Dualities and Polarities: Are They Useful in Paganism?
“The large statue of Baphomet found inside the Satanic Temple”, a known example of a non-binary God.
The Goddess and the God, Shakti and Shiva, Yin and Yang, the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Are these concepts that serve our practices and beliefs, or do they in some ways actually limit them? Do we need to gender our Pagan workings? Do we need the tension of polarity to make our magic work? Even in sex magic? Well, possibly not.
Firstly, a quick look at the tricky words sex and gender. Biological sex differences have evolved so that a plant or animal uses the coming together of two different gene-carrying parts in order to reproduce: pollen and pistil, sperm and egg. So if you’re talking about sexual reproduction, you obviously need to have these two items present. And of course there are then all the sex hormones that come with them – oestrogen, testosterone, and their undeniable effects on who and how a person becomes.
But gender, that’s a very different matter. It’s a word used these days to signify subtly different things, chiefly either as a sense of gender as a learned performance alongside one’s perceived biological sex, a performance that is socially constructed and can vary with time and place. Or, gender as an inner felt sense, whether or not that conforms to the sex that person has been assigned at birth – if indeed they have been assigned to one or the other, as it is increasingly accepted that some babies are born intersex.
Anyhow, for most people there’s male and female, masculine and feminine. We’re used to duality as a way of seeing the world: Plato, Descartes, Manichaeanism, all taught us that the ways of the world are easily divided into two – night and day, good and bad, mind over matter, mythos and logos. Though let’s also remember that not all cultures placed as much primacy on the number two: Celts, for example, preferred triads such as land, sea and sky, Norse myth worked with three worlds, three Norns. In China, four is most lucky. In truth, all numbers matter.
You could say that one basic duality as modern Paganism has evolved has been that between the esoteric (images and objects as symbolic) and the animist (nature and objects as sacred in themselves, not as symbolising anything more than they actually are). Modern witchcraft – and flowing from that, much other Pagan thought as well – originates largely from the first. The Western Esoteric Tradition, rooted in Ancient Egyptian magic, the Qabalah, alchemy, astrology, tarot, up to orders such as the OTO and Golden Dawn, from all of which Gardner and his fellow coveners drew in creating their rituals. These are systems that relied heavily on esoteric symbolism – so heavily that Crowley published a whole book just of correspondences.
So if you want, for example, to do a love spell, you might use rose petals or oils because we “know” that symbolises love, a pink candle (or maybe a red one if you’re invoking passion as well). You might, if you are heterosexual, use objects to symbolise the union of male and female. Symbolism, because that’s how esoteric magic works.
So within that esoteric system, male and female have come to be symbolic as well as actual. The sun as masculine, the moon feminine. The athame and the chalice. The Goddess and the God. And for many Wiccans, a sense that magic is created by the bringing together by sacred action of these two opposite forces.
Well, magic works for you the way it works for you, and I’m not in any way disagreeing with anyone else’s way of working. But I would like to look more deeply at how much we gender our symbols, and whether that truly serves us, or is more just a reflection of old, assumed ways of thinking. When we say, as some do, that air and fire are “masculine” and water and earth “feminine”, what do we actually mean? Does gendering them expand our sense of them, or does it contract them to fit better into our existing (and maybe more narrow) frameworks?
Do we need our deities to have fixed genders? In the old days many were way more gender-fluid than they are now perceived to be. If we say Ares is the God of war and Aphrodite the Goddess of love, are we not in fact encouraging men to be more war-like, and women to be more nurturing, in alignment with our own preconceived notions of gender performativity? (I can’t see Aphrodite, for one, approving of that at all.)
And if we do still feel a need to work with polarity, are male and female the most important polarities in the universe? Well yes, if you’re creating a baby. If you’re creating something more abstract there are plenty more core polarities in our world, maybe the most core of which is the polarity between inner and outer, self and other, as Yvonne Aburrow has written. Me and not me.
For Patricia MacCormack, magick works by explicitly going beyond these boundaries into the liminal (and non-binary) spaces in between: dissolving, queering, questioning. Austin Osman Spare thought that dualism reduces our ability to think creatively. Animist magic works with things as they actually are in the world, not with the esoteric meanings we have historically been taught about them.
Sex magic of course requires arousal (which may or may not be of the heterosexual sort), but it doesn’t in any way require two specific genitalia to be present. Solo sex is definitely easier to control. And sex magic itself is so much more than mere orgasm. Be creative!
Is it even feminist, these days, to gender our bodies and our workings? Gardner, mid 20C, took a huge step forward in asserting that the Goddess was as important as the God, and indeed often took precedence, as did the High Priestess over the High Priest. In the context of contemporary patriarchal religion that was truly radical. And when 1970s feminism came along, to have a deity who was specifically both female and powerful was transformative for many witches, both women and men. But these days, how much do we still need this?
If we wish our magic to be intersectionally inclusive, that means being more creative. Finding ways to welcome people who are non-binary, queer, or whose sense of their own gender doesn’t necessarily correspond with their specific reproductive organs. So we need to ask, at Beltane for example, is this really about the Goddess and the God mating to ensure the fertility of the fields, or are we really just celebrating the time of year more generally as a time of abundance, delight and desire (of all forms). Symbol, or actuality? How do we continue to make new forms of ritual to reflect that? For me, the most sacred value of all is inclusion, and that means creating rituals that resonate for everyone present, that leave no-one out.
Ultimately, our souls are not gendered. The goal of the Qabalah, yin and yang, the tarot, is not to find our “essential” feminine or masculine but to transcend duality to reach unity, balance. The Major Arcana of the Tarot may have many gendered cards, as ways of expressing differing challenges and situations in the world, but the Fool, starting out on their journey, is androgynous and the World, the ultimate card, contains all within it, all sexes, all genders.
In some ways, we gender things as a way of comprehending them better, of reducing the complex and ineffable to something we can get our heads around, that fits with our internal schema of the world. Male and female can be helpful metaphors. And yes, there are times and places when it may be helpful to our practice to place emphasis on gender, to acknowledge the effect on all of us of growing up in a gendered and at times misogynistic world. To meet in women-only or men-only groups, LGBT+ groups and straight groups. But before we ascribe gender to anything, to ourselves as well as to forces in the world, let’s take the time to really ask, in what ways does this enhance my magical or ritual practice, and in what ways might it, on the contrary, limit it?
My thanks go to Ian Jamison, whose PhD thesis highlighted for me the difference between esoteric and animist discourse, and to the Totnes Pagans Online Moot, as ever, for letting me test my ideas out on them first, before putting them down in writing.
Sylvia Rose
is a long-time Reclaiming witch. She lives in the beautiful countryside of South Devon in the UK, and writes and blogs on various matters, including the trials of living with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.