Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
In The Great Triad, Rene Guenon describes the True Man as the being who has actualized all his possibilities as a man. True Man is also man as he is in the Primordial State, in contrast to the “ordinary man” or today. Using the initiatic formula “Heaven is his father, earth is his mother”, man can be described as the Son of Heaven and Earth, thus is the third term of that triad. The following schema relates this symbolism to various Traditions:
Masculine Principle | Heaven | Essence | Yang | Actuality | Interior |
Feminine Principle | Earth | Substance | Yin | Potency | Exterior |
Although everything has aspects of both principles, True Man has them in a balanced way. He “possesses the fullness of human nature, for he has developed in himself the totality of possibilities that implies.” For examples of what this may mean, see Cagliostro the Trickster, Genius and the Real Man, Life of a Contemporary Hermetist, or The Wise Man rules the Elements.
Ordinary man, on the other hand, has developed primarily at the corporeal or hylic level, and is thus yin, or passive, in relation to the Cosmos. As Evola writes of this type:
the “I” still lives only as if in a dream: it is not yet a self-consciousness, nor an autonomous principle of action: immersed in an immediate, indistinct coalescence with nature and the world, we can say that it is not so much he who thinks, speaks, and asserts himself, as much as that various forces and impulses think, speak and assert themselves in him. He therefore is only a type of medium, a passive instrument that has his very life outside himself, and he experiences everything as grace, as spontaneity, as the immediate self-manifestation of something that transcends him. (From The Individual and the Becoming of the World.)
The ordinary man is described as the Son of the Earth. For the true man, his actuality is equal to his potency, that is, he is perfectly balanced between yin and yang. He is thus yang, or active, in relation to the Cosmos, because celestial nature is predominant over terrestrial nature; he therefore is in the center.
The fall of the True Man from the Primordial State is the result of a decentering, a change in consciousness to exteriority from interiority. Now the Primordial State is the Androgyne of the Alchemists, that is, the perfect balance of the male and female principles. From the center, he is the unmoved mover, and his actions are wei wu wei, or non-acting activity.
We see that the shift from the ordinary state to the Primordial State represents, spiritually, a transition from a passive, yin, or feminine state of existence to a more active, yang, or masculine state. This is the opposite of the “macho” man, obsessed with frenetic activity for its own sake and focused solely on material life. Yet, when esoteric teachings enter into the popular domain, they are completely misunderstood by those at the hylic and psychic level. When such types hear of the Androgyne, they can only envision a feminization of man, that is, a exterior type of man taking on more effeminate characteristics. Thus the epicene man of today, common in the West, regards himself ipso facto as an advanced spiritual being. Unfortunately, this occludes the true spiritual nature of man and discourages many more masculine men from developing themselves in that direction.
Leave a Reply