CYCLE EIGHTY-ONE

1. It is generally understood that man is positive and woman ... negative, and superficially this would appear to be the case. But, in reality, man is less positive than neutral, since he is first and foremost a creature of the brain and/or intellect with a correspondence, in consequence, to the lunar limbo of purgatorial materialism. One could argue, as in fact I have done, that this correspondence implies a juvenile association and should not be considered in relation to man become properly adult. But that begs the question: When does man become properly adult, and thus fully masculine? And the answer might suggest that man is only fully himself in relation to woman, in which case we would be talking of emotional and sexual 'man', which I have elsewhere characterized as man-become-Devil and Devil-become-sin, where we do in fact have a positive correlation.

2. Yet such a correlation exists in relation to the above-mentioned characterizations rather than to man as such, and is therefore a characteristic of the Devil, of man-become-Devil/Devil-become-sin, and not of man. For man, I have argued, is not positive but neutral, a 'middleman', and therefore he cannot act in a positive way without ceasing to be himself and effectively selling-out to the Devil. Hence that which, through love or lust, has the appearance of adult man is really the Devil, who leaves man behind no less than the soul leaves the intellect behind or the sun leaves the moon behind or the heart leaves the brain behind. As soon as one departs the brain for the heart, one abandons the vertical axis of man vis-à-vis fleshy woman for the horizontal axis of fiery Devil vis-à-vis airy God, and man-become-Devil is the emotional result.

3. To contend, on the other hand, that such a departure is really juvenile-become-man is to put man in an emotional, and hence solar, relationship to the World which, besides making his essence soulful instead of intellectual, relegates the Devil (assuming he still figures at all) to a purely copulatory relationship with woman that smacks of mundane heresy, man-become-Devil being the creature who merely imposes himself upon woman for carnal ends. Alternatively, the notion that juvenile-become-devil leads, following seduction, to devil-become-man ... does about as much service, or justice, to man as the above contention to the Devil, since one would then have to regard man as a mundane creature who only achieves full masculinity in the World or, rather, through a copulatory imposition upon the fleshy earth-woman, and was therefore no less mundane - and possibly even more so - than woman. Such a reduction of man to the earth smacks of an even graver heresy than the reduction of the Devil to it, and flies in the face, moreover, of religious tradition, with its very logical placing of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost above the Mother in a transcendent realm which indicates, plainly enough, the distinction between male and female standings in relation to the World. Were man no more than a sort of positive woman, he would be incapable of envisaging a transcendent alternative to the World and its mundane essence. Fortunately, however, man is never more himself than in the neutral realm of a lunar and/or purgatorial Overworld, and it is from there that he has both the option and capacity to become either diabolic or divine, to drift towards the fiery Devil or to rise, on wings of concentrated breath, towards the airy God. Man is Son until he chooses to become either Father or Holy Ghost. No woman has this choice; for the 'Daughter of Woman' differs from the 'Son of Man' as the World from Purgatory. The World is an end-in-itself, roughly commensurate with the 'eternal feminine'; Purgatory isn't.