The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious selection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love is inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher ideal, rather than a higher order. The higher order can come only by getting back to primal laws.

The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble, and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.

Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal of sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted in, finally results in decadence.

We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a marriage between a brother and sister—a custom which prevailed among ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love. Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.

In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and intellectual.

Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of "Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful physical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.

Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.

Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish and unselfish—are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light" housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.

Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say, notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.

This does not mean that the conscious motive which actuates the average woman, who is able physically and financially to bear children and yet will not, is a high and noble one. The law deals with the planet, not directly with the individual; it acts upon the developed and the undeveloped with equal impartiality, even as the rain falls upon the just and the unjust alike.

Spiritually conscious persons realize the necessity for a change in human ethics. The world is in need of a more exalted ideal; an ideal in which equality shall be more nearly represented and they give themselves consciously to the task of assisting in this regenerating work.

The difference is not in the law itself, but in our comprehension of it. The curriculum of the school of life is unchanged. We graduate from it or we return for another term, according as we have mastered the studies. Applying this truth to the conditions just stated, and we see that this rebellion on the part of woman against child birth has two aspects. One is from apparent selfishness and lack of the temperamental quality, which has erroneously been attributed to women as an exclusive possession, namely, the maternal instinct.

The other aspect of woman's disinclination to maternity is due to a restless, vague but nevertheless determined desire on the part of the Feminine Principle, to wait until conditions are more equal. Sometimes we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind.

Women know much more in the depths of their souls than they can put into words. A part of this knowledge is the fact that child-bearing is not a function limited to the physical, the mortal plane of life. Every woman who is anywhere near balanced in the struggle for completeness knows intuitively, that even though she may never beget mortal children, there are innumerable opportunities for the exercise of her maternal functions, awaiting her just behind the veil, which seemingly separates us from invisible areas. Moreover motherhood is qualitative. It is not synonymous with maternity. It is not made nor unmade by the birthrate.

Two important considerations present themselves to the world today: One is that woman—considered as the fecund receptive sex-principle—is refusing the sex relationship on the old basis, however "respectable" and well-intentioned that basis was. Generally speaking, it is evident that the old basis of intercourse between the sexes has been, is being, and will continue to be, disrupted, denied, refused, as the approved and fixed plan and purpose of Destiny. The other important observation is this: there is a cosmic cause for this.

It is only those who are blinded by prejudice or by sense-conscious limitations who refuse to look below the surface for the cause of a condition so general as that of unhappy marriages; of innumerable divorces; of the refusal to bear children. What is the cause? Why are women refusing to marry, or when they do marry refusing to live with their husbands? Why do they shrink from child-birth? Are they less courageous than their progenitors? Or are women less capable of love—either love of children or love of the father who begets the children?

It will be agreed that we are establishing a higher standard of love than ever before in history. We are beginning to realize for the first time in the history of many generations, what we owe to the future. Formerly men built entirely for self, and for the immediate present. We can look back and trace the development of a race consciousness from the clan to the nation. In this century we see the barriers between races and nations and sects and societies, as also between the sexes, slowly dissolving.

Only a few years ago we could not imagine an Oriental, occupying a political, or educational or religions platform with an Occidental. Now it is a common thing. We know the hostility which has existed between the Jew and the Gentile—now they exchange pulpits, and all sects and all nations unite in matters of world interest. Women are elected to political and educational offices. No matter that these evidences of unity are as yet incomplete. They are promises of the birth of a larger concept of love than that which prevailed when a man's highest idea of honor and of love was to protect his immediate family only; to care for his own legal wife and children even at the expense of and certainly with heartless indifference to the fate of any other women and children.

To be sure, this protection has often been vouchsafed because of the self interest which is inseparable from the idea of possession and is not, per se, a grander or nobler impulse than that which actuated our hair-clothed antecedents, who found that their own lives were best conserved by respecting those nearest to them. But thus it is that Love has been implanted in human hearts through no higher or more altruistic method than that of self-interest; but the nature of love is to expand; to grow; to give of itself until unselfishness must come with the final aim of love, which is unity and not possession.

We of this era are unquestionably manifesting a larger and more inclusive ideal of love, and since the Female Principle conserves the higher aspects of love, we are bound to concede that a higher ideal of love is possible to the woman of today than ever before. We must take into consideration the average of the sex, at the same time not forgetting that in the highest type of individual, the qualities of both sexes are balanced, uniting the spiritual, self-sacrificing and unselfish love-element of the female principle, with the wider scope, the inclusive element of the male. Let us remember that we are dealing with principles and not merely with individuals.

Admitting that it is not because of lack of love, either maternal or conjugal, that women are shirking marriage and maternity, we may then ask: "What is the cause?" The answer may be found in the conclusion that women are done with mere instinctive procreation. They demand conditions consistent with the birth of a higher type of human-kind. They desire to "make right the way" for the coming of the perfect race—a race that will not snarl and bite and growl and tear and claw and choke and starve and freeze and otherwise kill each other over the possession of bones.

Ever and ever we have been promised the coming of the perfect man—the "man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged under the domination of the animal nature which subdues and appropriates.

A race of supermen can be born only of full and complete union. Animals reproduce their kind, but man's perogative is to invite the gods to come to earth. We may consciously beget souls, not merely reproduce bodies. Women are demanding a union in which there shall be something more than mere physical contact resulting in reproduction. This demand is working itself out more or less blindly according to the development of individual women, but the ideal of soul union is coming to be more and more recognized not only as a desirable type of union, but also as the initiative of the promised time when the kingdom of God should come on earth as it is in the heavens.

