According to Riane Eisler in her seminal book, The Chalice and the Blade, there was an age of androgyny during Paleolithic times, before the fall into history. Relations between the sexes were egalitarian, there was goddess worship, and life-affirming values, emblemized by the chalice, were celebrated. But this age was wiped out by dominator cultures that worshipped the One Male God to rule them all, and the sword became the worshipped emblem, skill in violence and conquest were celebrated, and this trend continues right up to a monotheistic president landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit with an enormous codpiece. (Though he was replaced by the surprisingly androgynous Obama.) How did such a dramatic change occur?
One intriguing theory is put forth by Leonard Shlain in his book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess. According to Shlain, the switch over to dominator culture was always preceded by the adoption of a written alphabet. Written alphabets, as objects of perception, cause a shift in hemispheric dominance emphasizing the left hemisphere. This is the hemisphere that can deal with abstracted language, and it is also the hemisphere associated with linearity and hierarchy. It is the Masculine hemisphere, the one which would be inclined to build a dominator society. As Shlain points out, quickly following the adoption of a written alphabet goddesses are eliminated, women are forbidden to preside over religious rituals, or even to participate at all, and in general become second class citizens or disposable property. A text of some sort becomes the ruling principle (“In the beginning was the word…”), and that text could be religious—the Bible, the Koran—-or secular—-the Communist Manifesto, the “rule of law.” Clerics would even come to prefer garments of black and white, the colors of ink and paper. (See the four hour audio “Logos Beheld” or the Logos Beheld section of my book Crossing the Event Horizon—Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype.)
The excited penis manacled by words of fell power could be seen as the emblem of the patriarchal era. Language-abstracted war-like primates continue to dominate a planet which they see as made up of real estate and livestock there to be conquered and exploited. The manacle of abstracted language, taking the forms of propaganda and ends justify the means rationalizations, allows this destruction to occur. The words of fell power include many abstracted phrases of the Twentieth Century like “inferior races,” “justified use of force,” “collateral damage,” “pacification,” “neutralize,” “Department of Defense,” “non-operative personnel,” “body count,” “final solution” and “ethnic cleansing.” The Ring in the vision also acts as a “cock ring,” it keeps the phallic patriarchal intention engorged with blood—a manacle of metal and language keeping the Tower of Babel erect, and excited, acting out masculinity inflated, its six thousand year erection continuing into our present era of Viagra and violence.
The quest of the Ring Fellowship is the quest of a few individuals who seek to throw this Ring into the Cracks of Doom and bring down the phallic towers of power and oppression. The tower, phallic in shape, which leaves the ground at an abstracted distance below, is the unsurpassed emblem of the dominator culture. This is the reason that phallic-possessed Islamic terrorists would want to bring down the Twin Towers of a competing dominator culture. 9/11 was an act of castration. Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code, a book that for all its many flaws is essentially about the rediscovery of androgyny, begins with jokes about the phallic Eiffel Tower.
One of the most emblematic scenes in contemporary mythology occurred at the top of a giant Ferris wheel, which was probably used as the tallest object around. It was a key scene in the film noir classic The Third Man, which was written by Graham Greene and starred Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. The setting is Vienna right after World War II. Joseph Cotton plays Holly Martin, a writer down on his luck who has arrived at the invitation of his lifelong friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) who offered him a job. Harry Lime is a personality of immense charisma who has great powers of charm and persuasion. When Martins arrives he finds that Lime has supposedly just been murdered, but there are so many conflicting details that he knows that something very fishy is going on. Martins meets Lime’s lover, a beautiful, intelligent woman who remains under Lime’s spell no matter what terrible things she learns about him, and his many betrayals. Martins soon discovers that Lime has faked his own murder to avoid arrest. Lime has become a black market racketeer, and one of his scams involved stealing penicillin from military hospitals and then diluting and selling it on the black market for 20,000 pounds a vial. The diluted penicillin resulted in numerous deaths, especially of children, and there is a hospital ward of children dying horrible deaths as a direct result of the diluted penicillin. Martins refuses to believe his friend capable of such appalling evil until he is shown all sorts of incontrovertible evidence. As they stand at the top of the Ferris wheel, Martins confronts Lime with his terrible deeds. Essentially, Martins, with World War as the appropriate back drop, is asking the question of the age, how such a talented, charismatic Masculine force could do such appalling things. Martins asks,
“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” Lime replies with the view from the tower,
“….victims? Don’t be melodramatic. (Lime gestures at the people walking far below them.) Look down there, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare, free of income tax, old man, free of income tax, the only way you can save money nowadays…”
A minute later Lime points out that he is only emulating the morality of governments,
“Nobody talks about human beings anymore. Why should we? They talk about the proletariat and the people, I talk about the suckers and the mugs, it’s the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.”
