ONE
THE “FILTHY GNOSTICKES”
For centuries, our only information regarding the Gnostics of late antiquity came from their enemies, the church fathers. Having done everything they could to discredit the Gnostic movement, it took until the publication of Gottfried Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy (Unparteyische Kirche-und Ketzer-historie) in Frankfurt in 1700 before any theologian had anything good to say about the so-called heretics. Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), himself dedicated to the feminine figure of the divine Sophia (“Wisdom”), connected the Valentinian Gnostics of the second century and the followers of spiritual genius Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), as well as the Rosicrucians in his own time, and believed the heretics belonged in Christ’s church. What they all had in common was a personal spiritual devotion to Sophia, the mirror of God. It took two more centuries, however, before biblical historians became more aware of their duty as scholars to take into account the Gnostics’ own point of view, a task precipitated by the appearance of authentic Gnostic works.
Carried from Egypt to London in 1774 by explorer James Bruce (1730–1794), the Gnostic Books of Jeu (“Bruce Codex”) were joined at the British Museum in 1794 by the Coptic Askew Codex. The Askew Codex contained the Gnostic work Pistis Sophia (The Faith of Sophia or Faith-Wisdom). While interest in these particular works was confined to specialist scholars and to theosophical circles, the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi Library eventually brought the Gnostic phenomenon to the wider public. Published in English in 1977 under the aegis of Professor James M. Robinson, and popularized in works by Elaine Pagels, myself, and others, the appearance of the Gnostic Gospels initiated a process of enthusiastic assimilation that continues to proceed apace. There’s something about these Gnostics that many people like.
This has all greatly affected our understanding not only of the origins of Christianity, but also our sense of what religion is and ought to be. Certainly, the one-sided accounts of Gnostics by patristic writers (church fathers) now have to be placed beside new bodies of knowledge in a spirit of objective inquiry, free from the old paymasters of theological studies. This author happens to be one of the first professional theologians engaged with the subject not to be on the payroll of any religious institution whatsoever, directly or indirectly (including church funding of academic institutions or posts). Gnostic studies require both independence of thought and a sense of humor.
Not surprisingly, most scholars nowadays tend to doubt many of the conclusions of the heresiologists—those who wrote against heretics. This doubt stems partly from the fact that we now have at our disposal copious remnants of the Gnostics’ authentic voices. From such discoveries, we have learned that the authentic testimonies themselves do not generally support many anti-Gnostic accusations, particularly as far as condemnations of sexual libertinism are concerned. We just don’t seem to find libidinous Gnostics in the Nag Hammadi codices. Indeed, many authentic documents veer toward antisexual “Encratism” in orientation or influence, holding theological positions favorable to celibate monks attempting to live in closed communities. That is to say, far from giving in to lusts, numerous Gnostic writers expressed, in no uncertain terms, horror and disgust at the body’s tendency to overwhelm the call of the Holy Spirit to a life beyond this world. The Book of Thomas the Contender is particularly marked in this respect. The “one who is awake,” the “one who knows himself,” is the one who has come forth from the flesh and left the world of pollution behind. Sex for this Thomas is filth.
Rather than being honored as a vehicle for spiritual ecstasy, the fleshly body, for numerous advocates of gnosis, is denigrated emphatically as a tomb of the soul. For these Gnostics, flesh was to be regarded contemptuously. Flesh was the means by which the “god of this world” imposed his dominion over the will of spirit.
Of course, it could be counterasserted that this view of the flesh could easily promote indifference as to what one did with the body. The word ecstasy, after all, means being “beside oneself,” an experience that might be considered to intimate an out-of-body experience—the breaking of the bonds of the flesh—if only momentarily, in a spirit of joyful exaltation or extreme pleasure, or a state “beyond” pleasure and physical sensation. Immoral indifference to the body was certainly an accusation leveled at the heretics: they didn’t care what they did with their bodies, their enemies insisted, since the bodily life was held to be fundamentally unreal of itself (“dust to dust”) from the spiritual perspective. This sharp distinction between flesh and spirit explains why Gnostics are often, confusingly, described as “dualists”; it is not a confusion I wish to promote further. The insight behind the distinction is simple enough: the highest God creates eternities, while the flesh, like wood without sap, rots. As rot-in-the-making, flesh of itself can be of no special interest to eternity: flesh is a temporary “billet” of the soul, not its proper home. Flesh is chaff, to be cast out and destroyed: mortally dangerous then for the soul to be attached, or too attached, to it. When the “word becomes flesh” to “dwell amongst us” in the prologue to St. John’s gospel, the act is plainly a condescension, and the “word” (logos) overcomes the corruption of the flesh being absolutely superior to it, doing the “will of the Father” absolutely. Christians are to cleave to the spiritual “word” not the flesh, for the flesh inherits the lot of things in this world: Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world.
The radical teacher Carpocrates (early to mid-second century CE), based in Alexandria and a follower, apparently, of the Simonian gnosis first attributed to Samaritan Simon Magus and his alleged followers—Menander, Dositheus, Cerinthus, and Saturnilus—was particularly condemned for his indifference to the flesh, since Carpocrates believed the Gnostic Christian was one “above the law” in spirit, so that, first, what the body (below) did was of no spiritual concern, and, second, apparent licentiousness could be practiced as a means of asserting contempt for the god of the law and his fleshly dominion: a kind of progressive “redemption by sin.” This general approach to conduct is sometimes called “antinomian”; that is, “in opposition to law.” It is also quintessentially “Tantric,” reminiscent of the hero of Tantra, who, at specific points and for specific purposes, flauts convention in order to expand his consciousness and his command of existence.
According to Irenaeus and the considerably later anti-Gnostic bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (fourth century CE), Carpocrates believed that unless the soul experienced, while being above, the temptations that beset it below, it could not demonstrate its mastery of the flesh, a failure that would compel it to reincarnate, falling back into the munching jaws of the Demiurge and his fatal universe. This systemic return cycle, akin in its essence to aspects of Buddhism and its close cousins, occurred because the soul had not been sufficiently spiritualized to overcome the attractions of this world.
Something of a psychologist, Carpocrates did not share the view of the prohibitionist that you overcome risky things simply by avoiding them or by being denied them; such, he appears to have believed, only adds to their fascination, empowering lusts and attractions to work a subconscious, corrupting influence, easily hidden from the eyes of the world, but spiritually demeaning and obstructive all the same. Suppressed lusts could generate obsessional consequences. Release from obsession might involve enacting, in a somewhat ironic spirit, scenarios that ordinarily might disgust. Returning to one’s right mind afterward, with the attraction having been literally drained away, one might see the former obsession’s hollowness or irrelevance, and one could mock the insidious attraction, and consciously dispense with the obsession. The theory is still current. It was widely employed during the great pornography debates of the 1970s and 1980s: fascination for the forbidden, it was asserted, lasts only so long as the activity is forbidden; remove the prohibition, and free choice becomes possible in a spirit of “adult” objectivity and self-knowledge. A pitfall of the theory is of course that the fascination may continue, albeit in a more ironically detached form, promoting an interior double-mindedness that may become unsustainable. Carpocrates might blame the “world creator” as we today might attribute questionable behavior to “nature.” Taking half a tip from the gospels, Carpocratians decided that hypocrisy was “dirtier” than wantonness. “Veil not your vices in virtuous words,” as the antinomian advocate Aleister Crowley expressed his ironic, decadent scheme of “redemption by sin.”
