The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage

INTRODUCTION 

Very few people know that there are long-standing traditions of sexual mysticism in the West. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, many in the West became aware of Hindu and Buddhist forms of Tantra, but as Hugh Urban and other scholars in that field have shown, tantric traditions were often distorted in the process of transmission or transference to the modern West, where they frequently became commodified and trivialized. This never happened to esoteric Western traditions of sexual mysticism, primarily because they were entirely unknown. This is the first book to outline the existence of such traditions, and in what follows, I will describe for the first time in print the hidden history and nature of Western sexual mysticism.

Of course, we should begin by explaining what we mean by sexual mysticism in the first place. After all, the very term mysticism is ambiguous, for some even synonymous with woolly-headed. The word mystic derives from the Greek word mustein, meaning silent or closed lips, and it has the same origin as the word mystery. The words mysticism and mystery are associated with the ancient Greek Mystery (revelatory and initiatory) traditions of antiquity, which, as we shall see, certainly had sexual dimensions. As far back as we can trace, the word mysticism refers to religious traditions that point us toward inexpressible transcendence of the apparent division between subject and object, or self and other, and toward realization of the divine.

When we look back into Greek and Roman antiquity, we see that the Mystery traditions almost always had sexual dimensions, and there is good reason for this. The Mystery traditions, be they Bacchic, Dionysiac, Eleusinian, or Orphic, were closely bound up with the cosmic cycles, and in particular with the cycles of agricultural and human fertility. In fact, the earlier forms of the Mystery traditions, including during the Hellenistic period, were in the domain of women. Only later were men allowed to be priests in many of the traditions, and the orgia (orgiastic celebrations) took place under the auspices of women. What we are looking at in these ancient traditions bears little relation to the common stereotype of femininity as demure, coquettish, or passive. The women described in some of the ancient Mystery traditions seem to our eyes (as to those of their contemporaries) frenzied, wild, and dangerous, but this authentic wildness expresses a dimension of nature itself that we moderns often fail to recognize.

We will discuss the Greco-Roman Mysteries in much more detail soon, but it is worthwhile here to at least note the profound connection between nature and the Mystery traditions during the entire period of antiquity and late antiquity. The Dionysiac rites and the Bacchanalia took place outdoors, and often at night; and although the rites were associated with the fertility of nature, that was not their only dimension. The Mysteries entailed direct contact with the transcendent forces of the cosmos, which, although they are expressed in the natural world, have their origins in pagan divinity. There is a fierceness in the Mystery traditions, and a dissolution of civilization, that is very important in understanding both their power and their dangers.

When we turn to the advent of Christianity within the declining pagan world, we see something quite different and, in many respects, new. There really is a changing of the age represented by the shift from the ancient Mysteries to the mysteries of Christianity. There were Stoic and other ascetic or semiascetic traditions within Greco-Roman antiquity, but there is a very real and profound shift that took place from the orgiastic traditions of antiquity to the extreme asceticism of Christianity, as emblematized in the desert fathers. Consider on the one hand the bacchanals (those participating in Bacchanalia) of antiquity, and on the other Origen’s self-castration. It would seem that we are observing a shift from one extreme to the other. Admittedly, there were Mystery traditions that involved emasculation, too, but those underscored the primacy of the feminine powers, whereas Origen represents those who are eunuchs for the sake of heaven.¹ In this, as in many other aspects, even the apparent similarities between the two broad traditions turn out to be differences.

And yet there is a notable kind of continuity in one respect. Although it is almost never discussed except in the works of specialists, early Christianity also entailed a sexual dimension. As we shall see, one should not simply dichotomize between, on the one hand, the orgiastic traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity, and Christian asceticism on the other. Christianity, after all, was not a single movement or sect, but a whole series of phenomena that emerged in the midst of late antiquity and that included a gamut of possibilities, all the way from asceticism to license. And even within what later became known as orthodox Christianity, there was a mysterious tradition of subintroductae, in which men and women lived and slept together, but without male ejaculation. Thus there was a Christian tradition from very early on—it is mentioned by Paul himself—of sexual mysticism: that is, of drawing on sexual tension and power, but harnessing it to achieve spiritual transcendence.

