The Divine Hermaphrodite

There is a magnetic bond that connects Mercury (4^th Ray) to Venus (5^th Ray), a bond that leads the enlightened Mind and the loving Mind to intertwine so deeply as to delineate that synthetic unity between Reality and form, between Being and becoming, between the One and the manifold, that reveals, in a play of infinite symmetries, the pattern and texture of Manifestation. (1)
“… The Four, being the centre, being the lord of symmetries, cannot do anything if the Five does not reveal them by lending it its dualism. Therefore the dualism that could be considered as an energy that deceives, seen from the threshold of the Temple, is instead an energy that expresses. And we could not admire the harmonies and symmetries that the Four composes if the Five with its dualism did not represent them!” (2)

Myth, the mighty voice of the eternal, reminds us that Mercury and Venus gave birth to Hermaphroditus, who, unique example in all Greek mythology, was a representative of both sexual genders at the same time.
“Now Mercury is called Hermes, and Venus, Aphrodite, and thus their conjunction in man on the psychophysical plane gives him the name of the Hermaphrodite, or Androgyne. The absolutely Spiritual Man is, however, entirely disconnected from sex.” (3)

Other sources, e.g. Ovid, tell of the beautiful Hermaphroditus who inflamed the nymph Salmacis with love, but she was rejected by the young man. The nymph waited for the boy to bathe in a lake to embrace him, wrapping herself around him and praying to Zeus that she might forever be united with her beloved and never be separated from him. Her ardent wish was granted and the two became one body with both sexes.
This mythological figure, in addition to the suggestions that see in the coexistence of the sexes in a single creature the power of fertility, recalls the figure of the perfect man who was able to unite in himself the human and divine aspects and represents the coincidentia oppositorum, the perfect union of opposites, that rediscovered unity that makes man a citizen of both earth and heaven, also echoed in the narration we find in Plato’s Symposium. (4)
This ‘nostalgia for wholeness’ or ‘longing for the One’ urges man to search: mind and heart reach out together to regain the lost unity and, step by step, internally rebuild that garden of perfect beauty where all separations vanish and the Union can shine.
A union which, as the myth once again confirms, is also expressed by the image of Ouroboros, the serpent that turns on itself in the guise of a circle and which, like the Hermaphrodite, represents completeness, the universal globe, the Whole which reveals itself through a perfect form.

Following Madame Blavatsky’s lead, we then see another aspect in the figure of the Hermaphrodite, namely that original male-female duality in a single numinous expression that connoted many of the ancient depictions of the deity and thus expressed the completeness and integrity of the One:
“Nevertheless, one finds the Hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction? (…) Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution of the Human Races from the Divine, and especially from the Androgynous Race—the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages! Divine Wisdom incarnating on Earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated on Earth only under the shade of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—a secret first known only to the Elohim, the Self-Initiated, “Higher Gods.” In the Book of Enoch we have Adam, the first Divine Androgyne, separating into man and woman, and becoming Jah-Heva in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel—male and female—in its other form or Race—the double-sexed Jehovah, an echo of its Âryan prototype, Brahmâ-Vâch. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind—that is to say, Races of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no longer sexless Semi-spirits and Androgynes, as were the two Races which precede them. This fact is hinted at in every Anthropogony. It is found in fable and allegory, in myth and revealed Scriptures, in legend and tradition. For, of all the great Mysteries, inherited by Initiates from hoary antiquity, this is one of the greatest. It accounts for the bi-sexual element found in every Creative Deity, in Brahmâ-Virâj-Vâch, as in Adam-Jehovah-Eve, also in Cain-Jehovah-Abel. (…)
The “Divine Hermaphrodite” is, then, Brahmâ-Vâch-Virâj; and that of the Semites, or rather of the Jews, is Jehovah-Cain-Abel.
(…) But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double- sexed first creators of every Cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zên (Æther), and Chthonia (the Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona—the former God also representing Æther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light; the Goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras, the rock-born God, the symbol of the male Mundane Fire, or the personified Primordial Light, and Mithra, the Fire-Goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of Fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or Matter (the female or passive element of cosmical generation). All these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.” (5)

The figure of the Hermaphrodite also foreshadows the fulfilment of the future union between human and devic evolutions.
The two evolutions are currently only juxtaposed and not fused together. “In the three worlds the two lines of evolution parallel each other, and must not be consciously one. In the planes of the Triad they are known as a unity, producing the Divine Hermaphrodite, or the Heavenly Man,—the self-conscious human units embodying the three aspects of divinity, while the conscious deva units embody the divine attributes. The two, blended together, form the body of manifestation, the centres and substance of the Heavenly Man.” (6)

“It is in the vegetable kingdom that we find one of the first and temporary approximations between the evolving human Monad, and the evolving deva Monad. The two parallel evolutions touch in that kingdom, and then again follow their own paths, finding their next point of contact on the fourth or buddhic level, and a final merging on the second.” (7)

“Further, the two great evolutions (human and deva) find their group unity on the buddhic plane, and portions of both hierarchies blend and merge so as to form the body of the divine Hermaphrodite. Earlier, at certain fixed points, they may temporarily approximate each other. On the buddhic plane definite and permanent alliance may be seen.” (8)

This future glory sees the One shining forth in the fullness of its power also through its parts which, after the evolutionary journey, can contribute to rebuild its substantial fabric with Intelligence and Love.
The Divine Hermaphrodite is precisely this great Being, planetary and solar and cosmic, which in itself manifests the pair of opposites and in this divine unity guarantees the fecundation and generation of the manifested world.
Life and Space, Father and Mother, unite, though they had never been separated, in the fullness of their manifesting power, merge into the One Fire that is the image of the infinite creative capacity of the Absolute, intertwine, and with them all creatures that live in their breath, in an embrace of Light.

“When Father approaches Mother, that which will be taketh form. The union of the two concealeth the true mystery of Being. When the two great devas seek each other, when they meet and merge, the promise of life is fulfilled. (…) Herein lies the key to the mystic marriage, and to the student of occultism much may be revealed through the study of these pairs of opposites; it will cause the revelation of the process (in time and space) whereby this union and its fruit is consummated, and the resultant creation of the divine Hermaphrodite is seen upon His Own high plane.” (9)

This triumphant glory is also envisaged as the outcome of conscious human participation in the building of the cosmic Temple, and finds in the energies of Mercury and Venus the necessary fire for this undertaking of Communion, knowing that “absolute Reason and the perfect Heart are one and the same Source.” (10)

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1 – Today we celebrate the conjunction, according to the heliocentric perspective, between Mercury, Lord of Harmony and Beauty, and Venus, Lady of the Golden Proportion, in the First Sector of Scorpio. On this occasion the Formula “I resonate with hierarchical Harmony” resounds, urging everyone to raise their consciousness, in the Light of Love, to unite it with the one of the Masters.
2 – E. Savoini, Commentary to the Mysteries, unpublished paper
3 – Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine vol. III
4 – In the Symposium, Plato has the playwright Aristophanes tell of the existence of a third gender that partakes of both sexes. This gender was not a child of the Sun like men, and not a child of the Earth like women, but a child of the Moon. The myth relates that self-sufficient completeness made humans so arrogant that they planned to climb Mount Olympus and so Zeus was forced to separate each of them into two halves, one male and the other female.
5 – Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Anthropogenesis
6 – Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, p. 663
7 – Ibidem, p. 589
8 – ibidem, p. 328
9 – Ibidem, pp. 671-2
10 – Agni Yoga Series, Infinity I § 300