The Realm Domestic

Dear friends,

The house is the centre of our lives. The farm is an extension of the house and the country is an extension of the same principle. Where territory ends is the boundary. The influence of Buddhism has made people feel guilty about thinking in terms of separation of forms but Buddhism is preventing people from seeing how the lower reflects the higher. Each part contains the whole. When you take a bucket of water out of the sea it seems on the material level that you are separating part of the water from the whole but on the level of pure idea the small portion of sea in your bucket contains the whole of the sea. It is part of the archetypalproperty of the sea that at some stage it is contained in the bucket. There is on the archetypal level only one bucket which is containing everything in every moment of existence including the person carrying the bucket.

 The house itself is an extension of the womb. At the centre of the house is the fire which is the means of nourishment. It is a curiosity of Latin that the word pater meaning father is the origin of the word pateria meaning bowl which is a feminine noun and patria meaning native country which is also a feminine noun. (It is often misleadingly translated as fatherland.) The explanation lies in the change of language. Originally pater meant giver of nourishment, then protector, then father. The word father means mother. Having clarified this point there should be no confusion from now on. To continue with my clarification of matriarchy - sorry, patriarchy - well, one of the two - the Latin for house is domus from which we get dominion and comes from the Indu-Aryan root dma from which we get mater meaning mother. The Greek form is meter from which we get the name Demeter of the Goddess of the Eleusian Mysteries.
Originally Jupiter must have meant the same. Some people argue that mater means matter butthe Latin for matter is materia. The -ia suffix denotes something in a state of being. Materia is in a state of being made while mater is the creative principle acting upon it. It also meansmeasure proving that matriarchy is not an anti-intellectual earth society.

 The problem comes from J. J. Bachofen's far fetched arguments to prove that every Goddess is an earth Goddess, using nature, agriculture, thrones and even the moon to symbolize the earth. He carries a lot of influence because he was the first to publish on matriarchy but it is probable that the reason he was the first was because he was the first to write on the subject in a form that was acceptable. He is supposed to be discredited but his phallic and earth mother symbolism is still indirectly influential through Freud and Jung. It is not the purpose of farming to make earth. Crops are the transformation of earth into energy. The food has to be brought to the house fire to be cooked. We go to work in order to bring money home and then take themoney out in order to bring purchases home. The national economy is based on taxation going into the treasury and out again into government spending where it occasionally does something useful. Everything moves into the centre and out again. The central concept of matriarchy is not earth but the fire of transformation. It is logical because it has to be aware of every possibility. It is for this reason that electrical heating is not contemplatively correct because it does not draw air into the house. The fire is also a ventilator. Bottle gas heaters are also not contemplatively correct as the purpose of the chimney is to create a column of air rising skywards.

It is important to remember that these symbols are not just projections of the unconscious mind but represent an objective reality reflected into the mind.

Food has to be cooked so fire is an important part of nourishment. In fact the whole point of nourishment is to maintain the vital force within us which is circulated by means of the blood. Blood must therefore consist of fire contained within water. The easiest way to cook is to place fire under water. The purpose of cooking is to make the food digestible which means the overcoming of consolidation of forms by the fire of transformation and activity. The simplest form of nourishment is milk which is a liquid that contains life and therefore must be fire within water. Since a cow is an earth animal its archetypal function consists of mediating the Spirit into substance in order to maintain substantial forms. This is why the cow is crowned with the psychic crescent the representation of which is frequently found in Minoan Crete. Receptacles for containing nourishment perform the same archetypal function as the breast.

The word sacrifice means sacred doing. Rituals were often performed in the ancient world as public festivals with a holiday atmosphere. There must have been children present and some people who had too much to drink. If there were any closing down rituals people will have often gone home before them. If the forces you are working with are pure nothing dangerous can happen just because of carelessness. If unpleasant things happen in a ritual consider what you are working with rather than your technical correctness.

The lower vehicle has to conform to the higher. The house is a microcosm of the world and the chimney symbolizes the World Pillar (which can manifest as a hole as well as a pole) created by the descent of the Spirit.

