Chapter 2
The Taboo against the Superior Man
Dracula and Frankenstein: The Ancient Superior Man as Scapegoat for the Modern Inferior Man
I
The roots of human inversion and failure are in the childhood of Man, and in the solutions to the problems of life that the subhuman or growing individual creates in the conceived world of his childhood. The child is dependent and vulnerable, surrounded by great natural forces and parental human forces. He is weak, unadapted, without functional facility and power, and without conceptual and intuitional understanding of his experience or his ultimate situation. Thus, to the degree that he makes solutions to the dilemmas he finds in the failures of what he depends on to protect and fulfill him, the child inverts within himself and resorts exclusively or negatively to himself. The unrelieved fears of childhood dependency and vulnerability leave the childhood vision of the world intact. Thus, unless higher adaptation is made possible through the help of mature others and through initiation into higher human wisdom, the individual remains more or less childish throughout his entire life.
This is generally the case, and, therefore, most people remain possessed by an inverted or self-possessed, subjectively oriented disposition, in which functional and bodily relations with the human and natural dimensions of the world are at best complicated. The truly human obligation is for relational adaptation. But the childish solution, created wherever fear dominates the force of adaptation, is toward inversion and the pleasures that may be realized within or on one’s person, both subjectively and bodily.
The childish view of the world is the vision of vulnerable dependency. It is not the heroic or enlightened vision of the mature individual. Just so, the childish or subhuman vision of life is also represented in various forms of inverted belief or “knowledge” passed on from generation to generation. Such persuasions include the ideas of “Evil,” the “Devil,” and the “Divine” taboos against the human attainment of higher wisdom and of ecstasy (or self-release) through relational sexual love.
Higher human cultural initiation and adaptation are the means whereby individuals and societies may move beyond the inverted visions and solutions of childhood and into the higher functional responsibilities of truly human maturity. Such cultural influences are a human necessity, although, for the most part, modern societies tend to be bereft of and even antagonistic toward such influences. Industrial civilizations acquire greater and greater mechanical facility in relation to the physical universe, and, therefore, must likewise give evidence of mature responsibility for the personal and universal display of natural forces. But these same societies also continue to carry the childish and timid and also the adolescent and casually rebellious visions and solutions to life. Therefore, industrial societies tend to develop individuals who are sophisticated in their general familiarity and exploitation of the natural world, but who are inherently indisposed toward responsibility for natural forces (either in themselves or in the world).
This spell of childish and subhuman persuasions must be broken if there is to be a future, and necessarily mature, humanity. This means that individuals must be instructed, initiated, and obliged to adapt to the higher human wisdom and its ways. They must be awakened from the childhood visions of fearful dependency, and the adolescent ways of egocentric exploitation of independent and private experience. My Work in the world is, at base, an initiatory influence of this kind.
The superior or mature human being must become the goal of our adaptation and, thus, of all the educational influences we promote. True, tested, human and spiritual wisdom must be represented by the religious, spiritual, and even secular institutions of our common culture. Therefore, we must purify ourselves, our fellows, and our institutions, so that we are free of the vision of childishness. We must oblige one another to a new and higher level of adaptation or evolution.
“Count Dracula” 4 and “Doctor Frankenstein” 5 are modern literary examples of how the childish vision of life may be superimposed on the possibilities of true and mature humanity. Each of these archetypal characters is made to appear evil, necessarily doomed by his primal “sin. ” Thus, each must die or fail in order to satisfy the childish vision of the way the world works.
“Doctor Frankenstein” is simply our human obligation to accept responsibility for our individual lives, the life process, the Life-Force, the bodily structures, and the natural domain. But he and his “monster” are made to suffer and fail, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as if the presumption of such responsibility were an offense rather than a natural and sacred obligation.
Just so, “Count Dracula” is simply our human obligation to accept responsibility for the sexual process and the higher, truly human, or ecstatic and regenerative purpose of both sexuality and the living mechanisms of personal life. But he is made to appear as the incarnarion of Evil, the Devil, the Anti-Christ, so that he must be suppressed and destroyed.
The problem is that “Doctor Frankenstein” and “Count Dracula” are each even today, in the person of each human individual suppressed, mutilated, and made a scapegoat through the lies of childish, irresponsible, and subhuman views of life. The literary characters and stories themselves belong only to the realm of amusing and terrifying fairy tales. But the significance of these tales is in the neurosis of modern human societies, which still support and to a degree depend upon the subhuman masses, controlled by antisexual taboos and manipulated by fears of responsibility for great matters in general. But if the human race is not permitted to rise up in the scale of evolution, the masses and their parental controllers will eventually destroy one another.
