This passage became one of my immediate favorites the first time I read the Kolbrin, and nowadays it seems more relevant than ever.“It is far easier to be a weakling than to be a Real Man. Were the Earth less harsh or the circumstances of life less austere, man would destroy himself before the shrine of the languid goddess. Only Real Men can with safety destroy the tangled forests and wilderness of Earth and make from them gardens, but will those who inherit the gardens be Real Men? The law decrees that they must be, or the wilderness will reclaim its own.â€I didn't understand that reference to the shrine of the languid goddess for a long time, now I do.The languid goddess to me represents the type of unbalanced feminine polarity we see nowadays manifesting in society . After many years of prosperity and lack of real challenge from the environment people have grown hedonistic and complacent leading to a spoilt generation. What this means is that we've bred a generation that won't be able to protect what the older generations created. Languid means lacking vitality, virility. I feel it describes our world nowadays perfectly. When I say our world I mean the western world because other societies who are more virile than ours do exist and may see a chance to take from us what we can't defend anymore. I believe that part is what is implied in the metaphorical wilderness taking over.The Kolbrin does give several examples of this happening in the book of gleanings, both when eloma returns to her people to find them overcome by foreigners who had a more warlike God than themselves and also when the children of God in the Maya and Lila story are overcome by the more warlike group of men banished for having illicit relations with Lila.The tytler cycle also describes this dynamic very accurately
In greek mythology AERGIA was the female spirit (daimon) of idleness, laziness, indolence and sloth.
It's worth noting that the Kolbrin holds femininity as the most important and key aspect of a successful society. According to the Kolbrin the feminine aspects hold the entire fate of civilization. It seems that if the feminine energies are on the right frequency things go great but when they become distorted then everything goes to hell. Just to be clear feminine energies or polarities does not mean women but how femininity is perceived in general and what attributes does it embrace.Just as well, when masculinity is distorted to an undesirable polarity you end up with societies like the ones from the children of men in the Kolbrin that treat women like a chattel and are extremely warlike and destructive. It seems both these dark feminine /masculine stages and brought precisely as a consequence of one another in an endless cycle.
I think the balanced periods are precisely half way in between each swing towards the extreme. I don't think a healthy balance can be attained during one of the extreme points. I guess you could say there are positive aspects in the extreme periods but buried in between a lot of undesirable things
I do believe there's an inertia. This inertia is caused because during the times of exacerbated feminine energy feminine polarized people become oppressive of men and manly things and vice versa and thus whenever one energy takes over then all the people tuned to that energy become hostile to the other.Of course we can break from that inertia just like the hermetic principle of the pendulum teaches. The wise individual knows how to rise above each swing, but the majority are carried along by it.
Well in middle periods perhaps
I believe we are ever on the edge of heaven and hell on earth, every time is a dangerous time, every age has its heroes and its villains and sometimes they are one and the same.
For instance in the Maya and Lila story they had a very strict matriarchal society. Things seemed great but the seed of discord was already sprouting. This strict moralistic society was destroyed by its own lack of warring capacity. The exiles could easily gather a war band and burn it down. So can we say that period of extreme polarity was really good? It had certain desirable qualities but it was fallible.There's a patriarchal example in the story of the flood where the mountain men descend upon the city people and conquer them but end up becoming complacent and turning weak like the city people themselves. But this story doesn't give many negative details about the actual society. In fact it's described as wholly good in itself, the weakness is shown in the men themselves who fall for the temptations of the pleasures of the city folk
We are spirit beings first. So were they.