tendency tochildlessness and not as should be taken into account the death rateamong children who are born of diseased and unfit parents and broughtinto existence without the necessary conditions of sanitation, foodand care. 

Our national Eugenic societies are hampered by false ideas of whatconstitutes morality, being bound to uphold the tradition that thechild that is born of married parents, no matter how diseased in bodyand deficient in mind, is better-born than is the offspring ofunmarried parents, even though the latter may be a model of physicalhealth and mental efficiency. Eugenics will remain limited in scopeuntil such time as the entire world adopts "in spirit and in truth"the recent action of the European governments, and recognizes thelegitimacy of all children however born. 

And although the action of the European governments was born ofnothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiersmight be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the humanrace. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended toall children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the crueland unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents. Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and althoughit seems a terrible price to pay for even so badly a needed reform asthis, Humanity has always paid dearly for its willful blindness. Itcertainly should be evident to any sane mind that every child that isborn 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 tobrand an innocent child with the epithet "illegitimate. " The lowestanimal has a right to be born. Many a beautiful and innocent child isdenied that right. 

If it has taken one of the most bloody wars in history to establishthe 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 soundfar-fetched to many, but the future will see the vindication of thisbelief. 

Birth is actually the most important function in life. If it isimmoral to be born, no matter what the conditions of such birth, whatpossible chance have we to live morally? We cannot discriminate indealing with the great fundamentals of life. 

This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws areinviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child ofthe beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of theunmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into theworld in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature maynot 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, becauseHumanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover weare so interdependent that the whole must be affected by theconditions of a part. 

Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under somecircumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take intoaccount our ideas of respectability. 

The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimatefor women to have children before they have been married?"

The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must bepermitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to doit for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter mustbegin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarriedwoman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Societyis injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state, because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that ofmaintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries--both of which resultfrom our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation. 

If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacyby generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world_desired by the mother_ is born in accordance with the highestpossible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church andGovernments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and childbecause of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race ofmen and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will beone of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the presenttime, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, andcondemnation 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 isinevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point ofchild-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women whowould be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather moreperhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to makemotherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one mightnot see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life. We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We arealways seeking to check effects. 

The average human being is little more than a phonographic record ofthe dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious. 

Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we willfind that the birthrate will increase among the "rich andrespectable, " where now we note a determined desire to shirk theresponsibilities of parenthood. 

We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will bealarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is theideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationshipsare neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established onlybetween free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choicemean life and health. 

The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free fromself-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phasestends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Consciousselection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love isinseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts ofall the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, howeverwell-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physicalaspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with theeffects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to diseaseand degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus noreal good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution toProgress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher _ideal_, rather than a higher _order_. The higher order can come only bygetting back to primal laws. 

The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks werecompetent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in twoimportant points of the well-balanced individual. They worked forbeauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, butboth also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to theworld. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was acivilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it waslike 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, butfreezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known. 

Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, wasunbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization offorce; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal ofsex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least importantrequisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without theelement of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction musttake on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time givethe finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persistedin, finally results in decadence. 

We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding ofthose types of humans which have the best advantages at least ofeducation and refinement, whether or not those advantages areembraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustriousexample of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of amarriage between a brother and sister--a custom which prevailed amongancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may wellbelieve was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certainthat 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 toexponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly establishedthat degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditionsonly. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome andintellectual. 

Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of"Margrave" in "A Strange Story. " Margrave was a perfect and beautifulphysical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no souland was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which weinstinctively classify as spiritual attributes. 

Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusualbehavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief endand aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoidmaternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman'srightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family. 

Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfishand unselfish--are refusing to bear children. The superficial observerrails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees womenliving in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; ifthey are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase ofsemi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light"housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where thenearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundryminimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies readymade, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Underthese conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "lighthousekeeping, " it is plain that children are not welcome. 

Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouragedfrom rearing children, since city life tends more and more toapartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulatedapartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say, notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be acosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "somethingback of it, " as we say of many things which we note in our every daylife. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seemdeplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is alwaysupward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will. 

This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates theaverage woman, who is able physically and financially to bear childrenand yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with theplanet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developedand the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain fallsupon the just and the unjust alike. 

Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change inhuman ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an idealin which equality shall be more nearly represented and they givethemselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regeneratingwork. 

The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension ofit. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduatefrom it or we return for another term, according as we have masteredthe studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and wesee that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth hastwo aspects. One is from apparent selfishness and lack of thetemperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to womenas an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct. 

The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to arestless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of theFeminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimeswe find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of thecause of their "brazen sterility, " as a virile writer has causticallytermed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking andthey merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind. 

Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can putinto words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing isnot a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life. Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle forcompleteness knows intuitively, that even though she may never begetmortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exerciseof her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, whichseemingly separates us from invisible areas. Moreover motherhood isqualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made norunmade by the birthrate. 

Two important considerations present themselves to the world today: Oneis that woman--considered as the fecund receptive sex-principle--isrefusing the sex relationship on the old basis, however "respectable"and well-intentioned that basis was. Generally speaking, it is evidentthat the old basis of intercourse between the sexes has been, isbeing, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied, refused, as theapproved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The other importantobservation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this. 

It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-consciouslimitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of acondition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerabledivorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why arewomen refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live withtheir husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they lesscourageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable oflove--either love of children or love of the father who begets thechildren?

It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of lovethan ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the firsttime 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 consciousnessfrom the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriersbetween races and nations and sects and societies, as also between thesexes, slowly dissolving. 

Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying apolitical, or educational or religions platform with an Occidental. Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existedbetween the Jew and the Gentile--now they exchange pulpits, and allsects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women areelected to political and educational offices. No matter that theseevidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are _promises_ of thebirth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when aman's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediatefamily only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at theexpense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate ofany other women and children. 

To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of theself interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and isnot, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated ourhair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were bestconserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is thatLove has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or morealtruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of loveis to expand; to grow; to _give_ of itself until unselfishness mustcome with the final aim of love, which is _unity_ and not possession. 

We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and moreinclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves thehigher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal oflove is possible to the woman of today than ever before. We must takeinto consideration the average of the sex, at the same time notforgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities ofboth sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing andunselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope, the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealingwith principles and not merely with individuals. 

Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal orconjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may thenask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusionthat women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demandconditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind. They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfectrace--a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and clawand choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over thepossession 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 consciouslyactive, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submergedunder the domination of the animal nature which subdues andappropriates. 

A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union. Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite thegods to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merelyreproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall besomething more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction. This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according tothe development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union iscoming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type ofunion, but also as the initiative of the promised time when thekingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens. 

All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief inits efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surelyvain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keepshis promises, " which is simply one way of saying that the law of thecosmos is reliable. 

"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God, " but both must agreethat whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. Therecan be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in whichLove is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree oflogic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and alsoso inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination onthe physical plane--a manifestation of life which even physicists arebound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities. 

We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of adecreasing birthrate as we see it on the physical plane. There aremany other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and theplanets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is theaxis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony. 

The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principleis refusing maternity, and above all the _bondage_ of matrimony forthe important reason that the time has come for the rearing of theMan-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex, superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sensegratification. 

Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Whyshould it not manifest in this most important of all our systems ofintercourse?

The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacredor holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishmentfor indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more thanhalf ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of acosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operatedwith to advantage. 

Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood. Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony isalways marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children. And there are many women with children who know not the first faintdawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) lovewhich comes most often in the guise of motherhood, but which isalways present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other'sinner nature. 

If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and therightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evademotherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of alllife; if they will not rest until every child that is born into thisworld is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is givenevery advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moraltraining, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only torival each other in the quality and the perfection of theirmotherhood. 

The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating thebirthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to preventconception, may be well meant as these things are consistent withprevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to theproblem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule, children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and providedfor. 

Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparativelyevery woman would be normal under proper social and economicconditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because oflack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because oflack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modernmo-loch, Public Opinion. 

When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of hischildren. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to befree from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving herfree to be guided in the most vital and important function of herlife, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Lovewill establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no otherpower on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachmentsnor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love isthe only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God. 

Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will besuperseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and whenthis 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 withintelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact thatsex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices, reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted tosex-worship and sex-degradation. 

It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and tomake a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" ofmatrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, soto speak, the social institution of marriage. 

Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which arebased upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to theprejudices and "beliefs" of the average. 

Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting andfundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudicesmust be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature'sconfidence and be the sharer of her secrets. "

The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark of theologicalbias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previousdiscovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend hisGod"--as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it--were notcapable 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 ofthe workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have beencleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable buildingwill be put up on the same ground; and anything from the oldarchitecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the newbuilding. 

The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protectthem from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from theirbrothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes adesirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home, rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study ofhistory should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changesin human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods waitupon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand forimproved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to bebidden, "Enter, Friend. "

As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals. Until there is amore general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quitecertain that the world will worry along with the one which now doesduty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poorthing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as manycomplaints as a hypochondriac. 

But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of thefundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning ofrecorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, verysatisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in socialand individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from astudy of the history of marriage. 

There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss allphases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic seesall life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies theexterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external, world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, theeverlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in asuccession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has longanticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatresand has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actualevents, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place fardistant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen whichmeets his eye. 

Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according totheir relation to other symbols which the mind has previously notedand classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism. 

Humanity is ever seeking the Reality--the Noumenon, which weintuitively 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 thesex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites andceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in humanethics, 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 offorms is common. 

And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to changeand variation, both in regard to the individual and the familyspecies, as we have in the human family. 

Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among someanimals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule. 

Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among theanimals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy isobviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific, to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males isgreater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wildand domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domesticlife, because the females are kept for breeding while the males areslaughtered for food. 

The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as themale, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing andrearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itselfvery early among the various families, from motives of self-protection, if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numericallystrong. 

In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life, and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in somespecies, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist, preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate onlywith a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to saythat should one die, the other refuses to mate again. 

It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. Amate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner. It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is acreature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guidedin his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional powerundeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, itmay be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has notemperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habitwould be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keepingwith the eagle character. 

The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists amongbirds and animals, and that it antedates history as a socialinstitution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we arejust, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upwardtrend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definiteand conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom isrecognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races oftoday. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamyobtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might notreinstate polygamy as a legalized custom. 

Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed assex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, andalso among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for anight by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanginghead-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms ofmarriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged amarriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. Inthese instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted andgenerally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. Infact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages wereeasily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seemsto have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continuethe family. 

Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as thevery natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he hadno rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the familywas the first consideration and this was maintained by the femaleheads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if hewould be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from herfamily, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female becamethe possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense. 

Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male graduallyacquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his"possessions, " from the fact that he had earned them by right ofconquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilizedidea of "earning. "

Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in thisrespect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almostgeneral observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudenceas "the unwritten law, " which permits a man to go unpunished when hekills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacywith his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in hiswife's person. 

In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicitywithin very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicideunder these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of amartyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions aregiven considerable space in the public print, defended a man who hadtaken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in thefollowing words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you foundprowling through your house with the intention of stealing yoursilver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. Howmuch more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from thesepestilential marauders?"

Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other indefense of mere property; but that is not the point here. Theinference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least theaverage degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category ofman's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power offree-will. 

Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is thepossessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing moreideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone. 

Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of whatconstitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The sameidea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so muchinvestment of time and money, and service of one kind or another, actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the maleare not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violentmethods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps shehas a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for"outraged honor, " and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessionsthrough the safer channels of the law-courts. 

The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much apart of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moralcode, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner. This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated tothemselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defensebeing that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family ofsatisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachablyrespectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to herneighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexualmatters, "as long as he provides well for me. "

When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutesmorality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it isgoverned by immediate conditions, both individual and social. 

It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessaryexpedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realizethe 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 inthe female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the falsevaluation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity. 

In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drovemany a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did notlike, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as herclaim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rarebird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and wemay safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average womanof the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" whichcritics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterizedour 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 theright of the parents to dispose of their children; the right bycapture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent. 

One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of theworld and at various times, and seldom has the condition of womanapproached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal, except in the comparatively short periods when women have been thegens of the family. 

These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legalstatus of women has been, as it is now, no more than what theevolving consciousness of the male permitted to her. 

It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, perse, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been eitherbetter conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon ouridea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of womenin Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; whichwould, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as ithas been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at besthas been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question ofpersonal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing inhim the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough atfirst in protecting his possessions; among which he egotisticallyconceded _his children at least_ first place; although the wife washardly more than a convenience and an incubator. 

Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom andamong the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his _Evolution ofthe Family_, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among theSemites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtlessthe 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, wasnecessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same soldto her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laboriousservant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though shemight gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of theHebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with noother reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her. Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to beable to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the momentof 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 thesame fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to theZend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being thatneither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been forcenturies an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes, where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women hasbeen, and still is, deplorable. 

In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was mostinferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Herhusband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their malechildren as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife andmother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was sheallowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choicefor her. 

This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuouswoman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes ofwomen were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One classwas formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree ofpower, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a lawunto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practicedprostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men onterms of at least temporary social equality. 

Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without theindependence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was inancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or theprostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, themost powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift loveout of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry, " and althoughthis, too, has at various times become a source of degradation, inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages withso-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in theevolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has servedtwo purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved thearistocratic class from extinction through decadence. 

As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy adegree 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 ofwealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord thefreedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly oftheir lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "Ihave married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields andhouses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils. "

One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greeceand Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of theircivilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logicallywas inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population inwhich women predominated, and we are told that in the interest ofprocreation 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 forthe story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and tookher back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from thetransaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarilyto Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that shewould have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse. 

In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was therule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wifewas subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him tothe eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons ina degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in oursocial ethics. 

It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any directinfluence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundredyears of Christian civilization among the white races. 

Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have notmolded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, whenesoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union meansequality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; raceequality. 

We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enoughto explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems tobe the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret tosay is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on theconstruction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expectto 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 professionalman. 

The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It isjudged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice offoods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate ofwhat a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge;and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicityof ideas and customs and creations. 

Differentiation is the primal attempt. 

Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first ofall she is different from, rather than identical with, men. 

The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "femininefrivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessingthat in her natural environment she does not consider herself hisequal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she maydeceive herself and others into thinking she is. 

An individual is important to Society in proportion to hisoriginality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; somehitherto unfamiliar view. 

Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, aconsciousness of our unity with all life, we find that althoughreligious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasizedin the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity shouldhave been established, segregation has been the rule, and it iswithout any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Churchthat we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and herco-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not aconsummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world. 

That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in thewake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction withreligious systems; and a determined disregard for what has beenpresented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religiouscreeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best theyhave been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom isthe great liberator. 

The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in Americaand Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science, mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" intoits literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the varietyof new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety ofnames 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 unityis presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, andSuffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "letus get together on this, " and in efforts at legislation that shallcontrol corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hoursof work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by therising sun of unity. 

We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, inorder that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: Whatdoes marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of thesocial body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entireCosmos?

Has it any real place and purpose beyond that of procreation, or anymore 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 monogamousmarriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain thatany other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race. 

Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promiseof the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfectimage of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for. That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallenfar short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizingthat the ideal is right. 

Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meetingand the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfectcomplementaries. 

In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritualcounterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base ofunion, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all thelaws 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 spiritualcounterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep theirsouls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in theflesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"--the word meaning whole;entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they maybe judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and anyattempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint ofexterior judgment must fail. 

The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highestideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for thatreason insist that marriage as a social institution is always completeand holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulusof no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemicalattraction and cohesion--an instinct, which we share in common withevery form of life, from the lowest insect to man--shall they becompelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" inthe 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 disruptthese immature relationships. 

"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passionalattractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all themotions, 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 thecause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in bothspheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would beno storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If themarriage between the individual will and understanding, between theinterior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regeneratedmen upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriagebetween the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise. "

Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons ofopposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every otheractivity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because ofthis union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; allmorality 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 ofwhat constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; conceptswhich, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord, " havetemporarily 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 basicprinciple of life. 

Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature is a system ofnuptials, " says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit orDivine Life. 

How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degradingsex-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 typesof marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us thatNature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secretof 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 prevailingsocial custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days. The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently byboth bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circleof wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one, " of thefinding by each of "the other half. " The circle is always used toexpress the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "withoutbeginning and without end. "

According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of puregold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might notacquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something morethan mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability tosustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. Itsymbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this pricelessblessing of perfect conjugal union, other than by his own efforts. Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartalunion--which means actually "twain made one, " comes only by dint ofstrife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life. 

Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that ofdrinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life, " at the completionof a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of thebride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; butmore generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Winedrinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can beenjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life--thedivine or spiritual sex-union. 

This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness thetruth that only complementaries have the power to act and react, without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfectbalance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction lessthan the other, perfect balance is lacking. 

Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was thedonning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly includedthe bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to thebride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greekmarriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads ofboth bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged. 

We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. Wehave the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; andthe circlet which symbolizes eternity. 

The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestowsthe crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love;which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literaltruth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance untilwe are _fit for the kingdom_. 

The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremonysymbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritualmarriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life, shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the weddingveil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of thephysical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shallknow our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we havefound that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge ofour every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entirepanorama 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 thepivotal center. 

So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man thatwe are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not soonerpenetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven, " we say ofsome self-sacrificing and loving soul, and the phrase suggests tomost of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all theirsplendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning whichthe splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes. 

Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature isin itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers aresymbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant;luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes ofthe beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value ofgems--diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?

It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is theirluminosity--their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the powerwhich we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has acorresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have allthings which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell usthat all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Eitherthey tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not theway. "

The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown ofgold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of itsesoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relatingto the spiritual marriage--counterpartal union. 

Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritualbody, the body also becomes sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, weremember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weedsare unregenerate flowers. 

Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human bodyis a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. Thechanges produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything whichthe 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, maypresent her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; noris this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized factthat anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructivethought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body. 

In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriageof Christian Rosy Cross, " which is, when read with the key to itsesoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between thesexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of theRosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets, "which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicruciansand other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union ofthe male and the female principles throughout nature and culminatingin man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through theperfect balance of sex. 

It has been said that women were not admitted to the Brotherhood ofthe Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there is plenty of evidenceto prove. 

Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation ofthe sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, itbecame necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires ofEsoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; inconsequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the veryheart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory, unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiatedinto the secret code. 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so farsucceeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women wereexcluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of thesecret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by sidewith this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbolshas been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixedwith frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to theVirgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenithof its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and, either through fear of the influence of their work, or possiblythrough lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, hademployed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power ofthe Church. 

This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter devoted to "TheHidden Wisdom, " and so we will leave it for the present. 

One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in theintimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove withthe ceremony of marriage. 

The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. Theturtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for thefervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for thedevotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that ifeither of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself todeath. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who arehappily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove asymbol of peace. 

Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figureprominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, fromancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flyingover the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth, the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms oflife. 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 functionwas doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stagesof sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almostgeneral licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sexfunction became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, incommon with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a parwith gluttony. 

Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilizationthat, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentiallymaterialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than itoccupies today in fine stock-breeding. 

Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitudetoward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in thehistory of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which wasevolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rathererotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although itsounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic. 

In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, thenormal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which heexperiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet wemust note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward thesex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; arevulsion 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 thatwomen had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took thebest of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man ofwealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; theorgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; allthese evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure andbeautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and itcame in the idea of asceticism--an instance where the remedy was worsethan the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism wasnot one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire oflicentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether assomething vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those whoshould have known better. 

The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind whichfostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women wereinferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more thanfrom any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note amilitant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues ofwoman's claim to free expression. 

While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Churchinstituted 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 HolyVirgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and theinculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-heartedchildren of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for theircomfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneaththe ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that aregone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyesto see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old, nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has beento hold to this central truth of all Life--religious, social, national, and domestic--the truth that it is only by exalting thematernal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviourof mankind. 

And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to bethe true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Churchitself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"--the pure Love between oneman and one woman; the "twain made one, " which is the only saviourthat ever was or ever will be--the pure Christ-child that is born ofconterpartal union. 

Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in acity called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember thateven so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel, " meaning apure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of theomphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of hisdiscovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have beenswallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember alsothat this central idea has been the foundation of all religious ritessince time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric ofChristianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, hewill see that it has merely been _revealed_, and the revelation willprove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual andthe most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that PerfectLove is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withholdHeaven from us, if we have this perfect love. 

Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every otherreligious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true andonly God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears;according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-uneGod, will be our spiritual development. 

We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when weabandon it as unclean and unworthy and unholy; both attitudes areabnormal, and unbalanced. 

Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balancedperson is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balancedindividual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced andtherefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced andhealthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; thisfact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is nowconsidering, 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 adefinition of words. 

The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in thematter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of thesex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The wordhas come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from thesex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, thatany indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, ourmodern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestlyparadoxical that they are absurd. 

On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful andholy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as anindecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh. 

We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible onlybecause of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taughtthat sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lowerstate of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we aretold that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, wherethere 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 theundeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoidof the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to ourminds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person;it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are notsurprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connectionwith the male. It is strictly a female attribute--nay, we may almostsay, "organ. "

If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack ofopportunity; 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 matrimonialmarket--if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapesbodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" isextolled. 

This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when abridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, shouldthe evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creaturewas stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, thearch-enemy of both sexes. 

And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we maylook back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting thePast with the Present; uniting the women of those days with theirsisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage uponthe spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery, among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale ofthat which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, thedeceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, relatedby a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteenyears of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged byher mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for thesame, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were consideredquite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was alwaysover-crowded with similar sales. 

Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beingskeep 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; failedto look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest pricefor the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutualdeception has been the rule. 

Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in thewretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the storyof a "pure woman, " and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure womanbrought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularlyfrom the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had givenbirth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the authormade it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances andcoercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes ofthe clerical critics. 

When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have everheld toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheldalmost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on onehypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized inthe story of the Holy Mother and the Child the _One primordial, andindestructible key to salvation_--the birth of the god-man through therecognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union. 

But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (thereis a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed toregard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as insex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychicaspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardentlydescribed in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness. "

If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it wereprofane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view ofmysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would beable to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack. 

The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance andecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Eitherthey will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is duethe subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or theymust be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns allsexual desire--that of eroticism and innate and ineradicabledepravity. 

Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, theparoxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to theHoly Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedlyobnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtueof prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to anideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual, then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at onceboth explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "themystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using theterminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physicalunion than the word "married") was the "bride-groom;" more than that;she declared that she was married with a ring, set with preciousstones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring. 

Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employwhen exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" issingularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips ofthe lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; andexalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of thedilettante lover. 

To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed withinthemselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age ofsexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human lovespiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal tothat of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for theintensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them intosuch an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the blissof the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, andwere totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-calledpractical life. 

Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his"Varieties of Religious Experience, " says: "Her idea of religion seemsto have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say sowithout irreverence--between the devotee and the Deity. " Although thisestimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless be shocking tothe 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 satisfyingthan that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most ofthe female saints, became "the bride of Christ"--the _man_ Jesus, theChrist, let it be remembered. 

St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gaveherself 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 describeany love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God"indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses andcompliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover. 

In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that heselected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and"consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning withlove, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. " In consequence of thisvow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautifulwomen. 

Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were notso, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as theobject of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, andTheresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the VirginMary. 

"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse with her guardian angel, who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun andwith a crown of glory on his head. "

St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved withextravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "ayoung 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 verymain-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown tothe merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritualsex-union. 

Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints reallycame into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms ofholy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequentlyappear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?

The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must beinterpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in theseinstances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology, that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even thoughthe visions did relate to some person other than the members of theHoly Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would havebeen attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint. 

They were practically compelled to include God and Christ in theirecstacies to prove their respectability. 

One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which"flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularlyapplicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described bythose who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborgso constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights. " Thisphrase is "melting love. " It is a feeling of melting or merging intothe other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed bythe two souls. In fact, it is _union_; whereas the lesser, or we maysay the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but _contact_. 

If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives ofthe saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we aresorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages, which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all wemay know of the "love of God, " is by analogous comparison to what weknow of human love. 

If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitablyarrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In whichevent, the very word itself would have lost its significance. 

The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects ofsaintliness lies in the realization that neither the saintsthemselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had anyconception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened andunprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly ecstacies, postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, beobjectionable, what can be said of the only other view which ispossible in the light of the evidence submitted?

Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we mustneeds decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue. 

