Male and female He created them both
In the Bible we're told that God created man and woman: 'Male and female He created them both.' (Genesis 1:27) Does this mean that he created man and woman as both male and female, that is, hermaphrodites? According to Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, the first man and woman had the attributes of both sexes, and in some accounts were physically one. But Lilith, Adam's first wife, refused to be subordinate and, calling on the name of God, disappeared.1 God, taking Eve from Adam's side (Genesis 2:21), gave him a woman that would lie beneath him. It's a tradition that points up the domineering characteristics of masculinity but also the serpentine lengths the female side will go to in order to see her will fulfilled. It is Eve that gives Adam the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God has forbidden them to eat. Having disobeyed, the pair are expelled from Eden, condemned to an ephemeral existence, and told they must 'live by the sweat of their brow'. (Genesis 3:19) Clearly Woman didn't accept her inferiority. Eve is effectively told by the Tempter, Satan (in the guise of a serpent), that she will be a goddess if she eats the fruit. Afterwards she gives it to Adam and he eats too. It would seem that Adam is reaping the harvest of the seed he has sown. In refusing to accept the natural equality of the female side, represented by Lilith, he is invited by God to examine the argument of this female side (literally; Eve is created from his rib), and she decides to act as his goddess and teach him that repression and subjugation, particularly of his female side and of Woman, is evil. Adam becomes a god only in the sense that it is the Fall that condemns humanity to a seemingly never-ending struggle against the taint of repression and subjugation that was begun in Eden when Adam determined the female side of himself to be inferior. History is man's coming to terms with this need for complementarity - both internal and external - in terms of man's relations with the female principle. Familial and tribal conflicts culminating in global wars leading to the spectre of nuclear holocaust tell us that the male principle of Logos (technology) has reached a zenith that suggests the female principle of Eros needs to be rehabilitated if mankind is to survive.
According to the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Eros is the principle of relatedness and relationships, which is the essence of both democracy and diplomacy; the basis of those supposedly naive old standbys 'Peace and Love [Man]'. He observes that it is man's lack of 'Feeling', one of the four functions of consciousness that also includes 'Thinking', 'Sensation', and 'Intuition',2 that leads him to view Woman as inferior. He therefore designates 'Feeling' as man's inferior function, associating the negative treatment meted out to women - and all others deemed at one time or another inferior by men - with the shadow; a psychological component representing an inferiority within ourselves - in this case an inferiority of 'Feeling' - which is projected externally. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler were all ruthless small men seeking to cast a giant's shadow.
In Jungian psychology 'Thinking' and 'Sensation' are associated with the male ego and 'Intuition' and 'Feeling' with the anima; the soul and female component of the psyche which finds its chief expression in being the force of attraction between man and the opposite sex insofar as 'love' occurs when the anima is projected onto a woman who closest corresponds to the man's soul. Jung calls this the individuation process, whereby in the course of an individual relationship with a real person rather than a projection, the man learns to differentiate between his anima and the woman, and the anima as inferior function/shadow complex receives integration/introjection as a part of his totality. According to Jung the proper role of the anima is as an internalized mediator of 'Intuition' and 'Feeling' contents of the psyche which, otherwise unconscious, would go unrecognized and unacknowledged. He cites the biblical figure of 'the woman clothed with the sun and with the moon at her feet' (Revelation 12:1) about to give birth to the new redeemer as an archetypal symbol of future hope in male-female complementarity symbolized by the sun (Logos) and moon (Eros) coming together to produce a child. The collective shadow is also present in the shape of a dragon waiting to devour the child as soon as it's born, a symbol of the difficulties associated with such a birth; given the fact that each individuation represents an individual struggle with anima projections contaminated by the shadow (both our own and those of others) before we can truly claim to be reborn into psychological bisexuality.
