The introductory chapter to the dissertation, Erotic Rites, Copywrite Loraine Hutchins
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Sacred Sex Goes Public
Just a few years ago the term sacred sex was rarely mentioned, much less understood in the United States, outside a few esoteric circles. Now, information on workshops, videos, audiotapes, and books on erotic spirituality are all easily obtainable from advertisements in mainstream magazines, through cable television talk shows, and on Internet websites. Familiarity with sacred sex imagery is even assumed - in everything from Atlantic Monthly whisky ads to mail order catalog Valentine's Day displays (as in the above collage). Publications as varied as New Woman, The Wall Street Journal, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Ms., Essence, Esquire, Time-Life Books' Living Wisdom Series, and Utne Reader have all issued first-time specials on sacred sex, and the network television news-magazine show 20/20's millennial year programming included a first-time segment on an icon of contemporary U.S. sacred sex imagery, The Sacred Whore.
Tantric sex, sacred sex, sex magic: different terms are used but whatever one calls it, there is a new popular interest in reviving the ancient arts of erotic spirituality in the United States today. People don't necessarily mean the same things when they use these varied terms, but distinctions between them are becoming increasingly linked and blurred. Tantra technically refers to a specific set of Hindu or Buddhist beliefs and practices that originated in ancient India. Sex magic refers to ceremonial uses of erotic energy for various purposes. Sacred sex is more of a catch-all term. People use these terms, however, to mean anything from erotic calisthenics, to enhanced partner-intimacy, to therapeutic spiritual and sexual healing; anything from the pursuit of better orgasms and feel-good ambiance, to seeking connection with the divinity within and beyond oneself. That's a wide range of different phenomena to squeeze under one umbrella of sacred sex, but the term does contain this wide spectrum.
Whatever people mean when they use the term, sacred sex, it is clear that unprecedented discussions and enactments of erotic spiritualities are emerging publicly across varied sectors of contemporary U.S. culture. Young people explore music-and-drug-induced trance experiences known as 'raves' - all night, often outdoor ecstatic dance rituals that provide a polymorphous sense of communion, both spiritual and erotic. College catalogs offer courses on sex & spirit. It is fairly easy in most big cities now to find one-on-one divine-love-making instruction sessions. Even once-taboo group erotic rituals are organized through health spas and retreat centers. This growing public interest in sacred sex appears to stem partly from larger social trends, such as interest in mind-body healing methods and sex-positive, earth-centered spiritualities, and the increasing intersection of these pursuits. When I first started studying U.S. sacred sex traditions five years ago in 1995, I found neo-tantra the most visible, high-profile form of U.S. sacred sex practice, with Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy which includes an erotic component, a close second. Tantra and Taoism have existed for thousands of years, with Taoism probably the older. The literature and teachings of both these spiritual traditions, including their sacred sex elements, are well documented, but not often well understood. For instance, many of those now attracted to tantric teachings say that the tradition's images of female/male-deities-in-union reaffirm, for them, the sacred part of sexuality. However, real Tantra has nothing to do with ordinary sexuality. Authentic tantric teachings use deep erotic meditation as a path to visualize oneself and one's beloved as divine, yes, but it is practiced in order to develop enlightened spiritual qualities, not to improve one's sex life.
For the most part, both Tantra and Taoism have had only small followings in the U.S., until recently, confined to rare esoteric scholars and yoga students. Now, with the wholesale importation and watered-down adaptation of these practices for mass U.S. consumption, a rapid transformation is in progress, which makes the former traditions almost unrecognizable in their new 'forms.' For example, just in the last several years (1998-2000) I have noticed that U.S. sacred sex practitioners, (with no regard for or perhaps knowledge of nuanced differences between different tantric and taoist traditions, much less the variations within them), have begun offering courses such as "Tantric Taoism", "Taoist Tantra," or "Tantric Wicca;" completely conflating cultures and disciplines, and blurring distinctions between these paths. The terms "tantra," "tantric" and "tantrikas" have so thoroughly made their way into common vernacular that they are now understood as labels for a larger set of phenomena involving a variety of ways that people eroticize spiritual practices or merge their spiritual and erotic lives. U.S. neo-tantric teachers now use the terms "tantra," "sacred sex," and even "sex magick" (a term from U.S./European occult ceremonial magic traditions) interchangeably; even mixing and matching these traditions further with techniques and principles from Afro-Caribbean traditions, such as Santeria, or Cherokee concepts of sexual (FireWoman and FireMan) initiations, and calling all of these pastiches "tantra," or "sacred sex." The dilemma presented for the serious student is that these threads are so mixed they become almost impossible to sort out.
Moreover, the field itself is still expanding; beyond the yoga, massage and New Age meditation arenas, and into more mainstream areas such as network television, Internet chat rooms, and professional associations. Human service professionals are presenting sacred sex-themed workshops at conferences, and several new organizations of sacred sex healers have formed, including the first long-term training and certification program in sacred sex. In the last five years (1995-2000), sacred sex leaders around the country have convened two major national conferences, under the auspices of the Sacred Space Institute of San Rafael, California. These conferences brought together a wide variety of skilled teachers for the first time - from occult sex magick to mystical Jewish and Christian sub-sects, from Afro-Caribbean Voudoun and Native American erotic initiation rites, to neo-pagan, Wiccan and neo-Tantric/neo-Taoist eastern traditions.
