To: thelema93-l@egroups.com From: catherine yronwode Subject: Phallism and Crowley's Ignorance Date: Fri, 04 May 2001 14:33:21 GMT > ...The Crowleyan Gnostic Mass _is_ a solar-phallic formula. (Just look > at the Tarot Trump XV, for god's sake. Great big cock. :D ) May i interject again with some messages from the world of linguistics and rationality, from the world of the pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian, and pre-Crowleyan study of sex magic and sexual worship? Cock is used to mean both the penis and the clitoris. Don't believe me? Check out Lucile Bogan's 1927 blues song "Shave 'Em Dry:" "My cock is made of whale bone," (meaning it is hard, erect, and firm.) This usage dates back to early England and is still to this day found among English speakers in the African-American community. Phallus means "penis or clitoris" (that is, the external genital organ of pleasure) in Greek and in English. Please try to consider this situation from a standpoint of equalitarianism, not masculist or feminist, not sexist in any way. Crowley became a member of the Reussian circle, the same circle from which Jung sprang, and Jung in turn was influenced by Freud. These people tried -- unsuccessfully so far -- to propagandize for two erroneous notions 1) the vagina is the center of female sexuality 2) the word phallus (or phallos in Greek) means penis. Go read the works of that wonderful Gnostic Saint Hargrave Jennings. HE certainly knew the truth -- because he lived before the coming (pun intended) of the early 20th century propagandists who tried to represent the word "phallic" as relating only to penises when, in fact, it relates to "the generative organs." It is my opinion that the early 20th century rush by a small clique of people to strip phallicism of its thousands of years of ambi-gendered meaning coincided with a certain resentment over women gaining the right to vote. Certainly Freud's "vaginal orgasm" theories -- now thoroughly discredited and no longer taught anywhere, even by Freudians -- seem to have been aimed squarely against women's assumption of political as well as sexual power. Crowley was of a kind with Freud. > Perhaps someone could point out why > that is a bad thing, rather than veering to the brink of political > correctness, and giving the sidelong impression that adoring an erect > cock at sunrise is somehow injurious to woman? Again, this notion, that women oppose adoring an erect penis (cock, after all can relate to the clitoris equally!) is a straw man argument in this elist. No one has suggested it. No one has called it "bad." Labelling the thinking of your honest opponents in philosophical matters with a sarcastic tag like "political correctness" is just a blind. Please try to stick with the topics of discussion rather than veeering off into meta-discussions about "political correctness" or (as [B.] did), "feminazis." Now, as a worshipper of the male phallus myself, i would like to note that i find something smarmily homoerotic in the Gnostic Mass, just as i do when i see Wiccan women worshipping the Goddess and her female phallus. Is asking for a het religion for hets too much? > I wish I had a copy of Foucault's Pendulum to hand, because there's a > passage in that which deals with this issue marvellously. Erect cocks > and big standing stones get worshipped for the reason that they are > big and happy and obvious. You can see them. You need to read some more archaeology! There is quite a lot of information on neolithic "goddess stones" (large rocks!) that indicates that they were paired with "god stones." In short, it was UNION that was celebrated, not lonely male seed-sowing. > It's internal and mysterious. For this reason, and for this > reason ALONE, the public rites of pagan religions such as AC intended > Thelema to be are often phallic. Then can you explain why the aborigines of Australia held big public sex-festivals celebrating UNION or why the Dravidian Indians did? Or why the Old European did? These were PHALLIC rituals -- as the Greeks defined the word phallos -- that is, they related to sexual union and pleasure. They did not relate to the penis to the exclusion of the clitoris. See "Phallicism, Celestial and Terrstrial" by Hargrave Jennings, the Gnostic Saint whose 13 volumes of material on world-wide phallic rites and rituals Crowley apparently was not able to understand. > Yes, wells are dressed and beer is > poured into oceans and the female is likewise honoured, but when it > comes down to it, the only reason the 'Cult of the Sun' is primarily > phallic is that you can't readily tie ribbons to a vaginal symbol and > dance around it on May morning. What about cultures where the SUN is a FEMALE (as in Hebrew) or a GODDESS (as in Japan)? You may have bought into a Jungian false-analysis of what the Solar symbol means, especially in the Middle East, where the MOON is MALE (e.g. Nanna,, father of Inanna) and the SUN is FEMALE (e.g. Hebrew, and Hathor the