Continuing on from my last oh-so-cheery entry... (consider that a minor content warning)

I once had a vision, which I have referred to in the past as "the death of the feminine principle." I've finally decided to share some additional details of this vision.

The main plot of the vision involved the herding of all earthly female entities (not just human ones, although they were the most visible and came in all races, sizes, ages, etc.) into some kind of Gigeresque complex. Those who had proved themselves more 'masculine' by traditional criteria (e.g. reason over emotion, mind over body, spirit over flesh, etc.) were 'installed' into cybernetic contraptions.

These overseers or 'queens' interacted with various bio-machinery in the complex so as to bring about the containment, classification, silencing, blinding, torture and extermination of all their various 'sisters.'

Once all things female were dead and their bodies piled in an orderly manner for efficient flushing into the abyss, the cybernetically enhanced female entities would also be slaughtered by the bio-machinery. And then, even the bio-machinery would self-destruct, leaving the universe's masculine entities with clean hands. (I assume actually that in this vision, all masculine entities had already long shed the inconvenient dross of their bodies and retired to some ethereal realm from which to observe the final flushing-and-evacuation of the world, leaving the female entities to 'finish the house-cleaning.' )

In any case, it was made clear in the vision that whatever 'God' ruled this (speaking as a feminine entity) nightmare universe, 'He' (and it was in this case most explicitly a 'He') had planned everything and that plan was now being executed perfectly, in all its violent glory. i.e. there are two lists...

Feminine Earth Gross Matter Conditioned Existence in this Life Emotion Physical Bodies

Masculine Heaven Ideal Form Unconditioned Infinity after Death Reason Eternal Souls

... and everything on the right was to be raised up while everything on the left was to be cast down. Which made me wonder why this oh-so-perfect 'God' wasted 'his' time even creating anything feminine in the first place... probably part of the whole usual gnostic view of earthly life as some kind of big mistake. Not sure what that's supposed to imply about the omniscience and omnipotence of God, but hey, what do I know, I'm just a girl...


All that said, let me be clear about this: It's obvious to me as I'm sure it is to many of you that one could swap "masculine" and "feminine" in the above lists without damaging the internal logic of the lists all that much. So instead of say, Gaia vs. Zeus, we have Athena vs. The Green Man, or whatever, and the rest of the list content remains consistent. Fine.

Or you could take gender off entirely, since all human beings have both reason and emotion, body and soul, etc. (Or so we now tend to believe, as I'm pretty sure women were deemed incapable of reason and heaven-exempt-due-to-lack-of-soul at some point historically, if not many points.) Again, fine.

My central point of concern, however, is not which side of the binary the feminine is on, but that, regardless of whatever title one wants to slap at the top of that left-hand column, one form of apocalyptic logic demands the wholesale elimination of this column. It does just so happen that the feminine has often been associated with this column, but I will leave the apparent misogynistic implications of this on one side for now because although obviously there are important issues there, they are not the issues that truly drive my obsession with this vision.

Rather, I am disturbed primarily by the implication that this world of matter here-and-now (whatever its gender or lack thereof) is disposable. This idea can be (and, I'm very confident, has been and is) used to support all kinds of very questionable political/social actions or lack of action, for instance: why should we conserve resources, why should we try to address injustices, torture is suddenly justified if it saves someone's soul, killing yourself and others as a service to that which you understand as infinity is okay, those more 'of the flesh' (e.g. women as per the historical understanding, going back to misogyny for a moment) than 'us' are not treated as full human beings, etc. etc. Whereas if religion admits that there is value in this world, instead of only looking to the next and/or hoping for 'the end' of this world, at minimum it seems these ideas will have less of a purchase.

It also concerns me that, if one sees the world as disposable, this seems to imply a profound disrespect for one's personal history and all the people who make one's life what it is. That is, even if one believes that there is no 'real you' and no thing/relationship/idea/etc. defines or should define you, the fact still remains that one's life, by virtue of being a life, contains various things, people, relationships, ideas, etc. which one has to interact with. To treat all these elements of existence dismissively if not contemptuously, and to view such an attitude as spiritually and morally edifying, strikes me as... odd? Vaguely repugnant? Unsettling if nothing else... but maybe that's just because I'm not so 'enlightened'...

... bah. Personally I am 'for' that left-hand column, not in the sense that it should overrule the right-hand column, but in that I think it has its worth and its place such that it is not ontologically/eschatologically inferior, much less disposable. Put less philosophically, if the apocalypse was to be anything like my vision, that is one of the few things I would consider worth fighting against. i.e. See my novel, which I've started working on again lately...

Hmm. Well that entry took ages to write, even without any extended tangential feminist ranting. Lighter content next time... maybe.