Observing the emergence of new sacred sexuality modalities in the U.S. brings up the question of these traditions' underlying sources. Some sacred sex systems are definitely imported from India and China, from Eastern teachers who adapt Tantra and Taoism for Western minds, but are any sacred sex traditions indigenous to the U.S.? Many Native American tribes most likely followed ways of life intertwining the erotic and the holy, but for the most part, several centuries of genocide, civilization and development have wiped out distinct traces of their specific legacies. There is some evidence of sacred sex influences in the roots of a few U.S. utopian communities of the 1800s, but interest in sacred sex seems to have subsided in the first half of this past century. Then, around the late 1970s to the mid-1980s a few U.S. yoga practitioners and occult adepts increasingly began to teach neo-tantric approaches and other forms of sacred sex.
Unlike in the past, these new sacred sex offerings are less related to esoteric groups or secret practices and more part of a democratized information-sharing trend, fostered by the sexual revolution and the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Massage therapists and other bodyworkers, as well as some psychological counselors practicing a variety of hands-on touch therapies, have increasingly begun taking an interest in modalities integrating body and spirit. This interest sped up during the sex-stressed late 80s and early 90s when AIDS panic entered the public awareness and continues today. Contemporary sacred sex instructors are more likely to be bodyworkers - Reiki, Alexander Technique, bioenergetics, massage therapists, movement/dance therapists, colonic therapists, Rolfers -- than the traditional yoga instructors who first pioneered U.S. neo-tantra workshops during the early 1980's. Some modern sacred sex teachers are also trained psychologists, chiropractors, nurses, sex educators/therapists and sex surrogates. Professional groups as divergent as sex workers and clergy also both occasionally integrate sacred sex approaches into the services they offer.
Whatever their professional backgrounds and experience, sacred sex teachers usually combine meditation and breathing techniques with sensually-focused touch, and movement, communication, and visualization exercises. Sacred sex instructors teach couples techniques they can practice at home, or teach singles how they might do these techniques when they have a willing partner. A small yet growing number of teachers also act as hands-on sexual coaches for their clients, using both private sessions and small groups to conduct intimate erotic rituals featuring nudity, touch, meditation, and orgasm as part of spiritual worship and communion.
Other distinctive aspects of these new erotic rituals -- whether for singles, couples or groups -- include:
As principles developed by grassroots groups, working independently but with some synchronicity, the above aspects of new sacred sex groups seem to bespeak the need and hunger their participants have to integrate the erotic with the spiritual in their daily lives; to "connect sex and spirit," as they often say. These aspects, if they continue to have influence beyond the groups developing them, could dramatically change how sexuality, and religion, are conceived, experienced, and expressed in the United States. Current modes of practicing sacred sex may eventually develop toward a genuine, thorough, social re-sanctification of sexuality that affects mainstream institutions of religion and society, or these trends may stay at the level of an entertaining diversion that does little to challenge or change the status quo. It is presently impossible to determine what the ultimate social and political impacts of these increasingly popular of sacred sex traditions will be. But let us first explore current aspects of the sacred sex phenomena, starting with examining the state of the U.S. religious establishment, since sacred sex groups are partly a response to religious attitudes toward sexuality.
Divisions in, and defections from, mainstream religious institutions are multiplying. A lot less of local community life in the United States is centered around religious institutions than was the case fifty, even thirty years ago and, despite the emergence of a few conservative mega-churches, church memberships and divinity school enrollments are overall still in dramatic decline. Mainstream religious institutions are currently occupied with a widespread, contentious struggle about the role of sex in religion, a struggle overtly focused on the ordination and marriage rights of women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender peoples within these denominations. This ideological split has been characterized as the biggest threat to church unity since the Civil War, but sexual behavior is really only part of a larger debate about the roles and rights of women and of gay people, as part of a larger discussion on social justice issues ranging from abortion and sex education, to pay equity, affirmative action, and welfare/family policies and structures. In all of this debate in the church, the roles of eros in worship, and of worship in eros, are seldom, if ever, directly discussed. And there is good reason for this. Innovations in making worship more erotic or making sexuality more worshipful cannot develop easily in the eye of a hurricane of angry, disputing views about sexuality. It is much more likely that experiments on more harmonious ways of integrating sexuality and spirituality will continue to develop outside mainstream religious institutions, where the pressure to conform is less strong.
Also, though rising interest in sacred sex traditions may relate to the increased availability, over the past several decades, of alternative, often sex-positive, spiritual paths; disillusionment with mainstream religion isn't the whole causal story. Other social changes - in increased information about sexuality, in the growth of alternative healing modalities, and in the proliferation of sexual liberation movements - all combine with the new sex-positive spiritual traditions to create more interest in and opening for mind/body beliefs such as sacred sex. My research first examines how the combined effects of these new influences create the preconditions necessary for more public sacred sex explorations. I then present specific sacred sex forms practiced in the U.S. today, with discussions by the people experiencing this range of erotic rites.
But first let us unpack the cultural meanings we have inherited with these words, sacred and sexual, both apart and together. Sacred and sexuality are not considered synonyms -- in fact the two words are usually considered antithetical. How did this come to be so? Let us examine what meaning sacred, itself, holds first.
SACRAL ROOTS
Why is woman's sexuality so exploited, so debased, when once it was revered?
… why is sexuality cut off from spirituality as if they were opposites?