COW (female, not bull!) with her SOLAR DISK. Jung wanted everyone to have Archetypes -- he propagandized for the false idea that all symbolism derived from nature by the people of all cultures was somehow uniform and sprang from a "collective unconscious." Crowley wanted this too. Jung, in 1925, finally dealt with the fact that the chief surviving Middle Eastern culture he knew well, the Jewish culture, had their celestial symbols "backwards" to him (that is, Sun is female, Moon is male) by declaring that Jews were not part of the racial archetypes of the rest of humanity and did not partake of "the collective unconscious"! (What he would have said about the Japanese is unknown to me; apparently he was unfamiliar with Japanese nature worship (a.k.a. Kami Worship or Shinto) and only knew about Zen Buddhism in Japan). The trouble with theorists like Jung, Freud, and Crowley is that they embed their premises in their conclusions and thus they must discard entire truck-loads of reports about cultural systems that do NOT support their grand schemes. Crowley believed that Nuit's mate was Hadit. There is no Hadit, and in fact Nuit's mate in Egyptian religious practice was Geb. And -- get this! -- Geb was an Earth-God, while Nuit was a Sky-Goddess. Yes, those darned Egyptians, being another Middle Eastern culture, had eveything "backwards." They worshiped the UNION of sky and earth, but they, unlike the European Greeks, had no passive earth GODDESS -- rather, they had an active SKY goddess AND an active Earth god. Is this so all-fired difficult to understand, really? Why was Crowley so WRONG? I mean, he had Hargrave Jennings' books RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM -- but he chose to join the then popular fad of degrading women (which, as i noted really came into full swing as female suffrage became an issue). Crowley could have been a leader, a far- thinker, a touchstone of humanity's desire for freedom and the right to live according to one's will -- but he baulked. He chose instead to support the notion that only the male is active and creative, that women are passive and depravedly vampiric, that lesbian sex is a curse or a shame and that male homosexual sex is the finest thing imaginable. > 'Our religion, therefore, for the People, is the Cult of the Sun, who > is our particular Star of the Body of Nuit, from whom, in the > strictest scientific sense, come this earth, a chilled spark of Him, > and all our Light and Life. His vice-regent and representative in the > animal kingdom is His cognate symbol the Phallus, representing Love > and Liberty.' Here is a passage that casts light on Crowley's anti-Semitism, similar to Jung's that was noted above: the fact that Jews, like the Egyptians and Sumerians and others from that part of the world call the Sun *female* may go some way toward explaining why Crowley was so anti-Semitic. These people could not or would not partake of his genderization of the sun as a male. They were "the enemy" of all that was holy to him! (We DO all agree that the sun is neither male nor female, right? It's a big ball of radioactive gasses and stuff, right? Just checking :-)) > Note that Crowley was adamant that women could not be III' Masons. The > above is the reason _why_ they couldn't. In his eyes, anyway. (Hello, > Catherine.) Hello, yourself! Unfortunately for the factuality of Crowley's opinion, the historical records show that women were indeed made III' Masons as early as the 1400s and that this continued to the present, with only a brief gap of 100 years (between c.1780 and c.1880, during which very few women were raised to the III'. See proof at http://www.luckymojo.com/comasonry.html > the semen is seen as both male and female, rather than as > exclusively male Excuse me? Even in Crowley's day, Mendlian laws of genetics made his modernized homunculus theory laughable to anyone with a high school science diploma. > [4] The Creed of the Mass and the Creed of the Roman Catholic Mass > correspond very closely. The Gnostic Mass was also described by AC as > representing the 'true pre-Christian Christianity'. But actually, it does not. Pre-Christian Judaism was anathema to Crowley and Pre-Christian Europeans worshipped female deities. Cf. "The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe" by Marija Gimbutas which was so poorly titled (there being virtually no archaeological evidence that Old Europe ever had "Gods") that in subsequent editions it was re-titled "Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe" -- and the "Gods" of the title consisted of a couple of halves of hieros gamos statues and a couple of "sorrowful god" statues that each had their own accompanying female figure and were not found alone. Crowley was as off the mark here as he was in his misinterpretations of Egyptian religion. > [6] Crowley FREQUENTLY portrays his solar-phallic religion as natural, > sensible, easily accomodated by the intellect, not outrageous to > common