The priestly influences of official subhuman society are found in a hierarchy, beginning with the super-parental influences of conventional religion, official science, and the unresponsive political powers of the State. These high priests are then served locally by communcations media and educational institutions, on down to our personal Mom and Dad. Such agents are parental and negative influences to the degree they do not responsibly communicate, permit, and even oblige the general population toward responsible free adaptation to higher and mature human levels of functional life. Where people are not obliged toward incarnation of the superior man, then “everyman” makes a chaos of absurdity out of the human world.
Thus, “Count Dracula” and “Doctor Frankenstein,” along with the “Devil,” and “God,” and “Jesus,” and all the other realities that have been fictionalized and degraded by the irresponsible and childish visions of mankind, must be liberated in our minds and from our minds. The Wisdom of the transcendentally Awakened Agents of the Real must somehow be made effective as the common Principle of human societies.
II
In the traditions of older societies there is commonly a convention or taboo that requires women to avoid the general company of men, and the intimate company of their husbands, during the monthly menstrual flow. The foundation of this requirement is the observation that, during the time of her periodic flow (and even during a number of days preceding it), the woman is out of balance in her energy and chemistry, as well as her emotions, her general physical state, and in her relationship to sexuality. It was felt that, in the case of most ordinary people, the force of the male could not equal or balance the female’s force at that time and, since that was so, he must avoid the woman during certain of her critical days, or else he would be in danger of losing his own vital strength through association with her.
This notion was based on profound sensitivity to the process of sexual association during the woman’s periodic flow. It was observed that the natural sympathy and effort of desire on the part of the male always moved to establish an equal or balancing intensity relative to the female. But this effort needed to go beyond equality during the menstrual time, and thus proved to be enervating to the male, creating an imbalance in his own case.
The regulation of contact between the sexes established by this principle was not at all antisexual, but a purely practical expression of sexual wisdom. It was intended to preserve harmony and pleasure between the sexes. However, in more recent, complex societies, encompassed by “civilized” demands on the individual, certain antisexual taboos and conventions have been made to proliferate in our lives and obstruct our sensitivity to natural bodily processes. At the present time, particularly in industrial Western societies, the prohibition against social and sexual contact between the sexes during the woman’s flow is barely perceived. But the general antisexual taboo is pervasive in its force.
In the progress of Western societies that led to the present state of affairs, men and women have moved from sexual sensitivity, and a valuation of both the relations and the relative independence of the sexes, to sexual insensitivity, or the general inability to inspect and be responsible for and engage the sexual process with free delight. Ths loss or suppression of sexual sensitivity has also been accompanied by a general devaluation of sexual relations (which came to be regarded more or less as “sin,” or at best as a vulgar personal indulgence) as well as a devaluation of the relatively independent character and way of life that pertains to each sex. As a result, we have produced a society where the norm is casual relations (both social and sexual) between the sexes, an almost total absence of understanding of the higher or uniquely human function of sex, a persistent sense of the wrongness or vulgarity of sex in principle, an equally persistent obsession with personal or self-oriented sexual exploitation (“unseen” by the parentlike enforcers of sexual taboos), and a general tendency toward reversal of sexual roles (in either heterosexual or homosexual relations) as well as an androgynous equalization of the sexes in general (without the realization of higher and bodily evolution and Enlightenment, which is the necessary pre-Condition for the transcendence of sexual polarization and playful differentiation in the human world).
Clearly, we must realize a responsible level of awareness of human sexuality, free of the antisexual bias. However, we must likewise awaken to an understanding of the higher and often esoteric functions of the sexual mechanism (or the generalized bodily mechanism touched upon by our sexual practice). Such responsibilities do not characterize childish people or subhuman societies, but practical wisdom of this kind has been exhibited by superior men and women and by higher human cultures since ancient times.
The present book is an effort to help this full transition in our personal understanding of human sexuality. In the process, we must awaken from our gothic fears of sexuality, and our religious disinclination toward bodily existence.
III
The “Devil” is nothing more than the Divine Reality in its Function as the Destroyer and ultimate Destiny of the sacrifice of all beings and worlds. He is “Siva,” the image of the Divine Person carrying a trident. 6 The free religious or spiritually awakened individual is not only himself restored to God, but his higher understanding restores aspects of God or the Godhead to Itself. When “sin” is forgiven, or when self is purified of its separative motivations, what was previously the “Devil’s work” (by virtue of egoic, fearful, and self-possessed fascination) becomes a matter of ordinary responsibility and sacrifice.
In modern literature, one of the most potent Satanic images is that of Count Dracula, in the novel by Bram Stoker. But the pervasive evil of this character and his deeds is itself only an expression of an inverted sense of the sexual function in Man. And, curiously, the story itself represents a cultural memory of the whole taboo against the association between the sexes during the menstrual flow of the female.