According to this countercultural theory, legal or moral inhibitions are basically external and arbitrary, applied without respect to one’s ultimate spiritual welfare. That is why Carpocrates held that what was believed to be right or wrong merely reflected either uninformed or unexamined opinion or else the state of consciousness of the perceiver: the ultimate goal was what mattered. The value of a thing was to be judged by whether it helped or hindered divinization. In William Blake’s words: “If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” So it was not only a question of spiritual indifference to the flesh. Such indifference had to be proved; rather like taking up smoking to exhibit mastery by kicking the habit at will: a perilous but not impossible feat. Carpocrates proclaimed the spiritual charter for the libertine.
Teaching that mere fear of the flesh was no basis for moral and spiritual triumph, Carpocrates advocated the showing of superior contempt for ordinary morality (the law) by overcoming the fear of sin, the fear of attraction. The hypothetically freed spirit could then demonstrate a true liberation from the world, commanding angels and demons (i.e., mastering his life and mind), rather than exhibiting a cowering fear of them disguised as prim righteousness, or self-righteousness. Jesus forgave the sinner, not the self-righteous. He looked at the despised prostitute and tax collector and loved them for what they had in them that they knew not.
For all its interest, however, this antinomian point of view, which may have been the specialty of the Carpocratian Gnostics, is in fact practically absent from the Nag Hammadi Library, whose texts nowadays tend to be looked upon as a kind of collective Gnostic orthodoxy—a misleading situation, to be sure, for Gnostics have their secrets, only open to those able to perceive them.
Besides, the libertine conduct ascribed to Carpocratians also appears to have been a feature of Christian groups subject to St. Paul’s censure in the mid-first century CE. Antinomianism may not necessarily be regarded as specifically Gnostic behavior. Paul suffered theological headaches trying to explain to his converts that simply because Gentiles were not under the “curse of the [Jewish] law,” that did not mean they could “sin” in order to experience “grace” (Epistle to the Romans 6). Paul said that, freed from the bonds of the law by Christ, selfless love should guide conduct, and many Gnostics took their cue from that belief. One wonders how many Jews took up Paul’s prescription for Gentiles of a new covenant with God without law.
It is not only a question of the incompatibility of authentic Gnostic literature with the hostile picture painted by orthodox critics. Aggressive reports of allegedly heretical practices often lack intrinsic consistency and accuracy, frequently—though not always—demonstrating scant interest in locating the truth behind hearsay reports of deviant behavior allegedly proceeding independently of episcopal control. The aim of the heresiologists’ writings was to turn the curious right off the heretics, to give those at risk a nasty jolt, and make them feel grateful that there was a good, safe, tried and trusted, socially respectable and morally decent, apostolically approved alternative. Even where some effort was made to interpret Gnostic symbolism (Irenaeus was fairly diligent in this respect), such symbolism was almost always judged from a cynical, even on occasion comedic perspective. Heresiologist Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, made every effort, writing in circa 180 CE, to portray adherents of the gnosis as simply bonkers, knowing that no one likes to be taken for a fool. Ridicule was a more effective repressive tool than theology alone, though, to be fair, Irenaeus did bring out in great detail his theological objections to Gnostic thought and practice as well.
Since it was taken as an a priori fact that Gnostics were perverting the orthodox (straight-teaching) gospel with an archcynical view of the world and its Creator, then their sexual practices could only be judged from the perspective of focusing on salacious details that outraged moral norms familiar to orthodox churches. According to their enemies, these cocky, perverse, and perverting people were simply scurrilous abusers of respectable religion, using Christian terminology as paper-thin, sophistical excuses to sate their lusts, laziness, and fantasies, aiming to exploit the vanity of women (in particular) and to lead innocent Christians into what Irenaeus described as “an abyss of madness and blasphemy.” The price was not only sanity; the price was salvation itself.
Fortunately, we do not ourselves have to take sides, especially where the evidence is, by modern standards, inadequate to form a definitive judgment of what is surely a remarkably complex, if colorful, case. Our ability to judge this case is anyway hampered by the fact that we still live in the shadow of nearly two millennia of hostility toward and persecution of Gnostic traditions. Just how influential that policy of outright condemnation has been, and how persistently the image of sexual excess has served as its primary propaganda weapon, may be glimpsed in the writings of two very brilliant men, neither of whom, interestingly, were clergymen, and who both wrote over a thousand years after the Christian Gnostic heyday.
GREAT MONSTERS OF HERESY
The first example comes from a rare book by the brilliant German magus, theologian, lawyer, and philosopher, Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535): Of the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences, published in English in 1569. It is thought that Agrippa’s thoroughly skeptical survey of existing knowledge may have been composed not only to assert his purified Christian evangelical credentials having embraced Lutheranism, but also to preserve him from censure as a dangerous black magician (he was the author of Three Books of Occult Philosophy). Chapter 47 dismisses as “vanity” the mystical tradition of the Jews known as Kabbalah or, as he refers to it, “Cabala”:
From this Jewish heap of Cabalisticke superstition proceed [I suppose] the Ophites, the Gnostickes, and Valentinian heretickes, the which also with their disciples have invented a certain Greekish Cabala, turning toplet [sic] down all the mysteries of the Christian faith, and with heretickal wickedness drawing them to Greeke letters and numbers, do make of them a body, which they call of truth, showing that without these mysteries of letters and numbers, the truth in the Gospel cannot be found out, because it is so diverse, and in some places contrary to itself, and written full of parables, that they which see it do not see, and they which hear it do not hear, and they which understand it do not understand, but to be set before the blind and ignorant, according to the capacity of their blindness, and error: and that the pure verité hidden under it is believed of the perfect sort alone, not by writing, but by a successive pronunciation of a lively voice, and that this is that Alphabetarie, and Arithmantical divinity, which Christ secretly shewed to his Apostles: and which Paule saith that he speaketh but amongst perfect men.
For whereas these be very high mysteries, they have not therefore been written, nor are written but are privily searched out by wise men, which secretly keep them in their minds. And among them none is accompted wise, but he which can forge very great monsters of heresy.
It should be observed that while Agrippa seems to attack Jewish Cabala as a source of heresy (does one hear the crackling flames about the inquisitor’s stake?), he is also preserving a point about an understanding only available to the spiritually enlightened, while secreting that point, in true cabalist fashion, beneath its apparent opposite point of view! It all depends how you read it. Agrippa’s smart and politically adroit textual duplicity is further evident in chapter 48, “Of Iuglinge” (“Juggling”), a general section on magic that appears, note, before a disturbing chapter on the vanity, cruelty, untruthfulness, and perverse excesses of the Catholic Inquisition.
Of the Magitiens also is sprung in the Church a great route of heretickes, which as Iamnes and Mambres*1 have rebelled against Moses, so they have resisted the Apostolick truth: the chief of these was Simon the Samaritaine [Simon Magus], who for this Arte had an image erected at Rome in the time of Claudius Ceasar with this inscription, to Simon, the holy GOD. His blasphemies be written at large by Clement [of Alexandria], Eusebius, and Irenaeus. Out of this Simon as out of a seed plot of all heresies have proceeded by many successions the monstrous Ophites, the filthy Gnostickes, the wicked Valentinians, the Cerdonians, the Marcionites, the Montanians, and many other hereticks, for gain and vaine glory speaking lies against God, availing not profiting men, but deceiving and bringing them to ruin and destruction, and they which believe in them shall be confounded in God’s judgment.
The paramount image of the heretics here is built around their alleged monstrousness, wickedness, and filthiness, that is to say, their supposed sexual, orgiastic abandonments. Agrippa concludes the chapter with a confession that his original Three Books of Hidden Philosophy (he reworked them later) were the product of a wayward and curious youth, having taken a path to knowledge he now recants utterly, lest others follow Simon Magus, Iamnes, and Mambres “to the paynes of everlasting fire,” such hellish punishments being the inspiration for the inquisitors’ auto-da-fé, imposed on heretics before judicial burning by civil authorities.