Lime has merely adopted the patriarchal morality of the day, the point of view of the one-eyed penis tower manacled by abstract language—-people become statistics, the living world becomes a chess board, the ends justify the means.
This “tower” consciousness is exemplified in the Tolkien mythology by The Two Towers, and their associated dictators Sauron and Saruman. Two Towers represent two solar phallic powers emblemized by the Red Eye of Sauron and the White Hand of Saruman. Each has their own army of genetically engineered Orcs which bear one of these two glyphs. Saruman’s orcs may be superior to Sauron’s in that they can better stand to be in the sun. They wonder which master is the more powerful,
“Is Saruman the master or the Great Eye? We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man’s flesh to eat.”
Towers are emblems of both solar phallic and chthonic phallic power. Neither solar phallic nor chthonic phallic power is good or bad in itself, like all forms of power either may be used for good or evil. The most complete embodiment of solar phallic power in the Tolkien mythology is neither Sauron nor Saruman, but Gandalf the White. Consider this description of him,
“A gleam of sun through fleeting clouds fell on his hands, which lay now upturned on his lap: they seemed to be filled with light as a cup is with water. At last he looked up and gazed straight at the sun.”
While the Orcs and Ring Wraiths can scarcely abide the sun, Gandalf the White can look straight at it, and his hands are filled with light. Sauron’s solar phallic power is not associated with the sun but with the inferior version of it—fire, even his thoughts are described as “fiery.” Fire is usually inferior to and derivative of solar energy. On the earthly plane fire is most commonly caused by the release of solar energy stored in a plant-based fuel such as wood, coal and oil and is far less intense that the nuclear fire of the sun.
When we first hear of Saruman, Gandalf the Grey acknowledges him as his superior, Saruman the White, highest of the Ishtari, the race of wizards:
“Saruman the White is the greatest of my order…Saruman has long studied the arts of the Enemy himself, and thus we have often been able to forestall him.”
A danger for the one-sided solar phallic personality is that it all too easily becomes obsessed and possessed by what it studies and this has already happened to Saruman. When Gandalf discovers that Saruman is a traitor, it is also learned that he is no longer white. Gandalf narrates,
“ ‘I have come for your aid, Saruman the White.’ And that title seemed to anger him….”
Saruman makes a proclamation of power,
“ ‘For I am Saruman, the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of many Colours!
White!’ He sneered ‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.’”
Gandalf replies,
“In which case it is no longer white, and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
To understand why whiteness is superior to many coloredness we need to reverse our associations of political correctness which would identify white as Caucasian and many colors as diversity. Tolkien is referring to white as an optical property, not a racial one. White light is a fusion of all colors, and corresponds to Singer’s definition of androgyny where Masculine and Feminine are fused. From the point of view of this optical metaphor, many coloredness is a fragmentation of the diverse elements analogous to Singer’s definition of the hermaphrodite. Gandalf’s response to Saruman shows his recognition that Saruman has left the path of individuation, of wholeness, and has descended into psychological fragmentation. Access to the source of consciousness, white light in this metaphor, has been shattered into identification with the ten thousand things.
The solar phallic personality who has undergone such a fragmentation typically seeks to compensate with a Luciferian will to power, a compensatory single-minded focus, which presents as a deluded will to bring order and control to everything in the external world. Similarly, Darth Vader, in the Star Wars mythology, hides his shattered, fragmented self in a cybernetic exoskelteon and seeks to seduce his son with a reasonable sounding entreaty, “Join me and together we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the Galaxy.” This is the same psychological force which motivates so many of the political power figures of our day who disguise, even to themselves, their unbridled lust for power, their hysterical attempts to compensate for inner chaos, by attempts to control the external— as patriotism, international order, etc. Rationalizations (in the form of inner and outer propaganda) parading as “righteous” and “reasonable” are used to justify the darkest means. As Saruman puts it to Gandalf,
“The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see… There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power….the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”
This line is extremely close to the logic of so many modern power figures. Saruman becomes even more transparent to Gandalf when he refers to the ring:
“Why not? The Ruling Ring? If we could command that, then Power would pass to us.”
