Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Hindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantric

sects o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cult

attached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to the

union o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. T h e culminating religious rite o f the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union o f man and woman which achieves, even if

only symbolically, the original androgynous energy.

This is the outstanding fact when one looks at yabyum

and Shiva-Shakti:

The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to the

passive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did

168

Woman Hating

the opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principle to the passive male pole, and the dynamic principle to the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhist did it the other way around. 5

The explanation for this major difference, this attachment in one case of the feminine to the passive and in the other of the feminine to the active, is that these

attachments were made arbitrarily. 6 Two convictions

vital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywhere the feminine is synonymous with the passive, receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definition of the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comes from the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity, receptivity, etc.

In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology, the phenomenological world is not created by god as something distinct from him. It is the godhead

in manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “. . . the

image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in

terms of an essentially psychological reading of the

problem of creation. ” 7 In a description of that androgynous being, we find: “He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself into

two parts; and with that there was a master and a

mistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage

Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ” 8

In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity was

Isis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous. So is Awonawilona, chief god of the Pueblo Zuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.

Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

169

older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f original human beings: male/male, male/female, female/

female. These original humans were so powerful that

the gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynous ancestry did not stop him from becoming the Macho Kid, halved them.

T h e Aranda o f Australia know a supernatural being

called Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynes

as the first beings, then split them apart, then tied them

back together with hemp to make couples. It is essentially this story that is repeated throughout the primitive world.

Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestral images o f one being with breasts, penis, and beard.

Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participate in the same devotional tradition —we perceive that they are united in sexual intercourse, but it is

also possible that they represent one literal androgynous body.

T here are still devotional religious practices which