What has just been said in terms of the procreation of a new body can as well apply to creative processes at the ideological-mental-cultural level. Every creative person is, or rather should be, a Virgin Mother in relation to his or her creations, be the works of art and literature, scientific theories or the organization of sociocultural institutions. In such a creative activity there should be no personal-emotional possessiveness or the type of intellectual pride which binds the creator to his work. The creator "pro-duces" (brings forth) that which is the result of the fecundation of his mind by a power that, in its noblest form, transcends the mind acting only as a womb. A creative process occurs through him, rather than from him. If he does not remain attached to, and possessive of it, he remains virginal. New flows of potentiality again and again will occur through him.

At the social level, money is a profound and vital symbol of potentiality. A dollar bill is ever-virgin, for it can be used for a multitude of purposes. With money (nearly) all things are possible — it would seem today. A modern bank should be a vast field of social possibilities, but a field exacting no price for the flow of its credit — a symbol of trust, which is "social love." The whole social process is vitiated and turns destructive of human values when exclusive possession is attached to money; and a constant increase of productivity in terms of material goods, on an Earth swarming with ever more bodies, is the one overriding goal of society.

The goal of productivity can be transferred to an ideospiritual level at which the needs of minds and souls is of far greater importance than the need of bodies. Yet even there the patterns of productivity will always tend to become rigid and resist transformation. Therefore to the inertia of every form that at any cost seeks to maintain itself and to expand, a new surge of potentiality must answer. No cyclic process must be allowed to turn into exact circles. Creativity alone can inject into the process a new spirit of creativity, and where creativity and spontaneity have been defeated by habit, technical routine and automatism, then repotentialization is the only way to spiritual transformation even though it means confrontation with the past and crisis.

It has often been remarked that women tend to be conservative in social matters and politics, because they are basically concerned with their offsprings security; and crises of social transformation inevitably challenge what has until then appeared as security. Let me repeat that the mother-type of woman is geared to what has been. Her natural function at the biological level is to transfer to her progeny the patterns of instinctual behavior required for physical survival. In the same manner the natural function of woman at the sociocultural level is to teach her children the behavior, the traditional types of emotional (and later ethical) beliefs and responses, and the simple basic skills that will insure the child's acceptance in society.

Thus, for a man who, after growing up, seeks refuge in the past, is afraid of changes and the big wide world, and whose mother has been psychically possessive and overprotective, the desired woman, be she wife or mistress, will be asked to carry the image and function of a mother. It may be a mother function at the sexual and emotional and home level; it may also be that function raised to the spiritual level of divine Motherhood.

On the other hand, men who are servants of the future and are consecrated to the ever-renewed possibility of creating unrepetitive tomorrows, will seek women who, to them at least — and they may be misled by temporary stirrings of sexual desires — can be embodiments of the virgin spirit; women who will seem to hold the everglowing promise of the actualization of as-yet-unknown possibilities, even possibilities beyond this earth, beyond the natural realm of loving and begetting progeny.

To such men, woman as the ever-Virgin can be the romantic "Muse," the inspirer, the Beatrice of Dante in search of the center of ever higher perfection rooted in the experience of ever deeper abysses of human tragedy. She can also be the companion of the true alchemist, traveling with him as a Holy Sister upon the mystical Path. Such a dedicated companionship may not necessarily exclude sex; if sex can be consciously ritualized and attuned to the interplay of the great cosmic Powers, that is the foundation of all existence. But it should not be, except in rare occasions, sex based on unconscious instinct, thus on compulsive biological and mere organic satisfaction. It should be a purposeful sexual togetherness freed of animal excitement. In this togetherness, the fire surging from the depths of the two harmonized human fields of forces may be transmuted into a light glowing within the field of the united vessels of life, united but open to the beyond that is also the ". . . within; open and free, free of each other as well as of the all-too-human patterns of our present humanity."

Such an alchemical, deeply quiet and unemotional process is, however, most difficult to accept or even to understand for vitally exuberant persons avid for orgiastic release, or for individuals tense with frustrations, tragic hurts, and perhaps guilt complexes. It is not only difficult; it is often quite dangerous — thus the usual emphasis upon absolute chastity in the relationships between the brothers and sisters who have become consecrated to the Divine within themselves and within humanity, the "Great Orphan" (a traditional occult designation.) And there may be such a consecration outside of official religious orders!