Gandalf incisively responds,
“Saruman…only one hand at a time can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!”
Gandalf recognizes the limitations of the monodimensional power-obsessed personality. It has no access to the Feminine, to eros, and therefore there can only be a ME! and never a we. This is the antichrist configuration where the Godhead resides only in that particular ego which gazes out at a universe of livestock and real estate there for it to exploit. But this monodimensionality is also its greatest weakness and leads to its defeat and destruction. Gandalf, who has solar phallic power, but is also an androgyne, is able to project his awareness into the mind of Sauron, but Sauron cannot project his monodimensional mind into the androgynous mind of Gandalf. Gandalf uses the superiority of his awareness to recognize Sauron’s blind spot and creates a strategy that ultimately defeats Sauron. Gandalf recognizes that Sauron weighs everything according to the one scale available to his mind—-self-serving power:
“For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power, and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it….This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.”
The scale of power allows Sauron to very accurately judge all other power-oriented personalities, but he is blind-sided by the androgynous psyche which is able to play out a Taoist strategy of conquering by relinquishing power. This is the purported strategy of Christ (but not of so many who purport to be his followers) who stated that “The meek shall inherit the earth.” It never occurs to Sauron that anyone who came into possession of his precious One Ring would relinquish it and destroy it. He is blind-sided by a principle that he cannot anticipate because it has no place in his one-sided psyche.
Another of Sauron’s vulnerabilities is that his power is altogether given over to an external object. Only the androgyne, who has followed the path of wholeness has restored any of the inner power which both the self-appointed slave and master give over to the outer world. The person who chooses the path of slavery projects power onto the master, the control system, the dogma, the outside Godhead, while the master projects his power onto the outside objects he desires to subjugate. Both are altogether given over to the outer world, the matrix, and just as sadism and masochism are two sides of the same coin, masters and slaves are merely the active and passive faces of bondage to the external. (Again, I refer to those who choose the slave’s path, not those involuntarily bound into slavery by force.)
This one-sided extraversion is apparent in many modern persons. For example, both Bush presidents have stated proudly and repeatedly that they never “psychoanalyze themselves.” W has stated proudly that, “I never look in the mirror except to shave.”
“I’m not really the type to wander off and sit down and go through deep wrestling with my soul.”
—George W. Bush, as quoted in Vanity Fair, October 2000
“I’m also not very analytical. You know I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.” —George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003
For those who refuse Socrates’ wise commandment, “First, know thyself” the whole world is a distorted mirror of the psyche they do not know and everything is seen as through a glass darkly. They may seem to have power, but it is of a delusory, mechanical sort that uses them, that easily possesses them and wisely has chosen them as voluntary hollow men, empty vessels, psyches proud to surrender inner vision, the only kind of vision which allows the possibility of having any individual will or choice. Without inner vision one is absolutely ruled by a constellation of the inner and outer forces continuously pressing on us.
Sauron, though he is such a powerful sorcerer and stands right at the threshold between the spirit realm and the external world, is still absolutely given over to the external. He has one eye only which looks outward only. It takes two eyes for stereoscopic vision which allows you to see the depth of things. To see the psychological and spiritual depth of things the eyes must be connected to two active hemispheres. A mind needs access to both Masculine and Feminine for there to be depth vision. The eye of fire stabs outward, but it cannot endure to penetrate itself with inner vision. Its power is bonded to the outer also, and Sauron has given over a great part of his power to an external object, his Precious, and all his will is given over to recapturing it.
