The Hot-Crazy Matrix: A Humorous Insight into a Profound Metaphysical Truth

A Traditionalist look at what a meme can tell us about the nature of the feminine

The hot-crazy matrix is one of the internet’s most enduring memes— most likely because it does speak to something that is on some level true. This meme posits that all women are at least a 4 out of 10 “crazy”, with the level of craziness a man is willing to tolerate increasing in direct proportion to her attractiveness. This idea that all women harbour a touch of insanity has long been part of cultural and mythological lore, sometimes celebrated and sometimes feared, but the deeper truth behind this notion is one that is rooted in the primordial essence of femininity. 

That essence is something we might think of as a “Durga” quality. Durga is a Hindu goddess who, in a nutshell, can be said to represent the primordial feminine. In the essay, Knowledge of the Waters, Abraxa describes this elemental force thusly:

“The nature of this force is craving: an appetite that is never satisfied, an endless restlessness, an irresistible need, and a blind, wild yearning. The essence of this primordial force is: becoming; chaotic and disorderly transformation; an incoercible flux; generation-destruction; attraction-repulsion; terror-desire; formation-dissolution. All of these elements are combined in a fiery mixture that knows no rest.” (Introduction to Magic, vol 1, p15)

This is the nature of the essential quality of the metaphysical feminine. An endless tug-of-war between opposites that generates friction, heat, and chaos. It is certainly a very powerful force and is the Matter required for the Great Work. But it is also by its very nature UNSTABLE. And when instability is present in a person, we call that… “crazy”. While it may be said in casual jest, it does actually encompass a profound, but often misunderstood connection to the to the raw feminine that resonates within the symbolism of Durga.

The biological woman embodies these qualities, balancing within her both awesome creative powers as well as destructive ones, serving as a vessel for the expression of the raw feminine principle to manifest itself in the material world. She is a physical portal to that abyssal realm where one finds a wellspring of occult power. In the context of certain magical practices, this force within women is what evokes heroism in a man— if he can prove capable of overcoming it. Either he will gain salvation for both him and her, or he will damn them both.

It could be said that woman is the greatest challenge to masculinity. Mythology is replete with the double theme of the feminine as either a temptation which leads any man who succumbs to it to his downfall, or the feminine is conceived as an object of conquest which will transform the one who dares and succeeds in the quest into something divine or immortal. The feminine is the Holy Grail, the supernatural power won by heroic men, but she is the downfall of lesser men, whose ability was not equal to their daring and who are thus blinded or incinerated when they attempt to grasp the Grail— which is to say, the raw feminine. (It should be noted that attempting to harness the power of the feminine, of Victory, is a “left-hand path”.)

This is in line with the concept of Shiva and Shakti. Shakti, which literally means “power”, is the primordial cosmic feminine and her nature is ultimately identical to Abraxa’s description above. Shiva, the masculine, represents the lighting rod which grounds and directs that power into creation rather than destruction, bringing order to chaos. Creation is thus, at its most basic level, feminine matter given order and limit by the masculine spirit. This theme of the stable centre (Shiva) providing order and limitation to chaos (Shakti) repeats itself through traditional literature as a fundamental principle of the created cosmos. Without the ordering, grounding, centring, limiting quality of the masculine, the feminine cannot be anything other than destructive, chaotic, and unstable.

If we conceive of women as embodiments of that archetypal Shakti, then the “craziness” of women starts to make a little more sense and we start to have some inkling about what causes high levels of crazy to surface. What would be needed to bring Shakti out of her dance of destruction? An equally strong or stronger Shiva force would be needed to match that. In other words, the crazier the woman, the more masculinity— stability— is demanded of the men around her. She is seeking a counterweight.

Theoretically, one could argue from these premises that most or all cases of craziness could be solved if each crazy woman had a man suitable for her. But in the Kali Yuga, when we have a crisis of masculinity, partly due to natural entropy and partly due to pre-meditated orchestrations, then we have an equal and opposite crisis of out-of-control femininity. Rather than the creative, nurturing, life-affirming side of Shakti that we see when she is guided by a higher ordering principle, we instead get the destructive side of an unrestrained Shakti who is spiralling out of control.

As such, we start to see the Amazon archetype come out more and more. Amazons arise whenever there is a vacuum of the masculine principle, either because it is non-existent or simply too attenuated to be effective. In the modern age, it is the predomination of the animus-possessed feminist in all her many guises. With no Shiva force to ground her, she attempts to be her own Shiva. But very few women have enough innate Shiva force to balance out their own out-of-control Shakti force, and this is particularly true of those women who have access to the deepest depths of the feminine abyss— that is, the ones who are the craziest.

This brings me back to the hot-crazy matrix and the implicit suggestion that the hotter a woman is, the more likely she is to be crazy. Having established that craziness is fundamental to the metaphysical nature of the feminine, we can now consider whether or not physical attractiveness has any correlation to the level of instability in a given woman.

First of all, I think a case could be made that the hotter a woman is, the more innately connected she is to the Durga element because the fascination of the feminine is related to Durga. The depth of the vital force, and a woman’s capacity to access it, is typically written in her physiognomy— it is a distinctly sexual physiognomy, whatever that might mean to a given man, but sexual nonetheless. 