- Nancy Qualls-Corbett, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine
The history of how sexuality became "cut off from spirituality as if they were opposites" is also the history, at least the white European-American history, of why men see women as less spiritual than themselves. In a long tradition of interpretations, the Christian Bible's creation story represents sexual knowledge (from the Tree and hence the apple) which was forbidden. Humanity's first experience of body awareness is portrayed as one of shamefulness, associated with the sin of willfully separating off from God. And in this story, the woman was responsible for sexual sin.
Not all creation stories blame women for humanity's problems or see sex as opposed to spirit. However, creation stories are often about a first experience of separation. Most creation stories recount a birth out of chaos, water, or darkness. Some stories are about a vessel breaking open or about light dispelling the dark. Some are about a Great Spirit (usually female) who fashions the first human beings from dirt or clay. Some are even about the universe being the fruit of the Great Goddess's exuberant masturbation.
But the most familiar and powerful creation story in U.S. culture is still the Christian story. There is no Mother Goddess (unless you count the snake), only a male parent present at the beginning of the world. God the Father created Adam and Eve and they lived happily in The Garden of Eden with Him, in childlike bliss. When God expelled them from Paradise for eating the apple it was blamed on Eve. Eve listened to the snake. Eve persuaded Adam to eat the fatal forbidden fruit. Their rebellious acts of separation propelled them into more awareness, more knowledge, not just about sexuality but about all worldly matters. However, their sexuality, at least in popular, even if not in all theological, interpretations, has been portrayed as a central part of what separates them from God, from what is holy. As special punishment, Eve and all of her female descendants (i.e. all women) are particularly cursed by this Father God. We must, due to Eve's original transgression and according to the scriptural edict, obey men's will over our own, and bear children in pain. The theological infiltrates the secular, regardless of any church and state separation claims. Witness this one nugget out of many, from a history of U.S. constitutional law: "An English resolution, submitted to Parliament in 1632 at the time of the Puritan settlement of Plymouth Bay, set out 'women's rights' in these terms: 'Eve, because she had helped to seduce her husband, had inflicted upon her a special bane. See here the reason … that women have no voice in Parliament. They make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married, and their desires are to their husbands. The common laws here shaketh hands with divinity.'"
In the Christian creation story women's and men's distinctly different gender roles reflect and determine our relations to God and to each other, to spirit, and to sexual relationships. To this insidious association of woman with evil, and man with good, the kind of duality that separates sex from sacrament can easily be linked.
Feminist theologians have often noted that cultural religious symbols dependent on concepts of duality invariably portray women as less spiritual, less rational, less action-oriented (than men). Religious scholar Mircea Eliade says that many cultures define the sacred, in fact, by means of contrasting it with the "profane." He points out that most Western (i.e. European and U.S.) religions emphasize verticality and height. The sacred is visualized as high up, distant, precious, set apart from the body and the earth. God is visualized as located in the heavens above, not here on earth. When the interpretation of the Christian creation story blaming Eve for sin is combined with metaphors of heaven above and earth below, which associates men (not women) with the mind and the spirit, and women (not men) with the body and the earth, then this mind/body duality functions to exclude both women and sexuality from the sacred paradigm, from all that is associated with the holy, belonging to God, consecrated. After this duality is re-enforced in popular thinking through centuries of religious education and literary references, it is but a short, slippery slope to automatically associate sex (and therefore women, by association) with the profane, not the sacred. There are, however, other sacred paradigms -- ways to define the sacred that do not depend so much upon the scarcity mentalities of us-versus-them and bad-versus- good. Many earth-centered traditions, for instance, view the entire world as endowed with spirit and aliveness, with sacredness. In these belief systems the sacred is expressed more through relationship and connection, than through contrasts of up and down, light and dark, good and bad. In this kind of paradigm it is being a part of precious life that flows that creates holiness, being at-one with the universe. Women are not as likely, in these systems, to be seen as evil because of our sex. Wilderness scholar and deep ecologist Dolores LaChapelle, for instance, describes the sacred as what is always going on, or on-going always, that it is a feeling in the body of 'being at home.' It is our natural birthright to feel this way most of the time, except most of us lose it as a child. "The essence of 'the sacred' is relationship," she says. "(W)e tend to think that God is some substance or thing which we worship. But … instead, 'the sacred' is whenever the relationship between human, land, animals, or plants occurs…." She cites various 'sacred gourd' creation stories -- from the Asian Pacific Islands, South Asia and Africa -- where the gourd is a womb, the whole universe, the life-giving mother of the human race. LaChapelle says that "…the energy of the universe operates through the yin and the yang, not as a dualistic system, but as a continually changing pattern; if something moves along the yin continuum and gets more and more yin, eventually it turns back and begins to move toward the yang pole. Everything is fluidly inter-related."
U.S./West African scholar and shaman, Malidoma Patrice Somé also offers a definition of sacred that is based on relationships. He says:
Our relationship with the Spirit World is a two-way stream, and we need to fine-tune and maintain the lines of communication between the two worlds … Our purpose in this world is linked to a job that returns critical material into the spiritual world. This notion of 'as above so below' is found also in Western lore. The problem is that the imbalances in this world are not being tended to, and this is endangering the health of the Other World. The Dagara people understand that the spirit that animates each one of us in our life can be reborn, and that the purpose of this reincarnation is to try once again to fix this world. And this is why when we come here we are not at peace until we find ourselves useful, wanted, and needed… The spiritual cosmology of an indigenous people like the Dagara does not involve worship; rather it is a paradigm for understanding based on careful observation of and a long and intimate relationship with the natural world that surrounds us.
