Freud chose the wrong version o f the right story.
Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne. Here is the substance o f a cultural underground most directly related to us. According to the Zohar,
the first created woman was not Eve but Lilith. She was
created coterminous with Adam, that is, they were
created in one body, androgynous. T hey were o f one
substance, one corporality. God, so the legend goes,
split them apart so that Lilith could be dressed as a bride
and married to Adam properly, but Lilith rebelled at
the whole concept o f marriage,, that is, o f being defined as Adam ’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in fact the first woman and the first feminist both. T h e Jewish
patriarchs, with shrewd vengeance, called her a witch.
They said that the witch Lilith haunted the night (her
name is etymologically associated with the Hebrew
word for night) and killed infants. She became symbolic
o f the dark, evil side o f all women. O f course, Lilith,
we know now, made the correct analysis and went to the
core o f the problem: she rejected the nuclear family.
God, however, saw it differently — he had created Lilith
from dust, just as he had created Adam. He had created her free and equal. Not making the same mistake twice, Eve was created from Adam's rib, clearly giving
her no claim to either freedom or equality. It took the
Christians to assert that since the rib is bent, woman’s
nature is contrary to man’s.
How then can we understand the biblical statement
that God created man in his own image —male and fe
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male created he them? The Midrash gives the definitive answer:
a corresponding Jewish androgynous godhead. The
very word for the godhead,
feminine noun and a masculine plural ending. God
is multiple and androgynous. The tradition of the
androgynous godhead is most clearly articulated in the
Kabbalah, a text which in written form goes back to the
Middle Ages. The oral Kabbalah, which is more extensive than the written Kabbalah, originates in the most obscure reaches of Jewish history, before the
Bible, and has been preserved with, according to occultists, more care than the written Bible —that is, the Bible has been rewritten, edited, modified, translated;
oral Kabbalah has retained its purity.
The Kabbalistic scheme of the godhead is complex.
Suffice it here to say that god is male and female interwoven. Certain parts are associated with the female, other parts with the male. For instance, primal understanding is female; wisdom is male; severity is female; mercy is male. Special prominence is given to the final
emanation of the godhead, Malkuth the Queen, the
physical manifestation of the godhead in the universe.
Malkuth the Queen is roughly equivalent to Shakti. For
the Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacrament is sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny.
Just as the Tantrics are/were ostracized by the rest of