All races have uttered this prayer, apparently with a firm belief in its efficacy. If they have not faith in its appeal, it were surely vain and foolish to voice it But we are assured that "God always keeps his promises," which is simply one way of saying that the law of the cosmos is reliable.

"One calls it Evolution and another calls it God," but both must agree that whether God or Evolution be the name, Love is the result. There can be no higher or more spiritual phase of life than that in which Love is an ever-present reality. Neither can we with any degree of logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on the physical plane—a manifestation of life which even physicists are bound to concede is an infinitesimal part of cosmic activities.

We need not worry therefore lest the race shall die, because of a decreasing birthrate as we see it on the physical plane. There are many other places and planes of consciousness. The stars and the planets are peopled. The cosmos is very much alive, because Sex is the axis (X-is) upon which it rotates in perfect harmony.

The fact which we here wish to emphasize is that the Female Principle is refusing maternity, and above all the bondage of matrimony for the important reason that the time has come for the rearing of the Man-god; for the establishment of the spiritual function of sex, superceding the mere instinctive animal urge of procreation and sense gratification.

Evolution is apparent in all other phases of our life-activities. Why should it not manifest in this most important of all our systems of intercourse?

The mere act of bringing forth children is not in itself either sacred or holy. Far more often it has been a perfunctory duty or a punishment for indulgence in an act of which men and women have been more than half ashamed, even while seeking it with the instinctive urge of a cosmic law which cannot be escaped, although it may be co-operated with to advantage.

Nor does the act of giving birth to children confer true motherhood. Maternity is not necessarily motherhood any more than matrimony is always marriage. There are many mothers who have never borne children. And there are many women with children who know not the first faint dawn of that wonderful, beautiful and intense (because spiritual) love which comes most often in the guise of motherhood, but which is always present when two souls who are truly mated contact each other's inner nature.

If the women of today will insist upon the sacredness and the rightfulness of birth the women of tomorrow will not seek to evade motherhood. If the women of today will establish the sacredness of all life; if they will not rest until every child that is born into this world is recognized as legitimate and more, is welcomed; is given every advantage of education, of healthful body, of right moral training, rest assured that the women of the future will seek only to rival each other in the quality and the perfection of their motherhood.

The efforts of many radicals to enact legislation regulating the birthrate, the struggle to disseminate knowledge of how to prevent conception, may be well meant as these things are consistent with prevailing conditions. But they are not the final answer to the problem. Love is the only answer. Where love is permitted to rule, children are not only welcome but ecstatically desired and provided for.

Motherhood is a hope and a joy to the normal woman. Comparatively every woman would be normal under proper social and economic conditions. When women seek to evade maternity it is either because of lack of sufficient means to care for children, or it is because of lack of sufficient love. Or it is because of fear of that modern mo-loch, Public Opinion.

When a woman truly loves a man, she longs to be the mother of his children. A balanced world will make it possible for every woman to be free from the bondage of fear and poverty, and ill-health, leaving her free to be guided in the most vital and important function of her life, by the call of the highest love of which she is capable. Love will establish motherhood as a divine privilege. Certainly no other power on earth or in the realms above can do so. Neither preachments nor platitudes, nor punishments, nor legislative blunderings. Love is the only saviour of mankind. There is no other true God.

Some day the symbol of Deity which now depicts Man crucified will be superseded upon all altars by the image of a winged babe, and when this comes to pass, Humanity will rise to that ideal.



CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND MATING

Any attempt to discuss subjects pertaining to the sex-relation with intelligence and an optimistic outlook is handicapped by the fact that sex-problems are so intimately associated with religious prejudices, reasons for which we have already mentioned in the chapter devoted to sex-worship and sex-degradation.

It is possible, therefore, that in seeking to define freedom and to make a plea for the freeing of women and men from the "bonds" of matrimony, we may be accused of seeking to demolish with one blow, so to speak, the social institution of marriage.

Such is not the intention of the present writer, for reasons which are based upon something far more noteworthy than a concession to the prejudices and "beliefs" of the average.

Luther Burbank has said: "In pursuing any of the everlasting and fundamental laws of nature, all previous bias and inherited prejudices must be laid aside, if the student hopes to be taken into Nature's confidence and be the sharer of her secrets."

The average person, entrenched behind the bulwark of theological bias, saturated with a belief in the finality of all previous discovery and knowledge, teems with a fanatical desire to "defend his God"—as if the Supreme Power, whatever name we give it—were not capable of self-defense.

It is due to this mistaken zeal on the part of the short-sighted ones, that human evolution is slow, albeit it is likewise inevitable.

They are like those who, viewing the wrecking of a ruined habitation, condemned by the Board of Public Safety, try to stop the process of the workers; they do not know that when the ground shall have been cleared, a finer, more sightly, and above all, more habitable building will be put up on the same ground; and anything from the old architecture that was worthy of preservation will be used in the new building.

The dug-outs of our antedeluvian ancestors were designed to protect them from the destructive forces of storm and wave and also from their brothers, the enemy; and although our ideas of what constitutes a desirable dwelling-place have evolved to our modern ideal of a home, rather than a shelter, yet the fundamental concept remains. A study of history should be encouraging if only to prove that no radical changes in human ethics have ever been forced upon us. Verily, the "gods wait upon men" and until there is something like a concerted demand for improved conditions, they stand just outside the door waiting to be bidden, "Enter, Friend."

As with mental ideas, so it is with ethical ideals. Until there is a more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many complaints as a hypochondriac.

