Mystics: Lou Andreas-Salome and Restoring the Feminine

One of the great contemporary mystic figures I have been studying is Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). If you don't know about her, it is worth the trip to Wikipedia to find out about her.  To begin with, she was a muse, a deep companion and loved mentor to Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud.  So one could say that  these male avatars were able to do their work because of her power to inspire their greatest aspirations.  For another, her deep insights, as a writer, observer of the creative human endeavor, and mystic (a term she never applied to herself) are unsurpassed.


Lest the feminists in the readership think I am guilty of placing Salome in the category of "the woman behind the great man," I want to make clear that this is far from my intention.  I see Salome as the modern Beguine -- the Beguines are the women  in the 13th Century who founded Western mysticism.  She is every bit the courageous envisioner of the grand human endeavor as they were; her writings are just as seminal to the mystic endeavor; and her complete identification with her womanhood and the great and primal feminine potencies is seminally instructive for those who study mystics.  I recommend her memoirs, Looking Back, as well as her works on Nietzsche and Rilke, at a minimum, for any course of mystic education.


In fact, her observations on the feminine (that extend far beyond feminist political and socio-economic concerns) are my subject today.


My contention, as presented in detail in my book The Mystics Among Us:  Into the Open (working title, and soon to be published) is that mystics in the West strive to restore the feminine generative potency in the human endeavor.  By that I mean that the very notion of "generative" (see below) is an expression of feminine cosmic potency.  Most briefly, the feminine potency names that aspect of our universe that "makes way" for, enables the "enduring placing" of distinctive singularities as viable aspects of the universe.


The male potency, in this view, takes up this opening and does the work of forming those singularities, those self-organizing systems into viable entities.  While increasing complexity could not take place without the driving potency of male constellation, organization and concentration, it also could not take place if, prior to singularizing acts, the universe did not offer its feminine aspect of "generative opening." Generative opening means an opening of  dimensions so as to become more expansive, and also doing so in a way that enriches and energizes that opening, and so is able to generate the great variety of singularities (things, beings, creatures, forces and events) within it. We have sexual division in the form we do because of the character of these potencies, not vice versa.


A line in her memoirs points to her profound grasp of this dynamic: "when I wrote scholarly essays, I felt strengthened, as if I had been doing something feminine, where as in the case of anything poetic, the activity seemed masculine." (p. 108).  EXACTLY.


Her "scholarly essays" were often about the grandly encompassing aspects of the human psyche, as it took shape and formed people's lives.  Her works on Nietzsche and Rilke were mystic realizations of the forming of two different figures -- the mystic and the artist, respectively -- out of the free-flowing potencies of feminine opening generativity.  Thus, she was speaking not as a muse or a lover to great men, but as one who discerns pure potencies forming as living psychic/somatic forces among us; she is speaking as the mystic.  She is telling us, as a mystic does, how to listen to these breakout creatives who were her soul-mates so that we can step into the generatively open way.  And as we have said, this is precisely the mystic precept:  restore the feminine potency.


Poetry (and psychoanalysis, as a prophetic expression) are decidedly male-potency based.  Poets ferociously drive the great and diffusely open energies of the generative into a singular form. In his Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses this intense effort at constellation and singularizing as his "angels" speaking to him, driving him to words and verse and the specific, pointed, tightly formed work.  In her chapter on Rilke, she notes his "ascension of the poetical work above the poet as a man."  This is the drive of the male potency in the breakout figure of the artist perfectly expressed: Work above being.


The prophet too expresses a derivation of the male potency. The great prophets in biblical tales are men; and   the great philosophers in Greece are men (who love men).  Freud is our exemplar of the contemporary prophetic figure.  The prophetic impetus is to shape the relation and interconnections among beings (alive in the generative open made way for by the feminine) into specific bonds, ties and laws. Salome disagreed with Freud exactly because she did not see his categories and descriptions of "complexes" as rigidly as he did.


Mystics restore the feminine against this male tsunami that has overflowed Western history.  Salome's writing is dedicated to the search (more or less successful, as with all the contemporary mystics) for a way to express the co-generation of the human psyche/somatic being with the most vast and incalculable and indescribable potencies of the feminine.  Far from being the "support" of these men, whom our culture is capable of acknowledging, she drove these male figures into the most vivid of living such that generative way spoke to them.


Today, we need her instruction on how to listen to breakout creatives most urgently.  She is our teacher in opening up to our own generativity.  And breakout creatives need to take her life as a precept for being able to open to listening to other breakout creatives (mystics hearing other mystics especially -- her ambivalence toward the fellow mystic Nietzsche bears witness to this).


Part of the greatness of these men was recognizing and taking into their own beings her truly feminine, mystic way.  For us, the standard of becoming a breakout creative to begin with, is just this action:  taking the likes of Salome, voices of the generative open,  to heart as the beginning and engine of the work to be done.