the vagina symbol clasik

In the human effort to make meaning of existence,people have developed symbols to represent those ideas they value most.Some of the most powerful symbols,in their capacity to affect people and draw together a broad range of human experience,as demonstrated in their pervasiveness across cultures,are symbols drawn from human biology.Biological processes are the most immediate experience of human beings and so resonate deeply with the mind.One of these clusters of biological images are those drawn from human female biology.Female biology is congruent with procreative capacity and its expression in terms of monthly flows of blood from the womb through the vagina, a process related to the life sustaining power of blood and its profound associations.Female biology is also intimately related to ideas about beauty and the opposite of beauty,ugliness.It is intimately related to sexuality and its possibilities,both positive and negative.It is also suggestive of the associations that emerge from conjunctions between the onset of monthly blood flows at puberty,to the relationship between lunar time and these monthly flows,to the cessation of menstruation at menopause and the relationship between these blood flows ,the creation and dissolution of eggs in the womb that leads to them,and the progression of age,its relationship to the appearance and powers of the body and the constitution of the mind through experience

These female biological processes and associations are conjoined in a number of cultures and practices as expressions of the powers and experiential possibilities unique to women.These powers and experiential zones are correlated with larger terrestrial and cosmic processes of which female biology is understood as both symbolic and demonstrative at the level of the microcosm represented by the human body,of which the earth is macrocosmic,as the earth is itself a microcosm of the cosmos.At various scales of being,human,terrestrial and cosmic,in the focus on the capacity to generate life,nature is feminised.

Perhaps the most systematic and wide ranging of these symbolic complexes emerges in Classical Indian thought,in which,as one of the myriad expressions of the broad range of cognitive approaches represented by Indian philosophy and religion,the universe is understood as brought into being by a female creative power, Devi,that power itself expressed in terms of a range of female figures.This feminine force is at times paired with a masculine force,as demonstrated by the conjunction between Shiva,the male potency,and Shakti,the female.These masculine/feminine conjunctions are represented by images of Shakti sitting astride Shiva ,an image which suggests the description of the masculine power of Shiva as a passive potency that needs to be actualised by the active power of Shakti.