But, the fact that marriage in some form has prevailed as one of the fundamental necessities of human ethics, ever since the beginning of recorded history, and doubtless before that, is, we believe, very satisfactory evidence that marriage has a permanent place in social and individual evolution. What that place is, can be deduced from a study of the history of marriage.

There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external, world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which meets his eye.

Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according to their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.

Humanity is ever seeking the Reality—the Noumenon, which we intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.

The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages, side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.

Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution, obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of forms is common.

And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family species, as we have in the human family.

Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.

Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific, to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild and domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are slaughtered for food.

The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself very early among the various families, from motives of self-protection, if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numerically strong.

In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life, and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist, preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.

It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner. It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habit would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping with the eagle character.

The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.

Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seems to have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continue the family.

Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.

Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his "possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized idea of "earning."

Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his wife's person.

In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these pestilential marauders?"

Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of free-will.

Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.

Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another, actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for "outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions through the safer channels of the law-courts.

The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner. This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual matters, "as long as he provides well for me."

When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.

It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense, which besmirch the path of Evolution.

Thus the tendency to aesthetic selection, always more pronounced in the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.

In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the "virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized our grandmothers.

Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating, everywhere, and at all times, as variable, controlled by expediency; and always based on the egoistic idea of possession, expressed by the right of the parents to dispose of their children; the right by capture; the right by purchase; and the right by consent.

One or all of these customs have been tried in various parts of the world and at various times, and seldom has the condition of woman approached even so enviable a place as that of the female animal, except in the comparatively short periods when women have been the gens of the family.

These periods have become more and more infrequent, until the legal status of women has been, as it is now, no more than what the evolving consciousness of the male permitted to her.

It is a question whether, under our pretended monogamy, which is, per se, a more ideal condition than polygamy, all women have been either better conditioned or more moral. The answer depends largely upon our idea of what constitutes morality. Certainly, the condition of women in Christian countries has been, and is now, far from ideal; which would, judging from surface appearances, indicate that monogamy, as it has been practiced in the past, served only as an ideal, and at best has been of first aid to the male, primarily because of a question of personal health and cleanliness; secondly, as a means of developing in him the latent qualities of altruism, manifested selfishly enough at first in protecting his possessions; among which he egotistically conceded his children at least first place; although the wife was hardly more than a convenience and an incubator.

Of the conditions that have prevailed under the monogamous custom and among the so-called superior races, Letourneau, in his Evolution of the Family, says: "The Hebrews seem to have been alone, among the Semites, in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Doubtless the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme as it is in Kabyle; it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage, it is true, was necessary when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold to her husband. We find hardly more than the portrait of a laborious servant, busy and grasping. We shall see that the wife, though she might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the Hebrew, according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her. Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be able to prove, cloths in hand, that she was a virgin at the moment of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."

The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia, although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes, where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has been, and still is, deplorable.

In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice for her.

This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on terms of at least temporary social equality.

Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation, inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent; and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the aristocratic class from extinction through decadence.

As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages, they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and, as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils."

One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece and Rome—an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished. Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase "between the devil and the deep sea."

Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse.

In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to the eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our social ethics.

It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization among the white races.

Religious systems have only reflected the race-thought; they have not molded it. This is true, despite the fact that true religion, when esoterically understood, has always aimed at union, and union means equality along all lines, sex-equality; social equality; race equality.

We must here digress from the main point of this chapter long enough to explain that equality is not synonymous with identity, as seems to be the impression among the many; a misconception which we regret to say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas! confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced by the professional man.

The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge; and yet it is evident that nature aims at variety; at a multiplicity of ideas and customs and creations.

Differentiation is the primal attempt.

Woman's claim to equality should be based upon the fact that first of all she is different from, rather than identical with, men.

The woman who dons male attire and eschews all so-called "feminine frivolity" in her efforts to prove herself man's equal, is confessing that in her natural environment she does not consider herself his equal, and is masquerading as man, in the vain hope that she may deceive herself and others into thinking she is.

An individual is important to Society in proportion to his originality; in proportion as he contributes some new idea; some hitherto unfamiliar view.

Returning to the point of what constitutes true religion, namely, a consciousness of our unity with all life, we find that although religious ethics have included this ideal, it has not been emphasized in the ratio of its importance. The result is that where unity should have been established, segregation has been the rule, and it is without any desire to reflect discredit upon the ideal of the Church that we point to the fact that woman's emancipation, and her co-operation in all departments of life, as a hope, if not a consummated reality, has but now made its initial bow to the world.

That this initial bow comes side by side with, if not actually in the wake of, disruption of the old theologic dogmas; dissatisfaction with religious systems; and a determined disregard for what has been presented as religion; cannot be denied. The fact is that religious creeds never save anyone; never really elevate nations. At best they have been but a "consolation prize" or a narcotic. Love of freedom is the great liberator.

The influence of Rationalism, as inaugurated by Ingersoll in America and Bradlaugh in England, was the opening wedge. Christian Science, mothered by a woman, incorporated the phrase "Father-Mother-God" into its literature, and unity has been the avowed ideal of all the variety of new cults and philosophies presented under so great a variety of names that we cannot here enumerate them.

Nevertheless, we are still many leagues short of realizing this ideal, despite the preachments in its favor. Politically, the ideal of unity is presented, more or less imperfectly, of course, as Socialism, and Suffrage. Commercially, still more imperfectly in the merchants' "let us get together on this," and in efforts at legislation that shall control corporation dividends and labor schedules, and regulate hours of work. In fact, all along the line we see the shadow cast by the rising sun of unity.

