Love Loses: The False Union of Sodomitical Sex

Disclaimer: We are writing this short, introductory article on Love and its subversion by the modern ethos not because we are 'disappointed' or in any way scandalized by the recent SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage; we accept this event as something of an inevitability, a kind of 'symbol' in Spengler's meaning of the ever-hastening decay of Western Civilization. We have long come to terms with the fallenness of the West and, save for the intervention of supernatural sources, with the impossibility of its salvation or the retrieval of its earlier health. We are simply using this event as an excuse to proliferate an essential critique of homosexual perversions, to investigate how the phenomenon of gay marriage symbolizes or indeed epitomizes the modern weltanschauung, and finally to reinforce the traditional, supramoral perspective on Love.

Secondly, while we understand the definition of sodomy to be every sexual act that is not conducive to procreation, we will be using it to refer exclusively to the sex acts waged between the same sex. This is because, while certainly masturbation, fellatio, and especially anal sex between a man and a woman are perversions, acts performed between members of the same sex are particularly devious deviations from the normal order and thus most representative of what we will be speaking about: it is the sin of sodomy between men, after all, that 'cries out to Heaven for vengeance'.

I

'Here is the key to all the metaphysics of sex: Through the Dyad toward the Unity.' ~Julius Evola

To really understand something physical we must understand the metaphysical. Man in his original, higher form is a sexually undifferentiated being. His ontological state in this primordial perfection is one of absolute unity, possessing within him both male and female principles coherently organized and whole in themselves. It is only as a result of being in creation, of participating in the world of regeneration where things are characterized by their multiplicity and duality rather than their unity or oneness, that male and female forms eventuated: 'Brought low by the gulf of his sin, man suffered the division of his nature into masculine and feminine, and because he was unwilling to use the heavenly mode of propagation, a just judgment reduced him to animal-like and corruptible multiplicity, consisting of male and female' (John Scotus Eriugena, De Divisione Naturae). The Fall mythologized in Genesis depicts the descent of originally integrated man into two separate beings who, while certainly able to recreate after a fashion their former unity through mutual love, are nevertheless doomed to continually engender separated beings through their copulation. This unending division of man represents his division from God, whose likeness man in his wholeness bears:

'God created his image and likeness in a single man.  Adam was a man and also a woman... for God did not in the beginning make man and woman, he did not create them at the same time, because the life in which the two properties of masculine and feminine are united in one, constitutes man in the image of God.' (Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum)

Man and woman are therefore two halves of a whole, dissociated from one another in every conceivable way. They are as two opposite poles on a metaphysical spectrum, with the principle of masculinity standing for creativity and leadership while that of femininity stands for fertility and submission: 'The male represents the specific form; the female represents the matter, being passive insofar as she is female, whereas the male is active' (Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium). In 'ordinary reality', i.e., the realm of multiplicity, these two poles constitute a Dyad that defines all material creation; this duality is expressed symbolically, such as the sun and the element of fire symbolizing maleness while the moon and the element of water symbolize femaleness.

This extends to all traditional metaphysics; just as the Western peripatetic schools considered form as masculine and matter as feminine, the Vedic system comprehended purusha (spirit) as masculine and prakriti (nature) as feminine. In the Upanishads, purusha is the immaterial creative principle which expresses itself through prakriti, the mutable material; and in the Tantras the principled, motionless entity is the god Shiva, whose 'emanation' in the Blakean sense is the goddess Shakti, who orbits Shiva and allows his hypostatic nature to manifest itself in creation. In 'The Great Treatise', one of the main commentaries of the I Ching, the same formula is expressed thusly: 'The male acts according to the way of the creative, whereas the female operates according to the way of the receptive' (T Chuan, I, s. 4). From the Hellenic and Roman rituals that associated masculinity with fire and femininity with water to the Kabbalah concepts of dubrah and nubkah (God and his Shekinah), every traditional metaphysic intuited the same fundamental reality: the male is creative and the female is receptive, and together they are necessary for the sustenance of life as we know it. They are two parts of one whole (hence the hermaphroditic Shiva, Ardhanarishvara, who represents the synthetic whole of Shiva and Shakti).

