INTRODUCTION TO THE FEMININE UNIVERSE
There is only one mythology, one iconology and one truth; that of an uncreated wisdom that has been handed down from time immemorial.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
The term philosophia perennis, which has been current since the time of the Renaissance. . . signifies the totality of the primordial and universal truths—and therefore of metaphysical axioms—whose formulation does not belong to any particular sytstem.
Frithjof Schuon
In truth pure metaphysics is neither Eastern nor Western, but universal. . . [the] forms may be Eastern or Western, but under the appearance of diversity there is always a basis of unity, at least wherever true metaphysics exists, for the simple reason that truth is one.
Rene Guenon
The traditional approach to reality is everywhere and always the same, despite the great differences in the historical development of traditional civilisations.
Lord Northbourne
THIS BOOK is the first systematic exposition of the Perennial Wisdom. It is an attempt to express in the clearest possible terms and in the smallest possible space the Primordial Philosophy accepted and understood in all times and in all places before the aberrations of the modern world. It gives this philosophy in its feminine form - that being the earliest known on this earth.
Ananda Coomaraswamy described traditional societies as "unanimous societies": that is societies not fragmented by conflicting factions and opinions, but united by a single, essential Truth.
And this unanimity exists - though often unrecognised—not only within all traditional societies, from the red Indian medicine lodge to the Chinese temple, from the Siberian shaman to the Indian guru, from the Platonic West to the Confucian East, but between all traditional societies. Each one is founded upon the same essential, unchanging truths, even though they may express these truths in superficially different ways. Each one is a unique expresion of the Sophia Perennis, the primordial, changeless and eternal wisdom that is the common heritage of all humanity.
While many books have been written about this Primordial Tradition, this is the first one to expound it systematically in its salient features. That alone would make it a book of the greatest significance, but, within an extraordinarily short space, this book does much more than that. It also discusses the essentially feminine nature of the earliest traditions and shows the importance of this in the development of the historical cycle and its special relevance to the developments of the last few decades.
Writers such as René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy have expounded the Sophia Perennis in many volumes. They have done so from a purely metaphysical and Traditional perspective (which is necessarily the highest and truest). While this book certainly expounds metaphysical Truth. which is indeed its very core, it also examines the consequences and ramifications of traditional thought from a lower, more 'human' perspective.
From the 'pure' perspective of Guénon or Coomaraswamy it is necessary to reject out of hand the Western world that has come into being since the European Renaissance, or certainly since the mid-17th century. Guenon writes:
. . . what characterises the final phase of a cycle is the exploitation of everything that has been neglected or rejected during the course of the preceding phases; and indeed this is precisely what is to be observed in modern civilisation, which only lives, so to speak, by things which previous civilisations found no use for.
Crisis of the Modern World
This poses certain questions. Are we, for example, to include the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Keats and Wordsworth, and even Michelangelo among the "rejected elements", the "things which previous civilisations found no use for", of which Guénon speaks? Indeed, we must. But to say that they are "rejected elements" is not necessarily to say that they are worthless and contemptible. It may be to say that they are the Final Fruits of the Historical Cycle, manifesting possibilities of a lower order than was possible to previous phases, but which nonetheless are good and beautiful in their own right and without which the Cycle would be incomplete.
This book takes a fresh look at post-Enlightenment culture with this in mind, analysing both its faults and its virtues, and shows how, even up to the earlier 20th century, the Traditional spirit remained vital in the aesthetic and cultural life of the Western world. What is necessary is to distinguish between those 'modern' developments that are legitimate Final Fruits and those which are truly malignant aberrations.
In the light of this, the book examines phenomena which Guénon and Coomaraswamy did not live to see and comment on: the cultural collapse of the 1960s with its complete inversion of normal values, and most terrible of all, the destruction of femininity and the creation of an unbalanced world in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman herself. This book explains the traditional value of femininity and its essential superiority. It exposes the modern attack on femininity and the absurd doctrine that this cosmic Reality is the result of 'social conditioning'. It shows how what is being lost by the totalitarian imposition of an all-masculine culture is something of immeasurable importance to our spiritual health and our very survival.
On this subject we wish to add a note to the scientific evidence presented in Chapter Four. The case presented there does not consist of 'selected facts'. Any one who cares to speak to those involved in neuroscience research will quickly discover that there is no 'opposition' within the field. Despite the almost universal acceptance of the 'social conditioning' theory of femininity by the lay public, there are no neuroscientists who can any longer sustain this. Modern brain-scan technology has made it visibly and unarguably clear that the female brain is radically different from the male brain and that the psychological characteristics that necessarily flow from this are precisely those of 'conventional' femininity. No informed person can any longer dispute this any more than she can dispute the roundness of the earth. The continued belief in the 'social conditioning' theory of femininity is simply an example of the 'ideological ignorance' of an over-politicised society.
What we must understand is that from the Traditional point of view, these feminine characteristcs are in fact the highest of human characteristics and that our rejection of them not only does violence to the inborn nature of women, but impoverishes society and robs it of its vital centre.
We ask readers to note that the 'universal she' is used throughout this book in place of the traditional patriarchal 'he' and the ugly and cumbersome 'he or she'. We do this for precisely the same reason that 'he' is used by patriarchal writers (or rather the reverse of that reason) - because we regard the female as the primary or fundamental sex; and in this, as we shall see, we are borne out by history, biology and metaphysics.
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