For example, consider the character of a mother of theself-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of thehuman family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect thegenerations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with anunmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of theopposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment;upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of thisself-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even commonaffection. 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 entireconstantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished;but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward thedivine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purerconception of love. As we approach a higher type of civilization, thebroader, deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. Themore spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and ourlove-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual loveis 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 uponits strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than anattraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, ithas no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like theelectrical wire that is "short circuited, " it expends itself in onespasmodic combustion. 

True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common anderroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process ofsubtraction. 

We need go no further than to review the processes in the externalworld of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of thespiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea ofexclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called"spiritual. "

All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Whereformerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we nowharness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces ofelectricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering betweentwo single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions ofpersons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness, as weapproach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging;drawing within. 

The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to thefemale pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in externallife. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid thesuction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, andunion between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth toindividual 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 isunsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that wealmost 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 usedas such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes andappetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages ofdevelopment may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highlyintellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend toattract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtueof mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only--that is, when it isbecause two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskeydiluted; or their wine iced--we are apt to find the result in amistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for thereasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which todraw. The chemistry of the body changes with time and emotionalexperiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from acongeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived. 

Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches astate higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos. 

Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to thesenses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; butback of thought is desire; and back of desire is design--cosmic designwe may say--expressing itself discretively; in individuals. 

Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of afiner nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-consciousattraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons ofthe opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference foreach others' society which deceives the average on-looker intothinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of factthere may never have been any thought of such relationship. 

A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, orMargaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion ofmen for many years without having entered into any more intimaterelationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past, and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirablecompanionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seentwice with the same man without having the neighbors speculating asto a suitable name for the baby. 

More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settlethemselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectualaffinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from theold thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse, and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexualappetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane ofintellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or bythe force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking tospoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature didnot intend it to be so. 

A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beingsnow accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes, a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. Hewas a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of adegree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; shewas moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a monthof married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community, remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval andshocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendshipwith his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, theex-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 individualpredilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire. And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is anidea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. Itis the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such anidea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination. 

Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists uponpersonal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each otherto have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but itstill exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit inthe seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant. 

A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity livedtogether most congenially for a period of twelve years, although theyagreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. Theyagreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should eithercome to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be givenwithout resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candorand honesty with each other on this score was a higher type ofcivilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule. 

True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed tobe the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave herup, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectualcompanionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit anddisruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, whichis as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and theanimal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of moralitythan that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor. " Byexactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defendedor appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power tofathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilizedman vents his remaining savagery. 

Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. Andwhile we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least somedegree of mutuality, are a step higher in social development than werethe alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domesticexigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; wherewoman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an"old maid, " still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and mustgo 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 andmutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as theyevolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectualaffinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanencythan has maintained during the past, before the word affinity washeard so frequently as it is now. 

The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only sincewomen became economically independent that disruption of the marriagebonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much morefrequent since women have become, to a great extent, economicallyindependent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage havebeen set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences. And it is at the _evidence_ of marital unhappiness that all thecriticism is directed. 

If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorcetells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid tothe injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equalmoral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a motheris 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 becomechaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of publicmorality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Areour social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If theyare, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must firstbe demolished, before they are rebuilt. 

The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not onesingle improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals, that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that thewhole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightestchange in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we goon year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word ofthe Century. If "self-improvement, " then social improvement. Mankindis 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 orthodoxmovement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention offinding a rich husband and not, emphatically, _not_ having anychildren. 

May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girlswho 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 arethey ruined?

Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because shehas loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any wayexcept that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nighunforgivable stupidity?

The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certainfamous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respectin the face of social criticism, because she had a child and nohusband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest placeaccorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist'swell-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy ofperpetuation. "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 regardchild-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been saidthat the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, butobservation should convince us that in all too many instances thefirst duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crimeagainst posterity. 

We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of ahusbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. Weendorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and weinsist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting thegreatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to thesex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to theunmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one, when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takescourage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in ahypocritical world. 

The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely andhappily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere inthe universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence, alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage willbe disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and nopower in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws maytemporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption. 

What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention isthat affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we mayhave many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possiblyhave more than one soul-mate. 

Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves thatmake a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merelysimilar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because ofcuriosity or dissimiliarity. 

They belong to each other because together they complete a perfectbalance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balancethe qualities lacking in the other. 

In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, andre-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, insteadof merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this externalplane of consciousness. 

Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, becausethe real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interiornature exists independently of the physical organism. 

Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This ismanifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all theavenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thingcalled "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere wenote a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathomthe depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuriesthe 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 seemagreeable. 

The scientist expresses it thus: "Nature is giving up her secrets toman. " The metaphysician puts it this way: "The soul of man isunveiling, and soon we shall know each other in Truth. " Thereligionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St. Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "weshall 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 thecrust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature, may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders ofdenunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who arenot yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and"respectability, " women have insisted upon freedom of the body indress until at last the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad womanexcites little adverse comment. The fact has at last establisheditself that the female form has legs. 

This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted tosee exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman hasalways known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the gameof enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her"meal-ticket. " She could always keep him guessing as to whether or notshe had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund ofcuriosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed towoman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donningthe matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have alwaysknown this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageabledaughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped tosecure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressedthus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of therespectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is thestandard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would haveus retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies arevile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an ideaof modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit hasfled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it wasfounded upon the idea that woman was an instrument of the devilhimself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked, and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innatedefilement. 

The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admitwomen to the communion table in the "holy sacrament. " A fine chancehas any sacrament of being holy, with one half of it missing!

The old idea of womanly modesty consisted of blushing with shame andembarrassment if by chance her ankles became exposed to the interestedand curious gaze of a male. Notwithstanding this ideal of modesty, thedesigning and beguiling female managed to arrange just such acontretemps every time there was an eligible male within sight; ifdiscovered, she either assumed a look of infantile innocence, or shetook the opportunity to coax a becoming blush. 

To be sure, this does not accurately describe all women of "the goodold days. " There was the other type. 

Nature manifests in extremes. There was the type, fitting ancestors tothose women of to-day who are outraged and shocked at the present-dayfashions, which actually disclose the fact that women areanatomatically endowed with legs and hips, quite in defiance of man'sinherited predilection for making this discovery under conditions thatwould pamper to his satiating sex-appetite. They, poor creatures, weredreadfully ashamed of being women, and they did all that was possibleto conceal the fact. They, doubtless, would gladly have amputatedtheir legs, if the ministers had so decreed, and they apologized tothe world every time an unforseen circumstance uncovered a portion ofthese offensive legs. In fact, they denied the existence of "saidmembers, " and alluded to them tentatively and with modest hesitation, as "limbs. "

"But, " some will exclaim, "we cannot see any possible connectionbetween a regenerated race, and a fashion which permits the display ofthe female figure upon the public streets, where men who are as yetun-regenerated, and licentious, may leer and pass vile remarks, andsuggest lustful thoughts. "

Few can see any connection between our so-called practical, everydaylife, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life assomething remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distantfuture. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that wepostpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the humanfamily has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdomcome upon earth, " they apparently have not had the slightest idea thatGod would take them at their word. 

They are like the old darky who called upon "de Lawd to strike himdead if he was not telling the truth, " when as a matter of fact he waslying roundly. At that moment a bricklayer on the building above whereRastus was standing, dropped a brick, which struck the old darkey onthe head, and he exclaimed "What's de matter, good Lawd, caintyou'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 beenpictured as nearly nude as our silly "morality" would permit. No onehas as yet suggested that we compel the angels to wear hoopskirts, although "September Morn" has been compelled, by police regulation, todon a sweater. 

The spiritual life awaits our cognizance, just behind the transparentveil of our limited mortal consciousness. This is the message of the"unveiling" of the female form. This is the time of woman's revealmentof true modesty; true ideals. The Female Principle, representing thespiritual element in nature, hitherto shut in; covered up; hidden--iscoming out. 

Men must learn to be able to look upon the female form without spasmsof either lustful desires; or contemptuous indifference. 

There was a time when the presence of a female office-force in thebusiness section of a city was the signal for unwarranted familiarityon the part of some of the male members of a corporation. There was atime, when women first invaded the ranks of the "down-town" businesscenters, that a woman's appointment to a responsible position restedupon her claims to feminine attractiveness. Now, the only questionasked is, "Is she efficient?"

_That which she is, in her interior nature, is the final test of herpower. _ When men have become inured to the knowledge, so longconcealed, that women have legs and that there is no moreseductiveness in them than in their faces, the love of man for womanwill undergo the same evolution that his estimate of her businessefficiency has undergone. He will judge her by what she is in herinterior nature; and his sexual desires, now manifested distractedlyin mere love of the female, will become concentrated in love of theone woman to whom his soul turns in irresistible sex-attraction, asunerringly 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 inmutual conversation, and interest, without encroachment upon the oneemotion which they were supposed to hold in common--sexual attraction. 

That was indeed the whole sum and substance of communication betweenthe two sexes, if we may except the rare instances which history hasmade much of, because of their rarity--women of the French salons, whohave become famous for their wit and beauty, in neither of whichattributes did they outstrip the average self-supporting woman oftoday. 

But custom has slowly, but perceptibly, established the possibility ofa frank and non-sentimental companionship between the male and thefemale, and the result is that both are much more clear as to the truecharacter of their sentiments toward each other. Neither is blindedby the force of undifferentiated sex-attraction. 

There must be some specific basis of mutual love; hence we have thevogue of the "affinity, " and by the term is instantly recognized aspecial force of attraction, independent of undifferentiated sexalone. It is known that there is at least an assumption of an interiorattraction, and we insist that affinity marriages, however incompleteas yet, are still superior in motive to that of mere marriage, whereit is a case of _a_ male and _a_ female, united by propinquity; familyconsiderations; commercial interests; class association; or what not. 

Affinities at least have the grace to presuppose a specialsex-attraction. They argue for the ultimate goal of special andpermanent selection, even if they fail to reach it. 

That there will be many failures during the journey from thesense-conscious life, to the soul-conscious life, is a foregoneconclusion. The pathway of Love has always been a thorny one, butthose who are on the high ground may look across into the rose-strewngarden, and know that the little god is aiming his arrows at theinterior nature of those whom he would unite. He is not blind. Hissight is illumined and he sees that the soul can unite only with itsmate. 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 thehidden wisdom of the initiates; the alchemical mysteries of theAncients. It is told to us in the fairy story of the SleepingPrincess--a story which is found in the folk-lore of every country ofthe globe. It is the philosopher's stone, which when found, opens thedoor to all wisdoms. 

_There can be no mismates in soul-union. _

Neither can there be any sexual "temptation, " or desire outside ofthis 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; whenin fact, the soul is revealed (unveiled) to our mortal consciousness;when the mind has been freed from its load of prejudices and fears anddoubts and belief in sin; then we shall, indeed, truly see each other. 

We do not see each other now, unless perhaps we have developed thatspiritual insight which is not blinded by appearances, but whichcontacts the interior nature. But the revealing, the uncoveringprocess has begun. We have come to the time so long anticipated; soearnestly promised, when "naked and unashamed" we should "re-enter thelost Paradise. "

Well, the women, God bless them, are as naked as the tender moralityof our police officials will permit and as unashamed as it is possibleto be with the handicap of a puritanical ancestry, which was soevil-minded as to suspect God himself of sin when He formed the"wicked" body. 

Prudists may howl; and legislators may legislate; but the course ofthe Cosmic Law which would free us and bestow upon us Peace and Loveand Happiness without stint, has never been stopped, although it hasbeen obstructed. 

Let us examine some points of the Hidden Wisdom, in the light of thispostulate, 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 areligious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from thestandpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is ineverything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of thesame subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticismitself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distanceview of science. 

Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noiseover calling each other black, we find the scientist frequentlydisdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equaldisapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from hispoint of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of thesame pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at thecause. 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 eternalenergy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with theexternal. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest. " Inreference to this definition of religious mysticism, perhaps thephraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism, "is the best possible exposition of the position of the religiousmystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religiousmysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of theliving God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attemptto realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal inthe eternal, and the eternal in the temporal. "

Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using otherterminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimatelysay, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms ofdiscovery. 

The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order tomeasure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrumsomewhere beyond. "

The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of theCircle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is thehypothetical base of algebraical science--the unknown quantity ofwhich sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and fromcause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we havedeciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercisethe inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is amost tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with thesame superficial idea that they entertain in regard to puzzles, saying"it is only a puzzle"--utterly ignoring the value of exercising theinductive reasoning faculties. 

