(no subject)

[timelets]

They [gods] emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind.
...
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." The question may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God; but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough. "When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him androgynous.'
The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites," by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.
...
... symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two.

--- The Hero with a Thousand Faces.