There is, of course, much more also to discuss in the Christian traditions of late antiquity. One cannot consider Christianity as a single entity, but rather as a congeries of very different currents of thought and practice, which we see exemplified both in the Apocrypha and in the various Gnostic traditions and compendia. In fact, a fairly reasonable case could be made that pagan orgiastic traditions did not disappear, but were subsumed into various forms of Christianity, sometimes called gnostic. But even here, there was a real distinction from the earlier cosmological traditions of antiquity. Christianity added gnosis, a metaphysical or transcendent dimension, which changed everything. In a very profound sense, Christianity was not of this world, and we see this not only in the New Testament, but also in what remains of the various Gnostic writings.

What we see in the Nag Hammadi library, and in the other fragments of actual Gnostic writings, is the sense that the material world is a realm of suffering and ignorance. This is a profound revision of the earlier, pagan celebration of nature, and it reflects a Gnostic and, more broadly, a Christian sense that Christ represented something new and irrevocable: the appearance in this troubled human world of divine grace and transcendence beyond it. Whether Docetic or not, the Gnostic Christ represents a new and resplendent divine revelation. Whereas in the pagan world, transcendence was to be found in nature, in the new Gnostic world, transcendence was separate from and beyond nature.

The Christian revelation focused, much more than its pagan predecessors, on the human sphere. That Christ appeared in human form is central for Christianity. But also central for Christianity is the beyond, the transcendent, the millennial, and the heavenly. These two tendencies did offer the possibility for incorporating sexual dimensions into the Christian path, and that is what we see during the early Christian period, both in Gnosticism and in what came to be called orthodox Christianity. Many priests and bishops lived with women, and it seemed possible, early on at least, that Christianity might represent not only an ascetic rejection of pagan excesses, but also entirely new roles for men and women, drawing on, incorporating, and transcending sexuality in order to restore humanity to paradisal wholeness.

However, this new model was not to last. Within several hundred years, a historicist and ascetic form of Christianity—represented in figures like Augustine of Hippo—became dominant, and other kinds of Christianity either disappeared or went underground. During the first few centuries after Christ, Gnostic Christianity offered a pluralist model not dissimilar from what we see in Buddhism. Indeed, there is significant evidence of cross-pollination between Buddhism and Gnosticism, as between Greek and Asian civilizations. One sees this clearly in the development of Buddhist art, which reveals strong Greek influence, and there are real parallels between Buddhism and some Gnostic writings and figures. Gnosticism represents what Christianity could have become, had it taken a path closer to that of Buddhism.

But from its inception, unlike Christianity, Buddhism emphasized practice and spiritual awakening through individual effort. Shakyamuni Buddha undertook particular practices, especially meditation, and achieved enlightenment as a result. By contrast, Christianity—even in its Gnostic strains—tended to emphasize divine grace and revelation from without, through Christ. What’s more, as the historicist and orthodox tendency within Christianity became more dominant, especially in the Latin West, the emphasis on individual spiritual practices diminished. Only certain practices were accepted, and those tended to be outwardly focused on prayer to God conceived as an external, divine being. Thus, whereas Buddhism developed into a pluralistic model that included a vast array of accepted inner practices and traditions, Western Christianity tended toward a single historicist perspective. By the thirteenth century, it even had developed the formal institution of the Inquisition to enforce that single Latin perspective, at one point even condemning Christianity’s greatest mystic, Meister Eckhart.

With all of this said, however, one has to recognize that Christianity was never a monolithic tradition. What I have been sketching are only tendencies. Nor was it the case that pagan traditions totally vanished, as if someone flicked a switch. History does not work that way. Rather, pagan traditions fed into the currents of Christianity in northern and southern Europe, as in Russia and England, often in subterranean ways. What is more, the various currents of Christianity—including Gnostic streams—did not vanish entirely, but also went underground or were transmitted through Judaism, Islam, or other traditions, only to reenter Christianity later on. And above all, Western Christianity included a whole series of recurrent heretical religious traditions that kept reappearing. But the most important of these recurrences was during the modern era.

It is not so much a matter of tracing one continuous hidden lineage in the West as it is of discovering where a given tradition emerged into visibility, and when it more or less vanished. Whereas Asian and Islamic religious traditions are largely continuous—one can trace lines of teachers and students back for generation upon generation—Western esoteric traditions demonstrate what I term an ahistorical continuity.² By this I mean that one can find both direct and indirect lines of historical influence and even of transmission, not least because adherents will cite their own predecessors and thus place themselves in a particular lineage. Yet these lines of continuity—one could call them initiatory lines—are not necessarily historical. A century might pass, but then one finds a student of Jacob Böhme’s, then a school, then a lacuna, then another figure, and so forth.

