Ancient Tower Press

Exploring the Realm of Two - Part Eight

 

 

The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be co-existent qualitative dimensions of reality, rather than distinct sequential units of quantitative measurement that we understand them to be today.  In my book, Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory, I consider the spiritual psychology of each of these dimensions – which I call the Number Realms.  In the following blog series, taken from Chapter Two of my book, I explore the Realm of Two.

 

This is Part 8 of an 11-Part Series

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Into Soul Space

Consciousness as a Play of Opposites

Two As an Echo of the Abyss

Two As the Embodiment of the Shadow

Two as the Gateway to the Fall

The Two as the Embodiment of Feminine Power

The Ambivalent Journey Through the Two Back to the One

 

Our Collective Need for the Balancing Medicine of the Feminine

 

Aside from the politics of inequality, in which women are treated unfairly, we pay a steep price spiritually for our ambivalence toward the Feminine.  This temporary life we live as spirits housed in bodies is a dance of balance between the Masculine and the Feminine – each of which is necessary if the dance is not to be a blind stumble back into the Abyss.  The Masculine is not the sole prerogative of men, nor is the Feminine a possession only of women.  Quite the contrary, life requires us to embrace and integrate both, regardless of our physical gender.  This integration – called the hieros gamos by Jung – is a necessary dimension of the quest for Wholeness, which is another word for the Pythagorean desire for a Return to the One.  The Return does not happen, except through hieros gamos – through an integration of the Masculine and the Feminine.  Given the continuing dominance of the Masculine within contemporary society, hieros gamos necessarily means making a larger space for a re-integration of Feminine values.

Re-integration of the Feminine does not just mean an affirmation of women’s rights, nor does it mean the return to a matriarchal society.  It requires a much more fundamental shift in consciousness than that, toward a culture of true equality, in which an awareness that the “the roots of all living things are tied together” (Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth, New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 137) serves as the basis for every decision we make – as a culture, as a political body, as a global society.  Within the Realm of Two, we must find a more humble place within the natural order, where our presence contributes not just to our own well-being, but to the well-being of every other life form with whom we share this planet. 

The Masculine seeks to dominate, and according to this rule, we have assumed dominion over the Earth – forgetting how much more durable the Earth is than we are.  We cavalierly raze forests that are older than us, older than the most ancient ancestor we could possible claim relation to.  We blast through mountains that pre-date the human species as though they were put there just to challenge our technological prowess.  Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson estimates that by the year 2100, half of all plant and animal species on the planet will be gone (Whitty 38).  Global warming; toxic chemicals in our air, food and water; the litany goes on and on.  All in a day’s work for the unbridled Masculine. 

Care of the Feminine requires us to realize that whatever damage we do to the Earth we do to ourselves.  Her roots and ours are inextricably bound.  In the end, it is we who will suffer, our children and our children’s children.  Future generations will live in a world that no longer quite so easily supports or sustains human life.  Some may die prematurely.  Many will become sick, with weakened immune systems, diminished capacity to procreate, no air to breathe that is not contaminated, no food to eat that is not toxic, no water to drink that has not been polluted.  It is already starting to happen. 

The only antidote to such a future is to create a balanced culture in which both sides of the polarity are honored – the Masculine drive toward meaningful progress and the Feminine capacity for caring about how that progress affects our culture, our children, and the larger web of life on which we depend for our survival and quality of life.  At various times in our history, we have reached for equality, though within the last 25 years or so, we have gotten severely out of balance.  We seem to care less as a culture than we did a short time ago.  In this age of austere budget cuts for social welfare programs counterbalanced by bloated military spending, caring itself is often seen as a sign of weakness – as an antiquated vestige of liberalism.  This is a dishonoring of the Feminine, and women in power are no less at fault than men.  What must change is not so much the percentage of women who are given the opportunity to rise to the top, but the culture in which that opportunity is given.  This requires a massive collective shift in consciousness, within the Realm of Two, from an attitude of inequality to one of equality.

If you find the ideas presented in this blog series intriquing and want to read the whole story, you can buy Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One here.

Exploring the Realm of Two - Part Seven

 

 

The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be co-existent qualitative dimensions of reality, rather than distinct sequential units of quantitative measurement that we understand them to be today.  In my book, Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory, I consider the spiritual psychology of each of these dimensions – which I call the Number Realms.  In the following blog series, taken from Chapter Two of my book, I explore the Realm of Two.