'Male and female He created them both' could be a reference to psychological bisexuality, that is, an original complementarity of male-femaleness. In Jungian psychology the soul of a man finds correspondence in the spirit of a woman. The masculine psyche is composed of the ego and the anima whereas the female psyche is comprised of ego and animus. Just as a man's soul is feminine so a woman's contrasexual component is masculne. In other words, both man and woman constitute a latent psychological bisexual complementarity that, in the course of the individuation process through the recognition/integration-introjection of projections, becomes conscious as a totality. Marriage, as the vehicle for this activity, requires for its culmination not only the coming together of male and female egos as Logos and Eros but also the union of masculine animus (which might be thought of as the female Logos) and feminine anima (which might be thought of as the male Eros). Rapprochement occurs during the process of shadow-integration and the recognition/introjection of projections arising from the activities of the contrasexual components insofar as they relate to the expression of unconscious contents of the respective psyches seeking to be made conscious during the individuation process. In this way male-female complmentarity for the couple becomes an external and internal reality. But the victory is hard won and the collective shadow is, as we all know from fascism and 'ethnic cleansing', bigger and stronger - or, if smaller, more determined in its terrorism. This is why a dragon is depicted in Revelation waiting to devour the new redeemer as soon as it is born.
In the Bible Christ is depicted as the masculine Sword of Logos, useful in Judgement but also highly dangerous. Witness the apocalypse of the prophesy in Revelation of the 'Pale Rider' which resembles nothing less than the apotheosis of techno-Logos in nuclear war. (Revelation 6:8) This is what the ancient Greeks termed enantiodromia: a lop-sided emphasis leading to imbalance and disaster. Christianity's one-sided reliance on the intellectual spirit of mankind has brought us to the brink of extinction. Man needs to balance his ego with the complementarity of Eros; the principle of relationships and relatedness that are the essence of those world-saving tools, friendship and negotiation. But what of the female Logos, the animus as woman's contrasexual component? Male logic has brought death and destruction to millions, so what would a fully conscious and differentiated woman's animus bring to the world's stage? In Eden it was Satan, Lucifer Fallen, that tempted Eve to punish Adam for his male chauvinistic denigration of the feminine because - in the shape of his first wife Lilith - she wouldn't accept she was beneath him. Effectively, Lilith's leaving him corresponds to the male ego's repression of the contrasexual component in his psychologically bisexual nature followed by negative shadow-projections indicative of Adam's own blameworthiness onto Eve: 'She tempted me and I did eat.' (Genesis 3:12) She has, in effect, 'from his side' already become a projection. So who is Satan, so intimately connected with Eve? Lucifer, 'the most beautiful of all the angels', cast out of the presence of God for daring to suggest that he was at least God's equal. If Christ is God then God is also Logos and Lucifer, if equal, must then be Logos too. He is Christ's 'brother'. And where do we find Logos II? As the animus of woman. Which would explain why it is Eve that is tempted by Satan as her animus to precipitate the Fall of Man and teach him a lesson about subjugation and dominance. Interestingly, Jung views woman's animus as being more like a crowd of appraising men for whom she is the centre of attention. Springing from the loins of Adam and Eve, mankind may therefore be thought of as Eve's self-appraisal. In the light of the glow from Hiroshima and Nagasaki did she do right in deciding to reveal to her husband the extent of the shadow he had constellated in rejecting his female contrasexuality? Clearly womankind came later too, and might have earlier developed a different perspective if she hadn't had to labour under the shadow of Monotheistic Patriarchy.
