Feminine and Masculine energies

[Guest]

Can someone explain to me as simply or as detailed as you choose the ideas surrounding these two, apparently opposite, energies?  My brain has been tripping over this for while, and since I'm looking at magician cards at the moment, I was reminded. Are they opposite?  Is it ever either/or, or is each never pure? What arrangement are those words actually trying to portray? 

 

Some of the problem might be the way words attract meanings and those meanings change over time.  For example, receptive, recieiving, irrational, immaterial or without form... these just don't sit well with me because it's like I'm missing the real point.  My culture thinks of those things as "less than", and trying to figure out what those words should or orignally mean in a spiritual sense is difficult.  Take the word irrational.  (I'm not a disciple of Jung, but...)  When Jung was drawing up his sliding rule of personality traits, he claimed that the feminine was rational, not irrational.  The definintion he gave was clinically clear, but them somehow it got changed, not by him, as if culture needed the female to be percieved as inferior.  This apparently happened without anyone ever asking what they were actually looking at.  If both are required for anything to exist, how can one be "inferior"?  The word is wrong.  If you refer to something like Taoism, they talk about submissive and receptive, and even if they say the feminine is the ultimate underlying source, still the word/meaning problem remains.  The extremely rough but common idea that the magician somehow snatches the feminine energy out of the air and forces it against it's nature to become solid material form just boggles the mind.  As if it isn't worth anything, or lacks definition in it's own right.  As if the space it fills might as well be empty, but there it is so we might as well accept it and use it.  And from there all kinds of silliness starts... "Are you too feminine?  Are you too needy?"  I've just read something like that, now.  oh please... i just switch off.  Apart from simply not understadning, using the wrong words poses the real risk of inadvertently training my brain to travel in circles and routes that could slip into obvious error because of being surrounded by a culture that champions hyper-masculinity. "Opposite" to the feminine we have "generosity" a masculine trait, apparently - also looked down on, or in the very least treated as suspicious by culture.

 

You can choose to reject the idea that these things exist too, I don't say it exists just because someone said it does way back whenever.  You might have to use pictures to explain it.  Maybe there are no words?  Whatever you like.  If this is the kind of question that you know stirs up trouble here I have no argument with mods erasing this thread.  I thought about posting in the magic and witchcraft section, because I thought if anyone would know they would, but I don't know those people and don't want to just burst in and get in their face.

[ilweran]

I use the Greenwood tarot which focusses more on red/white polarity but which the creator specifically divorces from masculinity and femininity as she felt this was something imposed later:

 

Quote

Red: Blood of birth, of menstruation, of hunting and attack, of death, of the flames of a fire, of the sun; its heat, and of warmth of heart. Of the red earth, of red ochre used for preserving skins (tanning) and painting, of chalybeate (iron-bearing) springs, such as Chalice Well in Glastonbury; of anger, determination, will, passion, activity.

 

White: Breast milk, semen, ash of fire, bones of the dead, ghosts and spirits, snow and ice, noon or summer sun, moon, chalk/lime bearing springs and wells, compassion, quiet, sensitivity, inactivity, withdrawal, passivity.

 

The qualities of red and white have recently been gendered - red  more active and forceful, thus male; white more passive and gentle, thus female. This is prejudice and there is no ancient basis for this. Previously the currents were non-gendered so that symbolically one could become a whole person in oneself.

 

Which doesn't answer your question, but does give a different view on it perhaps.

[LogicalHue]

12 hours ago, Sparrow said:

I've just read something like that, now.  oh please... i just switch off.

So you're seeing a lot of crap and you're looking for the other information on this that's not crap. But its all crap.

 

I just try to ignore it as much as possible. There's no such thing as "masculine" or "feminine" anything, those words are completely meaningless and useless. If a card is supposed to be one or the other, I think about how it was originally intended, to the best of my ability, and then I separate that from gender.

[Rupicapra]

I have to admit I'm not sure what the OP is asking, if these are questions about misogynist ideas of the patriarchy or about duality as principle.

