Magia and Gender II

It is not without good reason that the symbolic use of a form of immutable biological characteristics within a teaching such as Magia can cause suspicion or even alarm for those with marginal identities.

It is easy to take current open attitudes toward everything only recently repressed by the Cursed Form of Christianity for granted. It was only in the last century that being gay was legalised, despite the fact homosexuality was prevalent throughout the aristocracy and the church (indeed, it was Crowley’s sexual abuse at the hands of a well-known and respectable priest that fed his hatred of Christian hypocrisy on the subject).

It’s not hard to see much of the symbolism within Magia shared by early Christianity. Christ taught exclusively via analogy: parable is nothing but analogy that requires a key given to the initiated, and the early Christians were organised around these principles.

Today no one needs to martial evidence that the church’s two-millenia-year history shows evidence of a tyrannical repression of women and the feminine (we must of course avoid an over-simplification that hurts the assertion. There is much convenient over-statement or ignorance of doctrine/theology e.g. consider the extraordinarily popular, ancient and enduring cult of Mary.)

Why treat the feminine this way? The rote answer is irrational misogyny - a version of a bizarre explanation often trotted-out when you aren’t supposed to look too closely at your enemy, who after all must remain unintelligible at all costs: ‘some people just hate’ - and therefore the remedy is to be found in undoing structures that unconsciously enable such outcomes, the most important of which is language.

No doubt, there are many people who can only take symbolism literally, with many Christians historically being of this persuasion. The knee-jerk reaction is therefore to change any symbolism that can be interpreted in a tyrannical fashion; but this is merely to commit the same error, making oneself a literalist.

In the case of an initiatory teaching, whether early Christianity or Magia, this guarantees not only never coming into contact with the real tradition, but the animation of the same tyrannical parody in its place.

The literalist is motivated by good intentions: they always think they’re improving the current state of the tradition, but it’s necessarily going to involve unpopular and unpleasant actions - and they’re the ones with the back-bone and stomach to do it.

But the apparent solution of changing the symbolism is merely moving appearances around to give the illusion of change where there is none.

And the detrimental outcome is the same: initiation is murdered.

The repression of the divine feminine - the Goddess - is a necessary feature of excising wisdom from tradition. Without the Goddess, there is no initiate to speak of.

The solution is not literalism; for this is the murder all over again.

What we require is the restoration of a wise relationship to analogical symbolism.

And right there, hidden in the centre, we find the Goddess.