In the Church of Lucifer they worship Baphomet, a physically bisexual deity with horns, breasts, penis and vagina. Lucifer the Light Bringer is also the main deity in Wicca, a more female oriented religion that worships god and goddess as a true manifestation of the natural order of the cosmos. That Lucifer is associated with the worship of a male-female deity is primarily to do with the historical role of Woman's animus, the Fallen but Hidden Light of Reason (in the feminine sense of reasonableness rather than the nineteenth century's masculine quest for scientific formulae to explain away the mysteries of creation). Adam's unreasonable behaviour in refusing Woman equality and insisting that she was beneath him until she protested by leaving him is presented in the Bible as the more reasonable animus figure of Satan propositioning Eve - representative of repressed Womanhood - to show Adam 'the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil' - and Adam bites. Effectively he elects to follow the guidance of the projected shadow-anima complex that Eve has become for him. He won't find Reason again until after the madness and death of disease and war; and then only by means of a few individuals through whom the Light of Reasonableness shone - like Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi and Emily Pankhurst. Which is why there is a Church of Lucifer; somewhere where the Hidden Light of Lucifer as Woman's animus can be maintained. Baphomet, as a symbol, represents not only the male-female complementarity of Man (Logos) and Woman (Eros) but also the internalized psychological bisexuality of the male ego (Logos) with the anima (Eros) and the female ego (Eros) with the animus (Logos).
In Jungian psychology the male-female relationship is represented by the marriage quaternio,4 which is a schematic structure designed to indicate the relations between the marriage partners and their contrasexual relations, that is, there is a relationship between egos as well as between egos and contrasexual components and between contrasexual components themselves. Jung sees the process whereby anima and animus become consciously recognized and introjected into the totality of the workings of the 'Self' as being analogous to those processes through which the alchemists produced the philosopher's stone that, amongst its many other beneficent properties, included the bestowing of immortality.5 He introduces us to the figures of the Wise Old Man and the Great Mother as representing the individuated roles of the contrasexual components where the animus functions within the psyche of the woman as her Wise Old Man and the anima functions in the man's psyche as the Great Mother (or Wise Old Woman).
It is interesting that, in Wicca, the predominantly female-oriented pagan religion of witchcraft, the word 'wicca' means 'wisdom'. According to Jung there's an 'acausal connecting principle'3 operant in the world. It has a serendipitous function and the commonest example is that of the person who is thinking of someone and that person who comes to their mind telephones. It's a transcendent organizational capacity that the world seems to possess and occasionally is manifested in our mundane lives by concidence but we briefly acknowledge to ourselves that a power is there and we continue with our usual routine. Magic, of course, is what we associate with witches, and it is this that Jung associates with his 'synchronicity'. In witchcraft it's called 'sympathetic magic' in which the thing named becomes the thing itself in whatever magical process is underway. There are also 'correspondences', a system in which one thing may stand for another in the magical evocation, and this is elevated to the level of a science - or 'wisdom' in which each and every thing in the world 'corresponds' in some way to each and every other thing. A precursor to New Age holistics in which we recognize, through our understanding of Chaos Theory, that the beating of a butterfly's wings in the Pacific can cause a Hurricane that will devastate Indonesia.
Wiccans claim to be using 'correspondence theory' to bring harmony to humanity and, insofar as they elevate wisdom in their pantheism, from a Jungian point of view they're activating the animus within as Lucifer, the Hidden Light of Woman as Wise Old Man because it is in fact themselves as the god and goddess that they worship. Jung's marriage quaternio is, therefore, a 'magic square' in which the correspondences between egos and contrasexual components are designed to produce harmony and it is through the relationship between anima and animus that the 'magic' of the marriage is constellated as the 'synchronicity' of things coming together.
Jung views the operations of the unconscious psyche as being akin to those of the world at the quantum level in which particles lead their secret existence. In the Twentieth Century it was discovered by physicists that particles behaved differently when we were not looking at them. It was found that everything existed as wave forms that were made up of particles. Human beings, for example, were 'complex wave forms'. But scientists discovered that particle waves could be observed to 'collapse' when a single particle was being monitored in its progress. They decided that a particle wave represented a plethora of possible 'paths' open to the particle to travel along, but only when human consciousness looked at what it was doing did it choose one amongst the possible alternatives. If noone looked the wave remained, the particle did not 'choose', and all alternatives were possible. It gave rise to the alternative worlds' hypotheses and the idea that, as with Voltaire's (1694-1778) Candide, 'the best of all possible worlds' 6 somewhere did exist - if human consciousness could reach a sufficiently high enough level to be able to constellate it from out the quantum web 'without looking' but, as we are often exhorted by the world's major religions, 'by the power of Faith alone'.
