The Sacred Feminine, the Sacred Masculine, and the Divine Transcendent

Occasionally I’ve mentioned that people in alternate spiritualities are groping towards something that’s fundamentally true, but they often arrive at incomplete conclusions thanks to incomplete information. Today I’d like to explore a common example.

Among New Agers, Neopagans, Occultists, and other streams of modern western spirituality, there’s a paradigm in which the universe is seen as a “divine feminine” and a “divine masculine.” This line of thought is not necessarily wrong, and it’s clearly an attempt to understand and implement the concepts of “masculine principle” and “feminine principle” found within many other spiritual traditions.

Where they go wrong, however, is when they attempt to insert their conceptualization into Christianity. Don’t get me wrong because the masculine and feminine principles are definitely there. It’s just that these individuals are completely misunderstanding the implementation.

As we move forward in this discussion I would like to explain how the masculine and feminine are represented within Christianity, which I believe would be extremely useful for any Christian occultist. Afterward I plan to the misunderstandings among the alternative spirituality communities when they try playing at comparative religion.

The Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine

To put it very quickly, Christianity’s conception of the sacred masculine and feminine is embodied in the Holy Family, whose feastday the Latin Mass celebrates on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, and which this Novus Ordo celebrates on the Sunday right after Christmas. This is also one of only two places where I think the Novus Ordo calendar does it better, but that’s a conversation for another time.

For those unfamiliar, the phrase “Holy Family” is a reference to Mary, Jesus, and Joseph, and is usually pictured with Jesus as an infant or a young boy (sometimes as a teenager working in Joseph’s woodshop).

In this we see Mary symbolizes the Sacred Feminine, and Joseph symbolizes the Sacred Masculine. I say “symbolize” even though these are real people, in the same way one could say the same of George Washington. He was a real person, and he also symbolizes the founding of the United States of America. The legends of chopping down the cherry tree, crossing the Delaware, the winter at Valley Forge, and his refusal to be crowned king serve to bolster that symbolism even if they were also real events.

On this I needn’t say much because most of my readership is already familiar with the concept of polarity. I would however say that this picture only came together for me within the past few months, when I started taking up a devotion to St. Joseph.

Now I’ve come to know the Blessed Mother’s presence very well from 26 years of praying the Rosary. Something I’ve never mentioned but have hinted at in the new We Pray the Rosary is that after one becomes familiar enough with the rhythm of the devotion and orders their life properly as best they can, She can and does respond in real time. Sometimes she speaks during the Rosary itself, but most of the conversation happens during the “O Most Sorrowful and Immaculate” prayer.

I’m not going to give any details of the conversations, and it should be enough to say I recognize what her presence feels like, her personality, her way of speaking, and how she operates when affecting the material world – including her interaction with sublunary versus superlunary entities.

Suffice to say I will not be writing a book about any of this, because the Occulture’s resident Thelemites and Satanists are guaranteed to pervert this information the first chance they get. I’ve given you the tools to rediscover this knowledge on your own. But because the Occutlure exists, my own firsthand knowledge goes with me to my grave.

Enter St. Joseph. I hadn’t entertained the idea of devotion to him until last May, when my impromptu homily during the Mass for Breaking Curses started turning the gear-wheels of my mind. His day is Wednesday, so on one Wednesday morning praying the Rosary, I sat down with my Raccolta and recited prayer #476, first in English and then in Latin. I was not prepared for what happened next.

Around the completion of the English prayer, a presence filled the room. This was not the Blessed Mother’s presence, as this was very decidedly masculine. A very healthy sort of masculine at that. If you can imagine the energy of a grizzled self-disciplined old guy who’s seen a lot of things, been through a few wars, does right by his family, and can still kick your ass, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark from what I sensed at that moment.

Without drawing out the story, I learned several things after that encounter which have been reinforced since. The first was that my own devotion for 26 years had been unbalanced, that I’d completely misunderstood the concept of the Holy Family (hence my attempts to avoid preaching about it every January), and that there were a whole host of qualities within myself I’d never noticed the need to work on.

It was also in that moment that I realized – and subsequently confirmed – the reality of the Sacred Feminine and Masculine within Catholicism, with St. Joseph standing for the latter.

The Divine Transcendent

You may notice that I said “sacred” masculine and feminine, not “divine” masculine and feminine as is common in alternate spiritual parlance. This is intentional because though Mary and Joseph are real, they are not the Godhead. It is now when speaking of the Godhead that I’ll use the adjective “divine.”

In short, God does not have gender. God transcends gender and all notions of gender. The fact that we refer to God as “He” is a cultural convention that has nothing to do with God-as-God-really-is. This is something that mainstream traditional Christianity has consistently acknowledged to be the case, though for whatever reason it almost never filters down to the people in the pews.

For the sake of review, let’s quickly run through some receipts I’ve shared over the years:

In Job 38:8 the Hebrew depicts God as having a uterus: “Who closed the flood gates as the sea gushed from the womb?”

This often gets retranslated into “the sea gushed forth as from a womb,” but the Hebrew specifically states “from the womb.” In other words God is being anthropomorphized as having a specifically female organ.

The Early Church picked up on this, as we find in both St. Jerome and St. Gregory Nazianzen.