Fairy stories are popularly supposed to be for the entertainment andamusement of children. In reality they are the universal language ofsymbolism. There is not a single fairy story which has not been handeddown from generation to generation, and, what is more suggestive, eachstory is told with astonishing lack of variation, in every tongue andthroughout every nation on this earth. 

The stories involving the turning of men into animals and their finalrestoration to human form, as a reward for some service, somesacrifice, typifies the two-fold nature of Man. He may live in hisanimal, or exterior nature; or he may develop his spiritual, orinterior nature; through service; through unselfish love. Our limitedmortal consciousness is responsible for the tendency to personifyeverything, instead of to realize the principles underlying allexpression. God and the Devil have been the personification of the twophases of the principles of Evolution, from animal man to spiritualman. 

Romulus and Remus have been presented as an actual and specificinstance of twins; likewise Castor and Pollux. Almost every childinstinctively alludes to himself or herself, as either "the goodlittle me" or the "bad little me. " "O, I didn't do that; it was thebad little Dorothy, " or "Harold, " as the case may be, is thechild-like way of expressing the innate consciousness that there isan interior and an exterior nature to all of us. 

The union of gods with mortals, which forms the gist of Mythologicaltales, symbolizes the god-like and the mortal qualities inherent inhuman nature. Mortals raised to the abode of the gods; and the godsdescended into mortal life; symbolize the interchangeability of whatwe term matter and spirit--the power of transmutation of the lowerinto the higher life. 

Volumes could be written upon the subject, and we will therefore tryto confine our reviews to the symbolical traditions which deal mostdirectly with the relations of the sexes. 

In religious symbology, the story of the ark stands as the supremetype of creation, through the conjunction of the sexes. 

The cherubim are, when all is said and done, nothing more, nor yetless, than spiritual children--the result of spiritual sex-union. 

And in this later synoptic mysticism of the ark of the Covenant, weare informed that "every gift within the tabernacle is willinglyoffered. " If we will but contemplate the volumes of wisdom containedwithin that sentence, we cannot fail to conclude that everyinfinitesimal particle of coercion in whatsoever shape and form, individual, economic, ethical, or religious, must be excluded from theregenerated, perfect, ideal sex-relation; otherwise we do not attainit. 

If the Ancients seemed to take some of these folk-lore stories tooliterally, we of this "practical" age, do not take them literallyenough. 

We have imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended inthe 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 forthe 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 asspiritual laws; friendship; unselfishness; fidelity; paternalsolicitude--it is absolutely certain that the most beautiful things weknow here must have a correspondence in the life hereafter. Of thesebeautiful things in life, babies come first; with birds and flowersand music as fitting accessories. 

But to return to the ark of the covenant. The perpetual flame on thealtar (the center) is the undying Flame of spiritual love--and by thatwe mean sex-love, let it be understood. If we seem to repeat this toofrequently it is because of the almost general habit of the race toapologize for sex-love. The erroneous idea obtains, that spirituallove is sexless. All too frequently we come across the phrase, "with alove that has in it nothing of human love, " the writer evidentlyanxious to convey the impression of tremendous spirituality and theconsequent elimination of the sex function. 

And so we emphasize once more, and we may do so again, the assurancethat the symbol of the never-dying flame upon the altar is typical ofthe never-dying spirit of sex-love. Spirit is ever symbolized byflame, as in the "flaming sword" of the archangel. 

The Deity upon the seat of the altar symbolizes the bi-uneSex-principle of creation. 

The reason that the Jewish people have claimed that they were "God'schosen people" is because, in their symbolism of the ark of theCovenant, all Israel was grouped under the tabernacle. The formationof the tabernacle proves that it typifies the mother's womb. Thetabernacle was guarded by the priests who _were sworn to purity_; thusthey symbolized the esoteric truth that the pure spiritual sex-unionbestows immortal god-hood. 

Let us take another story, that of the life-token. This is best toldin the story of the Holy Grail, although it is found in all thefairy-books of all nations, in the language and form befitting therace to which it belongs. 

In the original, that is in the earliest recitals of this life-tokenstory, we find that the thing left behind, as a _center_ (which isalways guarded and protected in various ways), was a tree. Here, wehave the phallic symbol as the life-token. But in the story of theHoly Grail, the cup is the life token to be guarded; it is the sacredsymbol of the quest and it is of a design resembling the red rose ofthe Templars. This time it is the yoni--literally the _chalice_ of the_holy communion_; the centre of the radiant circle, which is theanswer 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 ofBeing, and only the purest and the noblest of the Knights of the"Round Table" essay the difficult quest. The "mound of Venus" isanother 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 shallsee 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 depictedas a princess, first of all, because she is the daughter of a king; aking is an earthly ruler, or exalted person. Esoterically, she is thedaughter of the exalted God, and she is the soul. Sometimes this storyis told in the male gender, but everywhere the essential points arethe same. 

Wagner, who is known as a Mystic, has illustrated the story inBrunhilde and Siegfried. Brunhilde is an immortal--a goddess, whorenounces her immortality to become a woman. 

She sleeps on the top of a high mountain and she is surrounded by acircle of flame; and here she sleeps, despite all efforts to arouseher, until awakened by the touch of Siegfried--the one human being inall 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 bythe word princess, and later, by Wagner, as the goddess, man must beher mate. _No other can enter the womb of her soul_, though many mayeffect an entrance to the outer court. 

This truth, as absolute as life itself, solves all the problems of themystery of love and its joys and sorrows. No soul can wholly, unreservedly love the "wrong" one. Though we may love and die of thepain of unrequited loving, yet love is its own self-justification, andits own reward. The pathway of love leads up the mountain top, but noone 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'sbluff--a fitting name for the game it is, too. Unable to see anythingbut the exterior nature, and longing for success in the search, wehave frantically grabbed here and there, and appropriated that whichwe grabbed, with a self-complacency and an egotism of which littleJack Horner would be ashamed. 

In the symbolical rites and ceremonies of secret orders, such as theAncient Alchemists; the Hermetics; the Rosicrusians; and in moderntimes, the Free Masons, we have this story of the search for theultimate balance of soul union, told in language veiled unless we arefit to know; but openly enough if we are fit. And in all these orders(alleged guardians of the hidden wisdom) we have varying degrees ofinitiation; and in each degree the initiate must undergo certaintrials to prove his fearlessness; his fidelity; his fitness, in otherwords, for the final revealment of all, which is the initiation intothe "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 withthe star and the crescent. The star preserves the esotericism of itsnomenclature, in whatever sphere it is used, namely, the power ofradiating light. It stands for the radiant center. The Knights Templarsought the radiant center to complete their half circle, and when theyshould have found, they were to become radiant with the light ofspiritual power. That they originally at least, understood the way ofthis initiation, is evident by the symbol of the rose and thecross--the combined phallus and yoni. 

This fact is the underlying cause of the open and hereditary enmity ofthe Church of Rome for the modern order of Freemasons. The Churchsought to specialize in the persons of the Virgin Mary and her Son theeternal principles of the "way of the cross. " The temporal power ofthe Church could be built up only by offering a complete system ofsalvation within the church itself. At the same time, the utterdegradation of Sex, which had reached its depths under Romancivilization, called for as complete a reversion of the ideas of theAncient sex-worshippers, as was consistent with the truth. 

Hence we find the extreme attitude of the Church opposing allreference to sex as other than a part of the temptations of the EvilOne, although they did retain the central truth typified by the HolyVirgin 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 howto make gold. This gold-making was always accomplished bytransmutation of the baser (lower) metals; also, the knowledge of howto 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 apurity that it was almost impossible to find it; that, althoughseveral initiates claimed to possess the stone, yet no visible proofof its existence, or of gold resulting from lead or copper, was everoffered; and again if we will realize the fine distinction between thewords "found" and "discovered, " and take note that the word "found" isused almost invariably in connection with those who claimed to possessthe stone, we will arrive at the obvious conclusion that the secret ofthe Alchemists was of an interior nature. We "discover" outside ofourselves; we "find" within. Above all, the "stone of great purity" isthe same that was raised at Babylon, supplanting the yoni, which isto say, the phallic symbol. 

A philosopher is one who is wise in his interior nature; his wisdom isof the esoteric quality; we do not apply the term "philosopher" toeither great educators, or great financiers; but to those whoseactivities are turned within. 

The force which is manifested in the lower desires and passions, whentransmuted into spiritual channels, opens the door to the golden lightof illumination. 

To become in reality a Prince of the Rosy Cross bestows the exaltationand the power, typified by that of an earthly prince--one who isexalted above the common man. 

It is doubtful, indeed, if many of the ancient alchemists attained tothis exalted degree in its true significance; and we may readilybelieve that in an age in which wealth was so eagerly sought; temporalpower so much desired; where deception was almost general; that fewlived the requisite purity of life to have accomplished thetransmutation; so today there is not one in a thousand of the many whohave taken the degree of "Knight Templar, " who recognizes its esotericmeaning. 

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. Theyhave not attained to its powers and privileges. 

Nor can they do so, when they exclude the very "gate of life" from theorder. They may become masons (builders of the temple), but how canthey become Architects, when they have not entered the tabernacle?

In a search for hidden meanings, and for a secret tradition which isbelieved to be discoverable in Kabalistic and Hermetic literature, wefind, if we possess true insight, the one indubitable truth, subordinating all the other symbols, namely that of the supremacy, thefinality, of the sublimated sex-union, resulting in immortalmastership. 

Most modern interpreters of the archives of these ancient philosophersignore the sexual significance of the arcana, but a glimpse at thesymbols will readily convince the initiated of their identity withsexual symbology. 

For example in "The History of Transcendental Magic, " by Eliphas Levi(Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plateused to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes"had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one. " Thesexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but thismay be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of thealchemical symbols, or it may be due to a materialistic tendency onthe part of the compiler. 

The plates, however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed toBasil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "TheGreat Hermetic Arcanum, " the supreme and significant point of theillustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through whichthe initiate travels in his search for the supreme god-head, twodoves, holding in their beaks a crown. The doves are perfectlymatched. The crown is balanced between them, and the figure tops thecircle, 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 across, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle withoutstretched wings, shielding her little brood, and on either side atree and a flowering rosebush. 

Here is the symbol par excellence of generation. The creative functionof the male and the female in procreative conjunctivity. 

The employment of the eagle as a religious symbol may be traced backto the civilization of the Hittites. 

Only a few years ago, two English archæologists discovered adouble-headed eagle in Asia. This was identical with those seenperpetuating religious rites and ceremonies of the sex-worshipers. Aneagle holding in its talons a serpent is an emblem well known today. The origin of the adoption of the eagle as a religious, though notnecessarily a "sacred, " symbol by prehistoric races, may easily beimagined, if we consider that the eagle is a bird of tremendous power;and that it soars to unreachable heights; and that it unquestionablywas 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 theceremonies of the serpent worshipers were carried on, as far asfeasible, upon the mountain. We allude to this stage of religioushistory as "serpent worship, " but when we realize the points ofanalogy between the serpent and the phallus it is apparent that theserpent was only the nature-emblem of generation, as manifested by themale principle. 

"The eagle and the dove" is a phrase employed today to illustrate thelaw of antithesis, and it is more than probable that the eaglerepresented the lower nature of the sex-relation, in juxtaposition tothe higher, as the dove is emblematical of the spiritualized aspect ofsex-love. We have an analogy to that of the eagle and the dove in theBiblical allusion to "the last day; when God will separate the 'sheepfrom the goats, '" Here again is a pertinent reference to the sexnature. The goat is a symbol of sensuality and lust, principallybecause he has perverted sexual proclivities, notably that ofcoercion. For this reason, Classical Mythology employs the satyr, acreature half man and half goat, to typify the lowest form of the sexcall 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 notdissimilar, their natures are antithetical. 

In estimating the God-idea of the Ancients, many mistakes have arisenby confounding religious symbols with the "sacred" symbols. Therace-mind was in its kindergarten stage, and all ideals were instilledby means of pictures--a method which even the present hour finds mosteffective. 

In modern theological symbolism we have God and the Devil; Heaven andHell; angels and demons, to illustrate by antithesis. 

They all belong to religious symbology, but only those which teachspiritual ideals are denominated "sacred. "

"Riding the goat, " alleged to be the almost invariable initiatoryprelude to fitness for membership in all secret orders, means, firstof all, that the would-be initiate must have control over his lowersexual desires. If he cannot control the goat instincts within hisnature, he stands small chance of taking the higher degrees ofspiritual regeneration, through transmutation. 