Jesus Christ tried but his final words on the cross tell the whole story: 'My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?' (Matthew 27:46) The spiritualization of Woman in the shape of the Virgin Mary and the myth of parthenogenesis doesn't cut the mustard; nor does the notion of a thirty-something virgin celibate claiming that 'God is love' but never having experienced the physical love of a woman to bring him down off his spiritual pedestal long enough to point out that suicide isn't. In other words, Logos isn't enough. Love, as is often said, is 'beyond words' - or logic. Christ, the Logos, is represented in the Bible as 'the Word' also; but it's clear from Gnosticism that literal interpretation isn't enough either. The great American science fiction writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) in 1961 declared words to be a 'virus' that took over the 'soft machine' of humanity like a souless programmer.7 If anything is to be wordlessly changed it has to be at the quantum mechanical level where psyche and particular universe meet, and transformation must occur through love and the liberation of woman's animus, the Wise Old Man growing out of the Hidden Light that was Lucifer, the Light Bringer, and erstwhile bane of humankind.
In the Bible Sophia is the Sapientae Dei, the Wisdom of God. She represents His female side, His Omniscience. This is evident from The Book of Job in which the central character is often thought of as a precursor of the figure of Christ insofar as Satan tempts God into persecuting him in order to demonstrate His Omnipotence. Jung observes that God becomes aware only slowly of his Omniscient nature as He becomes more conscious of Satan as his shadow-side,8 that is, God discovers that He has hammered Job in order to learn that He lacks something; compassionate love. (Job 42:2-3) In other words, it's the work of His Omniscience that causes Him to hammer Job in order to remember His compassionate love in the form of Jesus Christ who appears historically later in the New Testament. Again, we might think of Sophia as a figure of the role of the transcendent anima and of Satan as the shadow-side of Logos, that is, the Fallen Lucifer as the Hidden Light of Woman's Logos, the animus, which appears in the guise of the 'woman clothed with the sun [animus] and with the moon [Eros] at her feet' as a type of the figure of Sophia giving birth to the 'special child' at the close of Revelation. A new redeemer we can now recognize as a future archetype of the Everyman who has a relationship with a woman which is transcendent in that anima and animus are consciously introjected and function within the joint psyches of a psychologically bisexual complementarity as synchronistically magical manipulators of the quantum web. It's simply the idea that good things come to good people, or good produces more good though the 'magic' of correspondences, which is what the Christian Church has been preaching for generations without a specific rationale based on an understanding of the human psychological apparatus or, indeed, its own sacred texts.
Does this mean that the new redeemer will always be a woman? The sex of the 'child' is indeterminate; but there is no overt suggestion that it will be male, like the first Redeemer Jesus Christ. In the Luciferian Church the god Baphomet is worshipped as both a male and female hermaphrodite; which, as we have seen, is psychologically comprehensible: but some of us may never be ready for a world in which hermaphroditism is the norm. I can already foresee the dilemma in sexing; those with an animus are female and those with an anima are male: but what if our hermaphrodites are born with an anima and an animus? True psychological bisexual evolution indeed! What magical propensities might such a creature afford? Clearly this is why the Luciferians worship Baphomet: gender magic. But it's retrogressive in the sense that Adam's rejection of his first wife Lilith because she wouldn't 'lie beneath' was based on the same fallacy that gender is about the exercise of power. But it seems symmetrical to argue that the new redeemer would be female; because she contains in herself the redemptive factor of the animus, without which there can be no true union between the sexes to produce the saving Grace of Synchronicity. Imagine someone you'd forgotten suddenly keeps on coming to mind and you then receive a 'phone call from them that turns out to be very positive in its consequences for your family's future happiness. Serendipity? Thank God you worked on keeping the magic in your marriage, huh?