When I first began exploring religious views of sexuality, and of what is sacred and not and why, I tended to see nature-based beliefs like the Dagara's, above, as "all good" in terms of sex, and the Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of my upbringing as "all bad." I vigorously sought spiritual images of the holy erotic from the many non-Christian belief systems now available in the U.S. because I wasn't sure there was any sex-positive imagery in my own roots. Through this search process I finally did learn about some body-affirmative Christian beliefs, and mystical Jewish ones too, albeit they are minority traditions in both faiths. As Christian theologian and ethicist Marvin M. Ellison says, "Christianity is neither a static nor a monolithic tradition" and "(N)ewer approaches in social and cultural history are recovering great diversity in attitudes and practices among everyday believers and therefore give us reason to question whether, as yet, we know with much accuracy what most Christians of the past, especially women and other marginalized persons, really understood or cared about sexuality and family life." Ellison believes that certain negative "themes about body, sexuality and a right ordering of sexual relations took hold in the early centuries of the church," but that now a "methodological shift within Christian ethics," which he advocates, could make the Church more inclusive of sexual diversity and sexuality in general. Progressive U.S. Jewish theologians speak similarly about Judaism.
Discovering these minority traditions in mainstream Hebrew and Christian beliefs made me realize that I myself was in danger of constructing my own new dualisms. As a disaffected Westerner it was too easy to conflate Judaism with Christianity, and to read both simply as "anti-sex," while seeing Eastern religions, for instance, -- the tantric traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism, or Taoism -- as more "pro-sex," simply because many Asian countries have surviving goddess-worshipping traditions and religious art rich with imagery of sacred love-making. Exploring the pro-sex aspects of Tantra and Taoism are essential to sacred sexuality research, but adopting a duality of West = anti-sex, East = pro-sex is dangerously over-simplified. The yin/yang concept does not in itself eliminate sexism or women's oppression. Nor does the binary assumption that urbanized religions are alienated from nature and thus more anti-sex than indigenous earth-based cultures necessarily always ring true. I realized, that it was more important to look carefully for the sacred erotic in every religion that is part of contemporary U.S. culture, or has influenced it, rather than to dismiss certain traditions or embrace others uncritically.
Looking for the sacred erotic and asking why and how the sacred came to exclude the sexual, why the legacy of body-hatred and woman-hatred runs so very deep, also eventually led me to a fascination with the primary sources of word-meanings, the history of language. Etymologically, the Latin roots of sacred derive from sacrum or sacral -- terms associated with both the holy AND the sexual. Sacrum and sacral mean "of or for religious rites or observances." They also refer to the "sacred bone," the thick, triangular bone situated at the lower end of the spinal column, where it joins the hipbones to form the dorsalpart of the pelvis, the first five fused sacral vertebrae cradling the reproductive organs and genitals. Why is it particularly the sacral bone that is sacred? Why aren't all bones sacred, or none? Dictionary scrutiny yields little information. Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, asserts that the sacral bone is sacred or sacral because of its "former use in sacrifices." The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that the reason the sacral bone is called sacral is because this area situated at the end of the spine represented "a tasty morsel or bite" (in regards to animal sacrifices offered up to God). Perhaps.
Contemporary cultural critics like LaChapelle offer another interpretation of this possible sacral bone connection. According to her, the bone at the base of the spine is sacral not because of any association with animal or human sacrifice, but because of it being the "sacred middle" or pelvic area.
Because Western culture puts so much emphasis on the rational mind, (specifically, the rational, left hemisphere of the neo-cortex), the Taoist insistence on the importance of the lower mind, located four fingers below the navel (tantien in Chinese and hara in Japanese), seemed utter nonsense until quite recently .... but, in the last two decades with the growing popularity of such disciplines as Tai Chi, Aikido and other martial arts as well as therapies such as Rolfing, the pelvic area is coming to be recognized as truly our "sacred middle" - the area within us where the flow of energy takes place between us and the cosmos. The functions of sex, prenatal life, birth, assimilation of food as well as deep emotions all take place in this area. The "sacred middle" refers to the sacrum, the bony plate which gets its name from the same Latin root as the word, sacred.
She also argues that the human brain developed after we achieved upright posture, made possible by the pelvic structure. The walking, standing, sitting muscles all converge there. Through our mother's pelvis we come into life, through our own pelvis life comes through us. The Chinese call the tantien or pelvic region the seat of the "other" brain, teaching that we think with our bellies and sense with our bellies, that our gut has wisdom the head cannot do without. But obviously we won't, or can't, access our gut's wisdom, and the wisdom of our genitals, if we believe they have nothing to tell us, that our brains are the sole seat of spiritual guidance, intelligence and soul. Yet this is what happens when the sacred is associated vertically with heaven, with the head, with men; while the lower body is associated with the earth, with the emotions, with women.