I do recommend our own @TheLoracular's amazing podcast here, episode 2 is about duality, very much worth a listen 🙂 

 

Add on: I have no input of my own, this is too philosophical for me 🙂

Edited March 31, 2021 by Rupicapra

[TheLoracular]

1 hour ago, Rupicapra said:

I have to admit I'm not sure what the OP is asking, if these are questions about misogynist ideas of the patriarchy or about duality as principle.

I do recommend our own @TheLoracular's amazing podcast here, episode 2 is about duality, very much worth a listen 🙂 

Thank you for the shout out @Rupicapra!!

@Sparrow  Here is my personal hot take on the topic of feminine/masculine energies.

Traditionally, in tarot and everything there, there was a lot of subjectivity worked in.  The idea of binary, polarity, dualism is nearly universal and woven into the fabric of just about every spiritual, philosophical, psychological model there is.

Applying gender to concepts like Sun/Moon,  Heaven/Earth, Black/White, Good/Evil, Strong/Weak is not helpful to the modern world where we are actively trying to create balance and equality.   

I've been taught that dualism uses subjective terms like good/bad, right/wrong to make one side of a polar pair the ideal and the other the mistake.  Polarity vs. dualism is the concept of having your pair of archetypal opposites and seeing neither as good or bad in nature but that an excess of one one leads to problems and so health/wellness/happiness comes from finding the right balance between everything that is Yang (masculine energy) and Yin (feminine energy).

The early 1900s RWS and other esoteric tarot decks do teach this but I think all art/tarot is the product of the author/artist's experiences and people who are in their 30s-60s now had very different social constructs and life experiences than people who were in their 20s-50s back in 1920.   

I simply don't call anything I consider Yang, Yin or Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable or  Firey, Watery, AIry, Earthly, anything I am using to describe binary, trinary, or tertary/elemental energies or concepts as male/female or masculine/feminine any more.   When I made that transition, I felt enlightened and a lot less prone to bias in how I treated myself and others. 

[Page of Ghosts]

For many such concepts one encounters when studying subjects like tarot, esoterocism and/or witchcraft, my philosophy is to take what makes sense to me and discard the rest. As a genderweird person it doesn't really make sense to me to separate everything into male and female anyway, and dualism/polarity (the thing where two things are opposites yet relates to each other) as a concept is pretty interesting on its own without an association that carries a lot of baggage like the male vs female one.

 

That is my lazy input to this discussion, now I'll check out the podcast too 😄

Edited April 1, 2021 by Page of Ghosts

[Guest]

@ilweran  I guess that's one way to move forward from here.  With the White/Red thing, we know what's beneath the categories - specific ends of a spectrum - but we move away from misleading ourselves or anyone else by not directly using "baggaged" words as @Page of Ghosts says.

 

@Rupicapra Sometimes the things I ask turn into a boxful of concepts that don't fit together and I can't see a easy way to reconcile them all and simply ask, "Tell me about Duality/Polarity as it relates to principles found in the Kybalion".  In this case I didn't even know that book existed.  So I have to hope someone recognises the parameters of what I'm saying and can cut to the chase, such as happened here. As for the patriarchy and mysogynist thing, if it wasn't so destructive it'd be hilarious how some of the descriptions of cards change once the interpretor uses anything close to classically "feminine" terms.  They go off the deep end so suddenly and violently you can't but notice. 

 

@TheLoracular thanks for the podcast. Episode 2 cleared up the very rough framing of my "question".  Pretty strange that book being at a kid's school like that. 

 

@LogicalHue "think about how it was originally intended...and seperate that from gender" that's a way forward, too, requiring a lot of study I would imagine.   It's not so that I want to conclusively prove everything has a gender, and then use that information to my benefit, but to find the line between what we know as "gender related issues" in the modern sense, put that aside, and see what a wider realm of spirit might use to acknowledge a specturm of polarity/duality as mentioned above.  I was confused about what exactly I was being told I should be seeing.

 

Overall, thanks guys, plenty helpful in exploring this issue, which has taken up most of my time the past few days. I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole and so far the picture that is forming is clearer, but cannot be translated into words. 😏