Now for the part of Bachofen's writings which actually have been discredited, that the Lycians took their names from their mothers and not their fathers. He is supposed to have failed to distinguish between matriarchy and matriliniarity but this is pedantry. Bachofen was right when he said that women represent stability but he could not accept where this led to. He argued that women represent passivity and men action and that the two interact. Well, passivity does not interact with anything because it does nothing. He then goes on to loose speculations about phallic symbols. He argued that walls are phallic despite their enclosing nature. The walls of a house are substance that has been actualised to conform to an idea. The building of a house starts with an architect's plan. Substance is formless until idea is impressed upon it to give it shape so that substance maintains harmony with activity and protects created beings from dissolution. What people overlook when they see tools as phallic symbols is that the conforming of substance is a flowing into an idea. Just as the circumference of a circle is a radiance of its centre so the walls of a house are a radiance of the fire contained within the hearth. The square is formed by moving the diameter sideways until it touches the circumference. A square is a circle with an external diameter. The actualisation of substance by the idea is possible by means of the elemental fire of transformation.

 What Bachofen did not want to admit was that it is the shaping of the earth and not the earth which has feminine symbolism. We cannot eat earth. The vegetable is earth that has been conformed by an idea so as to be transformed into a state of energy. Similarly the bricks of a house are earth shaped, fired and shaped again. People are not prepared to accept the conclusionthat all this points to; that building work is a feminine activity. The building of a house is necessary to contain the fire. Feminine activity is not based on irrational Maenadic outbursts. The house fire is under control. It is a symbol of the gentleness of feminine strength.

If the name descends through the female line a woman must stay at home when she marries and a man leave to join his wife's household. Now we begin to understand why there are two sexes. Marriage creates a bond between the house a man leaves and the house he joins. A matriarchal society cannot be promiscuous. It is home and family orientated. However, a woman's body is a magnet for men. Attempts to establish male pin-ups have not been particularly successful and generally involve a woman in the same picture as the man. Female pin-ups do not. In Aristophanes's play The Frogs he said that an initiate of the Mysteries danced in a dress torn in a scuffle so as to expose the nipple but it is more likely to have been deliberately cut to expose. It may seem surprising for mystics to behave this way but all energy comes from the Spirit and excitement is of spiritual benefit. Anyone who meditates regularly will realize the benefit of livening up the mind as well as the impossibility of keeping sex out of the mind by an effort of will. The total nudity of Witchcraft is a less subtle derivative. Total nudity is not exciting. Magic cannot work better when naked if it works as well to the other side of the world as it does to next door.

If Wicca really is a survival of a secret tradition it is likely to have survived in many variations some of which are likely to still be secret. The ones that stay secret the longest are likely to be the ones that leave the least historical record. It is important to remember that Aristophanes was describing a dance and not a ritual as he would not have been allowed to see a ritual. The explanation for net designs on the dresses of statuettes found by archaeologists is that they actually wore nets. When the bare breasted Minoan dresses are taken into consideration this is not an impossibility. A matriarchal society would have to encourage late marriage and that means creating releases for sexual tensions. The grandmother is the senior parent. The whole point of a child obeying the mother is that she symbolizes the Celestial Mother to the child, for which reason the mother must continue to obey the grandmother.
The correct relationship between men and women is not physically possible on this level of existence as it involves the man flowing into the heart of the woman and interpenetrating her body. Now you know how to see eye to eye. The closest possible action we can get to it is impractical as it involves the man running in circles round the woman while she walks in a straight line. The reason why we have ritual, games and dances is so that we can perform actions which are spiritually correct but serve no practical purpose.

Pagans are arguing that they are correcting a society which is imbalanced on the male side by making the masculine and feminine principles correspond but there has always been as many women as men and they have always been expected to behave in ways appropriate to their sex. We are being lumbered with yet another Great Revolution to challenge everything in declamation and change nothing in practice. It depends on what you believe correct behaviour is. If a man rapes a woman a woman being raped corresponds to the raping and even corrects animbalance if it is the imbalance you want to correct. According to Bachofen's theory that the male is action and the female is passivity the immoral action occurs when the woman resists the rape. There is no act of violence which is not active. If the woman successfully resists she must be correcting something that it wrong and can only do so by having the power to do so. It is wrong for weakness in women to be sexually attractive. Magnets are made of iron.

It is important to remember that all physical activities and objects are possible manifestations and nothing on the physical level is absolute. There is no such thing as sexualsymbolism as an absolute principle for the same reason that it would be wrong to see a football as a manifestation of a cricket ball. Sex is one of the possibilities contained within the symbolism.

People do not grasp what mystical symbolism really leads to. It means that by acting from the pure idea of our actions we are free from the inertia of matter and different things become possible. We cannot assume that the material limitations we find in the world will always apply and use them as immutable principles to base mystical philosophies on. If all this seems far fetched remember that without will you would not even breath and without idea
you would not make a movement. The secret is to combine will with idea.

May She be with you,

David.