We all know the archetypal story: A power that once existed in the world has been lost, a light has dimmed and now all things exist in a state of half-way-ness, half-heartedness, half-aliveness. There is not enough of the power left so that we have the courage to break out of our daze, but it is not gone so completely that we have forgotten it. Therefore we feel uncomfortable in our semi-sleep knowing that there was something we were supposed to be, something more than...this. A part of us is waiting for the return of this power but we do not know the time or the place ...only that it is not now and it can't be us. Until it is.......
Many people these days are talking about the return of the feminine and the coming age of the feminine, equating the time we have been living through with the patriarchy and the dominance of the masculine principle in our global society. And there is definitely truth here when we are seeing things in a duality. In the duality of masculine and feminine, the masculine has been emphasised or preferenced. What is often missed is that the masculine referred to is not the deep or true masculine energy. Behind duality, the archetypal couple - the dual principles of the universe - are ever in love, ever entwined, eternally whole. The true masculine energy would never dominate or control the feminine, only celebrate her. So we have been living with the immature masculine, separated from wholeness, and his counterpart in the shadows has been the immature feminine. The true masculine and feminine energy always show up together. We need the return of the masculine as much as we need the return of the feminine. What is really lost is the power which lies behind and emerges through their union.
So where did this dominance of the immature masculine principle come from? When we journey back into the story we find it at he heart of core civilisation cosmologies. In the Greek creation myth the original father is Ouranus, the husband of Gaia. One of his sons, Chronos or Saturn castrates his father - the testicles fall in to the sea and give birth to Venus, goddess of love and sexuality. The original masculine principle loses his potency (balls) and gives way to the immature masculine (his son) who is the lord of civilisation, cycles and death. Modern civilisation has always been an uneasy balance between structure or Logos and life force or Eros.
In the Judeo/Christian tradition we have the Bible. In the beginning was the word…Logos…but the word now is no longer the living word (Logos and Eros combined) - the electric current that lives between the two cherubim in the arc of the covenant. The word becomes the idea, the concept, the written law which must be obeyed. We are no longer gods in connection with the Tree of Life but we are fallen and must be 'straightened' - we must obey the word of god, the law, as something external to ourselves, for we have lost connection to the living word being birthed moment to moment in the core of our being. We have lost our balls.
And when it comes time to birth the new sun god, the Christ, we have a virgin birth. Mary, the feminine principle is overshadowed by the dove of the Holy Ghost and impregnated by God the father. The son, Jesus is portrayed as sexless, celibate and concerned with 'higher' things - in short, cock-less like his Father. In essence what is holy or spiritual has now been divorced from and defined by being 'not sexual'. The fact that is not sexual is what 'makes' it spiritual. Perhaps this was part of a greater dynamic to balance the overemphasis on the body and carnality but we certainly are all living with the consequences of this divorce. So where did this Christian story come from in the great river of our collective consciousness? How did we end up with a cock-less god?
Egypt. Osiris, Isis, Horus. These are the original trinity. Osiris was tricked by Set, the opposing force, to enter a coffin built just for him (the father enters the tomb of matter, the living word becomes a concept). Though found by his wife Isis, Set steals his body and cuts it into 14 (sometimes 42) pieces and scatters it throughout the land. Isis, mourning, scours the land collecting his body together again - re-membering it. But there is a part missing (in the version of the story that came to us through Plutarch). His phallus! Isis creates an artificial phallus out of gold and hovering over it in her hawk-form she impregnates herself with their son, Horus. (note the connection to the dove impregnating Mary). There are many other places to go with this story but let's just stay with the lost phallus. The true masculine principle that can seed life is replaced with a substitute. The living word is replaced with a thing, a marker or placeholder that fulfils the function of the former but is not it.
So now let's follow that story in to Freemasonry and the concept of the 'lost word'. A Master is killed and with him dies the knowledge of the true 'word' which can raise the dead – i.e. make us come alive. This word is replaced with a substitute - the A.U.M that the initiate must use to eventually 'raise the Master' and receive the true word.
There are many other places we could follow this golden thread but this should be enough for the purpose of resurrecting the life principle. The 'word' which rules civilisation on earth is the word of Law - the substitute word - the concept. Whether formulated into a bill or rights, a united nations charter, a constitution, a personal mission statement, a thesis on the masculine and feminine principles, the Bible or the Koran ...this word is what we use for guidance in the absence of connection to the living word - the life principle which is never formulated, the godhead which can never be named but IS who we essentially ARE. We are god looking for god by chasing our concept of what god is. We are like the creator of a cartoon who has entered into one of his characters. Zombies following a will we have forgotten is our own.
This life principle is the lost phallus of Osiris, the lost word of the Masons, the lost Godhead that lives hidden inside each of us waiting to be resurrected, the risen Christ at-oned with the Father, Shiva's lingam, the balls of Ouranos.
And this phallic principle is not separated in any way from the feminine. The phallus is not the penis. It is what makes the penis rise. It is what makes the vagina moist and the clitoris erect. It is the erotic charge that brings the penis and vagina together. It is what is behind the outer manifest duality - the electric arc of the covenant between the two cherubim.