In earlier times and places, men generally avoided social and sexual contact with women during the days of the menses. However, those who were mature and representative of the higher human type were often initiated by the elders into methods for transforming various “negative” sexual indications into positive and regenerative means. Such methods are reflected in the descriptions of sexual communion in this book. Among such methods or approaches was one regarding contact with a woman during her monthly flow. The man who was truly prepared could embrace a woman during the time of menses and not only avoid enervating imbalance but actually benefit from the increased available force of the female (or the feminine, relatively passive, or “negative” and “left-sided” 7 pole in the polarized play of sex).
Male individuals trained in the greater arts and sacrificial responsibilities of sex knew not only how to compensate for and benefit by social and sexual relations during the menses of women and wife, but also how to use the force of the female in general, for regenerative purposes in the male body. And initiated females likewise knew how to use the force of the male for regenerative purposes in the female body. This yoga was common to certain classes in China, India, and elsewhere in more ancient times. In general, it was most often men who were trained in these methods, but there were frequent cases of women who were also trained in the positive regenerative sexual association with men. Whether ideal sex relations were considered to be polygamous or monogamous, the regenerative or Life-conservative practices related to sexuality were common throughout the ancient world.
In modern times, the positive, regenerative, higher, and esoteric approach to sexual relations and the sexual mechanism has become obstructed by dualistic and childishly inverted views of human life. The war of “flesh” and “spirit” has brought the world of mankind close to oblivion, and the last quarter of the twentieth century is perhaps going to be the ultimate test of our capacity to liberate ourselves from this profound lie and disturbance. The self-divided man is one in whom the psycho-physiological mechanisms of the left and right sides of brain and body are opposed to one another rather than polarized toward one another. Such a one originates Gods and Devils, Worlds and Heavens and Hells from his Own body-mind, and he lives his sexual character, male or female, as a principle of conflict with others and of independent satisfaction of self.
Thus, Count Dracula, the “Devil,” is the product of our antisexual, inverted, self-divided psychology. In him, the ancient superior man is made to wear the guise of Evil, and our conventional psyche rejects him and all that he represents to us, both consciously and unconsciously. But if we understand ourselves and cease to be self-divided, antisexual, alternately at war with the body and with “Heaven,” then we may also see the superior and even Divine qualities of Man underneath the superimposed vulgarities of Dracula.
Draculaapart from the disgusting and negative disguise given him by the modern mindis simply an ancient type of the superior man. He is a man who is free to embrace a woman during her time of menstrual imbalance, or greater force. He appears in the form of a bata blackened or evil inversion of a bird, a dove, the mind or “soul” of Man. He embraces his lover with passionate intent, as a life and death matterand mysteriously, suddenly, like the Holy Spirit descending on the future mother of an Incarnation of Truth. But he is made to kill, rather than to give and to receive Life in the positive sense. He seeks the vulnerable place of life and blood, at the throat, in the manner of an animal. But, truly, this is only an inverted acknowledgment of the yogic passageway between the trunk and the brain, and the necessity for the sexual force and the higher blood chemistry to rise to the brain and to the entire body of the regenerated individual. The white canine teeth, the eye teeth of Dracula, penetrate the vulnerable throat of his lover, again in animal fashion, but symbolizing in an inverted way the act of sexual intercourse. The pervasive presence of blood, the association of penetration or sexual intercourse with blood, is a sign of the ancient yogic practice of coupling during the menses. Dracula’s own bloody mouth with white phallic teeth exposed, duplicates the image of the sexual scene, while also symbolizing his own harmonization of opposites within himself, thus giving him the power of regeneration or relative immortality. And Dracula is given life every time he enters into embrace so that he even becomes perfectly regenerated, or immortal, as long as he continues his habit of sexual love. All the rest of the story is a pseudo-Christian accretion that mainly serves the whole notion of anti-sex and anti-Life.
Modern man, in the conventional guise of “Everyman,” fears the idea of taking responsibility for his own life, and the Process of Life itself, as it is altogether and everywhere displayed. Thus, another Gothic tale, by Mary Shelley, about the Frankenstein monster, manages to express the same psychology that inverts the ancient superior man into the “Monster,” Dracula. Doctor Frankenstein, in the ancient manner, takes bold responsibility for life, and, by acquiring the lightning power, or Life-Force, of a storm, enlivens a corpse. But Doctor Frankenstein is made monstrous, along with his “Monster,” by the inverted, antisexual and childish, subhuman mind of modern Man.
Truly, we must awaken to the ancient responsibility for sex and all the ordinary powers of Life in our own bodies. We must do this fearlessly, and return to the culture of a superior humanity, organized via a moral and esoteric order of physical and superphysical sacrifices of the individual. We must again accept our responsibility for life and death, and fearlessly embrace the bodily process of our existence, so that we may live humanly, and so that we may Realize the true Destiny of Man, which only comes through literal sacrifice and Translation of the whole and entire and individual body-mind into the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine Radiance wherein we all appear.
