I really like this reflection. It reminds me, actually, of a Qur’anic teaching: “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” (49:13) This verse is often interpreted to mean that our diversity--of gender, race, language, culture, and (in the works of some Muslim scholars, at least) even religion--is intentional and for our edification.
I would like to offer a thought on the Catechism’s statement that the “first moral action” (answer 45) of the soul in turning away from Dea was the “primal act of evil” (answer 46). I have heard a few people recently comment on being troubled by this wording, which I can quite understand, but I think in many cases their concerns may be based on a slight misreading. What I say below, then, isn’t to contradict the OP, but rather to affirm the OP and hopefully put her mind (and that of anyone else perturbed by the phrasing) a little more at ease.
Madrian texts often use words in very technical senses that are now archaic in colloquial English. The original notes to the hymn “She Hath Riven”, for example, inform the reader that the word “vicious” in that text is used in its original sense as meaning “prone to vice” and not its modern, colloquial sense as “cruelly violent” (EL vol. 1, p. 254). In its original usage, “evil” was a very general-purpose term more akin to our “bad”; Anglo-Saxons used it often where we might use “unlucky”, “unskillful”, or “defective”. As a noun, it often meant simply “misfortune”. Only in Middle English did the word begin to zero in specifically on the sense of being malicious or depraved, and even then it remained common for a long time to hear set expressions such as “natural evils” (our modern “natural disasters”). Taking some of the Chapel’s statements and earlier parts of the Catechism into consideration, my feeling is that the original, more “neutral” sense of “evil” is the one intended.
The Chapel provides some important clarifications on the idea of our turning from Dea. In its article on “Original Sin and the Snake in Filianism”, it tells us that:
“The doctrine . . . that humans . . . are guilty of sin even before they have done anything in this life . . . is not present in Filianism. . . . The act of the First Daughter of Creation (the first human maid) is not seen as ‘sin’ . . . It was not an act of disobedience (as the sin of Adam was). She did not do anything that God the Mother had forbidden. . . . the First Daughter's action is something very different and much more complex than ‘original sin’. . . . Manifestation means developing outward from the Divine. It means the existence of ‘things’ as well as God Herself. If things were not separate from God they would remain inherent within Her and there would be no outwardly-manifest cosmos. This is not original sin, but simply the nature of manifest being. Yet, insofar as things are outwardly manifested, they must have a degree of imperfection, since total perfection exists only in Dea and can be restored only by the complete return (or ‘inbreathing’) of manifestation to Dea. Thus the ‘fall’ or transition-to-imperfection of maid and of the cosmos is . . . a fundamental aspect of the process of manifestation itself. . . the First Daughter of Creation was fulfilling the conditions necessary to manifestation in turning from the Mother. . . . To call this ‘original sin’ would clearly be placing a grossly negative moralistic interpretation on something that is in fact far subtler.”
That same article makes a very important comparison as well:
“For Filianic thealogy . . . what Christians regard as the ‘fall’ (and the term really is not appropriate to Filianism) is not the source of ‘original sin’, but the source of cosmic existence itself. In Hindu terminology it can be seen as the source of avidya or the illusion of worldly existence. These two statements are really the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ sides of the same coin. It is important also to realize that while some Hindu sources regard the illusion of being - nescience or avidya - as purely negative, the religion of Our Mother God, both Indian and Filianic, see it as part of Her creative activity. Both vidya and avidya, nescience and knowledge, are powers of Dea:”
The article on “Christianity, Original Sin, and the Love of Our Mother God” takes this point still further:
“What we need to understand is that every legitimate religion accepts that there is a fundamental flaw in the human condition. If there were not, we should not require ‘religion’ since we should already be in a state of Perfect Union . . . In Christianity, original sin is the name of this concept, in Buddhism it is dukkha or ‘suffering’ seen as an essential condition (not an accident) of samsaric existence. The Western concept . . . tends to stress the ‘moral’ or volentive aspect, while the Eastern concept (including that of the ancient Greeks) tends to stress the sapiential. In other words, the West tends to regard the human flaw as essentially ‘sin’ while the East tends to regard it as essentially ‘folly’ or ‘ignorance’. It should be understood that this is a question of perspective rather than of doctrine . . . It will be readily seen that the volentive, or ‘sin’ perspective corresponds to the Path of Love, focusing on an act of willful and disobedient separation from our Beloved Mother, while the sapiential or ‘ignorance’ perspective corresponds to the Path of Light, seeing the Human Flaw as essentially the loss of our integral Knowledge of the Divine. Each is the expression of the same Truth relative to a particular path, and in practice all religions incorporate both perspectives . . . In Filianic doctrine . . . The perspectives of Buddhism and Christianity – original sin and dukkha respectively – are both recognized by Flianists in the term khear . . . For the Filianist, the Love Perspective normally takes precedence over the Light Perspective because it is in the Love of the Daughter that we find our salvation. . .”