The concept of yin and yang is an especially useful example in that it precisely explains the interdependence of the male and female principles and the necessity of their union. Again, all reality is conditioned and conceived in terms of male and female, yang and yin: 'All phenomena, form, beings, and changes of the universe are considered at the level of various encounters and combinations of the yin and yang.... From their dynamic aspect yang and yin are opposed but also complementary forces. The light and the sun have a yang quality, whereas shadow and moon have a yin quality' (Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). Male and female belong to the same order of ideas as virility and fertility, activity and passivity, spirit and nature; they are all analogous to one another, each representing in a different form what the others also represent. They essentially represent the principle duality that intrudes upon all created reality; they represent what the Pythagoreans called the 'Dyad', the law of opposition that defines everything which is manifested.


It is also in accordance with this law that each principle requires and desires its opposite, for in its differentiated state it is useless: what is creativity without material to use for creation? what is virility when everything is barren? Just as we cannot reproduce without partnership with the opposite sex, so we cannot recover our whole self without participation in 'the other', in whatever it is that we do not ourselves possess. Plato himself says that 'each person without any hesitation would deem that he had finally heard expressed what had certainly been his desire for a long time, namely to be united and fused with his beloved so as to form one single nature from two distinct beings. Now, the cause of this desire is to be sought in the fact that this was indeed our primitive nature when we constituted one unit which was still whole; it is really the burning longing for this unity which bears the name of love' (Plato, The Symposium). All creation desires wholeness insofar as all creation desires to return to its original, preconditioned form.

'In its most profound aspect, eros embodies an impulse to overcome the consequences of the Fall, to leave the restrictive world of duality, to restore the primordial state, to surmount the condition of dual existentiality broken and conditioned by the "other".' (Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex)

II

This brings us to our proper subject. As Plato says above, Love is the means by which we achieve this wholeness, our union with ourselves. When we strongly desire something, we see in that object some parcel of Heaven, of the intelligible reality, and most of all of who we essentially are: 'Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is able to see the loved thing' (Plotinus, The Enneads, III, v, 2). That initial pain we feel when this love is awakened is evidence of our new cognizance of our lacking a piece of ourself; it is as a hungry person becomes keenly, tortuously aware of his hunger when he sees and smells something delicious, only a thousand times more agonizing due to the far greater need for spiritual than physical satisfaction. Solovyov agrees that man in his 'empirical nature' is filled with this constant state of want, and purports that the aim of Love is to reintegrate him with his 'missing parts':

'The peculiar character of [our spiritual nature] consists just in a human being's ability, while remaining the selfsame human being, to accommodate absolute content in his own proper form, to become an absolute personality. But in order to be filled with absolute content... that same human must be restored in its entirety (integrated). In the empirical nature of the human being, as such, this is by no means so - he exists only in a specific onesidedness and finiteness, as a male or female individuality. However, a true human in the fulness of his ideal personality... cannot be merely male or merely female, but must be the higher unity of both. To realize this unity, to create the true human being as a free unity of the male and female principles, preserving their formal individualization but having surmounted their essential separateness and divergence - this is the proper immediate task of love.' (Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love)

The reconciliation of male with female individuality is necessary for the formation of true personality. This is true because man in his essence is not either one of these: he is both. Otto Weininger surmised that we are naturally attracted to, even in the psychosomatic sense, individuals who possess a substance which we do not: '[All] individuals have as much femininity as they lack masculinity. If they are completely male they will desire a completely female counterpart, and if they are completely female, a completely male. If, however, they contain a somewhat larger proportion of Man and another, by no means negligible, proportion of Woman, they will demand an individual who will complement them and their fragmentary masculinity to form a whole; at the same time, their proportion of femininity will be completed in the same way' (Otto Weininger, Sex and Character). Thus, someone who is, for example, '75% male' will naturally be most attracted to a woman who is '75% female', and vice versa, because it is in this way that both individuals best complete themselves; they are fulfilling what each of them lack inside of them. The law of 'opposites attract' has never been clearer. There is moreover no such thing as someone who is 'transgender', because insofar as we are born male or female we will always have a higher portion of that principle whose sexual representation we are born as. Even if someone is merely '51%' male (and thus '49% female'), he is authentically male, and no amount of surgery or drugs will alter his inner nature. This is because things are manifested according to their metaphysical principles, and thus not subject to chance but causal authority:

'If birth is not a matter of chance, then it is not a coincidence for a being to "awaken" to itself in the body of a man or a woman. Here too, the physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dharma.... [Man] and woman are two different types; those who are born as men must realize themselves as men, while those who are born as women must realize themselves as women, overcoming any mixture and promiscuity of vocations' (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World).

