In the preceding chapter the possibility of raising the level of productivity of an interpersonal relationship dynamized by love from the biological to the ideospiritual level of creativity was evoked. I should now like to speak of an archetypal image of womanhood that is closely associated to the concept and ideal of repotentialization, the image of the Eternal Virgin — an image that is also embodied in a still more life-transcending manner in the great examples of the Kumaras, the Virgin-ascetics.

To the Occultist, SPACE, abstractly considered as the infinite ocean of potentiality, takes the idealized and mythic character of the Eternal Virgin, for the virginal state symbolizes the possibility of any future manifestation. The woman virgin, traditionally speaking, can be whatever the beloved who will dynamize and fecundate her field of creative possibilities demands of her; for the archetypal Woman is the sacred vessel ready to receive the Logos spermatikos, the creative Word that fecundates, and that fecundative act transforms potentiality into emergent actuality. Before fecundation she is SPACE, the infinite possibility of any and all cosmic modes of existence. Once fecundation has occurred, woman becomes the mother; and the mother's existence, symbolically speaking, is utterly oriented toward her progeny. The mother's rhythm of existence has been set. She is no longer free; that is, unconditioned. Actuality, in her, has absorbed — for a time at least — potentiality.

The Virgin and the Mother represent therefore two fundamental images or archetypes of womanhood. They are two basic aspects of the Eternal Feminine — symbols of potentiality and actuality. At this present stage of human evolution, the Mother represents productive energy and the capacity to guide and manage the early biological and even sociocultural, stages of her children's life. Without children there is no state of motherhood. When the religious devotee worships the Great Mother, or the Mother Force, he or she acknowledges being a child. On the other hand, the man who bows before the image of "the Virgin of the World" accepts the power and responsibility to become a "father" — a creative origin, a "logos." He comes to the virgin, as a mind and will yearning for a new field for his activity. His capacity to fecundate may be only latent; he too may be potentiality far more than actuality. Yet this potentiality is polarized toward the creative act.

For him, the virgin girl may still be represented by a sister because the time — biologically or socially — has not yet come to actualize his creative potential. Yet a polarization already exists. If that polarization is too strong, the brother may keep seeing in every woman he later meets, a sister; and this may interfere with his normal love-relationships. Yet at a higher level of consciousness, the woman may appear to him as the Soror Mystica, the Sister participating in the Great Work of true, spiritual alchemy. She is then the Holy Virgin who, like him, has been self-consecrated to the service of the Divine in man — and therefore to the service of those who are building Man's future state of existence, the "Brothers" of the essentially hidden, yet at times revealed Great Lodge — the Seed-Pleroma of Humanity.

An entire society may be characterized by whether it emphasizes the mother aspect of women, rather than the Virgin of Light. In America today the cult of the mother has achieved world recognition, and often world notoriety. The Mom who "knows best" and makes a nondescript Daddy work hard for boudoirized Cadillacs and pastel Frigidaires has been the subject of endless discussions, psychological analyses, and comic strips. Often frustrated in her life or love with a business-engrossed husband whom she takes for granted, fascinated by her newly won intellectual and social independence from home and husband, self-consciously assuming an important place in the daily patterns of our economic, cultural and political life, the American Mom is most often torn by psychological conflicts. Caught as she is in a fever of self-exteriorization, she tends to ignore and deny her deeper femininity, and to live, tensely and relentlessly, and with much intellectual pride (a mask for insecurity!), at the very surface of the exteriorized portion of her nature.

Yet the very dependence of the typical American male on his mother and the quasi-matriarchal character of some aspects of our society have engendered in men and women a more or less conscious yearning for youthfulness. Just because our society has become mechanized and automated, and we officially worship the formalistic intellect of the technician hemmed in by written formulas and of the lawyer hypnotized by the need for success through cleverness, there is a nearly poignant longing once more to be unconditioned, as-yet-nonautomated once more to be young and at least in a deep spiritual sense virginal.

Thus the mature man and woman of Suburbia dress young, try to act young, and to make believe they are not the slaves of a system which, rigidly even if subtly, determines their manner of thinking, feeling, and behavior so that they will be "liked," accepted by everybody who counts, and successful in an indistinct and nonindividualized way. When the young generation rebelled and desperately tried to actualize their inner repudiation and protest by different clothes, hair-styles and loose way of relationships, the older people — upset as they were — quickly tried to imitate the countercultural fashions.

Alas, the process of "revirgination" or true repotentialization cannot be real if it means only the imitation of what is chaos rather than true virginity. In the deepest sense of the term, chaos is also a state of potentiality. The cosmos condition has broken down in the year cycle; the plant has lost its leaves which now are disintegrating into mere chemicals. These chemicals may be used in any new process of germination; but they will be used in a condition of unconscious absorption into the new germ. Today our society has not yet produced pure chaos, even (most often and exceptions notwithstanding) among younger generations who are still very much attached to their Western civilization even if only by their emotional rebellion against it. Chaos no longer rebels against anything; it is a passive condition.

The virginal state of which I am speaking here is totally oriented toward the future, but a future which as yet might have any form. In contrast to it the state of motherhood is completely determined by the need of what it has produced. Yet in some way the two states can be integrated within the life and the consciousness of women; and it presumably is what, at the deepest level, constitutes the new possibility toward the actualization of which many modern women more or less unconsciously and emotionally are striving.

Actually this possibility can be seen symbolized in the Catholic symbol of Mary, the Virgin Mother. What is implied in the symbol is the possibility for a woman who has a child to function as a mother without being exclusively committed to that function and to the man who fecundated her. The Virgin Mother knows in her deeper consciousness that it is the universal and impersonal power of Life (or God) that impregnated her virginal field of existence, and that regardless of what her future relationships to any man might be, she remains the servant of the creative Spirit, and thus a channel through which a fresh spring of potentiality may always emerge through her. Even in relation to her child she knows herself as a focus of love and intelligence guiding the child toward self-fulfillment, but what is concentrated by and passes through the focus of her body and her whole person is Spirit — not the will, love, or intelligence of a particular man who was merely the carrier of sperm to impregnate her ovum, or even whose ego and personal character sought to make her in his own image and possess her.

In this sense, virginity does not refer strictly to the fact of not having been "deflorated" by a male; it does not actually exclude sexual experience. It simply refers to a state of being in which the natural condition of productivity for exclusivistic goals implying possessiveness is transcended. Whether there is biological productivity in terms of child-bearing or not, the woman's consciousness is not fundamentally affected. Her body, for a time, may be caught in a current of biological procreation; yet even as this happens, her consciousness and life-purpose remain unattached to that current, because they do not expect anything personal from this life-process. The process passes through the woman who neither desires nor will claim rewards of any kind from her role as progenitor. She gives love to the baby, as she gave her body to the man — in the Name of the Divine that equally dwells in him, her and the child.