To an extent the Luciferians are aware of the limitations of their model. Baphomet is also called The Goat of Mendes because the physiological bisexuality of their deity is pronounced in the fact of its goat-headedness. A bestial pronouncement that underlines, to one schooled in Jungian transformation symbolism,9 its unfinished character; a question mark hangs over its completeness as a symbolic representation of humankind's future divinity.To 'divine', of course, means to choose the right path based on intuition, and we might recall that 'Intuition' is that other function of consciousness that, in a man, is associated with undifferentiated consciousness and the anima as mediator of unconscious contents of the psyche. According to Jung's Theory of Psychological Types, although 'Feeling' in a man is usually the least differentiated or inferior function, it's quite possible for 'Intuition' to be the inferior function that requires differentiation and incorporation into consciousness during the process of shadow-integration and anima-introjection.
Clearly what would be constellated in any genuine psychologically bisexual complementarity between a man and a woman would be a secondary tier of consciousness in which, as it were, a second individual would be created by the symmetricity of anima-mediated differentiation of the initially unconscious inferior functions of 'Feeling and Intuition' in man and animus-mediated differentiation of the converse functions of 'Thinking and Sensation' in woman. In truth, a tertiary tier of consciousness and a third individual (the new redeemer, a 'child' with the best - because hard-earned - psychological attributes of both sexes) because the psychological bisexuality of the man (ego + anima) and the woman (ego + animus) would constitute the first and second tiers (with no regard for who's beneath or primary). In short, Eros in a man would constitute differentiated 'Feeling and Intuition', which would amount to 'Divine Love' in the sense of being able to divine through love the path that is best. We might remember that particle being forced to choose which alternative universe to inhabit and observe that it is human thought that causes it to choose but take heart from the knowledge that it is differentiated 'Thinking and Sensation' mediated by the woman's animus that was previously missing from the equation and have Faith in the thoughtful, love-making, heaven-constellating, sensitive tendernesses of our marriage partner.
In Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984),10 science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88) has his protagonist, Alex, an espouser of wife worship, experience 'world shifts' in the course of his relationship with Margaret (the name means 'pearl of great price'; a euphemism for the alchemical lapis philosophorum and a nod in acknowledgement towards the 'science' of alchemy). We even find Satan, in the character of 'Jerry', playing a less than adversarial role as we discover that Heaven, Hell, Valhalla and Ragnarok - and all stops in-between - are only existent insofar as there are adherents to believe in them. It's a meditation, in the Candide-style, on the idea that wife-worship, insofar as it means the constellating of happiness - in Jungian terms - from the Chaos of undifferentiated consciousness, is the best religion a sane man can think of.
The premise of Job is similar to that of The Number of the Beast (1980),11 which features four characters as two married couples (Zeb and Deety, Jake and Hilda) in a flexible marriage quaternio of individuational shadow-contaminated contrasexual component projections where the four also correspond to the four functions of consciousness as they gallivant around squabbling individuationally, recognizing noone is superior or inferior and integrating their shadows, introjecting their projections, and having growth experiences in something called a multiverse that contains 'all possible worlds' (including the best of all, presumably) in a 'multiversal space car' - corresponding to the four-functioned or actualized 'Self' of Jungian psychology (and, presumably, the alchemists' 'stone of the wise') - all the while pursued by the 'black beast', a multi-personnel character that corresponds to Jung's collective shadow and, most likely, to the dragon of Revelation that lies in wait to devour the child of Sophia as soon as it is born. In Job Heinlein dispenses with the vehicle, as it were, and simply depicts his 'world changes' as a concomitant of Alex's worshipful attendance upon his wife, Margaret. In doing so he acknowledges the preeminence of the marriage relationship as the true vehicle for transcendence while presenting Jerry's (Satan's) household, in which the perky daughter is a devoted disciple of Wicca, as the model of self-actualization through sexual and familial love; the 'Agape' of Christianity which the first of the centralized repressive Churches banned as lasciviousness as early as the Third Century C.E., that is, right at the start.
