Forging of Passion into Power/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII

SEX INSTINCTS

From the dawn of organic life on this planet up to the appearance of civilised man, every race of organisms was forced to provide food for creatures not of the same race. Each race was therefore bound, under penalty of extinction, to propagate in great excess of the amount required to maintain its own numbers.

Pause for a moment and think. For countless ages, the whole evolution of everything depended upon everybody putting into the world a thousand times as many fertilised eggs as ever were intended to come to maturity. Everyone's duty was to give to some other race, as food, a thousand eggs or babies for one that was to be reared. Slowly, very slowly, there has crept in an idea, imperfectly carried out even yet, of protecting the young, of not allowing other races to feed on one's babies. Man has cleared off, at least from all the main centres of civilisation, all of the larger races (lions, tigers, wolves, etc.) which show any desire to eat the flesh of human babies; but we have not even yet accomplished the extinction of the parasites and microbes who devour human flesh. So that even still over-propagation is to some slight extent the duty of some people. That is to say, propagation somewhat in excess of what would be normal if everyone lived to die of old age.

For all our ancestors, from the first organic creature up to a few generations ago, an amount of propagating activity which would necessarily be highly inconvenient at the present time was a solemn duty. I am using the words "solemn" and "duty" advisedly. Duty is that which is due, and everything is solemn which tends towards the organising of a higher organism. It does not follow that the individual felt solemn or was conscious of his duties. For all practical and psychological purposes an enormous amount of over-propagation was a solemn duty to our ancestors. It is so to rabbits and wild birds still. For us it is no longer a duty. But the impulse remains in the shape of a fleshly lust. What are we going to do with it?

The first thing to do with it is to treat it always in thought and word with the utmost reverence which it is in our nature to feel for anything.

What have we done with it?

We have made of it the subject of irreverent jesting and of far more irreverent moralising.

Can one conceive of anything more hideously and grotesquely irreverent than the attitude of a priest who celebrates the Eucharist after prefacing it by a sermon in which he denounces, as the inspiration of the devil, that very condition in man to which, as it exists in the wheat and vine plants, he owes the possibility of having his bread and wine to consecrate?

Normal sex-action is fertile contact between suitably differentiated polars. This may take place either in the generative organs or in the brain.

When we sing the invocation "Veni, Creator," we invite Adonai to make fertile this contact of polars. When this happens in the organs of generation we call it fecundation; when it happens in the brain we call it inspiration (artistic, poetic, prophetic, or spiritual inspiration, as the case may be).

The problem with which Humanity is confronted is that of diverting the atavistic excess of desire for contact of polars from the physically fertilisable organs to that spiritually fertilisable organ which we call "brain," and so to increase the genius of the race while keeping its numbers down to manageable proportions. The difficulty of the problem has been enormously complicated by the action of moralists.

Nowhere is the action of moralists in increasing immorality so clearly to be seen as in connection with the sex impulse; and it is therefore in this chapter that I propose to describe it.

Probably no human being, possibly no mammal or bird, has ever experienced sex-action for the first time without at least a momentary impression of the Presence of something so sacred that all else which is held sacred Is to this new impression as shadow is to substance. If this momentary Revelation of Sacredness comes to a virgin mind cumbered with no previous ideas, it runs smoothly along the course of its normal evolution to its normal goal:—a quickening of the power of sympathy and a development of the power of altruism. The individual is then free to decide whether, when, and under what conditions, he shall repeat the act, according to his circumstances and to such knowledge as he possesses, guided by the additional sympathy and altruism left behind by the act itself. He will take his own liking only as one of many factors which have to be taken into account in deciding his course of action:—as we all do in the case of a liking for peaches, or a desire to enjoy music or pictures.

But if the sudden sense of sacredness comes into conflict with some preconceived idea of degradation, evil, or triviality, in the sexual act, the effect is somewhat like that of a collision between two trains running in opposite directions. Wreckage of something or other is certain to occur; and the answer to the question what shall escape from that wreckage is a matter of what we call "accident," by which we mean that it depends on causes over which we have no control.