In another symbolic chart presenting the secrets of alchemicaltransmutation, we find depicted "The Gate of Eternal Wisdom, " and weare further informed that this "gate" also brings "knowledge of God. "The design of this cave-like aperture should betray its esotericmeaning. It is situated under a mound, upon which trees are planted. The inscriptions on the corrugated walls of the cave, are evidentlydesigned to resemble seven lotus petals, and are set forth as theseven mysteries. Inscriptions warning against profanation of thissacred gate, and also promising eternal life and glory to the trueinitiate, inspire the intrepid and deter the doubtful. Of theselatter, several are outside the entrance. Two are on the steps leadingto the mouth of the cave but their attitude bespeaks doubt of theirworthiness. Only one has penetrated to the radiant center of theaperture, and there is room for but the one to enter the radiance ofthe solar gate, which truly bestows a knowledge that is "of God. "

Sex Symbology is a subject that calls for a large volume devoted tothis special side of it, and we cannot hope to do more here than totouch a few of the almost universal proofs of the contention which isthe purpose of this book, namely, that the supreme goal of life, typified in every religion, every philosophy, and in the intuitionalknowledge of the human mind, is spiritual sex-union; and that this canbe accomplished only by counterparts; the two halves of the bi-une godseed uniting in one immortal and complete pair--a man and a woman. Not, we must again emphasize, not in a hermaphroditic personality, butin two perfect complementaries--mates; not _one_ but _a pair_. 

In another exposition of Hermetic secrets we discover the amazingstatement that "the alchemist is found working throughout, inconjunction with a woman of the art; _they begin and they attaintogether_. "

This should be plain enough. Small chance, indeed, either would haveof attaining alone. But if this suggestion is not sufficient (andeither from design or from failure to comprehend the significance ofit, the translator seems to have missed the point), we are introducedto a symbolical figure-study, which shows a Chalice in which the sunand the moon are personified (the solar-man and the solar-woman), withthe god Vulcan (fire) seated between them. Underneath this "twain-one"symbol a mortal man and a mortal woman are kneeling on either side ofa cone-shaped and dome-tipped furnace, which is lighted by a feeblecandle. But their attitude of prayer bespeaks the hope that thisearthly flame will be transmuted by their prayers and aspirations; bytheir reverential attitude toward the divine character of the functionof mating, into the immortal and unquenchable flame typified by thegod of fire himself. 

In another series of symbolical plates, purporting to be the story ofMetallic transmutation, but representing, above all, the story ofmanifestation from the Divine to the human and again to thespiritualized and perfected Adam and Eve--(the solar man and the solarwoman), we again see that from generation to regeneration the work isaccomplished by man and woman in conjunction. 

These plates bear the hall-marks of Christian appropriation ofHermetic symbolism, as peculiarly applicable to the Church, but thecentral doctrine of salvation through sex-regeneration, is retained. Whether consciously or not, is a question. 

Modern commentators and translators of alchemical literature insistthat such documents are palpably related to the secret, or secrets, ofmetallic transmutation. That they prove the search for, if not theexistence of, a "magic solvent" that resolves the baser metals intogold; but, as far as known, such a compound has not yet beendiscovered or, if it ever was, it has since been lost and evades allattempts at rediscovery. But if we read these alchemical treatises asthey relate to transmutation of sex-love from the pro-creativefunction 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 alchemicalarchives, where "an unknown master testified to his possession of themystery" (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, applyingthis statement in its obviously logical sense, the unknown master knewthe esoteric meaning of the alchemical postulate, but not having methis female complement, he could not testify to the results of thistransmutation. An "elect woman" would hardly be necessary in the workof metallic transmutation. 

Small wonder that the "alchemist" abandoned the work of turning leadand copper into gold. If he had found the key of keys, he cared littlewhether lead were lead, or whether gold remained gold, or melted intothin air. The golden light of illumination showed him all things intheir purpose, and gold as a metal meant no more to him than did theso-called "baser" metals. 

Commenting upon this statement, the translator observes: "ThoseHermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if arecord of spiritual experience, present, like the literature ofphysical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism: the marriage ofsun and moon; of a mystical king and queen; a union between natureswhich are _one_ at the _root_, but diverse in manifestation; atransmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein. "

If we will remember that the solar-man was personified by the Ancientsas the sun; and the solar-woman by the moon, we have the first andsalient points of the original Hermetic secrets, however much they mayhave degenerated from their spiritual to their physical application. The probabilities are that owing to the disapproval of the ChristianHierarchy, only the most veiled terminology was permissible. This viewis more logical than is the one that the esoteric meaning was lostsight of. 

The marriage of an hypothetical or "mystical king and queen" bespeaksexaltation of the two conjoining persons, male and female, but thisexaltation is in consciousness, and not in mere personality. Theterms "king" and "queen" are nothing more or less than symbols of anexalted (spiritualized) state. 

And, in passing, we may here mention the fact that the language oflovers testifies to this intuitional realization. "My queen!" exclaimsthe enraptured lover, although in social station his beloved one maybe only a scullery maid; and certainly, neither the beauty nor thegoodness nor the wisdom of earthly kings and queens would besufficient to inspire the comparison. 

It is ever the soul calling for the mate who, when found, will exaltthe "twain-one" into the immortal powers and immortal wealthimperfectly symbolized by earthly rulers, making "right royal queensand kings of common clay. "

The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between twonatures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation. " Andthe alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promisedthat, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out ofwhich all manifestation is composed, " it only remained for someone todiscover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substancesin a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, couldbe dissolved into its constituent parts and re-solved again in theproportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared tosay could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would noteven be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interiortransmutation, because having attained to the radiant center, hewould realize the "glory of the worlds, " and gold, as metal, would beto him of far less value than the emerald of the grass; the pearls ofdew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; thelaughter of children. 

How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think itworth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even considerthe ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of hislabors. 

But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure andunquenchable love--that were indeed worthy of ages of research. Forare we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek andfind? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the gloryof 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 ancientalchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole, manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to thefourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "transmutation whichfollows this union and the abiding glory therein, " is the inevitableand logical sequential answer. 

An _abiding_ glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability. Transmutation is not synonymous with, extinction, or elimination, orabandonment. We _transmute_ the lower into the higher, the exteriorinto the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sumand substance of the "Ancient Wisdom. "

There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane oflife, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to assumethat Sex is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, orany other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are notdistinctively separable anyway. They are merely _names_ which we useto distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness. 

The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariablymisinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption ofindividuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, sexless Thing;but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than thatbringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided, would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more thanbringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fittingthe 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 andwoman. 

 CHAPTER IX

 WHAT CONSTITUTES SEX IMMORALITY?

The average mind, nurtured in apprehensive awe of that race fetishcalled Public Opinion, is inordinately afraid of words. 

"Atheist, " "infidel, " "ungodly" are epithets which have been used asmental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave ofreligious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the lastcentury. 

These words have now lost much of their terror, even to theundeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shownthat the God-idea which rational thought fain would substitute for theold revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to thecontrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of godhood thanthat which the early Church postulated. 

Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance againstEvolution. 

Ignorance is fearful of the unknown, and the knights of Enlightenmenthave ever had to fight their way through the ranks of abuse andcriticism and misrepresentation. 

Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate ofrational thought hesitates to claim affiliation; and yet the goal ofour 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 thecase of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignationbecause someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat. " She did notknow what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved. 

When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we willnot 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 ofsex? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one whois "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no wayaffects his social standing. 

Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalizedprostitution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning offree-love that the term is never used in connection with what modernreform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obviousreason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound andmurdered as in this phase of woman's degradation. 

Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type ofdefiance of traditional sex-ethics there is always the spirit ofself-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing. 

We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the youngwoman who has, what the world calls, "sinned, " because, forsooth, shepays the price of her deviation from social standards (whendiscovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, orby sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it isevident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuatesher conduct. 

It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to thosewho openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge inthe sex-relationship, independent of the marriage ceremony. It mattersnot whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is thedemand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect andmorality, which is resented by the many who still conform totraditional customs, and which general conformity results in investingthe 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 ofany person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties. 

The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little withTruth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence ofdivorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring tolive apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets beforethey may act upon such a decision. 

Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details ofthe love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden fromthe 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 theapproval of society. But this woman placed love above all materialthings, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love ofher husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not carefor particularly. When through the accident of the man's death thestory came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominentclub-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, ifany, this love-recluse should be forgiven. 

Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed tothink that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, shemight in time be worthy of their forgiveness. 

Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with Englandof being a nation without a sense of humor. 

Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angelsfear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions uponother people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue. 

The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven orunforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and whollyindifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessityfor either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the sillybrains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one manwith a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness ofself-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days ofpretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price forher idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, notalone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had takenher loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of reallove in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out thefearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. Itshould have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, thata modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she lovedto the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectableposition of wife, no matter at what cost to another. 

But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it issmall wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings. 

If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, wewould hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorcesare the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by theiroutward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demandsof Convention. 

The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women, because for many centuries the men have claimed their right topersonal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and untilwomen of the self-respecting and educated class began to openlyemulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use thephrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to womenthe right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition. 

All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in realitysufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sexpromiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobriumthat attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at theclaim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defianceof Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in itsstandards, or punishment for openly transgressing them. 

The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our otheradvanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life, has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only freechoice. 

Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shieldingher secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn andabhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretlyindulges her sex-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she isforced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequentlythese instincts are abnormally strong because of pre-natal andinherited influences. 

Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the averagewoman, are disastrous to the sex, and through them to the race, because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds andfetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement. 

Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physicaldisease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression ofthe sex-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through thecompulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercialprostitution, is death to the best development of the race. 

Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through thereligious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord andMaster" 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 educationfor this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance ofall that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of hernature--the function of sex. In the occasional instances where she hadinherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she mustat least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of everyemotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his sex-nature in hertask of "catching a husband, " it is small wonder that women havedeveloped the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently bothtreacherous and cruel. 

Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting andconserving power of the bi-une sex-love, that she has broken throughthese mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defianceat the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification ofher own sex-nature, and her right to her own person, despite theepithet of "free-love. "

Woman's partial emancipation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone toher head, " as it were, and we see many women confounding license withliberty; mistaking passion for Love; and exchanging restraint fordebauchery. 

The average woman is either almost entirely lacking in sex desire orshe is abnormally active in that function. In truth, the same state ofaffairs prevails here, as in so many other phases of our modern life, namely, there is no balance. We are a civilization of extremes; we areone-sided, abnormal; distorted. We are seeking the pivotal point ofour destiny, which is the soul, but few have reached that point. Thosewho have not, are groping through the jungles of the mental plane ofconsciousness, upheld on the one hand by the upward trend of theirbeing, which seeks the level of the soul-conscious state; and heldback on the other hand by the trammels of the sense-conscious typefrom which the race has developed to its present condition. 

Those instances where women indulge in excesses are comparatively rarein proportion to numbers, and they loom large in perspective becauseof their very incongruity with our ideals of womanly conduct. The vastmajority of women may be safely trusted to use their sex-freedom, whenit shall have truly arrived, for the purpose of finding that one andonly mate which their souls instinctively know to be our rightfulheritage--the proverbial "pearl of great price" which insuresimmortality in the bliss of union with our Beloved. 

Love, when freed from the illusions of sense; from the shackles ofcommercialism; from the bonds of error regarding the meaning andpurpose of marriage; freed from selfishness and licentiousness; willsolve the question of sex-promiscuity. This for the obvious reasonthat Love seeks its own. If left free to seek, it will find. 

But, if sex promiscuity is far from being free-love, if the doctrineof sex freedom is fraught with many dangers under our present socialsystem, it must be conceded that no one method of social evolution, thus far devised, can be recommended as ideally perfect. The best thatwe can hope to do is to emphasize the importance and the sacrednessand the innate purity of the sex-relation, while conceding to bothsexes all the personal liberty possible. 

And above all, we should avoid condemnation of those who claim theright to freedom, lest we cover up a condition which can but be thebetter for being open to the light. Particularly should we shieldwomen from the charge of immorality, and licentiousness, when we seethem straying down the by-paths of the senses, in their quest forfreedom, remembering that the centuries of repression and submissionand consequent deception have left their mark upon woman'stemperament. 

Man has for ages boasted of his sex virility; of his conquests in whathe has termed "love. " Not infrequently a man's choice of a wife is theresult of much seeking in the garden of Life; and much sipping of thehoney from the various flowers that grow therein. Often, indeed, a manfrankly tells the woman he would marry that he knows he loves herabove all other women for the convincing reason that he has tried somany and none have held him. Should a woman make the same confessionand draw the same conclusion, he would be horrified. 