St. Jerome’s words on this are found in his Commentaria in Isiam, book 11. Toward the end of his commentary on Isaias 40:9-11, he inserts the following: “But also in the Gospel which is written ‘according to the Hebrews,’ which the people of Nazareth read often, the Lord says: ‘this way hath my mother, the Holy Ghost, taken me up.’ Now no one should be scandalized on this account, because among the Hebrews the spirit is spoken of in the feminine gender, when in out [Latin] language it is called by the masculine gender, and in Greek by the neuter. For in the Godhead there is no gender.”

St. Gregory of Nazianzen is noteworthy for his work on the theology of the Trinity. In Chapter VII of his Fifth Theological Oration (also known as “Oration 31”). In this oration, Gregory is concerned with defending the divinity of the Holy Ghost, and touches on the concept of deity and gender: “For it does not follow that because the Son is the Son in some higher relation (inasmuch as we could not in any other way than this point out that He is of God and Consubstantial), it would also be necessary to think that all the names of this lower world and of our kindred should be transferred to the Godhead. Or maybe you would consider our God to be a male, according to the same arguments, because he is called God and Father, and that Deity is feminine, from the gender of the word, and Spirit neuter, because It has nothing to do with generation; But if you would be silly enough to say, with the old myths and fables, that God begot the Son by a marriage with His own Will, we should be introduced to the Hermaphrodite god of Marcion and Valentinus who imagined these newfangled Æons.”

I could go further, and if this were an actual research book I would. However this should be sufficient to make my point. This is also why I have no problem with people who refer to God as “she” so long as they’re willing to respect my own choice of a masculine pronoun. (Using the word “It” is kind of weird thanks to its derogatory connotations when referring to anyone that’s living, let alone Life life-self!)

In any case, what we have here is a double distinction. The first distinction is between the sacred and the divine, which is to say the distinction between that set apart by the Godhead and the Godhead itself. The second distinction is that between the Sacred’s participation in gender and the Divine’s transcendence of it.

Hence we find our way to the phrase “Divine Transcendent,” which simply notes that the Divine is transcendent of gender.

When anyone images the Godhead as a man with a beard, or as a woman in a flowing robe, or even my own description of the Trinity each having masculine and feminine aspects – Father/Mother, Logos/Sophia, Spiritus/Shekhina respectively – these images are still true and valid insofar as they take us toward a deeper engagement and interaction. Yet we have to remember these images are merely human constructs to help us engage and interact with One who can never be entirely modeled or understood by our limited human minds.

Misunderstandings and Concluding Remarks

Thus far we have drawn a picture of the Sacred Masculine and Feminine as pictured by Joseph and Mary respectively, and of the Divine Transcendent as pictured by the Christ-Child. This image of the Holy Family is familiar, readily accessible, and found on many a Catholic home altar. It also has representation in churches, where a statue of the Blessed Mother stands to the congregation’s left, St. Joseph to their right, and the Altar Crucifix is placed in the center. This leaves us with no problem in perceiving, assimilating, and acting upon this information provided we only desire to learn it.

This is so simple, yet the most common misapplication we see is “Mary as the Divine Feminine and Jesus as Divine Masculine,” effectively an attempt to translate the Wiccan Goddess and God into Christian iconography. Why is this so?

The main reason, as I see it, is that most people in alternative spiritual communities are coming from some incomplete and/or incorrect ideas. I don’t mean this as a judgment, but as a value-neutral observation.

Consider it this way. The vast majority of people involved in the New Age, or Neopaganism, or Occultism, etc., were born and raised in Protestant households. They grew up hearing stereotypes of “how those Catholics worship Mary” and effectively internalized those when searching for someone to fill a “Goddess” position. Most were also raised with the notion that God is emphatically male (a problem in most Christian households, not just Protestant ones), and often have an emotional need to counteract that but lack the intellectual basis to think their way through the paradigm.

Last but not least, most Protestants are completely clueless about the role Saint Joseph. This applies to the Scriptural Joseph as a psychic who received messages in dreams and protected his family any any cost, as well as to the devotional Joseph who is the Patron of the Universal Church, Patron of Souls of the Dying, Patron of Fathers, Patron of the Family, Patron of the Unborn, Patron of Workers, Terror of Demons, and Patron of Real Estate Transactions if all those people burying statues have anything to say about it. After my own interactions, I would also add that he’s the Patron of Healthy Masculinity and of Teaching a Boy How to Be a Real Man.

Take a moment to admire the rich tapestry painted in that last paragraph. Now try to imagine someone who knows nothing of it, but has just learned their parents’ understanding of the universe is incomplete (if not downright false) and is trying to grope their way toward something more accurate. Their intuition will take them so far, but it requires knowledge in order to cross the finish line.

This is but one example of several things we can notice in the Occulture, and I chose this because it’s one of the more blatant ones. To my mind it shows the problem of growing up in a religious household where the religion is overly exoteric, not even complete on that part, and filled with negative stereotypes of other traditions. Someday your children will react against that conditioning and hodge-podge their own systems based on every inaccurate stereotype you told them to condemn!

Or they’ll join systems that were based on those stereotypes and maybe even worse ones.

That’s it for today. I’ll try to post something here every week until the classes start coming back in October, so stay tuned!

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