Consciously or unconsciously, the man is confronted with the questions:—"If that was not sacred, then what else can be so? If that Presence was the devil, then what is the use of God?" Even if his conscious thought does not ask those questions, his flesh and blood and marrow and unconscious mind ask them, and insist on their being answered.

The following are some of the answers given in the wreck of body and mind:—

1. God is in Nature, and whatever is natural is holy. The individual seeks the opposite sex as freely as a wild animal does; forgetting that the proceedings of wild animals are consonant to the true order of Nature only where there is abundant room for healthy children to roam about in and plenty of carnivorous birds and beasts to rid society of sickly and superfluous ones. The original nerve-wreckage is helped into intellectual confusion by the double sense of the word "natural"; it is used sometimes as meaning that which we feel impelled to do because the doing of it was, for our ancestors, consonant to the true order of evolution at their level of progress, sometimes as meaning consonant to the true order of evolution for our stage of progress. People mistakenly suppose that what is natural in the former sense is necessarily so in the latter.

2. Some persons "return to nature" in a different way from that just described. They deliberately turn their backs on temptation, live in the country and almost in isolation; tire themselves with manual labour; adopt a poor diet; and avoid the society of the opposite sex, and everything which can stimulate receptivity to Adonaï, the fertiliser at either pole of their nerve-battery. They think that they "find God in Nature," because they use their senses on observing His work outside of themselves. They watch the effect of fertilisation on non-human creatures, as a substitute for becoming fertile themselves.

3. Some come to the conclusion that there is neither God nor devil; nor anything but illusion. They cynically decide to make a constant amusement of the sensations which indicate the touch of that Adonaï-Adonis, whom all normal instinct hails as God, but whom moralists proclaim to be the devil.

4. Sometimes the bewildered conscience fluctuates backwards and forwards, alternately yielding to the overwhelming inspiration of the "Adonaï," and then calling Him "devil" in a fit of" repentance."

5. Sometimes the individual gives up the attempt to find his way himself amid the illogical tangle, and hands over the business of guiding him to some priest, pastor, moralist, or "salvationist," not unfrequently the very same who originally did the mischief. This, of course, is the consummation most desired by the moralising gentry, who take occasion to magnify their office.

6. Sometimes the very physical nervous structure of the man, or of his posterity, is wrecked, and sets up for itself a variety of anomalous sensations, desires, and lusts, such as no wild beast could conceive the nature of. Whereupon moralists take the opportunity to point a moral about the fallen and corrupt nature of man. Now, whoever else may have the right to indulge in lamentations about the fallen and corrupt nature of a wrecked railway train, it is evident that those who put in its way the obstacle which caused the disaster can have no such right. Moralists and teachers of religion have not sufficiently taken to heart the great truth that whatever organ of the body is thought of while the religious emotions are active tends to become turgid and excitable. They seize upon children at the critical age, and preach sexual abstinence as a religions duty; with the inevitable consequence of making it, in many cases, an overwhelmingly difficult one. They should leave that topic entirely in the hands of unemotional medical advisers, and reserve religious emotion—if they must stir it at all—as a stimulus for the faculties which it is desirable to stimulate into action.^[1] No such thing as a sound system of education can be evolved till it is accepted that receptivity of Adonaï the Fertiliser is the inalienable birthright of all creatures; it is the glory and privilege of Man to direct, at any given time, at which pole of his nerve-battery Adonaï shall descend.

Ants and bees have contrived a scheme of morality in which large numbers of the community are kept physically infertile, apparently without evolving any compensating receptivity for fresh intellectual inspiration. All the industry, the altruism, and the magnificent organisation of these highly civilised peoples have not prevented arrestation of development and of progress. Nor do they succeed in preventing us—barbarians as we are compared with them—from appropriating to our own use the results of the bees' toil, robbing ant nurseries to feed our tame fish, and scalding out the ants in millions whenever we find them inconvenient to ourselves. The message of these arrested civilisations to ours is:—Beware of irreverence to Adonai the Fertiliser; for He will not let them pass guiltless who slight Him or blaspheme His Holy Name.