It must be admitted, then, that the term "free-lovers" is applied onlyto those who defy Public Opinion and claim their right to respect andmorality despite their defiance of Society's false standards ofmorality. These standards are false because they are based uponcriticism and censure of results instead of upon motives. 

Society ignores, if it does not actually encourage, frivolousflirtations, and frowns most harshly upon instances of real love. Itsets the seal of disapproval and ostracism upon those who, because ofcircumstances or possibly because of indifference to man-made laws, take their affairs into their own hands and refuse to exhibit eitherpenitence or shame when the world discovers that they neglected themarriage ceremony. If two persons truly love each other and there isnothing to interfere with their undergoing the publicity of a marriageceremony, well and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principlewith them that our social customs are a fetich. But there areinnumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which toovercome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or whereabsurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other, prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such asthese lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does losesomething by persecuting those who are independent enough and honestenough to act from motive, rather than from custom, and who insistupon 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 thecourage to endure martyrdom for their convictions, which is, perhaps, just as well, because the majority are unable to distinguish betweenbrazen shamelessness and unashamedness. The average woman will stickto the safe habit of dissembling. 

Women have learned the lesson of the cat too thoroughly to jumpimmediately from the back-yard of Deception to the front porch ofTruth. 

In this one respect at least, however much she may indulge her desirefor frankness in other directions, a woman will lie valiantly, self-protectingly, and continually, even though she follow in secretthe example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from thehunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride andsatisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that itwould 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 wecan imagine that her conclusion was that which women have arrived at, in a similar situation, to wit: man is unjust and unreasonable, but heis also stronger than I am, and therefore, while I shall follow hisexample, I shall take good care to hide the feathers. 

In the meantime, we are crossing the bridge that leads from thejungles of our animal nature, where prowl the beasts of deceit; greed;selfishness; sensuality; vanity; avarice; and domination; to theHeights, illumined by Love set free. 

Let us not jostle and crowd each other too harshly, while we are enroute. 

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 thesex relation. Freedom is so easily misconstrued into implyingsex-promiscuity; and monogamy, the final survival of the varioussystems of marriage, has in its modern as well as in its ancientaspect so much of coercion; and coercion is cited as the insuperableobstacle to attainment of the supreme state of spiritual sex-union, that the would-be initiate becomes confused, and is lost in a maze ofparadoxes. 

Moral distinctions are too fine for the undeveloped man-animal, andthat is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. Theobjection to them is not in their original intention, but in theirfailure 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 incarnatein our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an actreputed 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 thecentre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of uscan wrong the universe. "

It is a colossal piece of impudent presumption, when we come to thinkabout it, for Man to ask the Supreme, Absolute, Infinite Power toforgive him. But, if we cannot wrong the universe, we can and we dowrong ourselves and each other as mortals. 

That is the whole gist of the story. We are constantly wrongingourselves and each other and calling upon God to support us in ourstrife when God cannot know aught save the call of Love. 

The growing, evolving race, has found it necessary to establishcertain loosely defined codes of morals and of social ethics, in thesame 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 haveupheld (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 thepatriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can bereached upon this point, save and except that any condition, howeverprimitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must bebetter than that in which she is the object of coercion. This isevident, because the degree of coercion can never, under anycircumstances, be as great with the male as with the female. 

Therefore, matriarchal polygamy is comparatively more nearly moralthan is patriarchal polygamy, and when all is said and done, historicmorality is comparative. 

But from the standpoint of modern idealism matriarchal polygamy seemsto be a very low estimate of moral conduct; and from the standpoint ofsexual idealism it is a low standard; a standard only a degree higherthan that of patriarchal polygamy--a standard which is the linealdescendant of the ethics of the marriage-by-capture period of humanevolution, and from which we are today by no means free, owing toeconomic, religious, and ethical conditions. 

There is a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the unorganizedbrotherhood of the Enlightened, that laws are made for the guidance ofthe masses. Unbridled ignorance is a dangerous force; as dangerous asan unbridled horse, unless it be that the horse exhibits intelligenceenough to know where it is headed for and how to avoid obstacles enroute. 

And even as the laws of a community are made for the intellectuallyundeveloped, so the commandments were compiled for the spiritualguidance of the uninitiated. 

We trust that it will not shock the sensibilities of the "pious" whenwe 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, whichplaced a man's "neighbor's wife" in the same category with "his ox andhis ass and his house" and his other property and possessions. 

There is but one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, andthat is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot breakit if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying tolive in defiance of its immutability. 

"We cannot wrong the universe!"

Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are atpresent the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship, engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea. Both the Hebrewand the Roman customs maintained the inferiority and the consequentsubjugation of woman, despite the fact that the Roman Church exaltedthe Virgin as a personality; but the postulate of the Church that Marywas so exalted by a miracle, which never could be repeated, killed anyforlorn hope which might have lurked within the female breastregarding a possible emulation of her example. No other woman might domore than cringe and crawl and beg and whine; or cajole and wheedleand buy the Holy Mother's intercession, which intercession, even ifsuccessful, could at best but secure her an eternal job in theHeavenly hierarchy, where, sexless, companionless, mateless, anæmic, she could look all day at a male God whom she could never presume toreach. 

Rather a lonesome outlook for eternity, and it is small wonder thatwoman got discouraged at the prospect. The miracle is rather that sheendured it so long. 

But the Roman system had at least one virtue. It instilled into themortal mind of its people a sub-conscious realization of the ideal ofmonogamy; not an ideal monogamy by a long way, but a monogamic ideal. They are quite different; but inasmuch as it is an outward semblanceof a more spiritual conception of marriage than that of polygamy, itis the highest ideal yet realized for the many, and does duty in ourpresent day and age, as consistent with our superior civilization. 

Monogamy at least pretends to be a marriage by mutual consent; andeven in the pretense there is the germ of a hope; but it would befolly to deny that underneath this appearance of marriage by mutualconsent we see the remnants of the traditional idea of the right bypurchase, and therefore we have the jealousy that arises by virtue ofour property rights. 

The right by purchase assuredly underlies our present-day marriagesystem, although it is disguised as economic necessity; as a religioussacrament; and as a suitable or a brilliant "catch"--a type ofmarriage by capture which forms the ideal of our own upper-class womenand which the housemaid copies in her limited way. 

Viewed from the surface evidence, the average woman of today is, asKipling says, far "more deadly than the male. " She is moreunscrupulous in her methods; more unreasonable in her demands; moredevoid of sentiment or sympathy; more fickle in her desires and morenagging in her complaints. But, when all is said and done, we mustadmit that woman is only expressing her inheritance. When she becomesbalanced, the sexes will meet on common ground. 

Woman's demand for better physical environment; for more comfort, andmore justice; presages, after all, a higher and a more satisfactoryidea of the marriage relationship. Underneath this materialisticdemand, there is the silent voice of the soul calling for a moreideal marriage relation. It is the materialistic expression of aspiritual urge and will in time rise to higher ground. It is a demandfor a better state than that which our grandmothers enjoyed, orendured. 

We have seen in the history of marriage, that the estimate of sexualimmorality has been based, all too frequently, upon woman's disregardfor the rights of her husband in her person. 

For centuries the burden of sustaining a sexual moral standard hasrested almost wholly upon the shoulders of the women; and it istherefore natural that the present-day defiant attitude of many womentoward the traditional standard should be viewed with alarm; and thereis more in this thought of alarm than the mere anxiety on the part ofman to hold woman to her appointed task of guardian of maritalmorality. 

Although men may wander from the home and fireside, it is a peculiarfact that they generally hold to a mental string by which they mayfind their way back again, very frequently the more contented to bethere for their wanderings. But with a woman it is different. Once awoman has broken loose from the ties that have bound her to herinherited post of morality-preserver, she seldom goes back again, butkeeps on her way until she finds that for which she seeks, or gives upthe 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" ofthe matrimonial billiard-table?

We believe not; and this belief is founded upon the fact that thefemale principle, which is, we admit, the centralizing, centripetalforce 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 femaleprinciple they would not be complementary, but antithetical. Each mustbe balanced within himself and herself before they can merge into eachother. 

Affinities are numerous, but mates are found but once; otherwise, theproblems that are being discussed here would never have arisen. 

If, then, as has been shown in the fact that only counterpartal unionsare real, eternal and spiritually indissoluble; and that only truemates 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 beuntrue to the only one who seemingly has a right to our fidelity inthe sex relation and since this union can become general only byfreeing love from bondage, what becomes of the laboriously built upethics 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 mayfeel in duty bound to let loose at such a suggestion, if for no otherreason than that protest is the accepted way of proving one's ownvirtuous tendencies. 

In the early seventies, a woman named Virginia Woodhull brought downupon her defenseless head the un-Christian-like abuse of the Christianpublic by announcing a doctrine which seems to have been nothing moredreadful than that of an equal standard of morality for men and women. The poor woman died broken-hearted, it is said; and yet nothing thatwe can unearth regarding her personal life and habits would seem tohave warranted the cruel gibes that were hurled at her. The dear oldlady lived a most continent, even ascetic life. 

But the world has made rapid strides since that time, and we trustthat the urgent need of something reasonable and feasible upon the sexquestion will inspire the reader to an unprejudiced review of thischapter. We would that it were possible to supply a modicum ofunderstanding with each copy of this volume; but since it is not, wemust take our chance with the average. Let us reason together:

Expediency is the mother of morality in social organizations, whichhave, of necessity, unstable, ever-changing standards. These standardsrepresent, for some, ideals yet to be attained; while for others theybecome mere mileposts on the path of Evolution. The individualreaches, and then passes, an accepted ideal; gradually when asufficient number, constituting a majority, have reached this ideal, it ceases to be a standard for the social organization, and anotherideal is substituted. 

The laws of the cave-man called for self-restraint exercised towardhis own immediate clan, and this necessity for self-restraint wasbased upon nothing higher than the law of self-preservation; butgradually the sphere widened; from clan to nation. So do our ethicaland moral standards enlarge. Traditional concepts are not necessarilywrong, but they are almost sure to be inadequate to evolving Mankind. 

Formerly, sexual morality consisted of the reservation of the personof a sister to the use of her brothers. Any infringement upon thismoral code was punished by death to the woman and to her out-clannishlover. 

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 wifeviolates the marriage vows, it is more condonable, if theco-respondent be of the wealthy class; and in monarchies it isaccounted an honor to have been selected as the king's favorite. 

The institution of prostitution which exists everywhere today has itsstandards in the different countries; and the white races seem tothink that their morality is superior to that of the Orientals becausethe social standing of prostitutes in the Orient is not irretrievablylost; they are permitted, in the event of marriage, to resume socialequality with other women. Among white people, prostitutes have noother recourse than to sink lower and lower, until utter degradationis reached. 

We believe that the Oriental view of the situation is a far higherstandard of morality than is our Occidental attitude. 

If there can lawfully be such an organization as is now being proposedas desirable in large cities, namely, a "morals police, " it certainlyshould be instigated by a more sane purpose than that which is at theroot of our present police guardianship. 

Attempts at suppression of prostitution have hitherto been conductedon the principle that the women of that class are objectionable to thesight of our mothers and sisters and wives, and the sinfulness of thehopelessly "fallen" ones has been the theme of press and pulpit. Andall the time the women of the half-world have resented this attitudeas being unjust, and unfair, and hypocritical, and untenable. Theyhave known that if the act of selling their bodies to men is a crimeagainst the community, then more than half the feminine world iscriminal. And they have contended that since the "respectable" womenwere neither contacted nor exploited by them, they cannot see whereinthey offend society, provided the laws of sanitation and segregationare complied with. 

In other words, they have said that it is none of Society's businesswhether they sell themselves to one man or to a number, since theymust pay the penalty. And their attitude is relatively right. It isnone of Society's business whether a woman is a prostitute or not, considered as an offense against Society. That is the wrong attitudetoward 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 thatmake for such degradation. We are conniving with her to barter herbirthright of freedom and real love for food and shelter, and taintand tinsel, whenever we encourage marriage on any other ground thanthat of true love, and when we regard virtue as a matter of physicalcontact. 

