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XVII.
World’s Present State: Vivisection, the
Total Extinction of the “Woman,” Intuition
As in the world physical so in the world spiritual, illumination succeeds obscuration, and only when the lowest point has been reached, and the darkness and cold are most intense, are the day and the year reborn. Such is the moment of the advent of the New Interpretation.
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Man’s spiritual state depends upon that of the “woman” his intuition. Corrupt as she may be, so long as she survives he is still, spiritually, man. Her extinction is the extinction of humanity. Representing force only, be it physical or intellectual, man is demon.
Herein consists the difference as to spiritual level between the present age and its predecessor the “dark age.” The Inquisition, with the array of horrors which accompanied and followed it, marked the lowest point of degradation to which as yet the Fall had carried man. Man believed the specialists of religion, the priests, when they told him that God was to be propitiated and souls saved by the torture and slaughter of all who differed from them in religious opinion, and forthwith proceeded to ravage the world with fire and sword, stake and rack, compassing sea and land for victims. The real object, that of the instigators and beneficiaries, the occult powers of evil already described, was their own gratification. But for the world the Inquisition was saved from marking the absolutely lowest point by the motive. This was the soul. Man still recognised the soul, corrupt as his intuition had become.
It has been reserved for our age to surpass the record of the Inquisition and to reach the lowest depth, that which means the total rejection of the soul and extinction of the intuition. The “three veils” which, as “three spirits of devils,” are ever proceeding from the dragon’s mouth, to shut out from man the vision of God, were never so dense, so heavy, so firmly fixed as now. Their names are “Blood,” “Idolatry,” and the “Curse of Eve.” And they imply, the first, man become wholly carnivorous in body and soul, insisting on blood for the salvation of both; the second, man recognising only matter, the body and the appearance, and sacrificing to these the spirit, the soul, and the reality; and the third, the complete negation and extinction of the intuition and of all that is denoted by the “woman,” on the planes mental, moral, and spiritual in man.
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Revolting from Ecclesiasticism, man imagined that in renouncing religion he had escaped from the priest. But there was one who knew better, and who took his measures accordingly. This was the father himself of priestcraft. He had but to give the word and forthwith a new priesthood arose, a new priestcraft was instituted. The banner of religion was exchanged for that of science, and everything went on as before, no essential of doctrine or practice being changed, but only the accessories. And just as before man had believed his priests, the specialists of religion, when they told him it was necessary for the cure of souls that they should have a free hand to torture and slaughter those of his fellow-creatures who differed from him in religious opinion, so now he has believed his priests, the specialists of science, when they have told him that it is necessary for the cure of bodies that they should have a free hand to torture and slaughter those of his fellow-creatures who differ from him in form and complexion and grade of evolution.
The typical sin of this age is the practice called Vivisection. That which the Inquisition was to the last age, the physiological laboratory is to the present, – the index to the spiritual level of the man of the period. And whereas that pointed to a degree above Zero, this points to Zero. As represented by the recognised intellect of the age, man’s spiritual consciousness is extinct. From being grossly corrupt, the “woman” in him suppressed altogether; God, the soul, moral responsibility, all that the intuition represents, are set at naught and denied, the body alone is regarded, and Vivisection is avowedly the symbol of that negation.
