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When we attended Creating Change in Minneapolis in early February, we were frequently asked “Why Columbia?” To answer this question we might as well start with explaining what Columbia is, and how it relates to our website name, VenusPlusX, and the familiar trigender symbol we associate with our work.

It’s pretty obvious that the word symbol C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A is based on “Columbus,” the name of the purported “discoverer of the new world,” but how did this begin? The great lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, seems to have first used “Columbia” (rather than “America”) as a rather obvious codeword to designate the colonies in North America in reports he prepared of parliamentary debates in which actual names could not be used. Over time popular usage increased and, by the 18th century, the name had come to designate the spirit of an emerging nation.

Columbia was depicted in feminine garb, adopting the red, white, and blue colors. By the time of the founding of the nation, the image of Columbia had become that of a popular demigoddess, a power guarding our nation in the fulfillment of its destiny, a personalization of our collective ideals of freedom, equality, justice, and liberty for all. The song, “Hail, Columbia” was effectively our national anthem until replaced by the “Star Spangled Banner.” The words of the second verse speak in depth to our national spirit:

Immortal patriots, rise once more,

Defend your rights, defend your shore!

Let no rude foe, with impious hand,

Let no rude foe, with impious hand,

Invade the shrine where sacred lies

Of toil and blood, the well-earned prize,

While off’ring peace, sincere and just,

In Heaven’s we place a manly trust,

That truth and justice will prevail,

And every scheme of bondage fail.

Chorus

Firm, united let us be,

Rallying round our liberty,

As a band of brothers joined,

Peace and safety we shall find.

By joining ourselves to the name, Columbia, we proudly declare our allegiance to the cosmic ideals on which the nation was founded. Columbia is not merely a mythic vision attached to a set of sublime ideals. In Columbia, that vision finds resonance with the forces of destiny that shape humanity’s development away from the superstitious linear imperatives of history towards a fabulous future in which our highest ideals of beauty, goodness, truth, and love find full realization, even in everyday life.

In future posts we will further explore the true meaning we attach to Columbia in depth. Because the word “Columbia” is in extensive commercial use for almost every conceivable purpose, and our organization needs a name under which to do business that is relatively unique to us and our purpose, we have adopted “VenusPlusX” as the name under which we do business. VenusPlusX is the title of a science fiction novel by Theodore Sturgeon, published in 1960. In this novel, Sturgeon envisions a future in which all humans are physical androgynes, possessing reproductive organs of both sexes. Although Sturgeon’s novel is fantasy, its vision resonates with our own concepts of a transgender future for those who would be transhuman.

Let the trigender symbol stand as a wordless reminder of the power of unity in diversity across all variations in the expression of Love, the desire to do good to others.

–Dan Massey

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También en español Last week we attended a meeting of the trans section of a local PFLAG chapter. I guess there’s nowhere to fit the T into the acronym, much less the fully erased B. In any case, it’s clear these folks provide an important service to the trans community. Both parents of trans kids and trans parents were there, with the adult trans experience and wisdom helping the parents better cope with natural anxieties, given the extreme social pressures their children face.

As you know from my paper Why We Are All Transgender,  we consider the term “transgender” to be denotive of a human quality that reflects individual attunement and sensitivity to the natural psychic organization of the universe, which has no concept of “gender”. Only where actual physical reproduction occurs, do beings initially begin life in bodies segregated by genetic sex. Once such bodies pass reproductive age, there is no value in retaining genetic sex sterotypes. For reasons we do not understand, some people become attuned to this transgender destiny at an early age, even as children, and develop socially and present themselves androgynously.

In the trans PFLAG meeting, I was thinking how amazing and beautiful it was that these young people were blessed with this cosmic eruption into everyday life, that they might lead a doubting humanity to live the truth. And then I offered a comment aloud that I thought these kids were truly blessed. But I know that this understanding I feel in my heart for out entire trans community is completely at variance with just about everyone’s life experience.

With this thought in mind, I want you to take a look at the report Injustice at Every Turn, recently released by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. This depicts in full detail how every formal component of human society denies the most basic human rights to the transgender. This report is a scathing illumination of the most vile aspects of collective human behavior in areas of economy, government, and religion. It is incomprehensible to me how people can be so ignorant, fearful, and callous as to deny these unusually gifted individuals the right to contribute meaningfully to society.

I will return to this topic in future notes, because this relates closely to the central, foundational challenge of reforming society’s views on sexual freedom, beginning with Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SO+GI).

–Dan Massey

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When you were a teen did you go to DeMolay? Or perhaps you were a Daughter of Job? Or a Rainbow Girl? Were both your grandfathers 33^rd degree Masons? Was your mom Most Worthy Grand Matron of the Eastern Star? And did you ever figure out what it was all about? Yes, you knew you were always supposed to be really nice to everybody because that was the “square” thing to do, in a culture where “square” was a compliment rather than an insult, and then there was the Jacques DeMolay business.

DeMolay, the last of the Templar Grand Masters, along with all his followers, was prosecuted by the Inquisition, exonerated by the Pope, arrested and murdered by the King using an army funded by loans from the Templars’ own bank, yet died a martyr and a hero. But for what? Who were these men? What values and experiences united their purpose?