When a psyche is one-sided, particularly when its one-sidedness is Masculine, then it will seek to hurry or push itself through time in a vain struggle to obtain some external object, person, goal that it falsely believes will bring it wholeness (see Clock-time Metastasizing toward 2012 ). This configuration of pushing through time with eyes of fire and white hands of greed, is not limited to evil wizards, but is actually endemic in our culture in countless mundane versions. A man who is typically one-sided and deficient in the Feminine watches the clock till it is quitting time and he get with his girlfriend. Or he counts down the days to the next vacation when he can have a brief interlude in a tropical environment by the ocean. People of both genders in our culture are hurrying toward an imaginary future where they will reach their ideal weight, find their perfect mate, and obtain the fundamentalist materialist version of salvation, “success”—a blessed state where one can buy many things. But as Jesus put it, “What if a man should gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”
As I watched Lord of the Rings on Christmas Eve of 2002, my perception of the ring as a symbol of wholeness folded in on itself and reversed, and I saw that the key aspect of the ring was the ring as “The Precious,” the coveted external object which glows with the false promise of wholeness. I saw that Sauron needed to give power to the ring, because it was like his umbilicus, his point of connection to externality, a psychoid object that was made of both matter and language hovering between the realms of spirit and matter. As a being with no Feminine part whatsoever, his will to seek an external object was absolute and of fiery intensity.
Sauron’s predicament may seem inhumanly extreme, but it is actually a purified version of the typical predicament of the modern person. Anyone who is not in touch with their inner wholeness will become obsessed with a ring of power and may be devastated by its loss. That ring of power may be money, house, car, celebrity or other position of worldly power. The ring of power that most closely approximates the power of the One Ring, however, is the object of romantic or sexual infatuation, the beloved or “hottie.” (See Stop the Hottie! ) More than any material object or external goal, another person hovers like the One Ring at the threshold of the realms of inner and outer, spiritual and material. A person, like the ring, is made of both matter and language, and is the occurrence in the outer, phenomenal world best suited to arrest our gaze, mesmerize us, turn us into an obsessed ring wraith. A person of great physical beauty can particularly become a potent projection screen for our lost wholeness. Their Feminine, Masculine or androgynous beauty can cause them to emblemize the principle we are lacking, so that they light up in our imagination as the magical key to restore our lost wholeness. When this obsession takes hold,then we become like ring wraiths, and are consumed by an unloving monomania where the ends justify the means—-“all’s fair in love and war.” While we seek in the outside world for wholeness with fiery eyes and the white hands of greed, we become, like the ring wraiths, or Gollum, ever more withered and desiccated. What animates us is no longer real vitality but obsessive passions—greed, hate, jealousy and fear.
Am I speaking against romantic and/or sexual relationships? Of course not. What I am saying is that fulfilling relationships and eros are only possible if there is some degree of androgyny, which is the only way one can actually know another person rather than a flat projection of him. If you approach another person from the deluded belief that they will complete you and make you whole then you erect an enormous barrier between you and authentic relationship with that person which will have to be worked through before a fulfilling relationship can be established. Usually people don’t have the will to work through this barrier and after their projected idealization collapses, disenchantment and betrayal sets in and they are off to a new fantasy, a new ring of power with which they hope to find wholeness. It is crucial to realize that if you approach another person with the intention of that person completing you, then the very first step on that path is betrayal, a betrayal by you of your own soul, and you should therefore not be surprised if the theme of betrayal will continue to characterize this delusory quest.
As Aristophanes suggests in Plato’s Symposium, since we are incarnated in this realm bound anatomically (usually) to one gender only, we tend to look outward to regain our lost wholeness. As social, gendered mammals this has a certain validity. But since we are also androgynous psyches or spirits, this validity is only one side of the paradox. Loving and bonding to others is a key part of our destiny, but we are not fully capable of this without a return to our inner wholeness. In the unFeminine squareness of the 1950s a man would stereotypically introduce his wife: “And here’s the little woman, my better half.” I never cease to be amazed at how revealing are the most seemingly simple of unconscious statements. The above introduction manages to be patronizingly undervaluing and sentimentally idealizing at the same time, as well as revealing the essential flaw in the relationship. Multiply two half-persons and you get a quarter not a whole.
Imagine the following thought experiment: You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!
Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the “primitive.” The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was of secondary significance. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (what modern slang calls the “hottie”) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. For example, a man sees Britney Spears on television and says, “She’s so hot!” Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixellated phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the hottie.
When we are infatuated with another person, we see them as our energy source and our way to gain wholeness. The best thing that can happen to us on a path of illusion is disillusionment, which is often extremely painful. The problem is that we attribute the pain to the disillusionment, but not to the original illusion. We don’t usually see that we have betrayed our own soul by seeking wholeness in the outer world. Typically we think that if the other person had behaved more to our liking that we would have found what we were looking for. If our disillusionment with the other person becomes complete, then we will look to another person to find our salvation, and put another face on the same illusion.
