Masonic & Occult Symbols Illustrate

of consciousness. Thus, we are each a combination of male and female, masculine and feminine. The New Age encourages children and adults to appreciate and practice the harmony of opposites, teaching the individual to merge the two selves, man and woman.” Many of the gods and goddesses of paganism are shown to have dual sexual natures. Mercury, called the “male-female,” was an androgyne. Even much symbolism contains this dual nature. For instance: “The serpent’s head and neck is distinctly a masculine symbol, but the serpent is sometime symbolized with its tail in it mouth [oroboros], the body forming a circle which is feminine. Also, the mouth is feminine, while the tail, which is in the mouth, is masculine. Thus for two good reasons the serpent with its tail in its mouth represents both sexes. Sacred fire was often prepared on religious occasions by rotating a realistic wooden representation of the phallus in a wooden representation of the kteis, rotating being done by an apparatus resembling a bow. The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, was double sexed in symbolism. The horn was masculine and the inside was feminine. The fruit inside symbolized productiveness of the female.” “The four-limbed cross generally had a different meaning, and represented the male and the female in unison, in the act of creation. From time immemorial a perpendicular line or object has been used to symbolize the phallus, and a horizontal line the kteis or vulva. The surface of water, a female element in creation, was horizontal, and women were practically in the horizontal position in the act of creation. Prostitutes were spoken of as ‘women who made their living horizontally,’ and the term was applied to women who were kept in their own room by some wealthy man. Coitus has been called ‘horizontal exercise.’ Horizontales (horizontals) is one of the names which the French apply to women who sell love favors, women of easy virtue. The four-armed cross was an easy figure to make, being an intersection of two straight lines at right angels, and it became a symbol of man’s most lofty and most holy activity, expressing the reverence for the act. Some of the Asherahs of the Bible represented Baal in union with Astoreth. The results of the union between the sexes resulted in a new life. Separately, man and woman were incomplete, important, and barren, but in their union they became a