We now leap from a leading sixteenth-century Protestant magus to the greatest seventeenth-century Protestant scientist. Living in England under a reformed Church of England, and not therefore subject to the Catholic Inquisition, Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was more or less free to publish his theological studies.
It may come as a surprise nevertheless that this father of modern science devoted more time to the study of biblical prophecy and alchemy than he did to the mathematics of gravity, but it is so. The reason was basically because Newton believed that the original religion was the original science, and vice versa, and he was concerned with restoring both as one. For Newton, science would reveal the divine majesty in its austere purity, demonstrating God’s divine alchemy of nature, according to the most reasonable laws and harmonies of mathematics. Newton believed that the original truth had been corrupted over history and that the Bible gave ample evidence of the process by which this had happened. While Newton believed Jesus had come to restore knowledge of the “true Temple of God,” even his work had been corrupted by the deviancy of the Catholic and Orthodox churches in having absorbed heresies.
Chapter 13 of Newton’s Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. In two parts (1733) describes how Daniel’s prophecy of a king who would magnify himself above every God, honor “Mahuzzims” (taken by Newton to refer to the souls of dead men, that is, saints), and who “regarded not the desire of women” had been fulfilled with the spread of Encratism in the church, backed by the emperors (the prophesied king), especially after the third century CE, which corruptions manifested in virginal clergy, saint worship, and a profound suspicion of the natural order. An Encratite held to a sectarian position constituted of the self-controlled, practicing temperance in all sexual matters.
It is fascinating to read Isaac Newton attacking the Gnostics, not, in this case, for alleged sexual libertinism, but rather for the opposite: body-denying Encratism that made them promoters of “monkish superstition”:
Thus the Sect of the Encratites, set on foot by the Gnosticks, and propagated by Tatian and Montanus near the end of the second century; which was condemned by the Churches of that and the third century, and refined upon by their followers; overspread the Eastern Churches having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof, came into the hands of the Encratites: and the Heathens, who in the fourth century came over in great numbers to the Christians, embraced more readily this form of Christianity, as having a greater affinity with their old superstitions, than that of the sincere Christians; who by the lamps of the Seven Churches of Asia, and not by the lamps of the monasteries, had illuminated the Church Catholic during the three first centuries.
Newton examined prophecies regarding the Antichrist from the Revelation of St. John the Divine and found his “Antichrists” among the heretics:
It [Apostasy] began to work in the disciples of Simon [Magus], Menander, Carpocrates, Cerinthus, and such sorts of men as had imbibed the metaphysical philosophy of the Gentiles and Cabalistical Jews, and were thence called Gnosticks. John calls them Antichrists, saying that in his days there were many Antichrists.
So, in Newton’s ocular perspective, the same movement that led to the dominance in the Eastern and Western churches of monks, monasteries, virginity, saint worship, and sex loathing, was the same movement of apostates from the “sincere Christians” who engaged in the spiritually inspired sexual freedom of Carpocrates on the basis of a metaphysical philosophy exemplified by Jewish Kabbalists. It sounds contradictory, of course, but Newton may have a point, once we recognize that Carpocratian sexual liberties were likely a function of the belief that the body, being matter, did not really matter, that flesh was inherently corrupt, transitory, and not subject to resurrection; and that when the spirit had been through all possible traumas of physical life and thus proved its monarchy, it would be happily free of nature altogether. For Newton, on the other hand, God created the natural world and saw that it was good. Newton intended his scientific works to demonstrate this article of faith to reason: for Newton, faith had become knowledge. Atheist believers in modern science might take note of this.
It was statements akin to those made by Agrippa and Newton that kept all but the boldest minds off the “filthy Gnostickes” until the early eighteenth century. However, we should note that just as Agrippa and Newton used the vast inherited body of condemnation of Gnostics to support their own philosophical positions, regardless of how diverse or contradictory those positions might be, so also did those who took up the Gnostic cause after 1700 tend to paint Gnostics in their own ideological colors. The view of Gottfried Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy, for example, was influenced by Arnold’s seeing the Valentinian Gnostics’ kinship to the “philo-theosophy” of Giordano Bruno, Meister Eckhart, the Rosicrucians, and, above all, the Teutonic theosopher Jacob Böhme, whom Arnold greatly admired. Arnold’s contemporary, Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), who led a band of mystical Christians from his base in Amsterdam, joined Arnold in his concern for opening up spiritual and undoubtedly spiritual-erotic relations with the heroine of the Valentinian gnosis: Sophia, or Lady Wisdom.
Such studies of the Gnostics as appeared in the eighteenth century were almost always used for self-legitimization. William Blake, artist, poet, and autodidact (1757–1827), probably got some of his ideas on Gnostic emanations or aeons (which color and shape his own myths of the human psyche) from works by the radical Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Priestley used his limited knowledge of the heretics to justify his own heretical religious position: that of the Unitarians, the church to which he belonged and which he served. The use and abuse of Gnostic traditions continued throughout the nineteenth century among continental, mystical Freemasons and among Catholic anti-Freemasons among whom there developed the myth of a long-running conspiracy of Gnostic perversion of truth, running from the early heretics to the Manichaeans and on through the Middle Ages (the Knights Templar!) and into the Age of Reason (Freemason revolutionaries!), to the detriment of the “true faith.”
A highly creative exception to the self-legitimizing tendency was the work of a brilliant Catholic scientist and philosopher, Munich-born Franz von Baader (1765–1841), who, while personally devoted to the whole immensely rich concept of the Sophia, put that interest out of pure Pietistic inwardness and into action in direct service of humanity. Von Baader’s writings on the importance of erotic love, to unite men and women through mutual self-giving, discovering in each other and through each other the androgynous unity of spirit that helps humanity grow, deserve wide attention and dissemination. As Professor Arthur Versluis has maintained, von Baader’s works on society, the Catholic Church, nature philosophy, and the overall meaning of human life and the philosophy of time are important not only to a Germany that has neglected him, but to the dilemmas of the modern world in general.1
After 1875, the launch of Madame Blavatsky’s influential Theosophical Society, with its numerous offshoots, used the limited available knowledge of the Gnostics as part of a vast occult historical scheme: the passage of an antediluvian tradition of scientific spirituality through time. Theosophy’s mythic superstructure and speculative embellishments, however, alienated not only adherents of mainstream religion from sane consideration of Gnostic traditions, but also more objective historians of religion. On the other hand, without theosophical studies (especially those of G. R. S. Mead [1863–1933]), many in the period would probably have never heard of the Gnostics.
The twentieth century saw the beginnings of a more rigorous, scientific approach to Gnostic thought, with the emphasis on thought. Hans Jonas’s Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, 1934–1954) marked a seminal moment in the development of serious philosophical studies regarding Gnosticism. However, it was evident from my own numerous interviews with Professor Jonas in the mid-1980s that his approach was more than a little influenced by the existentialist philosophy of his teacher Martin Heidegger at Marburg University in the last years of the Weimar Republic.
For Jonas, the phenomenon of gnosis signaled a world-historical event, when humanity for the first time experienced “otherness” or existential alienation. For some, this alienation involved a disturbing rupture in our traditional relationship with the natural world; for others, it marked the end of the grip of pagan naturalism and of what the intellectual part of humankind had long considered “natural” assumptions about the cosmos. The “Gnostic religion” (as Jonas described the phenomenon) marked a kind of evolutionary epoch wherein humankind suffered an acute awareness of the distress of the human condition, a sense of estrangement from the cosmos: a terrifying rift had opened up between humanity and the world. The ensuing alienation was dramatized, Jonas believed, in the myths of the most radical Gnostics, those who, in his words, “made the flesh creep,” and which represented for him the most compelling aspects of the Gnostic “movement” by virtue of their radical, almost modern, cosmoclastic consciousness. For Jonas, the radical Gnostics are the ones who really matter; the softer and more Hermetic ones, he told me, added little to Plato. From Jonas’s point of view, if you wanted a real Gnostic text, then read the Apocryphon of John with its jaw-dropping account of the Demiurge’s treating Adam in the mythical manner of a hostile alien who has kidnapped a human being from Earth only to throw him on his mother ship’s operating table for a bit of casual dissection, without anesthetic or pity!