Singer contrasts the typical romantic experience with that of the androgyne:
“Unfortunately, all too often the expectations that the other person would fill the void in one’s own personality were frequently not met, because people rarely behave as we imagine they will or as we need them to behave.”
“Often, when the inner psychic process is unconscious, its expression becomes sexual in nature on a purely personal level. This means that the experience of loving is felt almost as something autonomous: people “fall in love,” something “happens” to them, and suddenly they are caught in a web of emotions that envelop the self and the other person. The attention is on the individuals and the magical interaction between them. This is “romantic love,” about which the novels, plays, operas and movies are written. It is engaging, enchanting, ennobling, inspiring and exhausting. Although it has also the capacity to bring about a sense of peace and well-being, romantic love also tends inevitably toward entropy because the energy in it is discharged little by little until the passion dissipates itself. This is because romantic love becomes a closed system when the two involved in it merge their psychological reality into one, bound closely in a relationship that revolves about its own center.”
See: No Tistans Allowed Beyond this Point—Debunking the Western Myth of Romantic Love (a crucial follow up to this document).
Androgynous love includes the inward reflectivity that helps to gain self-knowledge, it goes beyond the self-enclosed. It also extends beyond the interpersonal relationship we call “romantic love,” although it may very well include the most tender and deep feelings toward a particular person. Androgynous love is essentially transpersonal in nature. This is its distinguishing feature, whatever else it may include. The transpersonal dimension of the so completely human experience to which we refer as “love” is the intimate knowledge, made conscious in every cell of our bodies and beings, that we are nourished into life by the “stream of androgyny.”
The One Ring of the Tolkien mythology is emblematic of the human tendency to covet wholeness and power from an outside object. It is especially the one-sidedly Masculine characters who become most vulnerable to becoming possessed by the ring. We have already discussed the one-sided masculinity of Boromir who is described as “…taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms; fearless and strong, but caring little for lore, save the tales of old battles.” Not surprisingly, he is the member of the ring fellowship who most easily falls under the spell of ring lust. In violation of everything he has agreed to at the ring council, he presses Frodo to give him the ring. Frodo responds,
“ Were you not at the Council? … Because we cannot use it, and what is done with it turns to evil.”
But Boromir is not to be deflected by reason and with increasing mania he continues to press his case,
“For themselves they may be right. These elves and half-elves and wizards, they would come to grief perhaps. Yet often I doubt if they are wise and not merely timid. But each to his own kind. True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. …We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. And behold! In our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say; a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader? What could not Aragorn do? Of if he refuses, why not Boromir? The Ring would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!”
Tolkien switches to description, rather than verbatim dialogue to describe Boromir’s continued monologue. He makes it clear that Boromir is in a yang, excited state—-he paces, and speaks in an ever louder voice, and like other characters possessed by the ring he becomes more egocentric, his talk a monologue that becomes ever more unaware of Frodo. His manner is stereotypical of a romantically obsessed man prior to committing some crime of passion.
“Boromir strode up and down, speaking ever more loudly. Almost he seemed to have forgotten Frodo while his talk dwelt on walls and weapons, and the mustering of men; and he drew plans for great alliances and glorious victories to be; and he cast down Mordor, and became himself a mighty king, benevolent and wise.”
And then Boromir, whose hands are trembling in what sounds very like sexual excitement, commits a crime of passion which breaks the ring fellowship,
“He laid his hand on the hobbit’s shoulder in friendly fashion; but Frodo felt the hand trembling with suppressed excitement.
‘I am a true man, neither thief nor traitor. I need your ring…but I give you my word that I do not desire to keep it… Fool! Obstinate fool! Running willfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Numenor and not Haflings. It is not yours save by unhappy change. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!’ His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed; a raging fire was in his eyes. “
Frodo escapes, and then, like many abusive lovers, Boromir is filled with remorse and tries to get the object of his infatuation to come back,
“….What have I said? …What have I Done? Frodo, Frodo! Come back! A madness took me, but it has passed. Come back!”
