maps were drawn to the specifications of this belief. I call it a
belief, but then it was a reality, the only imaginable reality. It
was a reality because everyone believed it to be true. Everyone believed it to be true because it appeared to be true. The earth
not have, in the distances, edges off which one might fall;
people assumed that, somewhere, there was the final edge beyond which there was nothing. Imagination was circumscribed, as it most often is, by inherently limited and culturally conditioned physical senses, and those senses determined that the earth was flat. This principle of reality was not only theoretical; it was acted on. Ships never sailed too far in any direction because no one wanted to sail off the edge of the earth; no one
wanted to die the dreadful death that would result from such a
reckless, stupid act. In societies in which navigation was a
major activity, the fear of such a fate was vivid and terrifying.
Now, as the story goes, somehow a man named Christopher
Columbus imagined that the earth was round. He imagined
that one could reach the Far East by sailing west. How he
conceived of this idea, we do not know; but he did imagine it,
and once he had imagined it, he could not forget it. For a long
time, until he met Queen Isabella, no one would listen to him
or consider his idea because, clearly, he was a lunatic. If anything was certain, it was that the earth was flat. Now we look at pictures of the earth taken from outer space, and we do not
remember that once there was a universal belief that the earth
was flat.
This story has been repeated many times. Marie Curie got
the peculiar idea that there was an undiscovered element
which was active, ever-changing, alive. All scientific thought
was based on the notion that all the elements were inactive,
inert, stable. Ridiculed, denied a proper laboratory by the
scientific establishment, condemned to poverty and obscurity,
Marie Curie, with her husband, Pierre, worked relentlessly to
isolate radium which was, in the first instance, a figment of her
imagination. The discovery of radium entirely destroyed the
basic premise on which both physics and chemistry were built.
What had been real until its discovery was real no longer.
The known tried-and-true principles of reality, then, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, are often shaped out of profound ignorance. We do not know what or
how much we do not know. Ignoring our ignorance, even
though it has been revealed to us time and time again, we
believe that reality is whatever we do know.
One basic principle of reality, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, is that there are two sexes, man and woman, and that these sexes are not only distinct from
each other, but are opposite. The model often used to describe
the nature of these two sexes is that of magnetic poles. The
male sex is likened to the positive pole, and the female sex is
likened to the negative pole. Brought into proximity with each
other, the magnetic fields of these two sexes are supposed to
interact, locking the two poles together into a perfect whole.