We have thus briefly traced the history of marriage and of mating, in order that we may discuss with sane impartiality the questions: What does marriage symbolize? What is its function in the life of the social body; in the existence of the sphere itself; of the entire Cosmos?

Has it any real place and purpose beyond that of procreation, or any more spiritual function than the perpetuation of the human species?



CHAPTER V

THE SYMBOLISM OF MARRIAGE AND OF SEX-UNION

Notwithstanding the patent fact that the institution of monogamous marriage has not resulted in an ideal condition, it is also plain that any other ideal of sex-union is impossible to a highly developed race.

Monogamy, despite its present unsatisfactory condition, is a promise of the highest ideal to which mortals can aspire; it is the imperfect image of that ideal state which human nature has always striven for. That we have striven for the most part blindly; that we have fallen far short of the ideal aimed at, should not deter us from realizing that the ideal is right.

Monogamy, as a type of the perfect marriage, symbolizes the meeting and the consequent union of a man and a woman who are perfect complementaries.

In order to be a perfect and lasting union, they must be spiritual counterparts. Without this counterpartal affinity as the base of union, no power on earth can force them to unite, although all the laws of men be employed to keep them tied to each other in the body. If two persons belong to each other by the inviolable law of spiritual counterpart, no multitudinous set of man-made laws can keep their souls apart, although these codes may temporarily separate them in the flesh. The bonds of true matrimony are "holy"—the word meaning whole; entire; complete; but these bonds are of an interior nature; they may be judged only from the interior nature of two persons; and any attempt to decide this all-important question from the standpoint of exterior judgment must fail.

The perfect union of the one man and the one woman is the highest ideal of marriage of which we can conceive; but shall we for that reason insist that marriage as a social institution is always complete and holy? When two immature persons come together under the stimulus of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical attraction and cohesion—an instinct, which we share in common with every form of life, from the lowest insect to man—shall they be compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall live" in the physical body?

We would say, "Heaven forbid!" only that the appeal is unnecessary. Heaven does forbid, and that is why we see so many attempts to disrupt these immature relationships.

"The striving of sexual elements through affinities, or passional attractions, after congenial marriage unions, is the cause of all the motions, growths, and activities in the physical and moral world," says a writer, and he adds: "The failure to attain the desired end, and the warfare between uncongenial and repulsive elements is the cause of all the broken equilibriums, discords, and collisions in both spheres. If the atomic marriage in nature were perfect, there would be no storms or droughts, or poisons or monstrosities, or disease. If the marriage between the individual will and understanding, between the interior and exterior life, were perfect, we should have regenerated men upon earth, worthy to be called sons of God. If the marriage between the sexes were perfect, we should have a Social Paradise."

Marriage, then, in the sense of the conjugal union of two persons of opposite sex, is the most important function of our lives; every other activity is subsidiary to it. Commerce is carried on, only because of this union; all the laws of man are the outgrowth of marriage; all morality comes from the ideal marriage—the union of Wisdom and Love. To imagine that a function, so vitally important to our exterior life, should have no place in the phases of life which we know as "higher," is a manifest absurdity, and comes from those attenuated concepts of what constitutes spirituality, which Theology has postulated; concepts which, entrenched behind the walls of "thus saith the Lord," have temporarily defied modern progress.

There is no wide gulf between the spiritual and the material worlds, although the material is but an imperfect reflection of the basic principle of life.

Marriage, then, is eternally going on, "Nature is a system of nuptials," says a writer, and nature is only the language of spirit or Divine Life.

How it came about that Theology made the mistake of degrading sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only, we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret of eternal and never-ceasing union of complementaries.

Take, for example, the symbol of the wedding-ring. This custom, varying only in unimportant details, consistent with the prevailing social custom of the times, has come down to us from prehistoric days. The golden circle, sometimes worn only by the bride, but frequently by both bride and groom, is emblematical of the completion of the circle of wisdom and the final attainment, in "the twain made one," of the finding by each of "the other half." The circle is always used to express the Absolute; Aum; the Supreme Power that is "without beginning and without end."

According to the old Jewish law, the wedding ring must be made of pure gold and must be earned and paid for by the bridegroom; he might not acquire it by credit or gift. There is in this custom something more than mere thrift; or the assurance of the bridegroom's ability to sustain the needs and comforts of his wife and prospective family. It symbolizes the truth that no one may hope to acquire this priceless blessing of perfect conjugal union, other than by his own efforts. Immortality must be earned, and perfect union, counterpartal union—which means actually "twain made one," comes only by dint of strife and demand and proof of our fitness for the Perfect Life.

Another custom, which has been in almost universal vogue, is that of drinking wine, emblematical of the "wine of life," at the completion of a marriage ceremony. Sometimes this has been the prerogative of the bride and groom only; and sometimes of the officiating priest; but more generally the entire company has shared in this custom. Wine drinking thus symbolizes eternal youth and virility, which can be enjoyed only by those who have attained to the complete life—the divine or spiritual sex-union.

This symbolism is obvious when we take into our consciousness the truth that only complementaries have the power to act and react, without change, or loss. Equilibrium is maintained by a perfect balance of two forces; if one force be ever so small a fraction less than the other, perfect balance is lacking.

Another marriage custom in general use among the ancients was the donning of a crown on the wedding day. This custom formerly included the bridegroom as well as the bride, but later was confined to the bride alone, as was also the custom of wearing a veil. At early Greek marriages crowns made of gold or silver were placed upon the heads of both bride and groom; tapers were lighted; and rings exchanged.