So, what's the conspiracy theory? Christianity elevates Logos to the skies and man logically drops the atom bomb on us from there, and the Christians belabour us with celibacy, virginity and parthogenesis en route while making making love taboo. That's about the size of it. It's reminiscent of the behaviour of the figure of the god Set that, in Egyptian mythology, dismembers the sun god Osiris and hides his phallus so that he cannot be re-membered. Many scholars have noted the resemblances between the figure of Osiris and Christ, primarily because of the resurrection motif (the goddess Isis finds Osiris' phallus); but the real parallelisms reside in the Set-like role of the early Christian Church's rejection of sex and sexuality. D. H. Lawrence noted the omission and wrote The Man Who Died (1929), a story in which Christ crucified is discovered wandering around unable to remember who he is until he encounters an acolyte of the goddess Isis who restores him to himself through physical love.12 It relates to notions of rebirth and reincarnation; without the love of Isis, Osiris and Lawrence's Christ would not have resurrected. In Lawrence, Christ in effect recalls a past life; he experiences a reincarnation. It reminds us of the 'child' born to Sophia and the dragon lying in wait to devour it. Heinlein in I Will Fear No Evil (1970) presents a similar situation in which the three consciousnesses that have been the main characters of the novel, Jake, Eunice and Johann (Joan, incidentally, by sex-change) are preparing to transmigrate to the body of a newly born infant.13 It's a scene which has been called vampiristic, but it has the added dimension of focusing the reader in on the idea of life after death and the notion that, though ephemeral, we may be immortal in terms of continuity, that is, we don't remember past lives as infants but we could be taught to remember them as adults. It's just something we don't do; although the Osiris myth and the stories of the resurrection of Jesus point us in that direction.
And what if I was a woman in a previous life? Doubly difficult to remember if one's conditioned to accept that one's a man and most definitely not a woman. Perhaps this is the real reason why Luciferians worship Baphomet, to remind them that 'God created man and woman, male and female He created them both', that is, we are both male and female, viewed contiguously over vast stretches of space and time. Being 'as God intended us to be made' would then be as immortals rather than as ephemerals; with the knowledge of past experiences stretching behind, around, and in front of us. In Eden Adam and Eve were told by God that, because they'd eaten of 'the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil', they could never eat of the fruit of the tree of immortality, (Genesis 2:9) and He gave them a lifespan before expelling them from the Garden. In some ways it was an insurance, given the fact that Adam's repressive shadow-nature would result in global war and take us as victims of our collective shadow to the brink of thermonuclear extinction. To remember past lives would be to perpetuate past enmities; and it is only Christ's advocation of universal love in the New Testament of the Bible that can be said to have saved the situation.
Christian forgiveness is the key to our Salvation; as indeed they keep telling us. Only if we, as ephemerals accept the Christian position of universal love and forgiveness, can we hope to avoid perpetualizing past enmities as we recollect past lives and remember our immortal selves (as well as - potentially - our immortal enemies). This is what is being offered in the Catholic Mass; the bread and wine is symbolic of Jesus' body and blood, that is, of his forgiving of the betrayer Judas. Transubstantiation looks to reincarnate Christ, the Redeemer, as the Holy Spirit; the Paraclete: the 'Teacher'. It is this which would 'teach' the infant soul and help it to remember past lives and prepare it for immortality. The 'invisible friend' of childhood. The 'inner voice' of precognition or de ja vu usually 'nipped in the bud' by well-meaning paediatricians and other authority figures from pre-school awareness, but well-documented as a psychologem nevertheless. It would preclude that vampirism Heinlein is so criticised for in I Will Fear No Evil as the three disembodied consciousnesses of Jake, Eunice and Johann-Joan prepare to inhabit the new-born infant. The role of the Paraclete would be to ensure that contiguity in which the individual consciousness would be preserved over however many lifetimes it had been in existence. Vampires would then be those consciousnesses that seek to possess the newly nascent individuality and prevent it from remembering, for example, that (though a man) it was once a woman.
