Although it is more usual, in mainstream religions, to regard gods and goddesses as distinct and separate, there is a long history in occult and mystical writings of spiritual androgyny: the assertion that male and female qualities were originally contained within one deity. References to a race of androgynes which once inhabited the world, only to be separated into male and female as a punishment for offending the Gods, occur in the myths of both East and West. This primordial androgyne transcended the duality of gender and united male and female in wholeness and completion. (1) It is to be found, for example, in the writings of certain of the cabalists, Neo-Platonists, Swedenborgians as well as Theosophists. In these occult traditions, Adam was an androgynous being who fell from androgyny into gender. In the prelapsarian Adam, the male parts represent humanity and the female the divine. Life can only be complete when the duality of gender is transcended and male and female are reunited. The myths are frequently inconsistent. For example, in the Christian tradition, some authorities state that the Primordial Adam had the physical sexual characteristics of both sexes, whilst others believe that the first Adam was an entirely spiritual being whose non-corporeal nature can be imagined as sexless, beyond sex, or comprising both male and female. All agree, however, that the separation into genders occurred with the Fall.
The magical quest for the resolution of opposites and the spiritual search for redemption are frequently stated in terms of the abolition of gender differences. This, too, is often stated in different ways. It may, for example, to be taken to mean the possession of both sets of sexual characteristics or the absence of all such characteristics in a state that transcends difference. Alchemically, it is the summation of the Great Work whilst theologically it may be equated with Redemption: masculine and feminine are reunited in Christ and spiritual unity is achieved again. The occult importance often given to the sexual act is that orgasm mystically reunites, momentarily, separated souls and brings the participants mystically closer to the absolute (see Gibbons, 1996). This idea also occurs in Gnostic texts, where the union of man and wife can be seen as the actualization of divine love, a reformulation of the doctrine of spiritual androgyny in which sexual intercourse is a sacrament, at the climax of which the partners come closest to God:
When you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female… then you will enter the Kingdom.
Gospel of Thomas, 22
Notes
1. Gibbons, B.J. 1996. Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought. Cambridge: University Press.
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