We have a similar custom today in all fashionable church weddings. We have the lighted tapers, signifying the quenchless fires of love; and the circlet which symbolizes eternity.

The crown symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love; which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until we are fit for the kingdom.

The veil which the bride lifts at the completion of the ceremony symbolizes the truth that when we shall have attained to the spiritual marriage, the veil that separates the interior from the exterior life, shall be lifted; it is so thin that the illusion, of which the wedding veil is made, rightly symbolizes this apparent separation of the physical life from the spiritual. When the veil is lifted, we shall know our completement in the bliss of perfect union; and when we have found that other half of our being, which is the underlying urge of our every thought and act, we shall find the veil lifted. The entire panorama of the universe becomes an open book. There is no "visible" and "invisible;" it is all One, with our own bi-une sex nature for the pivotal center.

So simple and so obvious are all these symbols of the natural man that we are astounded, when we have found the key, that we did not sooner penetrate their meaning. "She will have a crown in Heaven," we say of some self-sacrificing and loving soul, and the phrase suggests to most of us the power of earthly kings and queens with all their splendor of jewels and retainers; but there is an inner meaning which the splendor and the crowns of earth's kings and queens symbolizes.

Spiritual union with the perfect complement of our interior nature is in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant; luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of gems—diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; topaz; pearls?

It is the radiations of light which they throw off; it is their luminosity—their transparency. It is, indeed, true, that the power which we see exemplified in the rulers of the earth has a corresponding meaning in a spiritual sense; as, in fact, have all things which we cognize with our physical eyes. The Hindus tell us that all things are either the "nita" or the "ita" message. Either they tell us "this is the way to the heights;" or "this is not the way."

The crown of orange blossoms which has supplanted the ancient crown of gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating to the spiritual marriage—counterpartal union.

Even as this union confers a beautiful radiance upon the spiritual body, the body also becomes sweet-scented like a flower. Weeds, we remember, have no scent or they may be obnoxious in their odor. Weeds are unregenerate flowers.

Certain chemical combinations produce nauseous gases. The human body is a laboratory in which chemical changes are constantly going on. The changes produced by sex-functioning are greater than anything which the experimental chemist has ever discovered in nature.

It is a fact well known to the pathologist that an unwilling wife, however faithful she may be, if forced into the sexual act, may present her husband with a well-defined case of genital disease; nor is this at all strange when we consider the now well-recognized fact that anger, fear, revenge, avarice, and all the destructive thought-forces produce poisons in the secretions of the body.

In Rosicrucian literature, we have the story of "the Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosy Cross," which is, when read with the key to its esoteric meaning, a story of the chemistry of marriage between the sexes. Indeed, the whole story of the secret doctrines of the Rosicrucians, is the story of the sexes, and the "secret of secrets," which was so zealously guarded by the Hermetics and the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, is the secret of the spiritual union of the male and the female principles throughout nature and culminating in man and woman, conferring upon them immortal life through the perfect balance of sex.

It has been said that women were not admitted to the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, but this is not true, as there is plenty of evidence to prove.

Owing to the enmity of the established Church toward any exaltation of the sex-relation, and particularly toward the veneration of woman, it became necessary for those who sought to keep alive the fires of Esoteric Wisdom to surround themselves with the most rigid secrecy; in consequence of this, the story of the sexes, constituting the very heart and center of Hermetic philosophy, has been told in allegory, unintelligible unless one has the inner sight or has been initiated into the secret code.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Church had so far succeeded in undermining the work of the Hermetics, that women were excluded from the Brotherhood, and the apparent sole purpose of the secret order was the search for metallic transmutation. Side by side with this convincing evidence that the esoteric meaning of the symbols has been perverted, we find their allegorical phraseology intermixed with frequent allusions to passages from the Scripture and to the Virgin Mary, proving conclusively that the Church, then in the zenith of its power, had confiscated the archives of the secret order, and, either through fear of the influence of their work, or possibly through lack of any adequate comprehension of their wisdom, had employed their symbolism to the further glory of the temporal power of the Church.

This subject will again be dealt with in a chapter devoted to "The Hidden Wisdom," and so we will leave it for the present.

One other great spiritual truth relating to marriage is found in the intimate and constantly recurring association of the turtle-dove with the ceremony of marriage.

The dove is, par excellence, an example of conjugal love. The turtle-dove, more than any other of the dove family, is noted for the fervor of its sexual desires; fidelity to its mate; and for the devotion and diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a symbol of peace.

Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth, the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of life. Let us also remember that they issued in pairs.



CHAPTER VI

CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE

From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par with gluttony.

Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it occupies today in fine stock-breeding.

Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.

In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.

Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy, except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars which took the best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it came in the idea of asceticism—an instance where the remedy was worse than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who should have known better.

The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than from any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note a militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of woman's claim to free expression.

While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy, but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained, from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old, nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been to hold to this central truth of all Life—religious, social, national, and domestic—the truth that it is only by exalting the maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour of mankind.

And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"—the pure Love between one man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour that ever was or ever will be—the pure Christ-child that is born of conterpartal union.

Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi. And when the shock of his discovery has somewhat subsided, and his prejudices have been swallowed up in a desire for the whole Truth, let him remember also that this central idea has been the foundation of all religious rites since time began; and instead of feeling that the whole fabric of Christianity has been rent by the light of scientific discovery, he will see that it has merely been revealed, and the revelation will prove to him that Truth is the most beautiful, the most spiritual and the most satisfying thing in life, because the Truth is that Perfect Love is the only passport to immortal bliss. No one can withhold Heaven from us, if we have this perfect love.

