Searching for God # 92

 From thehumandivine.org, in a piece entitled, “Gender and Perception: Willilam Blake and the Fall into Male and Female, by Northrop Frye,” September 18, 2022, by Golgonooza, we read:

Blake believed that Consciousness was originally integrated, non-gendered, and ‘androgenous’ (as he terms it). Human consciousness was, before the Fall, the ‘image’ or likeness of this: indeed as the Book of Genesis itself notes: ‘God (‘the Elohim’, an honorific plural) created man in his (in their) own image, in the image of God he created he him, male and female he created them.’ ‘God’ here is originally both what we know term ‘male’ and ‘female’ denoting the integrated sexuality of the sacred. As our imagination fell, due to the advance of rationalizing and moralising (judging) processes within the brain, the world appeared increasingly literal and separate from this original consciousness. In Blake’s terms, it ‘fell’ (or divided) into a rationalizing Spectre (Adam) and a feminine Emanation  (Eve). The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought was ‘external’ to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection—what is called in literary criticism ‘the pathetic fallacy’. Except of course, it’s not a fallacy. If anything it’s a ‘phallus-y’, a newly gendered schizophrenia within the perceiving consciousness—that is to say within perception itself- which now divided into ‘subject’ and ‘object’, perceiver and perceived, active and passive, and eventually ‘male’ and ‘female’. This was the world of Eden now seen in terms of Generation, of divided opposites, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth……Blake is not interested in the separation of emanations from their primary zoas as a tale about particular women and men (in terms of gender politics), or in terms of the orthodox story of Adam and Eve as usually understood. This is an archetypal, internal, process, a fundamental structural split within the brain—a powerful spiritual self-alienation that humans have repeated in stories throughout cultures: not only in the construct of Adam and Eve, but in the narratives of Dumuzi and Inanna (Mesopotamian, Ninti and Enki (Sumerian), Askr and Embla (Norse mythology), Artemis and Orino (Grece) and its many cultural and literary variations—Circe and Odysseus, Samson and Delilah, Jason and Medea, Cleopatra and Caesar, Salome and Herod. All these ‘couples’ exist within the one psyche, the tragedies of their outcomes lies in them not seeing this.

Reading and re-typing these ideas, perceptions, and their implications in 2026, is not only enlightening; it is indeed shocking, surprising and revolutionary. For many years the subject of androgyny has not only been mysterious and thereby magnetic; it has also been quite ‘radioactive’ among both secular and ecclesial societies. Men and  women have almost without consciousness become cardboard cut-outs of stereotypical gender identities. And the divide, for many, is so radioactive as to be considered life-threateningly dangerous to cross, especially among contemporary males.

Another ‘light-bulb’ that seeps into one’s consciousness when reading and reflecting on these words and ideas, is James Hillman’s attempt to wrap what he calls archetypal psychology, a re-invention of psychology, around the principle of the archetypal. Seeing such patterns in these repeated stories of a somewhat blinded and blinding male and female relationships, integrous to multiple cultures and societies, innocent of  the original ‘androgyny’ imaginatively embodied in God, offers a magnetic and magnifying lens through which to see both Christian theology and human psychology.

And the differences, apart from not being literal but archetypal, are illuminating, not only of how we have become stuck in stereotypes but also of how we conceive, perceive, and represent God.  The stuckness too in rationalizing and moralizing, especially from a Christian perspective, judging others, and feeling permanently judged as Paul puts it in Romans 3;23: (KJV)  For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Imperceptibly yet blatantly linking such a ‘sentence’ with the list of ‘evils’ detailed in the Decalogue, among others, and then propagating criminal laws and punishments based on the commission of any of an innumerable number of ‘sins’ as a theological pattern to ‘awaken’ (frighten? terrify? scold? transform? Surrender? demean?) ‘empty’ and ‘confess’ to specific malfeasance(s) and to offer the grace of God’s forgiveness, upon those confessions, seems to, in many ways, perhaps to have missed the point of a much larger and much more deeply embedded and unconscious kind of permanent, conventional and even academic literalism, empiricism and rationalism.

Here we can see the deep and profound ‘connection’ between the thought of William Blake and James Hillman, a searcher and revolutionary in the former and a rebel and revolutionary in the latter. Recall that for Blake ‘Revelation’  (last book of New Testament) was equated with revolution as the core of what he believed was the core of the Christian theology.

