Masculinity and femininity

As we have seen in this chapter, steroids have a number of functions in human physiology. Cholesterol is a component part of cell membranes and is found in large amounts in the brain. Derivatives of cholic acid assist the digestion of fats in the small intestine. Cortisone and its derivatives are involved in maintaining the electrolyte balance in body fluids. The sex hormones responsible for masculine and feminine characteristics as well as numerous aspects of pregnancy from conception to birth are steroids. 

Stories of past lives actually strengthened, even as they subverted, the power of the binary oppositions of man and woman, masculine and feminine. These binary oppositions were central to the theosophical cosmogony. As Blavatsky had argued in The Secret Doctrine, all manifestation involved duality, and the opposition between masculine and feminine was among the most basic of dualities. Theos-... 

Hermetic and Neoplatonic tenets into their Islamic asceticism. Like all mystics, they strove for a personal experience of the divine, so it was natural that Jabir would be attracted to alchemy. Jabir developed a theory that became common to all subsequent alchemical texts. He said that all metals seemed to contain a balance of the four qualities that is, they are cold and dry externally, and hot and moist internally. This was due to the fact that they were formed in the earth by the union of a substance that he called sulphur or earthy smoke, and another, which he called mercury or moist vapor. Sulphur and mercury became a masculine and feminine polarity in alchemy. 

To the alchemists duality is an illusion. It is the division of the Unus Mundus into opposite pairs of polarities, which were considered masculine and feminine. The fact that these masculine and feminine pairs attract each other was considered a divine gift in that this allowed them to recombine and return to unity. The alchemical Great Work, therefore, is a process of transmutation in which opposite polarities are combined, separated, and recombined to attain a state beyond duality. 

Alchemists identified numerous symbolic pairs of opposites that need to be combined and transformed in the Great Work. The polarities are always masculine and feminine pairs, such as the Red King and White Queen, Sun and Moon, Gold and Silver, or Sulphur and Mercury. These pairs are listed in masculine and feminine columns in Table 5.1. 

Besides the four elements, the Great Work was divided into four stages and each was characterized by a color black, white, yellow, and red. The Great Work consisted of separation of the Primary Material into separate masculine and feminine parts that were joined in what was called the lesser conjunction. This substance was subjected to various chemical operations until the substance was killed and left to rot in a process called putrefaction. Next the substance was separated again, bathed and purified, and then recombined in the greater conjunction. This process brought the substance back to life in a spiritual form. Because of the Great Work, the substance... 

Spence, J.T., and Helmreich, R.L. (1978). Masculinity and Femininity Their Psychological Dimensions, Correlates, and Antecedents. Austin, TX University of Texas Press. 

MASCULINUM ET FOEMINUM SEMEN — Masculine and Feminine Seed, the substance of Mercury and Sulphur. For the Mercury is transformed into Sulphur it is a spirit which possesses both natures, and is called Mercury. Out of one pound of Matter, scarcely half an ounce can be extracted. It is also called Ore, Penny, Lead, Albor Aeris Turba, folio 16, calls the Female Magnesia. The white is red Sulphur. When the two are again united, they are still called Magnesia, until the end of the cooking. It is the medium between fixed and not fixed. 

The two poles of masculinity and femininity are represented re-spectivetly by the Tigne droite and the ligne arabesque , or, in other words, the straight branch and the flowers wrapped around it. The entanglement, and ultimate fusion, of both components is at the core of Baudelaire s interest in the thyrse ... 

The stream of urine from the little boy is gray or silver, associated with spirit and with Luna, the changeable. Silver also denotes Mercurius at the beginning of the work. The girl s urine is a golden stream, which refers to soul, sulfur, and Sol. As we discussed previously sulfur and mercury represented opposite qualities of matter, often thought of as masculine and feminine. According to John Read,... 

In the operations of the Great Work, the union of masculine and feminine principles was associated with the process known as conjunction [coniunctio] .Sulphur was said to bestow, and mercury to receive, the form assumed by the material resulting from their conjunction— just as wax takes and retains the impression of a seal. There were innumerable synonyms for each of these principles, many of which were used also to denote the Philosopher s Stone. Sophie sulphur was called Sol, king, male, brother, Osiris, lion, toad, wingless dragon,..., etc. 

In the cryptic expression and symbolic representation which characterised alchemy and found a later expression in the symbols and formulae of modern chemistry, sophic sulphur and sophic mercury assumed a bewildering variety of forms. For example, they were known as Osiris and Isis, sun and moon, Sol and Luna, brother and sister, masculine and feminine, active and passive, giver and receiver, seal and wax, fixed and volatile, wingless lion and winged lioness, lion and eagle, and so forth. The Stone, when conceived as the result of the union of masculine and feminine principles, was sometimes represented as an infant. 

The view of the sulphur-mercury theory as a union of masculine and feminine principles found an expression in various pictorial representations of the so-called Hermetic Androgyne, Rebis, or Two-Thing. These designs, like so many others in alchemy, were often delicately coloured for example, the masculine and feminine half-figures of the hermaphrodite standing beside the sun-trcc (yellow) and moon-trec (blue), signified multiplication and a dragon at the foot represented the liquid menstruum. 

V Ticn considered as masculine and feminine principles, sulphur and mercury were regarded as fixed and volatile, respectively, a connotation that seems at variance with this scheme. Here is another inconsistency but if alchemy had an extra principle it was certainly not consistency. >... 

Wisdom, is also feminine. This is just the reverse of the Moon God Sin, who became Yahweh s wife Ashima Recognition of the Son as both masculine and feminine is the key to understanding western religion. 

Even the lines between men and women themselves, between masculine and feminine, are portrayed as under attack in the Bond novels. The mixed gender-marking of Vivienne Michel s Ml name—a woman s name followed by a man s name—is emblematic of the creeping androgyny that is portrayed as a menace in the Bond novels, even in this era pre-dating the women s movement of the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. 

Here, several strands of anxiety are interwoven anxiety about women transgressing pohtical and employment boundaries by entering the formerly all-male worlds of suffrage, govermnent, and commerce anxiety about the fluid nature of masculine and feminine qualities anxiety about bisexuality and anxiety about (presumably sexual) dominance and... 

In her very first writings, primarily reviews and essays for periodicals, Virginia Stephen had addressed the issues of masculine and feminine writing and the nature of their differences, the place of women in the literary tradition and the explanations for their relative absence until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1905 she reviewed W. L. Courtney s The Feminine Note in Fiction, asking Is it not too soon after all to criticize the feminine note in anything And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman The second question suggests the argument she would later... 

A number of mid-century critics, in particular those influenced by myth and archetype criticism, focused less on the ideologies of gender identity than on masculinity and femininity as principles. Mrs Ramsay becomes perceived as a representation of the mind and sensibility of the female... 

Attribution of a feminine image to chemistry implies that other disciplines of science could be considered as more masculine (i.e., physics). As discussed earlier in the chapter, in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the masculinity of the scientific fields had been ensured by restricting women s participation in higher education and public life. Masculinity and femininity were defined and redefined in light of early scientific and yet ideological constructions based on ancient prejudices. These scientific explanations justified cultural expectations... 

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