sense, not absurd to the rational mind, and not abhorrent to > scientific thought. The sun is LITERALLY the Father in Heaven. The > phallus is equally literally the Father on Earth. FFI, consult 'De > Natura Deorum'. The trouble is -- for many people today (and many in Crowley's time as well), his solar-penis religion was perhaps "natural," but it was NOT easily accomodated by the intellect and it WAS outrageous to common sense. To re-assign the ancient and accepted word phallus to mean "only the penis" and to then assign a radioactive gas ball to the animal gender "male" is irrational and defies scientific thought. > Comparisons between the Gnostic Mass and Gardnerian Wicca are > interesting. They both arise from Freemasonry, have certain passages > in common, and culminate in sexual formulae; but Gardnerian Wicca does > not include the semen-related doctrines of Crowley, and it may be for > this reason that it enjoyed such a (relatively gender-balanced) > groundswell of popularity as compared to the more halting advance of > Thelema. I agree! And Dianic Wicca is, for the same reason only in reverse, a relatively small portion of the Wiccan movement. Gardner may have been an S-M fetishist and a brazen fabricator of false historicity for his religion, but he got one thing right that Crowley simply never understood -- the ancient religions of Old Europe celebrated the UNION of male and female, not the exclusive exaltation of the male and not the exclusive exaltation of the female. and then, re: the list of Saints: > Again, it's primarily a moral significance, not a magical one. It > makes the congregation there present symbolically part of the t > radition. 'Hear ye all, saints of the true church of old time now > essentially present, that of ye we claim heirship, with ye we claim > communion, from ye we claim benediction...' Is it fair -- is it ethical -- to claim heirship from someone whose work you are distorting badly in order to consider him a forebear? Hargrave Jennings wrote extensively on phallic worship -- the worship of the generative organs of both male and female (penis and clitoris) and Crowley must have known this -- yet Crowley included Jennings' name in his list of forbears, as if to say that Jennings was a proponent of the Crowleyan sperm-worshipping solar cult that owed more to Reuss and Jung (and Jung's "solar-phallic man" lies) than to Jennings, who understood the nature of heiros gamos rites. cat yronwode Karezza and Sacred Sex ------ http://www.luckymojo.com/sacredsex.html Freemasonry for Women ------- http://www.luckymojo.com/comasonry.html Copyright (c) 2001 catherine yronwode. All rights reserved. Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 05:31:30 GMT [from thelema93-l@egroups.com: catherine yronwode ] [some personal communications omitted -- nagasiva] >> Cock is used to mean both the penis and the clitoris. Don't believe >> me? > > Of course I believe you. I'm a folk singer amongst other things, and > though I may not be the seventh child of a seventh child nor have no > silver-strung guitar, I knows about meatskins and goldmines and > peppermint sticks, thankyou ma'am. Cool! >> Phallus means "penis or clitoris" (that is, the external genital >> organ of pleasure) in Greek and in English. Now, to reply to Tim Maroney who wanted a citation on the ambi-sexuality of the word phallus --: ------------------------------------ Webster's 5th Collegiate Dictionary (1936, 1941) Phallus 1) A symbol of the male organ of generation as used in the Dionysiac mysteries. 2) The penis or clitoris ------------------------------------ Note that (1) is not "the penis," rather "a SYMBOL" of it, specifically as used in rites of the Dionysiac mysteries, that is, male mysteries in ancient Greece. Theoretically, at a female-oriented rite of the same region and era, the phallus would be a clitoris. (I say theoretically, as i have no evidence that this was the case.) > Are you familiar with 'Eve's Secrets?' The notion that the clitoris is > in itself the equivalent of the penis is soundly debunked. IIRC, the > clitoris is biologically equivalent only to the glans. The shaft of > the penis is present, but I forget exactly where it is. I am not familiar with that book. However i know that what you assert is utterly wrong, no question about it. No anatomist would support your assertion now, or 100 years ago. The clitoris is not -- repeat NOT -- "biologically equivalent only to the glans [of the penis]" -- it is a bifurcate erectile organ with its own glans and foreskin. The clitoral glans is the only part in most (not all, MOST) women that is visible externally. However, the organ, when dissected, resembles a penis down to the minutest structures. When you look the pictures, note that the two major differences between the clitoris and penis are that 1) the clitoris is permanantly bent downward (and only straightens partially when erect) -- the bend is called "the clitoral knee." 2) below the clitoral