The alleged crimes of the Templars make great reading—a teenager’s introduction to kink. Good stuff. They were accused of sodomy and worshiping an image called Baphomet. In their initiation ceremonies the anal kiss was featured, too. It’s pretty easy to see how accusations like this in the 14^th century would be easy to use to get “the simple folk” charged up and deflect their ire away from the criminal church and king, who were stealing their lives and labor, as such continue to do today.

Today it’s hard to get sane people excited about a little sodomy and a few rim jobs, but what’s this business about worshiping Baphomet? That sounds rather creepy and very Hollywood. When you put all this into context with later historical trends, you realize that this imagery was used metaphorically to conceal and guard the one deep and true secret the Templars knew, the secret of true sex magick, a secret that began to become public 300 years later with the publication of the founding Rosicrucian document, the Fama Fraternitatis, though only initiates would know the inner meanings for another 200 years and few would actually pay attention for another 100 years or more.

There is no actual record of the Baphomet image from Templar times. The accepted classical image of Baphomet was disclosed by the occult popularizer Eliphas Lévi in 1854. It depicts a winged androgyne body with the head of a goat surmounted by the flame of wisdom. The image is intended to be profoundly symbolic and deeply disturbing. The breasts of Aphrodite adorn a mildly masculine body from whose groin rises the phallic caduceus of Hermes. A great mystery is expressed in this image and the goat’s head discourages the fearful from investigation. The underlying mystery of this image is revealed in my paper Why We Are All Transgender.

Without pursuing the matter in detail in this brief note, there can be little doubt that the inner circles of the Templars were familiar with the powers of sex magick and, since the Templars were an exclusively male order, that sex magick was necessarily homoerotic. This fact alone is sufficient to explain their difficulties with both secular and religious authorities. Knowledge of such activities, practiced on a large scale with numbers of new acolytes who were unprepared for the rituals of initiation, much less the real-life community that treated these rituals as routine parts of a life dedicated to sacred sexuality, would inevitably slip out and eventually attract undesired attention from church and state.

After the purge, Templar knowledge, customs, rituals, etc., continued to live on in secret groups, often protected from temporal conflicts by virtue of the importance of the matters to which they could bear witness. Over 300 years later, the Rosicrucians began to emerge bearing Templar knowledge under a bold, new, rational synthesis of truth and understanding. The Templars had chosen as their symbol the equal armed cross which had long designated receptive eroticism (as in the pendant of the astrological sign for Venus). The Rosicrucians proudly and somewhat publicly adorned this ancient symbol (which the public had thought to symbolize the cross of Christianity) with the anal rose (which the public seemed to conclude had something to do with sacred blood or some other nonsense).

And, of course, out of all this over another few hundred years, as the original secrets were abandoned to achieve greater social acceptance, finally came the Freemasons, the Shriners with their Hospitals  for kids, the DeMolay boys, Job’s Daughters, and don’t forget the Rainbow Girls, whose flag of seven colors played a small role in the evolution of the modern symbol of LGBT equality. My paper Dawn of the New Age deals with some other historical aspects of the rediscovery of sacred sexuality in modern times and the overwhelming repression by social institutions that has denied humanity the power of justice, equality, freedom, and liberty to all. The loss of Templar knowledge by modern Freemasonry is but one example of the power of social repression.

In spite of such repression, we are now ready to reclaim our joy and our destiny, finally setting aside the delusions of our ignorant and frightened ancestors in favor of a rational approach to understanding our relation to the cosmos and our responsibilities to this planet and its peoples, as I will explain in my next blog.

—Dan Massey

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También en español Many people today, uneducated in the ideals upon which our nation is founded, will claim that we are a “Christian” nation. Others, slightly more respectful of reality, may call us “Judeo-Christian” or even “monotheistic.” All of these notions miss the real point. Though these terms may accurately name some contributory cultural sources, the founding ideals of our nation are vastly superior to the theologies, dogmas, doctrines, and moralities of any and all human religion.

Consider the mottoes and symbols of our nation that bombard us at every turn, and meditate for once upon their true meaning. For example, the Latin slogans:

E Pluribus Unum—from many, one—unity without uniformity

Annuit Coeptis—he approves our undertaking—divine providence is assured

Novus Ordo Seclorum—a new order of the ages—we’re here to change the world

What is this all about? Are these empty classical boasts, or do they hold genuine meaning for understanding our national purpose?

In preparing for a brief presentation on the history of sacred sexuality in “western culture” during our Blueprint for a Revolution program at Creating Change, I was able to present a narrative showing how ideals, ideas, and practices, dating from ancient, if not prehistorical times, had progressively converged to the present day when we are at last able to begin to openly celebrate sexual freedom in all its manifestations.

As I reviewed the timeline of these events, it became clear that the common basis of association that brought together the “founding fathers” was actually a system of rational thought that had existed for centuries in secret groups, which finally emerged in Western Europe, triggered the Enlightenment, and inspired the deistic but non-sectarian approach that was able to unite thirteen colonies into one nation. The label publicly attached to this world view was “Rosicrucian.” If any labeled tradition can be said to lie at the foundation of our nation, it is Rosicrucian.

Rosicrucianism involves many things beyond such ideals. The single, central core of the system has always been the sacred employment of sex and eroticism in the service of individual moral growth and spiritual perfection. And this dynamic, too, is being reborn today in evolution of American society.

There’s more about this stuff in my talk “Dawn of the New Age” and I will write about other aspects soon.

—Dan Massey