Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00011)

This is a quote from Dudley Young's book "Origins of the Sacred, The
Ecstasies of Love and War"
Mr. Young is a professor at the University of Essex in England and teaches
in the Department of English, and has authored the book "Out of Ireland: The
Poetry of W. B. Yeats".  As most of you know  W. B. Yeats was a Theosophist
during his life as well as a member of the Golden Dawn.
The following quote is from page xiii of the Preface and Acknowledgments and
deals with a subject that a lot of women of the TS have a problem with, I
hope that this will help:

"The other point concerns the implicit sexism of words such as mankind and
human, both of which shorten to man taking the pronoun he.  It is absolutely
clear to my mind that Adam's rib is embedded in the linguistic structure
(event though the word man goes back to Sanskrit manus, which before it
meant mind, meant born of woman), and equally clear to my ear that there is
no way of correcting the fault without falling into circumlocution and
cacophany.  But just as B.C. and A.D. began preemptively and have now
arguably become innocuous, so the use of man for all of us can eventually be
neutered (or at least house-trained) if authors who must employ it remember
their Sanskrit and proffer appropriate apologies for the sins of the fathers
in their prefaces."