 

This is Part 7 of an 11-Part Series

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Into Soul Space

Consciousness as a Play of Opposites

Two As an Echo of the Abyss

Two As the Embodiment of the Shadow

Two as the Gateway to the Fall

The Two as the Embodiment of Feminine Power

 

The Ambivalent Journey Through the Two Back to the One

The Realm of Two made the Pythagoreans uncomfortable, because it defied the logic – the Logos – of all that they revered.  Reunion with the One was their goal, but the path to that goal was apparently down into a darkness populated by an overwhelming messy diversity of seemingly separate forms.  Even though they called the Dyad, “the Goal, because She is that to which the Monad proceeds” (John Opsopaus, “A Summary of Pythagorean Theology,” Bibliotecha Arcana, Part II), it made no rational sense because it was to the Monad that they felt themselves returning.

As deep ecologist and feminist scholar Joan Halifax reminds us, this downward Feminine movement that gives birth to the life of the soul has it own logic, its own purpose that can only be understood through the experience of it (The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth, New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 137):

We go into darkness, we seek initiation, in order to know directly how the roots of all beings are tied together: how we are related to all things, how this relationship expresses itself in terms of interdependence, and finally how all phenomena abide within one another.  Yes, the roots of all living things are tied together.  Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace.  This understanding is expressed in the term non-duality.  If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.  We cannot exist without the presence and support of the interconnecting circles of creation – the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the sphere of our sun.  All are related to us: we depend on each of these spheres for our very existence.

This interdependence is what allows us to exist as souls – splinters of the fragmented One – within seemingly separate bodies.  The separation – feared by Pythagoreans as a necessary evil in moving evolution forward – is as illusory as the absolute authority of the reference point from which we project our gods and goddesses in the Realm of One.  For as we consent to participate in the opportunity that the Realm of Two offers us – the formation and exploration of relationships – we learn that we are not separate.  We share the same human spirit as those who appear radically different than us.  We belong to the same biosphere as every other living creature on this planet.  Our bodies are composed of the same elements as mountains, oceans and stars.  We are a unique mix of ingredients, occupying a singular niche in the cosmic food chain, and serving an individual purpose that we can call our own.  Yet, ours is not a solitary dance, and within the Realm of Two, we get to explore the larger choreography.

This is essentially a Feminine exploration, because women are biologically conditioned not just to give birth, but also to foster life.  Relationship is the vehicle for this task, which begins with the sacred relationship between a mother and her breast-feeding child – an act that is the epitome of physical nourishment, emotional bonding, and psychological security.  To contain the mother-child relationship, family provides a larger network of support; family extends to community; and community expands to include all living things and the ecological interdependence that sustains them in an all-inclusive network of Life. 

Within the Realm of Two, it is the Feminine embrace of interdependence that allows becoming to proceed.  This is no longer just a solitary becoming, although it is that – since we are still growing as individuals within the context of our relationships.  It is also a collective becoming, since interdependence by definition is a quality of the many.  While our chosen gods and goddesses provide a role model as we seek to evolve as individual souls within the Realm of One, the relationships between them that are part of any polytheistic pantheon, provide the role model for our interactions with each other within the Realm of Two.

The monotheistic religions and those that adhere to a dualistic framework pitting good against evil, fail to provide this more pluralistic role model, since the rich diversity of polytheism is subsumed by the Monad against which the Dyad is considered inferior or sinful.  In keeping with Pythagorean ambivalence toward the Dyad, the Feminine expression of divine power survives only as a virgin birth that is incidental to the main attraction, or a consort goddess who plays a secondary supportive role to some male deity, or a goddess cult that remains a marginalized echo of what it once was in its matriarchal heyday.  This is changing slowly, though most denominations still do not ordain women priests, God is still predominantly addressed as He, and patriarchal attitudes still limit the power and authority of women in the Church.  Though Eastern religions have, in general, been more accommodating of female deities, the actual treatment of women in the religious societies of the East has paralleled or lagged behind that of the West.

If you find the ideas presented in this blog series intriquing and want to read the whole story, you can buy Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One here.

Exploring the Realm of Two - Part Six

 

 

The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be co-existent qualitative dimensions of reality, rather than distinct sequential units of quantitative measurement that we understand them to be today.  In my book, Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory, I consider the spiritual psychology of each of these dimensions – which I call the Number Realms.  In the following blog series, taken from Chapter Two of my book, I explore the Realm of Two.