knee the clitoris divides into two forks or crura (the penis is actually formed fetally by the FUSING of its two crura before birth) and these run down the length of the vulva. There is a very clear drawing of this from a 1941 textbook on anatomy at my site. I gave the URL previously but it seems you did not check it out -- it is in an the article on the subject written by my daughter (a med student at UCSF). here are the URLs again. I urge you to check it out because i want you to realize that whatever you were taught or whatever "debunking" you read is simply not good biological science. Please see http://www.luckymojo.com/tkclitorislarger.html and also, for another take on the subject, an article i wrote on sexual function in the clitoris at http://www.luckymojo.com/tkclitoris.html One more thing about the real, actual, biological correlations between the clitoris and the penis -- and i hate to come on too strong in the field of biology, since this is an elist about occultism, but... Fetal development studies have long ago proved that the clitoris is the "default" organ that will develop in any mammalian fetus not exposed to testosterone, regardless of the actual karotype (chromosome array) of the individual. What this means is that during fetal development, a lack of testosterone or an inability to perceive it due to faulty cell receptors (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS) will result in the development of a genetic male with a clitoris instead of a penis. Depending on the degree of testosterone deprivation or AIS-mediated inability to perceive testosterone, the clitoris may be of the size normally seen in a woman, or it may be as long as an inch or two exterior to the body. (At 3" it is generally described as a "micro-penis" rather than a "hypertrophied clitoris.") Such a person is called an "intersex individual." Conversely, a female exposed to too much testosterone during gestation will develop a hypertrophied clitoris. This can be up to 3" long. The person is still female, but is also classified as "intersex." Obviously, if the clitoris only corresponded to the glans of the penis and had no shaft of its own, there would be no such thing as a 2" long hypertrophied clitoris. So on that account alone, your idea is proven false. But the anatomists prove you wrong more elegantly, simply by dissecting the average clitoris on cadavers and presenting their results. :-) There is also an article on my site about intersex individuals and about the correlation between the clitoris and penis during fetal development, written by my daughter Althaea Yronwode: http://www.luckymojo.com/tkintersex.html > I do detect (or perhaps imagine) a reaction against penis- > adoration based on the idea that the erect penis is somehow an organ > of repression. HUH? Where and when did i ever call the erect penis "an organ of repression"? That is so totally off-base for me that i can't believe you ever read my posts at all! You don't know me, but you might enjoy knowing that my personal sexual altar is literally COVERED with natural and artistic representations of the erect penis. I sell raccoon penis bones, Thai penis amulets, and Siva linga stones through my company, the Lucky Mojo Curio Co. In fact, i think i am the world's largest supplier of penis amulets and penis bones to the occult and magical community! My friends call me "The Penis Queen" -- and this is obviously the result of my adoration of the penis. Want proof? Check out Thai penis amulets http://www.luckymojo.com/penisamulets.html Raccon penis bones http://www.luckymojo.com/raccoonpenis.html Siva linga stones http://www.luckymojo.com/siva.html I try to keep my sense of humour and to treat false "detections" such as yours and [B.]'s lightly, as the mere workings of ignorant and fear-filled minds, but it becomes difficult as the days wear on and on and i keep hearing this shit about me not liking erect penises or having some political agenda against men. DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Go read my web site. Hey, and check out the party dress i was wearing at my wedding with its necklace of 25 penis amulets hanging from it! You can see that at http://www.luckymojo.com/wedding.html >> You need to read some more archaeology! > > Actually, what I need to do is make it more plain when I'm playing > devil's advocate or paraphrasing, and when I'm giving an account of my > own beliefs. If you feel some inner need to play "devil's advocate," then satisfy yourself, but please do not do so by making up false statements and ascribing them to me because that is not "paraphrasing," that is being fundamentally dishonest. >> Jung wanted everyone to have Archetypes -- he propagandized for the >> false idea that all symbolism derived from nature by the people of >> all cultures was somehow uniform and sprang from a "collective >> unconscious." Crowley wanted this too. > > I'm assuming here that you take 777, for example, as evidence of this. Oh