Professor Jonas had little to say about alleged sexual excesses; they did not really concern him. He had his philosophical priorities, and he continued to feel until his death in 1993 that while the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 (after his first Gnostic studies were published) had revealed the authentic voice of the Gnostics themselves, his essential philosophical treatment of gnosis had stood and would continue to stand the test of time. Reading The Gnostic Religion, his condensed version of his Gnostic studies today, is a thrilling experience for the intellect and should not be avoided by newcomers to the subject.
Jonas was not the only person who saw the extraordinary modernity of the Gnostic challenge to the consciousness of their times, which, though long distant, suddenly came into focus with fresh relevance and cultural urgency. Carl Jung, former colleague of Sigmund Freud, also seized on the startlingly modern aspects of the Gnostic vision. Jung’s ideas, however, were far less linked to the development of philosophy and the existential heart of religious thought, than to the modern science or would-be science of psychology, informed by immersion into Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). When Jung received a copy of the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Truth, a long-thought-vanished Valentinian work, he famously declared to church historian and theologian Gilles Quispel: “All my life I have been looking for the secrets of the psyche, and these people knew already.” (Quispel told me this story himself at Bilthoven near Utrecht in 1986.)
When we hear the word archetypes in psychological jargon, we are hearing a word Jung picked from the flora of Gnostic traditions. Archetypes live in the unconscious. They make us: we do not make them. Jung compared the Gnostic Pleroma (or “Fullness” of the Godhead) to his conception of the Unconscious, liberating that idea from the Freudian model of an unconscious functioning primarily as an attic or even dungeon of repressed, taboo, or forbidden and denied thoughts and images. Shortly before his death, Jung shocked John Freeman’s audience on the BBC’s Face to Face TV show when, in answer to Freeman’s question: “Do you believe in God?” Jung replied: “I don’t need to believe. I know.”
Apart from the worlds of respectable academe and new sciences, interest in Gnostic practices continued apace through the esoteric schools that have flourished quietly and occasionally under persecution in the Western world. Among the jungle of little bodies that have sprung from the world of the French Occult and Gnostic Revival, from Freemasonry, and from theosophical variegations in America, British and European colonies, and on the Continent itself, many have taken aspects of the Gnostic tradition as have suited their philosophical outlook. Few, however, have been quite so bold as Theodor Reuss, Aleister Crowley, and E. C. H. Peithmann (1865–1943) in concentrating on the sexual lore and supposed practices of Gnostic radicals. Theodor Reuss (1855–1923) took his and Carl Kellner’s (1851–1905) idea of an Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of Oriental Templars, or Order of the Eastern Temple) to Crowley, along with Reuss’s conviction that, as with Carpocrates, the secret Jesus imparted to his disciples at the Last Supper was the occult mystery of sexual fluids. According to Reuss (and Carpocrates, according to Clement of Alexandria), Jesus practiced a kind of magical and spiritual holy sex with at least one beloved disciple and Jesus’s semen (logos spermatikos) in this context could be considered a potent sacrament: “This is my body which I give to you.”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) famously experimented with what was prosaically termed “sex magick” for many years between 1912 and the end of World War II. German theosophist Peithmann, author of The Gnostic Catechism (1904), was party to a tiny parallel body of sacred sex enthusiasts (the Old Gnostic Church of Eleusis), whose purpose was, Peithmann declared, “to liberate the seed from servitude”: an idea we shall explore fully in the context of authentic Sethian and Valentinian sex gnosis.
Taking from Gnostic traditions what suits the commentator seems endemic to the case. Perhaps this has something to do with the curiously emotional appeal of the subject. Even John Lennon voiced his partiality to the Gnostics in 1980 as being the authentic holders of the true Christian flame.2 This is not something to be found delineated in many a fan site devoted to the late Beatle, but those in the mainstream media never like to sully their hands with spiritual matters, unless they’re issuing warnings against cults, celebrity excess, or the like. Journalism can easily function as a form of cultural censor.
From the perspective of objective study of Gnostic traditions, it is perhaps unfortunate that the Nag Hammadi Library appeared in English during the long post-1960s twilight, in the wake of hippydom, antiestablishment activism, sexual revolutionary fervor, psychedelicism, neotroubadours (rockers and singer-songwriters), science-fiction TV, and revived interest in occultism, mysticism, paganism, and various skeins of Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (My! What exciting times we have lived through!) Gnostics are again painted in colors to suit the case. This time, however, Gnostics may be presented as remarkably cool. The new vision of them is a fairly innocent, even sanitized, vision of Gnostics as advanced modernists, with strong feminist (the “divine feminine”), sex-positive, freethinking leanings. From Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s Templar Revelation to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the recrudescence of Mary Magdalene–oriented feminine spirituality literature, we find a gnosis thoroughly purged of elements discordant to the New Age narrative with its strong neopagan, goddess-worshipping, user-friendly features, set against an authoritarian, corrupt, patriarchal evangelism or scientism of one kind or another.
It is fascinating to observe how even once-taboo elements of Gnostic sexual mysticism can be co-opted into new or revived spiritualities. For example, Marnia Robinson’s harmonious relationship sex guide Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow quotes selectively from the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip and Exegesis on the Soul to suggest that the famous Gnostic bridal chamber refers to some nice safe-sex practice to bring harmony into an oversexed, modern marriage–threatening scenario. That is to say, the Gnostics performed “carezza” or “caressing”: orgasm-free or penetration-free sex, where the loving Christian couple celebrates a union reflecting Christ’s love for his church, or the love of the Gnostic, or Jesus for Sophia, or some undefined union with God or Spirit, generated by controlled sexual excitation and immediate sublimation. One may applaud the notion that, rather than living a life of emotionally pain-ridden serial sexual encounters, stable couples might opt instead for sacred sex and long-term relationship stability.
The author offers a good dose of required neuroscience theory and experiment to suggest that repeated orgasm can increase frustration and dissatisfaction with a partner on the biological basis that nature and its supposed evolutionary imperative wants us to mate with new partners and increase the genetic stock of variant possibilities, regardless of damage to our sense of security or romantic yearnings for long-term unions. The implication from this questionable premise is that a secret of spiritual romanticism between couples was known to Gnostics (and Taoists) and that this restraint constituted a divine secret of happiness and personal fulfillment. It is, as they say, a nice, even neat, idea, but while it has its place in the canon of modern sex and relationship guides, I am not sure it is a valid interpretation of actual Gnostic practices and attitudes, where the emphasis, as we shall see, with regard to the bridal chamber is very much on quality of seed, that is, sperm, and you don’t obtain that precious substance by holding back as a matter of persistent practice. Indeed, the nearest thing to restraint in the third century (when the Gospel of Philip was composed) would be the Encratites, whose name, as we have seen, means “self-controlled.” However, Encratite self-control meant, among other things, the permanent eschewing of sex and marriage altogether. Encratites discouraged contact with the opposite sex as a matter of principle. Absolute virginity was deemed vital to salvation; there was no such thing as “safe sex.” To Valentinian Gnostics, on the other hand, quality of orgasm was essential among those wedded by Christian commitment to the tree of wisdom and thus to one another.
