Magia and Gender

Magia is currently being translated into Portugeuse, and my friend translating the text asked a pertinent question:

Portuguese is a gendered language. As you may know, in gendered languages the "male" or "masculine" is used as neutral, and this fact reflects social and cultural aspects of a patriarchal system. God is always "him" because the noun is always "male". It seems to me that Aion is ungendered, right?

And further:

When you write "men and women of Alabaster", do you think I can say in Portuguese something in terms of "all the people", or "all the persons", or "all the human beings" of Alabaster? This is a related question because we have all this discussion today about gender and non-binarism, and I think not only magic but also your work talks to each and everyone regardless.

I thought my response was worth sharing, because I have no idea how well I have communicated on this issue in the past.

Disclosure comes first

In the first instance, Aion must be allowed to disclose his own nature, same with the Goddess. Who are we to decide their identities?

Similarly, we must also allow the teaching to disclose its own nature - or are we to take the attitude we already know what it means? (Which renders the teaching pointless.)

Aion has disclosed his own nature first as 'I' and 'we', but secondly as male and father. He is Speech. Also the Sun.

The Goddess has disclosed her own nature as female and mother. She is Silence, the Moon, and is hidden in Aion's name in the Holy of Holies. Saying his name is how we honour her. (Everyone always wants her name, but she is not to be possessed in that way.)

If we un-gender Aion, She is erased.

I can understand the impulse to make Aion ungendered because gender isn’t an issue with God, but to un-gender Aion is to make gender an issue for him, which he has not done.

Why is Aion the true name for God? Because the fact God is a plurality (so everyone - whether they recognise it or not - is in one sense analogically male in a specific relationship) seems to be the salient aspect.

Analogical relationship, not personal identity

The God and Goddess are father and mother, and the name Aion is a way of understanding a family structure or 'formula' for creation (and so initiation, which is really just completing the circle of creation).

Being principally concerned with creation, we cannot escape the reality of sex: vaginas/wombs/eggs (female) and penises/sperm (male). (This formula is explained in-depth in the magical castle videos.) This isn't a political or social instruction, but an analogical symbolism that anyone can apply to themselves to understand a specific relationship between (ultimately) their own parts.

I do not need to be currently combusting to understand ‘awakening is a fire’. I do not need bees to share my specific sex, gender, race, orientation, etc. in order to understand bee social relationships. This is the correct attitude to approach understanding our relationship analogically with the God and Goddess (or anything else we would use analogy for).

What are the sexual analogies for the God and Goddess?

Symbolically, the male/female pairing is the generative biological relationship (penis/vagina, sperm/egg) upon which we can understand analogically the relationship between the initiate (male) and the Goddess (female), or the soul (female) and God (male).

The Magia practitioner should be able to understand themselves as male as initiate, and as female as the soul, in order to analogically understand their relationship with both Goddess and God, within the Magia teaching.

If a person cannot do this because the symbols don’t match the details of their own identity, they will not be able to practice Magia anyway - given analogy is a key feature - and, for everyone’s safety, probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive either.

Concerns of exclusion surrounding the use of analogical symbolism are an exercise in pretending to study the teaching to change the teaching, when we should instead be studying the teaching to have it change us.

Alabaster analogies

As for the 'men and women of alabaster', Aion’s first mention of this analogical symbolism is actually, ‘men of alabaster’. I’m pretty much convinced this was the old usage of the term ‘men’, meaning ‘humans’ (i.e. ‘men’ and ‘women’ are both versions of ‘men’).

It is no longer politically acceptable in the English speaking world to use ‘men’ in this sense; but in my opinion, a translation into Portuguese of the equivalent of ‘people’ or ‘humans of alabaster’ would be accurate for this first mention.

Ironically, for English speakers, the second expression of ‘men and women of alabaster’ would be considered more politically-inclusive than the first, but is obviously not inclusive enough for today’s left-wing political position.

However, given the first usage, I can’t see how it isn’t meant the same in the second usage.

The One Job

Regardless, I have one job: not to alter or change the teaching based on personal preference (or likely ignorance), because I don’t get to decide its nature (if I did, it would negate the existence of the teaching, because there would be nothing to disclose).

As translator, this responsibility has now fallen to you!