One has to wonder about the depth of insecurity, and fear that has gripped centuries of Christian attempts to please and surrender to God, from the perspective of having committed various ‘malfeasances’ many of which any self-respecting culture would seek to eliminate if possible.

The irony is that given the tight-fisted and self-righteous rational judgements that have been inflicted, imposed and punished over the centuries, the relative numerical and statistical incidence of evil has not decreased, even with the promise of an eternal life in  heaven upon one’s death, following the confessions, and the surrenders and the emptying of our evil will.

The moralizing, especially of those whose words and general conduct are not conforming with the general, rational, literal, empirical, legal, medical, psychological and even theologically based ‘judgements’ has now reached a zenith beyond anything that might have been envisioned anytime in the last century.

Another fascinating aspect of the thoughts and perceptions of Blake is the universality of the cultural ‘couples’ blind to their own androgyny, crossing the boundaries of ethnicities, religions, geographies, political ideologies and literary traditions. Have we fallen victim to our own blindness about the implicit schizophrenia embedded in a divided human gender? Is that one of the reasons why, in the 21^st century, we are witnessing an explosion of incidents in which gender is being questioned, scrutinized and even biologically manipulated? Is this social and cultural explosion, to many of us both threatening and even for some disgusting, the incipient signs of a new consciousness about who we are, the nature of God and the implications of a relationship to our imagination as both relevant and essential to our recovery from our blindness?

Is it even feasible for us mortals, without the visionary imagination of a William Blake, to wrap our minds, hearts and spirits around his conception of the Fall? If it were, would we be able to envisage a theology that welcomes an archetypal, as opposed, or perhaps supplemental and complemental, to a literal, empirical, and academically endorsed epistemology? Has the Christian church so ‘fallen’ into the comfort and political correctness of a secular culture, with both its vernacular and its ‘take’ on reality, that theological exegesis has become almost exclusively literal, empirical and rational?

And if that is even imaginable, what has been the cost?

What do we lose by entrapping our “reality” in the strictures, constrictions, demands and expectations of a rational, literal world of expectations? Is such a template not potentially partially responsible for the millions of men and women who suffer from interminable, inescapable and insoluble agony of depression, worthlessnes, isolation, alienation and hopelessness? Insert the American version of an ‘ego’ that has certain specific rungs on one of many ladders of ‘success’ all of them defined in literal, empirical terms and then rationalized as both achievable and ethical and warranting cultural endorsement, into a ‘reality’ that is boundaried by the human capacity to reason, to account, to reduce to empirical literalism, and would that not likely make many of us wonder at our own blindness?

The nature of a God who seeks, first of all, to find and expose our sins, our frailties and our shame, in order to then rescue us from the damnation that has been barnacled to those sins as reinforced psychic pressure, seems to be a perhaps innocent, and yet dangerous and risky equation into which to condemn millions of men women and boys and girls.

Let’s, for a moment, take off the constrictions of the literal, the empirical and the judging and moralizing entrapment in which we have been ensnared, and wonder how we might conceptualize a return to androgyny, as men and women. While the hypothetical imaginative exercise may be anathema to some, it offers some interesting and provocative changes for each of us. For instance, men would no longer have to continually prove their (our) masculinity, in competition with millions of other males, themselves believing that ‘alpha’ male is the highest model of masculinity. Gay men would no longer feel the debasement from other men, who themselves would find new aspects of their own identities. Similarly lesbian women would no longer have to suffer the alienation that accompanies their uniqueness and their androgyny.

While it requires much more reflection, I know that the question of medically assisted gender change is one that has already presented itself in many jurisdictions, this scribe is not yet prepared to offer an opinion about such medical interventions, given that we have so little evidence of its impact on the long-term lives of those who have chosen that path.

Androgyny, as ‘natural’ and not aberration could lead us into a kind of equality and equity to which we have yet to give full imaginative consideration. A theology that embraces androgyny, too, will find multiple opportunities to ‘free’ formerly constricted and constricting images, expectations and even imaginations. And our image of God, too, could undergo a massive shift out of the gender politics of contemporary tension and conflict.

Oh, to continue to wonder, to imagine and to continue the search….for God!