In sharp contrast to Boromir is his brother Faramir, a character that Tolkien identified as like himself. Faramir is competent in arms, but does not delight in them. Faramir has androgynous qualities and is able to resist the power of the ring when he has it within his grasp. His father Denethor, however, worships only the Masculine principle. He is another solar phallic- possessed tower dweller, his wife dies of despair in this anti-Feminine atmosphere, and he identifies with his chthonic phallic son Boromir and treats his more evolved son, Faramir, with contempt. Significantly, he tries to sacrifice both himself and his son Faramir to the yang element of fire.
Tolkien describes Denethor as follows:
“Denethor marries late a woman of great beauty and gentleness but within 12 years she is dead. But it seemed to men that she withered in the guarded city, as a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock. The shadow in the east filled her with horror, and she turned her eyes ever south to the sea that she missed. …In this way (palantir) Denethor gained his great knowledge…but he bought the knowledge dearly, being aged before his time by this contest with the will of Sauron. Thus pride increased in Denethor together with despair, until he saw in all the deeds of that time only a single combat between the Lord of the White Tower and the Lord of Barad-dur, and mistrusted all others who resisted Sauron, unless they served himself alone.”
Hobbits are able to resist the ring more than most because they have a kind of earthy androgyny. Gandalf says about them, “Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree roots. I think it likely that some would resist the Rings far longer than most of the Wise would believe.” Unlike men, the hobbits have no tendency toward one-sided masculinity. To some extent this is also associated with a rural mediocrity as they do not go in for adventures or advanced learning. But this also gives them a sustainable way of life and they avoid the obsession with warfare, machines and towers. Consider the following descriptions of hobbit nature:
“At no time had the Hobbits of any kind been warlike, and they had never fought among themselves. Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough.”
“They do not and did not understand or like machines… (except of the simplest sort such as a hand loom)”
“The craft of building may have come from Elves or Men, but the Hobbits used it in their own fashion. They did not go in for towers.”
“But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind, and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.”
A gender swapping quirk that the hobbits share with the elves is that they call the sun “she.” Like the elves, the hobbits live in their own “green world” and have separated themselves from historical time:
“Shire-reckoning and Year One of the Shire begins with crossing a river. At once the western Hobbits fell in love with their new land, and they remained there, and soon passed once more out of the history of Men and of Elves. While there was still a king they were in name his subjects, but they were, in fact, ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside.”
In addition to their aversion to towers, the hobbits opt out of history/ his-story.
Amongst hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo come from the most androgynous ancestry:
“The harfoots had much to do with Dwarves…
The Stoors…were less shy of Men…”
“The Fallohides(the least numerous, were a northerly branch. They were more friendly with Elves than the other hobbits were, and had more skill in language and in song)…the Fallohidish strain still noted among the greater families, such as the Tooks and the Masters of Buckland, were fairer of skin and also of hair, and they were taller and slimmer than the others’ they were lovers of trees and woodlands.”
In the Hobbit, Tolkien tells us,
“It was often said…that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife…still something not entirely hobbitlike about them.”
Goldberry (Mrs. Bombadil) says: “I had not heard that folk of the Shire were so sweet-tongued. But I see you are an elf-friend; the light in your eyes and the ring in your voice tells it.”
Tolkien tells us that: “Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.”
And as their fellow hobbits describe Bilbo and Frodo: “…Bag End’s a queer place, and its folk are queerer.”
One of the most effective changes made by Peter Jackson in adapting the books for film was the casting of a young, androgynous Elijah Wood as Frodo. In the books, Frodo is turning thirty-three when we first meet him. He doesn’t leave on the quest for another eighteen years after Bilbo’s departure and is fifty-one when he begins the quest, which is well into middle age even by hobbit standards. He is described as having a middle-aged paunch and Merry and Pippin joke about how the walking may help him to work that off. Our archetypal expectations are somehow better fulfilled by a younger-looking, more androgynous character in this role. In the film Frodo resolves the conflict in the council by volunteering to take the ring, and then adds humbly, “But I do not know the way.” This combination of decisiveness and humility has a Taoist androgyny, he knows what he knows (what fate requires of his essence) and knows that he does not know as well. The casting of large-eyed, androgynous Elijah Wood makes Frodo seem by far the most elvish hobbit, which reinforces the rightness of his being chosen as ring bearer.