If we judge from the many plays which we see on the boards; if we areinfluenced by the press and the pulpit; we must acknowledge that thegeneral idea of sexual morality is an absurd one. The inference isthat one special organ of a woman's physical body is the solecustodian of all virtue and all morality. The accepted idea seems tobe that if a woman is married her body is then the property of herhusband. Her emotions, her mind, her heart, her happiness, herpreferences do not count for anything. The one act is madeall-important. On the husband's side, if he provides for his wife andfamily, 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, hejustifies himself, and the wife not infrequently feels satisfied, aslong as he provides well for her. What is this but prostitution? Theprinciple is the same as in the case of the recognized prostitute, although the conditions are easier for the woman, and less cheapeningof her womanhood, but the difference is only in degree. 

Now, a singular idea of fidelity, a direct antithesis to the one justmentioned, prevails among prostitutes, when married either by law orby selection. 

They may surrender their physical body to another, for money, andaccording to their idea they may yet remain true to the husband orlover, because the matter is a business transaction. The other man hasonly what he has purchased, namely, the physical body. But should thewoman permit another man to arouse in her a sexual response; shouldanother invade her mind, absorb her thoughts, or engage her heart, thehusband is outraged and the woman realizes her unfaithfulness. 

All of which goes to show that up to the present time sexual moralityhas in itself no absolute uniform standard by which it can be measuredand satisfactorily and convincingly presented to all persons, as haveother phases of morality, such as honesty, justice, mercy, generosity, friendship, fidelity to country, and self-sacrifice to the good ofhumanity. 

And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexualmorality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality. Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, butas has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined bylocal conditions. 

Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexualmorality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remoteprobability, 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" ofmatrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from anyerroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced, deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to thesexual 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 thephysical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so manywomen toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowryfrom mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if welisten to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate oursouls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedlycultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness ofmind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor touplift the moral tone of the world. 

These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration ofSex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protectmyself against my enemies"--and so it is in this instance. 

Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why thatname, anyway?) are infected with the bacteria of sex-degradation. They really require a lengthy process of mental disinfection, beforeattempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexualuplift. 

A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largestcity in the United States recently declared in public print, of thebeautiful and chaste painting "September Morn, " that it was "lewd, filthy, and suggestive of unclean things. " This type of woman isintrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting themwith the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of theFather-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"

Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted inour souls, namely:

Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing inthe universe--because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. Therighteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man'scustoms; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement, indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thoughtwhich may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency toconfusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us seeif we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction. 

One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem issadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension ofthe average, we may at least do so for some. 

One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement thatthe sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in theconclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then itis right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live asthey do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, andwhile pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretlycarry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"

Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is thesex-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 womanwill 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 aremarried it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" andeven as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that itis puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, fewhave 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 shinesometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right forthe sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all thatis needed. 

Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, isentirely "up to us. " The sun does its part. It is fulfilling theinexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right. 

But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. Thelaw is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or itmay 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 andwholesome sprout from a diseased root?

The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and theonly remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may bedone by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy, sacred--the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quitedifferent from saying that people are always right or sacred in theirsex-relations. 

To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution ofmarriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bringback health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thingthat can make us whole--and the first office of Truth, as everyoneknows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, andthe essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive thelie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage. 

Does the libertine believe in the sacredness of sex? Never. Does theprostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she wouldnot sell herself for money. 

Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exaltedideals of sex?

If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit. 

These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex fromlove. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sexas a human plaything--something which may be called bad one day andgood the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near. 

Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "onestandard of morality" replacing the double standard which nowpersecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand, that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have beenfound?

A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning thewoman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?

History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeededin improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The bestthat can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attentionfrom ourselves. 

Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing thata force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-maderegulations, are not in danger. 

Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more thanthey will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval, should they encounter it. They know that if they would find thehighest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how highthe 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 tolove or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit oflove. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and itis at the same time the only liberating force. 

Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free apeople from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root ofthe "casus belli, " other and more direful disasters will follow in thewake of seeming victory. 

There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, thatDeath frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal andthe incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; thereare innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows thewings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reignssupreme. 

Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberateus either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from thelimitations and attractions of the animal-man. 

Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life. "There is no other Godbut Thee, " has been the cry of every race on this globe, apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified andpresented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; butalways it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored. 

Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired bythat great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:

"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning andevening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on thetomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot andphilosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of everyhome; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress ofimmortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice oflove. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthlessthings to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay. It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and withoutthat sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, butwith it--earth is Heaven and we are gods. "

It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever beenrecognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of lifeare worthless. 

It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age ofcommercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may bebartered for. 

Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful andmagic solvent which transmutes all baser emotions into the higher, the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is notsexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, oraltruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity haddeveloped nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sexinstinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, aswe have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in mostinstances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more loftythan the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true ofanimals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily theearliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have withus 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 weterm a tendency toward _selection_; and in the animal also, throughthe exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here againwe note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life ofhumans, namely, that in some instances what we have called thematernal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love, is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals thanwith Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of theevolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in thefamily. 

If maternal love were confined strictly to the female parent, and theprocreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only, we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogentreason 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 thelife of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on alarger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and aboveeven 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 thisabstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we maytacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear ofthe Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths ofthe love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something towhich the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is someperfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flowerinto its full possibilities. 

And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; morethan wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting thatwe 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 verygenerally held--that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finerphase of emotion than that expressed in procreation; and that inorder to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew allother phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his beingin the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat. The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confrontedwith the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to breakthe 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 orsomething else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worrywhether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as hedoes not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we maypermit him the same liberty. 

God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take careof Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot bekilled by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying. 

Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes ofseeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfectmathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or awoman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neitheris Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned withappearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within. He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with thematerial at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeksto unite lovers in their interior nature, but as each of the would-behappy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he ishandicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness ofLove, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over Hiseyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, theEgyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger onhis 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, mistakesprotestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriagesare consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depictedCupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is aslander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could seeone. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what oneknows, " declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern brideand bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards ofliving, to know dollars better than they know Love, their pervertedvision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even thedollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united inlove, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united thenindeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty. 

But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, marriedcouples have learned or they are learning, that there is an interiornature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected. 

In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road tothe heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Lovenever faileth. "

It has been said that "love makes gods of men, " and we have taken thisphrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth, because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced theirnatures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, andare immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God, " and the pilgrimageis ended. 

There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, thatuniversal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot. " Itcomes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-matequest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no meansalways wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found myseek-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 mockeryif unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle tothe one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to shareit. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, hewhose love nature is supposed to find satisfaction in making othershappy--can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unlessthere is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; orlacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness whichhe does not find here. 

Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material planefor 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 whendenied the interior union which should exist between a conjoiningpair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship asmuch of the divine nectar as they will accept. 

_There is no impure love. _ I repeat: There is no impure love. Theimpurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until hefails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from theSlough 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 factthat men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, womenhave lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk todepths below that of the brute creation?

What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appearsto love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate lovefor all that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that loveis always pure when it leads to such disaster?

Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever theerring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently draggedfrom his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of humanconflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; Heunites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity ofunion. 

Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation ofegoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes aman to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loveswith jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence withthe baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he mustbe 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 becaught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereasby seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path ofinwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safelytrust his redemption. 

If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through whatappears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity havetemporarily supplanted Love. But there is another side to thequestion. Society has very erroneous ideas of success and failure; andin looking at these opposite ends of the same pole, Society may bestanding on it's head. 

A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worthrepeating. 

A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities ofsocial life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercialworld, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that hehad married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life ofthe 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 enjoyinglife and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversationthe visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been ratherwild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impartagreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "SirArthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon theself-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity;and he was such a decent sort, too. " So we may see that there is muchin the point of view. 

Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trustthis test, because no one can be happy in any other than theprogressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been asatisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to thepossessor if it shuts out love; and if love be present, wealth holdsbut an inconsequential place. 

However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force ofattraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the unionof two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced, there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the questioninevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are notyet perfect?"

If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate foreach man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the onlytruly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of"temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all themarriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident thatsoul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to beabandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?

It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deceptionand dishonesty are immoral. 

Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage. Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray aconfidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and itis the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether appliedto the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges. 

Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not imposeupon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not tobreak 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 orpromises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to thenecessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at itsvery highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated, nothing more than announcement to the society of which they aremembers, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, aswell as inwardly, in sexual union. 

We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of thefitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether toomuch confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, andaltogether 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 ofunion. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit. 

Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathwayleads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promisesstaring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitutemutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If wecannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith andshould cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action wewould have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husbandand wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame ofmind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be nofurther opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world ofa 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 andthe ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?

They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desireto crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love andcompassion that there is no point of connection between them and thedestructive instinct in the beast. 

When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away fromthe tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent andthe eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure andperfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet itand when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear, all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fearof "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though"seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween theeand 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 vowsand promises, and bonds?

It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, evenfeverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implyingthat they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although thisconclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and thefaculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty thatprevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, andabove all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to imputepersonal 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 doaway with "bonds. " We would substitute therefor mutual agreements, subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutuallyhelpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of thecrippled human race. We need not always walk lame. 

It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surestway to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind himthat he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out tohim the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man hasso little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, whenassured that God-hood means a bliss so great that he can hardlyimagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of birthsand deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself. Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritualunion--with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or anyother impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?

No, but with his mate. 

On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. Thereis no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-lovein its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more loveflows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny littlepearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heightsand imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods. "

Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants theperfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropinglytries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of thesesame desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and insteadof demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks forunion. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited toexterior 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 thegolden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactlythe opposite direction. 

Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Mostcertainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Mostcertainly not. 

We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we haveconcluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized oruncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoralin Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth isadherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance;sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexualimmorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submitthat it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is basedupon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made aconvenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her ownrealization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship isimmoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independentof marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; forposition; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutualhelpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfishgratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money;or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression ofan unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divineoffice of sex. 

But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yetall may, if we desire, be moral. And all moral and sexualrelationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever thetime comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truthneed not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages. 

If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy thatsex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex frompure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the loveof, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates insoul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of therestraints of marriage. 

But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospectof an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on theother, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, andhas decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego thehappiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogativeof perfect mating. 

If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapablefinality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throneendlessly, 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 tooshort" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness isthe only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!

But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if werealize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn byexperience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we beginto glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom andsufficient 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 satisfyingaspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love andbliss, 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, orfeigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishmenthas never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of thedoctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner hasknown better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that hasdwarfed our stature. 

In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wisepatience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods. "

Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good andearnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of blissbeing given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; andwhen the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhapsdeath will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd backat its summons to inhabit their perfected world. "

We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautifulwords--elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is alwaysin the future; but if it be always in the future it will never beours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. Theseprophetic utterances are literal truths. 

Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as wewill be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise--thebody. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interiornature. 

While we are building the business which sustains our physical body;while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion orwhatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior naturewhich we are now, and which we will be when the life of the bodyceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business weretheir only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing thesame methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate fromthe same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands orfalls 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 areapparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these littleimpulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seeminglyimportant business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which weclimb 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 evenbelieve it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of ourcrazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they arealso, and above all, idealists. 

 CHAPTER XI

 THE LAW OF TRANSMUTATION

External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we havebuilded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortalsenses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal whichprompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one wholooks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead ofmerely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells itsinterior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It issaid that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; butto those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; whatseems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which islimited to sense consciousness. 

There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give thekey to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered. The word "union, " or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase ofour busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. Thisword, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word"agreement, " or "combination" or "partnership, " formerly used. Unionmeans something more interior, than do these other words, even whenapplied 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 andideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. Wehave labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity ofeffort; a merging of interests; a welding together into onethought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness ofmeaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the wordslodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organizationof men in social or commercial combination. 

In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there maybe no quality of union, although there is the outward bond offellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know moreof 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, orthe appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import--the word_within_. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footstepstoward home. 

The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but theChristian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those whowould listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was trulyspiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed, but only to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandmentsalready in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the oneand only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begathim: "That ye love one another. "

Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets andthrough all the channels of the physical senses to look within. Thatwhich you are--not what you appear to be to the eyes of thesense-conscious--but that which you are in your interior nature, iswhat counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to writesalable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in thecommercial game; but when the word is impartially consideredefficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability ismeasured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wisejudgment--interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin bewhite or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are ofimposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within thatconstitutes 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 yourpower is in the interior of your nature. 

If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to theCosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again tothose who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in onthis, " has been said to one who was left out of some supposedlydesirable thing; or "you are not _in_ it, " meaning that you are not upto the required standard. Even as the walls of a building onlyimperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that whichthe building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physicalappearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature. 

"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritualteacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. " The character ofthe heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are atvariance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within, we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom--interiorvision. 

Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exteriorand their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled uplike a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grainof true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message fromknowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and we _find_wisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interiormeaning. 

The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is adifference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to theinterior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience. Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with theinterior; it penetrates the outer and seeks the interior; but neverdoes the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never doeshe mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message. 

Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life werethe only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of thethinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, thevisible results of a given achievement? He would conclude thatcivilization is insane. 

If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all thiswhich we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is inhis interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example, is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advancedcivilization?

With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable follyto project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories ofwood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain andhands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities areostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing, embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution ofman's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights towhich we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tellus 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 intoethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them. 

Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, didit not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mindregardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seeminglyintervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set inmotion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to acorresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has thepower that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brutestrength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively punystrength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force ofthe elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire--aninterior quality. 

Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make ushappier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather thantheir so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to manhis power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it todo his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above andbeyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put uponmodern inventions and accomplishment is the message which thesemechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not amachine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not amiserable worm of the dust, but a winged god. 

Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanicalmarvels is the knowledge of each other which has resulted fromintercommunication between nation and nation. The great breeder ofdiscord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man ofthe cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he didnot know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know;his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous anddangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country arelike ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even thoughthey may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet ofnuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down. Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideasof "alien" races and "foreign" nations. 

Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanicalinventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other humanbeings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings, emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like ourown, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reachthe heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet beenestablished, it is because the majority of Mankind are still onlysense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which thepast few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that theslow-moving mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all thisknowledge must come in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seekslove as the only eternal reality. Not because God has commanded thatwe shall do so; not because of a sentimental ideal, but because anyother 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 uponperpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symboliclanguage of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. Thesetwo words are really complementary, because it is only with theinterior nature that unity can be established. 

We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships, corporations, combinations from the outside. These are externalexpressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of theinterior nature only. 

With the more intimate knowledge of each other whichintercommunication between nations makes general, each littlesegregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at theconclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" onany proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much lesscostly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than bygoing to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains ofthe majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thoughtthat perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained bypeaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained norappeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wiseobservation that fundamentally, cosmically there is no place forenmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that thewhole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities andsegregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world canpermanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undevelopedand savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all thesethought-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 whichbelongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has beencarried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight liketigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well, using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devicesand the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this typeof warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose betweentransmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blindindeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who usethe sword shall perish by the sword. " How else can it be? There is butone force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use itto destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of lawthat we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum inarithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is nolimit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate. 

The fact is dawning upon an increasing number of thinkers, that evenas brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there isstill a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its powerthat nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. Thatpower 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 theearth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the eroticpomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to theirchariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourgedslaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of theamphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged"civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolutionof our own "false gods. " Transmuted into pure and perfect love andpeace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate anddestruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward themaintenance of a balanced world--a world in which Love and Wisdom areunited. 

We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitudeare blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the CosmicLaw which has always given us a better ideal in the place of thedecadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say whycannot we trust God?

In the external world, then, the idea that a part of this sphere isinherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies; thatthe female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy--all theseideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the comingcivilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it toour individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the humanorganism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Beforewe can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to abalanced and sane state within our own organism. 

We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the variousexpressions of life in the individual body as well as in the socialbody and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintainunceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we maysafely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we haveconquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind ourchariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in theclutches of an abnormal appetite. 

Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physicalappetites 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, perfectand harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it isbalanced. 

In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly everyone is lop-sided, and unbalanced. Alienists declare that almost everyman and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An ageof specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness. " Butthe source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where weconsciously unite with that interior source we will no longer beunbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, atthe center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There isno chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy. There is equilibrium. 

It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness thatequality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life willappear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer mencan imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-poweringand at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy. The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable fromsex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine themechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail tocomprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior beinguntil we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortaland glimpse the heights of the immortal life. 

No one can give to another this interior wisdom--this philosopher'sstone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into thepure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way andpromise 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 sideof the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed forpurposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex iscontrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize. Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primaryfunction. 

Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses theyare still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as theyremain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek. All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or womanwho is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of theecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritualalchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus foundthe key to the gate of eternal life. 

As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, oldage is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature intointerior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to expressthe sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to becometransmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts. It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fostersthat quality--be it much or little--so that we may not go into theinterior realms a spiritual pauper. 

Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, soold age, our "second childhood, " is a prelude to our soul adultship, and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state inthe soul life. 

There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have anydegree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty andlove-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shinesthrough the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know thatwhen that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, thatthe soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light. 

This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of amental recognition of age. 

"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youthand life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdomthat knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spirituallove, 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 leavesthis one, without having attained that which he craves. 

This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is noappeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons. " The lawis absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price ofimmortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm. "

"But, " questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there besuch in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do theynot tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritualsex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of itsreality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the verynature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices hisunreadiness for _Illumination_. The desire for self-gratification, though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimicalto attainment of spiritual consciousness. 

There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrineof sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, orgifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power gloriesin our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thingby giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spiritbecomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of ourwillingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existenceseems a sacrifice. 

"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him passon" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it asclearly as it can be stated. 

Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expectto enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to theletter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruism _is_; it is not mererecognition of a word. 

We may presuppose another natural and instinctive query: "If then onlyby union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal lifeand love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever allties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, andsearch for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found theanswer to all life's problems?"

Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We shouldremember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitfulquest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), helearned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom hegave the cup of cold water _without any consciousness of doing a gooddeed_; without hope of thereby finding the grail. 

He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any goodwill not find it though he should give away every farthing to thepoor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips;though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all dayand all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of selfand of _obtaining_ something so long will he miss the _attainment_. 

Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute orreversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not tryingto say that they should not be broken; or that they cannot be brokenwith impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished. They simplycannot be broken--they are unbreakable. 

We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, orin any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any morethan we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing toit; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest norscribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. Noone can break the law of your being any more than you can break thatof another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in theintervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Whereforethen, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousyand wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to amarriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?

If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that theobject of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres thereis only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by anypossibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place oncefound no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said inprevious chapters of the word "found;" it is from within. 

How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, somagnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama oflife; to establish such marvelous diversity within such simple unity;to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile hasbeen the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need notworry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God areloaded. " Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we maycheat in the game of life. 

We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility ofoffending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so faras it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us. " We can delayarrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if wewill. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfiedlonging shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remainwandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn ofhis hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundlessareas of infinite bliss and wisdom?

We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothingmore phenomenal than withdrawing from one room to another. The soulmay strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing canfree it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. Thebroader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfoldin its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine webecome, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual andattract our own. 

It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession asone's own counterpart defeats the very effort. We are not to seek; weare only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shallhave done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though thetwo halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers whichthe sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves andthe bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate tothee. " We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest welose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyesglued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realmsof vibration "whence cometh our light. "

Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that isspoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrateon thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs tothee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open orwinding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but thegreat and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in hisembrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is theheart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is thereanywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endlesscirculation 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 furtherenlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraicalpropositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortalgodhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Sourceof Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but wemust claim it if we would consciously realize this truth. 

God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and intruth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not onehermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, eventhough each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperamentand qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point becausethere has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon thisdefinition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctivelymasculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and heor she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness. 

Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Womanis not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear forcourage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality;helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when hespares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; whenhe unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy fromweakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentlenesswith vigor. 

No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore youare not to try to enforce your ideas of morality upon others. Who hasconstituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concernyourself 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 yourimmediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You neednot worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. Youare to render love and service to this world with all your heart andall your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of yourdesires. 

No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that isrendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail, " which is to saythe bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly fromthe responsibilities and the environment in which you are, withoutregard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neitherdo we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained toa post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentmentand hatred. 

There is no one formula which fits all cases--other than that given inlove and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others aswe would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and itmay read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do tothem. " If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no othermotive than personal selfishness, you may be doing yourself aninjury; 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; itmay be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word"unselfishness. " "Not mine but thine also, " is the watchword of thewise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him orher. There is just one big world of difference between these twopoints of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven andHell. 

 CHAPTER XII

 "SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"

Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure andsatisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing andfeeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-foldis the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who arethemselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others. This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, andwhich they will not believe or trust. 

Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs usheavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short andturbulent pleasure. "

And finally, as regards the sex-function, we would like to impressupon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom willunderstand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation ofsex-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love thatis of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in theregion popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circumscribe thesex-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 thusentering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mindphysical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and isfound to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. Sex is notconfined to the specialized sex-organs. It permeates the entire being. The person who has no conception of his reality other than as aphysical entity has not so much as touched the area of spiritualecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the gods;" and soinfinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not doso until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains uponthe sense-conscious plane and seeks by sexual perversity anddebauchery and sexual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection ofjoy which he intuitively knows evades him. 

Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and justand merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies, " that it cannotbe defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It isforever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope toexpress the creative power, the sexual realization of a god, throughthe functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of theanimal. 

Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do notimagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your punyphysical powers would suggest. Neither should you imagine that thesex-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking inlove-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right andnormal in itself; the attitude of the average man and woman invests itwith all its uncleanness. 

But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulgedin respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayedagainst it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Churchdenying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling itin the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing lessthan the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divinefulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poorlittle bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as thehope 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 fromthe "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. "

Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and wewould like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; nomisconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we arehere stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple andunescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time andignorance. 

The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapterswe will again state it, so that there may be no mistake: If thebalance is found in counterpartal sex-union--the one man and the onewoman uniting on the solar plane--would not this balance be maintainedif only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; inother words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on theone hand and extreme impurity on the other?

Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that thereare no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that theunion is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one mustbe balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union ispossible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would, really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things wemay appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense ofthe poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense ofserfs; but doubt not that _eternal equation_ is perfect. 

There is still another query: If true sex-union is of the soul, whatis to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment ofdeath, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thuscircumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compeleach one to earn the prize of eternal life?

The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. Therealization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more thanis the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence ofuntold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realizevalues, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand hemight command millions. One might give a blind man a check for amillion dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was, he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestowwisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator. 

If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne ofangelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take thecrucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common, everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This isthe only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, andthe sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love withoutthought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light andlove of the spiritual realms. 

The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of esotericwisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that sucheffort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that theprincipal benefit of a college education is to teach the student thathe does not need a college education. This estimate of the value ofyears 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 werewell worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is theprice of transmutation only after exhausting every other method, whatdoes 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 amoving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch withsegregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; thehopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and theheartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole movingpicture. 

You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a huerivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like aclowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dressis amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest. " Your first impulse, perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but ifyou will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see thather eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seemingexperience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she hasdonned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries ofgrandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right tocomb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wantedto; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free andhappy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, andthe tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must becarefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest. "

Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of ourfore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will beheard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel fortheir freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted dollof a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent onhaving two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If sheis foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all themore reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of yourhelp and sympathy. 

"_Learn to look into the hearts of men. _"

Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinderdoing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not justan old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings andlongings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter ifthe organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria orthe intermezzo. 

And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and boldstreet-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside. But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of theirappearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize withthem. If you can get back to the underlying cause of themanifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with thecondition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted incrime. 

You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize withhis misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if youwould transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key toimmortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and tosympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong withoutsympathy walks to his own funeral. "

Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas tofind the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the HiddenMysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, youmust lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but thelesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personalitythat conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard thispersonality 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 aswe say "the hand is the servant of the brain. " If your hand becomesunruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut itoff, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should themen who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of alater century?

You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood, " inorder to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There isnothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannotlearn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart ofthe world. 

There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greaterthan love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is noGod holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you willreadily see that it is for you to think love into those things thatappear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking thelesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest theexpression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gaveto it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to doso. 

Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with theInfinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection withthe specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illuminationfrom on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if youturn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of thetoad, ' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula andstill blesses it with His fruitful presence. "

And finally do not make the too common mistake of confoundingbrazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation. 

Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life hascome because of the divinity of Sex. If you have been wise enough toknow this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect tothat function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading thesubject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would"cast pearls before swine;" you will not countenance jokes and ribaldsongs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you willfold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart's divine altar, assomething too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of theun-tender day. 

If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of Sex, youwill desire unity and disdain possession, knowing that whatever ofHeaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality ofspiritual realization of the function of Sex. You will respect thephysical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of theuniverse, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. Youwill teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; thatnothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inwardhonesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire. 

If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love andwe shall surely enter therein. 

Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal gods. 

 FINIS

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 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. 

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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. 

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 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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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 inspelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.