We can already guess what this means for 'homosexual' activity, and indeed Weininger goes on to say that the great majority of homosexual relationships occur where the partners are intermediately differentiated, meaning that they possess high proportions of M and W and thus desire fellow beings who are also intermediately differentiated; the man who has 49% of W in him will have far more of an attraction to a man of like proportion than a man who is 80 or 90% M will. This explains the very high ratio of homosexual men and women who also identify themselves as 'bisexual', or are at least not averse to normal sexual relations. Evola also supports this, but adds that 'when homosexuality is not "natural" [meaning according to the theory of middling sexual differentiation just explained] or else cannot be explained in terms of incomplete inborn forms of sexual developments, it must have the character of a deviation, a vice, or a perversion' (Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). So, in our society, for instance, where spiritual and mental disorders (the ones which are not psychiatric make-believe, that is) resulting from the dissolution of the family, the community, and the entire socio-political realm are more pervasive than ever before, it is altogether to be expected that the rate of sodomitical sex is as high as it is, certainly much higher than it otherwise would be if it were limited to partners who were on the border of being '50% M' and '50% W'.

The real crime of homosexual activity consists simply in its complete inversion of the normal interaction of the sexes. The metaphysical traditions which we outlined above are not theoretical abstractions that exist in an 'intellectual void'; they are that which is fundamentally real, in comparison to which this created world, the 'veil of Maya', is but an illusory distortion. They profoundly influence this world because they are this world in its truest, most articulate form. In the performance of copulative union, for example, man and woman recreate the genesis of the world; they merge together and create not only a life of their own, a new world, but they create themselves through their erotic synthesis of each other: 'Each of the two sexes is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way. The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2335). Man becomes truly man, woman becomes truly woman, and together they become the new Adam: 'And they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore they are not now two, but one flesh' (Mark 10:8). The Fall is conquered by their physical union which, sacramentally, also has the nature of a mystical union; where they were formerly opposed to one another, the dual principles (yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, Nut and Geb) are now intimately combined in the maximal expression of their essential nature and in their relations to each other:

'If the root of false existence consists in impenetrability, i.e., in the mutual exclusion of beings by each other, then true life is to live in another as in oneself, or to find in another the positive and absolute fulfillment of one's own being. The basis and type of this true life remains and always will remain sexual or conjugal love.... True union presupposes the true separateness of those being united, i.e., a separateness by power of which they do not exclude, but mutually replenish each other, each finding in the other the fulness of his own proper life.' (Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love)

Sodomy receives no such justifications or blessings; there is no telos whatsoever to its practise: '[Homosexual acts] are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2357). This unbridgeable dispute between sodomitical activity and man and woman as they really are is what makes it unnatural in both a metaphysical and a physical sense. Indeed, it is because there is no metaphysical legitimacy to homosexual relations that there is no physical legitimacy: the copulation of man with woman results in the birth of a new life because of their union on a higher level (at least in potentia; procreation that is the consequence of extramarital sex is still natural, but it is divorced from the sacrament of marriage, hence it is of a lesser quality due to the absence of a sacral authority blessing the union).

The copulation of man with man and of woman with woman, on the other hand, bears no such fruit because of their incompatibility in the principial realm. The principle of maleness only acts according to its nature when it is associated with the principle of femaleness, which correspondingly acts according to its nature; that which is virile and creative naturally desires that which will bring out these qualities in it, which is of course the fertility and the passivity of its female counterpart. By reneging on this primordial agreement and a metaphysical law, homosexual 'union' condemns itself to a fruitless pursuit of something that it longs for but is looking in the completely wrong place; it is a sacrilegious caricature of supreme union, and makes something which is ideally spiritual and sacred into something strictly physical and therefore ugly. Instead of the satisfaction felt when something smoothly falls into place, like pouring wine into a glass, the homosexual act consists essentially of the frustration involved in pouring water into a sieve, because there is zero complementarity between two active or two passive principles: male and female create a self-sufficient whole that completes each other while male and male or female and female are doomed to wander alone, unredeemed, and separated from themselves.