Harlots and Holy Women
The gods did not die in Nietzche's time, but centuries earlier with the subversion of the priestesses and the secularization and degradation of the holy body. Deena Metzger, "Re-Vamping the World: On The Return of the Holy Prostitute"
The prostitute, or harlot, to use the more Biblical term, is that woman most looked down upon, that woman most associated in Western traditions with the body, with the earth, with sin. In the Bible, when God is mad at Israel for being disloyal to him, he often compares her (yes, Israel has a gender, just as the Church; they're both female) to a slut who'll sleep with anyone. Israel is promiscuous when she worships the Gods and Goddesses of other lands instead of, or in addition to, the God of Israel. Seeing this characterization of Israel as a woman, from the woman's point of view, feminist scholar Phyllis A. Bird points out that, ironically, whores have more control in some ways than the average wife, sister or daughter: "The harlot is a kind of legal outlaw, standing outside the normal social order with its approved roles for women, ostracized and marginalized, but needed and therefore accomodated. … the harlot not only demands a price, she controls the transaction … a reversal of the normal sex roles … ambivalence pervades the whole relationship..."
Let us explore this "ambivalence that pervades the whole relationship" between whores and men. It is the ambivalence about women who step outside the sex/gender norms for what a 'good' woman must be. With the sexual double standard and the religious association of women with sexual sin, all women can be treated as whores, if we dare to act as independent sexual beings. But those held in the most contempt are the ones who actually act openly as sex objects, the women who sell sex for money. This whore archetype is a two-sided coin and the other side of the coin is this: if we are not dirty and sexual we are the opposite - clean and spiritual -- thus the dichotomy of Virgin and Whore (or Madonna and Whore).
But Virgins and Madonnas are not the same as holy women with high office of their own. They are holy, but holy by virtue of their relationship to men -- holy because they are virgin, as yet unbound to any man, or holy because they have mothered God -- not because they are priestesses or embodiments of divinity in their own right. Therefore, the roles for women in Christian iconography are sexual OR holy. Even when we are holy it is only a lower, more subservient form of holy since we are always reminded that Christ was made in God's image and that's why Christ came as a man. Seeing present-day women as free agents -- as people who are freely sexual and holy both -- is, for mainstream Western religions, still primarily a contradiction in terms, since women are theologically associated with sex as sin and temptation, and not associated with the mind or with the spirit. And even after many years of organizing to change treatment of women and women's opportunities for leadership within major U.S. religious institutions, women still do not hold religious office or authority comparable to men.
There is no holy AND sexual woman, unless she is the Mother of God, or the repentant prostitute who gave up her "filthy" life of selling sex and now serves God instead, as Mary Magdalene and other famous harlots of the Early Church are reputed to have done so magnificently. The holy and the sexual are at odds, opposed, contradictory. So collapsing these two polar images into one, as the image of the Sacred Prostitute does, is profoundly disturbing and fascinating; impossible and enigmatic, or a powerful statement of reclaiming female wholeness, depending upon how you look at it.
Where did these stories about Sacred Prostitutes come from? According to some scholars they came, originally, from historic accounts of goddess-worshipping times. In the 1970s when the current wave of feminist research was first in flower, one of the first scholars to take on goddess traditions research was Merlin Stone. In her ovular contribution, When God Was A Woman, Stone discusses the history of sacred sex customs during ancient Goddess-worshipping times. She asks why rites of Goddess-worship were historically portrayed as prostitution. She says that the term, Sacred Prostitute, is a mis-translation artifact, resulting from white male scholars' misunderstanding and/or distorting of what they discovered about women's sexual and religious roles in ancient (patriarchal) times. The actual term in Akkadian meant 'Holy Woman.' But the men studying these erotically powerful temple priestesses could not imagine women being fully in their sexual and spiritual power, without framing it in patriarchal terms of fee-for-service, commodified sexual exchange:
The sacred sexual customs of the female religion offer us another of the apparent ties between the worship of the Divine Ancestress as it was known in Sumer, Babylon, Anatolia, Greece, Carthage, Sicily, Cyprus and even in Canaan. Women who made love in the temples were known in their own languages as "sacred women," "the undefiled." Their Akkadian name of qadishtu is literally translated as "sanctified women" or "holy women." Yet the sexual customs in even the most academic studies of the past two centuries were nearly always described as "prostitution," the sacred women repeatedly referred to as "temple prostitutes" or "ritual prostitutes." The use of the word "prostitute" as a translation for qadishtu not only negates the sanctity of that which was held sacred, but suggests, by the inferences and social implications of the word, an ethnocentric subjectivity on the part of the writer. It leads the reader to a misinterpretation of the religious beliefs and social structure of the period. It seems to me that the word "prostitute" entirely distorts the very meaning of the ancient customs which the writer is supposedly explaining.
Though in the above passage Stone clearly eschews sacred prostitute, as a term, her comments captured the feminist neo-pagan and New Age movements' imaginations about contemporary women's growing erotic autonomy and ironically, despite her cautions, the terms Sacred Prostitute, Sacred Whore, or sometimes Temple Harlot, have persisted over the past quarter century since she first released When God Was a Woman in 1976.
Feminist poet Deena Metzger also did much to conflate the sex worker and the priestess, and to popularize them both in one term with her article on "Re-Vamping the World: The Return of the Holy Prostitute," which was picked up and reprinted by Utne Reader and republished there, to great debate, in 1985. As Metzger wrote then: "The original whore was a priestess, the conduit to the divine, the one through whose body one entered the sacred arena and was restored. Warriors, soldiers, soiled by combat within the world of men, came to the Holy Prostitute, the Quedishtu, literally meaning "the undefiled one," in order to be cleansed and reunited with the divine." The modern Holy Prostitute, Sacred Prostitute, or Sacred Whore of the late 20th century, (the terms vary according to the user), probably started off as an imaginary metaphor conjured uncritically by cultural feminists to symbolize what women's erotic and spiritual power might have looked like in a matriarchy.