Interestingly, Lilith is associated with vampires, which would fit the case if vampires prevent us from remembering our contrasexuality. It was Lilith that, according to Jewish tradition, was the female part of the original human created by God, the hermaphrodite Lilith-Adam. She, of course, disappeared when Adam tried to subdue her to his will in a typical example of male domineering. In effect she became his shadow, which thereafter functions vampiristically in the sense that the children of humanity's collective shadow is the bane of civilization (Cain, Adam's son and the first murderer - of his own brother - is traditionally the fatherer of a vampire host upon Lilith, his mother). She signifies the danger that shadow-possession represents. Imagine an individual unaware that intimations of homosexuality, for example, only refer to past lives' experience of being the 'other' sex. This is an effect of the shadow that is vampirism. That individual may never reach a point of view at which the psychological bisexuality of the Self can be attained because they're stuck in preconceptions about being male or female that are determined by their inability to transcend their ephemeral timespan or present sexual orientation.
Of course, if homosexuals were vampires shadow-possession would increase the supply! But, joking apart, the role of the collective shadow constellated by an over emphasis upon the male principle of Logos in man has assumed the role of bloodthirsty vampire, and anything that prevents us from achieving psychological bisexual complementarity in our relationships based on a full understanding of our past as 'both male and female' has to be understood as the work of our Great Enemy. Whatever we choose to call it, identifying it is more important. In legend, Lilith has a spouse, the demon Asmodeus. Having attempted to rehabilitate the figure of Satan as the Hidden Light of Lucifer the Fallen, the animus in Woman, it would seem more useful to depict Asmodeus as the Evil One, amongst a host of demons that Lilith is supposed, with Adam and Cain, to have spawned. All of these are representative of the collective shadow or those for whom the existence of the shadow in man is of benefit.
Clearly these vampires aim to stop man from remembering he's been a woman (and vice versa) because then one would be as God intended: 'Male and female he created them both'. There must be an advantage, then, in keeping us in the dark, far outweighing the dangers of the shadow - or inclusive of them. Of course, there's the possibility of Pure Evil, that is, we're kept in darkness because that's what Evil Ones do. But what about the human servants of evil; what do they stand to gain by maintaining our ignorance? It's a wise person who once said that 'noone is evil to themselves'. Attilla the Hun, Stalin and Slobodan Milosevic (and their huge numbers of supporters) all thought of themselves as being amongst history's good guys. In Masonry, the stated goal is the creation of 'foursquare men',14 which corresponds to the individuated four-functioning men of Jungian psychology; but suggestions that men are also female - and used to, perhaps, be so - would doubtless meet with vitriolic business-and-Christianity outpourings worthy of the Ku Klux Klan's opinion of Michael X.
It's a fine line between ignorance and maintaining it. The number of high school abortions tells us that. In the nineteenth century, the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote In Memoriam (1849), and canto 56, about 'nature, red in tooth and claw',15 was later given as the rationale for capitalist exploitation of the masses. The vampire imagery is so vivid as to be almost crass: but it's accurate. This is why we're kept in ignorance. One might equate it with the vampires' need to keep us alive as a steady supply of blood - to them we're only walking blood bags. There is, in fact, a science fiction story in which humanity discovers that it's a device for moving water from one place to another (90% of the body is H2O). In other words, we're only useful insofar as the vampires say we are. Once we stop being exploitable we're cannon fodder; the Wall Street Crash of 1929 produced the thirties' Depression, for example, followed by economic boom through the horrors of World War II. It's how the shadow and the collective shadow manifests itself. The Wall Street Crash of 2008 in which a trillion dollars was wiped off the value of the stock exchange (the then single biggest day's fall ever), together with the trillion dollar war against Iraq (which didn't have 'weapons of mass destruction' - the excuse for starting one) suggests that the Twenty-First Century has learned nothing from the Twentieth's experience of the shadow. If we have to wait for improvement through individual individuations then we may never escape our shadow. What's required is a general shift in consciousness equivalent to a mass conversion of energy in the E=MC2 bracket. Instead, we've got the False Prophets of the United States of America's Holy rolling Christian Fundamentalists high rolling with threats of hellfire from the nation's nuclear weaponry for anyone who doesn't accept Jesus.
