There’s a Kabbalistic idea that God has both a male essence and a female essence. The female essence is called “Shechina”. Near the back of some Reform prayerbook or another in the “Prayers and Psalms for Other Occasions That You’ll Probably Need” section, I once came across a silent prayer which was all about Her. Shechina. It was a spinoff of the “Avinu Malkeinu” where instead of beginning Avinu, Malkeinu, “our Father, our King,” every line began with “Our Mother, Our Protector” or something like that. Each line had been rewritten from a female lens, so that the prayer was sort of a female mirror, a yin-and-yang companion to the “Avinu Malkeinu” – instead of “Our Father, Our King, give us strength and deliver us,” it was like “Our Mother, Our Protector, bring us inner peace and teach us how to choose the right path.” Stuff like that.
I thought that was a really cool idea when I saw it, but I’ve never been able to picture God as a girl, just because of simple lack of imagination. We are made in God’s image. I am a boy, so I see myself in God’s image. Kind of like how as a boy, most of my stuffed animals as a kid tended to get dude names as well. Make sense? Maybe it doesn’t.
But the point is, just now I had an interesting thought that challenged my way of imagining God as a male. This is sort of how it happened.
I’m reading The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and they make a foreshadowy joke about some chick (a mistress of Alexandre Dumas’) being really good in bed while she’s possessed by the Devil. I say foreshadowy because I’ve seen the movie based on the book, “The Ninth Gate” directed by Roman Polanski, and there’s a really memorable scene near the end of the movie (and presumably the book too) where the main character, played by Johnny Depp, has sex with his creepy protectress/demonic guardian angel, a blonde femme fatale with dragon-like green eyes that glow maniacally as she fucks him in front of a burning castle. Hottest straight sex scene ever. But I digress. Near the end of the movie (and this is why I’m stoked to read the book) the narrative dissolves into weird, unclear, very speculatable twists and turns that dump you out to the denouement a little too fast and leave a lot of things unexplained. One of these unexplained things is the sex scene, and when I got to that line in the book I was like “Oh. So she was possessed by the Devil.” After which, being about as mature as a 15-year-old boy, I immediately thought, “Hah. It’s like he had sex with the Devil. Kind of gay.”
Except is the Devil male?
This instantly (and I mean instantly) bloomed into a full-on pro-and-con list in my mind. What is feminine about the master of all evil, and what is masculine? You can start with symbolism, a list which looks something like this.
FEMININE: Eve. Temptress. Garden of Eden. Delilah. Femme fatale.
MASCULINE: Fallen angel. Lucifer. King of Hell. Red man with horns.
But the lists quickly got longer and more complicated. I thought to myself: could the source of all evil be masculine or feminine? The answer, of course, is no. Women, with their backstabbing and judgments and passive-agression and cunning and command of lies and mind tricks, have such style that a male Lord of the Flies could never truly be said to know everything about evil. But women are also life-givers, evil though they may sometimes be. War, maybe the ultimate evil, is inherently male. There is a certain brand of cruelty – the cruelty of dominance-asserting torture, of beating people up and stealing their lunch money and faking the basketball at them so that they flinch – that is 100% male. The Whore of Babylon may have been a home-wrecker, and she may have murdered an ex-husband here or there. But Attila she wasn’t.
So, I suddenly saw with blatant clarity how an embodiment of all evil, the “Devil”, could be a sort of two-faced being, a male avatar and a female avatar both at once. And suddenly it made sense that God could be the same way.
And my mind jumped to how these two images of God could be constructed. But where my mind had fountained with examples of male evil and female evil, I started to think about quintessential male goodness and quintessential female goodness and…
FEMININE:
MASCULINE:
Maybe thinking about evil makes it hard for a moment to switch tack. Because given a moment I could of course come up with a list: mother and care-giver as opposed to righteous and honest, et cetera. But the hesitation to me was just as interesting the answers, and I wanted to end this thought by mentioning it.
Why is it so much easier to define people in terms of the bad than the good? Why are bad things just more memorable? Maybe it’s because a character is defined by flaws. Funny, isn’t it. God protects and nourishes us all that, but it’s in terms of the Devil that we are… us. The Devil is in the details.
