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Updated: June 2, 2025
I must observe that the hermetic attempt to get back to Adam’s condition has some of the homunculus phantasy in it. Adam was regarded as androgyne, a being at once man and woman, but sufficient in himself alone for impregnation and procreation.
One of the most learned and illustrious of French Masonic writers, Jean-Marie Ragon, describes such androgyne or female lodges as "amiable institutions" invented by an unknown person some time previously to the year 1730, under the name of "mysterious amusements," which appears to describe them exactly, and one cannot be otherwise than astonished at the extraordinary gravity of nervous and well-intentioned persons who ascribe them such tremendous importance.
On the 20th of May, 1737, there was constituted in France the Order of the Palladium, or Sovereign Council of Wisdom, which, after the manner of the androgyne lodges then springing into existence, initiated women under the title of Companions of Penelope. The ritual of this order was published by the Masonic archæologist Ragon, so that there can be no doubt of its existence.
The cry of vengeance refers to the similar utterances of the Ghost, of Hamlet, and of Laertes, who all seek revenge. Mosca, with a view of preparing for his master a pleasure more suitable to his taste than that which a play like 'Hamlet, we suppose, could afford him, brings in the three gamesters: Nano, a dwarf; Castrone, a eunuch; and Androgyne, a hermaphrodite.
In any case it failed to spread, and it is uncertain whether the New and Reformed Palladium, also an androgyne order, with which we shall presently be concerned, is a metamorphosis or reconstruction of the original institution, but a connection of some kind is affirmed.
In Greece, when the desire was to express the androgyne qualities of the deity, a beard was added to the female face, or one half of the statuette represented the male form, the other the female. Such representations do not indicate great ingenuity, however skillfully they may be executed. As is generally known, traces of sun worship are found in almost every country of which we have a record.
The last point is brought within the scope of our inquiry because the Palladium is an androgyne order.
He was already in a certain sense the discoverer of "Female Freemasonry," that is to say, he was the only equipped person who seriously maintained that the exploded androgyne system was worked in modern France, and when he added the development of the Palladium as the climax to the mystery of iniquity, it is small wonder that his book achieved notoriety to the extent of five thousand copies.
But the destruction of this androgyne proved an arduous task.
The long document which the pamphlet prints in extenso exhibits Albert Pike preaching Palladism in the full foulness of its doctrine and practice the "resolution of the problem of the flesh" by indiscriminate satisfaction of the passions; the multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature of the Divine Principle; and the cultus of Lucifer as the good God.
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