Paglia continues by contrasting nature and society as opposing forces – society, the much weaker power, is delusionally thought to rival nature but it never really comes close. Nature in its entirety is always dangerous. The delusional attitude of mind that makes humans fight against nature Paglia labels: Apollonian. It is characterized by reason, fear of nature, and final goal orientation. Anyone can have an Apollonian attitude but men have daily continuous behavioral stimuli that nudge men to more fully adopt an Apollonian attitude. Its opposite, Chthonian is the term Paglia uses for women, for rhythmic, deadly, chaotic nature. It is the real power on earth one that is feared by men and which men continually try to dominate and tame – in vain. “Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness.” Rather than just accept the power and force of nature, western culture has striven to dominate nature; to break the rhythm of nature through the Apollonian. “Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is they seek to surmount or transcend nature.” When God in Genesis gave dominion over all the earth to his creation, Apollonian man saw an aim to conquer; today dominion is being reinterpreted to mean stewardship or to live in harmony with the rhythms of the earth – a very dangerous move for civilization because we cannot live in harmony with nature (there is no balance; there is only struggle, the survival of the fittest, and everyone’s eventual death) – in fact nature is always trying to kill you and will someday succeed. “The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses [as opposed to stewardship notions of relations to nature in general] has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature’s bare blade without shedding our own blood.”
Three other notions that Paglia emphasizes are 1) the earth-cult, 2) the Apollonian movement to 3) the sky-cult. The oldest and most primitive religions worshiped gods associated with physical phenomenon. But she detects a subtle several thousand year-long ascendency of male immateriality and domination: a movement from the concrete to the immaterial; from the earth to the sky; from creativity in the womb to the mind. Religion started with fertility goddess in all primitive cultures; they were always women. But this movement to the immaterial culminated in Christianity where Jesus literally is believed to have risen from the earth (which could not hold him) and assented into heaven (to sit at the right hand of God the Father). “Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted women with it. The very language and logic modern women uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
“Hence the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman, at first content to accept man’s protections but now inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man’s systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them. By head-magic she will deny there ever was a problem of sex and nature. She has inherited the anxiety of influence.”
Free will is also a delusion that helps build civilization because all we really do is preform the natural roles we inherit as a result of our biology and our circumstances. “Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackage and special delivery, molded by hands not our own.” In other words, we think and act in the only way we can given the vast sums of chthonian forces that act on us at every second and every day of our lives. If we are successful we find it pleasing to delude ourselves by thinking we did it of our own free will and ingenuity.
Paglia, at every praise of man’s actions and accomplishments, subtlety jabs his pretentions and delusions. Every time that she credits man for what is considered good and beneficial she also simultaneously claims it is a sham; it is a separation from nature and therefore destined to fail. This is also true when woman tries to act like or become a man. It is all pretentious illusion. Civilization will fall and we will return to a chthonian time; to a Hobbesian state of nature. But, before we do, times will be good, we will feel safe, we will be comfortable, and we will prefer to be deluded about all that. “The western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future, a progressive or providential design climaxing in the revelation of a Second Coming, is a male formulation. No woman, I submit could have coined such an idea, since it is a strategy of evasion of woman’s own cyclic nature, in which man dreads being caught. Evolutionary or apocalyptic history is a male wish list with a happy ending, a phallic peak.”
Modern western notions of freedom, individualism, self-realization and self-actualization are male creations that attempt to save men from the chthonian power of women. When woman appropriates these notions for herself she isn’t being a man, she becomes more pathetic than a man for she denies herself. The harder she fights the harder nature will punish her. The female body (like the male body) does not belong to its “owner,” we are all the playthings of nature but the female body feels it more. “The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it. Organically, it has one mission, pregnancy, which we may spend a lifetime staving off. Nature cares only for species, never individuals: the humiliating dimensions of this biologic fact are most directly experienced by women, who probably have a greater realism and wisdom than men because of it….Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initiated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature’s heart of darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.”
All the antecedent is the ground for Paglia’s theory of beauty. Like an artist who looks at the real world and stylizes it, Paglia looked at the real world and will show how each of 24 sexual personae are works of art stylizing reality. “…the aesthetic sense, like everything else thus far, is a swerve from the chthonian. It is a displacement from one area of reality to another, analogous to the shift from earth-cult to sky-cult….The eye is peremptory in its judgments. It decides what to see and why. Each of our glances is as much exclusion as inclusion. We select, editorialize, and enhance. Our idea of the pretty is a limited notion that cannot possibly apply to earth’s metamorphic underworld, a cataclysmic realm of chthonian violence. We choose not to see this violence on our daily strolls. Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads.”
When man first delusionally rose above nature by developing mind, consciousness, and culture, we all began a long process of taming our fear of nature. But it came with a price: by creating the rituals of culture we created a new fear of breaking the rules of our culture. We delusionally believe that culture keeps us safe from nature so we generally prefer not to break cultural taboos. “Consciousness has made cowards of us all. Animals do not feel sexual fear, because they are not rational beings. They operate under a pure biologic imperative. Mind, which has enabled humanity to adapt and flourish as a species, has also infinitely complicated our functioning as physical beings….Beauty, an ecstasy of the eye, drugs us and allows us to act. Beauty is our Apollonian revision of the chthonian.” Sex, has in all cultures, come with significant cultural regulation meant to curb our natural animalistic drives and keep men and women safe from unbridled lust and violence. Cultural norms, taboos, ethics and religions are natural sex inhibitors. Sexual personae are sex dis-inhibitors as art. Each sexual persona, as art, takes the signs of sexual attractiveness from nature, stylizes them and enhances them (often with technology), and ostentatiously displays them (in other words eroticizes them) in order to purposely displace the powers of all the regulatory institutions of society and civilization in order that we may act.
Consider that “the permanence of the femme fatale as a sexual persona is part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion flounder. Eroticism is society’s soft point, through which it is invaded by chthonian nature.” Eroticism can at any time destroy every edifice built by man to control nature. Sex is a return to nature and is therefore dangerous by definition.
Paglia has identified 24 sexual personae that are repeatedly taken on by people throughout western history and recorded in the whole history of western fine art, visual art, and literature. Some come and go, wax and wane, in relevance and expression at particular times (the beautiful boy); some are constantly found in all times and places (the femme fatale) and some evolve as they play their historical script (the Amazon). Paglia also classifies some personae into two broad categories: An androgyne persona mixes male and female elements at the same time (Fred Astaire); a hermaphrodite persona switches between male and female elements at will (Cleopatra).
Next time we will start to look at the 24 sexual personae: the Amazon; the androgyne of manners; the android; the beautiful boy; the court hermaphrodite; the dandy; the decadent aesthete; the drag queen; the Epicoene; the femme fatale; the Gorgon; the Great Mother; Khepera; the lesbian; the male heroine; the manufactured object; Mercurius; Pythoness; Teiresias; the transsexual; the twin; the vampire; the Venus Barbata; and the virago.