In an able article, written some fifteen years ago, our learned and respected friend Prof. Alexander Wilder, of New York, shows the absolute logic and necessity of believing “The Primeval Race Double-Sexed,” and gives a number of scientific reasons for it.[310] He argues firstly, that a large part of the vegetable creation exhibits the phenomenon of bi-sexuality, the Linnæan classification enumerating thus almost all plants. This is the case in the superior families of the vegetable kingdoms as much as in the lower forms, from the hemp to the Lombardy poplar and ailanthus. In the animal kingdom also it is the same. In insect life, the moth generates a worm, and the worm becomes a moth, as in the Mysteries the great secret was expressed—Taurus [pg 142]Taurus Draconem genuit, et Taurum Draco. The coral-producing family, which, according to Agassiz, has spent many hundreds of thousands of years, during the present geological period, in building out the peninsula of Florida, produce their offspring from themselves like the buds and ramifications in a tree. Bees are somewhat in the same line. The aphides, or plant lice, keep house like Amazons, and virgin parents perpetuate the race for ten successive generations.
What say the old Sages, the Philosopher-teachers of antiquity? Aristophanes speaks thus on the subject in Plato's Banquet:
Our nature of old was not the same as it is now. It was androgynous; the form and name partaking of, and being common to both the male and female.... Their bodies ... were round, and the manner of their running circular.[311]They were terrible in force and strength and had prodigious ambition. Hence Zeus divided each of them into two, making them weaker; Apollo, under his direction, closed up the skin.
Meshia and Meshiane were but a single individual with the old Persians.
They also taught that man was the product of the Tree of Life, growing in androgynous pairs, till they were separated at a subsequent modification of the human form.
In the Book of the Generations (Toleduth) of Adam, the verse:
God created (bara, brought forth) man in his image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them,
—if read Esoterically will yield the true sense, viz.:
The Elohim [Gods] brought forth from themselves [by modification] man in their image ... created they him [collective Humanity, or Adam], male and female created he [collective Deity] them.[312]
This will show the Esoteric point. The Sexless Race was their first production, a modification of and from themselves, the pure Spiritual Existences; and this was Adam solus. Thence came the Second Race: Adam-Eve, or Jod-Heva, inactive Androgynes; and finally the Third, or the “Separating Hermaphrodite,” Cain and Abel, who produce the Fourth, Seth-Enos, etc. It is this Third, the last semi-spiritual Race, [pg 143] which was also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, ingenerate in the Enochs, the Seers of that Mankind. The Fourth, which had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil—Wisdom already united to earthy, and therefore impure, intelligence[313]—had consequently to acquire that Wisdom by initiation and great struggle. And the union of Wisdom and Intelligence, the former ruling the latter, is called in the Hermetic books “the God possessing the double fecundity of the two sexes.”