Daily Meditation: Friday, May 6, 2005

Primitive androgen - its symbolism

05/06/2005

The idea of the original androgen, the perfect being who possesses the twofold nature of the masculine and feminine, can be found in one form or another in most of the great religious and philosophical traditions. Even the Book of Genesis carries a trace of this idea, since certain cabbalists have interpreted the episode in which God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs as a reference to the separation of the sexes. The alchemists, too, see in the mineral world this polarity of masculine and feminine, which they express in the symbol of the Rébis, a word which means ‘twofold thing’. The Rébis is a figure in the shape of an egg (the egg being a symbol of the totality), and within it is a body with two heads: the head of a man surmounted by the sun (the masculine principle), and the head of a woman surmounted by the moon (the feminine principle). All these traditions reassert the idea that creation is the result of the polarisation of the whole. With regard to human creatures, each represents only one half of a whole. This is why men and women perpetually feel incomplete and can live in peace only when they have found their other half.