'All You Need Is Love'16 The Beatles once sang and Woodstock's festival of Peace and Love was the hopeful voice of a new generation born in the mid-Twentieth Century. Half a century later, it's the age of the religious centre's suicide bomber and the lone high school gunman taking out their feelings of inferiority by projecting their self-hate onto anyone showing hope in the orbit of their shadow-possessed egos. Surely, it's not accidental. Schizophrenia is often blamed. Our societies are schizophrenic. Teevee violence is routine but if we want to see a penis going in and out we have to go to Budapest and lock ourselves in a porno cabin. Split-off components of the collective psyche leading independent existences in the shadows. No to women priests but openly homosexual and the Pope has to apologize to Australia for the Catholic Church's pederasty.This is schizophrenia, as clinically defined,17 but it doesn't explain why a schizophrenic in Finland hears evil voices in his head and blows away a dozen schoolchildren like he's seen it on teevee. Evil is Evil and we need to recognize its existence in ourselves and society as well as do something about it. Noone, contrary to modern systems of psychotherapy, is suggesting here that the Evil arising in us is us. But we have to learn to see what might be described as the shadow of the vampire on our lives and take steps to discover just what it is and how to combat it.
The Middle Ages developed the idea of male and female demons, incubi and succubi, and Lilith was 'the mother of all demons' according to tradition. They existed by drinking the life force and weakening their host so that they were able to maintain an energy supply. But weakened individuals are more susceptible to shadow-possession and shadow-projection, so the collective shadow would grow as the demons flourished. After a while, the human race wouldn't be in a position to remember or notice that it was once more vigorous and industrious. In fact we would view what we could do as the limit of possibility, while living as virtual zombies. Robert A. Heinlein recognized the extent of the problem in The Puppet Masters (1951) in which 'slugs' attach themselves to the spines of human beings which become slave-hosts to these 'demons'. The story ends with this statement 'Puppet Masters - the free men are coming to kill you! Death and Destruction!'18
Heinlein was thought to be expressing what most concerned Americans at that time, the Communist threat. But, in hindsight, it seems more likely that he was concerned about whatever demons they were that seemed to be undermining the spirit of the nation. It wouldn't be long before playwright Arthur Miller, with The Crucible (1953) presented the 50s Communist 'witchunt' of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities as having parallels with the witch trials (1692) of seventeenth century Salem, Massachusetts, in which many innocent people were hung after some form of hysteria had possessed the town's citizens.19 We've seen this kind of thing repeated down through the centuries, most recently in the ethnic cleansings of Darfur and Srebrenica, and it's convenient to call it a manifestation of the collective shadow, which is also true, but Heinlein seems to have the right idea; we're being weakened, to make us more susceptible to the negative capabilities of the shadow. Whether we call them 'slugs', succubi, demons, 'voices' or viruses, we're in a fight that's been unrecognized for too long - and we'd better start fighting back.
16 John Lennon 'All You Need Is Love', The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour (Parlophone, Capital Records, 1967).
17 Jung 'Schizophrenia' (1958), The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, CW, Vol. 3.
18 Heinlein The Puppet Masters (New York, Doubleday, 1951).
19 Arthur Miller The Crucible (First Performance, Martin Beck Theatre, New York, New York, 1953).