Put more simply, as spiritual counselor Rita Louise exclaimed to me recently: “Sex without orgasm isn’t sex!” To which I should only add: yoga means “union.” Let’s not beat around the bush!
IS AN EROTIC CHRISTIAN RELIGION REALLY POSSIBLE?
I discussed in the introduction why I have not focused on the alleged sexual excesses of the numerous Gnostic schools before. There is probably an additional reason, less easy to express. To be honest, I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of communion with God through sexual communion very difficult to conceive of clearly, either as an idea or in a practical sense, unless, that is, one takes it that there is something profoundly godly about sexual intercourse in the first place. While familiar with the crossover between romantic yearning, deep love, passion, desire, and spiritual feelings—feelings where physical acts are experienced as far more than mere sense experiences and where more appears to be involved than a physical exchange of energy or emotion, however intense—something in my thinking is still inclined to balk at the prospect of applying a sense of reality to expressions such as sacred sex, which fall too easily, it seems to me, from the lips of moderns.
We know what was understood by this expression in the ancient, pagan world. Religion, then, being based on nature (cycles of birth, death, and rebirth), could be very sexy indeed, even when rhetorically elevated. Their idea of the sacred might appear to us as strangely tainted with literalist vulgarity. We might find their sacred sex neither sacred nor sexy. Priests and priestesses performed sexual rites as ways of magically imitating the hieros gamos, or sacred marriages, between deities, as ways of magically invoking divine powers. Sex, being so closely linked to the mysterious powers of actual creation, of life itself, as well as inspiring music, poetry, plastic arts, and dance, was felt to be intrinsically magical and mysterious, with connotations of mysticism, initiation, and esotericism. To yearn to know a god or goddess was inherently erotic, where to know was to have erotic relations with. Intimate knowledge was intimate eroticism. Pagans found nothing surprising in this; it was natural to them. Erotic love made the world go round. A pretty face could launch a thousand ships. Gods could be attracted to human beings and even disguise themselves as humans to experience human love.
Children might be a by-product of fertility and mystery rites, but that would not have been intended necessarily, unless, say, one wanted the god, or the virtue of the god, to dwell in the child.
However, the Christian religion shot straight out of a Hebraic womb, at least to begin with, and much of the prophetic wisdom of the Jews was aimed precisely at denying the delights and conceits of the pagan world of polytheism and anthropomorphic deities (because they were so popular). Today, we are inclined to see ancient Judaism as uniquely patriarchal, gravel-voiced, overbearing, and bass-booming; sex in the Jewish Bible, where not tied to the blessing of marriage and children in the strictly natural order, is almost always the cause of disaster: David and Bathsheba, the priestly lust for Susanna in the Book of Daniel, Samson and Delilah, Jezebel; the list goes on. When Adam and Eve discover their nakedness, it betokens the absolute loss of innocence. Guilt holds mighty sway over those covenanted to Jahveh ever afterward: Thou shalt not! There is sacred love dotted about the scriptures, but out-and-out erotic demonstrations such as the Song of Solomon are rare, and where they do occur, the love is always sublimated by commentators into realms of symbolism that extend all the way to today’s Christian marriage ceremony where marriage symbolizes the love of Christ for his church.
In first-century synagogue life, menstrual blood is considered dirty; women need to be covered lest they shame the congregation with filth and lust. The first thing a baby boy can expect on entering this world is for religion to take hold of his penis and cut it with a knife.
It was the perception of primitive Christianity being thoroughly Jewish with regard to sex that led German theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) to characterize Gnosticism famously as “the acute Hellenization of Christianity.” All that tolerance of menstrual blood, sperm, and worship of a female deity (Barbelo) could not have been original; something had contaminated Jewish Christianity: Greek-speaking pagans had gotten their greasy hands under the skirts of the virgin faith and started messing around with what they found. Von Harnack’s precise view is not one popular with scholars today, but it challenges us nonetheless to account for the phenomenon of Christian groups practicing some kind of sacred sex.
From the generally understood Christian perspective, is there not something contradictory in the expression?
Sacred . . .
Sex . . .
Are not those who talk blithely of such a thing today simply kidding themselves? Are they not trying to have their cake and eat it too? Is there not a confusion of worlds in this expression? This world and the next, purity and the corrupt body? Of course, in a pagan world-view, everything may partake of God. We find echoes of this idea in Christian liturgy, where our sacrifices are regarded as forms of return to source: “All things come from you, O Lord, and of your own do we give you” (I Chronicles 29:14). (Some Gnostics, as we shall see, would apply this idea to sacramentalized semen.) Catholic believers in transubstantiation “eat the flesh of the dear Son” through the form of a wafer.
In pagan philosophy, and in common practice, God (theos) or gods constitute the invisible aspects of the visible world. Everything has a god or an angel behind it: bodily organs, too, even pleasure itself. Church father Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE) referred to sexual intercourse simply as “Aphrodite,” she being the tutelary deity of the act; such was normal in educated Alexandrian circles in the second century. We make nothing ourselves. God has created everything, sex included.
Arguably, and from a pantheistic point of view particularly, sex is always potentially sacred; is it our ignorance that prevents us from realizing this? Gnostics substituted gnosis for ignorance, and this fundamental adjustment seems to have involved a revaluation or even a transvaluation of sex, away from the primitive church’s Judeo-Christian point of view. As a redeemed spirit, you had to understand what sex really meant, so as not to be dragged about by it like one caught in the jaws of a hunting hound.
However, we should, I think, be making an error if we thought distinctly sex-positive Gnostic practice was simply a transposition of sensibilities from the pagan world. Pagans were also scandalized by Gnostic worldviews, as is demonstrated by the great Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (205–270 CE) in his treatise Against the Gnostics (Enneads II, 9). Though Plotinus did not mention Gnostics by that generic name, his pupil Porphyry’s title for his master’s polemic, “Against those who say the maker of the world is evil and that the world is evil,” indicates clearly enough what Plotinus found objectionable in the writings friends of his chanced upon. For Plotinus, Gnostics indulged in obscure mythologizing to excess and made the error of confusing the deficient aspects of manifest existence—when compared to the perfect ideas of heaven—with actual malevolence and positive evil. Plotinus would tolerate no rupture in continuity between the One and the created order, a position characteristic of Christian Platonism. Nevertheless, Plotinus’s invective against Gnostics is suggestive that in many respects, his thought was not as far from theirs as he might have hoped, and that, in fact, Plotinus recognized in them an arguably open flank in his own philosophy of spiritual emanations from the One and the Good. People who liked what he had to say liked the Gnostic stuff too! This is still the case.
Gnostic mythology, however, was determinative in giving the heretics distinct ideas that Plotinus, like other philosophers, could not have arrived at by strictly logical means. Gnostics took as their launchpad the sacred books of the Jews (Genesis, the Psalms, and Proverbs, in particular), as well as traditions—written and otherwise—associated with Jesus. Gnostics have been called brilliant exegetes. Indeed, their thought culture did come from books, but they brought to the texts distinct sensibilities and highly characteristic, and original, attitudes, inspiration and tropes, almost as if they shared a gag—a special, liberating esoteric gag with a touch of ironic comedy—that gave those “hip” to it a key to understanding all inherited religion, capable of giving the whole disparate body of religious ideas a unity within a greater scheme of cosmic conspiracy against the truth of their freedom attained via transmundane redemption.
To the hard-core Gnostics, the world was a fraud; it could be laughed at from the heights of exalted realization. Once this was recognized, things taught to be taboo could be revealed, au contraire, as gateways to knowledge, as symbols denied and forbidden by the repressive pseudo-deity. Gnostics penetrated into disturbed territory of the psyche where, we may suppose, Plotinus feared, or had more sense than, to tread.
Where would it end?