But the metaphor bore many of the trappings of patriarchy; in its historic derivations, modern literary portrayals, and its real-life social enactments. Metzger's imagery seems to come more from ancient Greek male historians such as Herodotus, whom Stone and others roundly condemn as having distorted women's roles in these ancient Near East temples with his own sexist projections. When I first began investigating the Sacred Prostitute I too thought that she was harbinger of a glorious matriarchal past where women were once free. But the more I studied representations of her, the more I came to believe that she is a remnant of women's oppression in early patriarchy; a way goddess-worshipping women, and men, strove to keep their rites alive during a time when monotheism and male supremacy were gaining hegemony. I say this also because, in her present forms at least, she seems to represent male fantasies much more than women's; more caretaker than queen. At some point in the late 80s to early 90s -- after a few U.S. women sex workers began publicly calling themselves modern Sacred Prostitutes, taking the fantasy into life -- the idea began to spread elsewhere: to the professional dominatrix realm, and to the field of sacred sex workshop leaders and teachers. Women, and some men, who now call themselves Sacred Prostitutes, often come from the helping professions just as much, or more frequently, than from sex work backgrounds. Philosopher and cultural critic Shannon Bell asserts that contemporary U.S. women who call themselves sacred whores are in the forefront of those artists who are redefining cultural constructs of sexuality: "Postmodern prostitute performance artists have traced their lineage back to the sacred prostitute; in doing so they have produced a strategic genealogy that undermines and displaces the modern construct of the prostitute." I think this is true in the sense that the Sacred Prostitute disrupts the usual boundaries between worship and sin, but not true in the sense that she continues to do what women under patriarchy have always done for men - which is to forgive them and nurture them.
In spiritual leadership terms we have the same question, whether or not the Sacred Prostitute archetype transcends the patriarchic role of sensual comforter, ("cleanser of violent men" as Metzger calls her) to become more fully empowered as an erotic priest/ess in her own right, a spiritual leader unencumbered by gender restrictions. This is a complex question, involving considerations of both clergy roles and counseling ones in contemporary culture. Therapists and other healing professionals have increasingly taken the place of spiritual guides for some people. And, in the case of offering sexual healing with a spiritual bent, there is a clear professional overlap between healers, priestesses and whores. In the last ten years a small minority of people from the nursing, massage therapy, ministry, psychology, chiropractic and the arts have joined a few traditional sex workers in taking up the mantle of the Sacred Prostitute. I have met some of these people and interviewed them but I am not sure they represent a trend that will have any substantive effect in their professions. It may be too early to tell yet. Jungian psychoanalyst Nancy Qualls-Corbett provides theoretical psychological analysis of this issue in her 1988 study, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine. Starting with Jung and continuing even more with his female followers - Esther Harding, Christine Downing, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Marion Woodman -- Qualls-Corbett gives academic credence to the Sacred Prostitute as a vivid archetype who operates significantly in the iconography of her male and female clients' dreams. Her book has been widely read among feminists and neo-pagans, even though it focuses mostly on psychotherapy sessions and patients' dream-scripts, not on actual sexual healer/client relationships.
At a national gathering of sacred sex practitioners in 1997 organizer Deborah Anapol asked the 150 attendees present how many identified as sacred intimates or sacred whores and over a third raised their hands, including some men. Anapol followed up that conference poll experience by designing several national training intensives through her San Rafael-based Sacred Space Institute, expressly for people who see themselves as, or want to be trained as sexual healers and/or sacred whores.
Men as Sacred Prostitutes
Although most people who call themselves contemporary sacred prostitutes are women, there are also a few visible men. The founder of the Body Electric Erotic Massage School, Joseph Kramer, offers Sacred Intimate training workshops for men interested in being sexual healers for other men, and has produced a teaching video on the same topic. Kenneth Ray Stubbs, a student of Jungian psychology, who, in the mid-seventies, chose feminist sex educator Betty Dodson as his mentor, is another man who has contributed to contemporary discourse on the Sacred Prostitute.
At that time Stubbs was working as a massage therapist. In beginning to explore the ethics and implications of the erotic energy stirred up between him and his clients he found the sacred sex field a useful framework within which to understand what he was facing. As he says: "Sooner or later, doing professional massage, one has to come to terms with sexual energy or burn out and quit the profession… I came to terms with the issue by developing a weekend course in erotic massage for couples: gentle, flowing touch that accepted and nurtured all parts of the physical-emotional body." Stubbs goes on to explain that "these were my beginning days on a path where my sexuality was a primary catalyst in my spiritual quest," and that he found more spiritual meaning in sex and massage than he had in church, that once he found the fellowship of other "somatic teachers" working with the "pedagogy of utilizing direct body contact rather than just talking-head verbalism" he learned that there were sexual teacher/healer/initiator roles throughout history, and that they were most often played by women. After twenty years of learning from the contemporary women in his life who were reclaiming these ancient traditions, Stubbs published his tribute to them, Women of the Light: The New Sacred Prostitute , which is an anthology of stories by contemporary sacred prostitutes. Stubbs ends this collection with a conclusion, "From Sexual Stereotype to Archetype," where he argues that some scholars make a distinct effort to differentiate between secular prostitutes and sacred prostitutes, but that, in this culture, he thinks that begs the issue: "Whether sexual service is sacred or secular, however, is not really the question. This debate overlooks a basic premise of our religious, legal, and social culture: sex is innately sinful; and its corollary: the spirit is superior to the flesh. As long as we hold these tenets - and most of us subconsciously do in some fashion - we can only begin to comprehend the profound contribution of women and men of the light to modern society."