Thus the essentials of Christianity are the essentials of every other religious system; and the essentials are: Love is the One true and only God; and Sex is the form in which this Bi-une God appears; according to our individual and collective reverence for this bi-une God, will be our spiritual development.

We do not reverence sex when we cheapen it by dissipation; or when we abandon it as unclean and unworthy and unholy; both attitudes are abnormal, and unbalanced.

Spiritual consciousness aims at equilibrium. The perfectly balanced person is equally developed on all planes; the perfectly balanced individual, in sufficient numbers, will produce a balanced and therefore a healthy social organization; and a balanced and healthy-minded race of beings will result in a balanced sphere; this fact is foreshadowed by the postulate which Science is now considering, to wit: the earth's axis may be straightened, and, if so, a uniform temperature will prevail on this globe.

Returning to a consideration of the subjects which head this chapter, we find it necessary to clear the ground a little, in regard to a definition of words.

The word continence should apply to the act of self-restraint in the matter of the emotions, desires, and passions, whether of the sex-passion or the passion of anger, avarice, or gluttony. The word has come to mean, in many cases, the total abstinence from the sex-relation, because of the general idea which has prevailed, that any indulgence of sex-love was a confession of weakness. In fact, our modern ideas regarding this subject are so chaotic and so manifestly paradoxical that they are absurd.

On the one hand we have a tradition that motherhood is a beautiful and holy thing; on the other, we regard the sex-relation, per se, as an indecent thing, or at best as a weakness of the flesh.

We have the obvious demonstration that creation is possible only because of the conjunction of the two sexes, and yet we are taught that sex-love is something which is permitted to us in this lower state of our being, and denied in heaven, and at the same time we are told that God creates everything, and God dwells in Heaven, where there is no such "polluting sin" as sex-love.

We certainly do need balance.

The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person; it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection with the male. It is strictly a female attribute—nay, we may almost say, "organ."

If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression, or—which occurs more frequently—as a commercial expediency, believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial market—if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is extolled.

This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a bridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should the evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the arch-enemy of both sexes.

And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery, among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had "sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always over-crowded with similar sales.

Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage; inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious, blissful life.

Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual deception has been the rule.

Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of the clerical critics.

When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the One primordial, and indestructible key to salvation—the birth of the god-man through the recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.

But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."

If, instead of indignantly denying this fact, as though it were profane criticism of the saints, defenders of the Theological view of mysticism would calmly consider and accept the evidence, they would be able to infuse into the creeds, the vitality which they so lack.

The lives of the saints, in so far as they relate to trance and ecstatic visions, must, sooner or later meet one of two fates. Either they will be analyzed and presented, with the reverence that is due the subject, as proofs of the spiritual function of sex-love; or they must be relegated to the position to which the Church assigns all sexual desire—that of eroticism and innate and ineradicable depravity.

Viewed in the light in which Theology has held the sex relation, the paroxysms which are ascribed to St. Catherine of Sienna, and to the Holy Mechthild and other saints, have in them something decidedly obnoxious; while, if we take the premise that these saints, by virtue of prayer, aspiration, and intended sacrifice of the mortal self to an ideal, transmuted their sex-nature from the physical to the spiritual, then indeed, we have an approach to a mighty truth, which is at once both explanatory and satisfying. St. Catherine is referred to as "the mystic bride;" and Jesus Christ, to whom she was "espoused" (using the terminology which the Church prefers, as suggesting a less physical union than the word "married") was the "bride-groom;" more than that; she declared that she was married with a ring, set with precious stones; just like any other betrothal or wedding ring.

Always in these recitals we find the phraseology which lovers employ when exalting the loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the dilettante lover.

To their credit be it said, the love which the saints developed within themselves, by dint of their attempts to exalt celibacy in an age of sexual profligacy, is none the less human love; it is human love spiritualized, exalted, and transmuted from the plane of the animal to that of the soul. This transmutation is in fact responsible for the intensity, the absorbing power of the love which thrilled them into such an ecstacy that in most instances they became lost in the bliss of the emotions excited by the inward flow of their sex nature, and were totally unfitted to take part in the outer, or so-called practical life.

Such, for example, was Saint Teresa, of whom William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," says: "Her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the devotee and the Deity." Although this estimate of St. Theresa's saintliness will doubtless be shocking to the people who think they are pious, we take an optimistic view of it, and suggest that the saint's idea of religion is far more satisfying than that usually presented as saintliness. St. Theresa, like most of the female saints, became "the bride of Christ"—the man Jesus, the Christ, let it be remembered.

St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the Thirteenth Century, gave herself up so wholly to this inward contemplation; to fasting, prayer, and withdrawal from the outer to the inner life, that she lived as the "bride of God," in such daily contact with Him as would fitly describe any love-mated honeymoon of today. According to her testimony "God" indulged in such language and caresses, and intimacies, kisses and compliments as would satisfy any woman married to her ideal lover.

In the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga, it is significant that he selected the Virgin Mary as the object of his adoration and "consecrated to her, his own virginity;" and we read how "burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity." In consequence of this vow, he was never tempted as was St. Anthony, by visions of beautiful women.

Here again we have the love of the male for the female. If it were not so, St. Louis may well have chosen Jesus, or Joseph, or John, as the object of his devotional contemplation; and St. Catherine, and Theresa, and Mechthild might have paid their homage to the Virgin Mary.

