CYCLE TWELVE

1. At bottom mankind are evil, for life is rooted in metachemistry, but some are more evil than others, even on a gender basis, and none are more evil than those who most approximate to a metachemical lifestyle and/or status in space-time devolution, whereby the evil of noumenal objectivity is the mean, and things are accordingly orientated towards a per se order of will.

2. But if mankind are at bottom evil, they are also capable of and variously given to goodness, folly, and wisdom, since life is not just a matter of metachemistry but also of chemistry, physics, and metaphysics, as it devolves away from the Devil in woman, and evolves away from man in God.

3. Generally speaking, goodness is no less the desired alternative to evil on the objective, or female, side of life than wisdom the desired alternative to folly on its subjective, or male, side, wherein wisdom is normally associated with an avoidance of folly and, hence, an undue emphasis on the physical aspect of things.

4. Yet there will always be people who are demonstrably more or most of one thing rather than another, and usually this follows from a predetermined orientation in the self, the central nervous system, towards one element as opposed to another, whether on not on the basis of gender or class (which latter has intimate associations with build, i.e. height, weight, and so on).

5. Certainly I do not agree with Nietzsche that woman is at bottom base while man is only evil, or something to that effect, for life tends to demonstrate the opposite - namely that man is at bottom base, or physical (and hence foolish), while woman is fundamentally evil, or metachemical (and hence cruel), even though the genders are capable of elemental cross-overs, so to speak, to a comparatively limited degree.

6. There is much more gender immutability to life than mutability, and gender is only one factor in an equation that needs to consider class before one can reasonably distinguish 'the evil' and 'the good' from 'the foolish' and 'the wise'.

7. Just as metachemistry and chemistry are germane to the female, or objective, side of life, so physics and metaphysics are germane to its male, or subjective, side, irrespective of the paradoxical extents to which females strive to be physical or metaphysical and males, by contrast, to be chemical or metachemical.

8. For fire and water, the primary elements, are objectively distinct from the secondary elements of vegetation and air, and it is as inconceivable that the primary elements could be male as that the secondary elements, with their subjective bias, could be female. Males are very definitely the second sex, whether as men in relation to women or, up above in the noumenal realms of space and time, as gods in relation to devils.

9. In an age when sensuality rules the roost in 'once-born' and therefore outer terms, it follows that females will have the upper hand over males, that the primary sex will take precedence over the secondary sex, in what amounts to a heathenistic norm of objective domination, whether negatively or positively.

10. The modern age, stemming from the nineteenth and even, to some extent, the eighteenth century, clearly demonstrates the hegemony of the female side of life over its male side, whether phenomenally in relation to the hegemonic standing of volumetric volume over massive mass, or noumenally in relation to the hegemonic standing of spatial space over sequential time - the former tending to be symbolized by 'Britannia' and the latter by 'the Liberty Belle'.

11. Such an age is clearly one in which chemistry and metachemistry, water and fire, are hegemonic over physics and metaphysics, vegetation and air, and it is also demonstrably the case that the mode of this objective hegemony is less religious (and supreme) than secular (and primal), so that negativity tends to overshadow positivity in the gradual drift, or degeneration, of society from the organic to the inorganic, as from (in objective terms) nonconformism and fundamentalism to realism and materialism.

12. Hence what could be identified, in broad terms, with Anglo-American civilization, that dominant feature of the modern West, has passed from an organic phase in which the hegemony of objectivity was avowedly, if falsely, religious, to one in which, with the rapid increase of technology and urbanization, the hegemony of objectivity, ever characteristic of a female orientation, is in its inorganic phase, and the prevailing criteria of sensual existence are accordingly primal rather than supreme.

13. It is as if the nonconformist domination of humanism in the phenomenal case and the fundamentalist domination of transcendentalism in the noumenal case have been eclipsed by the realist domination of naturalism on the one hand and the materialist domination of idealism on the other, making for a situation in which the personal and the universal modes of sensuality stand in the more overly heathenistic shadow, so to speak, of its geologic and cosmic modes.

14. Hence modern life, with its rampant technological and urban expansion, signifies the sensual hegemony not so much, in phenomenal terms, of strength and pride over knowledge and pleasure as of weakness and humility (if not humiliation) over ignorance and pain, where this gradual eclipse of heathenistic supremacy by heathenistic primacy is concerned, the personal inexorably losing ground to the geologic.

15. Likewise, in the noumenal context above the phenomenal one, which is more characteristic of America than, for instance, of Britain, one finds that the sensual hegemony is not so much of beauty and love over truth and joy as of ugliness and hatred over falsity (illusion) and woe, as the eclipse of heathenistic supremacy by heathenistic primacy runs its cosmic - and in some sense cosmic-slavering - course, to the detriment of universality.

16. It is obvious that no mode of objective hegemony, not even supreme, is conducive to a sensibly-run society, and that Protestantism, as we may call the supreme manifestation of such a hegemony, merely paved the way, in an ever-more technology- and urban-oriented fashion, for the wholesale primacy which characterises the contemporary West, whereof realism and materialism are the respective rulers of a secular roost.

17. I cannot myself endorse a society in which negative values are paramount, and even the dominance of positive values is objectionable to me when they so clearly manifest the hegemony, in female fashion, of either chemistry over physics or, worse again, of metachemistry over metaphysics. For such hegemony is frankly anti-Christian and thus symptomatic of organic secularity, no matter how much it may hide behind a mask of religion.

18. And whatever is anti-Christian is bad for the male side of life, flies in the face of that sensible teaching which decrees a male salvation from sensuality to sensibility as the only guarantor of release from the curse of male subjection to female domination, whether in relation to physics or, more wisely, to metaphysics.

19. Thus objectivity stands against subjectivity as freedom against binding, freedom for the female side of life to be objectively hegemonic over its male side, and to bear witness, in ever more primacy-oriented terms, to the domination of realism over naturalism and of materialism over idealism, of water, in simple elemental terms, over vegetation, and of fire over air.

20. Such a domination does not come about without the necessary technological and environmental preconditions, and once they are there it is difficult, to the point of inconceivable, to imagine a return to supremacy even on secular terms, Protestantism itself having succumbed to the negative goodness and negative evil which geologically and cosmically orientated societies so obviously demonstrate.