"Sex contains all," says Walt Whitman. "Bodies, souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk; all hopes, benefactions, bestowals; all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of earth; all the governments, judges, gods, followed persons of the earth; these are contained in sex as parts of itself and justification of itself.
"Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex; without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers."
Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet," only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of all life—Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting upon the world an ideal of Heaven from which they have extracted the very essence of Heaven itself, although nothing on earth or from divine sources justifies such an idea.
Possibly our civilization has proceeded on the plan of leaving until the last the most important thing in an ideal community and it may be that we shall do the necessary reform work in this department all the more thoroughly for having so long neglected it.
In the following chapters the physiological and hygienic side of the subject has been avoided as there is much sound advice already issued pertaining to this phase of the sex question, and it is our contention that the world must be brought to recognize the spiritual, and sacred function of Sex, as the basis of reformation or regeneration, before the Kingdom of Love shall be established upon the earth as it is in celestial spaces.
The Author.
CHAPTER I
SEX UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL
The fundamental basis of the universe is Sex.
Sex is the fulcrum upon which our life-activities turn. It is the life of Man and of planets, and ignorance of the laws of Sex is the cause of death of both. It is the conjunction of the forces of attraction and repulsion; the positive and negative; the centripetal and centrifugal forces which hold stars and planets in their orbits—or rather, it is the two expressions of the one power, which is both male and female, the eternal bi-une sex principle which is Life.
The law of attraction everywhere, from that of the sun and the earth, to that of the iron and the magnet, the "affinity" of the various gases and liquids, is founded upon Sex. Cohesion is but another name for copulation, and repulsion is absence of the power of contact. The law of attraction and cohesion everywhere is the law of sex-activity. "The law of conjugality is the basis of every force in nature," says a scientist. Sex constitutes the eternal energy from which issue all the forms and differentiations which we see manifested in the visible universe, and it is equally the foundation of the realms invisible.
Sex is the algebracial X—the unknown quantity which defies analysis.
Plato is said to have observed that "the son of man is written all over the visible world in the form of an X;" and also that "the second coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a cross." The cross is but another form of the X—the eternal bi-une sex-principle in action.
The Female Principle attracts to a central union; draws toward and within itself. The home is established and maintained by the female element; the nest is the special property of the female bird. Thus the Female Principle best expresses the highest love because the object of love is union. Hate scatters, disintegrates, destroys. Wherever the struggle between love and hate is seen, there we will find a lack of union. There may be marriage, but there will not be mating. True union must come from the Center of Life—from the spiritual Reality, which the physical only imperfectly shadows forth.
Involution is best described as feminine, and wherever we note the upward trend of the feminine element in Society, we may know that the earth is on its involutionary path; the end of a cycle is at hand, and social unrest and marital upheaval are inevitable, because Love is in the ascendant and love demands union—not merely matrimony.
The Ancients sought to express the never-beginning and never-ending law of Sex by the symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth, forming a circle. The resemblance of the male sperm to the spiral convolutions of the serpent in motion, doubtless gave rise to the adoption of the serpent as a symbol of sex-worship. The retention and transmutation of the sex-force is typified by the serpent forming a circle. The circle represents the attainment of godhood—victory over death through regeneration.
It has been said that the most primal instinct is that of hunger, but without Sex there would not be even the urge toward physical sustenance. Sex is therefore both the urge and the answer to all instincts.
There is a very general idea that Sex is a physical function only. It is almost universally taught that when the life of the body ceases, sex-life ceases with it. Even among metaphysicians, who believe in the continuity of life after death, the absurd doctrine is taught that Sex has no place or part in spiritual life, that "there is no marriage nor giving in marriage" after death.
This idea has been a powerful deterrent in keeping the race from seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of mere physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as evidence of spirituality. Chastity has unfortunately been counterfeited by mere physical restraint, resulting in a type of human being whom the healthy, normal person instinctively refuses to emulate, deferring as long as possible the attainment of that which has been presented to the mind as "spirituality."
Let it be understood at the outset of this presentation of the problem of Sex that we state emphatically, that Sex is an eternal verity. Its spiritual function is not less but infinitely more than that which we glimpse on the physical plane of life-expression.
Far from outgrowing what we know as human love, we add thereunto a million fold, refining, purifying and intensifying the sex instinct until it bears a relationship to the average instance of sex-expression, analogous to that which the single-celled organism bears to intellectual man. If we will keep in mind the fact that Life in all its degrees of manifestation is like the ascending notes of the musical scale, we will be able to get a more comprehensive idea of the spiritual function of the sex-urge. We will realize that we can not mark a too distinctive separation between the various phases of life-manifestation.
We imagine that the physical life is widely at variance with the mental, the psychical, or the spiritual, when as a matter of fact each blends into the other, when we rightly understand their place and purpose, as harmoniously as the notes of the musical scale blend into the grand compositions of the Masters.
"As above so below, and as below so above," is a truism which we may safely take as our first maxim. Whatever we note as a fundamental principle of this external life which we cognize with our five senses (senses which merge so into the psychical that we know not always where the line demarks) has a permanent place in the Cosmos. Therefore we must conclude that a fact so universal as that of sex, and sex-attraction, must be grounded in something more stable, more permanent and enduring than the mere creation of physical forms.
Protoplasm, the only living substance, is found everywhere in the visible world and its universality is symbolical of the invisible worlds as well. Transparent, colorless, it contains within itself the mystery of reproduction. It forms the basis of the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. It is seen in bone and muscle and fibrous tissue, and protoplasm may be said to contain within its cells the principles of both sexes. It is not