As I discussed in my book Restoring Paradise, Western esoteric traditions are transmitted mostly via books or manuscripts—that is, via the written word and image. This means that a given spiritual possibility or even initiatory line may be dormant within a particular work for centuries, even millennia, only to reappear in a new era when the conditions are ripe for its restoration and reawakening. Hence, while it is true that Gnosticism died out in late antiquity, it is also true that Gnosticism as a range of spiritual possibilities within Christianity remained latent until being periodically rediscovered in one form or another, whether by medieval heretics or by modern seekers. Despite (or perhaps because of) the historicist emphasis of orthodox Western Christianity, and its long-standing ambivalence or hostility toward mysticism, Western traditions do not depend on historical transmission from master to disciple so much as on an ahistorical continuity that depends on recognizing and reawakening what is carried implicitly in the esoteric written and oral traditions that began with and are exemplified in the parables of Jesus. Parables are, after all, the koan tradition of Christianity.

Thus it should not be a surprise that in the early modern period, a whole new set of Christian traditions emerged in the wake of that great spiritual genius, Jacob Böhme (1575–1624). Through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, we see the emergence of esoteric religious traditions (broadly called theosophic and pansophic), which restored to Christianity an emphasis on inner spiritual awakening, and which furthermore emphasized a cosmology that, in total contrast to scientific rationalism, was based on the recognition of hidden spiritual qualities and meaning in all of nature. With the advent of Christian theosophy—even as the West more generally was tending toward scientific reductionism on the one hand, and toward fideist reductionism on the other—we see the unexpected resurgence of an esoteric Christian tradition that magisterially restores both metaphysics and cosmology. Suddenly there is a new kind of Christian gnosis for the modern era.

Early Christian theosophy does not include any clear sexual mysticism—though one does find hints of it in the work of John Pordage (1608–81)—but even as the Industrial Revolution developed during the nineteenth century, one also sees the emergence in esoteric circles (influenced by Christian theosophy) of sexual mysticisms both in England and in the United States. The nineteenth century is the period when sexual mysticism reemerges into broader consciousness in the West, as we see not only in figures like the poet and artist William Blake, but also in American utopian communities like Oneida, under the direction of John Humphrey Noyes (1811–86), and Fountain Grove, under the direction of Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906). Another important figure during what we may call the American renaissance of sexual mysticism is Alice Bunker Stockham (1833–1912). Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, one finds numerous practitioners and advocates of sexual mysticism in the West.

At this point, it becomes necessary to distinguish between sexual mysticism and sexual magic. For during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one also sees various currents of sexual magic emerge, most having their inception with Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–75). Randolph himself had traveled across the Atlantic, and the currents of sexual magical traditions moved from Europe and England to North America and back again.³ There is much yet to be written about sexual magical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But here we distinguish fairly rigorously between sexual mysticism and sexual magic, because whereas sexual magical practices are focused on particular worldly gains or, to put it another way, the acquisition of power to achieve particular ends, sexual mysticism is strictly gnostic in the sense that its adherents aim not for power but for inner or spiritual union and realization. While there may be magical dimensions to a mystical practice, or mystical dimensions to a magical one, by and large one can distinguish one from the other without too much trouble.

Of course, the twentieth century was marked by a new syncretism, and by the end of the century it was no longer possible to strictly divide Western and Eastern traditions or currents because each had taken on some properties of the other. Asian traditions, including tantric traditions both Hindu and Buddhist, had Western adherents and were also subject to New Age commodification, while at the same time Western currents had also made their way around the globe via printed works and electronic communication. By the early twenty-first century, one could find hybrid forms of virtually every tradition imaginable, but hybridization is visible especially when Westerners draw from Asian tantric traditions. This syncrasis (from the Greek krasis, or mixing) is a long-standing characteristic of Western esotericism, and is integral to the secret history of Western sexual mysticism, especially in the modern era.

But the West also does have currents of erotic mysticism that can be traced back into antiquity, and that are inherently Western even if they too have syncrasic elements. One reason these currents have been comparatively little