In the Old Testament it is suggested that Man exercise dominion over beasts and growing things. This is an acknowledgment that Man, in the form of every human individual, is not only functionally or structurally more and greater than anything else in the natural or elemental world, but that his happiness and even his survival depend on his acceptance of responsibiliry for everything in himself that is common to the rest of the natural world.
Thus, it is not merely that he is naturally superior to cattle, snakes, vegetables, and the elements, and, therefore, should force all such things into degraded submission to his own aggressive and stupid will to eat and use and do everything, and wait for understanding to come in the future, while the Cosmic Parent meanwhile keeps everything in order. Rather, the superiority of Man is in his responsibility to acknowledge that he is not merely a natural or vital creature, like the rest of the natural world. Man is structurally more and greater than the vital processes, and, therefore, he must understand, and accept responsibility for a right and Lawful relationship to what is merely vital, in himself as well as in the world.
If the individual does not accept active responsibility for his vital-physical and emotional-sexual functions, then he is reduced to these. And if he is not responsible for these functions in his own case, he will inevitably deal irresponsibly and destructively with all vital creatures and the natural domain itself.
Our science, technology, politics, and social experience bear this out. Mankind is, at this stage, generally still in the subhuman levels of adaptation, wherein responsibility for the vital functions and the vital domain is largely absent, because men and women have not aufficiently differentiated themselves from a sense of exclusive identity with the vital and elemental dimensions of themselves and the world. It is not that we must, as religious and spiritual cultists generally suggest, identify exclusively with what is not at all vital and elemental. Such would lead us into subjectivist illusions. However, we must realize that we are structurally more and greater than what is merely vital and elemental, even while we also realize that what is vital and elemental is apart of us, and the very part for which we must assume immediate and intelligent responsibility.
In our subhuman and childish condition, more or less exclusively identified with vital and physical experience, we tend to fear and avoid responsibility for the lower aspects of experience and of the world itself. Hence, we “play” with everything, but we cannot fully control our effects. We slaughter, exploit, poison, and spoil. We achieve power over great natural forces in the environment, but we cannot be the loving master of sex, or population, or industrial wastes, or international politics. Therefore, we are a destructive influence in the natural world, where beasts and elements consistently demonstrate an instinctual economy and harmony that puts our human vulgarities to shame.
The old orders of religion are the cults of this same childish irresponsibility. They support fear, dependence, and subhuman levels of adaptation and awareness. They do not do this altogether intentionally, but they do so effectively, by making consolation, mythical belief, child-parent imagery, and personal survival the core of the religious way, rather than self-sacrifice, radical spiritual intelligence, and higher adaptation.
Thus, higher or superior Man is present in this world only in the case of the rare individual, rather than in the form of the human world as a whole. And such an uncommon individual is regarded suspiciously by all. The responsibilities and the Vision he presumes make him appear like a “mad scientist” or an “evil” man of mysterious powers, in league with the “Devil.” All of this because the usual man refuses to be responsible for all that he must master if he is to be truly human and pass on to his Divine Destiny.
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Sexual taboos and the generalized sense that antisexual views and habits are humanly and even cosmically obligatory and correct are passed on from generation to generation by many means. The most influential means are those of the withholding of bodily and sexual communications. We only show and tell our children what we ourselves are not afraid to be and know. The rest is hidden behind the withholding of bodily and emotional intimacy as well as the absence of positive verbal communication about the whole affair of incarnate human experience, including sexuality.
The entire social and cultural game of antisexual, “spirit against flesh” education is so monstrous, so opposed to incarnate happiness and human responsibility, as well as the ultimate transcendental sacrifice of the individual body-mind though moral and spiritual processes, that it must be considered the primary social and even philosophical issue of our time.
We must all awaken from our loveless one-sidedness. The deluded religious and spiritual cultists are perpetually at war with the bodily life, choosing the brain-mind as if it were the Infinite. And the equally deluded anti-religionists, salt-of-the-earth political fanatics, and worldly humanistic social mechanics or scientific technocrats are perpetually at war with the higher, psychic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience.
Children of parents of the “spirit” are deprived of the energy of their incarnation, fastened to inward nonsense and the vision of a self-divided mortality that has no pleasure except away from here. And children of parents of the “flesh” are deprived of the powers of higher adaptation, fastened to cycles of endless work and reproduction, and the vision of utopian solutions that only serve those who happen to be alive when the great Future State comes.
We must awaken and adapt to the conditions of the whole and entire body-mind, and to the Way of truly human existence, which is made through personal, moral, and higher mental or spiritual sacrifice, or love. Then we will not only live in Truth, but we will withhold nothing from our children, who must always be permitted a complete bodily understanding that corresponds to their level of functional awareness, and who must be included in a culture of truly human adaptation, in which not exploitation but gradual responsibility is the key to human growth.