 

This is Part 6 of an 11-Part Series

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Into Soul Space

Consciousness as a Play of Opposites

Two As an Echo of the Abyss

Two As the Embodiment of the Shadow

Two as the Gateway to the Fall

 

The Two as the Embodiment of Feminine Power

As suggested by the story of the Garden of Eden, the gift of consciousness and the necessity for responsible choice require us to leave the Garden and enter the world.  If the Garden can be understood to be a state of unconscious identification with the One, then the world must be understood as the Realm of Two, where navigation is essentially an exploration of the relationship between opposites – or the resonant field I refer to in The Seven Gates of Soul as soul space.  The embodied soul – the unique fusion of Spirit and matter that makes us what we are – does not truly exist until the One leaves its state of pure potentiality and takes on a body, or a plenitude of forms within the embodied world.

Entering this dyadic realm of form was an additional source of ambivalence for the Pythagoreans, because it entails embracing a distinctly Feminine way of being.  The Dyad is Feminine because in necessitates entry into matter (from the Latin, mater, meaning mother), changeability (associated with the Feminine Moon moving through its phases), and plurality (through the Feminine process of giving birth). 

The Monad, considered by the Pythagoreans to be an essentially Masculine force, contains all potentiality within itself, and is essentially self-contained.  To enter the world of form, not as a potential, but as an actuality, a birth is necessary.  This comes only through the Feminine.  In a literal way, it is through the womb of the mother that we enter this life[i].  In a more cosmic sense, it has always been the archetypal Feminine that represents the power to give birth, the power to bring Spirit down into a life conditioned by form, matter, time and space – into existence as an embodied soul.

The ambivalence that the Pythagoreans projected toward the Dyad – through which the manifest creation came into being – also extended to the Feminine.  This ambivalence was shared by others – the Jews and Christians, in whose primal myth of creation, Eve was the temptress offering the apple to Adam; the early Greeks, for whom Pandora’s box was the source of all the suffering in the world; and in many indigenous and shamanic cultures, where menstruation is viewed as a source of ritual contamination (Lehmann, Arthur C. and James E. Myers. Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural. 3^rd Ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993, pp. 296-297).

Without embodiment, no evolution in consciousness is possible.  Yet within a body, different rules apply than do within the domain of pure potential.  We are no longer free to dwell unconsciously in Light; we must now grope our way through darkness.  The movement through darkness is not up – where we project our gods in some transcendent heavenly abode – but down into the thick tangle of root and blood, bone and rock, where progress depends not upon adherence to the purity of some ideal, but upon the willingness to sweat and moan, suffer and cry out from the depths of being, touch the Earth and learn from everything that touches us.  This movement downward shatters our self-containment, fragments our internal unity, and forces us to reclaim it through relationship with everything foreign to our nature.

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[i] Even though patriarchal medicine has attempted to bypass the womb through techniques of in vitro fertilization, the eggs that are the carriers of life, are still unavoidably of the Feminine.

If you find the ideas presented in this blog series intriquing and want to read the whole story, you can buy Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One here.

Exploring the Realm of Two - Part Five

 

 

The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be co-existent qualitative dimensions of reality, rather than distinct sequential units of quantitative measurement that we understand them to be today.  In my book, Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory, I consider the spiritual psychology of each of these dimensions – which I call the Number Realms.  In the following blog series, taken from Chapter Two of my book, I explore the Realm of Two.

 

This is Part 5 of an 11-Part Series

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Into Soul Space

Consciousness as a Play of Opposites

Two As an Echo of the Abyss

Two As the Embodiment of the Shadow

 

Two as the Gateway to the Fall

The predicament posed by the Realm of Two is depicted in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  In this myth, the serpent – a symbol for Mercurius, or Hermes, the Greek trickster god (Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, translated by R.F.C. Hull.  Bolligen Series XX, Vol. 9, Part 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 312) – tempts the first humans with fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Before this moment, there was no such thing as good and evil; only a neutral equality between everything on the left side of the Table of Opposites and everything on the right side.  Tasting this fruit, everything shifted, and suddenly our primal ancestors found themselves on the path of inequality, where guilt and shame accompanied choices on the right side (dyadic choices), labor became necessary to dwell within creation, and birth became associated with pain and suffering.

Christians have interpreted this myth essentially to mean that entry into the Realm of Two was the source of original sin – that is to say, a fall from the natural state of grace that existed when the soul identified completely with the One.  A more careful reading of the myth shows that the real fall is the embrace of the path of inequality, on which certain things, behaviors, and ideas were now considered good and others were construed as evil.  Before the knowledge of good and evil, such a distinction would not be possible.  With this knowledge, half of creation is suddenly cast in shadow.  The Pythagorean solution – central to the religious agenda – is that in order to return to God, one must move out of shadow and back into light.  Ignored in this injunction is the deeper recognition that shadow and light exist only relation to each other, and that to embrace the Wholeness that is God, one must reject neither.