boy, and how. > It may just be me, but I think you're being slightly more > confrontational than is entirely necessary. I don't think so. I think that what you call "paraphrasing" and "playing devil's advocate" -- that is, accusing me of claiming to call the penis "an organ of repression" when i never thought or said it, and saying that i have an agenda of "political correctness" when i do not -- are aggressive, hostile, and ultimately villainous tactics and that my responding strenuously to set matters straight is only to be expected. Had you (or [B.]) kept this discourse at a level of civil debate rather than bringing into it the sort of personal accusations you have made, i would have responded in like kind. I have taken part in usenet and elist discussions for years and i am not known as a hot-head -- but i will not sit still for calumny and lies about my personal beliefs. As i said earlier, i have tried to keep this discourse even-tempered and even light-hearted, but you get what you give, and what YOU have given me above is rude and presumptuous, so don't be surprised at the vigour with which i choose to refute your false claims about me. > I also think that a rather > crucial point concerning the Mass is being missed here. > > The Gnostic Mass, from one point of view, is the new Thelemic version > of the Roman Catholic Mass, in which the missing female element is > restored. As such, it is not universal; it only serves to 'renew' (or > mutate) the patriarchal Christian current, both cultural and > religious. I do not know what Thelemicized versions of the ceremonies > of other religions would look like, but it would be interesting to > find out. > > Sometimes it appears that Thelema is, as it were, a patch rather than > a program. What is left _after_ the eyes of Jesus have been pecked, > and wings flapped in the face of Mohammed? You said this very well -- Crowley's version of thelema (not thelema in its more universal sense, as promoted by folks like Paschal Beverly Randolph: "Will reigns omnipotent, love lieth at the foundation" -- "Eulis!", 1874) DOES seem to be more patch than program -- and what it is a patch FOR is an OBSOLETE PROGRAM, the Victorian repression against sexuality of the Plymouth Brethren. This is why, as Tim Maroney noted elsewhere, there is a gender imbalance in the membership and the Gnostic Mass sometimes looks more like strip club show (female naked, male clothed) than a religious rite. >> (We DO all agree that the sun is neither male nmor female, right? >> It's a big ball of radioactive gasses and stuff, right? Just > checking :-)) > > Therein lies the rub. > > You can't deprive something of religious significance by referring to > its chemical constituents, as if that were all there was to it - any > more than you can destroy the emotional significance of a home by > cataloguing its contents, or of a lover by itemizing his/her internal > organs, or of a seasonal festival by observing that it's merely the > result of the rotation of the sun around the earth, or of a piece of > music by observing that all it is is a selection of mathematical > vibrations. > > Fuck that materialist paradigm, frankly. Was i seeking to "deprive [the sun] of religious significance"? I think not! I was trying to explain that since human beings in different cultures have seen the sun variously as male or female -- that therefore, materially speaking, EITHER or BOTH of these concepts are arbitrary, HUMAN distinctions and that the supposed "universality" of Jungian archetypes is a false premise from which to build an understanding of religious impulses. > Whether one adores the Sun as Mother or as Father or as anything one > chooses to call it, it is the adoration that is important. IMO. This is what i believe -- but not what Crowley believed. >> Excuse me? Even in Crowey's day, Medlian laws of genetics made his >> modernized homunculus thoery laughable to anyone with a high school >> science diploma. > > You're missing the point. Genetics has nothing to do with it, just as > the chemical composition of the sun has nothing to do with its > potential religious significance. The wand is, in one context, a male > weapon; but it is not male by virtue of having male DNA. Sorry, i was not mentioning the wand -- i was speaking of the homunculus theory -- the belief that in sperm alone is the secret of generative power, that the female is not party to generation itself but rather provides a passive "gluten" or nourishment for the developing sperm. Crowley believed this -- he said as much. In saying it, he was going against all known science of his era and the past couple hundred years. He was reviving a defunct theory that spermatozoa were miniature humans -- homunculi or "little men" in Latin. cat yronwode Karezza and Sacred Sex ------ http://www.luckymojo.com/sacredsex.html Hoodoo and Blues Lyrics --------- http://www.luckymojo.com/blues.html Copyright (c) 2001 catherine yronwode. All rights reserved.