Hey folks,

Not sure if anyone's been watching my blog lately. I seem to have landed myself in hot water (nothing new there really) by shooting my mouth off around the issue of Polarity and Wicca. It was never my intention to rehash old stuff in the Craft but being a magician as well as a witch makes me want to further my understanding and because I'm not initiated into the Wiccan system my understanding is limited.

I'd like to know what other people's experiences of the Hermetic Principles specifically the Principle of Polarity have been. Have they been one of compartmentalization or perhaps people have really struggled with the understanding of polarity in a modern world where our collective understanding of sexuality and gender are ever evolving. I really have no doubt that Traditional Wicca and BTW are very open systems to people who identify as LGBTQ with many coven Priests and Priestesses actively involved in campaigning for LGBT rights but does that mean there isn't a bias in the system's interpretation of certain elements? 

That's a good question. I know some consider LGBT people as "walk-between"people, which mean they go from a gender to the other or stands between them, not really belonging to one of them, but defined by them both, which can be explained in the hermetic principles as the strength linking the male and the female. Some also see us as a third gender, with its own definition, which I don't think it fits to the hermetic principles.

See this is where I may have been going wrong because I was approaching the whole subject as one of Polarity in the form of a dichotomy between Masculine and Feminine energy and therefore between men and women. And for the life of me I couldn't get to where "the other" featured in all of this. The "other" being those whose gender isn't so clearly defined.

As a society (maybe not at grassroots level mind) have acknowledged to some degree that intersexed people (hermaphrodites) and transgendered people (gender identity dismorphia) fall under gender/sex rather than an orientation or sexuality. There is undoubtedly a lot of work to be done in terms of LGBTQ awareness around terminology even within the community.

As I was reading your response I was reminded of the Middle Pillar of the Qabalistic Tree of Life (ToL) which means there's a third path which balances out the "extremities" of the Pillars of Mercy and Severity.

The third pillar, indeed. The one that also goes through Daath, this sefiroth that is not really one, and which is linked to the doublefaced gods and goddesses (well, this year, I am studying Penczak's "temple of high witchcraft",so, this question of middle pillar talks to me). We can ask the question : What is the sphere containing the God and the Goddess. Is it only a male-female Whole ? Some androgyne, hermaphrodite Whole getting all the patterns from the two genders ? Or is it something more ? Different ? Set free from genders ? As if the fact of uniting the male and the female could give somthing different, with new properties that would not be present in any of these genders and that finally is not male, not female, just something else. That is why I don't believe in God Father nor Mother Goddess. I believe in a One who englobes them both but who is not only defined as a result from this couple (and also not only as their origin); because this Whole, having diluted the male and female is more, so that we, stuck in one of ach gender, could certainly not understand what It is. Think that you, english-speaking people have got the chance of being able to express this unmalefemale with the "It". We, french, have not. Each thing is male or female in our language. Even a bacteria (that is female in french). To us, this unmalefemale is just "unsayable". We can't talk about it. Even "le grand androgyne" (the great androgyne) is said "le", so is a male...or "la" and becomes female. "The whole" to us is male : "le tout". A being is also male (un être). An entity is female (une entité). A spirit is male (un esprit). Language is a strange thing.

Hey Faune,

Personally I tend to see this whole, as encapsulated in Da'ath, as being beyond the dichotomy between masculine and feminine polarities since it is the perfected state of unification. I don't think "set free from the genders" is apt either since indirectly this seems to imply that the genders where all that and a bag of potato chips in the first place. Gender is an important biological requirement but masculine and feminine principles or polarities aren't the same as physical genders. By the sounds of it we're actually in agreement but I wanted to make the distinction between masculine and feminine principles/polarities/energies and that of gender.

Linguistically I can understand what you mean by the gender or words which refers to the grammatical gender. Most Indo-European languages have this apart from Modern-English. In modern Irish we have masculine and feminine and Old-Irish possesses neuter as well. Modern German still has three grammatical genders. Some syncretic languages have none. These are social and cultural constructs.