Gnostics departed from the very essence of paganism—acceptance of nature. And here, almost paradoxically, we can see the startling face of Jewish religion’s historic objection to the pagan world: graven images of God were blasphemous; the Creator is not one with the creation. God must never be confused with the visible world or with objects and substances within it; the essential message of the Jewish prophetic tradition was upended by everything the Greeks and Romans did: statues, statues everywhere!
THE ESSENTIAL MYTH
A constant idea, arguably the constant idea, of Gnostic exegetical schools, was the transposition of the Genesis Eden/Fall of Adam and Eve myth from Earth to heaven. Edenic perfection is placed in heaven (the Pleroma, or divine Fullness-Plenitude). However, just as in Eden, a critical drama of temptation messes up a preexisting, possibly unconscious, harmony. The villainess is not Eve here, but the “Heavenly Eve.” The Fall to Earth would be an out-birth resulting from problems in heaven and the aberrant heavenly female’s subsequent exile. The Gnostic is one for whom a “house,” or home, has been prepared . . . on the other side.
According to contemporary Jewish lore, God’s Wisdom, called Hokhmah in Hebrew (Sophia in Greek), dwelled with Him in eternity. Picking up on certain suggestions as to Sophia’s peculiar nature, Gnostic writers took this primal bliss to its next logical stage, and—well, not to put too fine a point to it, they envisioned a scenario wherein she got herself into trouble. Why she? Surely God was not a partnership; he had no consort. Perhaps not, but Sophia is a feminine noun, and as far as the Gnostics knew from Jewish scripture in Greek translation (the Septuagint), she was all female, and her home was with God, for God and his Wisdom are inseparable (she being his First Thought), at least, until . . .
According to the common Gnostic myth, shared among different groups, with their own variants and emphases, Sophia allowed a passion to get the better of her; she desired to penetrate the mystery of the Divine Being of the Father (Bythos: Abyss, or “Depth”), even to know the unknowable, incomprehensible Father: an urge, unless we mistake, that had seized philosophers from the times of Plato at least, and with analogous results, that is, the production of an intellectual world that would prove inadequate either to critical thought or to application to the world as commonly experienced. The ones seeking absolute wisdom find themselves exiled from ordinary consciousness, with a fear of madness either in the self or from those now “outside” the experience of the seeker. The knower or would-be knower is the “outsider”: the outsider, a knower. Gnosis unites metaphysical effect with metaphysical cause.
When we say that Sophia wants to know the Father, we glimpse the essence of the Gnostic accommodation with sex, for this knowledge that Sophia seeks is a taboo uncovering of the nature of the Father; symbolically, it is sexual, an erotic urge generated by attraction for what is unpossessed. The result of this precocious movement within the Pleroma is that Sophia, unsettled, falls outside of her eternal place, just as Eve and Adam are banished from Eden in Genesis. Eve tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, just as Sophia is seeking to know the Father’s depth, so disrupting her relationship with the Father’s will.
God’s will with respect to Sophia is present to her as her true syzygy, or male consort, called Theletos (from the Greek Thelema for “Will,” denoting here God’s will). The Fall of Sophia involves a breach of a divinely ordained pair, once united harmoniously, as were Adam and Eve, before losing their unified innocence and bliss, when Eve disregarded God’s will for her own whereafter the man and woman’s days were, from then on, numbered with all the horror entailed therein.
Harmony was two functioning as one, or even two in one. This idea brings us to the truly distinctive idea of Gnostic sexuality.
ANDROGYNY
In the Hermetic Asclepius III, attributed to ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus (a considerable extract from which was found in the Nag Hammadi Library), we are informed plainly: “God is bisexual.” Not only God the Father and Master of all generative power may be so described, but also the manifestation of his spirit as life everywhere: “For either sex is filled with procreative force; and in that conjunction of the two sexes, or, to speak more truly, that fusion of them into one, which may be rightly named Eros, or Aphrodite, or both at once, there is a deeper meaning than man can comprehend.”
The unique speech that follows this introduction is found in Coptic in the Nag Hammadi Library: a rare, if not unique, paean to orgasm and its wonders presented as a holy mystery. That is why, Hermes assures his pupil Asclepius (or Asklēpios in the original Greek), the act is performed in secret, as an esoteric rite is performed away from prying eyes, lest the amusement of the rabble profane a holy mystery, a sacred rite of itself. Uniquely, startlingly, Asclepius lifts sexual love to the spiritual plane. The implication is one of theurgy: the Neoplatonic art of combining magic with religious fervor to generate rites attracting the light and power of heaven into the mind of the sanctified philosopher or priest.
While the hardcore Gnostic myth of Sophia’s disruption of the Pleroma is foreign to the Hermetic corpus, the theme of androgyny of the spirit-that-animates is common to Hermetic and radical Gnostic material, and we must remind ourselves that there was never a Gnostic orthodoxy about any single doctrine: something for which they were taunted by opponents.
To say that God is bisexual does not mean God experiences sexual attraction to males and females, though it may well account for that attraction in males and females. The Hermetic (Latin) text means the form of God contains both sexes (Utriusque sexus): “He, filled with all the fecundity of both sexes in one, and ever teeming with his own goodness, unceasingly brings into being all that he has willed to generate; and all that he wills is good.” God encompasses the original ideas of masculine and feminine and is, in a sense, then Mother and Father of life, operating in perfect, incomprehensible union. God is one, but spiritual oneness is not one dimensional, as it must appear to materialists who take their flat-Earth vision to a supposed heaven, devoid of spiritual life.
Gnostic belief in the original, divine idea of humanity (anthrōpos) being androgynous or even hermaphroditic follows, for did Genesis not say that woman was drawn from man (Adam) while he was asleep, that is, they thought, when Adam lost consciousness of his former androgynous divinity in the divine mind?
Expressed in the material world, God’s unity becomes a duality, so man also is divided from himself, which is the divine pneuma, or spirit of life. Pneuma—Spirit—being divine, was androgynous. It was therefore the divine seed’s fall into matter that led to the appearance of man and woman separated, or pared, into distinguishable beings. The body alone determines sex. The spirit of humanity remains androgynous. Gnostics of all hues are expressly warned not to worship or become enamored of the body qua body (flesh), as Jews were taught never to make graven images or material forms of the God they had never seen.
Following a Platonist philosophy, matter divides because its nature is to objectify ideas: to turn ideas into objects, that is, to separate them from their former harmony (the life of the aeons or, as we translate the concept, eternal life) and subject them to the vagaries and flux of time and space. What is harmonious in mind (nous) is unstable in matter. Hence, Jesus’s parabolic teaching is to build one’s house not on sand (unstable, transitory matter) but on rock, an image of a supernatural stone that comes from heaven. We shall discover more about the transformative stone in due course.
Male and female, then, while natural as far as the world of time and space is concerned (the creation, according to most Gnostics, of a misbegotten Creator derived from the out-birth of Sophia’s primal precociousness)—“male and female created he them”—it was in fact a catastrophic rupture of the spiritual being, a suffering of the spirit, mirroring the wound in the divine being when the suffering, passionate Sophia exceeded her proper boundaries, resulting in an abortion that is the cosmos. This wound corresponds to the human spiritual heartache for God or a lost world, the loss of God: a profound nostalgia, experienced also as the desperate need for love, which, if perennially frustrated, turns to hate, generating evil.
While the Hermetic corpus in general does not recognize the Gnostic Sophia speculation, we nonetheless find in the Coptic extract from Asclepius 21–29 recognition that gnosis is the means by which ignorance is cured. This ignorance is regarded as an incurable sore of the soul that grows with incurable passions until it generates all evils. These evils, Hermes says, cannot then be laid at the door of God, for God wills that humanity accept the gift of knowledge, a grace or gift. Only this gift can cure what to humanity in ignorance remains incurable.
