birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the
accident by the side of the road. It’s the mother grizzly, all compassion to her
cubs, who marks you as potential predator and tears you to pieces.
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal
counterparts^39 ). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this
reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in
attractiveness.^40 It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female
ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have
averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have
fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).^41
It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the
men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force
every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also
why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our
chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s
proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into
the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive,
domineering) creatures that we are.^42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well,
bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has
not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued
propagation.”
The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on
this underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. The Star of
David is, for example, the downward pointing triangle of femininity and the
upward pointing triangle of the male.fn1 It’s the same for the yoni and lingam
of Hinduism (which come covered with snakes, our ancient adversaries and
provocateurs: the Shiva Linga is depicted with snake deities called the
Nagas). The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the state, and Isis,
goddess of the underworld, as twin cobras with their tails knotted together.
The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of
humanity and of writing. The representations in Christianity are less abstract,
more like personalities, but the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary
with the Christ Child and the Pietà both express the female/male dual unity,
as does the traditional insistence on the androgyny of Christ.^43