Striking out in what first appears to be a different direction, Richard Heath (Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization: The Unfolding of History Through the Mystery of Number, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2007, p. 6) argues that:

The fruit that hangs on this tree is knowledge of the numerical relationships between planets that both initiates an understanding of number and reveals that creation is indeed structured in a numerical way.  The numerical culture would eventually measure the size of Earth itself and “become as one of us (the gods) to know good and evil.”  But when humans become knowledgeable of the cosmic, it angers a God that would keep them within a created paradise or, alternatively, forces a newly self-conscious couple to leave the garden paradise and make their own way in the world.

Implied in Heath’s statement is recognition of the awesome power of number – the knowledge of which – potentially gives us mere mortals, the power of the gods.  Setting aside for the moment the metaphysical implications of this knowledge, it is not hard to see how numbers – the root of all mathematics, and thus the language in which science expresses itself – have given the human race the power over life (e.g., life-saving medicine and the ability to clone other living things) and death (e.g., weapons of mass destruction and toxic chemicals).  Applied use of numbers has also given us a magical Pandora’s box of inventions that allow us to do everything the gods can do – e.g., defy gravity (with airplanes and space shuttles), ignore the limitations of space (through the Internet and wireless phone technology), and suspend time (using recording devices such as cameras and camcorders, digital recorders and hard drives).  All of these inventions – ultimately made possible only through our knowledge of numbers – have given us the power of the gods, or at least the semblance of their power.

The question remains, what is good or evil about this knowledge?  It is not the knowledge itself that is good or evil, but the use to which we put the knowledge.  To the extent this knowledge of number – of the archetypal power underlying creation – is pressed into service to promote equality between the opposites, a certain creative synergy takes place that ultimately furthers the evolutionary process of becoming.  To the extent that this knowledge is used to promote inequality between the opposites, then we have a devolutionary force that undoes creation through war, genocide, escalation of microbial and viral diseases with which we are also at war, and in general, a literal tearing of creation in two.  The technology that arises from number is neutral.  It is the intent behind our use of technology – and more fundamentally our attitude toward the Dyad out of which subsequent numbers spring – that determines whether our knowledge of number can be considered good or evil.

If our goal in moving through the numerical sequence – from potentiality in the One into a Creation blossoming in multiplicity – is to evolve as conscious beings living in a garden paradise, then using our knowledge of numbers to further this purpose along a path of equality might be considered good.  Using this same knowledge to promote devolution through inequality might be considered evil.  Ultimately, even this dichotomy is false, since devolution serves a legitimate purpose in the overall scheme of things, and is not more or less vital to that purpose than evolution.  Once we have this knowledge, however, we must make a choice about how we will use it, and there will be a consequence to this choice.  Put another way, consciousness entails responsibility, and to ignore this responsibility or to refuse it is to fall from grace.

If you find the ideas presented in this blog series intriquing and want to read the whole story, you can buy Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One here.

Exploring the Realm of Two - Part Four

 

 

The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be co-existent qualitative dimensions of reality, rather than distinct sequential units of quantitative measurement that we understand them to be today.  In my book, Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers: A Contemporary Reformulation of Pythagorean Number Theory, I consider the spiritual psychology of each of these dimensions – which I call the Number Realms.  In the following blog series, taken from Chapter Two of my book, I explore the Realm of Two.

 

This is Part 4 of an 11-Part Series

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Into Soul Space

Consciousness as a Play of Opposites

Two As an Echo of the Abyss

 

Two As the Embodiment of the Shadow

As Jungian mythologist Marie-Louise Von Franz pointed out, the duality inherent in the Realm of Two goes deeper than religious preferences, however violently defended.  The ambivalence at the root of these preferences is likely as hardwired into our psyche as the inclination to project our gods in the Realm of One.  This possibility is most clearly demonstrated on an archetypal level in the Two-Creator motif, mentioned in Chapter One, in which creation proceeds as a process of cooperation or competition between two gods.  As Von Franz describes this motif (Creation Myths. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1972, pp. 69-70, words in brackets are mine):

All over the world there is the tendency to ascribe the act of creation to one figure who then retires and stays outside, while another figure steps into the act of creation.  It seems to me quite obvious that this is an archetypal motif which describes the separation of individual consciousness from its unconscious background, the two together representing the pre-conscious totality. . . . The tendency toward consciousness [Two] would be the son of the pre-conscious totality [One], but at the same time the two exist in a natural union, because this tendency toward consciousness stems from the whole totality. . . .