The elves are the race whom we most expect to be androgynous. Tolkien, in his notes and in references in his letters, seems to come close to recognizing the androgynous nature of the elves, but then seems to withdraw from that recognition. At one point, in a letter, he states:
“It is the view of the Myth that in (say) Elves and Men ‘sex’ is only an expression in physical or biological terms of a difference of nature in the ‘spirit,’ not the ultimate cause of the difference between femininity and masculinity.”
Tolkien is saying that anatomy is not destiny, genitals do not cause sexuality, it is rather a function of the spirit and the body is a secondary expression of this difference. This is a quarter step toward recognition of androgyny. Tolkien takes another quarter step toward recognition of androgyny in the following note on elves which recognizes an androgynous inner independence:
“They are not easily deceived by their own kind; and their spirits being masters of their bodies, they are seldom swayed by the desires of the body only, but are by nature continent and steadfast.”
As if these partial recognitions made him uncomfortable (and Tolkien was extremely conservative, even a bit priggish in his personal life) Tolkien then takes a full step back from the brink of androgyny. Talking about the Eldar he splits them definitively into the “neri” (males) and “nissi” (females) and states that this is an absolute distinction that transcends even the life of a particular body:
“There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a ner can think or do, or others which only a nis is concerned.”
“According to the Eldar, the only ‘character’ of any person that was not subject to change was the difference of sex. For this they held to belong not only to the body…but also to the mind…equally that is, to the person as a whole. (even if their body dies, they will come back as same gender)”
Since the 1970s I have been studying an unfolding contemporary mythology, and associated emergent archetypal images, which reflect an approaching event horizon in human evolution (see Crossing the Event Horizon—The Singularity Archetype and Human Metamorphosis ). In the various permutations of this new mythology, the ones who make a break with the old human form are usually large-eyed, androgynous-looking adolescents. The Japanese anime classic Akira is an example. Akira is a large-eyed, androgynous looking male youth whose body parts must be kept stored underground in a massive vault at absolute zero, because if any of his cells reanimate, his mutant power is sufficient to overthrow the entire military-industrial complex of “Neo-Tokyo”(the patriarchal world order). Anime has settled on this form —large eyed, androgynous—- in general, and its characters look less and less like actual Japanese. The ubiquitous representations of the “Grays”— a stereotyped extraterrestrial with large eyes and willowy androgynous body is another presentation of this form. In the Sixties the counter cultural celebrities who became visual icons were mostly all androgynous like the skinny, large- eyed London model Twiggy who launched the anorexic version of female beauty. The male icons were mostly androgynous rock stars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger. In Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece, Dune, the Kwitsaz Haderach, the first example of a new human form, is a fourteen year old boy, Paul Atreides, who brings down the Emperor and a galactic patriarchal power structure. There are countless other examples. The casting of large-eyed, androgynous Elijah Wood as Frodo is, therefore, an archetypal updating of Tolkien’s mythology. This is the visual form we expect of the one who will throw the ring of power, the alphabet manacle, into the Cracks of Doom, bringing down a patriarchal power structure and ushering in a new age. (Of course, Frodo doesn’t actually do that without the help of his shadow, Gollum.)
It would of course be a literalizing of an archetypal projection to think that we must look toward a large-eyed androgynous adolescent form for our salvation. If we interpret this representation, however, we see a number of evolutionary themes. Larger eyes may be seen as a visual representation of a massive evolutionary change that is well underway—-a movement from an alphabet or text based culture toward a more visual one. Terrance McKenna has written much about this shift (see Logos Beheld and the “Logos Beheld” section of Crossing the Event Horizon when it is published) extreme relevance. Etherealized bodies are a representation of movement away from assigned corporeality in an age of plastic surgery and genetic manipulation. They emblemize our desire to transcend our gravity-bound mortal bodies (see The Glorified Body). And as we move from an iron and coal industrial age to a digitized, pixilated information age, our technologies become ever more etherealized. While adolescents are more likely to be hermaphrodites than androgynes (as June Singer defines the terms) they are usually the best visual representations of androgyny as a human type. Also adolescence is a difficult, acting out, rebellious phase of human biological metamorphosis which has a parallel resonance to the present state of our species.
The path of androgyny, however, suggests that we do not look toward any external figures, mythologies or evolutionary developments for our salvation, but to our return to the inner union of Masculine and Feminine within.