point. My own experience is that night and day are
more alike than different —in which case they couldn't
possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has
reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are
more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.
166
Woman Hating
Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually
female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and
misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We
know that at one time men were hunters and women
were planters. Both forms o f work were essential and
arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength
and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men
hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that
they could not run, go without food for long periods of
time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It
is probable that very early in human history women
also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival
of the species that they develop into planters — first to
supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant
and woman mortality. We see that the first division of
labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the
man in the process of impregnation, women were invested with a supreme magical power, one which engendered awe and fear in men. As they developed skill in planting, they embodied even more explicitly fertility, generation, and of course death. The overwhelming mana of women, coupled with the high mortality which went along with childbirth, could well have led
to practices of protection, segregation, and slowly
increasing social restriction. With pregnancy as the
one inevitable in a woman’s life, men began to organize
social life in a way which excluded woman, which limited her to the living out of her reproductive function.
Androgyny: The Mythological Model
167
As men began to know power, that power directly related to the exclusion o f women from community life, the myth o f feminine evil developed and provided justification for laws, rites, and other practices which relegated women to pieces o f property. As a corollary, men developed the taste for subjugating others and
hoarding power and wealth which characterizes them
to this very day.
Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is the
realization that these concepts did not originally attach
to sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (first
being) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’ai
Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation o f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender o f the noun is feminine) because o f woman’s generative function.
Am ong the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called male-
female polarities are called