At first, the two gods are identical.  There may be a contest or a battle between them as one tries to prove himself superior, but it invariably winds up in a draw.  Still, the intent of such a contest is to differentiate one god from the other, and eventually this comes to pass.  In Von Franz’ estimation, there are seven dimensions of this differentiation, some or all of which may be present in any given Two-Creator myth:

1) One is more active; the other more passive.

2) One knows more; the other knows less.

3) One is more human; the other less human.

4) One is a father type; the other is a son type.

5) One is male; one is female.

6) One is good; one is evil.

7) One is more towards life; one is more towards death.

There is an echo here of Aristotle’s Table of Opposites albeit with a different set of polarities.  Within Von Franz’ delineation, there is an additional sensibility that sheds light on the true nature of Two, for everything on the right (associated with Two in contrast to One) can be considered an attribute of the unconscious, while everything to the left can be understood as an embodiment of consciousness.  This dichotomy between conscious and unconscious does not exist when everything is pre-conscious (or potential only) as it is in the Realm of One.  It is only when we get to the Realm of Two that the unconscious has any meaning at all.  When the unconscious becomes a separate creative force in its own right, then we have counterbalance to the conscious mind – one that often serves to undermine the conscious agenda, generate ambivalence with the conscious intent, and produce results that stand in stark contrast to the conscious goal. 

In Jungian terms, this counterbalancing force is known as the shadow.  When the shadow is engaged on a personal level – often through some relationship in which unconscious patterns are mirrored by one’s partner – the Realm of Two becomes the arena in which resonance by wounding takes place.  Resonance by wounding occurs within the Realm of Two as the necessity for dealing with the shadow.  Whole societies also have their shadow, which is generally projected onto an enemy in times of war, and more generally onto various targets epitomizing evil – i.e., drugs, pornography, or terrorism.  When the shadow is projected in the broadest possible sense on the collective level – as an embodiment of everything the Monad is not – it gives rise not to a Creator god, but to his arch nemesis.

This arch nemesis is usually a trickster god – depicted in indigenous cultures by an animal such as raven, coyote, hare, or spider, but also in more sophisticated anthropomorphic form in Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Hebraic traditions (Paul Radin. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York, NY: Shocken Books, 1956, pp. xxiii-xxiv).  Although one might reasonably expect Satan to fall into this category, the Christian adoption of a shadow god is actually more complicated.  Though mentioned in the Old Testament, Satan didn’t really come into prominence as a counterforce to God until the Hellenistic period (c 200 BCE – 150 CE) (Arthur C. Lehmann and James E. Myers. Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural. 3^rd Ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993, p. 192).  Before that, Yahweh himself at times became a trickster.  According to Jung (Radin 196):

If we consider . . . the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behavior of the trickster, of his pointless orgies of destruction and his self-appointed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization.

It was only when Yahweh was elevated in Hebrew thought to the status of a Creator god that Satan arose as a projection of Yahweh’s trickster function.  As religious scholar Willard Oxtoby wonders (World Religions: Western Traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 25), “Did a God now responsible for everything that happens need an adversary to whom people could assign the blame for what goes wrong?”  If so, then typical of a trickster god, Satan becomes a scapegoat for everything within the resonant field of opposites that can’t be comfortably contained in our concept of God.

As Jung tells us (Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Tr. R.F.C. Hull.  Bolligen Series XX, Vol. 9, Part 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 270, 264):

The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. . . .  The trickster is inherently ambivalent, because it represents “a primitive ‘cosmic’ being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness. 

We are simultaneously attracted to the trickster for what he has to teach us, and repelled by the mirror he holds up to our basest, most embarrassing incongruities.  To fully enter the Realm of Two by embracing the path of equality, then, we are immediately challenged by having to step through the trickster’s minefield of shadows, where every virtue we would claim is counterbalanced by a correspondent vice.  The temptation is to keep the virtue and project the vice, but doing so immediately sets us on the path of inequality and back down into the Abyss.  To step beyond this minefield onto the path of equality, we must own the shadow and find the secret light within it that dissolves the false barrier between virtue and vice altogether.

If you find the ideas presented in this blog series intriquing and want to read the whole story, you can buy Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One here.