"Jeanne of the Cross" held constant converse with her guardian angel, who by the way was a beautiful youth, "more brilliant than the sun and with a crown of glory on his head."

St. Frances was inseparable from her angel, whom she loved with extravagant and blissful devotion, and whom she also described as "a young man of such radiant beauty and purity that he melted her soul."

The truth is that, in seeking to escape from the "sin" of human love, as seen in the world, in the union of the sexes, they touched the very main-spring of their sex-nature, intensifying to a degree unknown to the merely sense-conscious person, the ecstatic bliss of spiritual sex-union.

Naturally the question will arise as to whether these saints really came into contact with their spiritual mates in these paroxysms of holy fervor, and if so, why did the vision of the Christ so frequently appear to them and not alone the vision of some other being?

The answer is found in the fact that spiritual experiences must be interpreted through the channel of the outer mind, which in these instances was obsessed by the thought implanted by Medieval Theology, that human love is sinful. It may be questioned whether, even though the visions did relate to some person other than the members of the Holy Family, the fact would have been admitted since it would have been attributed to unworthiness on the part of the saint.

They were practically compelled to include God and Christ in their ecstacies to prove their respectability.

One phrase, commonly employed to describe the kind of love which "flooded the soul" in these saintly ecstacies, is particularly applicable to the effects of spiritual sex-union, as described by those who have experienced counterpartal union, and which Swedenborg so constantly emphasizes in his recital of "conjugal delights." This phrase is "melting love." It is a feeling of melting or merging into the other's being, until there seems to be but one person, formed by the two souls. In fact, it is union; whereas the lesser, or we may say the lower, phase, of the sex-relation is at best but contact.

If this view of the trances and ecstacies described in the lives of the saints, be repulsive to our readers, we can only say that we are sorry for our readers. They have imbibed the spirit of the Dark Ages, which regarded human love as sinful, overlooking the fact that all we may know of the "love of God," is by analogous comparison to what we know of human love.

If human love be sinful, by logical deduction we would inevitably arrive at the conclusion that the universe is all sinful. In which event, the very word itself would have lost its significance.

The objectionable part of the orthodox view of the effects of saintliness lies in the realization that neither the saints themselves, nor the Church which perpetuates their recitals, had any conception of the real situation, so evident to the enlightened and unprejudiced reader. And if this view of saintly ecstacies, postulating the transmutation of sex-force into spiritual channels, be objectionable, what can be said of the only other view which is possible in the light of the evidence submitted?

Our ideas of what constitutes chastity need revising, else we must needs decide that chastity is more a vice than a virtue.

For example, consider the character of a mother of the self-sacrificing, noble type, devoting her life to the welfare of the human family; interesting herself in all the problems that affect the generations to come; patient; sweet and wise. Compare her with an unmarried girl whose body is immune from contact with one of the opposite sex, but whose mind is bent upon self, and self-adornment; upon the necessity of capturing a wealthy husband, as a means of this self-gratification, without regard to any sentiment or even common affection. Who is the more chaste?

Coventry Patmore says:

"Virgins are they before the Lord, Whose souls are pure. The vestal fire Is not, as some mis-read the Word, By Marriage quenched, but burns the higher."

If purity of soul were synonymous with celibacy, the entire constantly-copulating cosmos would have long since been demolished; but despite the mistaken attitude of religious systems toward the divine function of sex, Humanity is reaching a higher and purer conception of love. As we approach a higher type of civilization, the broader, deeper, and more intense becomes our capacity to love. The more spiritual we become, the more vital is our love-nature, and our love-nature is grounded in sex. Let us not imagine that spiritual love is less sexual than is physical love. Spiritual love is physical love, plus all the other phases of love.

The real objection to sex love on the physical plane is not based upon its strength, but upon its weakness. If it be nothing deeper than an attraction of chemical affinities generated by physical activities, it has no reservoir from which to draw its supply. It is like the electrical wire that is "short circuited," it expends itself in one spasmodic combustion.

True spirituality is attained by a process of addition. The common and erroneous idea of spiritual attainment involves a process of subtraction.

We need go no further than to review the processes in the external world of today to understand this fact of the inclusiveness of the spiritual life, in contradistinction to the generally accepted idea of exclusiveness which is attached to a contemplation of the so-called "spiritual."

All our activities are now carried on upon a gigantic scale. Where formerly a little stream supplied the water to the mill, we now harness the invisible and apparently inexhaustible forces of electricity; where formerly commerce was a system of bartering between two single individuals, it is now a huge network involving millions of persons. Everything teaches us the lesson of inclusiveness, as we approach a more spiritualized ideal of life. We are uniting; merging; drawing within.

The Centripetal force of the planet itself, corresponding to the female pole of the magnet, is today the active principle in external life. The machinist knows this when he is compelled to avoid the suction currents of electrical power. Cosmic reaction has set in, and union between complementaries is the result. Applying this truth to individual human life, and we have what?

Counterpartal Sex-union.



CHAPTER VII

SOUL-UNION: WHERE WILL IT LEAD?

We have heard much in recent years of "affinities," and "soul-mates," and we are likely to hear much more in the future. So much that is unsavory and sensational is associated with these two words, that we almost hesitate to employ them; but that is always the way with Fear. It builds a high wall between us and Truth, and dares us to scale it.

We accept the challenge.

