Ardhanari. Púrusha and Prakrití.
The symbolism of the Ardhanari can be understood in the context of the Sámkhya philosophy. According to this naturalist system, every cosmic manifestation is founded upon the fundamental duality between the Púrusha, the transcendent principle, represented as masculine, and the Prakrití, the primordial substance, represented as feminine. The Púrusha, the principle of consciousness (which is neither creation nor creator, which bears no attributes nor qualities, and which resides in the core of everything yet remaining external), is beyond both the non-manifest and the manifest. Prakrití, in turn, can either remain undifferentiated, resting in its natural state (the equilibrium of the union of the opposites that precedes manifestation and follows dissolution within each creative cycle) or, under the non-active influence, contact or proximity of the Púrusha, the Prakrití can become manifest, generating universes.
This duality exists only in relation with the manifest and, as a polarisation, it represents the first division within an original whole, with the aim to produce the multiplicity of the manifest, thus bearing a cosmogonic reach. The Ardhanari, anthropomorphized as half-masculine/half-feminine, represents this duality, also bearing a cosmogonic status.
‘In India a whole literature has been devoted to explanations of this paradoxical relationship between what is pre-eminently unconscious – Matter – and “pure consciousness”, the Spirit [Púrusha], which by its own mode of being is a-temporal, free, uninvolved in the becoming. And one of the most unexpected results of this philosophic labour has been the conclusion that the Unconscious (i. e. Prakrití), moving by a kind of “teleological instinct”, imitates the behaviour of the Spirit [Púrusha]; that the unconscious behaves in such a way that its activity seems to prefigure the mode of being of the Spirit [Púrusha]’ (Eliade, 1977, p. 122).
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