The Feminine World

Despite the fact that the modern world, built on patriarchal culture, regards masculine expansiveness as the dominant principle and even refers to God in the masculine, the magical myth holds to the exact opposite view, asserting that the manifested world, in its fullness, is essentially feminine.

We have already said that the Being of the world, while primarily rooted in consciousness, ontologically derives from the World Environment, the Immanent countenance – the Great Mother of the worlds.

“Nothing is eternal in our differentiated world; everything appears but for a moment, everything disappears to shine briefly and then dissolve again in the abysses of time; She alone is Eternal. All changes, the forms of creation are eternally varied, individual souls perfect themselves or fall again; She alone is Unchanging in Her majestic calm.” – V. Shmakov

The World Environment, and its aspect fertilized by will – Telesmi – constitute the “dry residue” of reality: that from which the fabric of being is woven.

Through all religions, mystical and magical teachings run the idea of the world’s femininity. No matter how much patriarchal cultures dismiss this idea, it pervades all mystical experience, gives life to folk religiosity, and significantly shapes the worldview of magic.

However, even when the Great goddess and Her faces – separate Mistresses – are acknowledged as embodying the Beingly principle of Pravi, attention is usually focused only on Her uniting aspect, and the duality of the maternal principle is forgotten.

Although the world’s Passive principle emerged from a state of potential existence as an abstract aspect of the Great Spirit, moved beyond His essence and became an active Principle, it flowed into the world of archetypes, the World of first causes.

“When the Great Spirit filled space with waves of His rays, piercing the darkness and creating myriads of worlds, She — Bright, Pure and Perfect — continued to reign as One in the cosmos. Not for a moment did She fall into deathlike repose; She mourned the destruction of the Whole — Her Divine Consort; She experienced every turn of each spirit’s life, every movement of the soul of every being. She remained Indivisible in Her Great Whole and, hovering in the boundless expanses of the universe, She carefully gathers the remnants of Her Consort and weaves from His shards a majestic Form.”

Poets sing of the White goddess, mystics bow before Her.

But the Magical myth views the matter with somewhat more skepticism.

At the root of this skepticism lies an idea as old as the world: that the manifested world is not what it was “intended” to be; it is “corrupted” because it has “fallen.”

In whatever form the idea of the fall of the world appears — as its immersion in illusion, the fall of Adam and Eve, or the usurpation of power by dark demiurges — schools agree that the world’s development allowed for the emergence of evil (again, in the present context it is irrelevant whether this could have been avoided, or whether evil was a necessary component).

The fall of the cosmos, naturally, was accompanied by the “fall” of those primal principles on which it was founded.

The gnosis-kabbalistic system describes this situation most accurately: the originally constructed World Tree altered the character of its reception of Light, it “fell” — and in its place a “second” tree was created: the manifested universe in which the subsequent process of the development of mind unfolded. It is held that the inhabitants of the first Tree gave rise to demonic worlds, and their rulers to arch-demons.

Since independent reception of Power does not occur in the worlds of Sheol, for these worlds it is crucial to fully exploit the sephirotic worlds, to parasitize them and prey upon them.

Discussion of the concept of the Fall goes far beyond the scope of the present discussion; for us what matters is only the mutual relation of the “upright” and the “fallen” trees. As mentioned, it is incorrect to speak of the Qliphoth as “anti-sephirot,” because the trees stand in more complex binary relations than simple reflection. In particular, the movement of Power in the worlds is reversed.

The feminine principle in the World Tree is reflected in two hypostases: the Great Mother of the Worlds and the Great Generative Womb (corresponding to the sephirot Binah and Malkuth). However, it is precisely the second aspect of the Mother that is the foundation of the cosmos, Nature in the absolute sense of the word. And we have already said that it is thanks to the active attractivity of this principle that the very entry of the Power of mind into the worlds is made possible.

In the “upright” tree, the source of Power is the creative impulse of the Absolute, descending through the Great Father into the Great Mother, and from this pair into all the other vessels of mind, and ultimately, into the Generative Womb of the Environment.

In the inverted tree, however, the inflow of Power can occur only through that Womb, since it is this that contacts the Stream of Power directly.

In other words, all outflows of Power from the sephirotic worlds into the Qliphothic ones are mediated by the Dark Mother.

This idea finds expression in the Magical notion of the “reverse hierarchy” of demons, according to which the “angel Lucifer,” the fallen Logos of the first tree, sits at the very bottom of this inverted hierarchy; the receptivity corresponding to him is also far from the source of Power, and that source itself is controlled by the generative force of the Qliphoth — the Mother of Evil.

In other words, if in the sephirotic world the female principle is gnoseologically secondary, though ontologically primary relative to the male, then in the fallen worlds the Mothers of Monsters exercise unquestioned dominion over Power.

By and large, it was precisely the awareness of this fact and the fear of the Dark Mother that, throughout the existence of human civilization, led to all those horrifying persecutions of the feminine principle that history has known.

At the same time, those very persecutions destroyed primarily the Benevolent aspect of the Mother; the Dark Mother was not driven out — on the contrary, she gained greater power, because outflows of Power increased as people feared her. Thus, broadly speaking, persecutions of femininity were the suppression of the Light Goddess in favor of the Dark goddess.

It is precisely the recognition of the greater perfection of the feminine principle than the masculine, the understanding of the universality and ubiquity of the Maternal principle, that allows the power of the Dark visage of the Mother to be diminished, since it makes it possible to balance the currents of Power filling the mind.