Now, young mother, I know what you want to ask. What are you to say to your boy "before he goes to school"? It is not my business, as I remarked before, to form conclusions for you, or to dictate what you shall say or do; I am trying to help you to learn the Art of Thinking for yourself. There are two or three obvious truths which it would be well to get soaked into your own mind before the child is old enough to talk, and two or three mental habits which he had better form before he goes out into the world of school.

For yourself, take notice that the two more important faculties, that of thought and that of generation, are slowly passing through the same process of evolution which the faculties of sight and hearing have already passed through. Having been evolved, under pressure of the struggle for life, as implements of racial preservation, they are being gradually transformed into instruments of creative art and channels of spiritual inspiration. Read over again the last chapter and apply it to the art of generating progeny. Learn what you can about Nature's wide variety in the matter of marriage customs.^[2] This will help you to clear your mind of insular and narrow ideas.

For your child, accustom him, from infancy, to realise consciously the sacredness of order and sequence. Bring it home to his consciousness that people are not trusted to walk down stairs till they have shown that they can walk steadily on the floor; that one is not trusted to handle costly and delicate objects till one knows how to handle common ones carefully; that one is not allowed to experiment with dangerous explosives or poisons till one has shown oneself capable of dealing properly with the more harmless kinds of chemicals.

Let him see what an ugly, miserable thing is a flower whose protecting sheath has been torn away before the proper time.

Accustom him to the idea that Church is a great Drama, in which all are actors and nobody a mere audience; and that the silence, solemnity, and orderliness enforced there are rehearsals intended to get people into the right habit and attitude in which to approach the really sacred facts of Life.

Then "before he goes to school" tell him that the organs by means of which children are made are the most delicate and the most sacred things with which we have to do; that he may ask you any questions he likes about them, and you will answer him if you can; but that till he is quite grown up he must not experiment with them; and had better not listen to the talk of children who know nothing of order and sequence.

When he asks questions, answer him according to the best of your own judgment at the time. He is your child, not mine; I cannot tell exactly what ought to be said to him.

If you are under the delusion that you, or I, or anyone else knows now what opinions the best and purest people will be holding, or what line of action they will be taking, in sex matters, in twenty years from now, pray occupy some of your thinking-time in shaking yourself free from it.

But if anything can be said to be clear and certain on the sex-question, it is that a person who is going to try extra-legal experiments should not entangle with his own life that of any woman who would not have associated herself with him had she known it, and especially he should not have children by such a woman. Therefore give your child the habit of understanding that a promise once made must be kept, even if the keeping of it should prove more inconvenient than at first seemed likely; and that whoever is not prepared to keep a promise at all costs, should, at all costs, forego the convenience of making it.

There are whispers in the air of a great discovery in America about sex-action, which seems likely to revolutionise all our ideas on the subject. It has always been known to occultists that each form of worship of the concrete, from the purest Christian ecstasy to the most degraded fetish-worships, has its exact analogue in some form of sex-action, passion, or emotion. But modern occultists knew of no sex-analogue to the calm, unemotional, passionless absorption of soul and mind in adoration of The Non-conceivable Unity, which is the secret of the force of Israël. This missing link has now been recovered: the lost secret, apparently, of the higher and purer Mysteries of Egypt and the East. No one can form any conception of how this discovery may influence our whole conceptions of sex morality. The best that any mother can do now is to pray and strive that her child may grow up worthy to take a manly part in the revolution which is obviously preparing.

1. The above applies to religious emotions, such as are roused by thinking about the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, the sorrows of the Madonna, and the ecstatic utterances of saints. All such topics may seem to give self-control for a time, but are prone to leave dangerous reactions unless the force generated is immediately carried off in some active work. They are therefore most safely employed as stimulus to beneficence and the doing of duties. The same caution does not apply to calm religio-philosophical absorption in the thought of the Infinite Unseen.
2. Grant Allen's Story of the Plants is a simple, cheap, useful little book, and contains a large quantity of information on the subject.