“The Cosmic Procession.”

White Ribbon, Volume 12, Issue 144, 15 May 1907, Page 9

“The Cosmic Procession.”

(By Francks Svviney).

All is a procession : The universe is a procession With measured and perfect motion ! Walt. Whitman. A few decades since scarce a Christian pulpit would have been open to the speaker who ventured to suggest that Revelation is continuous, and always and necessarily in consonance with human development and power of receptivity. To-day, Ulirist’s words to His disciples, “ I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot hoar them now," form a text not mi frequently preached from. This being so, Mrs Swiney’s latest book, “ The Cosmic Procession,” will produce neither tin shook nor the outcry it might have done had it first seen the light ten or twenty years ago Dr. Stenton Hooker pronounces it an epoch making book. It certainly is a work indicating a line of thought that, if generally adopted, will materially modify current ideas, both social and theological. And even those readers who may not see their way to agree with all the author s deductions, will assuredly lie impressed anew with a sense of woman’s immense power and consequent responsibility. In her Introduction, Mrs Svviney says, “ . . . I have striven to bring before tin* reader a wider, deeper, and more complete aspect of the Eternal Truth than generally obtains. It is 110 new truth, fur truth is from everlasting to everlasting the same ; rather is it the phoenix rising from the pyre of our faulty and obsolete conceptions of the reality. My argument is the basic source of all phenomena, The Eternal Feninine Principle, by which all exists.” This Feminine Principle is the theme of Chapter I. “in the Archaic ages,” writes Mrs Svvinev, “ when man lived in closer touch with nature, in more open communion with the realities of life, the chief divinities were feminine . . . . and consequently the inatriarchate was supreme in the various social organisations.” Woman’s characteristic industry and more highly devcloj>ed emotional nature —love of offspring, courage in defence, fear of evil, etc., are noted as all powerful factors in human development. “ The mother is the chemist who mixes the

ingredients which form the basis of character. . . We shall find that maternal impressions are at the root of all the variations and developments we see in the organic world, culminating in man. . . The mother’s mental influence upon the brain structure of her offspring can alone produce a better standard of brain power. She lias to build up the nobler, purer, brighter and happier manhood and womanhood of the future—the outcome of maternal impressions, rightly dirigated, controlled and synthetised. Her creative powers range from the strictly material to the sublinnst spirituality ; and through and by that spirituality she will, as the highest evolved organism, and as the chosen medium to achieve the greatest results in the process of evolution, gradually uplift humanity.

. . . The children of the Great To-be will be the outcome of controlled and selfless parentage, and of noble and purposeful intent, not of aimless desire.’’ Chapter 11. treats of

The Ultimate of Aim. “Truth crushed to earth shall rise The eternal years of God are hers,” quotes Mrs Swiney, and goes on to remark that man has from the earliest historic records regarded himself as the centre of the universe. “ Working upon that assumption, logically he made . . . everything subservient to his behest.” “ The Divinity was glorified man, the life element was male, the forces, the attributes that governed and subdued the world were masculine. Mail could not free himself from the limitations of sex differentiation He opined that what was good for the man was not good for the woman.” Combating these ideas the author says : “ We must first make a clean slate of all past conceptions and arbitrary designations of natural phenomena. Our ideas are contracted by the limitation of language and the significance that custom has ascribed to certain w'ords. Thus male and female are designated as individuals of different sixes when in reality there is only one sex, the feminine, maleness being an intermediate phase of development. As the celebrated scientist, Albrecht, remarks, ‘ Males are rudimentary females.’ . . . The male cells are those which have gone too far in katabolic disruptive forces for the possibility o! independent development. . . . The female, as the most complex organism in every species, is the outcome of the best con-

<1 it ions for mother and offspring.” And, Mrs Swiney opines, the characteristics of humanity are becoming the same in men and of higher civilisation, foreshadowing the time when there shall be “ neither male or female.’

“ Yet in the long years liker must they grow/*

“ The woman in man is asserting herself. The consciousness of the woman is overshadowing man. The evolution of the race is gradually shifting what we may term the serual centre of gravitation to the higher psychic plane. ‘ True civilisation,' says the Rev. Frank Hillis, 4 is nothing more than the woinauisation of brave men. ‘ Woman, observes Karl Heingen, ‘ represents, as it were, from the start tin* humane principle, and man, in a certain sense, becomes a human only, being in so far as he approaches woman.” rhapter 111. is concerned with the Divine Motherhood, and begins with “ In one of the mosaics of St. Mark's, Venice, there is depicted the Creator, in the form of the Virgin Mother, endowing Adam with the living soul. The writer then goes on to adduce evidence to show that not only did tiie early Christians hold this belief but that, in both Fast and West, in the early religious faiths of the early nations the same idea prevailed. Mrs Swinev says, “ The first allusion in Genesis to Divinity is to the Divine Feminine, the Flohim. . . I I e Jews themselves, in their own commentaries on their Scriptures, eon*lusi\elv prove that the Flohim of Life, the Creator of Heaven and Fart i, designates the Supernal Mother, >y whom all things are made. ’ Not until the seventh century B.C. did tie Jews change the name from Flohim the Eternal Mother) to Javeh. In the earlier ages of Christianity, in harmony with the Hebrew conception of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit was regarded asthefeminine principle of the Divine. One writer asserts i licit it was not until the fourth century A.D. that the Christian Trinity became* exclusively designated as male. The word Lord, too, in the original, includes the Supernal Mother. Singularly apropos of the present unrest and uncertainty with regaid to the verity of the orthodox creed are Mrs Swiney’s words on parthenogenesis: “Science proves that not only is the Virgin Hirth possible, hut that

the greater number of living organisms are virgin born. ... It is absurd to suppise that earth’s noblest thing, a woman perfected, will remain less potent in self pro-creation than the humblest of animals. . . In view of this natural development of the race, this bursting of the lower incasement of materiality in which the creative force has been imprisoned, >t is of the utmost importance that women should so attune their own psychic faculties that in the present generation, and in those which will for icons sucre d it, the psychological evolution of the race may proceed on tin purest and most exalted lines of conduct, thought an spirituality. The exigencies of space prevent further note and quotation. \Ve can only say that thoughtful woi len, interested in the development and future destiny of the race, will tincl the book of absorbing interest.