In his book Stubbs also makes critical distinctions between today's sexual healers and the typical prostitute. Self-identified Sacred Prostitutes, he says, chose their vocation freely, provide their service regardless of gender , are visionaries rather than victims, and are sometimes men as well as women. I agree that the Sacred Prostitutes in his book chose their vocations freely and are quite remarkable women. But I now see the term, Sacred Prostitute, also being used by sex-workers who have very little understanding of sexual communication as a spiritual act. They are merely capitalizing on a popular trend, as an even cursory Internet search for this term on the World Wide Web bears out. In summary, the real-life Sacred Prostitutes I know of live out their label in a variety of ways - from entertaining, romantic enacters of clients' fantasies to wounded healers who minister to others while working on their own healing too. But they exist, at least for now, on the boundaries of a culture where erotic healers are still quite gender-bound. They are part of a larger picture where the effects of unequal eroticisation of gender is part of an overarching system of inequalities - pitting young against old, queer against straight, of color against white, poor against rich - each binary negatively impacting people's ability to experience the sacred and the erotic as one. This sexual objectification of women associates us, as a group, with evil, with earthiness, with sin. And the objectification of women re-enforces the objectification of other groups, keeping a system of interconnected oppressions, and an unsacred regard for sex, socially and politically in place.
Evil Sexual Dirty Other
If I order my perception of reality so that I see one gender as more evil or irrational than another, then it is easy to extend this sorting out, us/them, approach to much more than just women and men. In matters of sex, race, class, religion, age, sexual orientation etc., the us-versus-them approach functions by privileging one class or group of people over another, making more and more either/or distinctions that separate people into superior and inferior groups. Such a power-over mentality functions through dominance and submission, through the imposition of the will of a stronger group on a weaker one. Whoever is in the most dominant group - by sex, race, economics, and/or sexual orientation - uses their superior strength or power to enforce their will on those "different" from them, making their way the only way, rather than looking for a win/win approach which meets everyone's needs. This dynamic works to continually create groups of people regarded as other, further distancing people from understanding or sharing the experiences of those different from themselves, while particularly targeting those different from the majority for less than favorable treatment and regard. One argument about the origins of this us/them, our-group-versus-'others' approach is that it functions so well interchangeably, regardless of which group the oppression is focused on - the poor, queer, people of color, religious minorities, etc. - because its power is rooted in the most ancient alienation of all - that of humanity separated from spirit, of the mind/body alienation rooted in how the Hebrew creation story was interpreted by the Church.
As theologian elias farjajé-jones writes: "In the formative years of many early Christianities … outright hostility toward the body continued to shape attitudes toward women (considered as the very incarnation of body and lust) and sex. These body-negative/sex-negative currents in early Christian thought reached their zenith in the writings of Augustine, a fourth-to-fifth-century (CE) African theologian whose work shaped Western Christianity's dichotomism and its negative attitudes toward women, the body, and sex. 'Aberrant' sexualities were often portrayed as being linked to religious error (which was 'criminal') and therefore to evil. The end result is that, today, very few people find it possible to think of sex and the sacred together in a positive way." The devastating result of labeling certain sexual expressions 'aberrant' is illustrated by a long history extending from the church-sanctioned burning of homosexuals and witches during the European Middle Ages to hate crime persecutions of queer people in the U.S. today.
Either/or dichotomies serve as deniers of diversity, exaggerating the extremes, while blurring the shadings and gradations of the full spectrum in between. Enforcing the either/or dichotomy of mind/body -- where mind equals spirit and male, therefore leads easily to degrading sex and women as non-sacred, but it does much more. Male/female intercourse is privileged over all other forms of human sexual expression. Only reproductive sex (in certain proscribed circumstances) is holy. The rest of the attractions and affections people have for each other are degraded. As philosopher S. Elise Peebles argues, speaking of the queer/straight dichotomy: "We do not have the words to describe these different attractions (more than heterosexual) because we have destroyed the continuum of our experience by continually jamming everything into two opposing camps," erasing the varieties of non-reproductive sexual connections between people, making them seem to disappear. This same mind/body dichotomy not only makes homosexual love less holy than heterosexual love. It also supports a system of white supremacy that regards indigenous people and people of color as less spiritual, more earthly and instinctual, less intellectual and spiritual.
This underlying separation of the erotic from the spiritual conflates race hatred with body-hatred and hatred of women and queers:
The roots of religious erotophobia in the particular varieties of Euro-Puritanism that came along with the European invaders go back to notions of a desexed God, a basically bodiless God, without any notion of a Goddess … (E)rotophobia, the fear of the erotic and of its power, has therefore played a powerful role in shaping institutionalized white supremacy's vision of what it means to be African, to be Black. African is wild, hot, savage, beastlike, libidinal, primal; in short, the African is the very embodiment of all that the dominating culture sees as evil and in need of being policed and controlled...