To begin with, the words are not synonymous, although frequently used as such. Affinities are based upon mutual interests; mutual tastes and appetites; mutual stages of development; but these stages of development may be sense-conscious only; or they may be of a highly intellectual order. Whatever their basis of mutuality, they tend to attract upon that plane. Whenever this affinity, established by virtue of mutual tastes, is on the sense-plane only—that is, when it is because two persons both like their roast-beef rare; or their whiskey diluted; or their wine iced—we are apt to find the result in a mistaken idea of sexual affinity, which wears itself out for the reasons already stated, because there is no reservoir from which to draw. The chemistry of the body changes with time and emotional experiences. Affinity of bodily contact only, resulting from a congeniality of sense-appetites, is therefore necessarily short lived.

Affinity of intellect is much more lasting, because it approaches a state higher in the ascent to the spiritual center of the cosmos.

Thought is the parent of speech, or of any external appeal to the senses. Back of all objectivity is the thought that molded it; but back of thought is desire; and back of desire is design—cosmic design we may say—expressing itself discretively; in individuals.

Affinities that are based upon intellectual similarities are of a finer nature and generally more lasting than those of sense-conscious attraction only; and it is no uncommon thing to find two persons of the opposite sex enjoying a protracted friendship or preference for each others' society which deceives the average on-looker into thinking that there is also sexual affinity, when as a matter of fact there may never have been any thought of such relationship.

A few brilliant women in former times, notably Madame de Stael, or Margaret Fuller, have enjoyed the attentions and apparent devotion of men for many years without having entered into any more intimate relationship with them. But these examples have been few in the past, and have been much commented upon. In the present, such desirable companionship is becoming much more common and a woman may now be seen twice with the same man without having the neighbors speculating as to a suitable name for the baby.

More and more, as women become freed from the necessity to "settle themselves" in marriage, we find evidences of this intellectual affinity between the sexes; and more and more, as we get away from the old thought that a man has but one desire, that of sexual intercourse, and a woman but one motive, that of enslaving man through his sexual appetite, we will find that men and women will meet on the plane of intellectual affinity and not be driven by gossip of outsiders, or by the force of the race-thought in their own minds, into seeking to spoil such companionship by a matrimonial alliance, when nature did not intend it to be so.

A number of years ago, when even the little freedom which human beings now accord each other in this matter was denied the struggling sexes, a certain man and woman, who were intellectual companions, married. He was a writer; she was a physician; which is evidence in itself of a degree of intellectual power not so common at that time as now; she was moreover an unusual woman in many ways. They parted after a month of married life and to the horror and scandal of the entire community, remained friends. The scandal reached the climax of disapproval and shocked morality when the man, married again, continued his friendship with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.

The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be "yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire. And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.

Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.

A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.

True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized man vents his remaining savagery.

Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some degree of mutuality, are a step higher in social development than were the alliances of the old regime, where a man's social or domestic exigencies required a wife or a housekeeper, or both-in-one; where woman must marry whomsoever asked her, or be pitied and scorned as an "old maid," still affinity-marriages are not the final union, and must go through an evolutionary phase.

Affinity-marriages are eligible to disruption. Happily, we trust, these disruptions will in the course of time be devoid of hatred and mutual recriminations and abuse. Certainly they will be, as they evolve from the plane of sense-consciousness to that of intellectual affinities. Moreover, they stand a much better chance of permanency than has maintained during the past, before the word affinity was heard so frequently as it is now.

The general impression is abroad in the land, that it is only since women became economically independent that disruption of the marriage bonds has become so general. It is true that divorces are much more frequent since women have become, to a great extent, economically independent; but that only means that the parties to the marriage have been set free. The disruptions are not more, it is only the evidences. And it is at the evidence of marital unhappiness that all the criticism is directed.

If the criticism were directed against the condition that divorce tells us of, instead of against the divorce itself, the first aid to the injured would be to establish a social order wherein an equal moral standard for both sexes should be the rule, and where a mother is recognized, and respected and honored in the name of motherhood, whether she is a wife or not.

This suggestion will of course be met with a shocked gasp from many. The cry that "Society will be disorganized" and our "moral code become chaotic" will go up from the self-constituted keepers of public morality. But is our morality so tender that it needs protection? Are our social conditions so ideal that they cannot be improved? If they are, then nothing can besmirch them. If they are not, they must first be demolished, before they are rebuilt.

The limited mortal mind is always terribly afraid of a change. Not one single improvement has ever been suggested, from mechanics to morals, that has not been met with that ever-ready fear-thought, that the whole universe is going to the eternal bow-wows, if the slightest change in established institutions is made. And despite it all, we go on year after year, improving. "Self-improvement" is the watch-word of the Century. If "self-improvement," then social improvement. Mankind is still in the making, as far as external conditions are concerned.

The complaint goes up from every side, that women refuse motherhood. Girls who have been carefully reared, brought up in the most orthodox movement, are heard to openly, unashamed, announce their intention of finding a rich husband and not, emphatically, not having any children.

May this not be Nature's revenge upon our inhuman treatment of girls who become mothers without first becoming wives?

We are wont to refer to unmarried mothers as "unfortunates" and "ruined." But in what does the misfortune consist, and wherein are they ruined?

Is a woman ever unfortunate if she gives birth to a child because she has loved, and because she loves the child? Is she ruined in any way except that she becomes the target for our inhumanity; our well-nigh unforgivable stupidity?

The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain famous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respect in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband, but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"

We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example, and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but observation should convince us that in all too many instances the first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime against posterity.

We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one, when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a hypocritical world.

The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence, alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.