The Return of The Phallus

The Return of The Phallus – Bruce Lyon
We all know the archetypal story : A power that once existed in the world has
been lost, a light has dimmed and now all things exist in a state of half-wayness,
half --heartedness, half- aliveness. There is not enough of the power left so that
we have the courage to break out of our daze but it is not gone so completely that
we have forgotten it. Therefore we feel
uncomfortable in our semi - sleep knowing that there
was something we were supposed to be, something
more than...this. A part of us is waiting for the return
of this power but we do not know the time or the
place ...only that it is not now and it can't be us. Until
it is.......
Many people these days are talking about the return of the feminine and the
coming age of the feminine, equating the time we have been living through with
the patriarchy and the dominance of the masculine principle in our global society.
And there is definitely truth here when we are seeing things in a duality. In the
duality of masculine and feminine, the masculine has been emphasised or
preferenced. What is often missed is that the masculine referred to is not the
deep or true masculine energy. Behind duality, the archetypal couple - the dual
principles of the universe - are ever in love, ever entwined, eternally whole. The
true masculine energy would never dominate or control the feminine, only
celebrate with her. So we have been living with the immature masculine,
separated from wholeness and his counterpart in the shadows has been the
immature feminine. The true masculine and feminine energy always show up
together. We need the return of the masculine as much as we need the return of
the feminine. What is really lost is the power which lies behind both and emerges
through their union.
So where did this dominance of the immature masculine
principle come from? When we journey back into the
story we find it at he heart of core civilisation
cosmologies. In the greek creation myth the original
father is Ouranus, the husband of Gaia. One of his sons,
Chronos or Saturn, castrates his father ( with a scythe ) the testicles fall in to the sea and give birth to Venus,
goddess of love and sexuality. The original masculine principle loses his potency
( balls ) and gives way to the immature masculine ( his son ) who is the lord of
civilization, cycles and death. Modern civilisation has always been an uneasy
balance between structure or Logos and the life force or Eros has been
controlled and suppressed.
In the Judeo/Christian tradition we have the bible. In the beginning was the
word...Logos..but the word now is no longer the living word ( Logos and Eros
combined ) - the electric current that lives between the two cherubim in the arc of
the covenant. The word becomes the idea, the concept, the written law which
must be obeyed. We are no longer gods in connection with the tree of life but we
are fallen and must be 'straightened' - we must obey the word of god - the law as something external to ourselves, for we have lost connection to the living word
being birthed moment to moment in the core of our being. We have lost our balls.
And when it comes time to birth the new sun god, the Christ, we
have a virgin birth. Mary, the feminine principle is overshadowed
by the dove of the holy ghost and impregnated by God the
Father. The son, Jesus is portrayed as sexless, celibate and
concerned with 'higher' things - in short, cock-less like his Dad. In
essence what is holy or spiritual has now been divorced from,
and defined by, being 'not sexual'. The fact that is not sexual is
what 'makes' it spiritual. Perhaps this was part of a greater
dynamic to balance the overemphasis on the body and carnality
but we certainly are all living with the consequences of this divorce. So where did
this Christian story come from in the great river of our collective consciousness?
How did we end up with a cock-less god?
Egypt. Osiris, Isis, Horus. These are the original trinity. Osiris was tricked by Set,
the opposing force, to enter a coffin built just for him ( the father enters the tomb
of matter, the living word becomes a concept ). Though found by his wife Isis, Set
steals his body and cuts it into 14 ( sometimes 42 ) pieces and scatters it
throughout the land. Isis, mourning, scours the land collecting his body together
again - re-membering it. But there is a part missing ( in the version of the story
that came to us through Plutarch ). His phallus!. Isis creates an artificial phallus
out of gold and hovering over it in her hawk-form she impregnates herself with
their son, Horus ( note the connection to the dove impregnatiing Mary ). There
are many other places to
go with this story but let's
just stay with the lost
phallus. The true
masculine principle that
can seed life is replaced
with a substitute. The
living word is replaced
with a thing, a marker or place-holder that fulfills the function of the former but is
not it.
So now let's follow that story in to Freemasonry and the concept of
the 'lost word'. A Master is killed and with him dies the knowledge
of the true 'word' which can raise the dead - ie make us come
alive. This word is replaced with a substitute - the A.U.M that the
initiate must use to eventually 'raise the Master' and receive the
true word.
There are many other places we could follow this golden
thread but this should be enough for the purpose of
resurrecting the life principle. The 'word' which rules
civilisation on earth is the word of Law - the substitute
word - the concept. Whether formulated into a bill of
rights, a united nations charter, a constitution, a personal
mission statement, a thesis on the masculine and
feminine principles, the Bible or the Koran ...this word is
what we use for guidance in the absence of connection to the living word - the life
principle which is never formulated, the godhead which can never be named but
IS who we essentially ARE. We are god looking for god by chasing our concept
of what god is. We are like the creator of a cartoon who has entered into one of
his characters. Zombies following a will we have forgotten is our own.
This life principle is the lost phallus of Osiris, the lost word of the masons, the lost
godhead that lives hidden inside each of us waiting to be resurrected, the risen
Christ at-oned with the father, Shiva's lingam, the balls of
Ouranos.