In this sense the penis and the vagina, man and woman, are BOTH form and when we identify with the form we replace the living word with the formulated word, we enter the coffin and lose our phallic power. Isis mourns for the loss of Osiris. The feminine mourns the loss of her partner. For the feminine to return the masculine must return. And they must return together in us. We all know the stereotype of men following their dick around as if the cock was a problem and phallic power the source of rape, war and other distortions of the masculine principle. But immature men are following the substitute cock. It is not phallic power that leads them but the longing for phallic power and its loss. And immature women are trying to fill their loss with the substitute cock, putting the penis in the vagina again and again trying to become pregnant with the child that will save their world. What they both miss is that the sexual longing is itself the indication of the presence of the phallus - the lost life principle - lost to us when we separated sexuality from spirituality. The phallic power enters us and we suddenly become aware that we are missing something and go to seek it in a partner. We do not know who it is arriving so suddenly, opening us, and we think the arrival has to do with the other who we then try to possess and fuse with - resulting in the withdrawal of the phallic power.
As long as we come together longing to be fulfilled or completed by the other pole we are in the world of the lost word, the lost phallus - zombies and vampires trying to suck a little eros out of each other, thinking this is love and wondering why we keep feeling alone and betrayed. When we understand what we have lost and we also understand that this life force is trying to reach us, fill us, fulfil us, in every moment. We long for it and yet we are barely able to contain it for a few minutes in sex, meditation or prayer before sneezing it out of us in orgasm, turning it into a doctrine, dulling it with alcohol or the drug of busyness following the substitute word. If our spirituality has become dominated by the immature masculine - controlling, judgemental and pedantic - then our sexuality has become dominated by the immature feminine - demanding, possessive, attached and full of sentiment rather than love.
So our god has no cock and balls and our goddess is fallen. Jesus is nailed to the cross and Magdalene is reframed as a prostitute. Our sexuality and our spirituality both become places of longing for what has been lost rather than celebration of our wholeness. We seek enlightenment. What a joke. Like the Tibetan proverb about a man riding his horse from town to town shouting 'Has anyone seen my horse?' We seek fulfilment in sex. We long for 'the one' when we ARE THE ONE! The end of the search is the realisation that we are already that which we seek. The separation of sexuality and spirituality has created a longing in them both. The phallus is lost and we accept but are never truly fulfilled by its substitute. Our spirituality becomes impotent, words mumbled in church on Sunday while neglect, corruption, greed and hypocrisy tear the heart out of our planet. Our sexuality loses its divinity becoming an urgent wanting, a compensatory thrusting trying to squeeze a moment's ecstasy in the wasteland of our half dead lives.
When a man's penis stands up with the sunrise it doesn't want anything. When a women's vulva throbs and swells with life or her nipples overflow with milk they are not wanting anything. The wanting comes after. We have become afraid to let our bodies fill with the phallus, the living word of god because we are afraid of the wanting that can follow - in ourselves or others. Men are not too phallic but not phallic enough. Women must be veiled either physically or energetically lest their remaining phallic power arouses too much longing in the men or makes them feel their impotence and loss.
In the Egyptian story, the phallus of Osiris has been swallowed by a fish - just like the ring in the Lord of the Rings. The fish is the symbol of the Piscean age - a period of two thousand years dominated in the Western world by the image of the immature masculine face of God nailed to a cross in the attempt to get back in touch with the Father principle.
In the Aquarian age the symbol is the water bearer and the water is the water of life, the living word, the electric current of divine fire. This water is the lost phallus and it is the return of the phallic power that quenches our thirst, the longing that is present in both our sexuality and our spirituality. God the father is no longer a distant sky god who the world has fallen away from and needs atonement with. The Father principle is right here living inside of us waiting for our recognition, waiting for us to give up our chase and fall back into his arms. And the Mother principle, the goddess that we are, is right there with him. We do not need to move away from the masculine and embrace the feminine. It looks like we have too much masculine but we do not have enough. We have lost our spiritual cock and balls and then asked the fleshy ones to compensate. We do not need to move away from the masculine and embrace the feminine. We need to let go of duality and the immature expressions of both masculine and feminine that result from loss of connection to our true source, which emerges as a life-giving stream behind and between them.
When the phallus was lost it was replaced with the obelisk and Egyptian obelisks have found there way into places of temporal power all over the planet from Washington to Rome. The obelisks are also lightning rods and it was interesting that just before the pope resigned St Peter's was struck by lightning. Lightning is the living word and when our bodies and souls are struck they resign their dominion and open to the living word. The obelisk of the soul is the ego - a substitute phallus standing up to receive the lightning. A false 'I' which must become an 'eye' through which the life giving waters can flow.
So reclaiming our phallic power is not something that only men must do or are capable of. It is a power that has withdrawn from our grasp until we realize that the true masculine and feminine principles are already united in us whatever our gender or sexual orientation; that spirituality and sexuality are not separate, and that we are already in heaven, on earth, as expressions of divine life and love.
Bruce Lyon