Erotophobia thus intersects with white supremacy in the investment of peoples of colors as the exotic/erotic other ...(I)n this context, the decolonization of Black queer male bodies begins with the physical/spiritual/psychological process of making our bodies and our desire our own. - elias farajajé-jones, Holy Fuck
There is nothing inherently less spiritual, or more sexual, about racial or sexual identity groups regarded by the dominant culture as "other." But the same mind/body split used in the Bible, and elsewhere, to portray women as more associated with the body and less holy, is also often used by the group(s) in power to "eroticize" and objectify any group with less power. Just think of how blacks, for instance, and queer people, are treated, similar to women, as groups that have less sexual self-control, or morality, than whites or men; the attitudes are ubiquitous and easily identifiable in discussions about teenage pregnancy, crime, AIDS, child abuse, welfare policy and gays in the military.
Anthropologist Will Roscoe says this otherizing of the discriminated-against group is due to the fact that "(B)inaries are always covert hierarchies" and must function to privilege one aspect of the binary over the other. The enforcement of these ways of thinking is part of what institutionalizes male supremacy, white supremacy, heterosexism, etc., and takes the sacred out of the erotic, separating body and mind.
By enforcing a top/down, either/or system of good/bad dichotomies, the dominant group(s) -- whether men, heterosexuals, white people, or all three -- project the qualities of being less spiritual and more evil and 'sexual' onto those with less power. Characterizing certain qualities, favorable or unfavorable, as belonging to one group of people over another, has the effect of enforcing discrimination on the group with less power, the group to which the more negative characteristics are blanketly attributed.
Such dichotomous, injurious, us/them roles are not biological givens. They are social, cultural constructions, of gender identity, race, etc. The stereotypical statement: 'women are more passive than men,' for example, doesn't reflect any reality of nature that women are essentially, inherently, passive. Rather it reflects that, in sexist situations, when we are not passive we are deemed bad and beaten back into line, so that we get the message we better 'act' passive if we know what's good for us. This so-called female passivity isn't 'natural.' It is achieved through intimidation, systemic, not just individual. And as anyone who has ever 'strayed' outside her or his expected gender roles knows, the social consequences for deviating are harsh and clear. Why are these covert and overt divisions critical to evaluating whether or not anyone is practicing, or can practice, sacred sex? Because to move from a self and other adversarial paradigm to a more trusting, honoring I/Thou relationship, which is what is necessary for sacred sex, we must first analyze the dynamics that block the harmonizing of sex and spirit. That is part of dismantling them.
A New Politic of Sacred Sexuality
No one can feel sexually who does not have in his or her bones something sacred. … A person who is desperately drawn to sexual activity is … a person who is desperately trying to break into the spirit world. He thinks that the more he involves himself in sexual activity, the more he will find himself or find spirit. … (m)odern culture, in its advertising of sex, is actually in a misguided fashion advertising its longing for the sacred … longing to reconnect with something it knows has the power to heal. … First … look at your intimate life as a communion with the sacred. If you understand that, then you can see in the practice of sexuality something that is essentially ritualistic.
- Sobonfu Somé, The Spirit of Intimacy
I agree with Somé's assessment, above, that there is a deep connection between people's longing for sex and spirit. This erotic longing is sacred. It must be taken seriously and addressed. The erotic is holy, in and of itself, and, by definition, sacred. The oppression, however -- of women by men, of sexual minorities by heterosexuals, of people of color by whites, throughout recorded history -- is what stands in the way of making sex sacred, what caused the de-sanctification of sex in the first place. Amazingly, people in oppressed groups are sometimes miraculous survivors who share their unique insights on problems at hand for the good of all. I have found that oppressed peoples often have more insight into how to repair and heal what is wrong than their oppressors do. This insight is part of how the oppressed survive, and a function of the fact that it is easier to see how to correct an imbalance when you are its victim. Therefore, it is particularly women and queer people, of color as well as white, who contribute missing understandings of contemporary sacred sexuality's forms and meanings, potentials and implications, that are useful far beyond their own groups. I have, therefore focused my research on recording and interpreting at least a portion of this wisdom distilled from oppressions and am applying it toward a larger vision of how this contemporary U.S. culture might make sex sacred Sacred sex is no magic potion, no special formula for changing the world. I wish it were. Rather, I think it functions in a whole range of ways - from revolutionary to reactionary.
At the beginning of my research I wondered whether sacred sex groups are part of a larger trend toward social justice, or are more symptomatic of current cultural obsessions with and confusions about sex. It may be too early to tell or to make any unilateral determination. Collecting information on what groups are doing is more important first. As the information is compiled and interpreted we can begin to evaluate what social impacts sacred sex groups, if any, will have. In the meantime, I find it useful to remember a statement made to me by my Sacred Flame internship project co-leader, Andrew Hoerner. He said that when we participate in sacred sex practices we can: (1) use sacred sex techniques to support and re-enforce oppressive social conditions, or (2) engage in these practices merely casually and recreationally, without thinking about the larger meanings underlying the beliefs, or (3) consciously engage in sacred sex practice and teachings as a means of and as a part of opposing oppression. I invite you to now explore, with me, all the different ways that the contemporary U.S. sacred sex groups I surveyed, do sacred sex.
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