And this phallic principle is not separated in any way from the
feminine. The phallus is not the penis. It is what makes the
penis rise. It is what makes the vagina moist and the clitoris
erect. It is the erotic charge that brings the penis and vagina
together. It is what is behind the outer manifest duality - the
electric arc of the covenant between the two cherubim.
In this sense the penis and the vagina, man and woman are
BOTH form and when we identify with the form we replace the
living word with the formulated word..we enter the coffin and
lose our phallic power. Isis mourns for the loss of Osiris. The
feminine mourns the loss of her partner. For the feminine to
return the masculine must return. And they must return
together in us. We all know the stereotype of men following
their dick around as if the cock was a problem and phallic
power the source of rape, war and other distortions of the masculine principle.
Semi-conscious men are following the substitute cock. It is not phallic power that
leads them but the longing for phallic power and the vague awareness of its loss.
Semi-conscious women are trying to fill their loss with the substitute cock, putting
the penis in the vagina again and again trying to become pregnant with the child
that will save their world. What they both miss is that the sexual longing is itself
the indication of the presence of the phallus - the lost life principle
- lost to us when we separated sexuality from spirituality. The
phallic power enters us and we suddenly become aware that we
are missing something and go to seek it in a partner. We do not
know who it is arriving so suddenly - opening us - and we think
the arrival has to do with the other who we then try to possess and
fuse with - resulting in the withdrawal of the phallic power.
As long as we come together longing to be fulfilled or
completed by the other pole we are in the world of the
lost word, the lost phallus - zombies and vampires
trying to suck a little eros out of each other, thinking
this is love and wondering why we keep feeling alone
and betrayed. When we understand what we have
lost and we also understand that this life force is
trying to reach us, fill us, fulfill us, in every moment. We long for it and yet we are
barely able to contain it for a few minutes in sex, meditation or prayer before
sneezing it out of us in orgasm, formulating it into a doctrine, dulling it with
alcohol or the drug of busyness following the substitute word. If our spirituality
has become dominated by the immature masculine - controlling, judgemental and
pedantic - then our sexuality has become dominated by the immature feminine demanding, possessive, and full of sentiment and attachment rather than love.
So our god has no cock and balls and our goddess is fallen. Jesus is nailed to
the cross and Magdelene is reframed as a prostitute. Our sexuality and our
spirituality both become places of longing for what has been lost rather than
celebration of our wholeness. We seek enlightenment. What a joke. Like the
tibetan proverb of a man riding his horse from town to town shouting 'Has anyone
seen my horse?'. We seek fulfillment in sex. We long for 'the one' when we ARE
THE ONE! The end of the search is the realisation that we are already that
which we seek. The separation of sexuality and spirituality has created a longing
in them both. The phallus is lost and we are never truly fulfilled by its substitute.
Our spirituality becomes impotent, words mumbled in church on Sunday while
neglect, corruption, greed and hypocrisy tear the heart out of our planet. Our
sexuality loses its divinity becoming an urgent wanting, a compensatory thrusting
trying to squeeze a moment's ecstacy in the wasteland of half dead lives.
When a man's penis stands up with the sunrise it doesn't want anything. When a
women's vulva throbs and swells with life or her nipples overflow with milk they
are not wanting anything. The wanting comes after. We have become afraid to let
our bodies fill with the phallus, the living word of god, because we are afraid of
the wanting that can follow - in ourselves or others. Men are not too phallic but
not phallic enough. Women must be veiled either physically or energetically lest
their remaining phallic power arouses too much longing in the men or makes
them feel their impotence and loss.
In the Egyptian story, the phallus of Osiris has been
swallowed by a fish - just like the ring in the Lord of the
Rings. The fish is the symbol of the Piscean age - a period
of two thousand years dominated in the western world by
the image of the immature masculine face of God nailed to a cross in the attempt
to get back in touch with the Father principle. In the aquarian age the symbol is
the water bearer and the water is the water of life, the living word, the electric
current of divine fire. This water is the lost phallus
and it is the return of the phallic power that
quenches our thirst, the longing that is present in
both our sexuality and our spirituality. God the
father is no longer a distant sky god who the world
has fallen away from and needs atonement with.
The Father principle is right here living inside of us
waiting for our recognition, waiting for us to give up our chase and fall back into
his arms. And the Mother principle, the goddess that we are is right there with
him. We do not need to move away from the masculine and embrace the
feminine. It looks like we have too much masculine but we do not have enough.
We have lost our spiritual cock and balls and then asked the fleshy ones to
compensate. We do not need to move away from the masculine and embrace the
feminine. We need to let go of duality and the immature expressions of both
masculine and feminine that results from loss of connection to our true source
which emerges as a life giving stream behind and between them.
When the phallus was lost it was replaced with the obelisk and
egytpian obelisks have found there way into places of temporal
power all over the planet from Washington to Rome. The
obelisks are also lightning rods and it was interesting that just
before the pope resigned St Peter's was struck
by lightning. Lightning is the living word and
when our bodies and souls are struck they
resign their dominion and open to the living
word. The obelisk of the soul is the ego - a
substitute phallus standing up to receive the
lightning. A false 'I' which must become an
'eye' through which the life giving waters can flow.
So reclaiming our phallic power is not something that only men must do
or are capable of. It is a power that has withdrawn from our grasp until
we realize that the true masculine and feminine principles are already
united in us whatever our gender or sexual orientation; that spirituality
and sexuality are not separate, and that we are already in heaven, on
earth, as expressions of divine life and love.