With all this in mind, let us consider some of the earlier responses in the Catechism. Answer 32 tells us that a “moral decision is a decision between good and evil”, but answer 35 defines “relative evil” simply as “a state of moving further from Dea”. (Answer 36 defines “absolute evil” as “the complete absence of Dea”, which answer 37 indicates is impossible.) Answer 41 clarifies that “moving further from Dea” entails “becom[ing] more unlike my true self and more out of harmony with Her”. Thus, in saying (in questions 45 and 46) that the “first moral act” of the soul at the Turning was the “primal act of evil”, the Catechism appears, effectively, to be saying simply that the Turning was the first voluntary movement away from Dea. Both because of the generally Western vocabulary of Madrian writers and because of Filianism’s specific orientation toward the path of love, this idea is expressed in “moral” terms but, with the original sense of “evil” in mind, we can perceive how the phrase “primal act of evil” is wholly cognate to such alternatives as “original state of ignorance” or “first occasion of self-forgetting” (in Islamic tradition, Adam and Eve simply forgot the commandment not to eat the fruit, and this forgetfulness is understood as the fundamental flaw that Islam addresses through its call to remembrance of God).
I do not mean to suggest that it is wrong for anyone to be uncomfortable with the Catechism’s phrasing. For many people who have had negative experiences with Christianity, the terms used are off-putting and perhaps obscure more than they reveal. My hope is simply to offer some reassurance that they are not (I believe) intended to communicate in a Filianic context what they might in some Christian ones. The Turning (whether addressed in relation to the First Daughter or our own souls) was not, in Orthodox Filianic teaching, an act of wickedness or depravity. Indeed, it was a part of the outworking of thamë. The Chapel assures us that, although we cannot, from within manifestation, know the reasons that God chose to make Creation manifest, “what we can understand is that Dea initiated manifestation out of Love.” (source) We moved away from Dea--which is all the Catechism means by “evil”--but only to become, as the Chapel has it, “a part of the process of manifestation both in its negative and its positive aspects.”
The negative aspects are, presumably, those which the original sense of “evil” captures as a kind of misfortune or unskillfulness (one is reminded of the Buddhist distinction between “skillful” and “unskillful means”). As the Chapel says:
“[The First Daughter] helped to bring about a world that was beautiful, but not perfect (i.e., not unmanifest) and therefore ‘not as beautiful as it had formerly been’. However, for the first ‘time’, that beauty was able to shine outwardly. The rhythms of the universe, the cycles of being, the harmony of the spheres, all stem from this act. They are Divine, but before this time they only existed within the Divine in potentia. Unlike the Christian story, this is not a moral fable about original sin. It is a depiction of the development of manifestation in both its beautiful and its imperfect nature. Its meaning is inherently metaphysical. The reaction of God the Mother to this act was not in any sense one of anger or even mild disapproval. She simply states what has happened and explains her arrangements for making life possible to her child. She initiates the harmony of the universe . . . Participating in that harmony is the path of the Filianist believer.”