On behalf of this new cult, Christendom – ostensibly so-called in token of its veneration for a humanity which, for its miracles of sympathy and self-sacrifice in love for others, was accounted divine – has become thick-studded from end to end with torture-chambers wherein,
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year by year, myriads upon myriads of creatures, highly organised, keenly sensitive, harmless, healthy, and otherwise happy, are subjected to the most excruciating and protracted torments which the human mind can conceive, and scientific skill devise and inflict. And this on the chance, avowedly remote, of finding thereby some modicum of relief from the ailments which, by their own ignorance, folly, or wickedness, men have brought upon themselves. And these things are done, not by the rudimentary, the barbarous, the savage, the monomaniac, the sorcerer, the outcast, and in defiance of the laws; but by the educated and highly-placed, under sanction and licence of the laws and the protection of the police; their perpetrators being endowed and promoted and otherwise honoured as benefactors of their kind. And the churches called Christian, one and all, remain passive and mute, not one of them, as a church, raising a voice in protest. While – with a handful of exceptions, despised and scoffed at for their “fastidiousness” – their members stand by eager to accept the proffered gains, heedless of the cost in suffering involved to the victims; heedless of the degradation to the perpetrators; heedless, too, of the principles which, by consenting to such iniquity, they avow as their own, and of their utter incompatibility with everything human or divine. And all the time the father of priestcraft looks on, exulting to see his favourite, because most effective, device for depraving man’s conception at once of God and of humanity – the doctrine, as ecclesiastically presented, of vicarious atonement – so faithfully reproduced in the sphere of science; and the true method of salvation, whether for soul or for body – that of regeneration by self-purification and amendment – expelled from that sphere as from the other, and without any diminution of degradation to man, or of satisfaction to himself and his brood. Ecclesiasticism, meanwhile, finds its reward in the consciousness of having so well served its masters, in
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that it has at length accomplished its final end by blotting out wholly the faith it undertook and pretended to cherish, using the name of Christ not to destroy but to promote the works of the devil, by establishing human society on the ethics of hell, peopling the earth with fiends in place of beings really human, and setting up for worship a demon instead of God. For what but hell is a condition of things in which the stronger and craftier are free, for their own selfish ends, ruthlessly to torture the weaker and simpler? What but fiends are they who do or who consent to this? And what but a demon is the being who prompts and approves it? Yet such is the being which the Christendom of our day, judged not by its professions but by its actions – the sole true criterion – has exalted to the place of God, “so that He as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing that He is God.” For, let man call himself what he may, theist or atheist, that which he makes his rule of conduct is for him God; and in that image is he himself made. This is a conclusion from which there is no escape. And this also is positive, ascertained fact: – That which man makes this world for others, no matter how little and mean they be, he makes the next world for himself. For the hells, as well as the heavens, have been opened that nothing may be wanting to make the new interpretation a gospel of redemption. The most welcome, because the most hardened, recruits of the pit, are they who have had their training in the physiological laboratory.
And as man, whether theist or atheist, must have a God, so must he have a creed, and the articles in the creed of a vivisecting Christendom are in this wise. Instead of there being one and the same source, and that a divine source, for all things good and true, the universe is so perversely constituted that the morally wrong is the scientifically right and the practically useful; and divine ends – such as the art of healing – are to
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be attained by infernal means – such as the practice of torturing. It is not the finest minds that are the best qualified for the investigation of disease and ministration to the suffering, but the hardest hearts; and the proper persons to dictate in matters of religion and morals are the specialists of physical science who have renounced the very idea of such things as a chimera. Might is right; the end justifies the means; there are no moral limits to the pursuit of a self-gratification, but it is legitimate to seek one’s own advantage regardless of mercy and justice and the cost to other sentient beings. Man has no duties, either towards those who are unable to assert their own rights, or towards his own better nature. It is not the character but the form that makes the man. The head is all, the heart nothing; sense is all, conscience nothing; the body is all, the soul nothing; inhumanity is humanity; and not love but self, the bodily self, is the all in all of being, and the gratification of that self the fulfilment of all rational law; the true way of evolution is by moral degradation; the practice of the lowest is to be the rule of the highest; and humanity is to be benefited by that which is utterly subversive of humanity, even to the demonisation of man.
Such, as demonstrated by its acceptance of Vivisection, is the condition of imbecility, mental, moral, and spiritual, to which Christendom has been reduced by its ecclesiasticisms religious and scientific. And that it has been made the occasion by the Powers of Good for making known the New Gospel of Interpretation which is to restore to man the knowledge of God, is because They regard it as the last, because the worst, attempt of the powers of evil to abolish God. The Fall having culminated to its lowest depth, the Redemption is indispensable if humanity is at all to be saved. And, whereas the fall has consisted in the loss of man’s mental balance through the suppression of one whole moiety of his intellectual system, namely, the feminine – and the
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loss of mental balance constitutes insanity – the redemption will consist in the restoration of man’s mental balance, through the replacement of this suppressed moiety, to his recovery of his sanity. “For the man is not without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord” of the whole divine Humanity; the Humanity, that is, spiritually, both man and woman, unfolded, equilibrated, and conjoined in a pure spirit.