CYCLE SIXTEEN

1. Although women are capable of and, indeed, disposed to sensibility, viz. the heart and the womb in particular, it would seem to be a fact of life, confirmed by experience, that they retain a keen bias towards sensuality, particularly with regard to the eyes and the tongue, and appear, in consequence, to lack sensibility, or to have too much 'common sense'. Certainly, it would seem that they have more sensuality and less sensibility, overall, than men ... when considered in general terms. And the fundamental reason for this, it seems to me, is that the organs of outer sense to which they more naturally relate as women, viz. the eyes and the tongue, stand above the respective male, or subjective, senses, viz. the ears and the phallus, whereas the sensibilities to which men relate, viz. the lungs and the brain, stand above the respective female, or objective, sensibilities, viz. the womb and the heart.

2. Hence women have an advantage over men in sensuality but are at a disadvantage to them in sensibility, where their sensibilities are lower than the corresponding (noumenal or phenomenal) male sensibilities. In outer sense, women are accordingly able to dominate men from their higher sensuality, eyes over ears and tongue over phallus, and this is doubtless a more desirable situation, from their point of view, than the converse situation ... of not being able to dominate men because the latter have effectively turned away from women in their dedication to higher sensibilities, viz. lungs over heart and/or brain over womb, as the case may be.

3. Thus women are obliged, by necessity, to play a double game: on the one hand, they need to achieve sensibility for romantic and maternal purposes, the former more usually a precondition of the latter, whilst, on the other hand, they cannot allow themselves to become too dedicated to sensibility at the risk of losing domination, through sensuality, over men. Thus no sooner have they achieved sensibility than they are apt to return, like boomerangs, to sensuality, in order to dominate men from above, i.e. the superfeminine over the submasculine and/or the negative feminine over the negative masculine.

4. It has to be admitted that the distinction between the supernatural and the natural planes, the former embracing metachemical and chemical alternatives, the latter embracing metaphysical and physical alternatives, is effectively one of upper- and lower-class divisions, with 'upper-class' people, in this more general sense, appertaining to supernatural sensuality and/or sensibility, but 'lower-class' people appertaining to natural sensuality and/or sensibility.

5. Thus there are women, for instance, for whom emotional fulfilment of a romantic order is sufficient unto itself, without the need or even desire for maternal responsibility, while, conversely, more than a few mothers would not be able to say, with any great confidence, that they have personally experienced very much in the way of romantic passion, prior to becoming pregnant. The former would effectively be upper-class women and the latter all-too-palpably lower class. I say nothing of what could be described as a middle-class tendency to descend from romance to maternity, in due worldly fashion!

6. One can see how easy it would be to extrapolate from the above supernatural/natural distinction the notion that Space and Time have an upper-class correlation, in contrast to the lower-class correlation accruing to Volume and Mass, both of which of course appertain to the natural, as defined in terms of metaphysical and physical alternatives. Hence the 'upper-class' nature of God and the Devil, as opposed to the 'lower-class' nature of man and woman. Or, in religious terms, the 'upper-class' nature of transcendentalism and fundamentalism, as opposed to the 'lower-class' nature of nonconformism and humanism. Doubtless, Nietzsche would see in this upper/lower distinction a confirmation of his belief that Christianity is a lower-class religion, a religion not rising above woman (humanism) and man (nonconformism), or the Mother and Christ. Certainly one has to remember that it also embraces the Father and the Holy Spirit, although, as I hope to have shown in both this and earlier texts, neither of these fringe 'Christian' deities has much to do with either fundamentalism per se or transcendentalism per se, since pertinent to quasi-fundamentalist and quasi-transcendentalist deities having reference to the cerebral/lunar sphere of the 'Three in One', a sphere dominated by Christ, and hence man.

7. Thus Christianity doesn't really rise above Volume, and salvation to and by Christ is no better than to the brain, in what is effectively a nonconformist Heaven or, more correctly, Purgatory. Christianity is most definitely, in its cerebral phenomenality, a 'lower-class' religion, and therefore not properly religious, or supernatural, at all, but all-too-natural, within strictly political (humanist) and economic (nonconformist) contexts. A religion centred and/or rooted in Volume and Mass can only bog down in Volume and Mass, to the detriment of Time and Space.