'All the natural loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good.... Those forms that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations of any reality; for they are no true issue of Soul; they are merely accompaniments of a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct.' (Plotinus, The Enneads, III, v, 7)

III

If the aim of all human life is to become reintegrated as a whole person in the manner of Adam prior to his Fall, it cannot follow that establishing an erotic relationship with a woman is necessary for this end, for that would mean the futility of all ascetics and holy men and other such types who have surely come nearer to this reality than the vast majority of married men and women. The truth is that the capacity for reintegration subsists in the depth of our own self: the potential to become whole is already within us. To love a female is simply the most direct means available because it is neatly aligned with our libidinous appetites, but it is hardly the only one, as the various spiritual or yogic paths to self-completion are manifestly singular by nature, oriented around the fulfilment of one's inner nature or dharma. Infact, even in loving a woman what we are really doing is loving ourselves; the presence of another person is merely the object which sparks in man a desire for some element of himself shown in a separate individual. The truth of this should already be apparent by virtue of our earlier arguments, that male and female are really one entity, and that males and females inherently pursue beings whose natures correspond to what they are lacking in an effort to create a whole; thus, if we really do feel love as a burning desire to restore ourself to an earlier state of integration, it would make sense to see in our beloved simply the other half of what we once were.

It is crucial not to be confused by what we mean by 'loving oneself'. We certainly do not mean that we are engaged in an auto-erotic narcissism wherein we idolize our ego or the shadowy fragments of our malleable personality; what we do mean is the love of who we are as a composite whole, of our self as a personhood composed of both male and female harmoniously organized. In our love of another person we see ourselves as perfected: 'Whenever a man loves, he loves only himself. Not his subjectivity, not what he actually represents as a being tainted with every weakness and baseness, every gracelessness and pettiness, but what he wants to be completely and what he ought to be completely, his most personal and most profound intelligible nature, free from any scrap of necessity and from any residue of his earthly nature' (Otto Weininger, Sex and Character). The disturbed and amorphous constitution of ordinary reality and of our conscious minds is suddenly clarified into something so solid and true that we cannot help but pour our hearts into it, feeling our beloved as something absolutely necessary to our being: 'It is not for love of woman that woman is desired by man, but rather for love of the atman' (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, IV). The atman is the highest principle of Self, pristinely real and unadulterated by the conditional factors (such as space and time) of the created world, and it is that which we see in what we love. Shakespeare beautifully expresses this idea in a sonnet:

'Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on me.' (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 24)

The neoplatonist French poet Antoine Hermoet is equally sublime in his description of the same thing:

'[I meditated upon] how our hearts, bent on "death",
Revived one another;
How mine, loving his,
Transformed itself into his without changing.' (Antoine Heroet, La Parfaicte Amye)

So, again, in stark contrast to the normal order of things, homosexual relations are founded not on a spiritual love of Self conceived as a perfect whole comprised of both male and female, but on a purely physical love of self. The sex act of the sodomite is not something that symbolizes the harmonization of male and female into one flesh and one soul, but something that represents the man's false love for himself; it is not the atman which he 'loves', because that would imply a reconciliation of opposites into one Self, but merely his own lust and ouroboric desire and possibly his own demented personality. It is infact not even an entrance into the Other: for in copulating with another man (or woman with woman) he is copulating with himself; while they are ostensibly two different persons, both members of the act derive from the same principle of maleness, and thus metaphysically correspond to the selfsame individual. It is as though Shiva were to try to act through Shiva instead of his Shakti; the world would go uncreated, and he would never be reunited in himself.

The sin of sodomy is the worst instance of onanism possible because it simultaneously satirizes the holy union of male and female and projects upon another person one's own failings; while this is so in all extramarital intercourse, it is manifestly and monstrously worse in this case by virtue of the involvement of a more extreme narcissism, psychic and spiritual disorders that take pleasure from abnormal practises, the confusion of one's principial maleness or femaleness (i.e., their natural desire to be with the other), and the complete absence of any natural end to the event. Once more, it is essentially characterized by self-love: 'Perversion may be defined as the diversion of sexual desire from a person of the opposite sex to a body of the opposite sex... or to a person of the same sex... or to an inanimate thing (fetishism). At the root of all forms of perversion is self-love, the utilization of another, who... is seen as no more than an instrument for one's pleasure (or pain)' (Vladimir Moss, The Theology of Eros). The extent of how morally and spiritually adverse this kind of behaviour is, inasmuch as it is not self-evident, is illuminated all the more by comparison with normal sexual behaviour:

'Man should help woman to free herself from her womanliness (as incompleteness), and woman, in turn, should help man, so that in both of them the full primal image of man will inwardly merge again. Both of them, instead of being half-men, will become whole men once again, i.e., Christians. For the expressions: to have become a Christian, to be born again, and to have recovered integrity of human nature are synonymous.' (Franz Xaver von Baader, Werke)

In the crisis of the modern world, the principles that were once intimately known and even taken for granted are entirely obscured by both an exclusively empirical and positivistic understanding of reality that determines everything according to its material nature, and a falsely 'humanistic' crusade for 'human rights' to the point that the instinctual and temporal desires of the individual, regardless of how perverse, matter more than either the health of his soul or of the community at large. It is in this environment that the 'cult of the body', exemplified by the 'Sexual Revolution' in the middle of the previous century, has been able to flourish, for it is only in the absence of the intellect and moral awareness that the sensual impulses are able to riot uninhibited by their normal constraints. Evola is right in attributing this to the lateness of our civilization's current cycle, for, like any organism in nature, our culture is an old and dying animal: '[It] remains true that a universal and feverish interest in sex and woman is the mark of every twilight period and that this phenomenon today is among the many signs that this epoch is the terminal phase of a regressive process.... It is clear that today by regression we are living in a civilization whose predominant interest is neither intellectual, spiritual, nor heroic, nor even directed to the higher forms of emotion. Rather the subpersonal - sex and the belly - are idolized....' (Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). It is exactly this, the subpersonal, that motivates such notions as homosexual nuptials (or even the normalization of paedophilia, as the 'slippery slope' proceeds apace), for real personhood consists not of realizing one's sexual fantasies in another individual, but in identifying who you are, which invariably means a reconciliation of the male and the female inside of you.

As the demonstrably false phenomenon of 'gay marriage' spreads to those places in the West which most accurately mimic the ethos of modernity, it is crucial to remember that fraternal love, or sincere love between men, is entirely possible - provided that such relationships remain celibate. We need only to bring the reader's attention to such practises of adelphopoiesis in the Byzantine Church, which ritualized an extraordinary friendship between men, or of the blood-brotherhood of the Norse society and the Scythians which united men into something much more than friends. The difference, of course, consists in the modernist's permissiveness in the sexual realm, where everything is allowed so long as it remains a 'victimless crime' (a terrible vacuity when considering the spiritual damage such acts lead to); the 'gay' man becomes gay not merely by his perverse sexual habits, but by his very identity. One's gayness marks him out as who he is more than any other facet of his character, thereby epitomizing the modern's purely physical comprehension of reality, where nothing exists other than what we can touch and feel. Indeed, the rather ridiculous idea of 'gay pride' serves as an inordinately transparent symbol of modern man's hubris: we are not merely permitting our regression into worse forms of barbarity, we are proud of it, as though we are calling God out to destroy Babel once again, daring him to smite us.

In deep contradistinction to this is the traditional worldview, according to which the spiritual is not only real, but it is more real than the physical. Man is called not to 'be who he is' in the vulgar sense, but to become who he is essentially; which means the reconciliation of the sexes, which means becoming like unfallen man, which means becoming like God. Yes, this can be achieved through the special love between man and woman; but it can even more strongly be achieved through a direct unity between man and God: '[There] is need for the blessed passion of holy eros; it binds the mind to spiritual objects and persuades it to prefer the immaterial over the material, the intelligible and the divine to the sensible' (St. Maximus the Confessor, On Charity). The 'passion of holy eros' is an excellent way to describe man's fervour for God; in the place of a woman who inspires him to find his Self, man starts to see God, who will help him in that regard more than anything else. By imitating God, man becomes like God: 'For the Son of God became man so that we might become God' (St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione). The love between a man and a woman is but a reflection of the love which God has for his children, and those who love him in return are guaranteed salvation: 'I love them that love me: and they that in the morning early watch for me, shall find me' (Proverbs 8:17). Love loses when it is reduced to something physical, to something that makes a mockery out of God's laws and tries to marry two things which are already one; love wins when two different beings come together out of separate, solitary lives to form one whole. For love exists not to divide us or to join us to our basest elements; love exists to unify us.

'I am you and you in me mutual in love divine.' ~William Blake, Jerusalem