If he accepts the gift of gnosis, he can become pious and avoid sinking into the passions of matter: “For,” as Hermes asserts in a powerful phrase, “the knowledge of the things which are ordained is truly the healing of the passions of matter.” This line constitutes pretty much the essential itinerary of the Valentinian Egyptian gnosis. The myth of the passionate Sophia, suffering to know, but generating only deficiencies of her disharmonized self, was formulated precisely as a means of pointing the way to “the healing of the passions of matter.” Furthermore, we are at liberty to recognize that such also must be the essential aim of the arrow of desire that is Gnostic sex. Spiritually oriented sex heals the passions of matter, subjecting the organism to spiritual and harmonious lordship. This is a healing prefiguring of the restoration of the exiled, fallen spirits to the divine Pleroma, through love and elevating knowledge of the heart. The joy of union, the dissolution of separation, is all. Thus sex becomes the great gift, a divine grace to the Gnostic man or woman whose soul is in love with God.
Incidentally, Hermes, for one, is adamant that those who cannot recognize the holy mystery of the sexual act are impious, thus condemning the larger part of official church teaching from at least the fourth century CE to our own revelatory times: “Therefore wickedness remains among the many, since learning concerning the things which are ordained [by God] does not exist among them.” Sex is holy for the holy; for the wicked, it is as groping in the dark. Instead of the church teaching the gift of gnosis, it has suppressed and persecuted it—and don’t we know it!
The Spirit longs for union; the flesh (divided) is weak. To repeat: Yoga means “union.” Samadhi, the supreme trance in raja (royal) yoga may be expressed, from the Gnostic point of view, as: “I and my Father are one” (cf. John 10:30). Whether Gnostics got their ideas from India in this regard is unknown, but it is fairly obvious that once you allow that the division of the sexes, the pains of childbirth, and the life-and-death cycle are a catastrophe for the spirit of God, then the practice of a sacred reunion of the bodies can be seen as sacramentally prefiguring, or as an intimation or anticipation of, the exiled soul’s reunion with its heavenly, spiritual, or angelic counterpart still at home in the heavenly world. Such is the spiritual blessing of the sacrament of marriage. A sacrament takes something of the Earth and raises it to its heavenly correspondent. To use poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fascinating phrase, a sacrament disembodies the soul of fact, which is also the function of the imagination in its highest phase.
So far, so good. Taking a Gnostic perspective, we can see a serious reason for a sacrament of sexual intercourse aimed toward realization of spiritual union with God, or at least with one’s estranged angel or daimōn (protective transmundane spirit): that part of the human being (the crown) not entirely swallowed up by the deluge of time and space—the Pythagorean psychic non-ego, beloved as the dawning, or augoeidēs, of Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, and known in high magical circles today as the Holy Guardian Angel.
The theory here works well enough. Conceive of sex not as a lustful descent into pleasurable stimuli in a largely inhibition-free romp, but rather as a loving discipline of minds and bodies combined and focused on a higher reality and you have, well, something like sexual mysticism. In Hindu Tantric ritual, such unions are prefigured in the love-embrace of Shakti (the feminine cosmic creative energy) and Shiva (the supreme masculine god, patron of yoga, worshipped in the form of the lingam), whose orgasm generates the universe eternally: AUM! The god and goddess thus become, after considerable ascetic rehearsal, in-personated by the Tantric worshippers: see me as Shiva and I’ ll see you as Shakti: thus become we One.
In terms of creative energy, the union of Shakti and Shiva corresponds somewhat to the bisexual Hermetic God, generator of life and goodness. In this context, orgasm can be a physically registered experience of God—so long as physical experience is not the condition or wished intention of the rite—and for this to have spiritual meaning, the mystical couple needs to be in a mind above the downward-tending physical consciousness. If we may employ alchemical terms, orgasm-as-sensation is ideally the parergon (by-product) of the ergon (essential work) of spiritual union.
But is it the sex itself that gets them there? I fear the theory is largely mute on this point, though we may say that the good will and right intention are primary requisites.
Again, we have a grand metaphysical theory, and we know that the theory has enjoyed many practitioners, but is such a thing in itself really possible or realistic? Well, nobody said it was not rare. However, the realization of such a state might still seem inherently contradictory if we analyze our experience. Apart from the fact that when I was in my learning stage in my teens, my first sexual experiences promoted the word heaven to come spontaneously to my lips to describe them, since orgasm seemed, to begin with, the closest thing to an overwhelming heavenly feeling I could recall—save visions of God experienced as a child—(I can hardly be alone in this!), it was of course not long before the practice fell into an appetite for more because it felt good.
Harmonious relations with the partner took second place to what was now something like a raw need. It’s almost as if the mind is permitted its first spiritual delight, and then the body takes over, muscling in on the scene to get its fix and get that DNA stirring up into the great cycle in which we may lose ourselves.
Soon enough, what promised liberation, love’s alleged fulfillment, became necessary, a condition of mutuality, a pang, and the delightful Edenic Adam and Eve pulsing wonder of it all became the frustrated, morbid, longing cycle that depresses youth, bound up as it is with inchoate ideas of love, marriage, security, self, peer pressure, confusion of needs with wants, and all the rest of it. What began as heaven would become an awful pain one way or another! Though, I have to say in my own case, as one fell unconsciously from the Pleroma to planet Earth’s reality, the sense of romance never entirely died under the asphyxiating erotic hunger of the senses. But I had certainly lost my glimpse of heaven: innocence lost forever perhaps. I am optimistic.
We can probably agree that to enjoy sex at its best, we need to be in love with our partner and/or be very horny and aroused physically by an agreeable or more than agreeable lover. The idea of purity (which we associate with God) or lustless love as an ideal, when applied to sex, is for many of us counterintuitive. I might want in spirit to reach for divinity or celebrate divinity with, in, or through another, but to be candidly frank, to “get it up” (enthusiasm, that is) I need to think (if that’s the right word) of something sexy and/or be confronted with someone who irresistibly arouses lustiness.
Alternatively, one might simply feel sexually frustrated and anxious for a fortuitous outlet for sexual emotions and physical pangs. Many who associate guilt with sex, need alcohol to get over their inhibitions. Such persons need very little reminding that “sin” can be very enjoyable, for a time. Then there’s set and setting, romance, and all the other means we know to let Venus radiate in our lives. We need the right partner, and if God is love, and good sex helps us to admire our partners and cements our dependence on them, then we may say sex has a spiritual dimension, though we’d be at a loss to indicate where exactly or know what to do with it. Isn’t sex problematic enough without bringing God into it?
I remember when I was about ten, my father took an interest in the local Mormon community in Birmingham (in the English Midlands). Eager representatives from Utah visited us regularly. Along with promises of root beer to substitute for forbidden coffee came a series of colorful pamphlets. One I well remember was the suggestion that membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints entitled one to consummate one’s marriage in Salt Lake City in a marriage chamber specially designed for that purpose, where it was guaranteed (if I recall correctly) that angels would be present to make that first night really something special. I found this detail laughably naive, even in my tender years, for one couldn’t help wondering whether there was anywhere you could go where you might not be observed by angelic visitants. Now I think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s line that “Strong beliefs are prison houses of the mind” and wonder if these angels were not so much cheerleaders of a divinely ordained nuptial as foreshadowers of a life of custodial observation to come! I also can’t help wondering if the obscure origins of such beliefs might lie with some of those advocated by Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who held that sexual joys and feelings of married Christians could actually be felt in heaven. If I read this right, our dear departed (and others) could sensually benefit from our nocturnal lustrations. This notion strained the tolerance and credibility of many of Swedenborg’s London followers after his death, and I suspect this curiously materialistic vision would turn many off the whole notion of linking too closely our earthly amours with any heavenly scheme.