Generally speaking, women hold a natural fascination for men, but as Julius Evola argues in Eros and the Mysteries of Love (and with which I agree), this fascination cannot be wholly explained by biological urges. The root of female fascination is found in the depths of the feminine abyss and that chaotic element holds an air of dangerous yet intoxicating mystique.

The more sexually attractive a woman, the more that telluric chaos finds a natural channel in her. Thus, fascination is increased, but so is the danger. It’s an attunement that’s scaled based on the woman’s potential to not only open herself up to the abyss but to be a vessel for it. This is precisely how women were chosen for use in initiatic sex, as the capacity to be a vessel for all that is abyssal is a foundational requirement. 

The Durga element is always there just below the surface, singing like a siren to lure unwitting men under. This is not a malicious force, but rather functions as a test to determine if the man is equipped to hold the Grail he is seeking to possess. If you can’t control the power, then you can’t wield it and it will destroy you— simple cause and effect. That’s why so many men are destroyed by hot women. They fall prey to Durga’s siren song and aren’t even remotely equipped to deal with the forces they encounter. The craziness of the woman is then unleashed due to the man’s failure to maintain a stable centre for her, as Shiva does for Shakti.

Statistically speaking, physical attractiveness in both men and women is linked to shorter and less happy relationships. There have been a number of studies demonstrating that physical attractiveness is a reliable predictor for relationship outcomes. From an esoteric perspective, this is a problem. We have a situation where the hotter the woman, the more likely she is to experience relationship trauma, and this trauma will serve to draw out and exacerbate her craziness. Let me explain why, from a metaphysical, rather than psychological perspective.

One of the principles of magic on the so-called humid or wet path is this idea that man first needs to agitate the corrosive waters- this is the chaos that women embody as part of their connection to the primordial feminine. One way of agitating the corrosive waters is through the power of Eros- strong romantic attraction, sexual tension, intercourse, all that stuff. 

Upon having agitated the waters, man is supposed to submit himself to their power, only pulling back and reaffirming his masculine principle at the last possible moment. In Hermeticism, this is the White Work and the Red Work respectively. The White Work involves woman reducing man to her nature (because sex is an inherently feminine act, participating in the orgasmic delights and giving oneself over to its sensory pleasure which is under the aegis of the feminine), and the Red Work involves man reducing the woman to his nature. The Red Work is the essential part to achieve salvation for both. The feminine is then imbued with Logos, transfigured and elevated, having provided the jet fuel for man’s Olympian leap into the celestial realms. This is what creates an Absolute Woman on the Aphroditic path. The corrosive waters become the Waters of Life, which grants “immortality”— that is, success on the Olympian solar path.

But when men have sex only for pleasure, they get lost in desire and lust, and their only goal is physical satisfaction or emotional sentimentalities, then the Red Work never begins. He has indulged in the pleasures of Chaos and lost himself to it. He has agitated the corrosive waters within the vessel of the woman and she is left with the spiritual, psychological, and physiological repercussions. The chaos in her has been awakened, but not grounded or directed and she as a human being (and a woman, at that) is not sufficient to contain or control that force.

It thus manifests as “craziness”. Wherever you have a crazy woman, you have a failure of masculinity that precipitated it. Someone aroused that force and then did not finish the job. So when you have these hot women who are at least medium-level crazy (the hot-crazy matrix asserts that there are no women who are above an 8 in hotness, but below a 5 in craziness), it’s not hard to see why they would be, whereas if a woman has fewer relationships and they last longer, there is a greater likelihood of her having a consistent and stable masculine presence to ground her. With the rise of hook-up culture, it was inevitable that we would see an increase in unbalanced, more chaotic, more destructive expressions of the feminine, to the point of extreme mental illness in some cases. 

Now some of you might be saying that you know plenty of crazy men, too. Yes, no doubt you do. It’s not only women who manifest instability and ungroundedness. Remember what we discussed earlier about the feminine being represented in two ways in mythology, either as the prize to be won or the source of man’s destruction? 

We all have within us varying degrees of the masculine and feminine principles. The Kali Yuga is characterised as the age in which the masculine is in a torpid slumber, and so that which is masculine is less present in the world overall, including in men. Modern men have an over-abundance of the feminine principle within them and while they cannot embody it in the same way that women do and are not intimately tied to it in the way women are, it is still part of them. When you see a crazy man, you’re seeing an expression of the feminine in him that his own masculinity cannot control. He is unable to conquer it in himself and so he cannot conquer it in an actual woman, either.

The hot-crazy matrix is a humorous facade that masks a profound truth: women who are perceived as attractive are seen as having a greater capacity for the Durga element, the chaotic yin energy that fuels what we call “craziness”. This is not a flaw but a feature of the feminine nature that requires the correct masculine balance. As we confront the disintegration of this era, we must not shirk from this revelation, but should embrace it as a guidepost. For in the alchemical dance of Order and Chaos lies the secret to taming the wild currents of existence, but also the secret to healthier and happier relationships in our day to day lives.