Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: The fantastical elements of the world we are creating don’t exist in a void. It’s only natural for both historical and contemporary concepts and issues to crop up. Gender identity will naturally be one of them, complicated even more by magekind having a view into the image of their souls. In this excerpt we see a casual introduction to their pursuit of understanding what is the actual relationship between gender and the “soul”. It shouldn’t be a surprise, that the presentation is inconclusive.
Transcript from 37th Conference For The Practical Study Of The Soul, 2011, “The Gender of the Soul” by Marie-Claude Comtois
Alright, so, for today, I’d like to tackle a topic that I’ve found very interesting through many years of my study of this subject. And that’s soul gender. Or rather, do souls even have gender. And to make it clear, I’m discussing the Einheit within the Einheit-Gestalt model.
So does the Einheit, the soul, have a gender? If we take a look back through history, we definitely see different lines of thought about the issue. And this can range from fully embracing the idea of a gendered soul to, so to say, variably hermaphroditic souls. I’ll revisit this in a bit.
Let’s start with the simplest assumption here that the soul is indeed sexed, and well, the biggest proponents of this idea, oddly, are not the oldest we’ll be dealing with today. Aristodemos the Hierophant, for example, maintained that not only is the soul gendered, but that it also, but that also that male and female souls had a different source and were, metaphysically, two different orders of supernal beings. It is also present in the writings of Cato, who did not subscribe to this idea. Still, in his commentaries, we see mention of the Loukios school, which permitted only men to join based on, as he puts it, belief in a different quality of the male soul. This is, of course, a part of the conflict present among mages during the time of the Roman Empire concerning the possession of Vir by women. This is a more complex topic. Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that Loukios was ah, assassinated by a female rival during a bid for political power.
More commonly, historical mages have taken a stance that the soul has a male and female component but that, in a way, it is gendered by the dominance of one element over the other. This stance can be found, for example, in the writing of Yue Bin, in regards to the ancient Taijitu model of the soul. But we can also see in the texts of many Mekubal, where the Adam Ila’ah is a metaphysical being of both genders, from which all human souls are born, also carrying this property. But yet, at the same time, we return to the idea that these properties mix differently to produce men and women.
But these beliefs come from a place where, in essence, the soul comes before the body, or really, the mind. So in that way, the soul carries with itself the identity which the body will take. But, of course, this was because we were working without understanding what shapes the body before we began figuring out chromosomes in ah, around the mid-1880s.
And this is a problem unless, of course, you are working under the assumptions of synchronicity, like the hypothesis of Urban Schuchard on the topic of predestination. But, still, those beliefs were largely discredited over the last century or so. And with that, we were left with a realisation that perhaps we’ve been mixing up the cause and effect from the beginning.
From our current perspective of understanding, it seems that the soul is a creation of the mind’s self-perception. Or, instead, that the mind is what imposes upon the soul its self-image, as its true form. The soul does appear to us now as being not only genderless but also free from most aspects of what we’d call manhede. Unless, or until, as it might be, they are imparted upon it by the mind, based on the minds qualia. That is to say, the subjective experience of oneself.
At the core, this self-reflective nature leads us to the connection between physical trauma and changes to the Einheit. Likewise, of course, we acknowledge that metaphysical trauma can lead to changes to the Leib. The more developed the soul and the mind become, the more interconnected their workings are. However, it does appear to us that the mind does take a leading role in this duality.
To return to the works of Aristodemos, for a moment, as expected from a Platonist, his constructed model of reality elevated the supernal beyond the mundane. That is to say, using the allegory of the cave, our physical existence is the shadow of the soul. But, as it might be more accurate, it seems that the soul might be, in reality, the shadow of the mind.
And so, from a simple question about the gender of the soul, we stumble upon a much greater paradigm shift in our perception of the world. A step from the traditional supernacentric axiom and towards a new inquiry about the true relations between the soul and the body.
Esoteric Musings... 