Returning to the psychology of sexual experience, I think it is generally the case that the moment we think of or concentrate on that which stimulates us physically, any spiritual aspiration or dimension of awareness splits off like the section of a Saturn V rocket, plunging back to Earth or jettisoned into space. In short, feelings, however temporarily uplifted, become earthbound in quality though pleasurable—in the sense of stimulating—at the sensory level and pleasurably dreamy perhaps.
Conversely, however, if you try to concentrate solely on receiving physical pleasure as physical pleasure, or the sensations of nearing and achieving orgasm itself alone, you can feel strangely cold and empty afterward, or even at the supreme moment. Self-loathing may result, along with a sense of having strangely bungled something potentially significant. The greater pleasure, its essence, may not be purely sensual at all. The deepest pleasures may be seen as simply registering something that is truly good; and I mean by deepest the highest. Revenge is only the highest pleasure to the lowest kind. The essence of the thing is not pleasure itself. The greater pleasure transcends pleasure. The transcendent moment may not be possessed by the ego and, therefore, is not, properly speaking, a moment at all, being timeless. Effort to possess the ultimate joy, to hold it to oneself, can lead to a very dark feeling, or lack of feeling at all: a road to be avoided at all costs. One may experience a mighty fall. Indeed, sacrifice of the ego is properly involved in sex consummated, quite unlike many of our imagined pleasures. I am reminded of Friar Lawrence’s speech in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 6:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so.
Alleged incompatibility of the physical sexual experience and the life of the spirit, which requires a surrender or transcendence of ego and wanting (anything but spiritual desires), has appeared to many observers to preclude any idea other than that sex should be seen as nothing more than nature’s crafty way of establishing the conditions for reproduction, and while we may steal some temporary gratification or tantalizing glimpse of a transitory and arguably counterfeit heaven from the process through nature’s slippery incentive of orgasm, that too is part of the trick. The “selfish gene” idea is not really an original thought of Richard Dawkins, but the fundamental suspicion of the Encratites of late antiquity! If orgasm is the snare that leads spirit down into the grip of the sinful world or the power of the Demiurge (which, by the way, could easily become another word for evolution), then orgasm and childbirth are to be avoided like the plague: the vulva is hell’s gateway! This is the creed of the Encratite, both in late antiquity and today, where it might help to sustain the celibate monk and nun through the long renunciation of sex.
According to this fatal view of nature, we are enjoined to think of the Venus flytrap and think of ourselves as the hapless fly: Oh, those pretty flowers! And what is in there? Oh succulent, perfumed bliss! Oh, what if I taste it? Snap! Snap and crunch go the jaws of devouring nature, whose teeth, ever hungry, thrive on death: dog eat dog. Nature eats herself for breakfast; she is no vegetarian! Why, even romance itself can be seen as a ruse of nature to drug us into the great cycle to which most of us acquiesce, sooner or later—or wish we could!
In practical terms, how could one overcome the obvious dichotomy? We have all read about Tantric practitioners training for years to isolate the mind from the mundane instincts, to be able to enter a sexual union that is a spiritual exaltation as self is surrendered in a cosmic zero that annihilates subject and object. We have read about this, but it seems very far from Acacia Avenue: though Catholics are taught that God approves of children born in wedlock, and if that be not exactly ecstasy in itself, it is doubtless pleasant to know one is at least doing the right thing, even if it be a sin to enjoy it too much.
I once heard a very sensible female Anglican marriage counselor advocate—in the face of confused, delicately sensitive wives who could not equate Christian decency with sexual appetites—that Christian women should feel that it is OK to “be a whore in bed”; to give their husbands the things that, if they let themselves relax, they could really enjoy giving and not be ashamed of. In other words, they shouldn’t be afraid of enjoying themselves with their husbands to the full. Good sex requires lust, and if God made the world of nature, God respects happy, lusty marriages. I hope the counselor’s advice loosened up a few over-tight blouses and brought some harmony into troubled marriages. As it was Woman’s Hour (a BBC radio show), I did not hear her advice for Christian men. It is often presumed that men are quite lustful enough, but who can say? The angels at the foot of the bed aren’t telling! One sees many disappointed women whose efforts may have been wasted.
The problem of the “lust brings the spiritual exaltation down” scenario might be solved if we could find the idea of God sexually arousing, but here Western religion has a distinct problem. The root of it may be expressed in the story in Genesis (9:22) of Ham seeing his father Noah’s naked genitals after Noah gets drunk in his tent, and Noah’s subsequent curse of Ham’s son, Canaan, for having apparently taken advantage of his condition. The father is not to be seen as sexual by the children; in Genesis, the result can be incest, as in the case of Lot’s daughters (Genesis 19:30–35). One might conclude, from the Freudian perspective, that while the father might be killed (Oedipus complex), he must not be penetrated.
Western men would have to make an enormous leap to get an erection from imagining God (images anyway are forbidden), though some women might experience suppressed delights from serving an attractive Jesus image. If men want a female image to worship—and really love in the flesh—they would need to join an Isis-worshipping or other neopagan group. Nevertheless, it is well reported through the ages that mystics have been sexually excited as a by-product of high trances, where they felt transported among divine powers regardless of any overt sexual aspect within the vision itself: spiritual ecstasy can manifest in physical ecstasy, though the reverse order is more problematic. No wonder orthodoxy has always been, at best, suspicious of mystics! Is that a pistol you got in there, or are you talking to God?
As for the controllers of religion, are they not likely to be affected by prevailing ideas of God? If God is defined by qualities that are sexless, sex-repressive, dull, square, boring, oppressive, and so on, are his ministers not likely to appear likewise, with all the usual human failings thrown in as well, if obscured from the public eye?
Just why are horns and horniness applied to images of Satan? Well, we know the horns came originally from the god Pan (the “All”), associated with country rites and the resonant power of sacred groves. Pan has about him the physical characteristics of the lusty goat. It was William Blake who turned all this on its head when he declared in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) that “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” Bounty means a free gift: a grace, in fact. But Blake identified the New Age with its corollary: the necessary “improvement in sensual enjoyment.” For Blake, as we shall see, the vulva was not the gate of hell, but of the New Jerusalem!
So, if we are to be aroused by God, we need a God who is arousing. Now, here is where Egyptian religion really “scored.” And, let us not forget, Egyptian religion provided set and setting for the Gnostic schools of Alexandria. It is arguable that for Christianity or Judaism to transform into gnosis, it must be transplanted into a culture of intellectual pagans as well as mystical exegetes. It needs, I think, a sensual environment with the right climate. In Egypt, we get a real sense of the froth of Wisdom related to the foaming spirit of creation: the divine prerogative itself. By contrast, Western Christianity has, arguably, sterilized God. He only created once, apparently. His primary duty done, he spends eternity in reposeful semiretirement: more a grandfather than a father. The Father engenders, but without sex. He is, after all, the Father!
Unlike Shiva, what might be held his natural symbol is strictly, absolutely taboo. When Mary the Virgin becomes pregnant, it is not the Father but the Holy Spirit that fertilizes the ovum, passing through her hymen like light through glass as an early church father put it. Bearing this in mind, the reappearance of the Divine Feminine—both whore and virgin—will continue to raise a tremor to shake the great religions to their foundations.
An erotic religion may now be extremely rare and is perhaps for most people practically impossible, but it continues to be a consummation devoutly wished.
However, before we approach the true object of Gnostic desire, we need to establish precisely where the image of the “filthy Gnostickes” came from and specify precisely what it was that made Gnostics “filthy” in the minds of their opponents.