The Hermetic Environment and Hermetic Incest: The True Androgyne and the "Ambiguous Wisdom of the Female"

Michael Manning: Under the Venusberg: Tannhäuser, Beardsley and Me

... Laboring under the shadow of his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, his interpretation of L'Morte De Arthur had all the trappings of their chaste and higher-minded romantic fantasies but with dark-side twists that always left me both fascinated and vaguely uneasy. In Beardsley's Arthurian tableau, the sexually-neutral androgyny that characterized Burne-Jones' work was pushed to the level of parody. Lancelot, Guinevere, Tristram and Isolde were transformed into incestuous hermaphrodites, confronting one another in scenes suffused with a deadly languor or a decidedly unchaste almost vampiric urgency. The starkly ornamental scenes, their borders entangled in coils of spiky flowers, seemed strangely claustrophobic; voyeuristic views of chambers draped with barely-parted curtains and shadowy twilight landscapes filled with gleaming mirror/pools, trees that resemble ornamental tapers and candles that look like sex toys. ...

If my work and Beardsley's can be said to have any similarities beyond the purely technical, it would probably be on the theme of the hermetic environment. Beardsley saw Tannhäuser's subterranean Venusberg as a jumping off point for the creation of an inner world of total sexual license -- an elaborate stage on which deliciously decadent fantasies, repressed by the society of his day, could be played out without regard to social order or gender, safe within the womb of the Goddess.

Shaalis the Sacred Androgyne is my Venus, "S/He who delights in that part common to both Hir men and Hir women," the Goddess incarnate with both cock and cunt who accepts the intimate worship of Hir slaves (beautiful men and women made equal by gender transformation) while dispensing Hir sacrament through blood ritual and sodomy. I took narcissism and the mirror, two other recurrent themes in Beardsley's work, to an incestuous extreme with Shaalis' former lover, Squamata Serpentine. She and her sister Lichurna are the ultimate fantasy/cautionary tale of falling in love with your own image.

Theirs is a truly hermetic existence, a divided soul locked in a self-devouring embrace while their sex-starved Tengu slave Gion is reduced to sucking himself off for their pleasure. I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time I first started drawing them (there are versions of Shaalis and Squamata that date back to my high school days) but now when I look at the Sister's snaky locks and contortions and Shaalis' regal perversity, I can't help but see echoes of Beardsley's Athenian bacchantes from Lysistrata and L'Morte De Arthur's witchy androgynes.


The True Man

In The Great Triad, Rene Guenon describes the True Man as the being who has actualized all his possibilities as a man. True Man is also man as he is in the Primordial State, in contrast to the “ordinary man” or today. Using the initiatic formula “Heaven is his father, earth is his mother”, man can be described as the Son of Heaven and Earth, thus is the third term of that triad. ...

The fall of the True Man from the Primordial State is the result of a decentering, a change in consciousness to exteriority from interiority. Now the Primordial State is the Androgyne of the Alchemists, that is, the perfect balance of the male and female principles. From the center, he is the unmoved mover, and his actions are wei wu wei, or non-acting activity.

We see that the shift from the ordinary state to the Primordial State represents, spiritually, a transition from a passive, yin, or feminine state of existence to a more active, yang, or masculine state. This is the opposite of the “macho” man, obsessed with frenetic activity for its own sake and focused solely on material life. Yet, when esoteric teachings enter into the popular domain, they are completely misunderstood by those at the hylic and psychic level. When such types hear of the Androgyne, they can only envision a feminization of man, that is, a exterior type of man taking on more effeminate characteristics. Thus the epicene man of today, common in the West, regards himself ipso facto as an advanced spiritual being. Unfortunately, this occludes the true spiritual nature of man and discourages many more masculine men from developing themselves in that direction.

WB [Wild Boy] comment:

The ‘androgyne’ is not a hapax legomenon in Evola’s work, but occurs time and again. It’s all well to say, “Well, of course, he’s not talking about, well, you know…” But if not, then what on Earth IS he talking about?

Of course, words like ‘epicene’ are culturally determined. I think ‘Alan Alda’ and of course that kind of “sensitive liberal man” would be loathed by Evola. Funny thing is: look at Evola’s passport photo, for example: fancy suit, monocle. He’s a FAG by today’s standards, determined as they are by the rise of the telluric negro [Evola's definitive essay on 'America Negrified'].

Childless, never married, interested in "sex magic." Hmmm. Mighty suspicious if he were, say, running for Congress. And what would the judaic-inspired “family values” crowd think of his mockery of marriage and population growth in Men Among the Ruins or Ride the Tiger?

Here is what E. says in “Serpentine Wisdom” [i.e., Taoism], after describing the Man of Tao who ‘acts without acting’ etc.:

“How disheartening to those who uphold the myth of manhood based on muscles and metallic strength: this alone is the TRUE man, the ABSOLUTE man. He [Evola's ideal] absorbs within himself the ambiguous virtue of the female…. ‘The Way that is the Way is not the ordinary way’ indeed…”

In The Hermetic Tradition, Evola expands on the idea as involving a becoming female [Hercules in drag], as it were coming under the domination of the Woman as a necessary stage; the salient point is, does one remain so, or does one conquer the female [the Hermetic Incest] and thus acquire her unique powers for oneself.

Now, does that make a difference or not?

Brunhild the Valkirie from Michael Manning's The Nibelungen

If you look at popular culture, it’s clear that the ‘fag’ is not just the simpering queen, or Alan Alda, but also any White man acting in the light of the Aryan ideal. Dressing well, speaking correctly, acting modestly, well read.

The average “Traditionalist,” reading books and even knowing several languages, is clearly considered a fag.

To the extent that a culture, like America, takes the Negro as the Ideal Man, then that ideal will be psychic, even material; and vice versa, the causality is not important here.

To the extent that a culture adheres to Aryan ideal, rooted in the primitive Mannerbund, then it will not be a culture that idealizes the brute, but the warrior, Greek or Icelandic, who triumphs in battle and then spontaneously recites poetry. Long blonde hair flowing, he will more closely resemble Leif Garrett than Puff Daddy. Pausanias, not Alcibiades or Themistocles.

They certainly won't look like the Right's little pets, and the Left's Brer Rabbit style nightmare, the "skinheads," who, with their shaved heads, dull uniforms, poor impulse control and abominable taste in music, from reggae to "Northern Soul," bear all the marks of the telluric negro. Although the boys at Soiled Cinema are right that:

Since most so called “progressive” bourgeois liberal and cosmopolitan types seem to think highly of themselves due to being proponents of pacifism, equality, peace, and other fantastically absurd pseudo-virtues, what better wake up call for them than being gang raped by a brigade of Neo-Nazis?

As for for being "safe within the womb of the Goddess," Camile Paglia has suggested [Vamps and Tramps, pp. 56-69] that while drag was a way of propitiating the Goddess, the post-Stonewall adoption of the pretend-macho "gay clone" [a close relative of the skinhead, but PC-Leftist version] and denigration of drag and any hints of 'effeminacy' caused a reaction from Mother Nature in the form of AIDS.

Well, it's a theory...