Sex--The Unknown Quantity Part 11

The third aspect of the symbolism tells of "an union between two natures which are one at the root, but diverse in manifestation." And the alchemist who sought the physical interpretation of this, promised that, as earth, air, and fire and water were the elements "out of which all manifestation is composed," it only remained for someone to discover the exact proportion of each of these elementary substances in a specific compound; this accomplished, copper for example, could be dissolved into its const.i.tuent parts and re-solved again in the proportions which formed gold, a thing which we are not prepared to say could not be accomplished, but a thing which we do say, would not even be attempted by one who had found the secret of the interior trans.m.u.tation, because having attained to the radiant center, he would realize the "glory of the worlds," and gold, as metal, would be to him of far less value than the emerald of the gra.s.s; the pearls of dew upon the rose; the scent of the lotus; the song of birds; the laughter of children.

How vain and foolish to imagine that a philosopher would think it worth while to search for gold, as a metal. He would not even consider the ambition worthy the parchment used to preserve the record of his labors.

But to find the golden light from the radiant center of pure and unquenchable love--that were indeed worthy of ages of research. For are we not promised, the "glory of the world" if we will seek and find? And he who truly seeks will absolutely find. What is the glory of 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 ancient alchemical symbol, namely, that the two halves of the one whole, manifesting diversely as male and female, are reunited, we come to the fourth aspect of the symbol mentioned, and the "trans.m.u.tation which follows this union and the abiding glory therein," is the inevitable and logical sequential answer.

An _abiding_ glory must be founded upon spiritual substantiability.

Trans.m.u.tation is not synonymous with, extinction, or elimination, or abandonment. We _trans.m.u.te_ the lower into the higher, the exterior into the interior, the physical into the spiritual. This is the sum and substance of the "Ancient Wisdom."

There is no eccentric change or transition from one phase or plane of life, into another. It is neither logical nor justifiable to a.s.sume that s.e.x is limited to the physical, or the astral or the psychic, or any other specific planes of consciousness. These planes are not distinctively separable anyway. They are merely _names_ which we use to distinguish degrees, or limitations of consciousness.

The statement that the "two halves are reunited" is almost invariably misinterpreted to imply an annihilation, or absorption of individuality, into some sort of vaporous, formless, s.e.xless Thing; but why this should be so misconstrued is a puzzle, any more than that bringing together the two halves of an orange which had been divided, would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting the 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 and woman.

CHAPTER IX

WHAT CONSt.i.tUTES s.e.x IMMORALITY?

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

"Atheist," "infidel," "unG.o.dly" are epithets which have been used as mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the last century.

These words have now lost much of their terror, even to the undeveloped consciousness of the average, because it has been shown that the G.o.d-idea which rational thought fain would subst.i.tute for the old revengeful Deity, has not annihilated the world, but quite to the contrary has resulted in a happier and higher ideal of G.o.dhood than that which the early Church postulated.

Epithets are the mental bulwarks of the powers of resistance against Evolution.

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

Free-love is a phrase with which even the most intrepid advocate of rational thought hesitates to claim affiliation; and yet the goal of our highest endeavors must be a state of Society where Love, the G.o.d, 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 the case of the little girl who ran to her mother crying with indignation because someone had alluded to her as an "aristocrat." She did not know what the word meant, and so resented it as something undeserved.

When we examine into what the phrase free-love really means, we will not 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 of s.e.x? Not at all. He is referred to as a "gay bachelor" or as one who is "sowing his wild oats" or some other phrase, which in no way affects his social standing.

Is it applied to women of the half-world, to recognized, and legalized prost.i.tution? Never! It is significant of the real meaning of free-love that the term is never used in connection with what modern reform has aptly designated the "white slave" traffic, for the obvious reason that nowhere is Love so un-free; so enslaved and bound and murdered as in this phase of woman's degradation.

Nor is the term applied to unfaithful wives, because in this type of defiance of traditional s.e.x-ethics there is always the spirit of self-accusation; a tacit, if not open, admission of wrong-doing.

We never hear the awful accusation of "free-lover" hurled at the young woman who has, what the world calls, "sinned," because, forsooth, she pays the price of her deviation from social standards (when discovered) by ostracism, and not infrequently by a broken heart, or by sinking further into the depths of bondage; and so here again it is evident that there is no freedom for whatever spirit of love actuates her conduct.

It must be admitted that the term "free-love" is applied only to those who openly claim the right to bestow their affections and indulge in the s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p, independent of the marriage ceremony. It matters not whether this claim includes but one mate, or several. It is the demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing the 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 of any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.

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

Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from the 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 the approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.

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

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

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

The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.

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

If the term free-love were really synonymous with s.e.x-promiscuity, we would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands of Convention.

The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women, because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to personal liberty in matters connected with the s.e.x-relation, and until women of the self-respecting and educated cla.s.s began to openly emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.

All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between s.e.x promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the claim to personal liberty in matters of the s.e.x-relation and defiance of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.

The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other advanced ideas) att.i.tude toward the most important function of life, has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free choice.

Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, s.h.i.+elding her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and abhorrence for the doctrine of free-love, the while she secretly indulges her s.e.x-nature, more or less promiscuously, or else she is forced to repress all her natural instincts, and not infrequently these instincts are abnormally strong because of pre-natal and inherited influences.

Both of these courses, the only two which are open to the average woman, are disastrous to the s.e.x, and through them to the race, because women are the mothers of men, and any course which binds and fetters the free spirit of woman hampers race-improvement.

Repression of the natural functions of her being results in physical disease, and ultimately in mental weakness. Unnatural expression of the s.e.x-function, under the ban of compulsion, whether through the compulsion of marriage or through the more flagrant type of commercial prost.i.tution, is death to the best development of the race.

Women, through the urge of economic necessity, or through the religious ideal of wifely submission and fidelity to their "Lord and Master" have been compelled to develop a craftiness and an artificial "modesty" which, in most cases, pa.s.ses for femininity, and deceives, as it is intended to do, the average man.

For centuries, a woman's only profession was matrimony. Her education for this profession consisted first of all of complete ignorance of all that relates to the most intimate and most vital part of her nature--the function of s.e.x. In the occasional instances where she had inherited a degree of mentality which could not be dwarfed, she must at least feign ignorance; and so, while secretly aware of every emotion of the male, and covertly playing upon his s.e.x-nature in her task of "catching a husband," it is small wonder that women have developed the traits of the cat animal, and are frequently both treacherous and cruel.

Indeed, it is only because the Female Principle is the attracting and conserving power of the bi-une s.e.x-love, that she has broken through these mental fetters, and in a few rare instances has hurled defiance at the devils of convention and tradition and claims justification of her own s.e.x-nature, and her right to her own person, despite the epithet of "free-love."

Woman's partial emanc.i.p.ation in some instances has, no doubt, "gone to her head," as it were, and we see many women confounding license with liberty; mistaking pa.s.sion for Love; and exchanging restraint for debauchery.